‘Why don’t you come back to my apartment?’
And that’s where it all begins. The truth is that I do not compare her to Sofia, to Kate, nor to any other woman I have been with. The time that we spend in bed together over the next two days feels almost natural, as if there were never anything false or morally reprehensible in my pursuit of her. You get so far into a deceit, so entwined in a legend, that the life becomes your own. After the first time, for example, standing under the shower at her apartment on Saturday afternoon, I realized that it would be possible to continue seeing Carmen for as long as it took to obtain the information. Equally, if my task were suddenly completed, I could walk out of the door and never see her again, only to feel guilty about the damage to her self-esteem at some later date. JUSTIFY was exactly like this. The process of long-term deception against Katharine and Fortner became commonplace. In order to function effectively as a spy, it was necessary to forget that I was lying to them. It is a version of method acting, I suppose, although one with far more serious implications.
So I stay at her place all weekend, closing both the kitchen and the bedroom doors in order to muffle the sound of our lovemaking from Macduff’s intrusive bug. I find physical characteristics to enjoy in Carmen – her flat stomach, the stone-smooth sweep of her back – and concentrate on these even as others – the smell of her hair, her chin, her childish laugh – conspire to repel me. There was only one thing which proved unnerving; her oddly muted reaction to the bruises on my body. Carmen barely commented on them. I had felt that they would be a barrier between us, even a clue to my true identity, yet it was almost as if she was expecting to find them, almost as if she had encountered violence in a relationship before.
On Sunday evening she has to visit her mother in hospital and I take the opportunity to go through her personal belongings, making a visual record of any Interior Ministry documents and searching for evidence of love letters from her former boyfriend at work. There is, of course, the danger that Laura de Rivera might return at short notice from Paris, so Macduff is stationed in the window of the bar outside her apartment, watching the front door for visitors. At eight I leave a note explaining that I need to go home for a change of clothes and dead-drop Macduff the list of phone numbers drawn from Carmen’s mobile while she was asleep. There were two for de Francisco and one for Maldonado, but as yet no information from her personal computer. A laptop is sitting on a chair in our bedroom, but I could not risk booting it up for fear of encountering a password.
Come Monday evening we meet for dinner again and drink a lot of good, homemade red vermouth in Oliveros, an old, family-run bar around the corner from her apartment. Over meatballs downstairs in a brick cellar we have our first serious conversation about ETA, but there’s nothing in Carmen’s unequivocal view of Basque terror to merit lengthy analysis.
‘They are all fascists,’ she tells me, and I suppress a smile. ‘The only way to deal with ETA is to arrest their leaders and to make sure that there is no place for them to hide. This is the view of the Spanish government and it also happens to be the view of my family.’
The vehemence of this last remark, given that her mother is Basque, surprises me a little, but I let it go. She is otherwise predictable company. She laughs at my jokes. She teaches me words and phrases in Spanish. We find out about each other’s families – Alex’s parents live in Edinburgh and have been happily married for over thirty years – and talk about music and films. I try to appear as smitten and sincere as possible and Carmen seems to be as enthusiastic about me as she ever was. Afterwards we return to her apartment and I suppose that I start to miss Sofia at this point, if only for her intemperate moods and greater skills as a lover. The friction of adultery with a beautiful woman is different from the necessity of sex with a plain, if willing, target.
‘What are you thinking about?’ she asks, coming back into the bedroom afterwards wearing just a pair of white cotton knickers. She picks the condom up off the floor, ties it quickly and skilfully into a knot and places it in the bin.
‘Nothing. Just how nice it is to be here. Just how relaxed I feel. I didn’t think I’d meet anyone in Spain so quickly. I can’t believe you’ve just dropped into my life.’
Her body is very thin and very pale. When she sits on the bed I can see the skeletal outline of her ribcage, her slightly fallen breasts, the nipples so tiny and almost shy. She lies beside me, on her front, and I stroke her back, thinking of Zulaika for some reason, wondering what Kitson did to shut him up.
‘Would you like to meet my friend Maria?’ she asks.
‘Of course, if you’d like to introduce us.’ It does not seem odd that we have grown so close so quickly. These are the first heady days of a new relationship and anything within the masquerade seems possible.
‘There’s a party on Friday night, in Chueca. A friend of hers is having it. She asked us to come along.’
