The Spanish Game am-3

by Charles Cumming

The next morning, at five, I pick up the car from the garage and drive back to Jiloca to be certain of following Rosalia if she leaves before dawn. Like some washed-up private eye in Hammett or Chandler I buy a cup of polystyrene garage coffee and drink it in a freezing front seat, cursing the pain in my back. That’s why all the experts recommend surveillance from a van; you can walk around; you can stretch your legs; you can piss without having to do it in a bottle.

  Gael finally comes out at 7.25 a.m., wearing a badly cut suit and shouldering a small red backpack. He is only the second person to have left the building all morning. He walks directly across the street, opens up the Xsara, throws his jacket on the back seat and drives off to work. This is now the crucial time. If Arenaza is still in Madrid, the chances are that Rosalia will leave to meet him within the next thirty minutes. He may even show up at the apartment. That’s what I have to hope for. Otherwise this is going to be a very long day.

  In the end, it’s three hours before she shows. Three hours of hunger, three hours of back pain, three hours of inconsolable boredom. What the hell am I doing? Why not just go straight to the police, tell them what I know about Mikel and Rosalia and let the cops sort everything out? Yet there is something thrilling about being privy to Arenaza’s dark secret; and if there is more to his disappearance than a mere adultery, perhaps that will lead me back into some of the excitement of ’96 and ’97. I am still buoyant from the initial lie to Plettix, from the stakeout at Sierra y Mar and the interview with Zulaika. Somehow all the kick and buzz of the old days has come flooding back; it’s a relief to have something with which to lift the everyday tedium of exile.

  Rosalia is wearing a denim jacket over a thick woollen polo neck and carrying a handbag about the size of a large hardback book. She has make-up on, although not as much as last night, and still looks somewhat withdrawn and tired. She may be on her way to meet Arenaza, although her appearance would suggest otherwise. It strikes me that this does not look like the mistress of a married man who. has dolled herself up for a day of romance and passion; on the contrary, this looks like an ordinary woman with the day off work, on her way to go shopping or to meet a friend for coffee.

  I looked at a map of the area last night and memorized every street within a three-block radius and it’s immediately clear that she isn’t going to hail a taxi. Instead, she turns away from Concha Espina – where they drive past all the time – and walks north along Calle de Rodriguez Marin towards the metro station on Principe de Vergara. Risking a ticket on the Audi I decide to follow her on foot, and it’s bliss to be moving again, my spine stretching out, pursuing at a distance of between thirty and forty metres, sometimes walking along the opposite side of the street, sometimes not. In the cluster of shops at the north end of Marin she buys a copy of El Mundo and then heads into a cafe for breakfast. I have a clear view of her table from the plastic bench at a bus stop just across the street, but she speaks to no one – not even on a mobile phone – in all the time that she is inside. Afterwards she heads home and doesn’t come out again until 3.15, when she lunches alone in a restaurant four blocks from her apartment. The highlight of my day comes at 5.05 when Rosalia does a series of aerobic stretches in the sitting room and I get to feel like Jimmy Stewart watching the ballerina in Rear Window. Otherwise it’s a pointless day. Gael comes home at 7.40, by which time I am dizzy with boredom and hunger. In thirteen hours I have eaten just two magdalena sponges and a cheese bocadillo, bought quickly from a corner shop when I was sure that Rosalia was safely settled in for lunch. The two of them stay at home all night and by 11.30 I cut my losses and leave. There must be an easier way of doing this. There must be a reason Arenaza hasn’t shown.

