The Blind Man of Seville

‘I’m a policeman,’ he said stiffly. ‘I’m looking for Eloisa Gomez.’

She sulked and nodded him to a group standing out in the square. He walked out from under the trees, disturbed to find that he could no longer be certain about himself. Unpredictability was seeping into his nature. He had to remind himself that he was good, a force for the good, because the snapshot he’d just seen of the dark side of his nature showed it to be teeming with life. As he walked the rough ground of the Alameda he conceived the insane notion that he could become afraid of himself, of what he had inside him that he didn’t know. Wasn’t that what the killer had done to Raul Jimenez, shown him what he dreaded every day of his life?

He reached the group of women standing opposite the entrance to Calle Vulcano, where more girls stood in the light of the road, their thigh-high boots silhouetted. Fantasy women, who with their every action tell men that they can do whatever they want, except kiss this mouth. The group parted without a word and waited for him to speak because they knew he wasn’t a punter. He asked for Eloisa Gomez. A short, fat girl with stiff, dyed-black hair and a swollen face said she wasn’t around. She hadn’t been seen since she took a call from a client the previous night.

‘Is that unusual, for her not to come back here?’ he asked, and they shrugged.

‘You must be a cop,’ said one of the girls. ‘Are you with that cabron who came here last night?’

‘I’m a homicide cop,’ said Falcon. ‘She was with a client Wednesday night, Thursday morning. After she left he was murdered.’

‘Too bad.’

He brought up Eloisa’s number on his mobile, punched it in. There was no reply; he left a message, giving his number, telling her to call. They made him feel like a zoo animal, waiting to see if he’d do something interesting, until a blonde girl at the back said: ‘You want a blow job, we’ll give you the usual police discount.’ They laughed.

He headed up Calle Vulcano past the fantasy girls to Calle Mata and then east on to Calle Relator. He was remembering the last time he’d been in this area, which must have been with his father because he never came here for a drink or a tapa. There were craftsmen in this part of town. Yes, a frame maker, and there was a copyist, too, a dangerous type, dark-skinned, who his father said was a heroin user. What was his name? A nickname. The first and only time he’d met him he’d come to the door in nothing but a pair of black satin briefs. He was thin with the musculature of a wild animal. Big teeth. He’d been shocked by him, by the way he didn’t bother to dress and discussed business with his father with a hand inside the front of his briefs.

He crossed Calle Feria to an old church with a Latin name — Omnium Santorum — which stood next to a covered market. It was dark and quiet so that when his mobile rang it startled him.

‘Diga,’ he said.

Silence apart from the ethereal hiss.

‘Diga,’ he said, again, harder.

The voice when it came was calm, soft and male.

‘Where are you now?’

‘Who is this?’ said Falcon, irritated by people who didn’t announce themselves.

‘Are we close?’ said the voice, and those three words transfixed him, bent him over in the middle, as if crouching would make him hear better.

‘I don’t know, are we?’

‘Closer than you think,’ said the voice, and the phone went dead.

Falcon whirled around, checked every doorway and street corner, the dark alley between the church and the market. He ran, looking down the side streets. A couple with a small dog crossed the road to avoid him. He must have seemed quite mad, dancing with the shadows like a boxer gone sloppy in the head.

He stopped and stared into the pavement, fidgeted through the two possible scenarios. If the killer didn’t know Eloisa Gomez before, he had got her number from Jimenez’s mobile phone, which he stole from the apartment. He called her last night and now he must have got her mobile phone because he’s picked up my number from the message I’ve just left, which means … Guilt settled in his chest. He’s killed her. And if he did know her before … it didn’t change the outcome.

We messed that up badly, he thought. He broke into a run, arrived in the Alameda in a sweat and out of breath. The women circled him.

‘Where does Eloisa Gomez live?’ he asked. ‘And does anybody know where she went after she got that call last night?’

The fat girl took him on a hobbling run to a house on Calle Joaquin Costa, past groups huddled in vacant lots and doorways, crouched over tinfoil, sucking on empty biro tubes, waiting for the spear-tailed moment of the dragon chase. She unlocked the door of a broken-down old building with grasses and flowers growing out of the cracks in the plaster. There was no light in the stairwell and the wooden stairs stank of urine. The girl pointed to a door on the first landing. He hammered on it. No answer. She brought a spare key from her room. Inside there was no Eloisa, only a brand-new large, cuddly panda on the punched-out sofa.

‘That’s for her niece,’ said the girl. ‘Her sister lives in Cadiz.’

The panda sat with its arms out in a stiff embrace, its eyes stupid and sad. Falcon momentarily contemplated his own loneliness in the face of that dumb toy. He called Eloisa Gomez’s number again and got the voice mail.

‘Where is she?’ he asked.

He gave the girl his card, told her the usual things. She took it with a trembling hand. She knew what it all meant.

His failure made him angry. He left the Alameda and went up Calle Amor de Dios. He walked with apparent purpose, but aimlessly turned left and right down the disorganized streets until he hit the stink of cats. The walls closed in before opening up to a church called Divina Enfermera. Divine Nurse? The tarmac was all torn up in great chunks of black cake and piled in the Plaza de San Martin. He had been here with his father on the way to the copyist. They’d passed the Divine Nurse and his father had made a dirty joke and shown him the divine nurses at