‘Maria knows about me?’
‘Of course!’
Laughter now as Carmen turns over, meeting me with a wet kiss that soaks my neck. The back of her head smells oddly sour, like the skin under a watch-strap.
‘And what have you told her?’
I know exactly what she’s told her. So does Kitson, for that matter. So does Macduff. That Alex is ‘so sexy’ and ‘funny’ and ‘not like the men we always meet in Madrid’. Thankfully the pair of them have yet to discuss the intricacies of our sex life within earshot of the bug, but it can only be a matter of time. Eventually Carmen falls asleep beside me, but not before I have asked if I can surf the net on her computer. She readily agrees, booting up the laptop (Password: segovia) before coming back to bed. At about one o’clock I roll away from her and creep out of the room, running a search on the laptop for ‘Sellini’, ‘Buscon’, ‘Dieste’, ‘Church’, ‘Sofia’, ‘Kitson’, ‘Vicente’, even ‘Saul’ and ‘Ricken’. Nothing comes up, so I simply transfer files in bulk onto a 128MB removable memory stick. Let SIS sort wheat from chaff: there’s bound to be something in de Francisco’s correspondence that will give Kitson a solid lead. To cover my tracks – and to make it look as though I spent the hour using Internet Explorer – I visit a random selection of sites (Hotmail, BBC, itsyourturn. com), shutting down the machine at around 2 a.m. Carmen keeps a bottle of cheap cooking brandy in the kitchen and I take a decent slug of that before trying to get to sleep.
Yet Tuesday throws everything into confusion. After she has left for work at 8 a.m., I walk back through Sol and buy copies of ABC, El Mundo and El Pais from a newsstand at the eastern end of Arenal. All three carry front- page reports about a failed attempt on the life of an ETA commander outside his home in Bilbao. A 22-year-old Moroccan immigrant, Mohammed Chakor, has been charged by local police. Details are sketchy, but it seems that Tomas Orbe, a veteran of ETA campaigns in the 1980s and early 90s, was washing his car outside his house when he saw Chakor approach, brandishing a gun. In the ensuing struggle the Moroccan let off a single shot which missed Orbe by several feet, embedding itself in the car. Orbe, who was himself armed, returned fire, seriously injuring Chakor in the neck. At the same time, Eugenio Larzabal, the Gara journalist who reported seeing a Madrid number plate on the car that fled the shootings last week in southern France, asks in a page-one story whether it is ‘more than coincidence’ that the kidnap and murder of Mikel Arenaza, the disappearance of Juan Egileor, the killing of Txema Otamendi, the double shootings at the ETA bars and the attempt on the life of Tomas Orbe have all taken place within the last two months. I notice that he is careful, perhaps for legal reasons, not to mention any individuals or government departments by name, yet the thrust of the piece is unmistakable: the shadow of a third dirty war hovers over it like a jackal.
By 10 a.m. the Orbe incident is being discussed by ‘Basque experts’ on a Spanish radio programme. Television stations do not appear to be overly interested, although footage of the Bilbao house and interviews with local residents are shown on morning news programmes. I call Kitson and we arrange to meet at two at the branch of Starbucks on Plaza de los Cubos. He’s late, and looks tired, apologizing for the venue.
‘Naomi Klein would doubtless disapprove,’ he says, perching next to me on a stool, ‘but I have a soft spot for their double tall lattes.’
We are looking out over the concrete square, at Princesa on the far side, at McDonald’s and Burger King to our right. ‘Could be bloody Frankfurt,’ he mutters, before asking for my ‘take on Bilbao’.
‘Bad news. It’s obviously part of our wider problem. This guy was hired by Madrid and he messed up. The papers say he’s unconscious in hospital, but once he wakes up he’s going to start talking. Even if he doesn’t make it, the press now have a hard lead. They’ve never had evidence like this before and Gara is already hinting at what we know. Larzabal has written a piece this morning which effectively accuses the government of running a dirty war. It’s likely to be ignored in the short term, but ask yourself this. Why would a 22-year-old North African want to shoot an etarra unless he was paid to do it?’
‘Why indeed? You don’t think it’s linked to Letamendia and Rekalde?’
That’s impressive. Last weekend, two veteran members of ETA, Raul Letamendia and Jose Rekalde, caused
