'So what are we going to watch, what are you going to show me?' I asked with a mixture of impatience and self-assurance. 'It's not a film, is it? It's hardly the right time for that.'
I still felt no fear, I was prevented from doing so by irritation and tiredness, it seemed unlikely to me that anything could wake me up. Besides, I'd seen quite enough unpleasant and painfully instructive things for one night, and not on a video but in palpable, breathable reality, right next to me, I could still feel in my body, albeit less keenly, the shock of that sword being brought down on the numbskull's neck, and in my head was the echo of the useless thoughts that had assailed me then: 'He's going to kill him, no, he can't, he won't, yes, he is, he's going to decapitate him right here, separate his head from his trunk, this man full of rage, and I can do nothing about it because the blade is going to come down and it's a two-edged sword, it's like thunder-less lightning that strikes in silence, and he's going to cut right through him.' I didn't believe there could be anything worse, and whatever Tupra showed me would, moreover, belong to the past, it would be something that had already happened, that was over and had been filmed, and in which I would not be expected to intervene. There would be nothing to be done about it; with every viewing, the same thing would be repeated identically. But I must have felt it, the dread, the apprehension, the cringing, the shrinking back in fear, from the moment when Tupra's voice had suddenly grown more mournful than usual and awoken in me a suggestion of motiveless, meaningless anguish, the way mournful music does, for no reason-yes just a few notes on a cello or violin or viola da gamba, or on a piano-as if he knew all there was to know about those retrospective disasters which could, nevertheless, be reproduced and made present again an infinite number of times, because they had been recorded or registered, the kind of disaster of which I had no knowledge or even the tiniest suspicion.
'What you're going to see is secret. Never talk about it or mention it, not even to me after tonight, because tomorrow I will never have shown it to you. These are recordings we keep just in case we need them one day'-'Just in case,' I thought, 'that, it seems, is our motto.'-'They contain shameful or embarrassing things, as well as crimes that have never been reported or pursued, committed by individuals of some consequence but against whom no steps have been taken or charges made because it wasn't or isn't worth it or because it's still not the moment or because little would be gained. It makes much more sense to hang on to them, to keep them, in case there's ever a use for them in the future, with some of them we could obtain a great deal in exchange. In exchange for them staying buried here, never seen by anyone, you understand, only us. With others we've already obtained a lot, made good use of them and, besides, their possible benefits are never exhausted, because we never destroy anything or hand it over, we just show them occasionally to the people who appear in them, to the interested parties, if they don't trust us or don't believe that such recordings exist and want to see them to make quite sure. Don't worry, they don't come here (very few people ever have), well, it's so easy now to make copies and you can even show them on your mobile phone or send them. So these videos are a real treasure: they can persuade, dissuade, bring in large sums of money, force some insalubrious candidate to stand down, they can seal lips, obtain concessions and agreements, foil maneuvers and conspiracies, put off or mitigate conflicts, provoke fires, save lives. You're not going to like the content, but don't scorn or condemn them. Bear in mind their value and the uses they can be put to. And the service they render, the good they sometimes do for our country'-He had used a similar expression the first time we met at Wheeler's buffet supper in Oxford, when I had asked him what he did and he had been evasive in his reply: 'My real talent has always been for negotiating, in different fields and circumstances. Even serving my country, one should if one can, don't you think, even if the service one does is indirect and done mainly to benefit oneself He had repeated the word 'country' which can be translated as 'patria' in my language, a word which, given our history and our past, has become a disagreeable and dangerous term that reveals a great deal, all of it negative, about those who use it; its imperfect English equivalent lacks that emotive, pompous quality. 'Our country,' he had said.
How odd. Tupra had again forgotten that his country and mine were not the same, that I wasn't an Englishman but a Spaniard, probably, like De la Garza, a useless Spaniard. That was the moment when I came closest to believing that I had gained his trust without his noticing, that is, without his having decided to give it to me: when, late that night, in his house that almost no one ever visited, before the as yet blank screen, when he was about to show me those confidential images, he lost sight of the fact that as long as I was working for him, I was serving him, for a salary, and not working for his country. Nor, of course, mine. As for him, it was impossible to guess what services, indirect or otherwise, he rendered to his country, or if he always acted mainly to benefit himself. Perhaps, in his mind, the two things were now indistinguishable. He added: 'Prepare yourself. We're going to start. And not a word to anyone, is that clear?' And he pressed Play.
