All That Followed: A Novel

by Urza, Gabriel

“Nothing,” he said. “No. A mosto.”

  The bartender seemed annoyed by the order and reached under the bar for the bottle of nonalcoholic grape juice.

  “So then,” Castro said. “You were about to tell me what I was asking Mariana Zelaia.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I think you were trying to ask if she was having a love affair.”

  Castro smiled.

  “Crimes of passion are much more common than politically motivated crimes. I had to rule it out,” he said. The bartender slid the two full glasses across the bar toward us, then went back to his cigarette.

  “The reason I asked you here,” I said, “is that I don’t think Mariana was entirely truthful in her answer.”

  The detective sipped from the brim of his glass, looking at me with interest, if not surprise. He knew much more than he was letting on.

  “Go ahead,” he said in a way that you might speak to a young child trying to tell a story of no consequence.

  “I think that there was a … a relationship. With another man.”

  “And who is this other man?” Castro asked. I took a long drink of the beer, then wiped my mouth with the back of my hand.

  “There is another American,” I said. “He works at the same school that I do. Duarte. Robert Duarte.”

  The detective removed from his jacket pocket the same notepad that he had earlier at the apartment and flipped to a blank page.

  “Duarte,” he said as he wrote. “A Basque name.”

  I nodded.

  “His family is Basque,” I said.

  “So how does this Duarte know Mariana Zelaia?” Castro asked.

  I dragged a finger through a bit of spilled beer on the bar, not knowing exactly how to answer.

  “I introduced them,” I said finally. “About three months ago. Maybe four.”

  The detective raised his eyebrows, as if this was the most interesting thing I had told him so far.

  “And how did you become aware of this supposed affair?” he asked.

  “Well,” I stammered. I felt as if I had unexpectedly become a suspect myself in José Antonio’s kidnapping. “I don’t have any definite proof, I suppose. It’s just a feeling I have. The way she talks about him. The way they act when I run into them having coffee on the street.”

  “I see,” Castro said. “But you don’t have any actual proof of this affair.”

  “I saw them once,” I said. “At a bar on the way out of town.”

  I realized how stupid it must sound, wondered if I really had seen anything incriminating that afternoon. The detective flipped his notebook closed and pushed his half-full glass of mosto back across the bar.

  “Well, it’s certainly something that we’ll follow up on,” he said. “Is there anything else that you wanted to speak to me about?”

  “No,” I said. “That was it.”

  The detective stood up to leave, rubbing his bald head with the palm of his hand as if still in concentration. He told me that he’d be in contact if he had any further questions, but instead of turning toward the door he lingered, regarding me curiously.

  “Can I ask you something?” he said finally.

  “Yes,” I said. “Of course.”

  “Why are you telling me all this?” he said.

  “I’m sorry?” I asked.

  “I mean, she’s your friend,” he said. “Mariana Zelaia.”

  “Yes,” I said. “She is.”

  “So why are you telling me about this supposed affair?”

  The bar seemed to fill with a momentary silence, only the high pipe of an Irish flute playing from a set of speakers behind the bar.

  “José Antonio was a friend of mine too,” I said finally. “I just wanted to do whatever I could to help.”

  The young detective closed his clear blue eyes, as if suddenly understanding. When he opened his eyes, he nodded and turned to leave. What surprised me was not that I had lied to the detective but that I had already begun to speak of Mariana’s husband in the past tense.

  43. MARIANA

  The night of the kidnapping, after the policemen and Joni had left the apartment, there was a knock on the door just after midnight. Elena was asleep in her crib in the nursery, and the sudden noise clattered through the silence of the apartment, startling my mother and me as we sat numbly in the kitchen. The two of us rushed down the dark hallway, and when I peered through the peephole, I half-expected to find José Antonio standing in the blue light of the entryway, his dark suit sagging with the heavy rain that fell outside. Instead, I found the bald little detective waiting on the other side of the door, studying the black metal cage surrounding the elevator shaft as if it held some missing clue.

