The Spanish Game

42. La Víbora Negra

At 7.30, after lunch and a long afternoon tidying my flat, I go round to Carmen’s apartment. The lights are on in the first-floor windows and I can see a shadow moving between the rooms. This could be Laura de Rivera, but when I ring the buzzer there’s no answer and I assume that Carmen just wants to be left alone. An elderly couple emerge at a quarter to eight and I step forward, holding the door for them as they offer muffled thanks. They don’t seem to notice or care as I slip into the building behind them. There’s a smell of garlic in the stairwell. I decide to try to talk to Carmen through the door of her apartment.

‘Carmen!’

A shuffle of socked feet on wooden floors.

‘Quién es?’

‘It’s Alex. I need to talk to you.’

‘Go away, Alex.’

‘I’m not going to go away’

‘I can’t see you any more.’

‘Well, at least open the door. At least let me see your face.’

‘What did you tell them?’ she asks. She is speaking Spanish, as if she knows that I understand every word.

‘What?’

‘You heard me. What did you tell them?’

‘Just open up. I don’t understand what you’re asking.’

The security chain rattles and there’s a twist on the latch. Carmen opens the door ajar and holds my gaze through the gap. Her face has been obliterated by worry and fatigue, black gothic shadows beneath her eyes. It is a depressing sight.

‘You think I don’t know who you are?’ she asks, again in Spanish.

‘What?’

Frustration gets the better of her. She closes the door, frees the chain and invites me inside with a grand, sweeping gesture of contempt. ‘Pasa!’ There is alcohol on her breath.

‘Carmen, what the fuck are you on? Are you drunk?’ I move past her. ‘You haven’t answered your phone for days. You won’t return any of my messages. I’ve been worried sick about you.’

She turns and smiles, a poisonous leer. ‘I have a question for you.’

‘Go ahead. Ask anything you want.’

‘What was significant about the Naftali Botwin company on the Aragon front in 1937?’

‘What?’ I am utterly bewildered until I realize that she is testing my legend. It is a question about the PhD.

‘What? Why the fuck do you want to know that?’

‘Don’t ignore the question.’ She slams the front door and heads into the kitchen, where she pours herself a large tumbler of red wine.

‘I’m not ignoring the question. I just don’t think it’s very important at this stage in our relationship for us to be discussing the political idiosyncrasies of the Spanish Civil War.’

She laughs, a spat contempt, and little spittles of wine settle on my cheeks and lips. ‘Que mentiroso eres!’ What a liar you are.

‘Carmen, you’re clearly very upset. You’ve been drinking. Do you want to tell me what’s going on?’

‘Do you want to tell me what’s going on?’ She imitates my voice with a shrill, clipped accent. ‘I will tell you what is going on. I will tell you. Alex Miller is a spy. A spy who has ruined my life. I have been told never to speak to him again. Alex Miller, who put his dick inside me for the sake of his career and said that we would be together for ever. Alex Miller, who kisses me and speaks perfect Spanish’ – I interrupt with a brisk ‘No’, which she ignores – ‘and who betrayed me to the CIA.’ She switches to Spanish, her face so twisted with the disfigurement of betrayal that it is sickening to witness. ‘You’ve known all along about what Félix was doing. You have known all along that he was paying murderers to kill and torture the men of ETA and Herri Batasuna. And you came to me because you knew that I could find you information. And when you got it, by listening to my private conversations like the coward you are, you went running to your fucking American government and they covered everything up.’

On no account, no matter what the circumstances, ever break cover. It does not matter if your identity has been exposed as an utter sham. Maintain the spy’s composure. Give them nothing.

‘Carmen, please speak in English. I don’t understand what you’re saying.’

‘Hijo de puta!’

She hurls her glass across the room towards my face, the tumbler smashing against the door behind me and sending red streaks of staining wine across the walls and floor. I back away.

‘They arrested me,’ she says. ‘They took me in. They told me everything. They told me that Javier, a man I loved and trusted, had run away because he had been stealing money from the government.’ She is speaking in rushed, drunken English but manages a kind of throat noise here, a guttural insult to those who interrogated her. If anything, this seems false, in some way overdone, and I feel uneasy. ‘As if that is what happened! I told them what I knew, and I told the other staff what I knew, but they would not listen to me. They did not want to know the truth. That Javier had organized a dirty war against ETA, that Mikel Arenaza and Txema Otamendi and Juan Egileor and Tomás Orbé were all connected to the crimes of one man – Félix Maldonado.’