What I saw thereafter should not be told, and I should do so only in short bursts. Partly because some scenes were shown in fast-forward mode, as Tupra had promised, and so fortunately I just caught glimpses of them, but always enough and more than I would have wanted; partly because for a few seconds-one, two, three, four; and five-I turned away or closed my eyes, and on a couple of occasions I held my hand like a visor at eyebrow height, with my fingers ready, so that I could choose to see or not see what I was seeing. But I saw or half-saw enough of each film or episode, because Reresby urged me to keep looking ('Don't turn away, resist the desire not to look, I'm not showing you this so that you can cover your eyes, don't hide,' he ordered me when, in one way or another, I tried to avoid the screen, 'and tell me now if what you witnessed earlier was so very terrible, tell me now that I went too far, tell me now that it was of any importance at all'; and by 'earlier' he was referring to what had happened or to what he had made happen in the handicapped toilet, in my presence and in the face of my impotence, my passivity and fear, my cowardice pure and simple). And partly, last of all, because I dare not describe it or I'm not capable of doing so, not fully.
As I looked and half-looked and saw, a poison was entering me, and when I use that word 'poison,' I'm not doing so lightly or purely metaphorically, but because something entered my consciousness that had not been there before and provoked in me an immediate feeling of creeping sickness, of something alien to my body and to my sight and to my mind, like an inoculation, and that last term is spot on etymologically, for it contains at its root the Latin 'oculus,' from which it comes, and it was through my eyes that this new and unexpected illness entered, through my eyes which were absorbing images and registering them and retaining them, and which could no longer erase them as one might erase a bloodstain on the floor, still less not have seen them. (Perhaps only when my eyes had recovered could I begin to doubt those images: when the time that levels and dissolves and mingles had passed.) And thus they entered, as if through a slow needle, things that were quite external to me and of which I was entirely ignorant, things I had never foreseen or conceived or even dreamed of, things so beyond my experience that it was of no use to me having read about similar cases in the press, for there they always seem remote and exaggerated, or in novels, or indeed in films, which we never quite believe because, deep down, we know it's all fake, however much we care about the characters or identify with them. Nevertheless, the first scenes Tupra showed me on the screen contained, relatively speaking, a deceptively comic element, which is why I could still make jokes and ask him about it (had he begun with what followed, I would probably have been struck dumb from the start): 'What's this? Porn?'
And this was tantamount to giving Reresby permission to enlighten me as much as he wanted-never very much, always concisely-about that initial recording and about others or most of them, although about two or three he kept a stra
nge and total-or perhaps significant-silence, as if there were no need to say anything.
'That was neither the intention nor the result,' he replied very coldly, my comment had clearly not amused him. 'That woman is a very influential figure in the Conservative Party, one of the old school, and currently has high hopes of being promoted, as a reassuring counterweight for the more hard-line Tory voters; and since she usually gives fiery speeches about the decline in society's morals and habits, and about unbridled sex and all that, it's interesting to see what she gets up to in this video, and one day it might be useful to show it to her. Her husband, of course, is not present.'
