Читать книгу The Spanish Game - Charles Cumming - Страница 18

A light drizzle has started to fall by the time we leave the bar, the dark, narrow streets of the old quarter coated in black rain. The sea air is damp, Atlantic, quite different from the dry and dusty atmosphere of Madrid, and to take it in deep breaths is a welcome relief after the fug of the bar. Moving quickly beside Arenaza as we walk along the street I try to anticipate what the next few hours might hold. Anything could happen. The evening may disappear in a mulch of booze and ideology, or it could acquire a completely different character. Unless I have read the situation wrongly, Arenaza appears to have undergone some sort of political epiphany, criticizing his former masters in the armed struggle and happily articulating that revelation to strangers such as myself. It is the aeroplane phenomenon: the most sensitive information is often disclosed to the passenger sitting by our side whom we expect never to see again. As Arenaza spoke to me in the bar, confidence seemed to ebb away from him with each passing drink, as if a mask were slipping from his face. On the basis of a shared acquaintance with Julian, a former councillor with Batasuna was taking me into his confidence, and yet it somehow made perfect sense. I charmed him back there. I worked him round.

‘First we have to go to my car,’ he says. ‘I have to take off this jacket, Alec, to change out of my suit and shoes. You OK if I do this?’

‘No problem.’

Most of the better bars and restaurants in San Sebastián are clustered around the Parte Vieja, but I have spent very little time here, largely because Julian’s contacts preferred to meet in the lounge bar of the Hotel Inglaterra, where the comfortable sofas and armchairs offer views out onto the promenade and the ocean beyond. As a result, I don’t know my way around and Arenaza’s frequent switches of direction along the grid of streets are disorientating. It feels as though we are heading west towards the Concha, but it is impossible to take a bearing. Arenaza is holding a copy of the Gara newspaper over his head to protect it from rain, using his other hand to talk into a mobile phone. He is speaking to someone rapidly in Basque:

‘Denak ondo dago. Gaueko hamabietan egongo maizetxean. Afari egin behar dut Ingles bankari honekin.’

Who is he talking to? His wife? A colleague? Halfway through the conversation he breaks off and gestures at a poster tacked to the window of a nearby bar. It is a cartoon depicting a caricature of Aznar, the prime minister’s tongue curling deep into the arse of President George W. Bush. The caption is written in Basque and I cannot understand it. Through the window I can see two men playing chess on stools. Arenaza mouths the word ‘Truth’ and continues speaking into the phone. ‘Ez arduratu,’ he says. ‘Esan dizut dagoenekoz. Gaueko hamabiak. Bale ba, ikusi ordu arte.’

Then the conversation ends and we emerge into a pedestrianized area immediately behind the town hall. It is past nine o’clock and the streets are teeming with people. Arenaza explains that his car is parked in an underground garage about fifty metres away. Putting his hand on my back, he steers me across a set of blinking pedestrian lights and we walk towards the entrance.

‘Down here,’ he says. ‘Down here.’

The staircase is poorly lit and I hold on to the banister, pushed aside at one point by a pensioner coming the other way wearing a fake mink coat. The car park is on three subterranean levels, each one increasingly damp. Arenaza’s car, a tiny, door-dented Fiat, is parked in the far corner of the bottom floor, squeezed in between a brand-new Mini Cooper with British plates and a dark blue Renault Espace. This must be the long-term car park, because the area is completely devoid of people. It is very dark now, and for the first time it occurs to me that I may have completely misread the situation. Why did Arenaza need me to come all the way down here? Why is he changing his clothes?

‘You know what, Mikel, I think I might wait upstairs.’ This could be a kidnap attempt, a robbery, anything. ‘I’ll see you at the entrance to the town hall.’

I should never have come here of my own volition. I’m letting things slip.

‘What are you saying?’ He sounds relaxed, fishing around in the boot of the Fiat, his face is out of sight. ‘Alec?’

‘Just that I need to make a phone call. From the entrance. To a friend in Madrid. She’s trying to call me. I’ll see you at the top, Mikel, OK? I’ll see you at the top.’

‘Wait, wait.’ He emerges between the Fiat and the Mini, dressed in an old sweater worn over a clean white T-shirt. ‘You’re going upstairs? Can you wait just for two minutes please?’

