‘What’s Mr Sellini done?’ Alfonso asks, already giving up Abel’s surname.
‘I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to divulge that information,’ I explain, hinting at something shady involving children on the internet. Alfonso looks suitably appalled, but I’m in a position to treble his weekly salary so he won’t be losing any sleep over it. We shake hands and I insist only that he keep our conversation private. Alfonso agrees and looks pleased as he leaves the bar. At Plaza de Colon, he crosses to the Barclays Bank building and disappears into the metro. I then call Bonilla from a phone booth around the corner, pass on Sellini’s name, and ask for an update on Rosalia.
‘It has been very difficult,’ he insists, adopting the evasive style that has become increasingly common in our conversations, ‘not easy to obtain answers, not simple at all.’ Having listened to his excuses for the best part of five minutes, I insist on a full progress report by Monday evening and arrange for a small team of four surveillance operatives to watch Rosalia over the weekend. Bonilla cuts me a deal – €1,600 for three days, with nobody in place, barring exceptional circumstances, between 2 a.m. and 6 a.m. After that I hail a cab, go for dinner in Malasana, and get to bed before midnight for the first time in ten days.
20. Dry Cleaning
The banging starts at half past five in the morning, very quietly at first, but gradually increasing in volume until I am almost shaken out of bed. The sound is initially like hammering, a spot of dawn DIY, but slowly I become convinced that somebody is deliberately dropping a large metal ball on the ceiling directly above my bed. At about ten to six the noise finally stops, only to be replaced within minutes by what sound like giant marbles being rolled en masse across a parquet floor. There is the sound of a young child laughing, then heavy footsteps and, finally, a crash.
My neighbours upstairs, a Danish couple from Copenhagen, gave birth to their first child around eight months ago. I see him in the lift every now and again, a sweet, blond-haired baby being taken for a walk in his pushchair by a pretty Venezuelan au pair. He has now reached an age where he can crawl, thumping around on his hands and knees, doubtless with a box full of Lego, while his parents clear up the mess behind him. Why don’t they take him into another room? Don’t they have soft toys in Copenhagen?
It’s pointless trying to go back to sleep. As though a mosquito were persistently dive-bombing my ear I wait, semi-conscious, for the next thump on the ceiling, the next floor-shattering bang of the ball. At half-six I get out of bed, make myself a cup of coffee and stand under the shower for ten minutes trying to work out the link between Rosalia and Sellini. Then I walk down to the newsagent on Plaza de Espana and buy all the British broadsheets, with The Economist thrown in for my conscience. Jaded clubbers are still drifting down Gran Via in the dawn light and it occurs to me that Saul is due back any day now. Having walked through Plaza de los Cubos, I take a window table at Cascaras, order coffee, tortilla and orange juice, and sit for two hours reading the papers from front page to back.
Sofia calls me at home at half past ten, just as I am beginning to make headway through a ten-day pile of foetid washing-up.
‘How was your visit to England?’ she asks.
In order to get away for the week of surveillance, I told Sofia that I had to go to London for a wedding. She has no idea that I haven’t been home for six years.
‘It was fine, thanks. Fine. Saw a lot of old friends. Ate some good food. Christ, London’s expensive.’
‘You sound like Julian,’ she says.
‘I sound like anybody who spends five minutes in England.’
Sofia laughs at this and asks what the bride was wearing and whether I danced with any pretty girls, but I grow tired of making things up and suggest we meet if Julian is out of town.
‘He’s in Cadiz,’ she says.
Cadiz? Where Saul has been staying. I experience that old familiar thump of paranoid dread, but try to dismiss it as mere coincidence. ‘Well, why don’t I take you shopping?’ I suggest. ‘We could go to the Vermeer exhibition at the Prado.’
‘You don’t want me just to come over?’
‘No. I want us to behave like a normal couple. Meet me at the main entrance to El Corte Ingles in Arguelles at midday.’
I have a hidden agenda, of course. Two or three times a week I follow a short counter-surveillance routine from the flat to El Corte Ingles via the post office off Calle de Quintana. The ten-minute route provides several opportunities to observe for a tail, while the department store itself is an ideal location in which to flush out a hostile team. In tradecraft terms, this process is called ‘dry cleaning’.
If I lived on a quieter street, one of my first actions would be to step out onto the balcony in order to check for operatives in ‘trigger’ positions; that is to say, anybody keeping an eye on my front door. But Princesa is far too busy to make an effective assessment of outside surveillance, so I set out down Ventura Rodriguez and make a right just beyond Cascaras. At the next block, on the corner of Martin de los Heros and Calle de Luisa Fernanda, there’s a branch of the Banco Popular with a broad glass facade set at a perfect angle with which to observe the pavements behind. Still, I have only about one and a half seconds to notice the teenage girl with her hair in pigtails walking twenty metres behind me, and a middle-aged man on the opposite side of the street holding a carrier bag and scratching his nose. The trick is to memorize faces in order to be able to recognize them if they reappear at a later date. Were I, for example, to see the woman who was talking on her mobile phone yesterday outside the tyre shop, that would conclusively prove that I have a surveillance problem.
