turned up with some police and a warrant. They broke the door down to R.’s house and removed all contents. Later a letter arrived at my home written in Arabic script, which I cannot read. I take it to the Spanish Legation where even the translator blanches at its contents.
I am Abdullah Diouri. I was a business associate of your friend whose name I cannot bring myself to write. You may know that he has deeply offended the honour of my family. He has treated one of my young daughters as nothing more than a common prostitute. Her life has been ruined. There is no amount of money that can repair the damage done to her or my family name. You should know that I have withdrawn from the business in which my associates and I had invested.
You should tell your friend that the family of Abdullah Diouri will be avenged and the price that we shall exact will be the same as exacted from us. I have lost a daughter, my family has been dishonoured. I will seek out your friend to the ends of the earth and I will reclaim my family honour from him.
There was a crudeness and a lack of affectation to this letter that gave it the ring of authenticity. The dots above and below the lines of script had been added in red ink. The effect was one of spattered blood. I send the original and translation to R., who has not yet been able to move G. from hospital in Algeciras, where she arrived unconscious after the crossing.
17th March 1959, Tangier
I have been too occupied by R.’s problems these last six months to contemplate the end of an era. It has stolen up on me and left me in its roiling wake. R.’s departure has hit me harder than I thought. I sit alone at his table in the Cafe de Paris and the talk is like an ongoing lament. Offices have closed down. No alcohol or tobacco can be loaded in the port. The hotels are empty. We have to use the dirham. The smart shops on the Boulevard Pasteur have closed down and been taken over by Moroccans selling tourist rubbish. Were it not for B.H. in Palace Sidi Hosni we would slip completely off the world stage. My work has foundered. All I seem to be doing is copying de Kooning, even though M. writes to tell me how admired my ‘peoplescape’ has been by those allowed into M.G.’s apartment. Even these words cannot stem my sense of decline. I feel like an old Roman, post-bacchanal, jaded and listless, prone to ennui and anxiety at the demise of empire.
R. sends word that he is living in the Sierra de Ronda. The clear dry air agrees with G.
18th June 1959, Tangier
The first heat of the summer is brutal. My brain is a seethe of nothingness. I lie about on carpets in my studio drinking tea and smoking. I sleep all afternoon and wake up at eight in the evening to find the temperature nearly bearable. I suddenly remember it is P.’s birthday and that I’ve failed to buy her a gift. I rummage about in the drawers and find an agate cube on a cheap silver ring. It must be a cast-off of M.’s. I fashion some coloured paper around it so that it looks like the pistil of a flower. I press it into a box and crush a lid on top so that when opened it will spring out. I tie it up with strips of red cloth and go home.
By midnight we have eaten. The children are about to go to bed when I remember my present. I send Javier round the table to her with my little box. P. opens it with great ceremony. The flower springs out and the box lid hits Javier on the nose. Everyone is delighted, including P., but then a look of complete puzzlement crosses her face. I panic that it was one of her old rings that I have given back to her. But I’m sure it’s not. I would have noticed it. The moment passes. She puts on the ring. I kiss her and notice that it is the only ring on her finger apart from her wedding band. This surprises me, because there was always one ring that she never took off — a silver band set with a small sapphire, which was given to her by her parents when she became a woman. I nearly ask her if she’s lost it, but that look on her face when she saw the agate cube has left me uneasy.
30
Saturday, 28th April 2001, Tetuan, Morocco
Falcon was up early to catch a grand taxi to Ceuta before dawn. From there he took the hydrofoil to Algeciras. The last entry of the diary was burnt on his mind. The silver ring with the single sapphire was his mother’s ring. The killer had been wearing his mother’s ring. That was why he’d had to come back to find it, because now Falcon knew the journal was the key. The killer had somehow had access to his father’s house, read the journal, stolen the vital section and set out on his avenging spree. But how had he come into possession of a ring his mother never took off? Uneasy truths slipped into his mind, along with the memory of being lifted high in the air at the edge of the sea on the bay of Tangier, legs kicking, above a face that would not come back to him.
By two o’clock he was in Seville. There was a message from Comisario Lobo on the answering machine. He was furious and used up a lot of tape telling him that it was no coincidence that Comisario Leon’s lackey, Ramirez, had officially removed Consuelo Jimenez from the suspects list as soon as he’d assumed control of Falcon’s investigation. He didn’t care. He went straight back up to his father’s studio. The jewellery box was still open on the table where he’d left it. He clenched the agate cube in his fist as if the impression of its geometry would take him through the lock of his memory. He paced the floor, kicked at a pile of magazines under the table which fell at his feet.
The cover of one of the magazines was totally black and its English title was Bound. He opened it with his foot and reared back. The two photographs he saw were visions of hell — two blindfolded women being tortured by heavily tattooed men. He kicked the magazine away.
Was that what his father had been driven to? Had the loss of his genius polarized him to the extent that, having painted the sublime and lost his grasp of it, he was drawn to the ugliest of pictures … to do what? To disturb his mind back to greatness? To bury himself in the philosophical hope that beauty can only exist if there is ugliness? Falcon couldn’t wait to get the appalling images out of the house and in kicking it away he saw that the whole pile consisted of pornography — hard core, bestial, depraved beyond imagination.
On the table above the pile of magazines was the roll of five canvases, none of which he’d recognized. He unrolled them again and pinned them up on the work wall. He noticed that the canvas was old but the paint was acrylic, which his father hadn’t started using until the late seventies. He was also sure that this was not his father’s work and he wished Salgado were alive to tell him about these paintings.
Then he remembered the copyist. The half-gypsy guy who lived in the Alameda somewhere, the one he hadn’t liked, who’d stood in his black underpants and scratched his genitals while his father spoke to him. What was his name? There was something odd about it. It wasn’t a real name. Something came back to him about the day he’d gone to the copyist’s workshop with his father. All the paintings were upside down on their easels. He copied upside down. El Zurdo — that was it. The left-hander. To imitate a right-hander’s brushstrokes he used to paint upside down. Falcon found an address for the copyist but no telephone number in his father’s old address book under ‘Z’.
He picked up a taxi outside the Hotel Colon and went to Calle Parras, not far from the Alameda. There was no answer from El Zurdo’s apartment, but the neighbour told him that he’d gone to lunch in his usual place, a bar on Calle Escuderos called La Cubista.
There were six lone men sitting at individual tables, eating and watching the television. He recognized none of
