‘Who said anything about going paranoid?’
We have drifted out of earshot of the spare bedroom, moving towards the kitchen.
‘Look, she’s not here to steal stuff. She’s not here to plant bugs. I went up to her in a club. We came back and watched a DVD.’
‘Yeah? Which one?’
‘Ronin.’
‘Sounds exciting. Glad to see you haven’t lost your touch with the ladies.’
Saul rubs his eyes. There’s a twist of amusement in his face. ‘Look, she’s an art student from Columbia. Studying Cubism.’
‘Analytic or synthetic?’
And now he’s on to me. ‘Oh fuck off.’
I turn away, grinning, and walk back towards my bedroom. ‘See to your guest. Make her feel at home,’ I tell him. If anything, I am relieved by what Saul has done; it helps to balance out my own moral failings. Does adultery still count if your estranged wife is sleeping with another man? ‘Would she like some coffee? A daily newspaper? A glass of freshly squeezed orange juice?’
‘I’m going to get dressed,’ he replies.
Yet once Saul has disappeared back into the bedroom I experience a strange mixture of contradictory emotions: mild panic, assuaged by his insistence that the girl is just a student; relief that he will no longer occupy the moral high ground when it comes to criticizing my own behaviour; and jealousy, if only because the sounds of giggling coming from the spare bedroom would be enough to make any man feel lonely.
I text Sofia:
Home now. Thinking of you. Can we meet? x
The next half-hour is spent unpacking and stowing the money behind the fridge. There’s no sign of Saul or the girl so I leave a note and head outside. I want to get some background on Arenaza and look into Nicole in more detail. At the post office I retrieve my computer hard drive and the various coded reminders of passwords and contact addresses, then head down to the internet cafe at the foot of Calle de Ventura Rodriguez.
According to articles I find in nexis. com, over the past five years there have been 127 Spanish newspaper stories linked to Mikel Arenaza. I print out those in which his name appears in the first two paragraphs and then run a separate search through Google. Mostly this leads to generic information about Batasuna, although something pops up from Bilbao University concerning a lecture Arenaza gave in 1999, and that is soon spooling out of the printer. Predictably, any combination of Arenaza/Bogota, Batasuna/Colombia or Church/Arenaza produces either garbage or irrelevant material. A Julio Arenaza from Argentina, for example, stayed at an obscure mountain hostel in Chile in 2001, and left a note in the on-line guest book saying how much he had enjoyed visiting the local church. Typing Batasuna/FARC into Nexis produces two interesting articles on the US wires about ETA’s relationship with the Italian mafia (from whom they have purchased Balkan weapons in exchange for drugs) and their links with FARC, the Colombian guerrilla movement. The US embassy in Bogota also provides a detailed website, although a thorough check of email addresses listed on the various pages fails to turn up anyone named Nicole or Nicki or Church. There’s an ‘nrodriguez’ working in the human resources section, but unless Nicole has married someone of Hispanic descent and taken his name, it seems unlikely that this could be her. I take a note of the main switchboard number and begin again.
Arenaza said that Julian and Nicole met in Washington DC several years ago, while Julian was working in a bank. There are more than seventy financial institutions listed on the web for the DC Metropolitan area, although I know that Endiom has only one office on the eastern seaboard, in lower Manhattan. At first I check private banks and British-owned institutions in Washington, later widening the net to American-owned organizations, or those with any kind of Hispanic connection. The list grows and grows and mostly it’s just a question of writing down phone numbers in order to check with the banks directly at a later stage. The Foreign Office website, unlike that of its American counterpart, contains woefully little information about Bogota. The page takes about six minutes to load and contains little more than a few titbits about visa requirements and Jack Straw. Eyes stinging with screen- ache, I head off for lunch and resolve to start again in an hour.
Saul calls just as I am about to tuck into a tortilla.
‘Sasha’s gone,’ he says.
‘So you remembered her name…’
‘Hope you didn’t mind her being here. Maybe I should have asked.’
‘Don’t worry about it.’
I am too caught up in Arenaza’s revelations to care. Besides, I’d like to have a hold over Saul, so there’s no point in giving him a hard time about the girl.
‘Listen,’ he says, ‘Andy’s back in Cadiz. I thought I might head down there for a few days.’
‘This afternoon?’
‘Maybe tomorrow. You want to come?’
It is the last thing I feel like doing.
‘I’d love to, but I have to write up this report for Julian. It’s going to take days.’
He sounds disappointed. There is a long pause. It is as if we have no more to say to one another.
‘How was the trip?’
‘Fine.’
And the rest of the conversation is inconsequential. I ask him if he liked the car chases in Ronin. Is he going to see the girl again? Then I hang up and see that Sofia has left a message.
Not this weekend. Must be with Julian. Lo siento. S x
And suddenly the paranoia returns. Why would she turn me down? Has Arenaza spoken to them? Has their plan unravelled? This will be the aftermath of San Sebastian: not concerns over Saul’s sex life, but other mistrusts and suspicions. I finish the tortilla – almost breaking a tooth on a diamond-hard chunk of jamon – and ring Julian in an effort to establish what’s going on.
‘So! You’re back. How was it?’
He is at his desk, chipper as ever, no suggestion of concern.
‘Terrific, thanks. Just need the weekend to write up the magnum opus. How are things with you?’
‘As ever, but who am I to complain?’
Indeed.
‘Manchester United still winning?’
‘Oh yes, oh yes.’
The question, as I might have anticipated, instigates a five-minute monologue about United’s chances of ‘stealing the title’ from Arsenal. (‘If we can just put a string of results together, I reckon Wenger will really eat his words.’) Then a call comes through on Julian’s other line and he is forced to cut the conversation short.
‘Doing anything this weekend?’ I ask, trying to establish Sofia’s motive before he rings off.
‘Nothing,’ he says. ‘Nothing. Bloody parents coming into town.’
This, at least, reassures me that she was telling the truth.
‘Well, maybe we can have lunch on Wednesday,’ I suggest. ‘Go through my report.’
‘Good idea,’ he says. ‘I’d like that.’ But he hangs up without saying goodbye.
To disguise any pattern, I choose a different internet cafe, on Calle de Amaniel, and work until six tracing language schools in Bogota. If Colombia is anything like Spain, companies offering language tuition will go out of business every few weeks, but most of the old stalwarts, including Berlitz, are listed on the web. I take down a series of numbers and realize that most of next week will be taken up making phone calls to Washington and Colombia. I also find a Basque translation service on the web that quotes me just under €800 for converting several Arenaza articles from Gara and Ahotsa into English. They promise that the results will be ready inside five working days, although it angers me that I’ll have to shell out the equivalent of almost five hundred pounds just to read what, in all likelihood, will be illdisguised nationalist propaganda.
Finally, I access a site for marriage licence information at the Superior Court of the District of Columbia and call the number listed using the Amena SIM card. For at least two minutes I’m trapped in a maze of automated voices, until a spirited receptionist eventually puts me through to ‘Leah’ in ‘our executive office’.
‘Who shall I say is calling, sir?’
‘My name is Simon Eastwood.’
