23. Bonilla

When Bonilla cancels yet another scheduled meeting I begin to think that I may have been ripped off. Five hundred euros in cash, handed to Mar at Atocha station almost a week ago, and not a single piece of useful information to show for it. Cetro’s entire week-end of surveillance turns up the following breathtaking facts: that Rosalía went to a party on Saturday evening dressed as a Bunny Girl; that she spoke to Gael for forty-five minutes on the telephone from the Delic café in Plaza de la Paja on Sunday morning; that she visited ‘a widow – almost certainly her mother’ in Tres Cantos that same afternoon. Neither has Bonilla been able to find out anything about Abel Sellini. Instead he is cloyingly apologetic on the telephone as he explains that he must attend a funeral in Oviedo (‘My wife’s brother, he has died suddenly’) before returning to Madrid on Thursday.

‘But let’s meet in person, Señor Thompson,’ he says. ‘I will take you to lunch at the Urogallo restaurant in Casa de Campo. This has been an interesting case. I always like the opportunity to meet a client in person.’

Once a hunting ground for the Spanish royal family, the Casa de Campo is now a vast area of protected land south-west of the old city overrun with prostitutes and mountain bikers. On an average evening in spring and summer, virtually every road running through the park from Pozuelo to down-town Madrid is jammed with kerb-crawling Pedros looking for a back-seat hand-job or a fumble in the woods. It’s a depressing sight: line after line of illegal immigrant girls from Africa, South America and Eastern Europe wandering into the headlights of oncoming cars, flashing their underwear and then banging on the roofs of the vehicles as they pass them by. Urogallo is at the more respectable end of the park, one of several outdoor restaurants lining the southern edge of a lake where rowing boats can be rented all year round.

Bonilla calls to confirm the lunch early on Thursday morning and I know that he’s not going to cancel again when he reminds me that I still owe him €1,600 for the weekend’s surveillance.

‘A cheque will be fine,’ he says, ‘although of course we prefer cash.’

A two-stop metro ride takes me from Plaza de España to Lago station, from where it’s just a short walk downhill to the restaurant. Urogallo has a large eating area set amongst a grove of plane trees looking out onto the lake, the jet-fountain at its centre bisecting a magnificent view of the city beyond. Bonilla has picked a table at the far side of a white marquee with flaps that can be raised and lowered according to the weather. It’s a bright afternoon, the first sign of spring, so the tent is open to the elements. He recognizes me from a description provided by Mar but doesn’t bother removing his €200 sunglasses as he shakes my hand.

‘Señor Thompson. I’m finally happy to meet you.’

Bonilla is younger than I expected, about thirty-eight and in impressive physical condition, with inflated pectoral muscles visible through a black nylon T-shirt. Gym-honed biceps roam through his light white jacket and he has tightly cropped black hair, long narrow sideburns and a very thin strip of beard that runs in a plumb line from the centre of his lower lip to a tanned cleft chin. Looking at him in a split instant, you might be reminded of a barcode.

‘Let me start by apologizing for any of the inconvenience my organization may have caused you in terms of any cancelled meetings,’ he says. ‘Maybe I can start by ordering you something from the bar, Mr Thompson, a cocktail of some sort?’

It’s two o’clock in the afternoon and we’re sitting next to a polluted municipal lake, so there’s something faintly ridiculous about the offer. Nevertheless I ask for a fino manzanilla and make small talk about the weather.

‘Yes,’ Bonilla replies, gazing up at the sky as if dazzled by God’s munificence. ‘It is a beautiful day, isn’t it? Tell me, how long have you lived in Madrid?’

‘About five years.’

‘And you plan to stay?’

‘I plan to stay.’

His manner is forced and oleaginous, not a single thing about him that one would trust or believe. He sports an artificial tan and enough cheap jewellery to stock a small flea market. I can hardly comprehend that I’m about to hand this guy a cheque for €1,600. He looks like an extra in Carlito’s Way.

‘I was sorry to hear about your brother-in-law. How was Oviedo?’

