The Spanish Game

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?’

It’s obvious that he has nothing to tell me. That’s why there’s been a two-course delay. Now he wants to use the paramedics as an excuse not to carry on with the briefing.

‘I’m happy,’ I tell him. ‘I don’t see a problem.’

There is a large, visible intake of breath. Leaning over, Bonilla lifts a battered briefcase from the ground and extracts a worryingly slim file. The sunglasses come off, a pen appears from his jacket pocket and he rolls up the sleeves of his jacket like Tubbs in Miami Vice.

‘Rosalía Dieste… Rosalía Dieste.’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, we must confess that she was not an easy assignment for us. Not easy at all.’

So effortless the slip into the plural; collective rather than personal responsibility.

‘I see.’

‘We were constricted by not knowing the exact nature of your enquiry.’

‘I don’t understand. I explained to Mar -’

‘Yes of course you did, of course you did.’ A pause. ‘But the exact nature.’

A teenage girl strolls past the restaurant and, like a tracking shot, Bonilla scopes her nodding breasts all the way to the edge of the lake.

‘Eduardo?’

‘Sí?’

‘I explained to Mar what I wanted. Deep background. Previous relationships. Some information about Plettix and Gael. I thought I made it clear.’

Thick lips bulge in thought. There is a moment of reflection before some of the poise and self-assurance returns to his face. He taps the file, mutters the word ‘Gael’ and begins searching for a piece of paper. There cannot be more than twenty pages contained within the folder’s narrow cardboard flaps, but it is some time before he has found it.

‘Gael and Rosalía met on holiday two years ago,’ he announces finally. ‘At the Parador in Cáceres.’ The waiter comes back and takes an order for coffee. I ask for a cigar to buy more time. ‘He was away on a business trip to Lyons this weekend.’

‘I knew that. What’s his job?’

‘Gael Marchena works for a small French pharmaceutical company called Marionne. The headquarters are based near Tours. He trained as a chemist at a university in Paris and was recruited after graduation.’

‘He’s French?’

Bonilla has to look that one up.

‘Spanish.’

One of the paramedics looks over and I wonder if I have underestimated the surveillance threat. Bonilla scratches his neck.

‘Rosalía and Gael have lived together at an apartment in Calle de Jiloca for under one year now’ He is still reading from the file. ‘The rent is shared, they pay by a regular monthly transferencia from Gael’s account with the BBVA. He is under a lot of pressure from his family to be married.’

A strangled laugh.

‘You listen to his telephone conversations?’

‘I cannot necessarily reveal the source of my information.’ This appears to be a small moment of triumph for Bonilla and he celebrates by putting his sunglasses back on. ‘I have a telephone record of all calls made from Señorita Dieste’s landline at Calle Jiloca.’ He passes a Telefónica bill across the table. The paramedics are making a lot of noise, laughing and joking and raising glasses over the table. ‘If you were concerned about an infidelity, Señor Thompson, my experience tells me people are using a secret mobile telephone that their partner knows nothing about. We have only been able to trace one mobile belonging to Rosalía, and the results were completely normal.’

‘Just calls to friends, calls to Plettix?’

‘Exactly.’

‘And email?’

‘Nothing.’

‘No strange internet activity? No private accounts with Yahoo, Hotmail, Wanadoo?’

He shakes his head. An insect lands on my arm and I flick it away.

‘No.’

‘And what about her past? Her education, previous relationships?’

The coffee comes, with a tubed Romeo y Julieta cigar proffered on a small white plate. It may be simply my characteristic paranoia, but I have a developing sense of anxiety that Bonilla is about to mention Mikel by name. Either that, or his whole approach is a charade designed to lure me into confession. If he reads the papers or watches the television news, he will know about Arenaza’s disappearance. Any evidential link with Rosalía and there’s a significant chance that he will have already alerted the police.

‘Again you asked us to look into this for you and we discovered nothing of consequence. Miss Dieste had a boyfriend for three years at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid…’

‘…Called?’

Bonilla checks his notes.

‘Javier Arjona. But he moved to the US in 1999.’

‘And no pseudonyms?’

‘No pseudonyms.’

‘Dieste took one year in the United States at the University of Illinois. After that, she returned to Madrid, completed her degree and went directly to France to complete postgraduate study in energía nuclear.’

