A fist tears into my stomach, doubling me over. I did not hear him there. The breath is ripped out of me, leaving a vacuum into which I choke and cough. There are particles of fine earth in the lining of the sack which catch in my throat. I cannot breathe. I try to speak but I cannot breathe. The woman says, ‘Stop lying. Who do you work for?’ but I am unable to respond. The flex binding my hands is too tight and it feels as if all of my weight is being supported on my torn wrists.
Again: ‘Who do you work for?’
When I give the same response – the single word ‘Endiom’ – I am punched a second time, and my assailant has to catch the weight of my head as I pitch forward. His hand covers my mouth through the sack and I want to bite at it, to return the pain. The woman says something in Basque which I do not understand. Then a great wave of nausea swells in me and I think that I might be sick. Again she asks the question, and when I do not reply I hear the grunt of the man beside me, as if he is readying himself for yet another strike. I try to tense my stomach muscles, to prepare for him, but I have lost all physical control over the lower part of my body. Then the click of a cigarette lighter just beside my ear. Oh Jesus, is he going to set fire to the sack? Summoning a desperate strength, I scream, ‘For Christ’s sake, I’m not a fucking spy. You said that I was a spy. When he brought the food three days ago. When he kept me awake.’
The lighter clicks off. I manage to scrape the chair away from the sound of it. There is silence. At the door the guard who threw the coffee clears his throat. I think that I hear him move towards me but I cannot trust my senses now. I am coughing again on the dust. I choke in the terrible darkness of the sack and shake my head, utterly disorientated.
‘How long have you been a spy?’ the woman asks.
This is the crazy, chopped logic of interrogation. Whatever I say, I say nothing.
‘I told you, I’m not a spy. You are keeping the wrong man. I am not a spy. Please don’t hit me when I tell you the truth. My name is Alec Milius. I am a British citizen. I came to Madrid six years ago. I work for a British company. You think that I’m a spy because of my link to Mikel Arenaza, but I had nothing to do with his death. I want to find his killer as much as you do. I think I know…’
But what I am saying is overhauled by the terrible screech of a heavy object being dragged across the ground. It is coming from the direction of the blue tarpaulins near the far wall. It sounds like a fridge, a chest, something large and cumbersome, the awful slide of fingernails being dragged along a blackboard. The woman was not interested in what I had to say. They were moving the object while I was talking.
‘What is that?’
‘Alec?’
Her voice is suddenly very soft and directly in front of me, just a few inches from my face. I could kick her if my legs were free. We could kiss. Even in this nightmare state, the thought arises that one should never strike a woman. I can hear the two men breathing hard as they come to a halt.
‘Yes?’
‘Have you listened to that?’
‘Listened to what? To the noise? Yes, of course.’
‘And do you understand what I have told you?’
‘What have you told me? You’ve told me nothing. I know that you’re ETA. I am not a spy…’
Another suffocating punch into my stomach. Who did that? Was that the woman? I scream something at her, aware that my private vow never to do so, never to grant them the satisfaction of hearing their punishment rewarded, has been easily broken. Then suddenly there is silence, long and quiet enough to hear a bird flap its wings in the rafters of the barn, until eventually the woman speaks again.
‘Let me make things clear,’ she says. ‘There is a gas stove in front of you. This is what we have taken from the other side of the barn. Now I want you to listen to me very carefully.’
Again, the awful static click of the cigarette lighter. One of the men is standing beside me. Someone turns what sounds like the dial on a cooker. I hear the hiss of gas escaping into nothing, followed by a hollow roar as it is lit. Oh, please God, no.
‘If you refuse to co-operate with us, we will put you on this stove. We will burn you and you will be left to die. None of us cares about this. We have done it before and we can choose to do it again. So I want you to consider very carefully when you answer us.’
I begin to weep. I cannot any longer hide my fear from them. My freezing body shakes with terror and cold and I feel a sort of madness welling up beneath the black horror of the sack. Let them do to me what they want. I have no more fight.
‘Do it then,’ I scream. ‘ Venga. No soy un mentiroso. Fuck you, you fucking animals. I am not who you think I am. I am not a spy. Fucking do it.’
