‘What?’
‘They found Juan Egileor an hour ago.’
‘Who did?’
‘SIS. In Thailand.’
‘What the fuck was he doing in Thailand?’
‘Good question. Resort in Koh Samui. No sign of a kidnapper, no sign of mistreatment. Just a Spanish translation of The Beach on his hotel bed beside a teenage boy from Bangkok with a sore arse and a sheepish grin on his face.’
‘Jesus. So he wasn’t abducted? He just took off of his own accord?’
‘It would appear so.’
And we leave it at that. Kitson tells me that Egileor is being questioned in the Thai capital and will be flown home within the week. The press, he says, have yet to be informed about his reappearance, but an absence of foul play ‘will certainly assist in quashing rumours of government interference’.
It’s not until later that evening, at Carmen’s apartment, that I realize quite how misguided that assumption is.
‘So take care,’ Kitson tells me. And remember. Bocaito. Nine o’clock.’
‘Nine o’clock.’
42. La Víbora Negra
At 7.30, after lunch and a long afternoon tidying my flat, I go round to Carmen’s apartment. The lights are on in the first-floor windows and I can see a shadow moving between the rooms. This could be Laura de Rivera, but when I ring the buzzer there’s no answer and I assume that Carmen just wants to be left alone. An elderly couple emerge at a quarter to eight and I step forward, holding the door for them as they offer muffled thanks. They don’t seem to notice or care as I slip into the building behind them. There’s a smell of garlic in the stairwell. I decide to try to talk to Carmen through the door of her apartment.
‘Carmen!’
A shuffle of socked feet on wooden floors.
‘Quién es?’
‘It’s Alex. I need to talk to you.’
‘Go away, Alex.’
‘I’m not going to go away’
‘I can’t see you any more.’
‘Well, at least open the door. At least let me see your face.’
‘What did you tell them?’ she asks. She is speaking Spanish, as if she knows that I understand every word.
‘What?’
‘You heard me. What did you tell them?’
‘Just open up. I don’t understand what you’re asking.’
The security chain rattles and there’s a twist on the latch. Carmen opens the door ajar and holds my gaze through the gap. Her face has been obliterated by worry and fatigue, black gothic shadows beneath her eyes. It is a depressing sight.
‘You think I don’t know who you are?’ she asks, again in Spanish.
‘What?’
Frustration gets the better of her. She closes the door, frees the chain and invites me inside with a grand, sweeping gesture of contempt. ‘Pasa!’ There is alcohol on her breath.
‘Carmen, what the fuck are you on? Are you drunk?’ I move past her. ‘You haven’t answered your phone for days. You won’t return any of my messages. I’ve been worried sick about you.’
She turns and smiles, a poisonous leer. ‘I have a question for you.’
‘Go ahead. Ask anything you want.’
‘What was significant about the Naftali Botwin company on the Aragon front in 1937?’
‘What?’ I am utterly bewildered until I realize that she is testing my legend. It is a question about the PhD.
‘What? Why the fuck do you want to know that?’
‘Don’t ignore the question.’ She slams the front door and heads into the kitchen, where she pours herself a large tumbler of red wine.
‘I’m not ignoring the question. I just don’t think it’s very important at this stage in our relationship for us to be discussing the political idiosyncrasies of the Spanish Civil War.’
She laughs, a spat contempt, and little spittles of wine settle on my cheeks and lips. ‘Que mentiroso eres!’ What a liar you are.
‘Carmen, you’re clearly very upset. You’ve been drinking. Do you want to tell me what’s going on?’
‘Do you want to tell me what’s going on?’ She imitates my voice with a shrill, clipped accent. ‘I will tell you what is going on. I will tell you. Alex Miller is a spy. A spy who has ruined my life. I have been told never to speak to him again. Alex Miller, who put his dick inside me for the sake of his career and said that we would be together for ever. Alex Miller, who kisses me and speaks perfect Spanish’ – I interrupt with a brisk ‘No’, which she ignores – ‘and who betrayed me to the CIA.’ She switches to Spanish, her face so twisted with the disfigurement of betrayal that it is sickening to witness. ‘You’ve known all along about what Félix was doing. You have known all along that he was paying murderers to kill and torture the men of ETA and Herri Batasuna. And you came to me because you knew that I could find you information. And when you got it, by listening to my private conversations like the coward you are, you went running to your fucking American government and they covered everything up.’
On no account, no matter what the circumstances, ever break cover. It does not matter if your identity has been exposed as an utter sham. Maintain the spy’s composure. Give them nothing.
‘Carmen, please speak in English. I don’t understand what you’re saying.’
‘Hijo de puta!’
She hurls her glass across the room towards my face, the tumbler smashing against the door behind me and sending red streaks of staining wine across the walls and floor. I back away.
‘They arrested me,’ she says. ‘They took me in. They told me everything. They told me that Javier, a man I loved and trusted, had run away because he had been stealing money from the government.’ She is speaking in rushed, drunken English but manages a kind of throat noise here, a guttural insult to those who interrogated her. If anything, this seems false, in some way overdone, and I feel uneasy. ‘As if that is what happened! I told them what I knew, and I told the other staff what I knew, but they would not listen to me. They did not want to know the truth. That Javier had organized a dirty war against ETA, that Mikel Arenaza and Txema Otamendi and Juan Egileor and Tomás Orbé were all connected to the crimes of one man – Félix Maldonado.’
‘Now that doesn’t sound right,’ I tell her. ‘Who are these men you’re talking about? You need to calm down…’
‘Calm down?’ She insults me again – ‘Cerdo!’ – and sweeps her arm across the kitchen table. Yet as I watch the pieces of fruit and the biscuits and a plastic bottle of water falling to the floor, I feel that there is something not quite right here. Carmen’s anger seems contrived, as if she has learned her lines by rote. Why did she list those names so precisely, with such melodramatized conviction? Does she want to convince me of something that is beyond logic? ‘Do you not know about Félix?’ she screams, and again it sounds as though she is overplaying her hand. ‘Do you not know what he has done? Let me tell you, Alex Miller. As a soldier in the army of General Franco, his men took a teenage boy in Pamplona who had insulted them and beat him to death with shovels. With shovels. He is a murderer. Félix Maldonado is the black viper of the Interior Ministry and it is time that the world knew.’
My blood runs absolutely cold.
That final phrase, the description. I have heard it used before, to describe de Francisco, just as I have heard the story of the murdered boy. At the farm, in the mouth of the woman who tortured me. Both of them used an absolutely specific translation from a mother tongue into English: la víbora negra. The black viper. In my consternation I back up further against the wall, my mind inverted by doubt. Surely it isn’t possible that Carmen is one of them? In the same instant, and I have no idea how this mental process takes place, Egileor’s appearance in Thailand makes perfect sense. ETA faked his kidnapping. We were led to believe that he was a victim of the dirty war, but his safety was never in doubt.