urbanity as good as armour plate.
‘I’m going to have to think about this, Ramon,’ he said. ‘It’s not exactly a normal piece of business.’
12
Falcon and Ramirez sat in the interview room at the Jefatura with the videocam plugged into the television while a younger policeman, who knew about these things, made it all work. Ramirez asked after the old guy in the cemetery.
‘Ramon Salgado. He was my father’s dealer.’
‘He didn’t look as if he could have lifted Jimenez out of his chair,’ said Ramirez, ‘or shinned up a ladder.’
‘He’s also an art historian, who gives occasional unattended lectures at the university. He has a gallery on Calle Zaragoza close to the Plaza Nueva. Some influential people still go there, including Sra Jimenez and her husband.’
‘He looked like he knew how to get money out of people.’
‘We talked about black money in the restaurant business. He even touched on Expo ‘92, which I don’t think he’d meant to, and there was an offer of information.’
‘But he didn’t tell you anything?’
Falcon felt the touch of that probe again.
‘I know Ramon Salgado,’ said Falcon. ‘On the face of it he’s a successful businessman — money, big car, house in El Porvenir, influential clients — but in his own eyes he’s a failure. He’s never committed himself like the artists he represents. He lectures to empty theatres. He’s written two books with no academic or commercial success.’
‘So, what did he want?’ said Ramirez.
‘Something personal … to do with my father, in return for information. I don’t want to give it to him and get gossip back.’
‘There’s a huge market for gossip,’ said Ramirez.
‘You’ve never been to an art opening, have you, Inspector? It’s full of people pretending to know more than they do, who think that only
‘That’s bullshit, not gossip.’
‘They’re people who want to be where “it” is happening. They want to touch “it”. They want to tell you about “it”.’
‘What’s “it”?’ asked Ramirez.
‘Genius,’ said Falcon.
‘Rich people are never content with what they’ve got, are they?’ said Ramirez. ‘Even the guys in the
‘My father never understood it either and he was a rich man himself,’ said Falcon. ‘He despised it.’
‘What?’ asked Ramirez, thinking they were still talking about genius.
‘Acquisitiveness.’
‘Oh, I’m sure he did,’ said Ramirez sarcastically, reaching for his cigarettes, knowing that old man Falcon had left a fortune in property he’d ‘acquired’. If he despised acquisitiveness then the old cabron despised himself.
The equipment was finally ready. They turned to the screen. The white noise slammed into the first image: the silence of the cemetery, the cypress shadows striping the path, the mourners gathered around the mausoleum.
Falcon’s mind drifted over thoughts of Salgado, his father, the uninvestigated studio and the odd request. It was Salgado who’d made the breakthrough for his father, which was why special contempt was reserved for him in private. Salgado had created the show in Madrid, which saw the sale of the first Falcon nude back in the early sixties. The European art world had gone crazy. The house in Calle Bailen was bought on the strength of it.
On the back of that bright but parochial renown, Salgado had put on a show in New York. There was talk of a set-up, that the painting had already been promised to the Woolworth heiress and ‘Queen’ of Tangier, Barbara Hutton, and that the ‘show’ was just that, a way of creating excitement about the Francisco Falcon name. Whatever happened, it worked. Barbara Hutton did buy the painting and the show was attended by a glittering array of New York socialites. The name Falcon was on everybody’s lips. The next two New York shows were huge successes and for a few short weeks in the mid sixties Francisco Falcon was almost as big a name as Picasso.
Some of this success was due to the talents of Ramon Salgado, who knew from the outset the limit of his artist’s work. The fact was — and it gave rise to much bitterness, anger and frustration in his father — there were only four Falcon nudes. They were all painted in the space of a year in the early sixties in Tangier. By the time his father had moved to Spain that particular vein of genius had dried up. He never recaptured the unique, mysteriously forbidden qualities of those four abstracts. His father used to talk to him about Gauguin. How Gauguin was already exceptional before he saw those South Sea Island women but nobody knew it. They touched off his genius again. But for them he’d have probably ended up bitter and painting doors in Paris. That’s what had happened to Francisco Falcon. His first wife died, as did his second, and he’d left Tangier. Critics said that the nudes had been painted with a knowing innocence, which gave them their untouchable presence, and that perhaps it was the trauma of those final years in Tangier that broke the flow. His losses closed off access to the purity of that innocence. He never even attempted to paint another abstract nude.
Something caught Falcon’s eye. A black speck had flashed against white on the screen.
