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“You’ve ants at home? I’ll come by tomorrow, don’t worry.”

  How could he explain to his father that the ants are not in the apartment he shares with Ana, no, but in a friend’s house, and that he doesn’t want to do “anything traumatic,” that bringing a fumigation team is too much, and isn’t there a natural remedy, something that’ll do the trick, maybe vinegar, something like that is what they need.

  “Okay, so tell me where your friend lives and don’t worry: I won’t charge him at all.”

  He’s about to hang up. How he’d like to say, “I can’t take you to see those ants, aita,” but he has to bite his tongue. Every father in the world is like that.

  “What are they like?”

  It hadn’t even crossed his mind to think that there might be more than one kind of ant. But, of course, there are lots of different types of ants.

  “Have you found the nest yet?”

  So they have nests, ants do. Of course ants have nests.

  “They’re usually very persistent.”

  It takes him a while, but he offers him a remedy in the end: place a jar of honey somewhere out of the way. Observe what happens to locate the holes from which the ants emerge, and plug those holes with toothpaste. The ants inside the room will go to the honey, and, in principle, no more should come in…

  “But if the nest in your friend’s house is quite big, one of those bad holes, then the best solution is to fumigate.”

  One of the bad holes. Best to fumigate. Your friend’s house. Quite a big nest.

  “Thanks, aita.”

  “Will you call me to let me know if it worked?”

  “As soon as I can.”

  And then he buys toothpaste, a jar of honey, observes the kidnapping victim’s puzzled expression, with his arms and face covered in red ant bites, looking crazy. The ants no longer march across the floor, but keep safe on the walls.

  “See? The ants don’t know what’s the floor and what’s the wall,” says the kidnap victim, “they can live without coming down to the floor.”

  “The two of us, you and I, we can tell the difference between floor and walls,” the kidnapping victim seems to be telling him, trying to establish a bond between them, a bit of empathy, inviting him to join him in his fight against the ants. And, indeed, together they plug cracks and holes with toothpaste and it works, they never show up again. Not on the floor, and not on the walls that the ants confuse with the floor.

  The kidnapping victim often wonders whether if it hadn’t been for that issue with the ants, such a close relationship could have been established between Diego Lazkano and himself. He adopts him as a confidante; it is known that he doesn’t speak at all with the guards from previous shifts, but that he starts chatting away as soon as Diego arrives; even though he is always covering his face with a black hood, they look into each other’s eyes, so much so that Lazkano is pretty sure that the kidnapping victim could easily identify him in a lineup, he’d notice his gray eyes and that’d be that. Maybe I should take my hood off, he’d thank me for it, this guy wouldn’t give me up, Lazkano thinks at one point, but he knows that rules are rules and that he shouldn’t do such a thing.

  And then the kidnap victim tells him details about his life: why he named his daughter the way he did, how his father used to send him to a hospital in Switzerland when he was young, to learn German; how his wife is a pharmacist.

  “Any news?”

  The kidnapping stretches on, and Lazkano doesn’t know what to say anymore.

  “Everything is going well,” he tells him at the start, but later he starts to coldly state that there is “no news,” because he doesn’t think that hiding the truth can do him any favors.

  The kidnapping victim, however, doesn’t seem too anguished, it’d seem that he trusts him, that he’s convinced that things are going to work out. He’s not a businessman, his family doesn’t have any money. He’s an engineer. Once he dared ask what was it they wanted in exchange for his liberation. Lazkano didn’t know what to answer. He is only a guard. “We need people who are not on file.”

  And then, that order from the Redhead:

  “Your last shift, you need to be on the French side tomorrow, in Iparralde.”

  The man with the freckle-covered transparent face hands him an address. Angelu, Rue Moulinaou. That’s it then, he has to go into hiding. That’s it then, he’ll have to kiss off the love of his life, Ana, without saying goodbye. That’s it then, goodbye to the joint LP collection, resting on a single shelf in alphabetical order: Mikel Laboa and Patti LaBelle, Echo & the Bunnymen and Errobi, “a union stronger than marriage.” That’s it then, goodbye to his ama’s sweet reprimands. That’s it then, he’ll never call his aita to ask him how to kill ants. How to kill cockroaches. Rats. He still has so much to learn from him.