  “I’m sorry to stop in this late,” he said when I opened the door. He shuffled a bit where he stood, then held his hand open toward the apartment. “May I come in?”

  “Of course,” I said, standing aside. He nodded briefly to my mother, then led us back to the living room and gestured for us to sit down. He remained standing between where we sat on the sofa and the hallway where we had entered, as if to prevent us from escaping.

  “I wanted to stop by before you heard from the news,” he said, nodding to the muted television, where a photograph of José Antonio was being displayed on a news program from San Sebastián. A jagged pain arrived just under the scar from the operation, and for the first time, it occurred to me that José Antonio would never return home. Castro stepped across the room and turned the television off.

  “We’ve received a message from the people who have your husband,” he said. Have your husband, I thought. He was still alive.

  “Who is it?” my mother said. “Do you know where he is? Is he all right?”

  Castro held up a hand to slow her down.

  “We think we know who it is,” he said. “It appears to be politically motivated.”

  “ETA?” my mother said, putting a hand over her mouth.

  “Shhhh…,” I said, gripping my mother’s leg. “Let the detective speak.”

  Castro seemed to appreciate this gesture; he sat down on the edge of one of the chairs across from us, his hands on his knees.

  “We believe it’s a local group that has ties to the separatist cause. But no, we don’t believe it’s the ETA.”

  “Thank the Lord,” my mother said, pushing closer on the sofa, taking my hand in hers.

  Castro made the motion as if to slow her down again, then turned to me. I looked past the detective, to a bookshelf that was lined with small framed photographs. Elena’s first week, swaddled in embroidered white cotton blankets that José Antonio’s parents had sent us. I barely recognized myself as the woman in the next photograph, sipping at the hole cut into the top of a green coconut during our first vacation together.

  I settled on a last photograph taken earlier that year. It had been the first warm day of summer, and José Antonio sat in the white wicker chairs of La Joya with Elena propped on his knee. Behind them, two old men batted a tennis ball back and forth on the beach with paletas, and José Antonio jokingly held his empty beer glass to Elena’s mouth. I hadn’t really thought about my husband for months—I had replaced him with the American, and with a dead man I had never met.

  “Mariana,” the detective said, as if preparing me for something. “This isn’t necessarily a good thing.”

  He leaned closer from the edge of his chair. “If it had been the ETA, it would be more predictable. We’ve done this before with them—there’s a ransom, or a demand. We have people with them. We know what they are going to do, more or less. With these people—the ones who have José Antonio—we don’t know what they’ll do.”

  “They’re local,” I said.

  Castro nodded, and as if on cue, he reached into his pocket and retrieved a large white envelope. He placed it on the low table between us, then reached in and removed a series of photographs. He spread them out over the top of the old magazines on the table, seven photographs in all. Three of them had white borders, as
if they were snapshots printed at a commercial photo shop. The other four were obviously from police records; these photographs were taken head-on, their subjects wearing somber, bleak expressions.

  “We believe this is the person who organized your husband’s kidnapping,” he said, tapping a finger on one of the police photos. “Do you recognize him?”

  I picked up the photo and held it on my lap. The photograph was of a young man, perhaps in his midtwenties. He had light-brown hair, sun-streaked to blond in places. He had the set jaw and thick neck of a natural athlete, dark eyes, a handsome face.

  “No,” I said. “I’ve never seen this man before.”

  “His name is Gorka Auzmendi,” Castro said.

  “Auzmendi,” my mother said. “The name is familiar.”

  Castro nodded.

  “You might recognize the name from the newspapers,” he said. “His brother was arrested a few years ago for an attempted car bombing in Madrid. Xabi Auzmendi. And this is where your husband comes in, I’m afraid.”

  I put the photo facedown on the low table between us.

  “Wasn’t the bombing in Madrid—” my mother said.

