‘But what did he say to you, the family? How did he explain it and his bizarre reaction?’
‘He didn’t explain it. He just used his volcanic anger to make us understand that we should all forget Arturo … that Arturo did not exist.’
‘And the kidnappers — are you saying there were no demands …?’
‘You haven’t understood, Inspector Jefe,’ said Jiménez, pushing his pleading hands across the table. ‘There were no demands. That was their price. Arturo was their price.’
‘You’re right. I don’t understand. I don’t understand any of it.’
‘Then you are in our club. My dead mother, my mad sister, me, and now you,’ said Jiménez. ‘In that move between Almería and Seville we lost all trace of Arturo. No evidence of him arrived with us. All photos, his clothes, toys, even his bed. My father rewrote family history and left Arturo out. By the time we moved into the apartment in Plaza de Cuba we were like the living dead. My mother stared out of the window all day, looking in the street below, jumping at the glass whenever a small boy appeared. My sister maintained her silence and had to be taken out of the school she’d just been put into. I stayed away from there as much as I could. I lost myself … with new friends, who would never know me as the boy who’d had a younger brother.’
‘Lost yourself?’
‘I think that’s what happened to me. I had a strange inability to recall anything before I was fifteen. Most people have memories as far back as three or four, some even as far back as babies in their prams. I had nothing distinct, just vague hints, shadowy forms of what I’d been … until a few years ago.’
Falcón tried to remember his first memory and couldn’t get much beyond breakfast yesterday.
‘And you have no idea why your father made this devastating decision?’
‘I assume it was something criminal. A serious investigation into Arturo’s abduction would have necessitated major revelations, which presumably would have ruined my father … probably put him in prison. It obviously had something to do with that ugly business in Tangier. There may have been a moral angle to it as well, appalling behaviour of some sort, which might have turned his wife against him. I don’t know. Whatever, my father must have reasoned it out in his own peculiar way, that Arturo would have been in North Africa or certainly in a ship bound for North Africa within hours of his abduction. He must have weighed it up, in his monstrous mind, that the police would have no chance, that he would have no chance.
‘The kidnappers’ message was clear. This is the price for what you’ve done. And now this is your choice: come after him and ruin yourself or accept this heavy price and continue. Don’t you think that the perfection of this terrible choice is in the nature of pure evil? They were saying, Do you want to embrace good or evil? If you are a good man you will come after your son, you will do everything in your power and it will ruin you utterly. You will end up living in exile or prison. Your family will be destroyed. And … this is the horror of it, Inspector Jefe, still you will not get Arturo back. Yes, that was it. That’s what I worked out. They forced him to embrace evil and, having done it, he had to resort to the devil’s means to survive. He persuaded himself and us that Arturo did not exist. He stamped him out and us with him. He forced us to cope with the loss in his way and he destroyed everything. His wife and his family. And this must have been his final calculation: given that Arturo is lost, that my family will be destroyed whatever I do, then what would I prefer?’
Jiménez held up a hand, weighed it, lifted it high and said:
‘The feathery lightness of moral goodness?’
He brought the other hand up and sent it crashing to the desk:
‘Or the golden weight of power, position and wealth?’
Silence while both men contemplated the unevenness of those scales.
‘I thought,’ said Falcón, through the leathery hush of the book-lined room, ‘that we’d outgrown the age of tragedy, an age where there could be tragic figures. We no longer have kings or great warriors who can fall from such heights to such depths. Nowadays we find ourselves admiring screen actors, sportsmen or businessmen, who somehow lack the stuff of tragedy and yet … your father. He strikes me as that rare beast … the modern tragic figure.’
‘I just wish the play had not been my life,’ said Jiménez.
Falcón stood to leave and saw his coffee cold and undrunk on the edge of the desk. He shook Jiménez’s hand for longer than usual to show his appreciation.
‘That was why I had to call you back,’ said Jiménez. ‘I had to speak to my analyst.’
‘To ask permission?’
‘To see if he thought I was ready. He seemed to think it was a good idea that the only other person to hear my family story should be a policeman.’
‘To act on it, you mean?’
‘Because you would be bound by confidentiality,’ said the lawyer seriously.
‘Would you prefer that I didn’t talk to Consuelo about any of this?’
‘Would it serve any purpose other than to frighten her to death?’
‘She has had three children with your father.’
‘I couldn’t believe it when I heard.’
‘How did you hear?’
‘My father dropped me a line whenever one appeared.’
‘She had to force him into it. It was a condition of their marriage.’
‘That’s understandable.’
‘She also told me that he was obsessively security conscious. He installed a very serious door in the apartment and made it his business to lock it every night.’
Jiménez stared down at his desk.
‘She told me something else which should interest you …’
Jiménez’s head came up on a very tired neck. There was a trace of fear in his eyes. He didn’t want to hear anything that might demand more revision of his newly constructed view of events. Falcón shrugged to let him off the hook.
‘Tell me,’ he said.
‘First, she believed her gregarious restaurateur husband, with his collection of smiling photos, to be a man in the grip of abject misery.’
‘So it did get him in the end,’ said Jiménez, with no satisfaction. ‘But he probably didn’t know what it was.’
‘The second thing was a detail of the will. He left some money to his favourite charity, Nuevo Futuro — Los Niños de la Calle.’
Jiménez shook his head, in sadness or denial of the fact, it was difficult to tell. He came round to Falcón’s side of the desk and opened the door. He walked his sled-dragging walk down the corridor. Had he walked differently before his analysis? thought Falcón. Maybe he’d been stooped then, as under a weight, and now at least the baggage was behind him. Jiménez produced Falcón’s coat, helped him into it. A single question rocked in the balance of Falcón’s mind. To ask it or not?
‘Has it ever occurred to you,’ said Falcón, ‘that Arturo might still be alive? Forty-two years old he’d be by now.’
‘It used to,’ he said. ‘But it’s been better for me since I achieved a sense of finality.’
10
Friday, 13th April 2001, the AVE Madrid-Seville
Even this AVE, the late one, which wouldn’t get into Seville until after midnight, was full. As the train shot through the Castillian night, Falcón brushed the crumbs of a bocadillo de chorizo from his lap and stared out of the window through the transparent reflection of the passenger opposite him. Thoughts trickled through his mind, which was tired but still racing from the intrusions he’d made into the Jiménez family.