The Blind Man of Seville (27 page)

‘Take it down to Forensics and get them to check it.’

‘Something else that might be interesting. I sent Fernández 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 Raúl Jiménez 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.’

Ramírez left with the package. Falcón’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 Ramírez 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 Jiménez for access, but she’d already blocked him on the Building Committee’s files.

The phone made him jump in his seat. Juez Calderón 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.

Ramírez returned with the ‘clean’ video cassette from
the Policía Científica. There was a printed card with the cassette which read: ‘Sight Lesson No. 1. See 4 and 6.’ The title of the cassette was
Cara o Culo I.

‘Wasn’t this the title on the empty slipcase in Raúl Jiménez’s apartment?’ asked Ramírez.

‘The killer must have taken it,’ said Falcón. ‘And … Sight Lesson?’

They went to the interrogation room, where the video was still set up. Ramírez 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. Falcón 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. Ramírez leaned forward, playing with his ring. He made comments to himself throughout and whistled occasionally. Falcón came out of his torpor only once during the last sketch, which he thought had been the one playing on the TV when Raúl Jiménez was with Eloisa Gómez.

‘I don’t know how you can tell that,’ said Ramírez.

‘It’s just shapes on a screen.’

Ramírez grinned. The cassette finished.

‘What’s this “Sight Lesson”?’ he asked. ‘If this was playing on the night Jiménez 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 Ramírez.

‘He’s teaching us,’ said Falcón. ‘He sees things that nobody else sees.’

‘He’s not teaching me anything,’ said Ramírez. ‘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
is
there?’

‘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 Falcón. ‘Let’s watch that last sketch and just look at the faces this time.’

Ramírez rewound the tape. Falcón turned the sound down to zero. They stood closer.

‘Have you seen the way these people are dressed?’ said Falcón.

‘It’s got to be twenty years old, this movie,’ said Ramírez. ‘Look at those shirt collars — I remember them.’

Falcón 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 …

One of the girls had dark, curly hair. She never looked at the camera. She either stared straight ahead or looked down on the surface of the table she was leaning on, as if it was only a matter of time before she was on the other side of this experience. One hand was balled into a fist
of bleak determination. He realized that if the camera’s focus had been pulled close-up on the faces while a voice-over unravelled the lives of the participants, the movie could have had documentary possibilities. Did these people have partners outside this temporary world? Would it be possible to have sex with seven or eight strangers and then go back home for dinner with a boyfriend or girlfriend? Did they have to give up on life to be able to do this work?

A wave of sadness collapsed in his chest.

‘Seen anything?’ asked Ramírez.

‘Nothing relevant,’ said Falcón. ‘I don’t know what we’re looking for.’

‘Is this
tío
laughing at us?’

‘This is his game and we play it because we learn something about him every time. Let’s go to number four.’

Ramírez rewound the tape, set it to ‘play’. It opened on a party in an apartment. The doorbell rang. The camera followed a girl in tight shorts and a halter-neck top down a corridor. She opened the door and let in two men and two women. Ramírez put his big finger to the screen.

‘Look at her,’ he said.

It was the girl with the curly dark hair and the balled fist, who never looked at the camera.

‘That’s a wig,’ said Ramírez.

The camera followed the group down the corridor to the party, which was now unaccountably out of control with everybody naked and performing. The four new arrivals, rather than running screaming from the apartment, joined in.

‘There she is again,’ said Ramírez.

This time she was stripped to the waist and sitting on the sofa looking up at a man’s bulging trouser front. The camera went in close as the girl’s hands reached for the man’s fly.

‘You know who that is?’ said Ramírez.

‘Incredible.’

‘It is, isn’t it?’ said Ramírez, his satisfaction palpable. ‘She’s younger and sort of fatter, but that is very definitely Sra Consuelo Jiménez.’

17

Tuesday, 17th April 2001, Jefatura, Calle Blas Infante, Seville

They were back in the office. Falcón behind his desk staring at the cassette while Ramírez stood tapping his ring finger against the window, looking out over the car park as if he had the whole lot to sell before the end of the week.

‘At least we know she’s not a virgin,’ said Ramírez.

‘You know what this does?’ said Falcón, batting the cassette across the desk. ‘It does exactly what it’s meant to do. It confuses everything.’

‘It was supposed to teach us something. It was a sight lesson,’ said Ramírez, straightening himself up, shaking his head at the cars, a really impossible task.

‘How does this make you feel about the case you’re building against Consuelo Jiménez?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said, turning his back to the window. ‘In one way it supports it and in another it destroys it.’

‘That’s the point,’ said Falcón. ‘It shows she’s capable of stepping outside the boundaries. But why should the killer, supposedly paid for and instructed by her … why should he send us the tape?’

‘Unless he didn’t send it.’

‘Look —
Sight
Lesson number one: Raúl Jiménez with his eyelids cut off. Who else could it be? It’s too knowledgeable.’

Ramírez walked across the room, wagging his ring finger.