  The next day – Saturday – it’s the same routine: up at five, in place by a quarter to six, nothing going on until eleven. I organize myself a little better this time, bringing sandwiches, a bottle of water, a Walkman and several CDs. Still, the time creeps by, as slow as the last hour of a train journey, and I am increasingly nervous about being spotted, either by Rosalia or – more likely – by an alert, curtain-twitching neighbour. If only I had access to a disused apartment, to a neighbourhood shop or cafe with clear sight of her flat. It might be a good idea to take the Audi out of circulation on Monday and to switch it for a different vehicle, a rental from Hertz, say, maybe even a van. It might be an even better idea to hire a professional investigator. What, after all, do I manage to deduce by the time the weekend is over? That Rosalia likes going to the gym on Saturday mornings. That she seems happy and physically intimate with Gael. That she visited an elderly relative in the suburb of Tres Cantos on Saturday afternoon and went for a brief walk in the park. They met friends for drinks in La Latina that evening but were home by one o’clock. This allowed me to grab three hours of much-needed sleep, but left me with the overwhelming sensation that I was wasting my time. On Sunday they woke up late and took the metro to Callao and I followed Rosalia into FNAC, a French-owned department store selling music, books and DVDs. Gael left her at the entrance and I was briefly concerned that he might have spotted me and was going to double back in order to watch her tail, but he walked south towards Sol and didn’t return for twenty minutes. By that time Rosalia had bought two CDs (Dido, Alejandro Sanz) and – as ever – was seemingly oblivious to any threat of observation. Later they went for coffee near the Reina Sofia museum, but were home by 8.15. They seem to spend a worrying amount of time sitting on the sofa.

  All of which raises the inevitable question: where the hell is Arenaza? ABC, El Mundo and El Pais are still reporting on the disappearance, but every journalist working on the story – including Zulaika – appears to have run out of leads. According to reports published on Friday, closed-circuit cameras at Barajas airport picked up Mikel getting into a taxi at Terminal One on the day of his disappearance. The driver, who has now been questioned by police, recalled dropping him off at the Hotel Cason del Tormes in Calle del Rio, but he wasn’t able to provide any information on his mood. That would appear to tally with earlier reports in which a receptionist said that she could not recall anything unusual about Arenaza’s behaviour. He wasn’t anxious or nervous or making a song and dance; he was just a businessman with a wedding ring on his finger who left the hotel at seven o’clock in the evening, never to be seen again. So it is with an odd mixture of dread and exhilaration that I begin to accept the reality of his murder. What else could have happened? Unless I have the wrong Rosalia Dieste, why hasn’t he come forward to declare himself?

  I follow Rosalia for a fourth consecutive day, on Monday 24 March, using a rented Renault Clio. She goes back to the gym, to Plettix to pick up a box of odds and ends, and attends a doctor’s appointment at half past four. Otherwise, nothing. Based on the lack of progress I decide to hire somebody to look into her background in the hope of establishing a connection with Mikel. If nothing has turned up within a week, I will go to Goena.

  18. Atocha

  Towards the back of every daily edition of El Pais, just after the six-page section dedicated entirely to classified adverts for prostitution, six numbers are listed for private investigators operating in Madrid. First thing on Tuesday I ring each of them in turn and settle for the one who sounds most professional and efficient – a Chilean from ‘Detectives Cetro’ calling himself Eduardo Bonilla.

  ‘I’ll send one of my assistants to meet you as soon as possible,’ Bonilla says, picking out my accent and opting to speak in convoluted, if fluent, English. ‘Do you know the main cafeteria at Atocha station?’

  ‘The one in the conservatory? Next to all the plants?’

  ‘That is exactly right. We say twelve o’clock?’

  The cafeteria is squared off at the southern end of a vast, barn-like structure more akin to a garden centre than the terminus of a mainline railway station. A jungle of tropical plants, sprayed at heights of ten or fifteen metres by the frequent mists of an automatic watering system, completely dominates the centre of the conservatory. It is one of the stranges
t sights in all Madrid. I take a corner seat beside a wooden railing and order a freshly squeezed orange juice from a young waiter who seems nervous and out of control. Maybe it’s his first day.

  Bonilla’s assistant is a respectable-looking woman in early middle age wearing a neat navy blue suit and plenty of mascara. She might be a single mother with a sideline in encyclopaedia sales; it’s hard to imagine her tracing a missing person, or snooping around in an extra-marital affair.

  ‘Senor Thompson?’

  I gave Bonilla a false name, of course. ‘I’ll be wearing a brown leather jacket,’ I told him. ‘Look for a man with short, dark hair, reading a copy of yesterday’s Financial Times.’ That was just my little private joke.

  ‘Yes. Chris Thompson. And you must be…?’

  ‘Mar,’ she replies. ‘I work for Mr Bonilla. What is it you think we can be doing for you?’

  The conversation takes place in Spanish and I lie right from the start. I’m not going to mention Arenaza. I’m not going to tell them about Zulaika or the cops. This is just a matter of finding out a little about Rosalia’s life: why she left Plettix; how she met Gael.

