The following morning – Monday – I call Carmen’s mobile and leave a message expressing the hope that she will ring me back. When she does so, three hours later, she plays it cool but agrees to meet for a drink in Plaza Santa Ana on Wednesday evening. Kitson is not happy about the delay, but I assure him that things will move quickly once the two of us have spent some time together.
We meet beside the statue of Lorca at 9 p.m. under the watchful eye of the Hotel Reina Victoria, the facade of which acts as a physical reminder that I have yet to break off relations with Sofia. Carmen has dressed up for the occasion, as we expected she would, although her taste in clothes has not improved from Saturday night. She’s also wearing a new perfume that I don’t like, floral remnants of which linger in my nose long after I have kissed her hello.
‘You look great,’ I tell her, and the compliment is returned as she suggests walking just a few metres to the Cerveceria Alemana, an old Hemingway haunt where I took Saul on his second night.
‘You have been here before?’ she asks.
‘Never.’
Carmen is easy to talk to, intelligent and eager to please, and at first I ask a lot of questions, to set her at ease and to establish that I’m a good listener. It’s what anyone would do on a first date, so the artifice feels natural and just. I hear about her work in Medellin, her friendship with Maria, and she speaks briefly about her job in the Interior Ministry. I deliberately let this slide and instead steer the conversation towards a discussion about the importance of the family in Spanish life, instigating a good ten minutes about Mitxelena’s skin cancer. Looking suitably sympathetic, I tell her that my own mother had a malignant melanoma on her leg which was successfully removed, with no further complications, in 1998. Then I talk about my PhD, my job at the Glasgow Herald editing copy written by drunken Scottish hacks and she laughs when I make up a story about a crime reporter called Jimmy who was caught screwing a work-experience girl on the editor’s sofa. She does not seem prudish or coy about sex, but has an astonishingly conservative view of society and politics, even for a servant of the Aznar government. When, in a second tapas bar, I venture a mildly critical opinion of the Bush administration, Carmen frowns and argues with some force that America’s mission in Iraq is not about oil or weapons of mass destruction, but a long-term crusade to create stable democracies right across the Middle East.
‘If we are strong,’ she says, ‘if we have the courage to see that young men will no longer wish to become terrorists because they live in these new democratic environments, then the world will be a safer place. We cannot continue to be isolated, Alex. Spain must move into the rest of the world, and this is where Aznar is taking us.’
Such an attitude is relevant to my operation inas-much as it reveals something about Carmen’s political affiliations. In due course, I will have to ask her for information which may help to bring down the government; her willingness to assist in that task will certainly be affected by her loyalty to the state. On this basis, it seems sensible to position myself in the same ideological neighbourhood.
‘I couldn’t agree more,’ I tell her. ‘It’s not naive to suppose that once every family in the Arab world has a colour TV, a microwave and a vote, things will become a lot easier. I often think that Arab leaders prefer violence and poverty to democracy and freedom, don’t you? If they could only share the Western values Bush and Aznar are trying to promote.’
‘What values do you mean?’
I have to scramble for answers. ‘You know. Honesty, tolerance, the desire for peace. There’s nothing we want more than for these people to live civilized, peaceful lives as part of a civilized, peaceful global community. The idea that America would invade Iraq just to get its hands on some oil and a few construction contracts is cynical and counter-productive. It makes me really angry.’
I may have gone a bit far here, because even Carmen looks astonished to have encountered a man under the age of forty espousing such views. Yet her perplexed expression gradually melts into one of intense relief. She has met a fellow believer. Assured now of both our physical and intellectual compatibility, she flirts with greater emphasis, and I feed off the energy of her desire, even as my own lies dormant. We order tapas and I pretend that I have eaten jamon on only two occasions in my life, a confession which cements her impression of me as a card-carrying guiri. For the rest of the night she makes a point of introducing me to the delights of Spanish cuisine – boquerones en vinagre, pimientos de padron – and I play the role of the gobsmacked tourist to perfection, marvelling at the variety and sophistication of her nation’s food. I am even mindful of Maria’s warning about drunken Englishmen, and match Carmen drink for drink despite longing for the fuel of vodka.
