Twist Page 10
As if he were a fox, his hearing sharpened with the passing of time. He thought he heard the faraway sound of water sliding down pipes, something like the sounds refrigerators make in the middle of the night. But the place he was in wasn’t a house. However, the sounds that made him think of irregular liquid releases didn’t stop at night, and he started to wonder if maybe, rather than discharges, rather than something liquid, those sounds were human voices. Human voices traversing the pipes. They didn’t speak of serious things: they were lively voices, in happy conversation, people chitchatting. They weren’t his keepers’ voices, it’s unlikely that they were, and there was no way of understanding what they were saying. It sounded as if someone, somewhere, perhaps in the middle of a silent forest, had left a radio on. His senses continued to sharpen, and he started to distinguish a word here and there, although admittedly this may have been a trick his imagination played on him. The voices carried a lot of rhythm and enthusiasm, it must surely have been the retransmission of a soccer game. Yes, he had no doubt about it. Those sounds in the distance were soccer sounds. Then, he started distinguishing the names of players: Sarabia, Gajate, López de Ufarte…A derby? But that soccer game was endless. That retransmission was much longer than the regulatory ninety minutes. Besides, and most surprisingly, even though the commentators spoke so effusively, they never called a goal. The game was never-ending and the result a perpetual no-score draw.
It was enough to go crazy. “Those voices down the pipes, that radio, they’re only in my imagination,” he told himself. He decided not to pay any further attention to those sounds.
Then the ants started to appear. Ants in every corner, biting into the wettest regions of his body.
One of his keepers placed a melon slice in a corner of the room, to attract them. It worked at the beginning, although it was quite nasty to see all those ants working diligently, covering the entire white surface of the melon’s skin. But even that wasn’t enough, soon the unwelcome guests started crawling up his ankles.
“These ants…can’t you do anything about them?” he asked his keeper. “At this rate, they’re going to eat me alive.”
He said they’d try, and that he was sorry. Not about dragging him into that hole, but about the fact that there were ants in the zulo.
So he started killing them himself: the keeper helped him too. Afterward they swept them with a broom, but they started coming through the holes in the walls again, through the cracks, through everything.
He read the papers every morning, although the pages with news of his kidnapping were cut out. As the weeks passed, however, the newspapers appeared practically whole, untouched by scissors: everything has a sell-by date. They didn’t mention the kidnapping anymore. They’d forgotten.
He woke up with a fever one day. He didn’t think it was very high, but he was incapable of quantifying it. He couldn’t finish his exercise routine. It was one of those slightly sweet fevers, the kind that overcomes you after sitting in full sun for too long a time. He found it nice, even. It was a change, and he’d had very few changes since arriving. It was a way of remembering, for a moment, the feel of sunshine, which he missed so much. The fever reminded him of his honeymoon in the Dominican Republic.
The mediator, Agirre Sesma, goes over the calculations that, from train to train, he’s already made a thousand times in his mind. The kidnapping victim has been kept from his home for forty-seven days, his wife hasn’t slept at all for the same amount of nights, worried sick about her husband’s health. The kidnapping victim’s wife says that health is very valuable, and that life is valuable too – life is especially valuable – and she appears willing to pay whatever they ask. That’s what she told Murillo, the family attorney; the mediation chain is long because even though there’s always a middle, it isn’t always the same person who is “in the middle” of one or the other party. This is the key to this undertaking – it’d be too much to call it an art: the responsibility and hard work are dissolved bit by bit, from hand to hand. There is something noble about the endeavor, of course: mediators do their work voluntarily, with the altruistic intention of mitigating distress, or at least avoiding its spread over time.