I back away from the car and spin slowly through a complete turn, trying to read his eyes. In the distance, something metal drops to the ground. It is too dark and very quiet. Just the concrete chill of basements and a pervasive smell of spilled petrol. Then, thirty feet away, two men emerge quickly from a van and start moving towards me. Immediately I turn and run back towards the exit staircase, with no thought other than to get out as quickly as possible. Behind me, Arenaza shouts out ‘Hey!’ but I do not respond, sprinting hard up three flights of stairs and into the blessed relief of rain and fresh air.

At street level I bend down and double up in the crowds, resting my hands on my knees in an attempt to catch some breath. Why did Julian set me up with this guy? My head aches and the backs of my legs are shaking. Then, behind me, the two men emerge onto the street, walking at a steady pace. With a sense of relief that quickly changes to shame, I see that they are Chinese. Not Basque nationalists, not errand boys for ETA, but two tourists wearing denim jeans and raincoats. One of them is telling a story, the other laughing while consulting a map. It is humiliating. Seconds later Arenaza himself emerges, looking around with an expression of complete bewilderment. How do I get out of this one? I take out my mobile phone, press it to my ear and say the words ‘Two three four five, two twos are four, two threes are six’ in an attempt to give an impression of urgent conversation. Arenaza spots this and frowns. I wave happily back, gesturing to the phone, and then snap it shut as he comes towards me.

‘Sorry, Mikel, sorry.’ My breathing is fast and irregular. ‘My phone started ringing down there and I wanted to take it. There’s this girl I’ve been seeing and the signal was weak…’

He doesn’t believe me. ‘What happened?’ he says gently.

‘Like I was just telling you. A girl…’

‘No, come on. What? You become scared by something?’

He is not angry. In fact he is being surprisingly sympathetic.

‘Scared?’ I produce an absurd burst of laughter. ‘No, of course not.’

‘You suffer claustrophobia, Alec?’

It’s an idea. I might as well play along rather than try to pretend that I received a mobile phone signal under fifty feet of concrete.

‘OK, to be honest, yes. I do. I got a bit freaked out. Call it claustrophobia.’

‘My brother has this as well.’ God bless Mikel Arenaza’s brother. ‘I am sorry, very sorry to hear about it.’ He shakes his head and puts a hand on the lower part of my neck, giving it a little squeeze. ‘You should have said something before we go.’

‘Well, I thought I’d outgrown it, Mikel, I really did. I haven’t had an episode like that for years. We bankers aren’t very tough, you know?’

He doesn’t laugh. ‘No, this is not funny. I know because of Julio. It ruins his life.’ Opening a wide-brimmed umbrella, Arenaza shields me from the rain and assumes an almost avuncular air. ‘You want to rest? You want to go back to your hotel?’

‘No, of course not.’ He has applied a fresh layer of aftershave in the car park and I wish that we were not standing so close together. ‘Let’s carry on. Let’s have a drink. I’d like to, I really would.’

And he accepts, talking all the way about his own fears–of heights, of spiders–purely to lessen my own sense of embarrassment. It is an unarguably kind thing to do and I feel an unexpected sense of shame that I should have suspected him of anything but openness and decency.

‘This is where I want to take you,’ he says as we arrive outside an herrika taverna, back in the depths of the Parte Vieja. ‘Inside you will see the problems with the abertzale. Then it will all become clear.’

The small bar is jammed and thumps with the cacophonic roar of Basque heavy metal. A smell of marijuana hits me like a memory of Malasaña and Arenaza looks back as we drift past its source: two Goths sucking on a joint the size of a magic marker. He is greeted, though not warmly, by several of the customers, yet he stops to talk to no one. At the bar we turn to face one another and I insist that it’s my round.

‘We pay at the end,’ he says. ‘You’re not too uncomfortable here? Not too much crowd?’

He is harping back to the claustrophobia.

‘No, I’m fine. It’s more a fear of the dark, Mikel. Generally I’m all right in crowds.’

A woman is serving behind the bar with the sides of her head shaved and the hair grown out long at the back. It is a Basque style. Looking around, I can see half a dozen young men with similar cuts, and another three or four with what can only be described as mullets. The idea–according to a journalist I had lunch with in Villabona on Wednesday–is to present a stark contrast to the primped rugs of Madrid’s young conservative elite, who tend to favour neat side partings or waves of sculpted gel. Arenaza leans over and kisses the barmaid on both cheeks, though again he is greeted coolly.