A wild slash across my head, the back of a hand, then something slamming into my knees, like a wooden stave or a pole. My neck twists as tears cut across my eyes. I scream at them again.
‘You are animals. You betray your cause.’ Where is this strength coming from? An extraordinary defiance has erupted within me and asserted control. ‘You do not know what is happening. There is another GAL. I know about the GAL. You kill me and burn me and you will all be finished.’
I do not know whether my words have any effect. I do not care. I think that I pass out and then return to consciousness. I think that the gas is switched off. My knees throb with pain. It is as if my bones pulse. I cannot stop coughing. At last, eventually, the woman says, ‘What do you mean by that?’ and her voice, for the first time, bears a trace of anxiety. ‘ Que significa la otra GAL? What do you mean, Alec?’
The use of my first name feels like a blessing. I have a chance to stop this nightmare. Sitting straighter, risking another blow from one of the men, I speak very slowly, with as much truth and care as I can summon.
‘I was sent to San Sebastian. I was sent to Donostia by the bank. I met Mikel Arenaza and I interviewed him. I had to ask him questions for my work. He was kind to me. He said we should meet in Madrid and he telephoned me the day he disappeared. He called from the airport and we arranged to meet.’ Somebody moves away from the chair and leans up against the stove. I hear it shift very slightly on the stone floor. I try desperately to remember details and it helps that I do not have to lie. ‘Mr Arenaza did not come to the meeting. I waited for him in a bar in Gran Via. The Museo Chicote. It’s a famous bar. I thought he was with his girlfriend and that’s why he was in Madrid. He had a mistress. I want to make sense. You need to know this. Am I making sense?’
‘Who?’ the woman asks.
I pause, trying to get a clean, steadying breath under the hood. What is she referring to? Does she want to know about Rosalia? Why did the leader say ‘Who?’ I have lost my train of thought. I want to ask one of the men to take off the hood and to give me a glass of water, but that would be to risk another blow.
‘Her name is Rosalia Dieste. Her step-father was murdered by ETA at Chamartin station. One of your operations a long time ago. She seduced him because he was Batasuna. She wanted him dead. It was revenge. I followed her because I liked Mikel. I was trying to find him.’
Something happens. I feel the touch of metal on the skin of my biceps. A knife. The string tying the sack has been cut. Then they rip off the hood and immediately tie a blindfold very tightly around my eyes. I register nothing but a blast of light. I gasp at the air in the barn and cry out pathetically, as if freed from a black hole. Then the woman says, ‘Keep going.’
‘I am a banker, a private banker. I am not a spy. Please don’t burn me. Please don’t put me on the gas.’ It is so hard to think. ‘I followed her because I was interested. I knew about the girl and I didn’t want to tell the police or the journalists who rang me because it was a secret. You see? Mikel told me not to tell anybody. He was my friend. Then I saw Rosalia with Luis Buscon. Do you know Luis Buscon? He is the GAL. I’m sure of it. There’s a journalist, Patxo Zulaika, who knows all about this. Maybe you know him. I think you know him. He works for Ahotsa. He doesn’t know about Buscon because I don’t tr
ust him. But he knows about the GAL. He told me at lunch. You need to believe me. You need to talk to him.’
Nothing is said. There is absolute silence, a minute for the dead. Then suddenly, heatedly, as if the volume had been turned up on a television, I hear them arguing in Basque. Even in my demented state I can tell that I have said something to unnerve them, something that might keep me alive. I may not have to tell them about Kitson. If they put me on the stove I would tell them about Kitson. I don’t think I’d be able to stop myself. I like Richard. He is what I wanted to be. But if they put me on that stove and they light the gas under my naked thighs, God knows I do not know what I will tell them.
‘Say that name again,’ she says. ‘Did you say the name Luis Buscon?’
‘Yes, yes.’ I seize on this like food. ‘Luis Buscon. He is also called Abel Sellini. He was working with Dieste. He murdered Arenaza and took the body to Valdelcubo. That’s why I was there today. Buscon is a Portuguese mercenary. Juan Egilan… I can’t remember his name. The one who was kidnapped…’
‘Juan Egileor.’
