It was a respite. His chloroformed brain toppled through space silently. The return to reality was fragmentary — bits of audio and then shards of visual. His head came up, the room tilted. Slices of light penetrated his eye and suddenly he was jerked awake by his own fear that something terrible might have been done to him.
He could see and his eyelids still opened and closed. Relief spread through him. He coughed. The flex was no longer around his face and his feet were free from the legs of the chair, but his wrists were still attached. He orientated himself in the room. He was facing away from the desk now. He leaned forward, trying to swallow back the turmoil rising in his chest and up his throat. He sobbed, straining against the memories, the shattered certainties. Was there any possible recovery from this?
A noise. Castors on tiles. The rush of something passing too closely. A thump of air. A man — Sergio, or was it Julio now? — shot past him and sailed to the far wall on his castored desk chair.
‘Awake?’ he asked, and nudged himself away from the wall so that he drifted nauseatingly to a point in front of Javier.
Julio Menendez Chefchaouni sat back in the chair, relaxed. Javier’s first impression was one of beauty. His looks were almost girlish, like a star from a boy band, with long dark hair, soft brown eyes, long lashes, high cheekbones and a clear, smooth complexion. It was the sort of face a camera would love, but only for a moment.
‘Here it is, Inspector Jefe,’ he said, framing his jaw with his hands. ‘The face of pure evil.’
‘Still not finished?’ said Falcon. ‘What more can there be, Julio?’
‘I think the project needs … not an ending exactly, because I don’t believe in endings — or beginnings or middles for that matter — but it needs to make its purpose known.’
‘The project?’
‘As I think your father noted: “Nobody paints any more,”’ said Julio. ‘Daubing canvases is not so far from what cavemen used to do. You know,
‘And what’s your project called?’
‘Even that is new. The title is constantly evolving. It is three words in English which can be placed in any order, using any preposition in between. The words are: Art. Real. Killing. So it could be the Real Art of Killing or perhaps Killing Real Art.’
‘Or the Art of Real Killing,’ said Falcon.
‘I knew you’d understand it straight away.’
‘Where is this project going to be shown?’
‘Oh, that is not really in my hands,’ said Julio. ‘It will be all over the media, of course, but, well, you’ve heard of people who’ve devoted their lives to things such as literature. This is an extension of that. I think it will probably insist on being posthumous.’
‘Start at the beginning,’ said Falcon. ‘I’m conventional like that.’
‘As you now know, Tariq Chefchaouni was my grandfather, my mother was his only daughter, who married a Spaniard from Ceuta. His art gene missed a generation but it got me. After my first year here, at the Bellas Artes, my mother and I went to visit the family in Tangier. I asked to see some of my grandfather’s work and was told that everything had been destroyed in the fire which killed him, apart from a few effects and some books. It was a couple of years later that the family called to tell me that, in doing some building work, they’d found a small pewter box under the floor in his room.
‘I was here in Seville, studying art, and I knew a great deal about the Falcon nudes because I’d done a project on them in my second and third years. In fact, I was obsessed by them even before I came to Seville and, when I found out that your father was still living here, I even met him on a couple of occasions to iron out some technical things I didn’t understand. Of course, he only knew me as Julio Menendez. He was very … gracious. We liked each other. He said I could call him if there was anything else I needed to know. So when I went back to Tangier and opened this pewter box I was completely fascinated to find that my grandfather seemed to have had the same obsession, except … how could he? He was already dead by the time the Falcon nudes came into existence.’
Julio opened the box and took out four postcard-sized pieces of canvas. He held each one up to Falcon. They were perfect reproductions of the Falcon nudes.
‘You can’t really see them without a magnifying glass and good light, but I can assure you they are perfect … each brushstroke is a perfect miniature of its original.
‘Now look on the back.’
He held up the reverse side of the miniatures and each piece was inscribed to Pilar, followed by the dates May 1955, June 1956, January 1958 and August 1959.
‘There was one other thing in the box, which is no longer in my possession.’
‘The silver ring with the sapphire,’ said Falcon. ‘My mother’s ring.’
‘My first reaction when I saw the miniatures was that I would show them to your father, that he must have lost them and they had strangely come into my grandfather’s possession. But then I remembered that the Falcon nudes were all painted in the space of a year, which didn’t fit with the dates inscribed on the backs. I was confused.’
‘When was this?’
‘The end of 1998, beginning of 1999.’
‘And when did you think that there was something more sinister to this?’
‘While I was in Tangier your father had a heart attack and there was a piece in the paper accompanied by an old photograph of him in the sixties. One of the older family members said that this was the man who’d come round to the house after my grandfather died and bought up his few remaining drawings.
