barren mountains and set up homes in chabolas made from crates and pallets. They have nothing to lose and will steal anything. We have to be severe. The beatings have not deterred them. If we catch them now we cut off an ear, again and we split their noses or cut off a thumb and forefinger. If they come back after that we throw them off the cliffs on the outside of town.
8th September 1945, Tangier
The Spanish administration is withdrawing from Tangier. R. is momentarily frightened but it seems the city will return to its previous international status and business will not be affected.
1st October 1945, Tangier
We have decided to buy property. I have found the perfect house off the Petit Soco, a labyrinthine affair built around a central courtyard in which there is a large fig tree. Light comes from the most surprising places. R. thinks it is the house of a madman. His house is just inside the medina gates off the Grand Soco where a lot of other Spanish live. He alarms me by constantly talking about the thirteen-year-old daughter of a Spanish lawyer, who lives opposite. The father of the girl miraculously becomes our lawyer and it is he who draws up the contracts for buying the property. I pay $1,500 and R. $2,200 and we don’t have to borrow a cent.
7th October 1945, Tangier
I am painting again. I draw the house and paint it in abstractions of dark and light. Occasionally patterns emerge within these black-and-white structures. I think of the Russian work and realize where this monochromatic obsession comes from.
26th December 1945, Tangier
During our Christmas Eve dinner R. asks if I want to get married. ‘To you?’ I ask and we laugh so hard that the truth gradually becomes painfully apparent. He is a massive presence in my life. (Me less so in his.) He controls my every move. We are partners but he pays my expenses, instructs me on security measures, and makes all the plans. I am eight years older than him. I was thirty this year. It must be the Legion, that life … I need structure in order to perform. I am not my own man … except here when I retreat to my courtyard.
This house is like my head, which, given that (as R. said) it is the house of a madman, is revealing. I occupy new rooms. One with a very high ceiling and, at the top, a window with Moorish latticework. I sit on a carpet and smoke hashish and watch, completely fascinated, as the pattern cast on the wall moves with the sun.
P., the barman at the Cafe Central in the Petit Soco, pointed out a ‘fellow Spanish artist’ the other day who looked worse off than some of those living in the chabolas on the edge of town. His name is Antonio Fuentes. He paints, but he doesn’t sell and he doesn’t show. I don’t see the point and try to discuss this with him but he’s impenetrable. P. introduces me to an American musician — Paul Bowles. We speak in Arabic as my English is poor and his Spanish worse. He talks about majoun, a sort of hashish jam I have heard of but never tried. P. makes it and we buy some.
5th January 1946, Tangier
It is cold and wet. The weather has been too bad to take the boats out. R. shows me the present he has bought for the young daughter of our lawyer — a doll carved out of bone. It is extraordinarily delicate but a little macabre. Later we see the girl crossing the street with her parents, heading for the medina and the Spanish cathedral. She is very beautiful but still a girl. Her breasts are small bumps and the line of her body totally straight from armpit to thigh. I don’t see what is stirring him until he reveals another thing to me from his earlier life. She reminds him of a girl from his village whose parents were shot on the same day as his own. This girl though, would not leave her parents and could not be prised away from them, not even by her own father. In exasperation the anarchists shot her, too. What does this say about R.’s infatuation with the lawyer’s daughter? She stirs in him that which he values most.
25th January 1946, Tangier
I have some majoun. I spread it on bread and eat it in the strange room with the high ceiling. I wash it down with some mint tea. Hardly has my glass hit the tray than I fall back in a relaxed stupor. After some minutes I feel my body come tingling alive from hair ends to toe calluses. I float upwards to within a foot of the ceiling and look out of the latticed window, which has a view across the rooftops of the medina to the walls and the grey sea beyond. A watery sunshine plays the shadow of the window across my shirt. I flap my arms and legs, concerned to be 7 metres from the ground with no visible support. I close my eyes and relax. I feel colder than I’ve ever been, even in Russia. I open my eyes to see the whitewashed ceiling and, growing out of that white expanse, small patches of black, which prove to be clusters of frozen dead bodies, and I become very afraid. I will myself out of this state but it persists for hours. I wake up in the dark. This morning I see mildew patches on the ceiling from the winter rains. The small clusters. The spores. The living dead.
21
Thursday, 19th April 2001, Jefatura, Calle Blas Infante, Seville
As Falcon was thinking that this Raul from his father’s journals could be nobody other than Raul Jimenez, he called Ramon Salgado to be told that his schedule was unchanged. He was going to have an early dinner in Madrid, take the AVE, and would not be back home before 1 a.m. on Friday. He also had a meeting in the morning. His secretary, Greta, suggested lunch, which was longer than Falcon wanted to spend with Salgado, but then it would be entertaining to see the old dealer’s face as MCA Consultores was introduced into the mix.
The Jefatura was silent as he sat back working through his memory, trying to find an instance when the name Raul Jimenez had been mentioned by his father. In 1961 when his mother had died his father had been exclusively painting. There was no business that he could remember. And while he’d been in Seville, no Raul Jimenez had come to the house. It was also surprising that his father did not appear on the Jimenez wall of celebrities. They must have fallen out.
As he rocked back on his swivel chair he glanced at the group’s reports. There’d been a sighting of a grey hatchback around the small industrial zone at the back of the cemetery. One of the security men had it down as a Golf, the other as a Seat. The number plates had been too dirty to read although one had seen the initial letters SE, which made it a Seville plate. Serrano’s report mentioned that only cars behaving suspiciously were noted and this grey hatchback had cruised slowly around the factories that butted up against the cemetery.
Perez’s report on Mudanzas Triana was expert and in depth. There was even a diagram of the warehouse floor plan with the location of the Jimenez storage cage. Extensive interviews with the foreman, Sr Bravo and the other workers showed that it was unlikely that the killer would have had time to do all the filming for Familia Jimenez whilst holding down this kind of job. On the day that Betis lost 4–0 to Sevilla all regular personnel were out on jobs. On the morning of Raul Jimenez’s funeral they were, again, all working. There was a list of casual labour employed over the last year and finally an admission that some of these were illegal. Only a small percentage gave addresses. Perez’s report on the home movies consisted of two lines of the bare facts.
Fernandez had shown Eloisa Gomez’s picture around all the mourners he’d come across in the cemetery. None remembered her. The gardeners did not work on Saturday or Sundays. The area for garden detritus was cordoned