‘Let’s drink something,’ he says, ordering two large whiskeys–Irish, of course–with plenty of ice in mine. There is a small, blue-black pot on the bar, like an Inca urn, and I ask what it is.

‘That is a collection box,’ he replies quietly. ‘Money for our prisoners.’

‘For prisoners of E-T-A?’

‘Exactly.’

This catches me off guard.

‘That’s legal?’

Arenaza shrugs. I can see now that there are photographs of ETA prisoners all over the bar, hidden in corners next to ageing stickers promoting Batasuna, mug shots of ‘freedom fighters’ with self-conscious stares, gazing out in defiance at the insult of devolved power. About one in every five is a woman, and none of them can be much older than thirty. What must it be like to live with the day-to-day conviction of political violence, to take a human life in the name of a cause? Epiphany or no epiphany, Arenaza must have some experience of this; you do not work for Batasuna for sixteen years without drops of blood accumulating on your hands. It is in herrika tavernas like this one, all over the Basque country, that ETA firebrands will do a lot of their recruiting, pouring nationalist propaganda into the ears of susceptible young men who will later go off to bomb the hotels of British tourists in Alicante, or to blow up the cars of a politician or judge brave enough to have taken a stand against the ‘armed struggle’. Is that how he started out? Was Arenaza talent-spotted as a teenage terrorist, later to send out acolytes of his own on the path to an ignorant martyrdom?

‘Would you like something to eat?’ he asks.

‘I’m not hungry.’

As if on cue my mobile phone trills and a text message comes through from Sofía:

Miss u tonight. Hope u are being careful in the north.

Be aware of the basques. They are fascists. xxx

‘Is everything all right?’

I switch off the phone.

‘Everything’s fine. Still feeling a bit strange from the car park.’

He picks up our drinks and finds a corner in which to stand and talk.

‘Tell me something,’ I ask him, feeling like I want to have this out. ‘Are these bars used for money laundering? If I buy you a whiskey or a bocadillo, am I helping to pay for a detonator on E-T-A’s next car bomb?’

He appears to admire my frankness.

‘Well, it is true, up to a point. What is the reason for denying this? A lot of people are engaged in the war, Alec. A lot of people want to see an independent Basque state.’

‘And a lot of people just want to be left in peace. Most people want to have nothing whatsoever to do with politics. You said so yourself, just half an hour ago.’

‘It’s true, it’s true.’ He looks suddenly disgusted by his cigarette and extinguishes it in an ashtray. ‘Politics is over for the great majority. We have talked about this. The complete irrelevance of political discourse of any kind. This is why an event like 9/11 comes as such a shock to the average American. “Who are these people?” they ask themselves. “What have we done to them that they can do this to us?” People are ignorant of the facts. They are misinformed by journalists on the television and in the newspapers, and anyway they do not care. If they did, they would seek answers. If they did, they would take to the streets.’

‘But Spanish people never stop taking to the streets. There are protests in Madrid all the time. I can’t hear myself think in Calle Princesa at the moment. Every time I look out of the window there are 10,000 people protesting against the war in Iraq.’

He smirks. ‘And they will not be heard. It is only a story that fills news programmes, something to give people a subject to talk about over lunch. This protest makes them feel good, as if they have done something. But it is just the orgasm of the collective act, a masturbation.’ Arenaza mispronounces this word and I almost laugh. ‘Take away that person’s television, their car, their house, then you will see them commit to a cause.’

‘But that’s the position here in Euskal Herria. You insist, in spite of all the freedoms enjoyed by modern Basques, that Spain has stolen something from you. Your country. And yet you’ve given up–on yourself and on the people. You think democracy and freedom of speech are wasted on them.’

This gives Arenaza pause, as if I have locked him in a contradiction, and again I begin to wonder whether he really believes anything he says. It all seems so cynical, so reductionist, so completely at odds with the confident, Madrid-bashing nationalist of first acquaintance. Has he been told to say it?

‘I will explain.’ Moving only his eyes, he gestures towards a spidery figure standing about ten feet away in the bar. A stooped, ageing man, bald and bearded, is jabbering with electric conviction at a teenager wearing jeans and leathers. ‘What do you see over there?’