‘Now that doesn’t sound right,’ I tell her. ‘Who are these men you’re talking about? You need to calm down…’

‘Calm down?’ She insults me again – ‘Cerdo!’ – and sweeps her arm across the kitchen table. Yet as I watch the pieces of fruit and the biscuits and a plastic bottle of water falling to the floor, I feel that there is something not quite right here. Carmen’s anger seems contrived, as if she has learned her lines by rote. Why did she list those names so precisely, with such melodramatized conviction? Does she want to convince me of something that is beyond logic? ‘Do you not know about Félix?’ she screams, and again it sounds as though she is overplaying her hand. ‘Do you not know what he has done? Let me tell you, Alex Miller. As a soldier in the army of General Franco, his men took a teenage boy in Pamplona who had insulted them and beat him to death with shovels. With shovels. He is a murderer. Félix Maldonado is the black viper of the Interior Ministry and it is time that the world knew.’

My blood runs absolutely cold.

That final phrase, the description. I have heard it used before, to describe de Francisco, just as I have heard the story of the murdered boy. At the farm, in the mouth of the woman who tortured me. Both of them used an absolutely specific translation from a mother tongue into English: la víbora negra. The black viper. In my consternation I back up further against the wall, my mind inverted by doubt. Surely it isn’t possible that Carmen is one of them? In the same instant, and I have no idea how this mental process takes place, Egileor’s appearance in Thailand makes perfect sense. ETA faked his kidnapping. We were led to believe that he was a victim of the dirty war, but his safety was never in doubt.

I try to maintain my composure but Carmen has detected the doubt in my eyes. I say, ‘That may be the case, sweetheart, that may be the case…’ but her expression has tightened. It is as if she realizes that she has made a critical mistake. Does she know that I know? Think, Alec. Think. This cannot be happening. You could be wrong. You could just be paranoid and confused. But it is as if scales have fallen from my eyes. I have been used. We have all been used.

Too soon, perhaps, because it risks everything, I move towards the stove and prepare to seize a knife from the block beside the fridge. Carmen follows my eyeline and does not seem surprised. Is that a smile at the edge of her mouth? She says, ‘What are you doing, Alex? Listen to me!’ but the rage in her performance, the authenticity of it, has been replaced by something like cunning. She blocks my approach to the knives with a physical intensity that is quite unlike her, as if she would be capable of committing an act of violence without any thought to its consequence. Then I hear another person moving through the flat. This noise is a moment to compare with anything in the barn, the same sense of powerlessness, the same terror. Carmen frowns as I say, ‘Who the fuck is that? Is there somebody else here?’ and in an instant every tic and nuance that I associate with her face seems to completely fall away, like an actor dropping out of character. It is as if she ceases to be Carmen Arroyo and assumes an entirely new personality. I feel physically sick.

Simultaneously a man comes into the kitchen, my height, compact and athletic. He looks first at Carmen, then at me, and I look down at his right hand where he is holding a knife. I think I say, absurdly, ‘Now hang on a minute,’ but everything has moved into a different sphere. Then I see that he is wearing a red sweatband on his wrist, and an old leather-strapped watch, and I am right back in the nightmare of the farm faced by the man who treated me like a worthless animal. Anger and terror and panic rise in me with the force of a fever.

What happens now happens very fast. Carmen moves towards me and I reach for the knife block, seizing an empty wine bottle from the counter which I swing at the man, connecting instantly with his head. He drops to the ground so suddenly that I am actually taken by surprise. There is no noise. I have never struck a person like that before and it was so easy, so simple. He did not even speak. Then Carmen tries to seize my arms, kicking precisely at the agony of my knees. We struggle briefly and I find that I punch, without doubt or hesitation, at her face, at a woman’s face, throwing blow after blow at her feeble, corrupted, treacherous body, each enraged strike a savage revenge for the farm. I don’t know how long this goes on for. Eventually both of them are on the ground, the man still unconscious, Carmen groaning as blood curls from her lips. I’m not proud of this, but I drive my shoe into the Basque’s mouth two or three times, smashing teeth, almost crying with the pure adrenaline pleasure of revenge. I land a kick into his stomach so that he groans in pain. Carmen tries to reach for my legs to stop me but I am exhilarated by the opportunity to hurt them. It is even in my mind, a terrible thing, to sink the knife deep into his heart, to be revenged for the torture, for Mikel, for Chakor and Otamendi, for every loyal minion ETA betrayed so that their plan could reach fruition.

But I am exhausted. I move towards the kitchen door and walk out into the hall. How much noise did we make? Outside, perhaps from one of the apartments on the third or fourth floor, I can hear somebody shouting, ‘What’s going on down there?’ as I look back at their still bodies. Carmen is facing the floor, the Basque groaning and drifting in and out of consciousness. They are touching each other.

Noise on the staircase. I have to get out of here. Closing the front door behind me I hurry down the stairs and step out onto the street, turning quickly in the direction of Plaza Mayor.