He rested his hands again on the immobile steering wheel. He turned towards me, to his left, and in the faint light – the lunar light – his eyes seemed black and opaque, as I had never seen them before; or was it the dominant effect of his eyelashes, long and dense enough to be the envy of any woman and to be considered highly suspect by any man? Although I'm a man too, and my lashes are neither short nor sparse. He laughed briefly, although more wholeheartedly this time, my remark had amused him. Once again I had amused him, and that is the best safe- conduct pass you can have in order to step free from any situation (not where grudges or revenge are involved, but certainly from angry reprisals and threats, which is no small thing).
'Oh, you can laugh now, Iago,' he said mockingly, he always called me that when he wanted to annoy me. And then he continued in a more serious vein. 'You can laugh now, but an hour ago, when I had that sword in my hand, you were as petrified as Garza was' – he pronounced this in the English fashion, 'gaatsa' – 'and if I were to get out of the car now, go to the boot and take out that sword, you would be terrified all over again; and if I threatened you with it, you would race off to your front door, cursing the existence of keys, which have to be taken out of your pocket and fitted into that tiny slot, not so easy to do when your life depends on it and when you're desperate and can't catch your breath. You would never get the key in the lock in time. I would have caught up with you before you managed to open it. Or if you had managed to unlock it, leaving me outside with my sword, I would have jammed the blade in the crack so you couldn't slam the door shut. Even dreams know that your pursuer usually catches up with you, and they've known it since the
And Tupra fell silent, he was definitely not Reresby any more, his lecture was over, he must have studied fear first hand, must have experienced and lived it as well, presumably because he had made great use of it during his life, here and there, who knows, on his missions to various countries or on field trips, there are insurrectionists everywhere especially if one is working for an old empire that is in ruins and in retreat, which leaves behind it only a few sturdy outposts to take stock and to transfer powers and to organise not entirely dishonourable departures, future business deals and belated withdrawals. The dark thought crossed my mind that he might have been a torturer himself and witnessed as much panic as Orlov and Bielov and Contreras, who, in their day, had tortured Andres Nin (the first man's real name was Nikolski and the third was really Vidali and later, in America, Sormenti: Tupra had his aliases too) in a cellar or a barracks or a house or a prison or a hotel in the Russian colony in Alcala de Henares, the town where Cervantes had been born; one sombre and unspecified informant suggested that these three comrades had flayed him alive; but this version or idea filled me with such fear that I flatly rejected it for no other reason than my own incredulity or my struggle against that fear, just as I immediately rejected this dark thought about my comrade, Tupra; after all, I saw Tupra nearly every day, on workdays anyway, during that London time of mine.
He suddenly fell silent, as if he had run out of verbal rather than respiratory puff, his hands still on the wheel, as if he were a child playing in a pretend car or in his father's stationary, immobilised car. He was staring absently into space, at nothing in particular, he was certainly not seeing what his eyes were seeing, my front door, my square, the trees, the offices, the hotel, the street-lamps, the statue, or the scene that he had just invented, in which he was pursuing me in order to kill me – it was odd to see those eyes at rest, so to speak, eyes that were normally so aware and never idle – or the lights in my dancer-neighbour's windows, Tupra knew nothing of his existence, nor that he was my entertainment when I was alone at home, tired or depressed or nostalgic, and sometimes also a solace, the happy, carefree dancer with his two women, and an extra one now and then. The square was empty during almost all of this time, only the occasional car or passer-by, several minutes apart; and because it was a secluded place, a semi-oasis, the footsteps of the latter rang out loudly on the pavement. Some noticed this and tried to silence them, to muffle them, as if they suddenly missed having a carpet beneath their indiscreet feet. Not the cars though, cars are always inconsiderate everywhere. They didn't even slow down. Nor had we, in the Aston Martin, when we drove into the square.
'Anyway,' I said, because, like Wheeler and like Tupra too, I did not let go of my prey if I was interested in what I was being told. 'You were talking about your apprenticeship, about the sword.' I had dropped the wounding tone, or perhaps it had merely been one of friendly mockery.
He immediately emerged from his absent state, lit another Rameses II and this time he did offer me the open, predominantly red, Pharaonic packet; he did so mechanically, without, I think, realising that he had not done so before. We had carefully extinguished our previous cigarettes in the ashtray; in London people don't throw matches or cigarette ends out of the car window. He began talking again with the same vigour and conviction. He had clearly studied and weighed his methods, he had pondered them or else experts had pondered them for him and he had adopted them after listening to their explanations and fully conscious of the implications; almost nothing happened by chance, nothing was mere outlandish caprice, judging by what he said next (and for once he did not change the subject from sentence to sentence): 'Exactly. If I draw a gun or a knife on someone, they're bound to be scared, but only in a conventional, or, as I said, common-or-garden way, yes, perhaps that's the word. Because it's the norm these days and has been for a couple of centuries, quite ancient really. If someone mugs us or kidnaps us, if they threaten us in order to make us talk or want to force us to do something or to teach us a lesson, in almost every case they will do so at gunpoint or knifepoint: those are the easiest weapons to get hold of and, besides, they're simple to use and practical, they fit in the pocket and can be pulled out quickly with one hand, and they're what we expect the other person to be carrying when we sense that something bad is going to happen. When, for example, we come across a gang of football hooligans or skinheads and we just have time to wonder whether or not to cross over to the other side of the road, almost always too late, if they've already seen us, it's not usually worth it and may even make matters worse. Or if someone is following us with suspicious intent, for example, the woman who suspects she's going to be raped both fears and assumes that the point of a knife will be pressed to her chest or her throat; the man who is home when his house is broken into expects the barrel of a gun pressed against his temple or the back of his neck, it's normal and predictable and, in a way, you get used to the idea. Getting used to the idea may not help much, but it does to some extent, because, almost unwittingly, you're already thinking about ways of escaping or of limiting the damage, even though, given the circumstances, such thoughts are
