‘Was he doing something unforgivable?’
‘It was dated August 1958 and he was kissing a woman …’
‘Don’t tell me … she wasn’t Mama?’
‘That’s right.’
‘And you were shocked?’
‘Yes, I was,’ he said. ‘It was Mercedes.’
‘Papa was no angel, Javier.’
‘Wasn’t Mercedes still married then?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Manuela, waving it all away with her cigarette. ‘That was Tangier in those days. Everybody was as high as a kite and fucking everybody else.’
‘Can you try and remember? You were older. I wasn’t even four years old.’
‘What does it matter?’
‘I just think it might help.’
‘With Raul Jimenez’s murder?’
‘No, no, I don’t think so. It’s personal. I just want to sort it out, that’s all.’
‘You know, Javier,’ she said, ‘maybe you shouldn’t be living in that big house all on your own.’
‘I did try to live there with somebody else, who we can’t mention.’
‘That’s the point. Old houses are crowded and women don’t like sharing their living space unless they choose to.’
‘I like it there. I feel in the centre of things.’
‘You don’t go out into “the centre of things” though, do you? You don’t know anywhere that isn’t between Calle Bailen and the Jefatura. And the house is far too big for you.’
‘As it was for Papa?’
‘You should get yourself an apartment like mine … with air conditioning.’
‘Air conditioning?’ said Javier. ‘Yes, maybe that would help. Clear the air. Don’t the latest models have a button on the side that says “past reconditioned”?’
‘You always were a strange little boy,’ she said. ‘Maybe Papa should have let you become an artist.’
‘That would have solved everything, because I’d have been so broke I’d have had to sell the place as soon as he died.’
The rest of Manuela and Alejandro’s friends arrived and Javier drained his beer. He excused himself from dinner through a barrage of fake protest. Work, he said, over and over again, which few of them understood as they were well cushioned from the hard edges of daily toil.
At home he ate some mussels in tomato sauce, cold. Something left for him by Encarnacion, who knew that he couldn’t be eating properly without a woman in the house. He drank a glass of cheap white wine and mopped the sauce up with some hard white bread. He wasn’t thinking and yet his head seemed to be full of a sense of rushing. He thought it was his mind unwinding after the day, until he realized it was more of a rewind, like a tape, a fast rewind. Ines. Divorce. Separation. ‘You have no heart.’ Moving to this house. His father dying …
He stopped it. There was an audible thump in his head. He went to bed with too much happening in his body. He slammed into a wall of sleep and had his first dream, that he could remember, for some considerable time. It was simple. He was a fish. He thought he was a big fish, but he could not see himself. He
Awake, he looked around himself, astonished to find that he was in bed. He pressed his abdomen. Those mussels, had they been all right?
9
He was up early; the jitteriness in his stomach had gone. He spent an hour on the exercise bike, setting himself some arduous terrain on the computer. The concentration required to break through the pain barrier helped him map out his day. This was no holiday for him.
He took a taxi to the Estacion de Santa Justa, and drank a
Falcon introduced himself again and asked for an appointment.
‘I’ve got nothing to tell you, Inspector Jefe. Nothing that would help. My father and I haven’t spoken for well over thirty years.’
‘Really?’
‘Very little has passed between us.’
