‘I plan to stay.’
His manner is forced and oleaginous, not a single thing about him that one would trust or believe. He sports an artificial tan and enough cheap jewellery to stock a small flea market. I can hardly comprehend that I’m about to hand this guy a cheque for €1,600. He looks like an extra in Carlito’s Way.
‘I was sorry to hear about your brother-in-law. How was Oviedo?’
‘Oh fine.’ Again, the polished white smile, the grin. Let’s not allow a little death to stand in the way of lunch. ‘I did not particularly know him, but my wife of course is very upset.’
‘How long have you been married?’
‘About three years. But there’s still time for life, yes?’
Bonilla might as well have winked here. One side of his mouth curls into a reptilian sneer and he pops an olive onto his tongue. The waiter comes back with my sherry and we open up the menus. Both of us order gazpacho in honour of the decent weather, and I opt for merluza a la plancha as a main course. Bonilla is a red-meat man and wants his solomillo cooked poco hecho with an ensalada mixta on the side.
‘Just kill the cow, wipe its arse and bring it to the table,’ he says, laughing energetically at a joke I’ve heard before. Without consultation he then orders a bottle of red wine – in spite of the fact that I’m eating fish – before treating me to some of his opinions about border controls and immigration.
‘These whores are disgusting,’ he says, gesturing behind him in the vague direction of the park. ‘Animals from Africa bringing AIDS to Spain.’
‘Wasn’t AIDS here before?’ I ask. He doesn’t pick up on the sarcasm.
‘Aznar lets in thousands of putas from Romania, from Hungary, from Russia. What are they good for but to ruin this country? They pay no tax, they steal, they are bad for the tourists.’
‘But you’re Chilean.’
The right pectoral appears to twitch.
‘Of course.’
‘Well, a lot of these girls are from South America…’
‘Sure,’ he says, ‘but not from Chile, not from Chile.’ Bonilla leans back in his chair and actually wags a finger at me. All of this is perfectly normal behaviour for a business lunch in Spain; just two hombres sizing each other up. His technique is to impose his personality as quickly as possible; mine is to sit there and watch him get on with it. ‘These girls are from Brazil, Mr Thompson, from Argentina and Colombia, not from my country. We don’t have the same economic difficulties in Chile.’
‘Of course not. When did you emigrate?’
‘My parents were forced to leave after the coup that removed Allende.’
‘So you were educated over here?’
‘In the south of Spain, yes.’
We then spend the next quarter of an hour talking about Nixon and Kissinger (‘Chile had her own 9/11, you know. A benign communist state fucked up the arse by the Republican Party’), a period which allows Bonilla to exercise his vigorous contempt for all things American. I hear him out, aware that my sole purpose today is to discover the truth about Rosalia’s link to Arenaza without revealing anything of my relationship with Mikel. To that end, I need to encourage a candour in Bonilla, a candour that would be snuffed out by seeming argumentative or asking too many awkward questions. It is always best to flatter the vain man.
‘And what do you do, Mr Thompson?’
‘I’m a screenwriter. In actual fact I’m currently working on a story about al-Qaeda. But enough about me. How did you become a detective?’
And this leads to twenty minutes of tall tales about Bonilla’s past as a member of the Guardia Civil in Alicante.
‘Of course, I knew a lot of girls,’ he says, the waiter spooning croutons and chopped onion into his flesh-pink bowl of gazpacho. ‘The uniform, it gets them wet, yes?’
I laugh in all the right places, nod when the conversation becomes more serious, appear dazzled by the sophistication of his work as a private eye. It is what might best be described as a feminine approach to the task at hand; a means of withdrawing into the shadows as Bonilla strides out into the light. A pattern emerges in his conversation, a habit of telling stories in which third-party players are routinely criticized with the intention of portraying himself in the most flattering possible light. Men who have lived alone for some time often display the same characteristic, and I begin to wonder if Bonilla is either profoundly insecure and unhappy or perhaps even lying about having a wife and children. Some of his stories don’t add up and there are strange discrepancies in his descriptions of home. Eventually I manage to steer the conversation towards the subject of Rosalia Dieste. By this point the main-course plates have been stacked and hauled away and for the first time he looks unsure of what to say. Two paramedics wearing orange Saumur jackets have settled at the table next to ours and he says, ‘You’re happy talking about this here?’
It’s obvious that he has nothing to tell me. That’s why there’s been a two-course delay. Now he wants to use the paramedics as an excuse not to carry on with the briefing.
‘I’m happy,’ I tell him. ‘I don’t see a problem.’
There is a large, visible intake of breath. Leaning over, Bonilla lifts a battered briefcase from the ground and extracts a worryingly slim file. The sunglasses come off, a pen appears from his jacket pocket and he rolls up the sleeves of his jacket like Tubbs in Miami Vice.
‘Rosalia Dieste… Rosalia Dieste.’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, we must confess that she was not an easy assignment for us. Not easy at all.’
So effortless the slip into the plural; collective rather than personal responsibility.
‘I see.’
‘We were constricted by not knowing the exact nature of your enquiry.’
‘I don’t understand. I explained to Mar -’
‘Yes of course you did, of course you did.’ A pause. ‘But the exact nature.’
A teenage girl strolls past the restaurant and, like a tracking shot, Bonilla scopes her nodding breasts all the way to the edge of the lake.
‘Eduardo?’
‘ Si? ’
‘I explained to Mar what I wanted. Deep background. Previous relationships. Some information about Plettix and Gael. I thought I made it clear.’
Thick lips bulge in thought. There is a moment of reflection before some of the poise and self-assurance returns to his face. He taps the file, mutters the word ‘Gael’ and begins searching for a piece of paper. There cannot be more than twenty pages contained within the folder’s narrow cardboard flaps, but it is some time before he has found it.
‘Gael and Rosalia met on holiday two years ago,’ he announces finally. ‘At the Parador in Caceres.’ The waiter comes back and takes an order for coffee. I ask for a cigar to buy more time. ‘He was away on a business trip to Lyons this weekend.’
‘I knew that. What’s his job?’
‘Gael Marchena works for a small French pharmaceutical company called Marionne. The headquarters are based near Tours. He trained as a chemist at a university in Paris and was recruited after graduation.’
‘He’s French?’
Bonilla has to look that one up.
‘Spanish.’
One of the paramedics looks over and I wonder if I have underestimated the surveillance threat. Bonilla scratches his neck.
‘Rosalia and Gael have lived together at an apartment in Calle de Jiloca for under one year now’ He is still reading from the file. ‘The rent is shared, they pay by a regular monthly transferencia from Gael’s account with the BBVA. He is under a lot of pressure from his family to be married.’
A strangled laugh.
‘You listen to his telephone conversations?’
‘I cannot necessarily reveal the source of my information.’ This appears to be a small moment of triumph for
