The Blind Man of Seville

‘He hanged himself the next day,’ said Falcon. ‘What do you do if you’re a priest and you’ve spent your whole life teaching the pursuit of truth in God’s word?’

‘My God,’ said Ramirez, ‘but you don’t have to kill yourself. You don’t have to take life so seriously.’

‘That’s why my father told me the story,’ said Falcon. ‘I’d said I wanted to be an artist … just like him. He told me to be careful because art is about the pursuit of truth too, whether it be personal or universal.’

‘I get it,’ said Ramirez, hitting the steering wheel, laughing.

‘You get it now,’ said Falcon. ‘What we know without knowing it.’

‘Fuck that! I know why you became a cop,’ he said, roaring.

‘Tell me.’

‘The pursuit of truth. Fuck me, that’s brilliant,’ said Ramirez. ‘We’re all fucking artists now.’

Had that been it? No. Because when he’d got over the idea of being an artist, come to terms with his father’s doubts about his talent, he’d told him that he would become an art historian instead and his father had laughed in his face. ‘Art historians are just policemen working with pictures. They hunt for clues. They fill their lives with speculation and conjecture and nine times out of ten they get it all wrong. Art history is for failures,’ he’d said. ‘Not just failed artists, but failed human beings, too.’ The reserves of derision his father had for these people … So he became a cop. No, that wasn’t quite it either. He went to Madrid University and studied English (the only race, including the Spanish, his father had any time for) and he developed a taste for American noir movies of the 1940s. Then he became a cop.

He had a sense of rush, as in shooting to the surface from sleep, except he was awake with his thoughts flashing past him, bright and fast like a shoal of sardine. He shook his head, shuddered back into real life, the seats of the car, plastic, glass, other solid, man-made things.

‘Did Serrano come back with anything on the chloroform and surgical instruments?’ he asked, steadying himself with words.

‘Nothing, so far.’

They pulled up at the cemetery. Ramirez reached back for the video camera, Falcon hovered on the pavement, surveyed the large crowd, the wall of flowers outside the chapel, the blue sky nearly making the scene cheerful. Consuelo Jimenez was in the middle of the herd, her three children bewildered amongst the forest of adult legs. Falcon had been that high, too, at a funeral.

They must have had the blessing. The coffin was being loaded into the car from the chapel. The driver pulled away to the gates, the mourners gathered behind and began a slow procession up the cypress-lined avenue into the heart of the cemetery. Beyond the box hedges were the mausoleums and monuments, a huge bronze of the torero Francisco Rivera in his suit of lights, an imaginary bull forever thundering past him, one hand holding a broken sword, the other an imaginary cape.

The car arrived at Jesus de la Pasion. They unloaded the coffin and took it up to the granite mausoleum where they positioned it opposite the only other occupant — his first wife. Consuelo Jimenez received condolences from those she’d missed earlier. Falcon checked inside the mausoleum. The shelf below the first wife wasn’t quite empty. There was a small urn in the corner, too small to contain ashes. He shone his pen torch in there and read the small silver plaque: Arturo Manolo Jimenez Bautista. Maybe that was Jose Manuel’s ‘finality’.

Falcon rejoined the mourners, gave his condolences and strolled back to the entrance. Ramirez was off amongst the graves with the videocam.

‘Of course, you knew him, didn’t you?’ said a voice close to Falcon’s ear, a hand gripping his elbow.

Ramon Salgado’s dog-sad face crept into his peripheral vision. Here was one of those people for whom his father maintained a savage derision. Not to his face, of course, because while Salgado was an art historian he was better known as the dealer who had made his father famous. He still had a list of very wealthy clients and, right up to his father’s first heart attack, regularly sent these clients to Calle Bailen, so that they could be relieved of those useless blocks of cash that cluttered their bank accounts.

‘No, I didn’t know him,’ said Falcon, summoning up the usual coolness he felt for this man. ‘Should I have done?’

Falcon held out his hand, Salgado used both hands to clasp it. He pulled back. Salgado put a hand through his long, pretentious hair, whose white silveriness kinked into curls over the collar of his dark-blue suit. ‘Salgado … even his dandruff glitters,’ his father used to say.

‘No, no perhaps you wouldn’t have met him, come to think of it,’ said Salgado. ‘He never went to the house. That’s right. I remember now. He always sent Consuelo on her own.’

‘Sent her?’

‘Whenever he opened a new restaurant, he always had to have a Falcon in it. You know, synonymous with Seville and all that.’

‘But why did he have to send her?’

‘I think perhaps he knew about your father’s practices and, being the very important businessman that he was, wasn’t prepared to put up with the … er … rather, how shall I put it? Sardonic, yes, sardonic … relieving process.’

He meant, of course, the utterly contemptuous ripping off of clients that his father used to indulge in with such obvious pleasure.

They set off towards the cemetery gates. The pink rims of Salgado’s sagging eyes made him look as if he’d just mopped up after crying. Javier had always thought that he must have been much heavier than the stick he was now, and that this weight, when he’d lost it, had dragged the gravity-bound skin of his face into swags below his eyes and jaw line. It was his father who’d said that he looked like a bloodhound, but at least he didn’t drool. This was a veiled compliment. His father had loathed reverence, unless if came from a beautiful woman or someone whose talent he admired.

‘How did you know him?’