As he spoke to the family attorney, the children sat around the table without saying a word. Apparently, they weren’t in complete agreement with their mother, who’d seen her husband for the last time forty-seven days ago. What they had in mind, of course, was the fact that a large chunk of money was going to be deducted from their inheritance, shrinking a part of their future wealth – they could keep the meanness from their mouths, but it was firmly settled in their eyes, in an almost obscene way, or at least so Murillo said to the mediator: “They deserve having it all taken from them, every last cent, they’re living off their father.” It didn’t sound like Murillo held his client’s children in great esteem, because at the highest peak of his outburst he came to suggest, in front of the mediator, that the businessman’s money would be better spent on bomb-making materials, that that was a better fate for it than his children’s pilfering. “C’mon now, don’t say that,” Agirre Sesma said. And Murillo: “Give them a couple of months, they’ll melt the steel and turn it into something else.” The family attorney and the mediator understood each other well. The truth was, po-tah-to potato, the mediator was an attorney too, and Murillo had acted as a mediator on other cases, although he had a very different point of view about doing the work for free. “If I don’t get paid, I’m collaborating with a terrorist group. If I get paid” – he always said – “I’m working. You should get paid too, Sesma.”
So, he’s got carte blanche. They are willing to pay the seven hundred million pesetas they are asking for, no counteroffer; that’s what the family attorney told the mediator. To put special emphasis on the installments. He could take half the payment along, in a suitcase, and if he could manage to persuade them to receive the other half in three installments, there’d be no problem. And that if it was two instead of three installments, or just the one, they’d still manage, but that it would be easier for them if they could split it in three.
That is why the mediator, having left Montparnasse Station in Paris, on his way to the Tenth Arrondissement, dying to get to Brussels as soon as possible, makes calculations and ponders the rash promise of the previous day:
“I’ll do everything I can.”
It isn’t the most difficult negotiation he’s had to deal with, not by a stretch, or at least that’s what he foresees. He’s more worried about other things: on the one hand, the suspicion that he might be followed by the secret services; on the other, the responsibility of the money he’s carrying in that suitcase.
Near Gare du Nord, he walks into the hotel he has reserved for three nights. He collects his key, goes up to the room, showers, takes the suitcase and goes to the underground garage. Just like they had promised, the car that’s going to take him to Brussels awaits.
“Are you Agirre Sesma?” asks a red-haired man with a face full of freckles.
He nods, and the man sitting in the car alone opens the passenger’s door from the inside.
The driver only addresses him again when he realizes that the mediator is nervously watching the road signs:
“The meeting won’t take place in Brussels, but in Strasbourg. For security reasons. We’ve changed it at the last minute,” he says in Basque. And as for the Redhead, who’s no spring chicken precisely, the mediator Agirre Sesma wonders whether he’s just a chauffeur or if he’s something more. It’s quite an irritating matter that concerns all clandestine activists: With military guys, at least, one look at their stripes and you know their rank…but, with these guys? He addresses him respectfully, just in case. The mediator offers a cigarette to the driver; he doesn’t accept, says he smokes dark tobacco but doesn’t like smoking while he’s driving. What a weird guy, decides Agirre Sesma the mediator, looking down on his companion’s bohemian look and inclinations.
By the time they enter the garage of a mansion
on the outskirts of Strasbourg, it’s been night for a while. “Wait here,” the Redhead demands, and shortly after, a swarthy man with a bushy mustache arrives. He offers his hand while looking at the suitcase. He shakes Agirre Sesma’s hand forcefully and, even though it might be strange to say so about a look, he also looks at the suitcase forcefully. The calculations he’s made flood the mind of the mediator, and he sees different calculations in the eyes of the other man. Guessing the calculations of the person one is negotiating with is also part of a mediator’s job. “This job of yours is a bit like a card game, don’t you think? There must be some fun to it…how do you do it?” a kidnapping victim’s family attorney once teased him. “Don’t ask me how we do it, we do it and that’s that; besides, it’s not a job, we don’t charge a cent,” was the mediator’s cutting reply.
“Murillo does.”
“I am not Murillo.”
But he wasn’t wrong: although the correct word was excitement, not fun.
