The Spanish Game am-3 Read online

  The question clearly strikes her as absurd.

  ‘Of course not. I felt wonderful.’

  ‘Vale.’

  Outside, in the corridor, a man shouts, ‘ Alejandro! Ven!’ as Sofia begins to undress. Slipping out of her shoes and coming towards me on bare feet, letting the jumper fall to the floor and nothing beneath it but the cool dark paradise of her skin. She starts to unbutton my shirt.

  ‘So maybe you booked the room under a false name. And maybe my uncle is staying next door. And maybe somebody will see me when I go home across the lobby at 3 a.m. tonight. And maybe I don’t care.’ She unclips her hair, letting it fall free, whispering, ‘Relax, Alec. Tranquilo. Nobody in the whole world cares about us. Nobody cares about us at all.’

  3. Taxi Driver

  Saul’s plane touches down at 5.55 p.m. the following Friday. He calls from the pre-customs area using a local mobile phone: there’s no international prefix on the read-out, just a nine-digit number beginning with 625.

  ‘Hi, mate. It’s me.’

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘The plane was late.’

  ‘It’s normal.’

  The line is clear, no echo, although I can hear the thrum of baggage carousels revolving in the background.

  ‘Our suitcases are coming out now,’ he says. ‘Shouldn’t be long. Is it easy getting a cab?’

  ‘Sure. Just say “Calle Princesa”, like “Ki-yay”, then “Numero dee-ethy-sais”. That means sixteen.’

  ‘I know what it means. I did Spanish O level.’

  ‘You got a D.’

  ‘How much does it cost to get to your flat?’

  ‘Shouldn’t be more than thirty euros. If it is, I’ll come down to the street and tell the driver to go fuck himself. Just act like you live here and he won’t rip you off.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘Hey, Saul?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘How come you’ve got a Spanish mobile? What happened to your normal one?’

  It is the extent of my paranoia that I have spent three days wondering if he has been sent here by MI5; if John Lithiby and Michael Hawkes, the controllers of my former life, have equipped him with bugs and a destructive agenda. Can I sense him hesitating over his reply?

  ‘Trust you to notice that. Philip fucking Marlowe. Look, a mate of mine used to live in Barcelona. He had an old Spanish SIM that he no longer used. It has sixty euros of credit on it and I bought it off him for ten. So chill your boots. I’ll be there in about an hour.’

  An inauspicious start. The line goes dead and I stand in the middle of my apartment, breathing too quickly, ripped out by nerves. Relax, Alec. Tranquilo. Saul hasn’t been sent here by Five. Your friend is on the brink of getting divorced. He needed to get out of London and he needed somebody to talk to. He has been betrayed by the woman he loves. He stands to lose his house and half of everything he owns. In times of crisis we turn to our oldest friends and, in spite of everything that has happened, Saul has turned to you. That tells you something. That tells you that this is your chance to pay him back for everything that he has ever done for you.

  Ten minutes later Sofia calls and whispers sweet nothings down the phone and says how much she enjoyed our night at the hotel, but I can’t concentrate on the conversation and make an excuse to cut it short. I have never had a guest in this apartment and I check Saul’s room one last time: there’s soap in the spare bathroom, a clean towel on the rail, bottled water if he needs it, magazines beside the bed. Saul likes to read comics and crime fiction, thrillers by Elmore Leonard and graphic novels from Japan, but all I have are spook biographies – Philby, Tomlinson – and a Time Out guide to Madrid. Still, he might like those, and I arrange them in a tidy pile on the floor.

  A drink now. Vodka with tonic to the brim of the glass. It’s gone inside three minutes so I pour another which is mostly ice by half past seven. How do I do this? How do I greet a friend whose life I placed in danger? MI5 used Saul to get to Katharine and Fortner. The four of us went to the movies together. Saul cooked dinner for them at his flat. At an oil-industry function in Piccadilly he unwittingly facilitated our initial introduction. And all without the slightest idea of what he was doing; just a decent, ordinary guy involved in something catastrophic, an eventually botched operation that cost people their careers, their lives. How do I arrange my face to greet him, given that he is aware of that?

