name.
The restaurant was in a garden wedged between two roads leading to a roundabout. The door was opened by an elderly man in a white jacket and a fez, whose breathing difficulties were manifest. As they made their way to the table a Pekingese dog attacked them. Javier winced at its penetrating yap.
He ordered steak and asked after Mercedes Romero and the old man pointed to an elderly, well-coiffed, blonde woman who was playing patience at a single table on the other side of the empty restaurant. He asked the old man to give her a note of introduction, which he wrote out on a page of his notebook. The old man staggered away, placed the note before Mercedes, told her the order and was given some money to buy the steak.
Mercedes came slowly across the room. She grabbed the Pekingese by the scruff, rubbed its tummy and threw it under an empty table. She sat opposite him and asked him if he was the son of Francisco Falcon, which Javier confirmed.
‘I never knew him,’ she said. ‘Nor Pilar, but I was a good friend of your stepmother, Mercedes, who was about my age. She used to eat in the restaurant my family owned then in the Grand Hotel Villa de France. We were very close and I was devastated by her death.’
‘I never called her my stepmother,’ said Falcon. ‘I always referred to her as my second mother. We were very close, too.’
‘Yes, she told me that she thought of you as her own son and how desperate she was for you to follow in your father’s footsteps. She hoped that you might be an even greater artist than he.’
‘I was barely eight years old at the time.’
‘You don’t remember that then,’ she said, nodding behind him.
In a simple black frame on the wall above his head was a line drawing of a woman. Underneath was written
‘No, I don’t.’
‘You drew that in the summer of 1963. Mercedes gave it to me as a Christmas present. It’s of her, of course, not me. I asked her why she was giving it to me and she said something very strange: “Because with you I know it will be safe.”’
Tears brimmed in Falcon’s eyes. He’d given up any attempt at control of his emotions.
‘She drowned,’ he said. ‘I still remember the night she left and didn’t come back. They never recovered the body and I think not seeing her again made it harder. I saw my mother in her casket …’
‘Where is your father now?’ asked Mercedes.
‘He died two years ago.’
‘Maybe you remember someone else from that time — your father’s agent, Ramon Salgado?’
Falcon nodded madly and told her how Salgado had just been murdered and that he was the investigating officer. It all came out why he was in Tangier, which was when the old man in the fez came staggering back with the steak and salad, which he breathed over heavily as he served.
‘Perhaps if you’d been a detective back then you might have dealt with the matter of Mercedes’ death with a more penetrating eye than the local police.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘I don’t believe in gossip — I hear too much of it running a restaurant — but there was a lot of it about at that time. Enough gossip to have made anyone seriously investigating that tragedy ask harder questions than they did.’
‘What are you implying, Sra Romero?’ said Falcon quietly.
‘I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but Mercedes was my friend and I was very sorry to lose her, especially in a boating accident. She had spent a lot of time on boats. Her husband, Milton, owned one. She had sailed across the Atlantic several times. She was a very experienced and sure-footed sailor. She did not make mistakes. They said it was rough that night, that a storm had got up in the straits, but I can tell you it was nothing compared to some of the storms she’d been through coming over the Atlantic. They said she fell overboard and I’m afraid that I for one did not believe it. I did not believe the gossip that ran along the lines of how careless it was of your father to have lost two wives. That disgusted me. But both your father and Ramon Salgado should have been forced to account for their actions in an official inquiry, at least.’
Falcon got up from the table, his steak untouched, and walked out of the restaurant. He wasn’t prepared to listen to that sort of stuff. That was what happened when you became famous. People loved to speculate at your expense. Fine. But he was not going to be a party to that. He walked flat out back to the Hotel Rembrandt, sprinted up to room 422 and threw himself on the bed, wrapped a pillow over his ears and clamped his eyes shut.
It was night-time when he woke up and a great storm was playing itself out across the straits over Spain. The sheet lightning ran for hundreds of kilometres, illuminating the vast, stacked clouds boiling in the night sky. Outside it was spitting. He found a restaurant and ate a lamb tagine and drank a bottle of Cabernet President. He staggered back to the hotel, collapsed on the bed and woke up sweating and fully clothed. He stripped and crawled back into bed. The rain slashed and raked at the windows.
* * *
The Friday morning was drear and sodden. He had one more enquiry to make, which was probably going to be more fruitless than the rest. He checked out of the hotel and took a
By seven o’clock he’d lost his guide in the Medina and was wandering aimlessly through the alleyways, following carts piled high with fresh mint, when he came across a sight in a narrow street that totally paralysed him with panic.
A man with a cart of steel churns was pouring milk into local women’s calabashes, in which they would make their yoghurt. The gush of white liquid induced nausea. The flat white calm of the full calabashes turned him and sent him on a wild run through the streets and out of the Medina.