  “Where are we going to set him free?”

  Silence is the answer; a resigned sigh from that redhead down to the last eyelash. A deep groan that seems to come from someplace other than his two nostrils. He waits and waits some more, but there is no answer. Finally Lazkano grabs the Redhead by the shoulders, recklessly: he should never do that with someone who outranks him and is older than him. He remembers the words embryonic cell or sleeper cell and suddenly realizes that, even though he wasn’t aware of it until now, he is among those who’ve been awakened.

  “We’re going to let him go, right?”

  In the silent house in Rue Moulinaou, in Angelu, he experiences his first day in hiding, the first day in which, as well as doing things outside the law, he lives completely hidden, awaiting orders. Remembering his parents, remembering Ana. And early in the morning he sees the picture of the dead kidnapping victim on the front cover of a newspaper he doesn’t have the guts to open, in the kitchen, in that house in which everyone else is still asleep. Aparece con un tiro en la nuca el ingeniero…A bullet to the head, dead. The world, still as it is, becomes even slower, and the same thing happens to his heart; the windows are steamed up, not even a bird’s feather moves in the Ecuadorian jungle he carries in his head. It’s the hardest blow of his short life, a bomb that’s blown to smithereens his idea of an “embryonic cell” or a “sleeper cell.” It’s as if they’d whisked away the ground beneath his feet. He didn’t even say goodbye to the kidnapping victim (but how can you say goodbye to someone you’ve kidnapped and who, whether you know it or not, is headed for slaughter? How can you say goodbye to the kidnapping victim, when you haven’t even said goodbye to your girlfriend, the love of your life?). He failed him, things weren’t going well and he told him they were. If he’d known things were going to end up like this, he would have spoken to him differently, he would have taken the hood off from the start, fuck, what kind of a coward doesn’t show his face; if he’d known things were going to end like this, he would have measured every word he uttered carefully, every word he shouldn’t have said, including the laughable ones: “dale una pasara con esto.” Wipe with this.

  We killed ants together, he thinks. He and I, we killed ants, and now he is dead. He spoke German, and now he’s dead, he thinks, absurdly, as if knowledge of the German language – any kind of knowledge – were an effective insurance against death.

  Attorney Luis Agirre Sesma’s offices were in a basement in San Marcial Street, a rather unpretentious place for someone of his standing, a man who’d worked in politics for thirty years, who knew the bitter side of a mediator’s job firsthand. Under the staircase, one of the two sides was rented by a seamstress who did alterations; his was the other side. ADELA RETOUCHERIE, read the sign next door; and, below, an explanation between brackets: ARREGLOS. Just in case, it wouldn’t be right to lose non-Francophile clientele for the sake of a display of distinction.

  In that bilingual sign that displayed ambition and then retracted from it – retoucherie, arreglos – Diego Lazkano detected the perfect manifestation of Donostia’s cosmo-hypocritical idiosyncrasy.

  He rang the bell of the door without a sign, and waited for more than a minu
te and a half; too long, if you took into account the smallness of those basement spaces.

  “I was waiting for you.”

  Agirre Sesma’s eyes were kind and transparent, like a calm sea, the eyes of someone who’d lived and who’d seen a lot. It was not easy to figure out his age: somewhere between sixty and seventy years old, maybe. He was chubby, abundant in rolls of flesh that escaped from his suspenders, like sheets hung in an indoor patio. Agirre Sesma, with little hair left, had a round, symmetrical face; he was one of those men who, from the moment they are born, are difficult to imagine looking any other way, the kind who age very early and hang on to that same look for decades, until they die of a heart attack. His head was a little small proportionally speaking, taking into account that the bulk that expanded either side of his tie could host two men of Diego’s size.