‘I see somebody trying to make a point. And I see an impressionable young man.’

When I have explained the word ‘impressionable’, Arenaza says, ‘Exactly!’ and reproduces an earlier smile of triumph. ‘This man was one of my former colleagues. We work together in the same office. Do not worry, he does not speak English. He will not be able to understand what we are saying. He is a man filled with hate. Once a true patriot, now extreme in all of his views. Just as I was telling you–a person of conviction who allowed personal vanity and weakness to cloud his judgment. And this boy you see, this is the first time that I have seen him in the bar. He is just a child, there are hundreds like him, and my colleague will be instructing him in the good sense of the armed struggle, letting him pick up the street slang of our language, giving him a purpose, a direction. See the way he looks at him, as if in the presence of greatness.’

It is indeed obvious that the teenager is eager and suggestible, to the point of caricature: the tilted head, the careful gestures, the respect and deference of his gaze. Blond threads of adolescent beard coat the sides of his face and his forehead is pock-marked by acne. Here is a person at the dawn of adult life engaged in a search for meaning, a young man of undecided character pounced upon by opportunists. Just as I was when Hawkes and Lithiby sucked me into the secrecy of Five and Six back in 1995. It is the first rule of recruitment: get them before the cynicism sets in. Get them while they’re young.

‘So your colleague is recruiting for E-T-A?’ I ask.

‘Who knows?’ Arenaza shrugs and drinks his whiskey and of course there will be no certain answer. I steal a second glance at the man and suppress an urge to confront him. Is there anything more dangerous than the ideologue, the fanatic with his bitterness and his cause? I feel a profound and urgent desire to protect this young man from his innocence, from all the pain and anguish that will visit him in his future.

‘Personally I have lost all belief,’ Arenaza says, interrupting this thought. ‘My colleague–his name is Juan–certainly believes that E-T-A will triumph. But I know now that armed struggle is wrong.’

‘But you said it could work. You said bombs will bring politicians to the table.’

‘To the table, yes. After that, everything is consensus. Just look at what has happened in Ireland. So what were we fighting for? It was as pointless as putting on sunglasses in the dark.’

Even if Arenaza is spinning a line, I would like to hear how this plays out. ‘What happened to you?’ I ask.

He repeats my question, possibly for melodramatic effect, and sinks the whiskey in a single gulp.

‘Two things happened. The first is that they set off a car bomb in Santa Pola, a bomb that killed a six-year-old girl. She was playing with toys in her bedroom. You were probably in Madrid when it happened. You probably took part in the manifestations which followed.’ ‘Manifestations’ is a mistranslation of the Spanish word for ‘protest’. ‘The E-T-A did not think to find out if the young girl was there. She was just a child, innocent of politics, of frontiers. And the day after the bombing I was very shaken, it surprised me to feel this way. I could not work, I could not sleep. For the first time I could not even talk to my wife or to my colleagues. It was as if all of my doubts about the direction of my life had been brought together by this single incident. They had printed the girl’s photograph in the newspaper. She looked like my own daughter, almost a copy. The same eyes, the same hair, the same clothes. And I thought, “This is madness, this cannot go on.” And to make it worse, a few hours after the bombing I was forced to issue a statement on behalf of the party, saying that we would be happy to “analyse” the situation. Not condemning the accidental murder of an innocent child, but “analysis”. A nothing word, a word that Rumsfeld might use, even the fucking tax inspector Aznar. The prime minister called us “human trash”, and for once he was right. Then, one week later, another bomb, and I thought, “Now the ban will go through,” and of course it did. The electricity was ordered to be shut off. No water came to any of the Batasuna offices across the whole of Euskal Herria. And in private I criticized the leadership, I told them they could not see what was going on, although of course nobody knew the extent of my dissatisfaction. Then I marched through the streets of the city with everyone else in protest against what the government was doing, because it was undemocratic, because it was stupid of the judge, Garzón, but the situation was hopeless. My heart had gone.’

Across the room, Juan emits a tight, rasping cough, like a dog with something caught in its throat. I hope he chokes. Arenaza leans on the shelf and lights another cigarette. There are dried balls of chewing gum, like little pieces of brain, lying at the bottom of his ashtray.

