I’m not sure whether Esteruelas was trying to have fun or scare me, but his words didn’t dampen my spirits. Mr. Handsome was a distant memory, and I felt protected from any threats by the shadow of Slim. Esteruelas’s lips dictated silence, he put a hand on his stomach, swallowed air, and, all of a sudden, let out a thunderous belch that echoed off the walls of La Copa before slipping up my nose. “Time simply flies,” he resumed philosophically, “and I’m not as healthy as I was, or as nimble. I digest food slowly, and any upset builds up gases.” He paused to think for a moment. “That other circus character, that hoity-toity bugger, who smelled sky high of shit, he was a friend of yours, too, wasn’t he?” I can’t think why, but the dedication to the book of poetry suddenly passed through my mind and I couldn’t think what to say. Then I swallowed and said he wasn’t.
That man, who’d spent his whole life sinisterly licking the backsides of the powerful, when he believed he’d finally seated his own butt on the best can in town, at the top of the political-social brigade, found himself threatened by times that were unstoppably a-changing. That bastard had never been very flexible; even as a youngster he’d been rocked by huge belches that left leaden dregs putrefying in the hollows of his mind. He was a piece of shit with a paunch who liked to generate unhappiness, a man who crippled himself and was forever dissatisfied because he thought himself better than everyone else; he buttered up the great and the good, played the tame poodle, went toadying and regaled their ears with praise, simply knee-jerking in his post, when in reality he hated their guts and would have royally stuffed them down the loo he’d just used and rubbed their faces in the feces they deserved. All people of that ilk are the same. Señor Antonio came over to the table with a fresh jug of wine he held by the neck. “Did anybody ask you for a drink, old man?” Esteruelas spat in his face in a ridiculous vaunting of authority. “No,” replied Señor Antonio. “So get back to where you came from and leave us in peace.” Señor Antonio cowered, turned round, didn’t stand up for himself, walked back behind the bar, and busied himself with his chores. Once he was there, Esteruelas raised an insidious hand, snapped his fingers three times, and shouted to him to bring us a drink. The old guy obeyed without saying a word. The air one chewed in La Copa tasted staler and staler; outside it began to rain. Esteruelas enjoyed watching the old guy pour his drink out. Of course, a single stubborn man can sustain the structure of a political regime; on the other hand, his disappearance guarantees its collapse. When the admiral was blown sky-high, it was impossible the regime could continue. Nobody of any standing dared pick up the baton, and Franco was now a corpse. Perhaps the specter of old age or some figureheads’ desire for a quiet life weighed heavily in the minds of those riding in the chariot of power. Never before had thrombophlebitis decapitated a state so definitively. People whose brains had stagnated, like Esteruelas himself, now drifted aimlessly down the byways of the bureaucracy, groping with their blind men’s sticks, and they never grasped that the times were dancing to another tune. They sniffed the air like wild animals, then began to retch and didn’t realize their own stench was the cause. In any case, Esteruelas hid all that under the strong smell of the black tobacco he chain-smoked, and rather than expelling the miasmas generated by his own putrefaction, he puffed out a potent, sweetish smoke that energized the brain. The bell over the door announcing customers tinkled. Slim had just walked in. Sopping wet, he was cursing under his breath the downpour that had caught him in the waste ground near Francisco el Grande. Initially, as he shook the water off, he didn’t notice our presence, though he soon stopped scowling when he noticed Esteruelas sitting at one of the tables. “What a surprise to see you here, Señor Inspector, we weren’t expecting you. Antonio, pour this gentleman a drop of the hard stuff.” “Forget it, I’ve got all I require,” retorted the other man. “Come and sit down, I need to speak to you, and don’t call me Inspector again in public, you idiot.” “Yes, Señor Inspector, whatever you command; it’s force of habit that betrays me,” replied Slim, flaunting the deferential bows with which he flattered those he reckoned were above him in rank. “Do you know him?” asked Esteruelas, pointing his fingertip at my face. “Yes,” came back Slim, “Goyo works for me; he can be trusted. Goyo, say hello to Señor Inspector, Señor Inspector is a very important person in the Ministry of the Interior; I’ve mentioned him to you before.” Seeing how irritated Esteruelas was at Señor Inspector being shoved in his face, I simply looked down and shut up. He said nothing about our past encounters and ignored me until almost the end of the meeting. He was a past master at the game these bastards carry in their blood: hiding what the left hand does from the right and vice versa; I expect that’s why he met a bad end. They talked for a quarter of an hour.