  “ETA,” the detective interrupted. “Yes. The Auzmendis are associated with ETA-militar, without a doubt. But it seems that Gorka Auzmendi planned José Antonio’s kidnapping without the knowledge of ETA’s leadership.”

  “And these men?” my mother said, holding up the photographs remaining on the table.

  “Mariana, do you recognize anyone here?” Castro asked.

  The first photograph was of a boy who couldn’t have been more than eighteen—he had black hair that was cut short except for a long churro hanging from behind his left ear. The photograph was taken at a bar that looked familiar, the boy leaning back against a white plaster wall holding a glass of kalimotxo. I shook my head.

  “You’re sure?” the detective said.

  “Yes.”

  “He’s a student at the public school here in Muriga,” he said. “Dani Garamendi.”

  “He’s a student?” my mother asked.

  “Yes. We believe that at least three of them were recruited by Auzmendi for the kidnapping. Their parents tell us that they haven’t been seen since early this morning.”

  I set the photograph facedown on top of the photo of Gorka Auzmendi, then looked down at the next photograph. It was of another young man, this time with neatly cut black hair parted on the side and dark, serious eyes. He wore the light-blue button-down and dark blazer of the private school on the hill, Colegio San Jorge. A jolt came through me, one of panic and of pain, as I realized it was the boy I had seen on the beach a week earlier. I had removed my swimsuit top for him. I touched myself for him. I lurched forward as if I were going to be sick.

  “Do you recognize him?” the detective asked. I felt my mother watching me.

  “No,” I shook my head. “No. I’ve seen him before, around town. But I don’t know who he is.”

  I picked up the remaining two photographs and flipped through them quickly.

  “I don’t know any of them,” I said. I felt my voice raising. From the back bedroom, I heard Elena calling for me. “Why are you asking me about these people if you already know who they are? If you know they have my husband?”

  44. JONI

  Two days after the arrest of Iker Abarzuza, Asier Díaz, and Gorka Auzmendi, a shrimping boat spotted the body of José Antonio a half hour’s walk north of Muriga. El Diario Vasco’s account stated only that the body had been recovered with gunshot wounds to the back of the head and the upper torso, but rumors began to circulate that the body had been picked apart by fish and scavenging birds, that his hands had been bound behind his back with electrical tape and laundry line, that his suit had been torn almost entirely from his body by the tide.

  Small towns thrive on gossip, and Muriga is no different. In my fifty years here, I’ve continually been struck by the reserve with which gossip had been passed in Muriga, the strict privacy allotted to rumor. But in the immediate wake of José Antonio’s kidnapping, Muriga seemed to collectively agree to unseal any information about anyone involved. Men like Santi Etxeberria, who had cursed at the campaign posters José Antonio had hung the week before his death, now remembered him as an ambitious young man—perhaps a little out of line with Muriga politically but hardworking and agreeable.

  Conversely, Asier and Iker were remembered as more isolated, more mentally unstable, more radicalized than I knew they had really been. Over the course of a few days, they came to be known not as Asier and Iker but as Díaz and Abarzuza. Not as “the two boys” but as bi gizonak. The two men.

  And in this way, almost simultaneous with the discovery of the body, Muriga began to construct its mythology. It began to tell, then revise and retell the story, each version spinning another protective layer around the town until any culpability on the part of its residents had been enveloped entirely by this narrative cocoon.

  When I arrived at Mariana’s apartment the afternoon after José Antonio’s disappearance, her mother, Carmen, answered the door. She held Elena on her hip in an old and weary way that reminded me of the work-worn women in the smallest villages of the Basque Country. Two police officers sat on the sofa in the living room, reading José Antonio’s sports magazines. I nodded to them, then followed Mariana’s mother into the kitchen.

  Mariana barely seemed to register my arrival. She sat hunched in a chair next to the tile counter, her right arm pulled tight across her stomach as if she had just been struck.

  “This stress is too much for her,” Carmen said quietly.