‘But the killing hasn’t stopped,’ I tell him. ‘Two weeks ago a police chief was shot dead…’

‘Yes, in Andoain. Eating his breakfast in a bar.’ Mikel’s face almost collapses with the pointlessness of it all. If this is an act, it is Oscar-winning. He is now in the throes of a full confession. ‘So I wanted to get out of it anyway. The ban came at the right time.’

‘Why are you telling me this?’

He laughs half-heartedly. ‘Well, we confide in strangers, don’t we? I am drunk. I am not careful.’ He leans towards me. ‘This is not the sort of thing that I can tell my friends, Alec. A man does not leave the party. There are those who would take revenge.’

‘You mean E-T-A?’

‘Of course I mean E-T-A.’ He tries to drink more whiskey, forgetting that it is finished. ‘There is a younger leadership now, more brutal. And then there is the fear that we all lived with, of reprisals from the families of the victims. We were the spokesmen of the armed struggle, we appear on television, and that always made us a target for revenge.’

‘And now you’re caught in the middle?’

Upon reflection, very quietly, Arenaza agrees. ‘Yes, in the middle.’ U2 pounds on the stereo–A Sort of Homecoming from The Unforgettable Fire–while he stares despondently at the ground. When he stoops, the muscles in his shoulders swell and stretch the fabric of his sweater.

‘And the second thing?’

‘What?’

‘You said two things happened. The bomb and something else.’

‘Oh.’ His head rears up, as if regaled by memory, and for a moment all of the pain and the doubt and the sadness seems to leave him. He looks suddenly happy. ‘The second thing that happened was that I fall in love.’

‘With your wife?’

It is a stupid question and Arenaza laughs in a way that opens up his face, gives it light. ‘No, not with my wife. Not my wife. With Señorita Rosalía Dieste. A young woman. From Madrid, in fact. We meet two months ago, at a conference on new energies here in Donostia, at the Hotel Amara Plaza. She is an industrial engineer, very beautiful. Ever since–how can I say?–we enjoy ourselves.’

He is grinning manically. The ladies’ man.

‘She’s your mistress?’

‘My mistress,’ he says proudly, as if the description pleases him. I feel like giving him advice on not getting caught. Get an email account that your wife knows nothing about. Keep any presents that she gives you in a drawer at work. If you go to her house, leave the loo seat down after using the bathroom.

‘So you’ve been to see her? She comes up here and you try to get away from your wife?’

‘It is not this easy. She also has a man she lives with. A boyfriend. But next week I am coming to Madrid to be with her. On Thursday. So we spend the weekend together at my hotel.’ As an afterthought, he adds, ‘Maybe we should meet for an evening, no? You show me around Madrid, Alec?’

Is this part of the grand plan? Is this what Julian wants?

‘With Julian and Sofía?’

‘Sure. But the two of us as well. Rosalía has to go home at night so I have a lot of time in my hands. We go to Huertas, we go to La Latina. I know a wonderful Basque restaurant in Madrid, the best cooking in the city. Two men with no cares in the world. I would like to leave all of my problems behind. I have no responsibilities for five days. And we find you a girl, Alec. You have a girl?’

His hand slaps onto my biceps as I reply, ‘Nothing regular,’ and shake my head. ‘Julian doesn’t know anything about this?’

‘Julian?’

The idea seemed to take him by surprise.

‘Julian. Julian Church.’

‘I know who you mean. No, he must know nothing. Nobody knows anything, and you must speak to nobody about it.’ He starts grinning again, wagging his finger. ‘Can you imagine telling Julian this, anything that I have told you? He would not understand. He would be English about it and wave his hands in the air, trying to make it all go away. They do not understand sex or politics in your country. You do, Alec, I can see that. Maybe it is because of your family’s history, the suffering in Ireland and the Baltics.’

‘What? That helps me to understand sex?’

He laughs. ‘Of course, of course. But I tell you this. I once shared a room with Julian and he was asleep as soon as he turned out the light. No dialogue in his brain, no conscience or worry. Just a flick of the switch and–Boom!’–Arenaza chops his hand through the air–‘Julian Church snores. Can you imagine such a person? So peaceful. No struggle in his soul.’

Why were Julian and Mikel sharing a room?

‘That does sound like him, yes. Yes it does.’

