The Blind Man of Seville

by Robert Wilson

  Because of the American blockade there’s very little fuel for public transport. I will have to walk to Toledo.

  19

  Wednesday, 18th April 2001, Falcón’s house, Calle Bailén, Seville

  The disasters of sleep — all that free falling and spitting out mouthfuls of teeth and examinations not reached in time and cars with no brakes and precipices with crumbling edges — how do we survive them all? We should die of fright night after night. Falcón came hurtling into the enveloping darkness with these thoughts plummeting down the lift shaft of his mind. Was he surviving them, his own personal disasters? He only survived them by banishing sleep, crashing out of his falling empire and into the cracked glass of his own world.

  He went for a run by the dark river. Dawn broke and on the way back he stopped to watch a rowing eight. The hull of the shell sliced through the water, dipping with each lurch of power from the harmonious crew. He wanted to be out there with them, part of their unconsciously brilliant machine. He thought about his own team, its lack of cohesion, its fragmented efforts, and his leadership. He was out of touch, had lost control, was failing to communicate direction to the investigation. He braced himself, dropped to the ground and throughout his fifty press-ups told the cobbles that today would be different.

  The Jefatura was silent. He was early again. He glanced down Ramírez’s report. The portero did not remember seeing Eloisa Gómez going into the cemetery, which was not surprising. Serrano had completed his check of all hospitals and medical suppliers and there were no records of thefts or unusual sales. He read through Eloisa Gómez’s autopsy. The Médico Forense had revised her time of death to later on Saturday morning, around 9 a.m. The contents of her stomach revealed a partially digested meal of solomillo, pork fillet, which must have been consumed after midnight. There was also a practically undigested snack of what was probably chocolate con churros. The alcohol content in her blood showed that she’d been drinking most of the night. Falcón imagined the killer taking Eloisa out as if she was his girlfriend, treating her to an expensive dinner, taking her to a bar or club and then the classic early-morning snack — and then what? Back to my place? Maybe he hadn’t chloroformed her but rolled the stocking off her leg, kissing her thigh, her knee, her foot. Then, just as she’d fallen back on the bed to be loved properly, perhaps even for the first time, she’d sensed something and opened her eyes to find his face over her, the black stocking a taut, dark crack between his two fists and his eyes intent with the relish of a live throat struggling and quivering under his restraining hands.

  Except that he had chloroformed her. There were traces. Falcón moved on from the stomach and blood analysis. The vagina and anus showed signs of recent sexual activity. There were traces of spermicide, but no semen in the vagina and an oil-based lubricant in the anus, which was distended from frequent penetration. Falcón’s mind slipped again and he saw Eloisa Gómez servicing her clients in the backs of cars and in her room until she got the call, the call she’d been waiting for all day. The call she’d been thinking of as her disembodied voice sobbed and whimpered under the bestial intrusions of her trade. The call that touched her so lightly, the words like a feather on a child’s ear, and it moved her, turned her, flipped her stomach over her heart. Such a gross seduction of someone who would start when the shadows moved, could only have been pulled off by another who had made a study of human nature with his own very specific purposes in mind. In his own way the killer was as brutally demanding as any client.

  The only interesting thing to be derived from the report was that it looked as if the killer had taken Eloisa Gómez to the cemetery on Saturday morning, probably when it first opened, and had killed her there.

  Ramírez arrived with the rest of the group at 8.30 a.m. They were briefed on the latest developments and given the profile of the killer, who would now be referred to as ‘Sergio’. If the killer had strangled the girl in the cemetery on Saturday morning then it was clear that he’d returned at night to put her in the Jiménez mausoleum. This would mean that he probably had transport and also accommodation in Seville. This galvanized the group. The idea that he was local made it somehow personal. Fernández, Baena and Serrano would take the area in and around the cemetery and try to find someone who’d seen Eloisa Gómez there on Saturday morning. The killer may have parked his car in the vicinity when he came back to deal with the body, so the security people in the industrial zone would have to be interviewed, given that the narrow passage at the back of the cemetery was the likely way in for Sergio.