The presence of Esteruelas in Slim’s holy of holies wasn’t a routine exchange of data, nor was it a mere courtesy visit, on the contrary, it was down to a matter crucial for the future of Spain, or so he then thought, and as later seemed to transpire.
The eagle eyes, attentive ears, or silent lips we’d posted throughout the city over the last months had proved futile when it came to anticipating what was really lurking round the corner. We knew that some of the flats rented out in the area of Lavapiés, in one way or another, acted as a base for that motley, unwelcome rabble, as we saw when the time for the pact came. These activists frequently changed their hideouts, either because they were burnt out or flat-broke and couldn’t pay the running expenses of rent, electricity, and telephone, though expenditure on water was never their problem. Night and their pitch-black habits sometimes reached us in dull, hesitant whispers, and, like a nightmare fading away, their visits left traces of their creeds on walls in the shape of hammers and sickles or letter As corseted in the enclosed circles of anarchism, though someone always recognized and observed them from a street corner, a doorway, or a night watchman’s cubbyhole. We possessed loads of information about places, individuals, and slogans, but everything pointed to the fact that we’d not picked up on something really crucial.
A high-up in the Spanish embassy in Paris had been informed by third parties that Santiago Carrillo, no less, the bête noire of Paracuellos, was planning a secret trip to the Spanish capital. It seemed intolerable that Satan’s most vile offspring should dare set foot in Madrid, and that profanation had to be aborted at any price, if only out of respect for the memory of the dead. If the message from Paris was correct, Santiago Carrillo was preparing a visit in spring. It seemed most likely he would use his presence to reinforce the hidden strength of the clandestine Spanish CP and try to endow it with strategies in keeping with those times that were a-changing, with a view to creating a flexible structure able to bring under its umbrella of influence every other communist groupuscule floating off the beaten track in the barren wastes of Leftyland. Only unity in struggle could guarantee success, and the establishing of a workers’ republic was what they should all be aiming for. Esteruelas believed that the arrest of Carrillo, apart from being a legal obligation and moral duty, would be a hugely efficient symbolic deterrent and would bolster the Regime. On the other hand, if Carrillo managed to stroll freely around the Puerta del Sol and talk to the rabble awaiting him, it would be reported in the international press, echoes would career off the walls of the fatherland, and those same walls would be irrevocably fissured, the credibility of the system would be undermined, and, given the manifest bungling by the police, the scum would seize the streets and provoke the death rattle of forty years of peace like a knife slitting the throat of a whimpering roebuck. “That bastard won’t have the balls to show up in Madrid, but if he does, we’ll catch him for sure. So, One-Eyed, you must keep your eyes wide open and keep you ear to the chatter in the gutter and pick up on all the jabber. Stick your lugholes up that crew’s asses if need be to find out what they’re plotting. Don’t spare any means, and risk your hide more than usual. I’ll be hovering in the background in case you need anything. Any movement, any sign, any comment, however minute, may be of use. The moment you dig something up, let me know. Got that?” Slim excitedly ruffled my mop of hair, as if he were lovingly stroking a cuddly toy and calming his nerves. Esteruelas clapped a couple of times to order Señor Antonio to bring us the bill. “Two hundred and thirty-five,” he mumbled from behind the bar. The inspector extracted from his wallet one of those green one-thousand-peseta bills where the faces of Ferdinand and Isabella occupied a fuzzy area between the excrescence of loot and the excellence of fame and glory, which he placed on the table like a snooty donation, or a tip delivered with contempt. Slim picked it up and handed it to Señor Antonio. “Give the Señor Inspector his change,” he told the old guy in a rather sarcastic tone, emphasizing much to his own amusement his Señor Inspector to upset Esteruelas yet again and show him once and for all that wielding power was about style and not rank. “Keep the change, old man,” Esteruelas insisted, “you’ll need it when you’ve lost the strength to put water in your wine, and as for you, Snow White,” he went on, addressing me, “you watch the witch doesn’t get out of jug and come to return the poisoned apple you handed him. I wouldn’t want to find you beaten to pulp on some street corner. We’ve got far too much scum to see to every day without having it spring up shaped like a dwarf.” Slim stood and looked intrigued, not knowing what that warning was all about, but he said nothing. He simply accompanied Esteruelas to the door, and watched him walk off in the direction of the Plaza de Cascorro, that hero of the fatherland who, selflessly risking his own life, showed how valiant he was by burning Cubans alive with kerosene. It was still raining outside.