‘You don’t have secrets? You don’t have things you hide from me?’
‘Nothing,’ she says, with melodramatic conviction. Lifting her foot onto the bed she begins stroking my leg through the duvet. I adore the shape of her thighs. ‘I show everything to you, cariño. I trust you with my marriage. There is nothing I wouldn’t tell you.’
‘And Julian?’
Her face falls. ‘What about Julian?’
She doesn’t like it when we talk about him. It is a sour subject, guilt-gathering. She fucks me wearing his wedding ring but flinches if I ever touch it.
‘Does he keep things from me?’
‘What do you mean?’
Fearing that I have been cack-handed, I adjust the pronoun in Spanish to alter the meaning of the sentence.
‘You misunderstood me. I said, “Does he keep things from you?”’
‘I don’t think so.’ Sofía looks nonplussed.
‘You don’t think so?’
‘No.’ She pulls away, no longer touching my leg. I have played it badly. She walks up to the window, seems to pick a piece of dust off the wall and then flicks it out of her fingers like an insect. She turns to face me. ‘Why are you asking me these questions?’
‘I’m just interested.’ I’m also beginning to wish we had had this conversation on the telephone. ‘Don’t you like it when we talk? I don’t want us just to fuck and not speak. I want us to mean more to each other than that.’
This turns out to be an effective if unpremeditated tactic. Sofía returns to the bed, touches my arm and looks at me with a mixture of surprise and delight. ‘Of course, of course. I don’t want that either. We make love, Alec, we have some time together, I like to talk.’
‘I just wanted to know more about Julian.’
‘Of course.’
She kisses my forehead.
‘It’s just that Mikel Arenaza told me something. In San Sebastián. Something about him.’
That stops her. Dead in her tracks. She sits up. ‘What?’
‘That he was married before you. That he had another life.’
If Sofía and Arenaza are part of a conspiracy against me, they will have expected me to bring this up. Equally, if she has no inkling about Julian’s past, that may help to expose his true motivation. But she begins to smile.
‘You didn’t know about that? Julian never told you he was married?’
‘Never. And neither did you.’
She begins to caress my palm with her thumb. ‘Well, that is his secret.’
‘Of course.’
‘And he is ashamed by it, I think. A part of his life that went wrong. Julian is a very proud man.’
‘Very.’
‘And Mikel told you this?’
‘He was drunk.’
‘Mikel is a fascist.’
She curls her bare legs up onto the bed so that her knees are almost tucked under my chin. This is how I wanted the conversation to progress. I would like to run my mouth along the bliss of her soft thigh, but need to stick to the task at hand.
‘He told me that Julian’s wife left him for another man. His best friend.’
‘Felipe, yes. An engineer.’
‘Where was he from?’
‘Colombia.’
‘Julian’s wife was Colombian?’
It doesn’t feel good to be feigning surprise like this, but it is necessary in the circumstances.
‘No. American. An East Coast family, lots of money. But they moved there because she was working for the government.’
‘The American government?’
‘Yes. She was some kind of banking or finance specialist. So boring’ Sofía uses a great Spanish expression here. Que coñazo! What a drag. I feel a great sense of relief.
‘And that’s how she met Felipe?’
‘I suppose, sweetheart, I suppose.’
For the sake of seeming disinterested I break off now and spend a wordless ten minutes exploring her naked body. Eventually we make love again, have a shower, and then head back to bed.
‘So what was Julian doing all day?’ By now it is as if I am making light of the whole thing, a joke of it. Both of us have a glass of wine in our hands and my skin is damp from the shower. ‘Was he working at the American embassy as well? Was he working for Endiom?’
‘Oh no.’ She laughs. ‘This is why he keeps it a secret. He was teaching English, like all good British people when they live away from home. In the old days Julian wasn’t the successful private banker. He was just following Nicole around the world.’
‘Nicole was her name?’
‘Si.’
‘Did you ever meet her?’ This elicits a brief look of Hispanic disgust, sour as old milk, which effectively provides me with an answer. ‘OΚ, but how come Julian’s best friend was Colombian?’
Sofía spins on the bed and places her head next to mine. Perhaps she has finally grown tired of all the questions.
‘Felipe was not his best friend. Julian does not have friends. Only silly people from his school in England.’ She starts to imitate them, adopting a clipped Sloane, arching her neck so that she is kissing me as she speaks. ‘“Sofía, darling! How charming to meet you! I don’t know how you put up with old Jules.” They are such idiots, these English. But not you, cariño. Not you.’
I reach for her stomach and walk my fingers up to her nipples.
‘So?’ she says, sighing. ‘You have no more questions? The little interrogation session is over?’
‘It’s over,’ I tell her. ‘It’s over,’ and I take the glass of wine out of her hand and place it on the floor.
13. Development
Late on Thursday morning the Nokia mobile shrills beside my bed.
‘Alec?’
It’s Arenaza.
‘Mikel, hi. Sorry, I was asleep. How are you?’
‘You sleep? At eleven o’clock? Are you sick, Milius?’
‘I was up late last night.’
‘OΚ. I am ringing to tell you that I’m going to the airport now. I fly into Madrid this afternoon. We still going to have dinner, right? You want to meet up on Saturday?’
‘That sounds great.’ I twist a crick out of my neck and sit up against the headboard. ‘Is Julian coming?’
‘No, I don’t call him this time. Who knows? Maybe I’ll see him for lunch on Sunday.’
‘What about your friend?’
‘You mean Rosalía?’ He must be calling from a public place because he says her name very quietly. ‘She meet me at Barajas this afternoon. We will be together tonight and tomorrow, but I will be free at the weekend. Let’s meet for a cocktail at Museo Chicote, yes? You know it?’
‘On Gran Vía? Sure.’
Chicote is probably the most famous and certainly one of the most expensive bars in Madrid. A haunt of Hemingway and Buñuel. A haunt of tourists.
‘Good. I will see you there at ten. Take it easy, my friend.’
‘You too, Mikel. You have a good flight.’
Interesting that he should go cold on Julian. Is Sofía the problem? Does she refuse to have fascists in the house? I get dressed, make some coffee and head down the road to check emails at the internet café on Ventura Rodríguez. Julian has read the Endiom report and sounds happy. ‘Bloody good job,’ he writes. ‘Really chuffed with the magnum opus.’ So at least that’s out of the way. The Basque translations have also come through and I print them off, asking the bearded attendant for a large plastic bag in which to carry them. While I am waiting, an email comes through from Saul:
From: sricken [email protected]
Subject: On the road
Hi mate
Thought I’d drop you a line from sunny Cadiz. Andy’s had to go out of town until tomorrow but he has a nice apartment near the beach that doubled for Havana in Die Another Day. Have you ever been here? It’s on a peninsula that sticks out into the Atlantic. This morning an aircraft carrier the size of the Empire State Building sailed across the horizon en route for Iraq. Apparently there’s a US naval base five miles up the coast. Franco handed over the land in the 50s in exchange for economic aid and now there are thousands of Yank sailors in shorts eating Oreos and drinking ‘Bud’ and really making a big effort to blend in with the local culture. These are the kind of things that a man learns on holiday.