  A different strategy was going to be used on Sra Jiménez. Ramírez would ask to look at the packing cases held in the Mudanzas Triana warehouse and also date all the different shots in the Familia Jiménez video, to see if there was a pattern to Sergio’s filming.

  Sub-Inspector Pérez provided the list of directors of major building contractors still existing who had been involved in the development of the Expo ‘92 site. Falcón sent him down to Mudanzas Triana to continue Baena’s work interviewing the employees. He wanted to know if any odd people had been seen in the depot and to find out about the storage warehouse, who ran it and who had access to it.

  Alone, Falcón looked down the list of building companies and counted forty-seven. He consulted Pérez’s original list and found that only one company had ceased to exist since the completion of the Expo site — MCA Consultores S.A.

  Falcón went to the Chamber of Commerce and looked up MCA, whose activities were described as building security consultants, giving advice on structure, design and materials in high-traffic buildings. He flicked through three years of accounts in which the company had generated between 400 million and 600 million pesetas a year until its closure at the end of 1992. An address was given on República de Argentina. The directors of the company leapt off the page: Ramón Salgado, Eduardo Carvajal, Marta Jiménez and Firmin León. He wondered what Ramón Salgado knew about building security — about as much as Raúl Jiménez’s incapacitated daughter, Marta. At least Comisario León had a job that was vaguely connected, but it did not persuade Falcón that this wasn’t just a shell company channelling funds to Raúl Jiménez and his valued friends. And Eduardo Carvajal … why did that name mean something to him?

  He photocopied the documents and went back to the Jefatura. As he pulled into the car park he remembered that Carvajal’s name had come up in a case that was still being talked about when he’d arrived from Madrid to take up his new post. The police computer revealed that Eduardo Carvajal had been part of a convicted paedophile ring but had never faced trial. He’d been killed in a car crash on the Costa del Sol in 1998. He called Comisario Lobo for a meeting.

  Before going up he took his messages, which included one from the Cádiz Police, saying they were bringing Eloisa Gómez’s sister up for the identification of the body and another from his doctor, asking why he’d failed to keep his appointment. He called Dr Valera and told him about his father’s paintings in the waiting room.

  ‘Has it occurred to you, Javier, that this is something you should talk about?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘but if it did, then I would not want to talk to somebody who … ‘

  “Who what?’ said Valera.

  ‘Who thinks he knows my father.’

  ‘You have to credit these people with more intelligence … ‘

  ‘Do I?’ said Falcón. ‘You never went to his openings, Dr Fernando.’

  ‘This might be difficult,’ said Valera. ‘He was a very famous man.’

  ‘But not everybody is interested in art.’

  They hung up. Falcón went up to see Lobo, who took the photocopies and pored over them like a man about to feast on small children. He asked how Falcón had come across the documents.

  ‘Of all the companies directly involved in the building of Expo ‘92, this was the only one that had ceased to exist. I asked Sub-Inspector Pérez —’

  ‘You know Pérez and Ramírez have been friends for years?’ Lobo interrupted.r />
  ‘I’ve noticed they talk.’

  ‘How relevant is this to the investigation?’

  ‘With the killing of Eloisa Gómez I think this case has taken a different turn,’ said Falcón. The soured business relationship may have been an initial motive but now, I think, this killer is operating on his own.’

  ‘I’ve heard Ramírez has other ideas and Juez Calderón, too.’

  ‘I’ve sent Inspector Ramírez round to see Sra Jiménez on his own. He’ll apply a different kind of pressure to me. We’ll see if he’s satisfied or not,’ said Falcón. ‘As for Juez Calderón, I think he’s open-minded. He has a practical, rather than obsessive, attitude to our prime suspect.’

  ‘You think Ramírez obsessive?’

  ‘Sra Jiménez is just the kind of woman that Inspector Ramírez despises. I think she represents a change in the order of things that he is not yet ready for.’

  Lobo nodded, went back to the documents.

  ‘Who on this list could you talk to privately?’ he asked.