  4. The Keeper of the Secrets

  At first it’s all nervous silences and small talk. There’s no big reunion speech, no hug or handshake. I fetch him from the taxi and we step into the narrow, cramped lift in my building and Saul says, ‘So this is where you live?’ and I reply, ‘Yeah,’ and then we don’t say anything for three floors. Once inside, there’s twenty minutes of ‘Nice place, man,’ and ‘Can I get you a cup of tea?’ and ‘It’s really good of you to put me up, Alec,’ and then he sits there awkwardly on the sofa like a potential buyer who has come round to view the flat. I want to rip out all the decorum and the anxiety and say how sorry I am, face to face, for the pain that I have caused him, but we must first endure the initiation rite of British politesse.

  ‘You’ve got a lot of DVDs.’

  ‘Yeah. Spanish TV sucks and I don’t have satellite.’

  I am astonished by the weight he has put on, puffy fat slung round his neck and stomach. He looks worn out, barely the man I remember. At twenty-five, Saul Ricken was lean and lively, the friend everyone wanted to have. He had money in the bank, enough for him to write and to travel, and a medley of gorgeous, jealousy-inducing girlfriends. Everything seemed possible in his future. And then what happened? His adulterous French wife? His best friend? Did Alec Milius happen to him? The man facing me is a burnt-out case, an early mid-life crisis of exhaustion and excess fat. And it shames me that there is still a mean, competitive part of my nature that is glad about this; Saul is deeply troubled, and I am not the only one of us in decline.

  ‘Anybody else been to stay?’ he asks.

  ‘Not here,’ I tell him. ‘Mum came to a different place. A flat I was renting in Chamberi. About three years ago.’

  ‘Does she know about everything?’

  This is the first moment of frankness between us, an acknowledgement of our black secret. Saul looks at the floor as he asks the question.

  ‘She knows nothing,’ I tell him.

  ‘Right.’

  Maybe I should give him something else here, try to be a little more forthcoming.

  ‘It’s just that I didn’t have the guts, you know? I didn’t want to burst her bubble. She still thinks her son is a success story, a demographic miracle earning eighty grand a year. I’m not even sure she’d understand.’

  Saul is nodding slowly. ‘No,’ he says. ‘It’s like having the drugs conversation with your parents. You think they’ll empathize when you tell them that you’ve taken E. You think they’ll be fascinated to learn that lines of charlie are regularly hoovered up in the bathrooms of every designer restaurant in London. You think that bringing up the subject of smoking hash at university is in some way going to bring you closer together. But the truth is they’ll never get it; in a fundamental way you always remain a child in your parents’ eyes. You tell your mum that you worked for MI5 and MI6 and that Kate and Will were murdered as a direct result of that, she’s not going to take it all that well.’

  To hear him talk of Kate’s death like this is buckling. I had thought for some reason that Saul would let me off the hook. But that is not his style. He is direct and unambiguous and if you’re guilty of something he will call you on it. The awful shiver of guilt, the fever, washes through me as we sit facing one another across the room. Saul is looking at me with a terrible, isolating indifference; I cannot tell if he is upset or merely laying down the facts. There was certainly no suggestion of anger in the way that he broached the subject; perhaps he just wants to let me know that he has not forgotten.

  ‘You’re right,’ I manage to tell him. ‘Of course you’re ri
ght.’

  He stands now, opens the window and steps out onto the narrow balcony which overlooks Princesa. Peering down at the street below, at the heavy traffic passing behind a line of mottled plane trees, he shouts out, ‘Noisy here,’ and frowns. What is he thinking? The characteristics of his face have been altered so much by age that I cannot even read his mood.

  ‘Why don’t you come inside, have a drink or something?’ I suggest. ‘Maybe you’d like a bath.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘There’s not much hot water. Spaniards prefer showers. But then we could go out for dinner. I could show you round.’

  ‘Fine.’

  Another silence. Does he want an argument? Does he want to have it out now?

  ‘Did you have any trouble with customs?’ I ask.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Leaving England. Did they search your bag?’

  If John Lithiby had wanted to find out if Saul was bringing anything to me, he would have alerted Customs and Excise at Luton and instructed them to search his luggage.