There were no preliminaries, by which I mean that it had probably been cut to show only the basics, or the nitty-gritty, which I rather regretted because I would have liked to know where they had come from, or what they had proposed to her, or how they had reached that situation, the two guys who-the scene began, as I say, in medias res-were already enjoying a sex sandwich, the three of them writhing about on a rather faded green carpet, or perhaps it was the film quality, which was only fair, but clear enough for me to recognize the woman, that is, I remembered having seen her before on television, in Parliament or on the news. I even remembered her rather gruff voice, a voice like a hairdryer, she was one of those people who, even if they try, cannot or don't know how to speak softly or even to pause for a moment, which must be a torment for her nearest and dearest. Fortunately, there was no sound, if there had been, judging by the look of double ecstasy on her face at being impaled simultaneously by the two men, one from in front, one from behind-or intermittently, they were not very well synchronised or not always a very good fit, they came apart-her howls would have sounded to us like a gale or else a handsaw. As far as one could tell from their scant clothing, the two men might have been civil servants and neither was very young or very svelte, and one of them-with only his fly open, a sign of laziness rather than urgency-was wearing a pair of very bracing braces over his bare torso, which gave him an incongrous air, as if he were an impossible blend of office worker and butcher. As for the woman, she was about forty years old and, in turn, had not bothered to remove her skirt, which was transformed now into a crumpled belt, nor was she particularly attractive despite her bare and ample bosom, clearly unaugmented by surgery. They could have been in a hotel room or in an office, the narrow field of vision did little to clarify this, the camera being focused only on the fornicators, the two jerks in question were both fully paid-up ġe-bryd-guma, indeed, they were being so there and then. It really did look like a low-budget or amateur porn movie made with understudies. Just who had filmed the scene and how was, needless to say, a mystery, but nowadays anyone would be able to do it, by using their mobile phone or even from a distance, without being present at all, and so no one is safe from being caught on camera in the most intimate or the most outrageous situations.
After about a minute or less, Tupra pressed the fast-forward button, for which I was grateful, there was no point in watching all that effort in order to reach an ending that would be of no surprise to anyone. I got as far as glimpsing a look on the Conservative lady's face at the conclusion of her double-decker experience, a look of pleased surprise, as if she were saying: 'How amazing. How could I have done such a thing? I'll have to try it again just to see if it really was as good as I think it was.' Perhaps it was her first act of daring duplicity. My boss returned the tape to its normal speed then, and we moved on at once to the second episode, with sound this time, which showed two famous actors and a third individual, unknown to me, spouting nonsense and falling about laughing while snorting cocaine in a living room, on a sofa, with the large, not to say enormous lines of cocaine set out on the coffee table, which they were gradually snuffling up like someone taking sips from a glass.
'I don't know who he is,' I said, pointing to the man on the right and making it clear to Tupra that I had recognized the two juvenile leads.
'He's a member of the royal family. A long way down the line of succession, very secondary. It would have been suited us perfectly if it had been someone more prominent, someone closer to the throne.' And he again pressed the fast-forward button, it was very dull footage, nothing but moronic laughter and that banquet of cocaine.
His remark momentarily gave me food for thought, I wondered why it would have suited them perfectly (I took 'us' to mean MI6, or the Secret Services as a whole, rather than our group) for anyone to take drugs, commit adultery, engage in corruption or break the law. They should have been glad that the Queen's closest relatives were not, like that trio, up to their eyeballs in cocaine.
'I don't understand,' I said, bewildered. 'Why would that have suited you?' And I made a point of not including myself.
Tupra froze the image in order to answer me.
'That's a very naive question, Jack, you disappoint me sometimes. Anything like that suits us, with anyone of any importance, weight, decision-making ability, fame or influence. The more blots and the higher up the person, the better it suits us. Just as it suits everyone everywhere with those close to them. It's in your interests that your neighbor should be in your debt or that you should have caught him out in some way and be in a position to hurt him by reporting him or doing him the favor of keeping quiet about it. If people didn't infringe the law or try to get round the rules or if they never made mistakes or committed base acts, we would never get anything, it would be very hard for us to have any bargaining power and almost impossible to bend their wills or oblige them to. We'd have to resort to force and physical threats, and we tend not to use that much any more, we've been trying to give it up for some time now, because you never know if you'll emerge from that kind of thing unscathed or if they'll end up taking you to court and ruining you. Truly powerful people can do that, they can make your life very difficult and have you dismissed, they can pull strings and make you the scapegoat. We still use force on insignificant people like your friend Garza. There's no more effective method, I can assure you. With people who won't utter so much as a murmur of complaint. But with other people, it's always a risk. You can't influence them with money either, because they have so much. On the other hand, almost all are capable of weighing things up and making a judgment, of listening to reason, of seeing what's in their best interests. Everyone has something to hide, as you know; I've never known anyone who wasn't prepared to give in, either a little or a lot, in order to keep something quiet, so that it didn't get around or, at least, didn't reach the ears of one particular person. How could it possibly not suit us that people should be weak or base or greedy or cowardly, that they should fall into temptation and drop the occasional very large gaffe, or even be party to or commit misdemeanors? That's the basis of our work, the very substance. More than that, it's the bedrock of the State. The State needs treachery, venality, deceit, crime, illegal acts, conspiracy, dirty tricks (on the other hand, it needs very few acts of heroism, or only now and then, to provide a contrast). If those things didn't exist, or not enough, the State would have to invent them. It already does. Why do you think new offenses are constantly being created? What wasn't an offense becomes one, so that no one is ever entirely clean. Why do you think we intervene in and regulate everything, even where it's unnecessary or where it doesn't concern us? We need laws to be violated and broken. What would be the point of having laws if everyone obeyed them? We'd never get anywhere. We couldn't exist. The State needs infractions, even children know that, although they don't know that they know. They're the first to commit them. We're brought up to join in the game and to collaborate right from the start, and we keep playing the game until the very last, even when we're dead. The debt is never settled.'
