I try to maintain my composure but Carmen has detected the doubt in my eyes. I say, ‘That may be the case, sweetheart, that may be the case…’ but her expression has tightened. It is as if she realizes that she has made a critical mistake. Does she know that I know? Think, Alec. Think. This cannot be happening. You could be wrong. You could just be paranoid and confused. But it is as if scales have fallen from my eyes. I have been used. We have all been used.
Too soon, perhaps, because it risks everything, I move towards the stove and prepare to seize a knife from the block beside the fridge. Carmen follows my eyeline and does not seem surprised. Is that a smile at the edge of her mouth? She says, ‘What are you doing, Alex? Listen to me!’ but the rage in her performance, the authenticity of it, has been replaced by something like cunning. She blocks my approach to the knives with a physical intensity that is quite unlike her, as if she would be capable of committing an act of violence without any thought to its consequence. Then I hear another person moving through the flat. This noise is a moment to compare with anything in the barn, the same sense of powerlessness, the same terror. Carmen frowns as I say, ‘Who the fuck is that? Is there somebody else here?’ and in an instant every tic and nuance that I associate with her face seems to completely fall away, like an actor dropping out of character. It is as if she ceases to be Carmen Arroyo and assumes an entirely new personality. I feel physically sick.
Simultaneously a man comes into the kitchen, my height, compact and athletic. He looks first at Carmen, then at me, and I look down at his right hand where he is holding a knife. I think I say, absurdly, ‘Now hang on a minute,’ but everything has moved into a different sphere. Then I see that he is wearing a red sweatband on his wrist, and an old leather-strapped watch, and I am right back in the nightmare of the farm faced by the man who treated me like a worthless animal. Anger and terror and panic rise in me with the force of a fever.
What happens now happens very fast. Carmen moves towards me and I reach for the knife block, seizing an empty wine bottle from the counter which I swing at the man, connecting instantly with his head. He drops to the ground so suddenly that I am actually taken by surprise. There is no noise. I have never struck a person like that before and it was so easy, so simple. He did not even speak. Then Carmen tries to seize my arms, kicking precisely at the agony of my knees. We struggle briefly and I find that I punch, without doubt or hesitation, at her face, at a woman’s face, throwing blow after blow at her feeble, corrupted, treacherous body, each enraged strike a savage revenge for the farm. I don’t know how long this goes on for. Eventually both of them are on the ground, the man still unconscious, Carmen groaning as blood curls from her lips. I’m not proud of this, but I drive my shoe into the Basque’s mouth two or three times, smashing teeth, almost crying with the pure adrenaline pleasure of revenge. I land a kick into his stomach so that he groans in pain. Carmen tries to reach for my legs to stop me but I am exhilarated by the opportunity to hurt them. It is even in my mind, a terrible thing, to sink the knife deep into his heart, to be revenged for the torture, for Mikel, for Chakor and Otamendi, for every loyal minion ETA betrayed so that their plan could reach fruition.
But I am exhausted. I move towards the kitchen door and walk out into the hall. How much noise did we make? Outside, perhaps from one of the apartments on the third or fourth floor, I can hear somebody shouting, ‘What’s going on down there?’ as I look back at their still bodies. Carmen is facing the floor, the Basque groaning and drifting in and out of consciousness. They are touching each other.
Noise on the staircase. I have to get out of here. Closing the front door behind me I hurry down the stairs and step out onto the street, turning quickly in the direction of Plaza Mayor.
43. Counterplay
There’s a bar at the southern end of the square with a sign outside, in English, saying, ‘Hemingway Never Ate Here’. I’ve never been inside before, but it feels safe, crowded with oblivious Brits, a place far enough away from the apartment where I can clean up and gather my thoughts.
Nobody looks at me as I make my way towards the bathroom. I wash my face in cold water for a long time and check my shoes for blood. My right fist hurts from the fight but my hands are unmarked and there seem to be no visible signs of the struggle in my appearance. At the bar I order a whisky and sink it in three successive gulps, the sweat cooling on my body all the time, my heart-rate coming down. I keep checking the door for police, for Carmen, but there are just tourists coming in, bar staff, locals.