‘You know what I like about Madrid?’ I say at one point.
‘No, Alex. Tell me.’
We are sitting in La Venencia drinking manzanilla with a bowl of olives and a plate of mojama. The bar is itself an appropriately artificial environment, an old-style, spit-and-sawdust bodega in the heart of Huertas where the bullfight and flamenco posters have hung on the walls for decades, stained by years of smoke.
‘I love it that the city is so relaxed and friendly. I love it that when I order a whisky, the barman asks me when to stop pouring. I love the fact that the sun is shining virtually every day and that you can see small children running around in the Plaza Mayor at midnight. I love children. In Glasgow everything is so grey. People are drunk all the time and miserable. Madrid really lifts the spirits.’
She falls for it.
‘I like you, Alex, very much.’ It is a statement without any specific carnal inflection, largely because Carmen would surely be incapable of even the simplest eroticism. Nevertheless, her inference is clear: if I play my cards right, our relationship will quickly become sexual. Leaning across to touch her hand, I say that I like her too – very much – and both of us savour the moment with a mouthful of cured tuna.
‘So, I have to ask now. Do you have a girlfriend back in Glasgow?’
I summon one of my consoling smiles. ‘Me? No. Used to, but we split up.’ She looks pleased. And you?’
Macduff has not been able to ascertain anything about her previous relationships, although I would suspect that Carmen has been on the losing end of one or two disappointing encounters. There is something desperate, almost pleading in her nature which a man might find initially sympathetic, but increasingly tiresome. Her political views would also find few sympathetic ears, except possibly amongst those who still mourn the passing of General Franco.
‘Not at the moment, no,’ she replies, a little fizz of spittle appearing at the side of her mouth. ‘For a while I was with somebody at work, but it did not go anywhere.’
Now this is interesting. It might be possible to find out who Carmen was seeing and to use that information against her. As soon as I get an email address, Kitson might be able to persuade somebody back in London to look through her accounts on the sly. If either de Francisco or Maldonado was the boyfriend, that would certainly give us leverage. We talk for another half-hour, mostly about Glasgow and the Scottish Highlands, but at around midnight Carmen yawns and says that she needs a good night’s sleep.
This is it. The consummation. I offer to walk her the short distance from Calle Echegaray back to her apartment in La Latina.
‘You English are so polite,’ she replies. I don’t bother to remind her that Alex Miller is Scottish. ‘That is very kind of you. It will be nice to have you walk me home.’
Yet things go wrong once we get there. Convinced that Carmen is both expectant of, even desperate for, a threshold kiss, I lean in, in full view of the customers at her local bar, only to be rebuffed by a slow, careful turn of the head.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Not now,’ she says. ‘Not here.’
‘Why?’ For some reason I am intensely irritated. I had built myself up for this on the walk and her rejection is crushing. ‘What’s the matter?’
A man is looking at us from across the street.
‘I do not know if I want to kiss you yet. Please understand.’
It is difficult to read her face. Is this a well-brought-up, conservative girl playing hard to get, or a genuine expression of a sudden loss of interest? Was she worried that I would expect to be invited upstairs, or simply embarrassed to indulge in a lengthy snog in front of her neighbours? Within a few seconds Carmen has kissed me all too briefly on the cheek and gone inside with a promise to ‘be in touch’. I feel angry, but also embarrassed. The man across the street – who appears to be waiting for a cab – is still facing me and I look him full in the eye from twenty metres, staring him down. How dare she flirt with me all night and then duck home without a kiss? What the hell am I going to tell Kitson? Perhaps I was too self-confident. Perhaps I was too assertive and sure of success. In the shadow of my eyes, did she see the damage of the farm, of JUSTIFY and Kate? It is impossible to know. Perhaps she decided, as long ago as the Alemana, that it was not in her best interests to make room in her life for a man who was so obviously damaged. But I thought that I had hidden that from her. I thought that I had played the game.