  ‘I need you to conduct some research into a woman named Rosalia Dieste.’

  ‘For what purpose?’

  ‘I’m not really at liberty to discuss that.’

  Mar shakes out a vaguely suspicious look and writes something in shorthand on a pad. ‘So where does Senora Dieste live?’

  A small boy runs past the table, colliding blindly with a passenger trolley piled high with luggage and plastic bags. There are tears and screams. Then his mother appears and whisks him off.

  I give the address, fill in Mar about Gael, but don’t admit to watching the apartment over the last few days. All I need are phone records, I tell her, some family background, previous relationship history, any pseudonyms she might employ – and twenty-four-hour surveillance for at least the next ten days.

  ‘Twenty-four-hour surveillance?’ The question is asked in a suitably impassive fashion, but there might as well be dollar signs spinning behind her eyes. ‘That will require a team of between six and eight operatives working around the clock. What’s your budget on the investigation, Mr Thompson?’

  ‘What do you charge?’

  ‘Per day, per employee, 115 euros, with expenses. Over ten days, with eight staff, you’d be looking to pay around…’

  I do it for her.

  ‘Nine thousand two hundred euros.’

  ‘ Your arithmetic is good.’

  ‘Well, in that case we may need to think again. How much would it cost just for doing the research into her background?’

  ‘Depending on the amount of time involved, probably not more than 1,000 euros.’

  ‘Fine. Then I’d like to start right away.’

  And the remainder of the meeting is purely logistical. How would I like to pay? – Cash, with half in advance. Do I have a fixed address in Madrid? – Yes, but use my PO box in Moncloa. How often would I like to receive a report? – Every two days. We arrange for the enquiry to begin as soon as Mar has returned to Bonilla’s office and I agree to meet her again in forty-eight hours.

  19. Middlegame

  In the old days, working against Katharine and Fortner, I didn’t have to do any snooping around. The relationship was stable; I knew what to expect. They wanted something out of me and I wanted something out of them. There was the odd nose around their bedroom – a time I almost got caught – but otherwise the work was mainly psychological. It was purely about trust and lying. And the longer I spend following Rosalia in Madrid, the more I realize that I am not cut out for the legwork of surveillance, for the patience and the wait. There’s too little excitement in it, no buzz.

  She’s at home by the time I make it north in a new hire car on Tuesday afternoon. Hertz at Atocha had a Citroen Xsara going for forty-four euros a day, and I picked it up as soon as the meeting with Mar had ended. Though clearly something could have happened in the past eight hours, it’s now the same old story as the weekend – gym visits and meals, coffee and Gael. Doesn’t this woman do anything with her life? Surely there must be something going on?

  I track her for three more days, waiting for a report from Bonilla. Now and again Mar will call up, wondering if I know Rosalia’s email address, her phone number or DNI. None of these questions exactly fills me with confidence – if she can’t find out that kind of information, what hope is there of her uncovering anything useful? – but no other option appears to exist. Access to a Spanish intelligence database would, of course, dramatically accelerate the investigation, but I have long grown used to the frustrations of private citizenship.

  So Rosalia goes swimming. Rosalia buys herself a nice new pair of shoes. Rosalia meets the same girlfriend twice for lunch and reads Perez-Reverte thrillers on the metro. She is shy and physically inexpressive, but clearly very fond of Gael and noticeably attentive to the older members of her family. On Wednesday afternoon, for example, she took the train back to Tres Cantos and spent most of the time with the same elderly woman whom she visited at the weekend. I assume that this is her mother – a widow, dressed head-to-toe in black – because they hugged for a long time on the doorstep when Rosalia finally left. In spite of all the frustration and the boredom, I begin to understand what Arenaza saw in her, besides an obvious physical appeal. There is something melancholy about Rosalia, an absence, as if to break down the defence of her self-possession would yield access to a full and tender spirit.