‘Oh fine.’ Again, the polished white smile, the grin. Let’s not allow a little death to stand in the way of lunch. ‘I did not particularly know him, but my wife of course is very upset.’

‘How long have you been married?’

‘About three years. But there’s still time for life, yes?’

Bonilla might as well have winked here. One side of his mouth curls into a reptilian sneer and he pops an olive onto his tongue. The waiter comes back with my sherry and we open up the menus. Both of us order gazpacho in honour of the decent weather, and I opt for merluza a la plancha as a main course. Bonilla is a red-meat man and wants his solomillo cooked poco hecho with an ensalada mixta on the side.

‘Just kill the cow, wipe its arse and bring it to the table,’ he says, laughing energetically at a joke I’ve heard before. Without consultation he then orders a bottle of red wine – in spite of the fact that I’m eating fish – before treating me to some of his opinions about border controls and immigration.

‘These whores are disgusting,’ he says, gesturing behind him in the vague direction of the park. ‘Animals from Africa bringing AIDS to Spain.’

‘Wasn’t AIDS here before?’ I ask. He doesn’t pick up on the sarcasm.

‘Aznar lets in thousands of putas from Romania, from Hungary, from Russia. What are they good for but to ruin this country? They pay no tax, they steal, they are bad for the tourists.’

‘But you’re Chilean.’

The right pectoral appears to twitch.

‘Of course.’

‘Well, a lot of these girls are from South America…’

‘Sure,’ he says, ‘but not from Chile, not from Chile.’ Bonilla leans back in his chair and actually wags a finger at me. All of this is perfectly normal behaviour for a business lunch in Spain; just two hombres sizing each other up. His technique is to impose his personality as quickly as possible; mine is to sit there and watch him get on with it. ‘These girls are from Brazil, Mr Thompson, from Argentina and Colombia, not from my country. We don’t have the same economic difficulties in Chile.’

‘Of course not. When did you emigrate?’

‘My parents were forced to leave after the coup that removed Allende.’

‘So you were educated over here?’

‘In the south of Spain, yes.’

We then spend the next quarter of an hour talking about Nixon and Kissinger (‘Chile had her own 9/11, you know. A benign communist state fucked up the arse by the Republican Party’), a period which allows Bonilla to exercise his vigorous contempt for all things American. I hear him out, aware that my sole purpose today is to discover the truth about Rosalía’s link to Arenaza without revealing anything of my relationship with Mikel. To that end, I need to encourage a candour in Bonilla, a candour that would be snuffed out by seeming argumentative or asking too many awkward questions. It is always best to flatter the vain man.

‘And what do you do, Mr Thompson?’

‘I’m a screenwriter. In actual fact I’m currently working on a story about al-Qaeda. But enough about me. How did you become a detective?’

And this leads to twenty minutes of tall tales about Bonilla’s past as a member of the Guardia Civil in Alicante.

‘Of course, I knew a lot of girls,’ he says, the waiter spooning croutons and chopped onion into his flesh-pink bowl of gazpacho. ‘The uniform, it gets them wet, yes?’

I laugh in all the right places, nod when the conversation becomes more serious, appear dazzled by the sophistication of his work as a private eye. It is what might best be described as a feminine approach to the task at hand; a means of withdrawing into the shadows as Bonilla strides out into the light. A pattern emerges in his conversation, a habit of telling stories in which third-party players are routinely criticized with the intention of portraying himself in the most flattering possible light. Men who have lived alone for some time often display the same characteristic, and I begin to wonder if Bonilla is either profoundly insecure and unhappy or perhaps even lying about having a wife and children. Some of his stories don’t add up and there are strange discrepancies in his descriptions of home. Eventually I manage to steer the conversation towards the subject of Rosalía Dieste. By this point the main-course plates have been stacked and hauled away and for the first time he looks unsure of what to say. Two paramedics wearing orange Saumur jackets have settled at the table next to ours and he says, ‘You’re happy talking about this here?’