The post office is also ideal, particularly for watchers who may not know the interior layout, and might therefore lack the nerve to wait outside. My PO box is on the first floor, up a narrow flight of stairs inside a small room that’s usually deserted. If an operative were careless enough to follow me, I could get a good look at his face simply by nodding to greet him. Downstairs, the post office itself is usually crammed with customers, providing a convenient choke point in which to flush out a tail. Again, the trick is to remember faces without making eye contact. You don’t want them to know that they’ve been spotted, and they certainly don’t want to be seen.
After the post office I double back onto Quintana and walk up the hill towards El Corte Ingles. There are two zebra crossings en route and I always pause to make a phone call at the second of them, dialling just as the pedestrian lights are turning green. This is a useful technique, and one facilitated by mobile phone technology, because it allows me to turn through a complete circle without drawing attention to myself. Furthermore, anyone following me on foot is obliged to pass and cross the street, or to walk on towards the next corner. Today I call Saul, who says he left Cadiz a few days ago and drove back via Ronda to Seville. He sounds jaded, perhaps depressed, and has a ticket on the AVE leaving for Madrid at four o’clock this afternoon.
‘Should be back by eight,’ he says wearily. ‘Looking forward to seeing you.’
Sofia, as ever, is twenty minutes late. It’s annoying to have to wait for her, standing around in plain sight of the entrance to Corte Ingles with nobody to speak to and nothing to pass the time. She is wearing sunglasses, not unlike Rosalia’s, and looks around nervously before greeting me with an abrupt kiss.
‘Let’s go inside,’ she says, anxious not to be spotted by one of her friends. ‘You look terrible, carino. Didn’t you sleep in London?’
‘I was on a camp bed,’ I tell her, a lie so instantaneous that I have no sense of its origin. ‘Kept waking up every two hours, couldn’t get back to sleep.’
‘Then you should have stayed in a hotel,’ she says, as if I have been both stupid and unreasonable, and not for the first time it occurs to me that we are entering into a discussion entirely without basis in fact.
‘Well, I thought about it,’ I tell her, ‘but my friend would have been offended. I hadn’t seen her in years.’
�
��You were staying with a girl?’
Now why did I say that?
‘Sure. Not a girlfriend. An old flatmate from university. She’s engaged. She has a boyfriend.’
‘I’m married,’ Sofia replies curtly, and it will now be at least ten minutes before the clouds of her jealousy subside.
We begin on the ground floor, ostensibly shopping for handbags and make-up. There are a few small reflective surfaces in the department but nothing to compare with the full-length mirrors upstairs in men’s and women’s fashions. I keep a constant look-out for faces and try to recall as many of them as I can before suggesting to Sofia that we take the switch-back escalators up to Level One. These are perhaps the best surveillance traps in the entire barrio. For a start, they are mirrored all the way up, allowing any number of opportunities to observe customers moving up or down on parallel stairs. Better still, they are situated in the centre of the building. It is therefore possible between floors to make an apparently wrong turn into a department, to spin around, briefly check the escalator for a tail, and then continue in the opposite direction. That’s exactly what happens on Level One, where Sofia even adds a note of unwitting authenticity by grabbing my arm and saying, ‘No, not that way,’ as I turn left, rather than right, into women’s fashions. She picks out several dresses and I buy two for her with the cash left over from Alfonso. At this point her mood visibly improves. Then we go up to Level Two where Sofia insists that I try on an array of Eurotrash jackets, most of which, she agrees, make me look like an Albanian pimp. Still, she’s determined to buy me something and it is with a sense of foreboding that we head towards Ralph Lauren. In Spain, the pijo look – Polo shirts, pressed chinos, tank tops – is considered the height of fashion among the more conservative classes, and Sofia finds no irony in recommending outfits that would have me beaten up in Notting Hill.
‘What are you trying to do, turn me into your husband?’ I ask as she passes yet another striped shirt through the changing-room curtains.
‘Just try it on,’ she says. ‘Don’t be so trendy, Alec.’
Eventually I settle for a jumper, endlessly checked in a full-length mirror providing almost total coverage of the men’s department. There’s no sign of the girl in pigtails, nor of the man with the carrier bags. Laden with shopping, we then leave via the exit on Alberto Aguilera, looping back towards the main entrance at Arguelles metro before proceeding east down Princesa. The walk offers conclusive proof that I don’t have a surveillance problem; in almost an hour of dry cleaning I haven’t noticed anything to arouse my suspicion.
Back at the apartment, Sofia makes lunch but shows no interest in going to bed. I am secretly glad of this, but irritated none the less by the sock to my vanity. Although she has never mentioned it directly, her sex life with Julian is clearly abysmal and I relish my role as the handsome young buck, Pyle to his Thomas Fowler. Instead we take a cab to the Prado, Sofia bombarding me with a series of uncharacteristically aggressive questions en route.
‘How come you didn’t answer your phone when you were away? For ten days you haven’t talked to me. Is it because you were sleeping with this girl?’
