35. La Bufanda
Carmen Arroyo is thirty-five years old. She was born in Cantimpalos, a pueblo sixteen kilometres north of Segovia, on 11 April 1968, a daughter to Jose Maria Arroyo, a schoolteacher, and his Basque wife, Mitxelena, who is currently in hospital undergoing surgery for a small melanoma on her left shoulder. Carmen is an only child. She was educated at the Instituto Giner de los Rios in Segovia and moved to Madrid at the age of eighteen, a typical provinciana. Having graduated from the Universidad Complutense in Moncloa with a mediocre degree in economics, she spent three years in Colombia working with underprivileged children at a hostel in Medellin, returning to Madrid in the winter of 1995. She passed the open competition for the Spanish civil service at Level D and has worked in both the Foreign and Agriculture Ministries in a secretarial capacity, always for Javier de Francisco, who has become a close friend. She became his personal secretary in the spring of 2001 shortly after Aznar appointed him Secretario de Estado de Seguridad under Maldonado. Her appearance alongside both men at an EU conference on policing later that year was noted by SIS.
Jose Maria Arroyo owns a two-bedroom apartment in the neighbourhood of La Latina on Calle de Toledo, right beside the metro station. Carmen has lived there for the past eight years. She shares the flat with an Argentinian actress, Laura de Rivera, who spends most of her time in Paris with a boyfriend, Tibaud, and is therefore rarely at home. Carmen has savings at the BBVA amounting to almost €17,000 and pays only a peppercorn rent to her father for use of the apartment. For the past five nights she has visited her mother’s hospital bed at 7 p.m. sharp, taking fruit, flowers or a woman’s magazine on each occasion. She listens to a lot of classical music, attended a Schubert concert at the Circulo de Bellas Artes on Wednesday evening, and shops mostly at Zara for clothes. The take quality from the bug fitted by Macduff in her kitchen is good enough to ascertain that she watched a dubbed American movie – Annie Hall – on Thursday night while eating supper off her knees. Carmen talked to herself throughout the film, laughing regularly and making two phone calls in quick succession at around 11 p.m. The first was to her mother, to wish her good night, the second to her best friend, Maria Velasco, to arrange to meet for a drink at a bar in Calle Martin de los Heros tomorrow night. That’s my opportunity. That’s how we’re going to start things off.
I wash my hair, shave and put on a decent set of clothes, but orchestrating the meeting is even easier than anticipated. I wait in the foyer of the Alphaville cinema until Carmen shows up at around 11.30 p.m. wearing a dark jacket and narrow trousers in Thatcher blue. She’s taller than I expected, thinner and more ungainly. She looks like the sort of girl I used to avoid in London: plain, shy and unimaginative. Once inside she finds Maria and the two of them sit down at a table at the back of the bar, each nursing a bottle of Sol and a cigarette. I follow two minutes later, pick a table with an eye-line to Carmen’s chair and retrieve a crumpled copy of Homage to Catalonia from my back pocket. The flirting happens almost instantaneously; indeed, she initiates it, sliding the odd glance and smile in my direction, tentatively at first, as if she’s not quite sure that it’s really happening, and then gradually gaining in confidence as the minutes tick by. I steal looks only a couple of times early on, careful not to overplay my hand, but at one point she actually blushes when she looks up to find me staring directly at her. For half an hour we sit there, Carmen doing her best to concentrate on what Maria is telling her, but finding it increasingly difficult not to be drawn away into a secret glance, a shy, blinking eye contact with her mystery admirer. Maria eventually cottons on and even turns round in her seat – much to Carmen’s embarrassment – ostensibly to attract the waiter’s attention but clearly to get a better fix on the stranger who has had such a remarkable effect on her friend. Then, at midnight, Macduff makes the call to my mobile and I pick up my book and leave.
She takes the bait. On the back of my chair I have left a scarf – a present from Sofia – and, sure enough, when I’m just a few metres down the street I hear footsteps behind me and turn to see Carmen looking anxious and out of breath.
‘ Perdone, ’ she says. ‘ Dejo la bufanda en el asiento. Aqui esta .’
She holds out the scarf and I pretend that I don’t speak Spanish.
‘Oh Christ. That’s so kind of you. Gracias. I totally forgot. Thank you.’
‘You are American?’
By phoning Carmen at work and pretending to be a journalist, Macduff was able to establish that she speaks English. Her accent is half-decent, but it’s too early to tell if she’s a linguist.
‘Not American. Scottish.’
‘Ah, escoces.’
If we can communicate solely in English, that will play to my advantage. In the course of our relationship Carmen might say something to a friend or colleague in apparent confidence which I will be able to translate and understand.
‘Yes. I’m just here in Madrid for a few months. You?’
‘ Soy madrilena, ’ she says, with evident pride. ‘ Me llamo Carmen .’
‘Alex. Nice to meet you.’
We kiss in the traditional fashion and her cheeks feel dry and warm. It’s already clear that the first part of the strategy is working well: Carmen has been bold enough to follow me outside and to strike up a conversation, and she clearly doesn’t want me to leave. In time we’ll exchange phone numbers, just as Kitson hoped, and the relationship will be up and running. Then all I need to do is work out a way of finding her attractive.
‘You are enjoying yourself here?’
‘Oh I love it. It’s such a great city. I’d never been here before and everybody has just been so friendly.’
‘Like me?’
‘Like you, Carmen.’
A first tension-shifting laugh. It is a strange sensation, this falsified union, this charade, but as we exchange further pleasantries I find myself warming to her, if only out of a sense of guilt that my sole purpose here this evening is to take advantage of her decency and palpable loneliness. If I can bring a little happiness into her life, then where’s the harm?
‘So you’re here on holiday?’
‘No, not really. I’m supposed to be researching a PhD.’
‘You are student?’
‘Sort of. I used to work on a newspaper in Glasgow but I’m taking two years out, with a view to becoming an academic.’
The structure of this sentence is too complicated for her and she frowns. I rephrase it and tell her the title of my thesis – ‘The British Battalion of the International Brigades 1936-1939’ – and she looks impressed.
‘This sounds interesting.’ Then there is an awkward delay.
‘It’s cold and you’re not wearing a coat,’ I tell her, just to fill the silence.
‘Yes. Maybe I should get back inside.’
Don’t let her go just yet.
‘But when am I going to see you again?’
Carmen’s face twists with pleasure. This sort of thing rarely happens to her. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, can I telephone you? Can I have your number? I’d love to see you again.’
‘ Claro.’
And it’s that simple. I scribble the number down on a blank page in the Orwell book and wonder if I should warn her, right here and now, that her life is about to be turned inside-out by a bunch of scheming British spooks. Instead I say, ‘You should go inside. It’s cold.’
‘ Si, ’ she replies. ‘My friend is waiting. Who are you meeting?’
Kitson anticipated that Carmen would want to know if I have a girlfriend or wife, so I have a preprepared response to the question.
‘Just somebody from my language class.’
‘ Vale.’ Something like disappointment, even a shiver of panic, runs through her eyes, although I may be reading too much into this. At the risk of exaggeration it seems that she has already fallen for me.
‘Thank you for this,’ I tell her.
‘ Que? ’