I kept occasionally turning my head a little to look at him out of the corner of my eye, but Tupra, who was behind me in relation to my position on the ottoman, was mainly addressing my back. His voice sounded very close and very gentle, almost a whisper, he had no reason to speak more loudly, there was nothing but silence all around. That la
st 'us' ('where it doesn't concern us') had been even more comprehensive than the previous one, he felt himself to be part of the State, its representative, possibly its guardian, possibly a servant of the nation, despite his tendency to consider his own benefit before all else. I imagined that he, too, would be capable of treachery, even if only to keep the country's supplies topped up, to satisfy its needs.
'The State needs treachery?' I asked, somewhat puzzled (although only slightly, for I was beginning to see what he meant).
'Of course, Jack. Especially in time of siege or invasion or war. That is what we most commemorate, what most unites people, what nations most remember over the centuries. Where would we be without it?'
It occurred to me that when I betrayed him with my interpretation of Incompara, I had perhaps been inadvertently useful to him in his role as man of the State, but this in no way helped me to feel that my debt had been paid off. This was doubtless partly why I put up with him-I could always leave-why I showed him such consideration, such leniency, or so I believed, because of that enduring sense of unease and because of that deliberate mistake of mine, I was still not sure if he had realized just how deliberate it had been. It was also because we liked each other, much to my regret sometimes and perhaps to his as well, young Pérez Nuix was far too optimistic in that regard. That night Tupra had put my liking for him to the test, and was still doing so with this film-show.
He stopped talking and immediately pressed the play button again. The previous scene ended abruptly and a new one appeared on the screen, and that was when the poison began to enter me. Two men in T-shirts and camouflage trousers and short boots, soldiers presumably, were standing over a third man, who was wearing a hood and sitting on a stool, his hands and feet shackled. There was sound this time, but all I could hear was a desperate panting coming from the prisoner, as if he had just run five hundred yards or were having a panic or anxiety attack. It was distressing, that loud, fast, somehow unquenchable breathing, it was quite possible that it was brought on by fear, being tied up and unable to see must make you dread every next second, and the seconds pass relentlessly. The room was lit from above, although the source of that light was offscreen, probably a lamp with a shade hanging from the ceiling, which revealed all three men or, rather, lit the two in camouflage trousers only intermittently because they kept prowling round the hooded man and, as they did so, were plunged every now and then into shadow. Beyond the circle of light, at the back, there were two or three other people, sitting in a row against the wall, arms folded, but in the darkness I couldn't make out their faces and only barely their shapes. The soldiers stopped their pacing and roughly hauled the prisoner to his feet and made him stand on the stool, helping him up. I saw them grab a rope, and although the hooded man's head was out of the frame now-the shot was fixed, the camera static-everything led me to believe that they had put the rope around his neck and that the rope was tied to a beam or some other high, horizontal bar, because one of the T-shirted men suddenly kicked away the stool and the victim was left dangling, unable to touch the floor, even though it was very near; this was a hanging.
Your Face Tomorrow 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell Page 14