ever cared for anything but their own personal and political advancement. They are all little Dick Cheneys, all the same. Politics is the vanity of individual men. Policy is shaped by flaws in the character.’
Why is he telling me this? Because he is drunk? ‘You’re saying that you disapprove of your colleagues?’
A heavy pause. Arenaza runs his hand through a thick clump of hair.
‘Not exactly, no. Not disapprove.’ I suppose he doesn’t want to overstep the mark. ‘It is more a question of human nature, of reality. Listen, you have somewhere else you have to go tonight?’
‘No.’
‘Then come with me. I will explain everything to you. We go to another bar and I will show you exactly what it is that I mean.’
10. Level Three
A light drizzle has started to fall by the time we leave the bar, the dark, narrow streets of the old quarter coated in black rain. The sea air is damp, Atlantic, quite different from the dry and dusty atmosphere of Madrid, and to take it in deep breaths is a welcome relief after the fug of the bar. Moving quickly beside Arenaza as we walk along the street I try to anticipate what the next few hours might hold. Anything could happen. The evening may disappear in a mulch of booze and ideology, or it could acquire a completely different character. Unless I have read the situation wrongly, Arenaza appears to have undergone some sort of political epiphany, criticizing his former masters in the armed struggle and happily articulating that revelation to strangers such as myself. It is the aeroplane phenomenon: the most sensitive information is often disclosed to the passenger sitting by our side whom we expect never to see again. As Arenaza spoke to me in the bar, confidence seemed to ebb away from him with each passing drink, as if a mask were slipping from his face. On the basis of a shared acquaintance with Julian, a former councillor with Batasuna was taking me into his confidence, and yet it somehow made perfect sense. I charmed him back there. I worked him round.
‘First we have to go to my car,’ he says. ‘I have to take off this jacket, Alec, to change out of my suit and shoes. You OK if I do this?’
‘No problem.’
Most of the better bars and restaurants in San Sebastian are clustered around the Parte Vieja, but I have spent very little time here, largely because Julian’s contacts preferred to meet in the lounge bar of the Hotel Inglaterra, where the comfortable sofas and armchairs offer views out onto the promenade and the ocean beyond. As a result, I don’t know my way around and Arenaza’s frequent switches of direction along the grid of streets are disorientating. It feels as though we are heading west towards the Concha, but it is impossible to take a bearing. Arenaza is holding a copy of the Gara newspaper over his head to protect it from rain, using his other hand to talk into a mobile phone. He is speaking to someone rapidly in Basque:
‘Denak ondo dago. Gaueko hamabietan egongo maizetxean. Afari egin behar dut Ingles bankari honekin.’
Who is he talking to? His wife? A colleague? Halfway through the conversation he breaks off and gestures at a poster tacked to the window of a nearby bar. It is a cartoon depicting a caricature of Aznar, the prime minister’s tongue curling deep into the arse of President George W. Bush. The caption is written in Basque and I cannot understand it. Through the window I can see two men playing chess on stools. Arenaza mouths the word ‘Truth’ and continues speaking into the phone. ‘ Ez arduratu,’ he says. ‘ Esan dizut dagoenekoz. Gaueko hamabiak. Bale ba, ikusi ordu arte.’
Then the conversation ends and we emerge into a pedestrianized area immediately behind the town hall. It is past nine o’clock and the streets are teeming with people. Arenaza explains that his car is parked in an underground garage about fifty metres away. Putting his hand on my back, he steers me across a set of blinking pedestrian lights and we walk towards the entrance.
‘Down here,’ he says. ‘Down here.’
The staircase is poorly lit and I hold on to the banister, pushed aside at one point by a pensioner coming the other way wearing a fake mink coat. The car park is on three subterranean levels, each one increasingly damp. Arenaza’s car, a tiny, door-dented Fiat, is parked in the far corner of the bottom floor, squeezed in between a brand-new Mini Cooper with British plates and a dark blue Renault Espace. This must be the long-term car park, because the area is completely devoid of people. It is very dark now, and for the first time it occurs to me that I may have completely misread the situation. Why did Arenaza need me to come all the way down here? Why is he changing his clothes?
