‘The guy who attacked us…’

‘Is José’s son. The Wolf is José Garovillo’s son.’

6

David booked himself into a hotel on the outskirts of Elizondo, to wait for Amy’s email to José to do the job. The Hotel Gernika was nothing special. It had a small swimming pool, a modest breakfast bar, and lots of leathery old French guests on cycling holidays wearing alarmingly tight Lycra shorts. But that was fine by David.

With his money, his unaccustomed wealth, he could have booked into the best hotel in Navarre – but it didn’t seem right. He wanted to be inconspicuous. Anonymous and unnoticed: just another tourist in a nice but mediocre hotel. So he grabbed his bags and booked himself in, and spent the rest of the day staring from his humble balcony, gazing out at the mountains. The cirques and summits seemed to shimmer, knowingly, exulting in their own remoteness.

It was a hot and dusty day. In the evening he decided on a swim: he walked into the hotel gardens and stripped to his shorts, and dived in the blue inviting water of the pool. He gasped as he surfaced, the water was freezing, straight from the mountains, unheated.

His whole body was tingling, his heart was thumping, it was a perfect metaphor for his situation. Three weeks ago he was a bored and listless commuter, reading free newspapers on the train, drinking machine coffee at work, doing the daily rounds of nothingness. As soon as he arrived in the Basque Country he had plunged right into it, straight into this mystery and strangeness and violence; and yet it felt good. Shocking but good; bracing but invigorating. Like diving into a pool of freezing mountain water. Making his body tingle.

I am alive.

The next day Amy called him: she’d had an idea. She reckoned that he should maybe publish his story, to help with the puzzle. Amy said she knew a local journalist who was willing to write it up; her way of thinking was that the more people who knew the questions, the better the chance they might locate some of the answers.

David agreed to the idea, with only the faintest sense of reluctance.

They met again in the journalist’s spare white flat; the young, dark-haired writer, Zara Garcia, banged out the article on a laptop. The piece appeared in a Spanish newspaper just half-a-day later. It was immediately picked up and translated by some English language newsfeeds.

When David finally read the published story, on his own laptop, sitting with Amy in a little wifi cafe near the main plaza of Elizondo, he felt anxiety as well as excitement. The article was headlined ‘Bizarre Bequest Leads to Million Dollar Basque Mystery’.

It had a photo taken by Zara of David holding up the map; the newspaper offered an email address where people could get in touch with David, if they had any ideas that might help.

The journalist had left out the connection with José Garovillo: she’d explained that it was too incendiary and provocative in the political climate. Reading the article, David decided this omission had definitely been a good idea; he already felt exposed enough by the newspaper piece. What if Miguel read it?

He shut the laptop and looked at Amy, in her purple denim jacket and her elegantly slender jeans. She looked back at him, silent, and blue eyed; and as she did, he felt the oddness of their situation – like an inexplicable shiver on a very warm day. Already they were sort-of friends: forced together by that horrible and frightening scene in the Bar Bilbo. And yet they were not friends; they were still total strangers. It was dissonant.

Or maybe he was just unnerved by the noise in the bar. The slap and laughter of kids playing pelota, the peculiar Basque sport, in the square outside, was very audible. Children were thwapping the hard little pelota ball against a high wall. The noise was repetitive and intense. She glanced his way.

‘Shall we go somewhere else?’

‘If you have time.’

‘Academic holiday. And I’d like to help, while my students are off shooting the police.’ She smiled at his alarmed response. ‘Hey. That was a joke. Where do you want to go?’

‘I want to start looking at the churches. On my map…’

‘OK.’

‘But first…I’d like to go somewhere I can have a proper drink.’ He looked at her for a long moment, then he confessed: he was still feeling the nerves, the fear, the aftereffects of Miguel’s attack.

‘Let’s go for a glass and talk,’ she said.

A few minutes’ driving brought them to a hushed little village; the sign said Irurita. Old men sat snoozing under berets, outside cafes. Parking the car by the village church they walked to one of the cafes; they sat under a parasol. The clear mountain air was refreshing, the sun was warm. Amy ordered some olives and a bottle of the chilled local white wine that she called txacolli.

The waitress served them at their shaded table with a nimble curtsey.

Amy spoke:

‘You haven’t asked me the most obvious question of all.’

He demurred; her expression was serious.

‘You ought to know this…if I am going to introduce you to José.’

He drank some of his cold fresh wine, and nodded. ‘OK. If you insist. Why did Miguel attack you? He came out of nowhere, then…assaulted you. Why?’

Her answer was fluent:

‘He hates me.’

‘Why?’

She pressed her hands together, as if praying. ‘When I first came to the Basque Country I was…as I said, very interested in ETA. The cause of independence. I thought it was a laudable ambition, for an ancient people. I even sympathized with the terrorists. For a while. For a few months.’

‘And…’

‘Then I met José. The great José Garovillo. We became very good friends, he showed me where to buy the best pintxos in Bizkaia. He told me everything. He told me he had renounced violence, after the fall of Franco. He said terrorism was a cul de sac for the Basque people, within a democratic Spain.’

‘But his son -’

‘Disagreed. Obviously.’ She gazed straight at David. ‘But then José got me a job, teaching English at the university. And you see…a lot of the kids who come into my class are very radical, from the backstreets of Vittoria and Bilbao, ready to die for ETA. The girls are even more fierce than the boys. Killers in miniskirts.’

Her lips were pink and wet from the txacolli. ‘I see it as my task to maybe steer them away from ETA, from violence, and the self-destruction of terrorism. So I teach them the literature of revolution: Orwell on the Civil War, Yeats on the Irish rebellion. I try to teach them the tragedy as well as the romance of a violent nationalist struggle.’

‘And that’s why Miguel hates you? He thinks you are working against ETA.’

‘Yes. I knew he’d been abroad for a while, though I did hear a rumour he was back. But I thought it was safe to go see my friends in the Bilbo. But he must have been in the bar already. Hanging out in one of the back rooms, with his ETA comrades…’

‘Then he heard the row.’

‘Yes. And he walked out. Saw me. With you.’ She grimaced. ‘And did his favourite thing.’

The explanation was good, if not perfect. David still felt the echo of an unexplained space, a dark blur on the image. What else was she not telling him? What about the scar on her scalp?

He stopped thinking as the waitress placed some olives on their table.

‘Gracias,’ he said. The girl nodded and bobbed and replied in that thick guttural Spanish accent: kakatazjaka…Then she waved to a friend across the cobbled plaza, and made her way back to the bar.

‘You know it’s funny,’ said David, half turning to Amy. ‘I’ve not heard any Basque being spoken. Not yet.’

‘Sorry?’

‘I’ve been in the Basque Country for two days. I’ve seen it written on signs everywhere. But not heard anyone speaking it.’

She gazed at him from under her blonde fringe – as if he was retarded.