“Shut up, you whore!” said the policeman, putting his hand over her mouth. He was speaking to her in a whisper, so that not even the passengers closest to them could hear him. All she could see was his flattened nose and his puffy eyes, puffier even than her own. “If you scream, I swear I’ll break something,” he added, again thrusting his fist into her side.
The pain brought tears to her eyes. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t open her mouth to shout.
“I don’t want any complications, but if I have to hit you, I will. I’ll beat you up and break a couple of your ribs. Do you understand?” said the policeman, panting. He was very strong, but he was much too fat. “Do you understand or not?” he repeated.
She nodded.
“Fine, that’s how I like it,” he whispered, removing his hand from her mouth. “Don’t go thinking that I’m like that handsome colleague of mine. He’s soft, especially with girls. I’m not like that, believe me.”
He smiled. Beneath the flattened nose was a small moustache beaded with sweat.
“What do you want from me? A magic formula for losing weight?” she said, after taking a deep breath. She saw that her jacket had fallen on the floor again and she bent down to pick it up.
“Be very careful what you do,” said the policeman, watching her every move. “And talk quietly, if you don’t mind.”
“I want to smoke a cigarette. As you know, it helps in tense situations.”
She still couldn’t breathe normally. She was a bit frightened.
“You can’t smoke up here.”
She thought of some cutting remark, but decided to adopt a different tone. In her situation, a cigarette could prove very helpful.
“Just the one,” she said.
The policeman smiled again. He took something out of the inside pocket of his jacket. A square bit of paper.
“What do you want to do? This?” he said, pressing a button on the ceiling that switched on a small light.
The square bit of paper was a Polaroid photograph. It showed a man’s naked trunk, criss-crossed with bloody lines.
“You certainly left your mark on him,” said the policeman.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, lighting a cigarette and inhaling the smoke. She had to be careful. She had very little room for manoeuvre.
“Oh yes you do,” said the policeman with a sigh. He put the photograph away.
“What do you want?” she asked, exhaling the smoke hard.
“We need your collaboration. We want you to collaborate with us.”
“Well, at least you don’t beat about the bush.”
“I don’t like wasting time. I don’t like it at all. I leave that to the handsome policemen.”
He was very fat around the eyes, which were dull, unhealthy-looking. She wondered what his attitude to sex would be? Probably not exactly wholesome. What would he be like with women? Would he beat them?
“Let me make myself even clearer,” the policeman went on. The noise of the bus engine had grown louder and he had to raise his voice. “We have some very concrete proposals to make to you. If you want to collaborate with us, everything will be fine. We’ll give you protection, new papers, a house, a good salary …”
“Until when? For the rest of my life? How much information do you think I have?” she said, almost laughing. She took another drag on her cigarette and managed to blow the smoke far enough to bother the passengers in front of them. One of them fanned the air with a magazine.
“Until when? Well, we’ll have to see. To start with, we have a special task for you. We want to find out about how Larrea died. We think the time has come to find out what really happened.”
“Why don’t you look to your own house first? You killed him, didn’t you?” she said in the most neutral of voices. But the news had startled her.
“That’s one possibility, but we’d like to examine all the possibilities, not just one. We’d like to go over the meeting you had about five years ago in the palace of a certain aristocrat. How’s your memory for faces? If we showed you some photographs, could you recognize the people who were there?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, really I don’t,” she said, blowing more cigarette smoke in the direction of the passengers in front. It was her only way out. She had to get them annoyed, so that they would interrupt that interrogation. It was clear that the large woman was being detained downstairs and was unable to come back up.
The policeman snorted. His flattened nose meant that he couldn’t breathe properly.
“You do, but you don’t want to tell me. That seems perfectly normal. You haven’t heard the rest of my proposal. And that’s exactly what I want to do now, lay the whole proposal out to you.”
The two passengers in front — a couple — were muttering about the smoke, but still didn’t have the courage to protest. If they didn’t react, she would stay there corralled by the policeman for as long as he wanted.
“Get to the point. I don’t like wasting time either,” she said.
“Don’t worry, it won’t take long. I just have to put the downside of the proposal to you — what would happen if you don’t collaborate with us,” replied the policeman. He seemed quite calm. He was smiling. “Can’t you guess? Can’t you guess what would happen to you?”
“I’ve no idea.”
She put her cigarette to her lips. She was annoyed with the couple in front. They seemed prepared to put up with as much smoke as she could blow at them.
“Well, we’ll just circulate the photograph. That should be enough,” said the policeman.
“Enough?” she laughed. “To start with, you’ve no proof. And even if you had, I don’t care. I’ll say it was self-defence, that he was trying to rape me.”
The policeman laughed.
“Besides, if the worst came to the worst, I wouldn’t get a very long sentence. To judge by the photo, he only had a few cuts.”
The policeman looked at her mockingly.
“I wasn’t referring to that photo. I meant this one.”
It was another Polaroid. It showed her and the policeman with the red tie sitting in the smokers’ section downstairs. She was eating a Crunchie bar and he was smiling and talking.
“Take a good look at it,” said the policeman, offering her the photograph. “And if you want to tear it up, do so. That one didn’t come out very well, it’s too dark. The others turned out much better.”
It showed a couple talking animatedly. It was taken from the service area, from the bottom of the stairs. When exactly? In the scrap of sky that appeared in one corner of the photo you could see some orange-coloured clouds and a yellowish circle, the last sun of the day.
“There wasn’t much light,” explained the policeman, guessing her thoughts. “But I have a very special camera, very quiet and very sensitive.”
“And what are you going to do with this?” she said at last. Her cigarette was coming to an end. Not counting the filter, she had little more than half an inch left. And the couple in front were still only muttering and occasionally waving away the smoke with a magazine, but still they did not raise their voices. What more could she do? She had to put an end to that siege. What if she started shouting? Perhaps that was a way out, but she was frightened of the policeman’s strength. Her ribs still hurt.
“As I’ve already said, if you don’t want to collaborate with us, we’ll put those photos into circulation. And then you’ll see. Before the month is out, some journalist will write an article about your life: ‘The price of freedom. The pacts terrorists make in order to get out of prison,’ or something like that.”
The policeman was looking up at the ceiling, as if the headline of the article were written there.
“We’ll issue a statement denying it all,” he went on, “but, of course, my colleague is too handsome to go unnoticed. Many of your former friends know him. They’ve seen him at the police station, I mean. I believe they call him Valentino. Anyway, I don’t want to hold you up any longer. I think I’ve made myself clear. Five or six articles about repentant terrorists who’ve betrayed the sacred cause and then bang, it’s all over.”