  ‘Of course not. Why would they do that?’

  He closes the balcony doors, muffling the sound of traffic, and begins pacing towards the kitchen. I follow him and try to seem relaxed, cloaking my paranoia in an easy, upbeat voice.

  ‘It’s just a possibility. If the cops want to check somebody’s stuff without raising suspicion, they hold everybody up and go through all the bags, maybe put a plain clothes officer in the queue to plant a rumour about a drugs bust or a bomb threat…’

  ‘What the fuck are you talking about? I went to HMV and Costa Coffee. Had an overpriced latte and nearly missed my flight.’

  ‘Right.’

  More silence. Saul has found his way into my bedroom and is peering at the framed photographs on the wall. There’s one of Mum and Dad together in 1982, and a shot of Saul as a teenager with spiked hair. He stares at this for a long time, but doesn’t say anything about it. He probably thinks I hung it there this morning just to make him feel good.

  ‘I’ll tell you one thing about Luton airport,’ he says eventually. ‘Ann Summers. Don’t you love that? Just the thought process behind putting a lingerie shop in the pre-flight area. Couples going on holiday, probably haven’t had sex since 1996, then one of them spots the black suspender belt in the window. The shop was packed. Every father-of-three handing over wads of cash for a soft lace teddy and a pair of jelly handcuffs. It’s like announcing that you’re planning to have sex on the Costa del Sol. You might as well use the PA system.’

  Taking advantage of his lighter mood, I fetch Saul a bottle of Mahou from the fridge and begin to think that everything is going to be OK. We make a plan to walk up to Bilbao metro to play chess at Cafe Comercial and he takes a shower after unpacking his bag. I notice that he has brought a laptop with him but assume that this is because of work. While waiting I wash up some mugs in the kitchen and then send a text to Sofia’s work mobile.

  Have friend staying from England. Will call you after the weekend. Agree about the hotel…

  A minute later she responds:

  A friend? I did not think alec milius had friends… xxxx

  I don’t bother replying. At 8.30 Saul emerges into the sitting room wearing a long coat and a pair of dark, slip-on Campers.

  ‘We’re off?’ he asks.

  ‘We’re off.’

  5. Ruy Lopez

  Cafe Comercial is located at the southern end of Glorieta de Bilbao, a junction of several main streets – Carranza, Fuencarral, Luchana – that converge on a roundabout dominated by a floodlit fountain. If you read the guidebooks, the cafe has been a favoured haunt of poets, revolutionaries, students and assorted dissidents for almost a hundred years, although on an average evening in 2003 it also boasts its fair share of tourists, civil servants and mobile-clutching businessmen. Saul walks ahead of me through the heavy revolving doors and glances to his right at a crowded bar where bag-eyed madrilenos are tucking into coffee and plates of microwave-heated tortilla. I indicate to him to keep walking into the main body of the cafe, where Comercial’s famously grumpy, white-jacketed waiters are bustling back and forth among the tables. For the first time he seems impressed by his surroundings, nodding approvingly at the high marbled columns and the smoked-glass mirrors, and it occurs to me that this is a foreign visitor’s perfect idea of cultivated European living: cafe society in all its glory.

  The upper storey of the Comercial is used as a club on Tuesday and Thursday evenings by an eclectic array of chess-loving locals. Men, ranging in ages from perhaps twenty-five to seventy, gather in an L-shaped room above the cafe, cluttered with tables and green leather banquettes. Very occasionally a woman will look in on the action, although in four years of coming here twice a week I have never noticed one taking part in a game. This might be sexism – God knows, still a familiar feature of twenty-first-century Spain – but I prefer to think of it simply as a question of choice: while men battle it out at chess, the nearby tables will be occupied by groups of chattering middle-aged women, happier with the calmer arts of cards or dominoes.

  Coming here on such a regular basis has been a risk, but chess at Comercial is a luxury that I will not deny myself; it is three hours of old-world charm and decency, uninterrupted by regret or solitude. I know most of the men here by name, and not an evening goes by when they do not seem pleased to see me, to welcome me into their lives and friendships, the game merely an instrument in the more vital ritual of camaraderie. Still, back in 1999, I introduced myself to the secretary using a false name, so it’s necessary for me to stop Saul halfway up the stairs and explain why he cannot call me Alec.