‘But of course it was not always this way. Like all of us, he has also had troubles in his relations.’

‘Yes.’

He obviously thinks that I know Julian far better than I do.

‘For example when he was living in Colombia.’

‘Colombia.’

‘All the problems with his wife.’

‘Oh yes.’

Sofía has never mentioned anything about living in Colombia. Arenaza looks at me doubtfully, but he’s too drunk to make the connection.

‘You know about his time in South America? You know about Nicole?’

‘Of course.’ I have never heard Julian speak of any woman of that name, nor of any time spent in South America. It certainly didn’t come up when I ran checks on him three years ago. ‘He told me over lunch one day. It must have been difficult for him.’

‘Of course, of course. Your wife runs off with your best friend, this is more than “difficult”. I think it nearly killed him.’

I am grateful for the low light and the din of the taverna, because they help to smother my reaction. Julian had a wife before Sofía?

‘You obviously know him a lot better than I do,’ I respond. ‘You and Julian have a history. I don’t think he would reveal something as personal as that to an employee, no matter how close we are. It’s very private.’

I try to work out the implications. Has Arenaza spoken out of turn? I need to put the pieces together without appearing ignorant of the facts. Yet I cannot even work out whether Sofía knows the truth about her husband’s past. Is she an innocent party in this, or has she been playing me all this time?

‘Another whiskey?’ I ask, assuming that alcohol will help to lower Arenaza’s defences.

‘Sure.’

And the brief respite at the bar allows me time to conceive a strategy, a question designed to discover what Julian was doing in Colombia.

‘I forget,’ I ask, returning with two tumblers of Jameson’s. ‘What was Julian’s job title out in South America?’

‘In Bogotá? His job title?’ He looks perplexed. ‘I think he was just teaching English. That was the whole problem.’

‘The whole problem.’

‘Well, Nicole is the reason they are there, yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘I mean, she works at the embassy all day and Julian has nothing to do but teach English to businessmen and students…’

I experience a thump of shock, a tightening through the upper part of my body. ‘The embassy,’ I manage to say.

‘That’s right.’

‘Yes. For some reason I thought Julian was connected to that.’

But which embassy? US or UK?

‘Are you all right, Alec? You look worried.’

‘I’m fine. Why?’

‘You sure?’

‘It must be the drink. We’ve had quite a bit.’

He shrugs. ‘Yes I think so.’

‘So where did they meet?’

‘Julian and Nicole?’

‘Yes.’

He is starting to look uninterested. ‘In the United States. Julian was working for a bank in Washington and they meet through work.’ Does that make Nicole a Yank? ‘But he gives it all up for love. Follows his new wife to Colombia where she falls for this other man. Why?’

‘Well, maybe that’s why Julian prefers marrying foreign girls,’ I suggest, adopting an ambiguity in the hope of discovering Nicole’s nationality. Arenaza duly obliges.

‘Sure. But I don’t think he will marry any more Americans, no? I think one is enough for a lifetime.’

Maybe it’s all coincidence, but at the very least Julian’s wife worked for the State Department. Yet in what capacity? The fact that neither Sofía nor Julian has ever mentioned her would surely suggest a connection with the Pentagon or the CIA–and that means a link to Katharine and Fortner. But why would Julian put me in touch with someone who had access to that information? Is it because he knows that I will not be able to prevent myself from investigating?

‘I’d forgotten all this,’ I tell him. ‘I’d always assumed that Julian had been with Sofía for longer. I guess that explains why they don’t have any children.’

‘I suppose.’ He is starting to look tired, glancing at his watch. I try to keep the conversation going, but his answers about Julian’s past are either evasive or ill-informed. Only when questioned directly about Nicole’s adultery does he become animated.

‘Look, the infidelity is not so rare, yes? We are all guilty of it. I was like Nicole. I get married very young and we make mistakes. Both of us.’

But this is surely self-serving, words designed to lessen his feelings of guilt over Rosalía. Within moments, Arenaza is looking at his watch again, finishing his whiskey and announcing that he has to leave. I invite him to stay for one more drink, but his mind is made up and he is determined to head for home.

‘It was my wife I was speaking to before,’ he explains. ‘She likes me to be home by midnight. The women, they keep their claws in us, no? But I give you my card, Alec. We call each other when I come to Madrid.’