They take him through to the living room. Whose home might this be? Who lent it to them? Do they live in it? Is their job just to negotiate the ransom and decide where to hide it? Do they really believe in freedom and socialism for the people? How many years are they willing to sacrifice? A whole lifetime? A whole life negotiating and carrying briefcases from one place to another, involved in clandestine arms trafficking with Lebanon, cherishing and trying out the product with professional zeal? No, he doesn’t think so. According to the mediator’s calculations – and assuming they were well organized – these must be white-collar criminals, not too different from Wall Street accountants. Another type of mediators, in the end, just like Agirre Sesma, whose job is to get the money and administer it to get the most profit out of it. There must be others in charge of buying and selling weapons and, of course, others whose job is to use them.
The house is really old: at least the room where they sit him down is. The décor is excessively ornate and baroque, the multiple flower prints make it difficult to affix an immobile, die-cast profile to his interlocutor and memorize it.
“Did you have a good trip?”
The mediator decides to refer only to the journey to Paris:
“I like to travel by train.”
“Yes: it’s a bit long from Hendaia, but there’s nothing like train journeys. Should we have some dinner? The lamb is excellent around here.”
What is this, a restaurant? Just then the Redhead appears with a tray of roast lamb. He smells garlic, bay leaf, and mint. Chauffeur and chef. The bohemian, the Redhead, takes care of logistics – the mediator makes a mental note. He is not hungry, or, rather, he didn’t think he was hungry until now, but as soon as he sees the lamb, all crispy on top, he remembers that it’s been hours since he ate, and his appetite stirs up.
They bring wine too. The mediator drinks little.
“Jauregizar is fine: we give him all the tablets he asks for. We have also determined the day of his release, as long as we reach an agreement, of course.”
That’s the moment he was waiting for. According to his calculations, it’s time to act:
“As you must know, things are complicated in the steel industry: only last year they had to get rid of seventy workers.”
“They had to get rid of? More like they fired them. And, according to our information, it was seventy-two. If they sent you over to haggle, I’m afraid you wasted your trip…”
“We just want this nightmare to be over as soon as possible.”
“We all agree on that.”
“There are three hundred and fifty million in the suitcase. The family hasn’t been able to put any more together without raising suspicion. Everything they had in private safe-deposit boxes and everything they could gather from trusted friends in the banking world is there.”
“Undeclared money I see…very cautious family…but this is only half.”
“I’m not going to beat around the bush: the family can pay up to five hundred. After Jauregizar is freed, we could make three payments of fifty each, just as you said.”
“We’d be two hundred short.”
“You’d ruin them. You can’t pressure them like that.”
“Let’s do this: in eight months’ time, you and I are going to meet in Geneva. You’ll bring me two hundred, in one lot. And with that, we’re even.”
“I’d have to ask them.”
“C’mon, c’mon…I know you’ve got leeway for that and more. What kind of a mediator would you be, otherwise?”
He could have just said yes. What did he care? Hadn’t he managed to get the deal he’d promised the family? An even cheaper one, in fact? He remembered the heirs, those parasites that lived off their parents. He insists, however:
“I should make a phone call.”
“No phone calls. Our next appointment is in Lac Léman. Geneva.”
“In that case I can’t guarantee –”
“In that case I won’t give the order to free Jauregizar tomorrow morning. We know everything about the liquidity of Jauregizar Steelworks, my friend. This is a good deal. And you know it, Luis.” The chauffeur, the waiter, the bohemian Redhead emerges out of nowhere, or maybe he actually never left; perhaps his pale, freckle-covered face, a redhead’s face down to the last red eyelash, his almost transparent face, was hidden among the flowers of those over-ornate walls. We each have our own semblance, our own jungle. Come to think, the Redhead was the only one to refer to Agirre Sesma by his first name.
He brings a narrow of bottle of grape liqueur, uxual, right out of the freezer, and three little glasses.