  The second meeting with Cetro, scheduled for Thursday afternoon, is cancelled on the basis that Bonilla (who has now taken ‘personal responsibility’ for the investigation) is waiting to hear back from two ‘extremely important’ contacts. Instead I spend the afternoon trailing Rosalia around the Retiro, where she goes to an exhibition and buys an ice cream near the lake. At one point, twisting her head out of a sudden gust of wind, she turned and looked directly at me, our eyes meeting for the first time. This was over a distance of perhaps eighty or ninety feet, but there was something in it, a momentary flicker of surprise. It was the worst possible outcome, and in normal circumstances would have been sufficient to pull me off the case. A watcher who has been observed by the subject is considered ineffective and blown. But I am working alone and can only take off my jacket and put on a baseball cap in a feeble attempt to effect a short-term change in my appearance. She does not appear to look for me again, but until Rosalia leaves the park I follow her using parallel paths, tracking her progress through screens of buildings and trees. It’s a mug’s game.

  Then Friday comes. Somehow I always knew something was going to happen on Friday.

  Gael leaves on what looks like a business trip at 6.55 a.m. He’s carrying the same red rucksack and a large suitcase and they wave goodbye to one another with the quiet sadness of parted lovers. Standing at the sixth-floor window as he drives off, Rosalia looks lost and appears to wipe tears – or is it sleep? – out of her eyes. How long is he going for? The suitcase looked big enough for at least a week. Is this the moment? Is this when Arenaza comes?

  Nothing happens until the early evening. Rosalia doesn’t go anywhere, not even to buy a newspaper. It feels like the longest day of the week and I break a golden rule of surveillance by going for a five-minute walk to lessen the searing pain in my back. Her front door was never out of sight, but it’s becoming clear to me that I can only cope with two or three more days of sandwiches and observation. I’m becoming sloppy and will soon have to hand things over to the police.

  Rosalia finally leaves the apartment at 7.10 p.m. wearing a pair of thick-rimmed Anna Win tour sunglasses. I haven’t seen them before and it has been a dull, overcast day. She has never struck me as the vain, fashion-conscious type, so I can only assume that she has an allergy or has been crying. She walks quickly out of the front door onto Rodriguez Marin and turns right towards Concha Espina. When she is twenty metres from the corner I switch on the Audi engine in anticipation of her catching a cab.
Only she doesn’t stop. Instead she turns right and I lose sight of her for about thirty seconds until I have caught up, on foot, and spotted her fifty metres downhill moving briskly west in the direction of the Bernabeu.

  She keeps on walking, crossing Serrano, then the southern end of Paseo de la Habana, past the bank of ticket windows built into the lower section of the stadium. I keep about sixty metres behind her, further than usual, but wary of being sighted a second time after the incident in the Retiro. In any case, it’s fairly certain that this is just a trip to the metro. We’ve been here before: Rosalia hops on Line 10, changes at Tribunal and then goes late-night shopping in Sol.

  Only she keeps on walking. She waits for the pedestrian lights on the Castellana and crosses over to the far side of the road. She’s moving more quickly than normal; she’s in a hurry. I hide behind a turquoise bus with German licence plates in the stadium car park and watch as she shrinks into the distance. This is risky. If Rosalia heads immediately into the grid of streets beyond the Castellana, I might lose her for the first time in eight days. We are separated by twelve busy lanes of traffic moving quickly in both directions. It was stupid of me to let her get this far ahead. I should have tucked in close behind and not allowed a gap of such size to open up.

  Where has she gone?

  Up to the right, about 150 metres away at two o’clock, I spot her on the pavement. Pale jeans, denim jacket, still walking quickly, still alone. There’s a flashing green man at the pedestrian crossing and I take it, sprinting over to the far side of the road and then jogging north to follow her.

  I can’t see her any more. She must have turned left at the next street. I take the corner of Calle de Pedro Teixeira at a wide angle, as the pavement artists advise. That way, if Rosalia has stopped for any reason – to double back, to check her tail – there is no danger of us colliding and I can continue in a straight line, as if intending to cross the road. But I can see that she has made the turn. Seventy metres west she is walking hurriedly along Teixeira. I follow from the opposite side of the street. After about forty seconds she makes a second left-hand turn onto a road running parallel to the Castellana. It dawns on me now that I have been here before, for a drink with Sofia about a year ago. There’s a bar on the next block called Moby Dick with an area directly in front of it reserved solely for cars. We had a pint next door, in a prefab Irish pub the size of Dublin. Is that where she’s going? Is that where she and Arenaza are planning to meet? He was always talking about Ireland. Basques love the craic.