‘Yes. He has been kidnapped by the Spanish. And Otamendi too. He was shot because he is one of you. They hate you. They think you are terrorists. They are fascists who do not believe in the cause.’
Again they go back to their conversation. All I want is half an hour to rest and gather my strength. I would give anything for that. I would give anything just to hold Sofia and to go back to our hotel in Santa Ana. If they stop hitting me, if they let me go, I will tell her that I love her. If they take away the gas, I will tell her that I love her.
‘Luis Buscon is somebody that we know about. How did you know his name?’
‘I bribed the concierge at the hotel.’
‘Which hotel?’
‘The Villa Carta in Madrid.’
‘And how do you know that he is a Portuguese mercenary? How does a private English banker know something like that?’
How do I answer this? It is as if I can feel all three of them moving towards me, shutting down the space. It should be easier to lie because they cannot see my eyes, but I cannot think of what to say.
‘The concierge told me. Alfonso told me.’ The found deceit is like a miracle. ‘He said Buscon always stays at the hotel and the staff had gone through his belongings. The hotel knows about fake passports, all the money he keeps in his safe. He books into the room under the name Abel Sellini. The police are keeping him under surveillance, but they don’t arrest him because of what he is doing to ETA. Don’t you see? They want him to carry on. He is leading the GAL.’
‘That is unlikely.’ The woman’s reply is very abrupt and I feel the dread fear of another beating. If they do not believe me they will light the gas. Then it’s over, all of this. They speak in Basque and one of them moves back to the stove. If I hear the click of the cigarette lighter again I think I will scream.
Say something. Do something.
‘Why is it unlikely?’
‘Because we have known about Senor Buscon for a long time.’ The woman’s voice is directed away from me, as if she is looking towards the door. I wonder if there is now somebody else, a fourth person, in the room. I wish that one of the men would say something. ‘He is an associate of the Interior Ministry. One of his oldest friends is second to the minister himself. Have you met these men?’
‘No, of course I haven’t. Of course not.’
‘Then why are you involved?’
‘I’ve already told you. I am not involved.’
‘You do not know Javier de Francisco?’
‘No.’ And this is the truth.
‘If there is another GAL, it will be Francisco controlling it. He is the scum. You know that he was a soldier in the days of Franco?’
‘I told you, I know nothing about him.’
‘Then let me educate you. A young Basque confronted him, a brave boy from Pamplona. And de Francisco took the boy, who had done nothing, and with two of his men they went into the countryside and they beat him with shovels until he was dead. So this man knows what it is to kill like a coward. He is the black viper of the government in Spain. And it has all been concealed by the corrupt government that you serve.’
‘That’s not true.’ I do not understand the link she is making between Francisco and Buscon, between a murdered boy and soldiers of long ago. I know that I will get out of this place alive if I can just prove the authenticity of what Zulaika told me. And yet he must already have shared his theory with my captors. Great waves of pain pulse across the left side of my head, making it impossible to think. Is this what Kitson wanted all along? Did he set me up? I cannot work it out. If Julian walked in now, or Saul or Sofia, it would somehow make more sense. I cannot seem to reason. ‘I’ve told you. I’m a private banker. I live on my own in Madrid.’ I am saying things now that they have already heard, but there is nothing left. ‘I became interested in what happened to Mikel. I liked him, I really did. I shouldn’t have followed Buscon. I shouldn’t have followed the girl. I was just bored. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I am not a spy.’
And then the beating starts again. After this I remember nothing. No more talk, no more questions, no fear nor even pain. I remember nothing.
30. Out
There is a Dutch film, The Vanishing, in which a man wakes up inside his own coffin. He has been buried alive. In the final scene he is left alone to suffer this terrifying end, this nightmare suffocation, and the audience drifts out into the night bewildered by fear. And so it is in the aftermath of my own terror as I wake into the total blackout of a living death. I am lying on my side. When I reach out with my right hand it hits a wall. When I stretch it above my head it collides with a hard plastic panel which sends a numb pain through my fingers and wrist. My feet can push out no more than two or three inches before they too are stopped by a hard, fixed surface. Everything around me feels completely enclosed. Only when I reach above my face, as if to search for the lid of the coffin, do I encounter open clear space.