‘How did it go?’ Kitson asks when he calls at 1 a.m. ‘Anthony tells me you’re not in the apartment. What happened?’
‘Carmen Arroyo is a good Catholic girl is what happened.’ I struggle to sound composed. ‘We had a little kiss on the doorstep, nothing more, then she went inside. It was all very romantic, Richard. We’re having dinner again on Friday.’
‘Did you set that up or did she?’
‘The latter.’
‘You don’t sound convinced.’
‘How does somebody sound convinced about something like that?’
There is a short pause. I have never been able to lie convincingly to Kitson.
‘Then good,’ he says. ‘So you’ll brief Anthony tomorrow?’
‘I’ll brief Anthony tomorrow.’
37. The Raven
As it turns out, I needn’t have worried. On Thursday morning Carmen sends me a text message apologizing if she seemed ‘strange’ outside the apartment and promising to ‘make this up’ to me if I am free for lunch on Saturday. I give Macduff the good news over coffee – explaining that our Friday dinner date has morphed into a weekend lunch – and he concurs with me that Carmen simply didn’t want to seem cheap by sleeping with me on our first date. I run through my general impressions of the evening and then head home for a siesta. The vital question – concerning her willingness to betray de Francisco once she learns of the dirty war – is left unanswered. None of us can make an informed judgment about that until I have spoken to her at length both about her career and her views on Basque terror. Of course it’s still possible that she herself might be part of the conspiracy. It’s an implausible thesis, but the liar is always vulnerable to his own deceit.
When I have woken up, later than planned after a night of gruelling dreams, I walk down Ventura Rodriguez and check emails at the internet cafe. There’s one from Saul which reawakens all my old paranoia just at the point at which I was sure there was nothing left to worry about.
From: sricken 1789@hotmail. comTo: almmlalam@aol. com
Subject: Enrique
So, what does a recently divorced man of 33 do with his time except sit around drinking Rioja and watching DVDs? And what does he do once he gets bored of doing that and of ringing up his old girlfriends, EVERY SINGLE ONE OF WHOM is now living in Queen’s Park or Battersea with her ‘wonderful husband’ and their little ‘bundle of joy’ and their wedding list crockery and their David Gray albums? Well, a recently divorced man of 33 writes down a list of famous Spanish movie stars and translates their names into English.
Here’s what I came up with:
Antonio Banderas – Anthony Flags
Penelope Cruz – Penelope Cross
Benicio del Toro – Ben of the Bull
Paz Vega – Peaceful Lowlands
Good game, isn’t it? Only, I was doing this for quite a long time, got into singers and politicians, and guess what I discovered?
Julio Iglesias – Julian Church
He’s a spook, Alec! It’s a cover name! All your worst nightmares have been confirmed! Pack your bags! Sell your flat! Check your underwear for bugs!
Hope all well -
S
I cannot allow myself to react to this. If I am going to do my job properly there can be no doubt in my mind about the legitimacy of Kitson’s operation, of Sofia’s possible role in the dirty war or of Julian’s double-life as a spy. All these things have been ironed out. I have to blank out such conspiracies. In none of my initial research into Julian’s background, nor in the more recent discoveries regarding Nicole and his life in Colombia, did I discover anything to make me remotely suspicious about his real identity. Julian Church is just who he appears to be – a private banker with an adulterous wife living out the expat dream in Spain. Saul is just winding me up.
Carmen and I meet for lunch on Saturday at a restaurant off Calle de Serrano, and it is from this point on that our relationship starts to become more serious. Barrio Salamanca is a more rarefied environment than La Latina, and one in which she seems a good deal more relaxed, at home with the expensive wives and moneyed twentysomethings gabbling into their mobile phones in branches of Gucci and Christian Dior. I glimpse, not for the first time, her secret dream of joining this elite urban middle class through marriage; they are, after all, the very people who voted her boss into office. Afterwards we go for a walk in the Retiro and I hire a rowing boat in a spirit of romantic endeavour. About fifteen metres from the concrete shore we share our first, surprisingly skilful kiss. I spend the rest of the afternoon in abject terror of encountering Sofia walking hand-in-hand with Julian but disguise my apprehension with ease. Fortune tellers, portrait painters, Peruvian puppeteers, even a poet from Chile have set up stalls along the western edge of the Estanque lake and we drift from group to group in the dense crowds with the permanent accompaniment of pan-piped music. On a grass verge near the cafe a group of Chinese immigrants are selling head and shoulder massages for a couple of euros. Carmen offers to buy me one – giggling now, really enjoying herself – but just as I have sat on the low stool and felt a dry hand settling on my aching neck two policemen appear on horseback, scattering every illegal immigrant in the vicinity to the four winds.