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘All of the guys here know me as Patrick.’

  ‘Patrick.’

  ‘Just to be on the safe side.’

  Saul shakes his head with bewildered, slow-motion amusement, turns, and climbs the remaining few steps. You can already hear the snap and rattle of dominoes, the rapid punch of clocks. Through the doorway opposite the landing I spot Ramon and a couple of the other, younger players who show up from time to time at the club. As if sensing me, Ramon looks up, raises his hand and smiles through a faint mist of cigarette smoke. I fetch a board, a clock and some pieces and we settle down at the back of the room, some way off from the main action. If Saul wants to talk about his marriage, or if I feel that the time is right to discuss what happened to Kate, I don’t want any of the players listening in on our conversation. One or two of them speak better English than they let on, and gossip is an industry I can ill afford.

  ‘You come here a lot?’ he asks, lighting yet another Camel Light.

  ‘Twice a week.’

  ‘Isn’t that a bad idea?’

  ‘I don’t follow.’

  ‘From the point of view of the spooks.’ Saul exhales and smoke explodes off the surface of the board. ‘I mean, aren’t they on the look-out for that sort of thing? Your pattern? Won’t they find you if you keep coming here?’

  ‘It’s a risk,’ I tell him, but the question has shaken me. How does Saul know a tradecraft term like ‘pattern’? Why didn’t he say ‘routine’ or ‘habit’?

  ‘But you keep a look-out for new faces?’ he says. ‘Try to keep a low profile?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘And it’s the same thing in your normal life? You never trust anybody? You think death is lurking just round the corner?’

  ‘Well, that’s putting it a bit melodramatically, but, yes, I watch my back.’

  He finishes arranging the white pieces and my hand shakes slightly as I set about black. Again the nonsensical idea arises that my friend has been turned, that the breakdown of his marriage to Heloise is just a fiction designed to win my sympathy, and that Saul has come here at the behest of Lithiby or Fortner to exercise a terrible revenge.

  ‘What about girlfriends?’ he asks.

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘Well, do you have one?’

  ‘
I do OK.’

  ‘But how do you meet someone if you don’t trust her? What happens if a beautiful girl approaches you in a club and suggests the two of you go home together? Do you think about Katharine? Do you have to turn the woman down on the off-chance she might be working for the CIA?’

  Saul’s tone here is just this side of sarcastic. I set the clock to a ten-minute game and nod at him to start.

  ‘There’s a basic rule,’ I reply, ‘which affects everyone I come into contact with. If a stranger walks up to me unprompted, no matter what the circumstances, I assume they’re a threat and keep them at arm’s length. But if by a normal process of introduction or flirtation or whatever I happen to get talking to somebody that I like, well then that’s OK. We might become friends.’

  Saul plays pawn to e4 and hits the clock. I play e5 and we’re quickly into a Spanish Game.

  ‘So do you have many friends out here?’

  ‘More than I had in London.’

  ‘Who, for instance?’

  Is this for Lithiby? Is this what Saul has been sent to find out?

  ‘Why are you asking so many questions?’

  ‘Jesus!’ He looks at me with sudden despair, leaning back against his seat. ‘I’m just trying to find out how you are. You’re my oldest friend. You don’t have to tell me anything if you don’t want to. You don’t have to trust me.’

  There’s genuine pain, even disgust in this single word. Trust. What am I doing? How could I possibly suspect that Saul has been sent here to damage me?

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I tell him, ‘I’m sorry. Look, I’m just not used to conversations like this. I’m not used to people getting close. I’ve built up so many walls, you know?’

  ‘Sure.’ He takes my knight on c6 and offers a sympathetic smile.

  ‘The truth is I do have friends. A girlfriend even. She’s in her early thirties. Spanish. Very smart, very sexy.’ It wouldn’t, given the circumstances, be politic to tell Saul that Sofia is married. ‘But that’s enough for me. I’ve never needed much more.’