‘You know what, Mikel, I think I might wait upstairs.’ This could be a kidnap attempt, a robbery, anything. ‘I’ll see you at the entrance to the town hall.’
I should never have come here of my own volition. I’m letting things slip.
‘What are you saying?’ He sounds relaxed, fishing around in the boot of the Fiat, his face is out of sight. ‘Alec?’
‘Just that I need to make a phone call. From the entrance. To a friend in Madrid. She’s trying to call me. I’ll see you at the top, Mikel, OK? I’ll see you at the top.’
‘Wait, wait.’ He emerges between the Fiat and the Mini, dressed in an old sweater worn over a clean white T-shirt. ‘You’re going upstairs? Can you wait just for two minutes please?’
I back away from the car and spin slowly through a complete turn, trying to read his eyes. In the distance, something metal drops to the ground. It is too dark and very quiet. Just the concrete chill of basements and a pervasive smell of spilled petrol. Then, thirty feet away, two men emerge quickly from a van and start moving towards me. Immediately I turn and run back towards the exit staircase, with no thought other than to get out as quickly as possible. Behind me, Arenaza shouts out ‘Hey!’ but I do not respond, sprinting hard up three flights of stairs and into the blessed relief of rain and fresh air.
At street level I bend down and double up in the crowds, resting my hands on my knees in an attempt to catch some breath. Why did Julian set me up with this guy? My head aches and the backs of my legs are shaking. Then, behind me, the two men emerge onto the street, walking at a steady pace. With a sense of relief that quickly changes to shame, I see that they are Chinese. Not Basque nationalists, not errand boys for ETA, but two tourists wearing denim jeans and raincoats. One of them is telling a story, the other laughing while consulting a map. It is humiliating. Seconds later Arenaza himself emerges, looking around with an expression of complete bewilderment. How do I get out of this one? I take out my mobile phone, press it to my ear and say the words ‘Two three four five, two twos are four, two threes are six’ in an attempt to give an impression of urgent conversation. Arenaza spots this and frowns. I wave happily back, gesturing to the phone, and then snap it shut as he comes towards me.
‘Sorry, Mikel, sorry.’ My breathing is fast and irregular. ‘My phone started ringing down there and I wanted to take it. There’s this girl I’ve been seeing and the signal was weak…’
He doesn’t believe me. ‘What happened?’ he says gently.
‘Like I was just telling you. A girl…’
‘No, come on. What? You become scared by something?’
He is not angry. In fact he is being surprisingly sympathetic.
‘Scared?’ I produce an absurd burst of laughter. ‘No, of course not.’
‘You suffer claustrophobia, Alec?’
It’s an idea. I might as well play along rather than try to pretend that I received a mobile phone signal under fifty feet of concrete.
‘O?, to be honest, yes. I do. I got a bit freaked out. Call it claustrophobia.’
‘My brother has this as well.’ God bless Mikel Arenaza’s brother. ‘I am sorry, very sorry to hear about it.’ He shakes his head and puts a hand on the lower part of my neck, giving it a little squeeze. ‘You should have said something before we go.’
‘Well, I thought I’d outgrown it, Mikel, I really did. I haven’t had an episode like that for years. We bankers aren’t very tough, you know?’
He doesn’t laugh. ‘No, this is not funny. I know because of Julio. It ruins his life.’ Opening a widebrimmed umbrella, Arenaza shields me from the rain and assumes an almost avuncular air. ‘You want to rest? You want to go back to your hotel?’
‘No, of course not.’ He has applied a fresh layer of aftershave in the car park and I wish that we were not standing so close together. ‘Let’s carry on. Let’s have a drink. I’d like to, I really would.’
And he accepts, talking all the way about his own fears – of heights, of spiders – purely to lessen my own sense of embarrassment. It is an unarguably kind thing to do and I feel an unexpected sense of shame that I should