I respond as calmly as possible, sensing that she is picking a fight for the sake of it, yet the presence of the taxi driver is unnerving. I am naturally reticent and closed and loathe holding potentially embarrassing conversations in the presence of strangers. Perhaps on this occasion, however, it is a blessing in disguise; were we back at the flat I would certainly accuse Sofia of hypocrisy and encourage the conversation to escalate into a full-scale row. Who is she, after all, to accuse me of infidelity when she shares Julian’s bed, night after night?
‘Can we talk about this later?’
‘No. I would like to talk about it now.’
‘You’re worried about me going to bed with another woman? You think I’m seeing somebody else?’
‘I don’t care who you see,’ she says, unconvincingly. The cab slides across two empty lanes in bright sunshine. ‘I just care that you don’t lie to me.’
‘Well, that’s reassuring. Thank you. This is turning out to be a terrific afternoon, just what I had in mind.’
Perhaps we have arrived at adultery’s inevitable final reel: it can go no further than mild escapism. Sofia cannot respect me for what I have done to Julian, and I cannot respect her for betraying her husband. She wants nothing more from the relationship, and I have nothing left to give. It has all gone on for far too long. We have absorbed one another’s lies.
‘What is this about, Sofia? What is it that you want?’
A withering look. ‘ Que?’
‘If it’s not worth it, if you’re not having a good time, then why did you agree to meet me today? Just to have an argument?’
Silence. The driver swings the taxi around the fountain at Cibeles and it’s obvious he has one ear on our conversation. I switch to English.
‘If you want to end it, then end it. Don’t make me do it, don’t make me into the scapegoat.’
‘The what?’
‘The fall guy. El cabeza de turco. It’s an expression.’
‘I do not want this to end. Who said that it was ending?’
‘Then let’s not fight. Let’s go to Vermeer. Let’s enjoy the afternoon together.’
‘I’m just tired of all your stories, Alec,’ she says. ‘I don’t believe them. I don’t believe you went to England. I don’t know who you are.’
It is like being with Kate again, a hideous recollection of the last time we saw one another at her house. Stupidly I say, ‘I can be whatever you want me to be,’ and Sofia looks at me with utter contempt. ‘I don’t mean it like that. I mean this is supposed to be fun, otherwise why are we doing it?’
‘Fun?’ she says, and it appears as though she might laugh. ‘You think that’s all this is for me? Fun?’
‘Well, what more can I ask for? I am faithful to you. I went to London for a wedding. I didn’t sleep with Anne. You’re married. I don’t know what else to say.’
The cab stops at a set of traffic lights beside the Museo Thyssen, about 500 metres short of the Prado. We’ll be there in under a minute, but time might as well have stood still. Very quietly, in English, Sofia says, ‘I love you, Alec,’ the first time she has spoken these words. The mixture of dread and exhilaration they engender, the flattery and the panic, leaves me speechless. I take her hand gently in mine as she turns away and looks out of the window. I touch her neck, her hair, and wonder what to say.
‘How much is it?’ The driver pulls over to the side of the road. We’ll get out here.’
I hand him a fistful of change and we emerge in silence. Gallery tourists are taking up most of the pavement, with their money belts and their litre bottles of water. Sofia follows me, her face flushed red, eyes brimming with sadness. I want to hug her but cannot do so for fear of being seen.
‘Just forget it,’ she says. ‘Forget what I have said.’
‘How can I forget it? I don’t want to. You just surprised me, that’s all.’
‘I surprise myself.’
To reach the Prado we have to cross the road at a zebra crossing. Years and years ago, Kate and I took this exact route on a long romantic weekend in Madrid, holding hands and laughing. I spent an hour inside looking at exquisite portraits by Titian and Coello; she went for late Goya and Hieronymous Bosch and I thought at the time that this said something worrying about our relationship. Sofia walks about five feet ahead of me, passing a line of stalls selling trinkets and bullfight posters, and folds her arms across her body.
‘Look, why don’t we go back to the apartment?’ I suggest, quickening my pace to catch her. ‘Let’s just go back and talk.’
‘No. It’s OK.’ She sneezes. ‘I want to see the exhibition. I want to see Vermeer. We won’t get another chance.’ Recovering some of her earlier composure, she adds, ‘It’s best if we go in separately. If anybody sees us inside we can tell them we meet in the queue.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Why not?’
‘Not about that. About us. Are you sure you don’t want to go home? Are you sure you don’t want to go for a coffee or something?’
‘I am certain.’
So we have to wait in line for fifteen excruciating minutes. Sofia stands several places in front of me and only rarely catches my eye. At one point she is chatted up by an Italian man carrying a brown leather handbag. Inside, she goes to the bathroom and rents a headset at the information desk, almost certainly as a conscious means of avoiding me during the exhibition. The paintings are extraordinary, but the temporary rooms are crowded and smaller than is usual in the Prado and I feel claustrophobic.
Afterwards, outside in the main hall on the first floor, Sofia turns to me. ‘This exhibition is all about living with moderation.’
An Englishman in a pin-striped suit passes us, calling out, ‘Lead on, Macduff.’
‘That’s what your guide said?’
‘No. It’s what I feel.’ A brief pause. ‘I think Julian would like it.’
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