37. The Raven
As it turns out, I needn’t have worried. On Thursday morning Carmen sends me a text message apologizing if she seemed ‘strange’ outside the apartment and promising to ‘make this up’ to me if I am free for lunch on Saturday. I give Macduff the good news over coffee – explaining that our Friday dinner date has morphed into a weekend lunch – and he concurs with me that Carmen simply didn’t want to seem cheap by sleeping with me on our first date. I run through my general impressions of the evening and then head home for a siesta. The vital question – concerning her willingness to betray de Francisco once she learns of the dirty war – is left unanswered. None of us can make an informed judgment about that until I have spoken to her at length both about her career and her views on Basque terror. Of course it’s still possible that she herself might be part of the conspiracy. It’s an implausible thesis, but the liar is always vulnerable to his own deceit.
When I have woken up, later than planned after a night of gruelling dreams, I walk down Ventura Rodríguez and check emails at the internet café. There’s one from Saul which reawakens all my old paranoia just at the point at which I was sure there was nothing left to worry about.
From: sricken [email protected]
Subject: Enrique
So, what does a recently divorced man of 33 do with his time except sit around drinking Rioja and watching DVDs? And what does he do once he gets bored of doing that and of ringing up his old girlfriends, EVERY SINGLE ONE OF WHOM is now living in Queen’s Park or Battersea with her ‘wonderful husband’ and their little ‘bundle of joy’ and their wedding list crockery and their David Gray albums? Well, a recently divorced man of 33 writes down a list of famous Spanish movie stars and translates their names into English.
Here’s what I came up with:
Antonio Banderas – Anthony Flags
Penelope Cruz – Penelope Cross
Benicio del Toro – Ben of the Bull
Paz Vega – Peaceful Lowlands
Good game, isn’t it? Only, I was doing this for quite a long time, got into singers and politicians, and guess what I discovered?
Julio Iglesias – Julian Church
He’s a spook, Alec! It’s a cover name! All your worst nightmares have been confirmed! Pack your bags! Sell your flat! Check your underwear for bugs!
Hope all well -
S
I cannot allow myself to react to this. If I am going to do my job properly there can be no doubt in my mind about the legitimacy of Kitson’s operation, of Sofía’s possible role in the dirty war or of Julian’s double-life as a spy. All these things have been ironed out. I have to blank out such conspiracies. In none of my initial research into Julian’s background, nor in the more recent discoveries regarding Nicole and his life in Colombia, did I discover anything to make me remotely suspicious about his real identity. Julian Church is just who he appears to be – a private banker with an adulterous wife living out the expat dream in Spain. Saul is just winding me up.
Carmen and I meet for lunch on Saturday at a restaurant off Calle de Serrano, and it is from this point on that our relationship starts to become more serious. Barrio Salamanca is a more rarefied environment than La Latina, and one in which she seems a good deal more relaxed, at home with the expensive wives and moneyed twentysomethings gabbling into their mobile phones in branches of Gucci and Christian Dior. I glimpse, not for the first time, her secret dream of joining this elite urban middle class through marriage; they are, after all, the very people who voted her boss into office. Afterwards we go for a walk in the Retiro and I hire a rowing boat in a spirit of romantic endeavour. About fifteen metres from the concrete shore we share our first, surprisingly skilful kiss. I spend the rest of the afternoon in abject terror of encountering Sofía walking hand-in-hand with Julian but disguise my apprehension with ease. Fortune tellers, portrait painters, Peruvian puppeteers, even a poet from Chile have set up stalls along the western edge of the Estanque lake and we drift from group to group in the dense crowds with the permanent accompaniment of pan-piped music. On a grass verge near the café a group of Chinese immigrants are selling head and shoulder massages for a couple of euros. Carmen offers to buy me one – giggling now, really enjoying herself – but just as I have sat on the low stool and felt a dry hand settling on my aching neck two policemen appear on horseback, scattering every illegal immigrant in the vicinity to the four winds.
‘Not very relaxing,’ I joke, struggling to my feet. Carmen laughs and we kiss again and she puts her arm round my waist.
‘Why don’t you come back to my apartment?’
And that’s where it all begins. The truth is that I do not compare her to Sofía, to Kate, nor to any other woman I have been with. The time that we spend in bed together over the next two days feels almost natural, as if there were never anything false or morally reprehensible in my pursuit of her. You get so far into a deceit, so entwined in a legend, that the life becomes your own. After the first time, for example, standing under the shower at her apartment on Saturday afternoon, I realized that it would be possible to continue seeing Carmen for as long as it took to obtain the information. Equally, if my task were suddenly completed, I could walk out of the door and never see her again, only to feel guilty about the damage to her self-esteem at some later date. JUSTIFY was exactly like this. The process of long-term deception against Katharine and Fortner became commonplace. In order to function effectively as a spy, it was necessary to forget that I was lying to them. It is a version of method acting, I suppose, although one with far more serious implications.
So I stay at her place all weekend, closing both the kitchen and the bedroom doors in order to muffle the sound of our lovemaking from Macduff’s intrusive bug. I find physical characteristics to enjoy in Carmen – her flat stomach, the stone-smooth sweep of her back – and concentrate on these even as others – the smell of her hair, her chin, her childish laugh – conspire to repel me. There was only one thing which proved unnerving; her oddly muted reaction to the bruises on my body. Carmen barely commented on them. I had felt that they would be a barrier between us, even a clue to my true identity, yet it was almost as if she was expecting to find them, almost as if she had encountered violence in a relationship before.
On Sunday evening she has to visit her mother in hospital and I take the opportunity to go through her personal belongings, making a visual record of any Interior Ministry documents and searching for evidence of love letters from her former boyfriend at work. There is, of course, the danger that Laura de Rivera might return at short notice from Paris, so Macduff is stationed in the window of the bar outside her apartment, watching the front door for visitors. At eight I leave a note explaining that I need to go home for a change of clothes and dead-drop Macduff the list of phone numbers drawn from Carmen’s mobile while she was asleep. There were two for de Francisco and one for Maldonado, but as yet no information from her personal computer. A laptop is sitting on a chair in our bedroom, but I could not risk booting it up for fear of encountering a password.
Come Monday evening we meet for dinner again and drink a lot of good, homemade red vermouth in Oliveros, an old, family-run bar around the corner from her apartment. Over meatballs downstairs in a brick cellar we have our first serious conversation about ETA, but there’s nothing in Carmen’s unequivocal view of Basque terror to merit lengthy analysis.