  The basement was filled with papers, civil and canon-law code and jurisprudence books. The office was a bit soulless. As he walked along the corridor, he was surrounded on either side by books, piles of folders, and towers made of magazines – Punto y Hora, Cambio 16 – accumulated over the decades. They walked on very slowly, and when Diego noticed the broken hiss of the attorney’s asthmatic breathing, he couldn’t help feeling in his gut that he’d reached out to the wrong person, and the deep disappointment that came with it.

  Wasted afternoon. I’ll entertain the old man with a bit of conversation, and head back home.

  Agirre Sesma collapsed behind a desk lit up by a table lamp, and invited Diego to sit on the armchair in front of him with a hand gesture.

  “Before anything else: I don’t want you to harbor any illusions. I haven’t decided if I’ll take the case yet.”

  Ha! Will you look at the old man! He hasn’t even shaken my hand! He basically shares his offices with a retoucherie, and intends to make me believe that his is a high-class attorney’s office that chooses its clientele? thought Lazkano. What does he think, that I’m going to put this case in the hands of a dinosaur who could suffer a cardiopathy on the first round? Because, besides intelligence and an encyclopedic ability, an attorney needed courage and energy, shrewdness, reflexes, cold blood, a firm hand, and thoroughly oxygenated rhetoric in order to get involved in proceedings with the Soto Zeberio case, which had been thrown out twice by the courts.

  “I imagine that whoever sent you warned you that I retired from the courts a long time ago.”

  “He also told me that no one is better than you.”

  “I would need a lot of help…if we did manage to reopen the case, that is.”

  “I don’t know how much you charge, but I’m not exactly swimming in money.”

  “No, money is important, but I wasn’t talking about that. I was talking about bravery, about courageous people.”

  All right, it looks like we might understand each other after all, thinks Lazkano. He knows that he’s not up for much anymore.

  “Look, young man, I don’t know if you’ve had any dealings with the law…”

  “Let’s say that I have firsthand experience with police stations…”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way, but police stations and prisons have nothing to do with the law.”

  “Really? I thought they arrested people in the name of the law. At least that’s what they told me.”

  “My job is to put people in jail, or to get them out, and the method I use for that…”

  “That method is the law, if I understand you correctly.”

  “It’s one of the methods…not the only one, of course, but it’s the best one I know, for sure. And, more than the method, what I know are its hidden nooks.”

  For a moment the snake hiss of his asthmatic breath takes over the office, as if his labored breathing and the hidden nooks of the law were one and the same.

  “I know them better than anyone…Excuse my lack of modesty. Many people have avoided jail thanks to me. Even death, back in the day, more than once. I am proud of that.”

  All is forgiven, my man, of course it is. Bigheaded men like us understand each other well, Lazkano determines silently.

  “With the Soto Zeberio case we’re not going to get anyone out of jail. It’s a different matter.”

  “Yes, I know it’s a different matter. But it’s possible that if we take things to the very end, more than one will have to see the sun through prison bars.”

  “That doesn’t interest me.”

  Agirre Sesma smiles. Lazkano is puzzled by the attorney’s last sentence.

  “Did you say that doesn’t interest you?”

  “Not in the slightest.”

  “An attorney who is not interested in justice, interesting.”

  “Justice, that’s a big word. Everyone has his own idea about it.”

  “They say that about asses too. We all have asses and the differences are massive.”

  “You have a funny way of speaking, young man. What do you do?”

  “I leave crumbs on paths. He, he stops the birds from eating those crumbs, I fear.” Things we think but we don’t say.

  “I’m a writer.”

  “Ah, a creative…”

  “A creative,” he says, like someone who realizes that an adult is suffering from the mental weakness that ails adolescents. Like saying “a romantic.” Earlier he called him “young man,” although Diego left forty behind quite a while ago. The attorney retakes the conversation.

  “As you must know, justice is not something they teach in law school. The laws change, and justice changes. The laws that we inherited from the Romans try to extol the figure of the judge as an equidistant and just being, but that doesn’t exist: no matter what TV series say, the law is an instrument of the executive powers…”

  “Tell me the truth: do you think we stand a chance?”

