break silences.
‘That is right. And you? You are leaving, Alec?’
I see that the top of his baby’s head is chapped with cradle cap.
‘Yes, I have to go back to work.’
‘Oh. Well I am also going to Madrid for the night. Perhaps you have time for a coffee?’
There’s no getting out of it. If I make an excuse and drive off he will only force my hand at a later point. This is exactly what Kitson feared. This is what he was talking about on the motorway.
‘Sure. But I can’t be long. I have to drive down to Marbella later on for a few days. Where do you want to go?’
He suggests that I follow him onto the motorway. There’s a busy roadside garage about fifteen kilometres south of Siguenza where we can talk in private, away from the pricked ears of journalists and Guardia Civil. Now that he needs me, now that he wants some answers, Zulaika has added a courteousness, even a finesse, to his manner. He introduces his baby son – little Xavi – with a proud father’s enthusiasm and excuses himself for five minutes while he retrieves his car. I’m going to have to play this one very carefully. He’s onto me. Zulaika is very smart and very thorough and he will stop at nothing to get to the bottom of whatever it is that he believes I’m concealing.
He drives fast and we arrive at the petrol station just after 3.30. Inside he selects a table at the rear of the restaurant and obliges me to sit with my back to the room. Zulaika then announces that he’s hungry and orders salad and fabada from the menu del dia. That was sly: now we’ll have to sit here talking until he has finished his food. With nothing to lose, I too order lunch and the first course arrives within three minutes. He has put Xavi in a rocker on the floor and the waitress keeps bending over to coo at him.
‘I didn’t know you had children.’
‘Well, we don’t know each other,’ he says. ‘Why should you?’
Now that he has me where he wants me, normal service has resumed. The manner is once again curt and to the point.
‘Did you drive down from Bilbao this morning?’
‘That is right. My wife had to go to England last night so she left me looking after the baby.’
‘She went to England?’
‘Yes. She has family there. Her grandmother is very sick.’
It is illustrative of my incessant paranoia that I briefly forge links in my mind between Zulaika and SIS. The conspiracy goes something like this: Kitson knew that I would not be able to resist coming to Valdelcubo, so he tipped off Zulaika – who is a source for MI6 – and hopes, in the long term, that the Spanish press will frame me for Arenaza’s murder. The theory is completely absurd, and yet it is three or four minutes before I regain my composure, a period in which Zulaika has been talking in Basque on his mobile phone. He may have been checking his copy with the sub-editors at Ahotsa, but it’s impossible to tell.
‘Do you understand Euskera?’ he asks.
‘Not a word.’ My salad has a lot of raw white onion in it and is otherwise composed of greying shreds of iceberg lettuce and some overripe olives. I set it to one side and watch as Zulaika eats his. ‘So what was it that you wanted to talk about?’
I time the question so that he has his mouth full of food; it’s a good twenty seconds before he is able to respond.
‘Well, I have to say that I was surprised to see you there today, Alec.’
‘You were?’
‘I did not think the English were a morbid race.’
On the basis that he would respond haughtily even to the mildest criticism of the Basque temperament, I feign annoyance.
‘The English are not morbid. Not in the slightest. I simply became interested in Mikel’s disappearance. It’s not every day that you have a personal link to a man’s murder.’
‘Of course. Don’t be offended.’
‘Forget it.’
He continues to eat in silence, pouring more vinegar on his salad as an articulated lorry parks outside the window, completely blocking out the sun. It immediately becomes colder at our table, like the chill between us, and little Xavi begins to cry. Zulaika has to pick him up off the floor and pat him on the back and, to judge by his slightly reddened cheeks, regards this as a loss of face. It’s hard to play the toughened hack when you have dribbles of baby sick splattered on your shoulder.
‘So where did you go on holiday?’
‘To Morocco,’ he replies, putting Xavi back in the rocker and shoving a dummy in his mouth. The waitress clears away the plates and says, ‘Such a beautiful boy’ in Spanish before touching his cheek with her knuckles. Under her jeans she’s wearing a red G-string which rides up on her back as she crouches down.
‘I haven’t been to Morocco. Fez nice this time of year?’
‘We travelled all over the country. Fez, yes. Also Tangier and Casablanca.’ He pours himself a glass of water. ‘I had no luck finding the Basque restaurant you were talking about in Madrid.’
It takes me a beat to realize that Zulaika is referring back to the lie I told him about Arenaza. I assume a look of disappointment and say, ‘You didn’t?’
‘No.’
His eyes narrow to suspicious slits. To spite him I stare directly back, two kids in the playground. Zulaika blinks first.
‘You know what I have been thinking?’ he says.
‘What’s that, Patxo?’
‘I think you rang to tell me something the other day. Something important. When you left your message, your voice it sounded tense. Then I think somebody got to you. I think you know what happened to Mikel Arenaza, but for some reason you don’t want to reveal it.’
I’ll say this for Zulaika: he tests my skills as an actor. Moving my head slightly forward, I bounce my eyebrows into a look of utter consternation and do a Dizzy Gillespie with my cheeks. ‘ What?’
‘You have heard me,’ he says. ‘If you want to talk about it, then I will listen. If you don’t, then I understand. I have my own theory about what is beginning to happen now in Spain.’
He knows that I won’t be able to resist this. As the fabada arrives, Patxo leans over, keeping his eyes on me for as long as he can, then wipes snot from Xavi’s nose. The waitress spoons beans into my bowl and I dunk a hunk of bread into the sauce before rising to the bait.
‘O?. What’s your theory? What do you think is happening in Spain?’
He speaks through a mouthful of beans.
‘What do you know about the GAL?’ he says.
At first I don’t think that I have heard him correctly and ask him to repeat the question. He swallows his food, rests his spoon in the bowl, wipes his mouth with a napkin and then, with the utter self-confidence of one who knows that he has stumbled on perhaps the biggest political story of his career, repeats the question with lazy understatement.
‘I said, what do you know about the GAL?’
28. Dirty War
It is the autumn of 1983. Joxean Lasa and Joxi Zabala are two young men living in exile among the radical Basque community in southern France. Both are attached to the military wing of ETA and have participated some months earlier in a botched bank robbery in Spain. On the night of Saturday 15 October they ask a friend if they can borrow his car in order to attend a fiesta in the village of Arrangoitze, on the French side of the border. The friend, Mariano Martinez Colomo, himself a refugee, agrees to the request. Thirty-six hours later, when Lasa and Zabala have failed to return the keys, Colomo notices that his car, a Renault 4, has not been moved all weekend. Nevertheless, two of the doors are unlocked, Zabala’s anorak is on the back seat and a hank of human hair, as if