‘You said it was designed to confuse, yes?’ he said. ‘Sra Jiménez is under pressure. You’ve spoken to her at length almost every day since the murder.’

‘You think she sent it herself or had it sent?’

‘Look at our reaction. We cannot believe that she would be prepared to expose herself to that extent. But think about it. She appeared in a pornographic movie twenty years ago. Big deal. She probably had her reasons. Cash shortage being the most likely. I mean, what do you want to do? Work as a chambermaid for a decade or suck a few cocks? The only way this movie would have an impact on her life is if we sent it to her friends in Seville with a red circle around her head and “Consuelo Jiménez” flashing on the screen, and if you haven’t got a budget for surveillance, then you certainly haven’t got a budget for that.’

Ramírez couldn’t help himself. That crude, irrepressible pugnacity always found a way out.

‘Maybe there’s another level to this sight lesson,’ said Falcón. ‘I thought this was the sketch that was playing when the killer filmed Raúl Jiménez with Eloisa Gómez. What does that say about Raúl Jiménez … if he knew who he was watching?’

‘He’s very strange.’

Falcón contemplated the binary tracks of the human brain, the endless choices. This way or that? What was driving the instinct to always choose the wrong way, so that instead of lying in bed with your wife, reflecting on the joy of marriage and children, you find yourself screwing a whore in your study while looking at your wife
performing on the screen? Raúl Jiménez had an instinct for worthlessness.

‘If you take into consideration the likeness of Consuelo Jiménez to the dead wife … it’s almost impossible to imagine what was going on in the man’s head,’ said Falcón.

‘Guilt,’ said Ramírez.

‘Guilt requires perception.’

‘Beats me,’ said Ramírez, easily bored. ‘What are we going to do with this?’

‘Confront Consuelo Jiménez with it … see how she reacts.’

‘I’m game for that.’

‘We’re also due to meet Juez Calderón before lunch,’ said Falcón. ‘I don’t think two policemen leaning on Consuelo Jiménez about her unfortunate past is going to be productive. I want you to prepare the material for the meeting with Juez Calderón. You could also tell Baena, if he’s still down at Mudanzas Triana, to see if they’ll let him have a look at Raúl Jiménez’s stuff or at least give him an inventory.’

Ramírez’s colour darkened with some tight internal rage. He didn’t like having his machinations turned on him and he didn’t want to be excluded from the humiliation of Consuelo Jiménez. Falcón called her. She agreed to see him and asked him to come before lunch was served in the restaurants.

He took another Orfidal in the toilet, amazed at how effective the first had been, tempted to spend the rest of his life on them. He drove through the subdued city and thought that his doctor might be right, that this was just stress. We live in an age of constant mild anxiety. Because there are no longer any defining events of world upheaval we focus our concentration on the minutiae of everyday life, engross ourselves in work and activity to suppress
the anxiety that goes with relative peace. Yes, that’s it, he thought, I’ll take these pills for a few more weeks, crack this case and take a holiday.

There were a couple of spaces at the back of the Edificio de los Juzgados. He parked up and set off through the Jardines de Murillo into the barrio de Santa Cruz. He slowed down as the doctor’s words came back to him … the most beautiful city in Spain … and he looked around himself as if for the first time. The sky overhead beyond the clear, rinsed air and the high palms was nothing short of cerulean. The Andalucian sun shone above the green leaves of the plane trees casting patterns of light and shade on the smooth cobbles below. Towers of magenta bou-gainvillea, spectacular after the rains, tumbled down the white and ochre buildings. The bright blood-red of geraniums nodded through the black balustrades of the wrought-iron balconies. The smell of coffee and baking bread loafed in the quiet streets. The cavernous cool of narrow alleyways broke out into the warmth of open squares where the golden stone of ancient churches settled in silence.

He walked under the high plane trees of the Plaza Alfalfa and regretted the business that he was on — the pain and the embarrassment at odds with the full flush of the day. The secretary showed him in to Consuelo Jiménez’s office. She sat right up to the desk, with her hands flat on the leather inlay, padded shoulders braced. Falcón sank into a chair, his stomach still fluttering with gaiety. These pills. Like a man listening to his favourite music under headphones he had to stop himself from roaring it out.

He handed her the video cassette in a plastic evidence bag. She turned it over and flinched at the title. He told her he’d received it in the post that morning and about the sight lesson card.

‘This is one of my husband’s dirty movies, isn’t it?’

‘It was playing while the killer filmed your husband having sex with the prostitute in his study. The card accompanying it told us to look at sections four and six very closely.’

‘Very good, Inspector Jefe, and what happened?’

‘You have no idea of the contents of this video?’

‘I’m not interested in pornography. I abhor it.’

‘From the clothes of the actors and actresses in this film we estimate it to be about twenty years old.’

‘Clothes
in a dirty movie … that’s novel.’

‘Only initially.’

‘Come on, Inspector Jefe, if there’s been a development then let’s have it out and talk it over.’

‘The two sections we were instructed to view by the sight lesson card feature you, Sra Jiménez, as a young woman.’