postmark on it.
‘It’s been X-rayed,’ said Ramirez. ‘It’s a video cassette.’
‘Take it down to Forensics and get them to check it.’
‘Something else that might be interesting. I sent Fernandez down to Mudanzas Triana yesterday to help Baena with the interviews. He got friendly with the foreman. One of the things that came out was that Raul Jimenez used Mudanzas Triana because they’d moved him before. They’re holding stuff in store for him from his last two moves.’
‘His wife said he moved into the Edificio Presidente in the mid eighties.’
‘From a house in El Porvenir.’
‘And before that he was in the Plaza de Cuba.’
‘Which he moved out of in 1967.’
‘When his first wife died.’
‘When they put his name into the computer at Mudanzas Triana they found he still had stuff in the warehouse. They asked if he wanted it moved into the new home. He said no, and he was very emphatic. They offered to dump it for him because it was costing him money. Again he said no.’
Ramirez left with the package. Falcon’s hand hovered over the phone. He sat back and thought about the quality of that information. The Orfidal was working. He was calm and concentrated in his thinking, although he was aware that he might be suffering a paranoid tendency — to believe that Ramirez was diverting his attention with tantalizing but fruitless information. He had two options: the first was to apply for a search warrant, which would mean filing documentary proof that he thought that events of thirty-six years ago had a bearing on the case. The second was to ask Consuelo Jimenez for access, but she’d already blocked him on the Building Committee’s files.
The phone made him jump in his seat. Juez Calderon was asking for a meeting. He’d just had an unusual visit from Magistrado Juez Decano de Sevilla Alfredo Spinola. They agreed to meet before lunch at the Edificio de los Juzgados.
Ramirez returned with the ‘clean’ video cassette from the Policia Cientifica. There was a printed card with the cassette which read: ‘Sight Lesson No. 1. See 4 and 6.’ The title of the cassette was
‘Wasn’t this the title on the empty slipcase in Raul Jimenez’s apartment?’ asked Ramirez.
‘The killer must have taken it,’ said Falcon. ‘And … Sight Lesson?’
They went to the interrogation room, where the video was still set up. Ramirez slipped in the cassette. Tinny music started up and bad graphics. There followed a series of sketches, each one five or ten minutes long, in which quite normal situations such as a drinks party, dinner in a restaurant, a poolside barbecue, disintegrated into improbable orgies of group sex. Falcon was instantly flattened by boredom. The music and false ecstasy irritated him and his palms began to moisten again. The Orfidal wore off. He breathed deeply to maintain calm. Ramirez leaned forward, playing with his ring. He made comments to himself throughout and whistled occasionally. Falcon came out of his torpor only once during the last sketch, which he thought had been the one playing on the TV when Raul Jimenez was with Eloisa Gomez.
‘I don’t know how you can tell that,’ said Ramirez.
‘It’s just shapes on a screen.’
Ramirez grinned. The cassette finished.
‘What’s this “Sight Lesson”?’ he asked. ‘If this was playing on the night Jimenez died, so what?
‘That was the last sketch of six. We were asked to look at four and six.’
‘We’ve done that.’
‘So it’s got nothing to do with the fact that it was playing on the night of the murder.’
‘Sight lesson?’ murmured Ramirez.
‘He’s teaching us,’ said Falcon. ‘He sees things that nobody else sees.’
‘He’s not teaching me anything,’ said Ramirez. ‘I know all that stuff backwards.’
‘Maybe that’s the point. What do you look at when you watch a pornographic movie?’
‘You look at them doing it.’
‘That’s why they’re called “skin flicks” in the States, because that’s all you look at. The skin. The surface. The action.’
‘What else
‘Maybe he’s saying that there’s more to this than meets the eye. It’s not just genitals and penetration. We forget that the performers are real people with faces and lives,’ said Falcon. ‘Let’s watch that last sketch and just look at the faces this time.’
Ramirez rewound the tape. Falcon turned the sound down to zero. They stood closer.
‘Have you seen the way these people are dressed?’ said Falcon.
‘It’s got to be twenty years old, this movie,’ said Ramirez. ‘Look at those shirt collars — I remember them.’
Falcon concentrated on the faces and, as he moved from one to the next, taking in the eyes and mouths, he wondered what was driving these people to do this. Was the money enough to abandon morality, innocence and intimacy? He moved from a pair of vacant eyes to a mouth with gritted teeth, from a slack and lifeless face to a sneering lip, and shuddered under the slow weight of the small, unfolding tragedy. Did these people even know each other? Perhaps they’d just met that morning and by the afternoon …