  ‘Ramón Salgado, but he’s away until the end of the week. I’ve been trying to talk to him since we met at the funeral. He offered me some inside information on Raúl Jiménez.’

  ‘What sort of information?’

  ‘Untrustworthiness in their exclusive world.’

  ‘Any reason why he should be believed?’ asked Lobo. ‘He must at the very least be a friend of Raúl Jiménez to be on this list.’

  ‘I have my doubts about him.’

  ‘And what does this information cost you?’

  ‘Access to my father’s studio,’ said Falcón, and remembered an exchange with Consuelo Jiménez. ‘They know each other, Salgado and Sra Jiménez. She has been reticent about their relationship. She says they met at one of my father’s evenings, but they might go even further back than that. She was in the art world in Madrid and Salgado circulated in that world, too.’

  ‘I think you have to speak to Salgado, but face to face,’ said Lobo. ‘And these documents are between us … you understand?’

  Lobo made eye contact and slipped the papers into his drawer. Falcón took it as a dismissal.

  ‘I had no idea how political your appointment would become,’ said Lobo, to the back of Falcón’s head. ‘The forces are ranged against us now. We are smaller but have the advantage of being more intelligent. We must not cross the moral line, though. I hope your arrangement with Salgado is as you say.’

  Falcón went straight to the toilet and took an Orfidal with a cupped hand of water.

  Eloisa Gómez’s sister, Gloria, looked only marginally older than her sibling, but she had none of her confidence. She sat in the passenger seat, pressed up against the door, arms folded across her chest, as they made their way through the traffic to the Instituto Anatómico Forense. She had a sharp, foxy face that had no small talk in it. She was held in, closed and alone in a world where nobody was to be trusted.

  ‘Did you know what your sister did for a living?’ asked Falcón.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did she talk about it?’ he asked, and Gloria misunderstood.

  ‘We did the same work … for a while,’ she said. ‘Until I got pregnant.’

  ‘I meant more recently,’ said Falcón. ‘Did she talk about what was going on in her life?’

  Silence. A sideways look told him that he did not have her confidence. He started again.

  ‘This person who killed Eloisa murdered one of her clients as well. It’s possible he will kill again. We know that Eloisa knew him. He passed himself off as a writer. They became friends and perhaps even something more than that. I think Eloisa had begun to see him as a way out of this life …’

  ‘He was that,’ she said flatly, which silenced Falcón, so that she added, ‘When a girl got SIDA we pointed to the SALIDA:

  ‘She said his name was … ‘

  ‘Sergio,’ filled in Gloria.

  ‘Did she talk about Sergio?’

  ‘I told her to forget Sergio. I told her he was a fantasy and to be careful of him.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he was giving her hope and that makes you see things differently. You start believing in possibilities. You overlook things. You make mistakes.’

  ‘You were right.’

  ‘This is what happens when you trust someone —’ she said, and lifted her hair at the neck to show the shiny, fossilized skin of a serious burn. ‘It goes all the way down my back.’

  ‘So you got out?’

  ‘I had a choice: the work or poverty. I chose poverty over pain and death.’

  ‘But this didn’t persuade Eloisa?’

  ‘Nothing had ever happened to her,’ said Gloria. ‘A knife had been pulled on her, sure. Somebody pointed a gun at her head once. She’d been slapped around, but she didn’t carry any scars. I knew, though, as soon as she started talking about Sergio, that he’d singled her out.’

  She unfolded her arms and they hung limp at her sides as if she was utterly defeated by life, as if all there was to add to the sum total of her experiences was the guilt of the survivor.

  ‘What did she tell you about Sergio?’ he asked, before she sank without trace.

  ‘She said he was guapo. They’re always guapo. She said he was like us.’

  ‘Like you?’ asked Falcón.

  ‘Eloisa and I used to call ourselves las forasteras,’ she said. ‘The outsiders. We called our clients los otros. The others … but she said he wasn’t.’

  ‘And what made her say that?’

  ‘Everything she said about him made me think that he was one of los otros. He was educated, well dressed, he had a car and an apartment.’