“A deal is a deal,” he says, and now, yes, of course, Luis Agirre Sesma sees, more clearly than ever, that the Redhead is the leader here. He imagines him hidden in a farm, collecting mint leaves and reading the financial papers. He’s the big fish, why didn’t he realize that before?
With a sigh, the mediator signals his agreement, a bit irritated by the thought that in calculating his calculations and his countercalculations versus the enemy’s calculations, he didn’t get it completely right.
I’m young, my blood runs too hot still, he admonishes himself.
They toast with the frozen little glasses without actually clinking the glass. But they come close. The mediator knocks his back in one gulp, without realizing that the two other men sitting at the table barely touch theirs.
Suddenly sleepy, his head lolls back and a fourth man – a little man wearing a hat who looks like a bellhop or an elf – comes running and catches his head with a pillow, as if it were a head that’d just been offed by a guillotine.
When the mediator opens his eyes, he’s in Paris again, resting in his bed at the hotel in the Tenth Arrondissement, with all his clothes on, his black leather suitcase on the bedside table, and no one looking like an elf around him. He grabs the suitcase, lifts it. Empty, just as he thought. He goes out to the corridor and sees a copy of Le Monde on the floor: Margaret Thatcher and François Mitterrand smile and shake hands on the front cover. When he unfolds the paper, a train ticket to Hendaia falls out. On the other side of the window, Paris is deserted. Agirre Sesma has no doubt: it’s either too early, or too late.
When he calls home, his wife, Emilia, gives him a message from Murillo, he needs to call him as soon as possible: another kidnapping. This time it’s an engineer. It’s not money they’re after.
The kidnapping victim continues to complain about the ants. They multiply by the second and there’s no way of knowing where they’re coming from. He says they won’t let him sleep. During the first week he was a model prisoner, he didn’t complain about anything. It’s Diego Lazkano’s job to talk to him and tell him that everything is going to be all right. They have no intention of harming him. He tells him things like: “we’re not going to hurt you,” or “we won’t do anything to you, don’t worry.” Although the kidnapping victim has a better way with words than he does, he does what he can and converses with him, that’s precisely what he’s there for, to tell the kidnapping victim
that he can relax, that they’re not going to kill him, that they won’t hurt him, that they won’t do anything to him, as if ripping a man from his everyday life and locking him in a hole is “not doing anything.”
He collects the ants at the doorway with a broom, cleans the room well each time the kidnapping victim eats something, but they keep coming. And, what’s worse, they’re multiplying. He brings a mop, thinking that after sweeping, perhaps the toxic dampness of water mixed with bleach might keep them away. After he mops the outside, he hands over a damp cloth to the kidnapping victim.
“Dale una pasara con esto.”
Give it a wipe with this. Many years later he will still remember, with shame, that he said pasara instead of pasada. “Dale una pasara con esto,” “emaiok pasara bat honekin,” he’d thought it in Basque and expressed it in Spanish.
And the kidnapping victim cleans the zulo inside too, he scrubs it thoroughly with water and bleach, killing the ants that move around in long lines with fury, sure that they won’t return. And those ones don’t, but others do. Lazkano thinks that they look bigger than the previous ones, but it’s quite certain that they’re not: what’s happening is that they’re more visible now, because the floor is clean and shining, and because they’re a bit obsessed and they fixate on the ants, they only have eyes for them. They mop, they clean, they kill armies of ants. All in vain. They keep coming in and out of the zulo, oblivious to all their efforts. Lazkano places a melon rind in a corner, to attract them. It works at the beginning, but the ants are too many and they seem to never give up.
In the end, in despair, he does what he should have done the first day. One night, when someone else is pulling his shift, he calls his father, whose business is precisely that; he feels doubly humiliated in having to ask his father how to deal with the ants; his father has spent most of his life destroying pests, but he doesn’t know the first thing about it, not even the simplest tricks.