‘Nuclear energy? Where?’

‘The tesis was at the INSTN. That lasted for two years. Then more post-doctorate work at the Argonne Laboratoire Nationale. I have to say that my impression of her is as a very focused, very hard-working and ambitious person, what we sometimes call in Spanish una empollona.’

It’s a word I have not heard before which Bonilla loosely translates as a ‘geek’. Three South American musicians hove into view and start to set up operations about ten feet away from our table. The tallest of them, a battered-looking accordion slung over his embroidered white shirt, steps forward to greet the assembled diners with an accent that sounds Peruvian. Across the restaurant, a lone balding businessman looks down into his plate and groans. He knows what’s coming. Now the drum machine starts up, attached to a powerful, battery-powered amplifier, and before long we are treated to the first bars of ‘My Way’ played at astonishing volume.

‘Oh Christ.’

‘You don’t like this music?’ Bonilla is grinning.

‘I was just enjoying the peace and quiet.’ I drop the head of the cigar onto the ground and light the end very slowly. ‘What else have you found out? Nothing from the weekend? Just this Bunny Girl party? Just brunch at Delic?’

‘I am afraid so, Señor Thompson. I am afraid so. Why you want to know about her? What is your interest?’

I have to give him something. It’s becoming a problem.

‘She may have been having an affair behind Gael’s back. With the husband of a friend of mine. It’s a delicate situation.’

‘Really? Who? What was his name?’

Bonilla seems excited.

‘I would rather not say. He’s from a well-known family in Spain and he doesn’t want any scandal.’

‘So it is the husband who hired you?’

‘That’s right.’

Bonilla is bound to see through this, but it’s the best I’ve got. ‘He wants to know how serious she is. Whether she intends to leave Gael or if she’s just after his money.’

‘He is rich, your friend?’

‘Very.’

‘I see. And where does he live?’

‘In the Basque country.’

Bonilla almost splits his jacket. ‘In the Basque country? Joder.’

‘You look shocked.’

‘No. It’s just not something we were able to discover. Mar I think checked all the numbers for source and not one of them originated in San Sebastián.’

I feel an awful lurch of shock, oddly close to betrayal. Bonilla has slipped up. He knows something.

‘Why did you say San Sebastián? How do you know where my friend lives?’

He looks baffled.

‘I didn’t. Is that his home?’ A consummate impression of innocence registers across his face; no blushing, no tell-tale covering of the nose or mouth. A man suspected of lying who has done no wrong. ‘I just mention it by coincidence. It’s the city I associate with the Basque country. I have been there and I do not like Bilbao. Too much industry. San Sebastián is beautiful, no?’

For a moment I do not know whether to carry on. I should have gone to the police weeks ago and saved myself all this trouble and money. If Arenaza is dead and Bonilla knows about his relationship with Rosalía, I could be accused of conspiring to pervert the course of justice. But if the slip really was just coincidence, I have €1,600 riding on the rest of this conversation.

‘There was just one other thing,’ Bonilla says, so calm and relaxed it seems impossible to believe that he might be setting me up.

‘And what’s that?’

‘We are assuming that you know about Rosalía’s family? About her step-father?’

‘No.’

He is looking at my cigar, following the smoke as it drifts in thick puffs towards the roof of the marquee.

‘It cannot probably be important because it was very long ago, but it was the only thing of significance in the investigation. I found out this morning.’

‘Yes?’

‘When Rosalía was six, her father died from liver failure. He was apparently a borracho, a drunk.’ This seems to amuse Bonilla, who finishes the last of the red wine before leaning back in his chair. ‘Her mother, the woman she visited in Tres Cantos at the weekend, went on to marry a member of the Guardia Civil in Madrid. His name was Pasqual Vicente. He became – how would you say it? – a substitute father to Rosalía, and to her brother, Adolfo. But he was particularly close to the girl.’

‘How do you know this?’

‘I find the interviews. The police reports.’

‘Police reports? I’m not following.’

‘Vicente was blown up by an ETA car bomb in 1983. Close to the Chamartín station. Killed alongside a colleague in the Guardia Civil. You look surprised, Mr Thompson. You start to look pale. Is everything all right?’