  ‘She didn’t talk about what type of car and which apartment?’

  ‘He wasn’t stupid,’ she said. ‘Los otros were always stupid. In that respect he was different.’

  ‘So what had happened to Sergio to make him un forastero?’

  ‘She thought he might be a foreigner or have foreign blood in him. He looked Spanish. He dressed Spanish. He spoke Spanish. But he was different.’

  ‘North African?’

  ‘She didn’t say that and Eloisa never liked those people. She never went with them. She would not have been drawn to him if he had that look. She thought he had perhaps been away a long time or had a mixed education.’

  They arrived at the Instituto. It was silent and empty. They viewed the body behind the glass. The eyes had somehow been filled out. Gloria Gómez put her hands up to the glass and pressed her forehead to it. Distress creaked out of her like suffering furniture.

  ‘Are either of your parents still alive?’ he asked the back of her head, whose hair was thinning already, her cheap coat split on the shoulder. She rolled her forehead from side to side on the glass.

  ‘Would Eloisa have had any reason to go to the San Fernando Cemetery?’

  Gloria turned her back to her dead sister.

  ‘She went there whenever she could,’ said Gloria. ‘Her daughter is buried there.’

  ‘Her daughter?’

  ‘She had a little girl when she was fifteen. She died at three months.’

  They drove back to the Jefatura in silence. Falcón made one last effort in the car park to see if Eloisa had mentioned anything about Sergio’s appearance.

  ‘She said he had beautiful hands,’ was all he could get out of her.

  The phone was ringing as he came into his office. It was Dr Fernando Valera telling him that he’d solved his problem, that he’d found a clinical psychologist who he could guarantee was not interested in art. Falcón was in no mood to discuss it.

  ‘Her name is Alicia Aguado. She’ll see you in her house, Javier,’ said the doctor, giving him an address in Calle Vidrio. ‘Clinical psychology is a very rigorous training and she’s combined it with some … unusual techniques of her own. She’s very good. I know how difficult it is to initiate these things, but I want you to see this woman. You’re already desperate. It’s important.’


  He hung up thinking how everybody was seeing his desperation, smelling it, Sergio, too. Ramírez came in and sat with his feet stretched out.

  ‘Did Sra Jiménez crack?’ asked Falcón.

  Ramírez brushed something imaginary from his tie as if he was about to share a sexual confidence — no, a triumph.

  ‘I bet she wears expensive underwear,’ he said. ‘And thongs in summer.’

  ‘I see she’s won you over,’ said Falcón.

  ‘I’ve called Pérez at the Mudanzas Triana warehouse and told him to pick up the packing case with the home-movie kit in it,’ said Ramírez. ‘She released it, no problem at all. But you might be interested in what she added as I was leaving.’

  Falcón wound him on with his finger.

  ‘She said: “You take that case and only that case. If you look in any of the others you can be sure that none of it will be admissible as evidence.”’

  Falcón asked him to repeat himself, which he did. He picked it up more clearly the second time — Ramírez was lying and badly, too. He doubted that Consuelo Jiménez would be so unsubtle.

  ‘What about dating the takes from the Familia Jiménez tape?’

  ‘She said she would look at it but she was very busy at the moment and that she wouldn’t be able to get down to it until after the Feria.’

  ‘Helpful.’

  ‘It’s difficult when you’re so bereft,’ said Ramírez.

  20

  Wednesday, 18th April 2001, Falcón’s house, Calle Bailén, Seville

  Falcón sat at home, his fork hovering over his untouched lunch, thinking not about Ramírez but Comisario León, who had not reached his position without considerable political talent. If León was keeping in touch with his investigation via Ramírez and allowing this pressure to be applied to Consuelo Jiménez, who presumably knew nothing about MCA, what did that mean, given that the Comisario had been a director of the consultancy? Falcón put his fork down as a wave of paranoia shuddered through him like nausea. They were going to take him out at the first opportunity. While the details of MCA stayed dormant, Comisario León was happy for them to keep knocking at Consuelo Jiménez’s heavy door. If they leaked, he was finished.