My senses gradually awaken. I am wearing clothes. It is warmer than I can remember for a long time. There are shoes on my feet and my eyes are gradually growing accustomed to the light. But when I lift my head, trying to sit up, a migraine sears across my skull, lifting vomit into the back of my throat. The pain is so intense that I have to lie down again in the darkness, breathing hard for release, swallowing.
I feel again with my right hand, slowly tapping along the panel above my head. There is an odd, recognizable smell, a mixture of alcohol and pine, that same acid sting in my throat. My fingers curl around what feels like the handle of a door. Lifting my head, risking the pain, I pull it and a bright light immediately flares into the space. When I open my eyes against it I see that I have been lying on the back seat of a car parked inside a tiny breezeblock garage. I am inside the Audi. What am I doing here?
The agony of asking my twisted body to move is worse perhaps than any pain that I can recall from the interrogation. Every part of me aches: feet, calves, thighs, arms, shoulders, neck, blending into a single conscious suffering. I am wretched with thirst. I have to sit with the door open and my feet on the ground for as much as thirty seconds while I gather the strength to stand. There is terrible bruising around my stomach, a scarlet map which appals me when I lift my shirt to look at it. These are my clothes, the ones I wore to Valdelcubo; I am no longer wearing their rags. I try to put weight on my legs, but the pain makes it difficult to walk. After just two steps I open the passenger door and collapse into the seat.
The glove box is open. Inside I can see my wallet, the two mobile phones and their chargers. It is bewildering. The SIM cards are inside and I switch the phones on, but they are drained of power. Why would they give them back to me? The etarras have taken all but twenty euros from my wallet, but the credit cards, the photographs of Kate and Mum and Dad, are all there. Dangling behind the wheel I can see my keys in the ignition. The keys to Calle Princesa, to the PO box, even to the bedsit in Andalucia.
Standing again, supporting myself on the open door, I walk very slowly, like an old and crippled man, towards the front of the garage. The air is stuffy and damp. I am aware of my own smell, of my sour breath and sweat. The door is not locked. When I turn the handle it slides up easily over my head, revealing a barren landscape of dust and low, pale hills. This is not the farmhouse. It is a different place. We have left the Basque country and come south into the desert. It looks like Aragon.
Finding more strength in the exhilaration of freedom I walk round to the back of the garage where there are nothing but old plastic sacks and pools of muddy water. A dead bird lies on a pile of wood. I can hear cars passing, the tarmac whisper of engines and tyres. A second, larger building is set back from the garage, ruined and open to the elements. I experience an overwhelming desire to leave this place and to be free. My stiff body is loosening up all the time, but if I do not drink something soon it will be almost impossible to drive. I have the presence of mind to bend down and to check under the car for a bomb and my thighs and back and migraine roar with pain as I do so. Then I lower myself into the driver’s seat, turn the key in the ignition and head out slowly onto the muddy road.
My eyesight seems OK. I haven’t checked the rest of my body for marks or scars yet but I can do that as soon as I find a hotel. The radio works. Just to hear human voices again, to reconnect with the world, feels like a blessed second chance. It is several minutes before I learn the day and the date – Saturday 19 April – but the clock on the dashboard puts the time at 4.06 a.m. That must be wrong; they must have played around with it. Then the news comes on Cadena Ser at 17.00. The anchorman talks at length about the Egileor kidnapping and the invasion of Iraq. Saddam Hussein’s statue has been torn down in the centre of Baghdad and some idiot Yank tried raising the Stars and Stripes in its place. A colleague of Arenaza’s has demanded a full investigation into the circumstances surrounding his death, but there is no mention of Dieste or Buscon, of Javier de Francisco or a dirty war. My own disappearance appears to have gone completely unnoticed.
The Spanish Game am-3 Page 23