I can sit here. I can hide. I can work it all out.
The evidence, the tip-offs, were staring us in the face. We were just too stupid to see them.
Carmen’s muted reaction to the marks and bruises on my legs, for example. I had assumed that she was either disgusted by them or simply being polite in an awkward situation. It never occurred to me that she was expecting to find them. It never crossed my mind that Carmen Arroyo already knew about what had happened at the farm.
Then there was her enthusiasm for all things American. That was wildly overplayed. In the two years since 9/11 I have rarely met a Spaniard under the age of forty with a single complimentary thing to say about George W. Bush, yet Carmen was borderline neo-conservative. Her enthusiasm wasn’t born of loyalty to the PP; it was all an exaggerated bluff.
Then, of course, there was the most obvious clue of all. Why would the Spanish government bother to launch a secret campaign of violence against ETA when ETA is on its last legs? Kitson and I talked about this at length, but we never thought simply to turn everything round.
Outside, perhaps a block away, a police siren flashes by on the street. In my mind’s eye there is a clear and precise image of Carmen and the man slumped on the floor and for the first time I wonder if their injuries will be serious. The fight was a frenzy of rage; I seemed to lose all sense of myself in the quest for revenge. Christ, perhaps I even killed a man tonight, left him brain-damaged, paralysed. Yet there must still be some salvageable sense of decency inside me because I feel terrible about having done this.
It’s not possible to get a mobile reception at the bar so I make my way towards the entrance and dial Kitson’s number. His phone has been switched off and I leave as clear and concise a message as I can.
‘Richard, you have to call me.’ Behind me, a customer laughs at just the wrong moment. ‘Something very serious has happened. Did Anthony hear what went on in the flat? Did you get it on the bug?’
Macduff has a number, too, but that is also on voicemail. They’re both probably in the air on their way back to London. They both think that the job is done.
Back inside I order a second whisky, get a cigarette off a girl and begin to piece everything together. It all goes back to the farm. Why didn’t they kill me when they had the chance? Why did they set me free and plant the idea of de Francisco’s involvement in the dirty war in my head? There was no way that ETA could have known, at that stage, that a dirty war was being organized out of the Interior Ministry. In any event, if they had had information of that kind, they would have gone straight to the press.
It’s obvious, too, that Carmen always knew I spoke Spanish. I was meant to overhear her conversation with João last week. Right from the start she knew who I was, why I was coming to her, who was playing whom. I was being used by ETA to feed information back to SIS which they hoped would accelerate the destruction of the Aznar government. Only they didn’t count on the cover-up. They didn’t think it would be possible to obscure a conspiracy of that size. And Carmen shouldn’t have told me the story about the boy from Pamplona. That was her one mistake. Otherwise the simplicity of it was breathtaking. Look at the victims they chose: Mikel Arenaza was, by his own admission, on his way out of politics. He had grown weary of the armed struggle and was looking to start a new life with Rosalía, away from the duplicity and double-standards of terror. Txema Otamendi had also turned his back on the organization. He tried to question the moral and political good sense of military action and paid the price. The others, the two men who survived the so-called dirty war, were the only individuals still of use to ETA: Juan Egileor, a millionaire businessman who had made massive financial contributions to the revolutionary cause, disappeared of his own volition and took a two-month holiday in south-east Asia in the company of a Bangkok rent boy. Tomás Orbé, a functioning etarra, was most probably tipped off that Mohammed Chakor was coming to get him. Why else was he carrying a gun? Only he wasn’t meant to kill him. The wound to the neck was too severe. Had he survived, Chakor would doubtless have sung like a canary, telling the world’s press that he had been hired to shoot a leading etarra on the orders of Sergio Vázquez and his old friend, Félix Maldonado.