  “To reopen the case, or to, excuse my language, fuck over the guys who took part in the deaths of Soto and Zeberio.”

  “Both.”

  “Now, let me ask you a question. Be honest: what is more important for you? Your peace of mind, in other words, that thing you call justice…? Or to find some scapegoats and make them pay a very high price for what they did?”

  “You call them scapegoats, I call them guilty.”

  “You didn’t answer.”

  Lazkano keeps quiet.

  The attorney Agirre Sesma opens a drawer, takes a cigar out and brings it close to his ear, rustle-rustle, like a child who wants to hear the sea in a seashell. He lights it up slowly. Exhales the smoke ceremoniously. He takes great delight in smoking, the cigar’s smoke takes a long time to leave his lips, as if its natural habitat was that mouth.

  “Silence is not always the worst answer,” resolves the attorney. “I’m going to take the case.”

  Agirre Sesma expects some reaction: a red carpet, applause, fireworks. But he doesn’t get anything like that from Lazkano. All he hears is the roar of an engine outside. The rumble of city buses.

  “But on one condition…”

  Enough, thinks Lazkano, it’s time to counterattack.

  “And what if I decide to look for another attorney. Maybe I don’t think you’re well suited for this…”

  “Whether I am well suited or not, you won’t find anyone else who’ll accept the case. Even less so, anyone who stands the smallest chance of winning the case. And, needless to say, as willing to shrink their honoraria. Don’t fool yourself; the days of lost causes are long gone.”

  “So, what’s the condition?”

  “That you’ll ask no questions. That you’ll do what I say and how I say it.”

  “I’ll do what you say?”

  “I’ll take care of the courts. But there will be a lot to do beyond that.”

  “Let’s talk about money. How much?”

  “I am an unusual attorney, your friend might have mentioned this: not a cent until the case is over. And then, we’ll see.”

  “What will we have to see?”

  Agirre Sesma’s eyes crinkle with mischief and shrewdness all the wa
y to the sparse hairs on his sides, drawing almost horizontal lines. He speaks, not without pomposity, from his refuge of smoke.

  “Whether we manage to get justice or not.”

  Agirre Sesma doesn’t usually attend the funerals of people he doesn’t know. It is his opinion that they’re always manipulated, be it by the left or the right, and he disagrees with building political capital out of the dead. But, on the other hand, what’s the point of this butchery if not political returns? No, Agirre Sesma doesn’t usually attend the funerals of people he doesn’t know, but he makes an exception in this case. The engineer’s case was particularly painful. At the beginning he thought it was a propaganda exercise, Tupamaro style: some newspapers complied with the demand to publish the kidnappers’ statement on their front pages, even El País printed the whole text. Basque newspapers did too, and some Catalan ones. Not always on the front page, as they demanded…but the press was generous in this instance, and was willing to sacrifice freedom of expression to save a life, following the German Doctrine. It was all in vain.

  They killed the engineer in cold blood all the same.

  In the church, black ties and white shirts. Gray linen waistcoats. Long dark coats, down to the ankles, good for hiding guns. Agirre Sesma was astounded when the parliamentarian Murillo confessed that some colleagues from Congress habitually carried guns. Hair-raising. All those socialist politicians, each with his weapon. There was this feeling in the air that anything could happen, even a new attempt at a coup d’état, like the recent one on February 23, 1981.

  In the church, the president of the Basque Autonomous Region, Lehendakari Carlos Garaikoetxea, and other chief executives from the Basque and Spanish governments, among them Minister Barrionuevo, freshly arrived, the previous day, for the funeral of national police guard Alfredo Trota, gunned down in front of his parents’ glassware store. After what happened to the engineer they remained to pay respects and say farewell not to one, but to two victims, in the same trip. It’s the last push the new Anti-Terrorist Law needed: astonishingly, from the opposition, Fraga and his right-wing parliamentary group have applauded Barrionuevo, a socialist minister. It’s a detail that very evidently reveals the true dimension of the issue.