opposite the trees and had immediately turned off the engine, but he wasn't going to let me get out at once, he still had things to say to me. And he had not yet revealed why he had wanted to give me a lift. – ' 'And I think to myself, George, I think,'' – he continued his monologue, it was as if he had learned it by heart on that night, years ago, when he had rehearsed it with his friend the actor -' 'these boys are special. These boys are a new kind. You've got it… And I can see it.'' – That or something similar was also our motto at work, 'I can see it, I can see your face tomorrow' -' 'And you've got to learn how to use it. Now these people, they don't like getting hurt. Not them or their property. Now these people out there who don't like to be hurt, pay other people not to hurt them. You know what I'm saying. 'Course you do. When you get out, you keep your eyes open. Watch out for the people who don't want to be hurt. Because you scare the shit out of me, boys. Wonderful.'' – That is what Tupra said in a fake accent which was perhaps his real accent, inside his fast car, in the lunar light of the street-lamps, sitting on my right, with his hands still resting on the motionless steering wheel, squeezing it or strangling it, he wasn't wearing gloves now, they were hidden away, dirty and sodden and wrapped in toilet paper, in his overcoat, along with the sword. – 'That's the thing, Jack. Fear,' he added, and those words still sounded as if they belonged to the role he had been imitating, or which he had usurped, or which perhaps he had stolen, or which he felt he had actually played through the intermediary of his friend. But it didn't really sound like his style, not the usual style of the Bertram Tupra I knew, more like the performance of a Shakespearian actor, although he did sound sombre, not squalid perhaps, but definitely sinister, ominous, so it was not surprising that along with the cold sweats that came and went and my general sense of fever, a shudder also ran through me.
26
My unease, however, had begun to subside since he had stopped the car. I could see the lights on in my apartment, I often left some or all of them on, to anyone watching from the building opposite or from the street, it would look as if I were always home, apart from when I was sleeping or on other occasions when I deliberately turned them off, to listen to music, for example.
'Are those lights yours?' asked Tupra, following my gaze, and he had to invade my space for a moment in order to lean across and peer through the open window on my side of the car, he liked to see things for himself, to scrutinise everything he saw with his insatiable eyes, blue or grey depending on the light.
'Yes, I don't like finding the apartment in darkness when I come home late.’
'It isn't because there's someone waiting for you upstairs, is it? And here I am monopolising your time down here.’
'No, no one's waiting for me, Bertram. You know I live alone.’
'You could have a visitor, a regular one, someone with a key. Perhaps an English girlfriend. Or would she have to be Spanish?’
'No one has my keys, Bertram, and tonight would hardly have been the best one to choose for a late-night tryst. When we go out with you, we never know what time we'll be back. We're not that late tonight, but if De la Garza had put up a fight or run away, or if we'd had to go to the police station for causing a public affray or for being in possession of some very original weapons, we would have been out until the small hours, or even until the morning.’
I had recovered my slightly reproachful tone and that may have reminded him that he, in turn, had something with which to reproach me, either in order to crush or quash my reproaches or because he had been keeping it back, and which was his original reason for wanting to give me a lift home. Yes, that was probably it, he did not usually allow faults to go unnoticed, or his own discontents.
'He couldn't have run away, nor could he have put up a fight, you know that,' he pointed out. 'But seeing as how you're calling me Bertram now, there's something I want to say.' – And his face hardened, I really must have done something to annoy him. 'Three times tonight, three times if not four, you called me Tupra when we were with that imbecile friend of yours. How could you, Jack? Where's your head?' And he even struck me on my forehead with the soft, lower portion of his palm, as if he were a gym teacher. 'I'm Reresby tonight, Jack, tonight that's the only name I have – I'd made that perfectly clear – under any circumstances. You know that full well, no matter what the situation, that's an immutable rule, unless, of course, I tell you otherwise. How could you have been so careless? That cretin heard my name. Other people could have heard it. He doesn't matter, he's not important, it makes no difference to him what my name is, besides, the last thing he'll want to do is remember me, my face or my name. He'll want to forget the whole dreadful nightmare, he won't be looking for revenge. But imagine if you'd let my name slip in front of Manoia, for whom I've always been Reresby, ever since he's known me. And we go back years, Jack. You can't just chuck all those years down the drain, simply because you throw a wobbly and get all hysterical and act as if you know what I might or might not be about to do, you can't possibly know that until you actually see me do it, and sometimes not even then, do you understand? I wouldn't have done it anyway.
Not that it's any business of yours. You'll be doing some travelling with me soon, Jack, abroad, and there'll probably be other trips too, if, that is, you stay with us and we continue working together. Regardless of what you see me doing, don't ever try to interfere again. It doesn't bear thinking about: with Manoia it's taken years to build the rather precarious, uncertain trust we've got and to see all that tossed overboard in a moment… How do you think someone would react to hearing a negotiator or a colleague suddenly being addressed by a different name from the one by which he or she has always known him?’
He was right in a way, indeed he was largely right: it had been a failure on my part. But it had happened when it had happened, each time that I believed he was about to kill the cretin, it wasn't exactly a normal situation. However, instead of immediately defending myself (to call him by the wrong name three times was quite a lot), I decided to ask a question of my own: 'So you've known each other for years, then, and yet he still thinks you're Reresby,' I said. 'I didn't know that, not that you ever explained. And may I ask what the Sismi is?’
Tupra laughed, on his own this time, a short, almost sarcastic laugh it seemed to me; or worse than that, condescending.
'You may,' he replied, 'although you may not need to. You'd probably find it in a dictionary, an Italian-English one, or Italian-Spanish in your case. It's the Italian Intelligence Service. The Military Security and Information Service, or something like that, it's an acronym, which in Italian gives you SISMI, s-i-s-m-i, there's no great mystery about it. You were paying more attention than I thought.’
'I see. Should I deduce, then, that Manoia works for them, that he's one of Berlusconi's vassals? Those poor Italian civil servants and soldiers, slaves to a man who has no taste in clothes at all. You can sense the sequins and the red satin jacket even when he's not wearing them. I wasn't paying much attention actually, it just happened to be a word I didn't know in any language.’
He didn't respond to my joke, but that wouldn't have been out of respect for that particular Prime Minister, I knew he shared my views, that Berlusconi was a man with no taste in clothes who was always implicitly wearing a sequinned satin jacket…
'That would be a deduction too far, Jack. So don't even ask. Mentioning the CIA or MI6 or MIS doesn't necessarily mean that you work for them, does it? In fact, those who do rarely talk about them at all, just as many mafiosi have banned the word 'Mafia', they can't bear to hear it being bandied about by other people, by civilians shall we say. Besides, you're not paid to make deductions or to ask questions, so you can save yourself some work, which you're doing for free anyway. So, if ever you're tempted, just keep any deductions and questions to yourself. But don't piss me off, all right, don't bother me with them.’
He suddenly turned rude and unpleasant and said those last words with great disdain. It was easy enough for me to recover my own anger, I wouldn't get over those deep feelings of rage for a long time and I would never forget the whole awful experience, the feeling of wretchedness and outrage he had instilled in me, of impotence and menace and even of analogical fascism. If it
'You were about to explain,' I said, 'about that wretched sword. About the Krays and all that. What was it you learned from them that was so important, how to be Zorro perhaps? Or d'Artagnan, Gladiator, Conan the Barbarian, Spartacus? Or Prince Valiant, the Seven Samurai, Aragorn, Scaramouche? Or even Darth Vader? Which was your chosen model?’