‘Not very relaxing,’ I joke, struggling to my feet. Carmen laughs and we kiss again and she puts her arm round my waist.
‘Why don’t you come back to my apartment?’
And that’s where it all begins. The truth is that I do not compare her to Sofia, to Kate, nor to any other woman I have been with. The time that we spend in bed together over the next two days feels almost natural, as if there were never anything false or morally reprehensible in my pursuit of her. You get so far into a deceit, so entwined in a legend, that the life becomes your own. After the first time, for example, standing under the shower at her apartment on Saturday afternoon, I realized that it would be possible to continue seeing Carmen for as long as it took to obtain the information. Equally, if my task were suddenly completed, I could walk out of the door and never see her again, only to feel guilty about the damage to her self-esteem at some later date. JUSTIFY was exactly like this. The process of long-term deception against Katharine and Fortner became commonplace. In order to function effectively as a spy, it was necessary to forget that I was lying to them. It is a version of method acting, I suppose, although one with far more serious implications.
So I stay at her place all weekend, closing both the kitchen and the bedroom doors in order to muffle the sound of our lovemaking from Macduff’s intrusive bug. I find physical characteristics to enjoy in Carmen – her flat stomach, the stone-smooth sweep of her back – and concentrate on these even as others – the smell of her hair, her chin, her childish laugh – conspire to repel me. There was only one thing which proved unnerving; her oddly muted reaction to the bruis
es on my body. Carmen barely commented on them. I had felt that they would be a barrier between us, even a clue to my true identity, yet it was almost as if she was expecting to find them, almost as if she had encountered violence in a relationship before.
On Sunday evening she has to visit her mother in hospital and I take the opportunity to go through her personal belongings, making a visual record of any Interior Ministry documents and searching for evidence of love letters from her former boyfriend at work. There is, of course, the danger that Laura de Rivera might return at short notice from Paris, so Macduff is stationed in the window of the bar outside her apartment, watching the front door for visitors. At eight I leave a note explaining that I need to go home for a change of clothes and dead-drop Macduff the list of phone numbers drawn from Carmen’s mobile while she was asleep. There were two for de Francisco and one for Maldonado, but as yet no information from her personal computer. A laptop is sitting on a chair in our bedroom, but I could not risk booting it up for fear of encountering a password.
Come Monday evening we meet for dinner again and drink a lot of good, homemade red vermouth in Oliveros, an old, family-run bar around the corner from her apartment. Over meatballs downstairs in a brick cellar we have our first serious conversation about ETA, but there’s nothing in Carmen’s unequivocal view of Basque terror to merit lengthy analysis.
‘They are all fascists,’ she tells me, and I suppress a smile. ‘The only way to deal with ETA is to arrest their leaders and to make sure that there is no place for them to hide. This is the view of the Spanish government and it also happens to be the view of my family.’
The vehemence of this last remark, given that her mother is Basque, surprises me a little, but I let it go. She is otherwise predictable company. She laughs at my jokes. She teaches me words and phrases in Spanish. We find out about each other’s families – Alex’s parents live in Edinburgh and have been happily married for over thirty years – and talk about music and films. I try to appear as smitten and sincere as possible and Carmen seems to be as enthusiastic about me as she ever was. Afterwards we return to her apartment and I suppose that I start to miss Sofia at this point, if only for her intemperate moods and greater skills as a lover. The friction of adultery with a beautiful woman is different from the necessity of sex with a plain, if willing, target.
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