  I sat at the small table in the corner of the room. The tabletop was covered with empty coffee cups, piles of papers from José Antonio’s Party office in Bilbao, pencils with the imprints of teeth marks breaking through the yellow paint just below the erasers.

  “Do you want anything, Joni?” Carmen asked. “Coffee? Tea?”

  “Thanks,” I said, shaking my head no.

  At the sound of our voices Mariana straightened herself in her chair, pushed a hand through the dark thickness of her hair as if to try to make herself more presentable.

  “You’ve heard the rumors, I suppose,” she said. “About me and the American.”

  I looked uncomfortably at Carmen, who hiked the girl higher on her hip. The police had confirmed the affair between Mariana and the American that morning, I’d learned. Maite Tamayo, the neighbor across the hall, told the detective that she had seen Duarte enter the Torres apartment several times, and (not that she was listening, but…) she had heard what could only be described as obscene noises coming through the walls when he was there. The rumor spread quickly from there. Soon after, Goikoetxea called to tell me that the police had taken Robert to the station in Bilbao for questioning, two officers and a young balding detective escorting him out.

  “It’s all right,” Mariana said, nodding toward her mother. “She was the one who told me the rumor was out.”

  “Yes,” I said. I watched her carefully, trying to figure out if Castro had told her about our meeting the night before. “Goikoetxea told me that they are questioning him now. I think it’s the same detective, Castro.”

  She didn’t seem surprised by this, nor did she seem to suspect my involvement. She appeared resigned to the chaos that had swept into her life, the missing husband, the police officers waiting in her living room.

  “It’s true, of course,” she said. “About the American. But he doesn’t have anything to do with José Antonio.”

  Her confirmation of the affair wasn’t surprising. But I began to wonder if it was possible that the American did have something to do with José Antonio’s disappearance. It didn’t seem likely that he would have the sort of connections required to carry out the kidnapping. But then again, he had mentioned family in Nabarniz, and I recalled the walk to the pelota match, when Robert had told me the story of his grandfather kept captive during the war.

  “You’re sure?” I asked. “How well do
you know him?”

  “It’s true,” Carmen said. “You don’t even know this man. You know nothing about him.”

  The girl fussed in her grandmother’s arms, and Mariana shook her head.

  “Can you take her out for a bit?” she said. She took one of the yellow pencils and placed the eraser in her mouth, biting gently into the chipped wood. “It’s time for her nap, anyway.”

  Carmen carried the girl down the hallway toward the bedroom, the afternoon sun flashing off a hanging mirror.

  “You know it doesn’t have anything to do with him,” Mariana said.

  “He hates José Antonio,” I said. “Or at least, he hates what he stands for.”

  “To be honest, it was the first thing that occurred to me,” she said. “When I heard the news, he was the first one I called. But even before I spoke to him, I knew that he wasn’t involved.”

  “How could you be certain?” I asked.

  She shrugged her shoulders, the corners of her mouth lifting into an odd smile. The pencil bobbed up and down like an unlit cigarette.

  “Because he doesn’t love me,” she said simply.

  45. IKER

  After Gorka and I were arrested at the French border in Hendaye we were interrogated separately by the Spanish police for two days. Within the first few hours I had told the young detective, Castro, everything that had happened. They had arrested Daniel and Asier at a roadblock the morning before—this much Gorka had already told me. Dani had spilled everything to them, Castro said. When Castro told me that Dani had admitted to burning the bus in Bermeo and that the rifle I had guarded the Councilman with had been taken from Asier’s father’s closet, I knew that he had confessed, and so I began to talk. Gorka had been more resilient; it wasn’t until the second day of interrogation that he admitted his role in shooting the Councilman.

  During the fourth day of the trial the fiscal handed a transcript of my interview with Detective Castro to the judge before asking a judicial assistant to play the audiotape. There was static, followed by Castro reading the date of the interview into the recorder, and then the courtroom was filled with a voice both familiar and foreign. The courtroom watched me as my voice came through the monitors.