'It'll only take a minute. And remember who I am, that's three times now.’
I didn't grasp the meaning of those last words and didn't have time to think about it either or to reflect on my worrying feeling of gratitude and that anomalous sensation of a weight having been lifted from me, a near-criminal sensation of lightness, because Tupra went straight to work: he picked up the packet from the toilet-seat lid, resealed the top and put it back in his waistcoat pocket – of his varied collection I will never forget that particular waistcoat, intense watermelon green – then with the same two fingers he picked up the Visa card, placed it in De la Garza's wallet from which it had come and put that in his other jacket pocket along with the rolled-up banknote. With one hand he swept away what remained of the line of cocaine, or talc, and the dust scattered and fell onto the ', floor, Rafita had not even got a snort, had never had the benefit of it, after all his preparations. Then Tupra looped the hairnet around De la Garza's neck and tugged, and immediately my sense of relief went on hold – 'He's going to strangle him, he's • going to choke him,' I thought, 'no, he can't, he won't' - before I realised that this was not his intention – he didn't wrap it around De la Garza's neck, he didn't pull it tight or twist it- he was merely forcing him to lift his head, the attache was still pressed so close to the lid that he was almost embracing the toilet bowl, and he would have embraced it, I think, if he had not chosen to keep his hands over his ears, he preferred not to see or hear anything in the vain hope that he would then not know much about what was being done to him, even though his sense of touch would be sure to inform him, and the pain and the hurt would tell him.
Once Tupra had lifted De la Garza's head high enough, he pushed up both lid and seat and plunged the latter's head into the bowl with such violence that De la Garza's feet lifted off the ground, I saw his loose shoelaces waving in the air, neither he nor I had got around to tying them. I did not, at first, fear that the water in the bowl would drown him, because it was too narrow at the bottom for his broad, full-moon face, which nevertheless got battered against the porcelain – and slightly stuck – every time Tupra pushed it back in again after puffing it up for a while, and he also flushed the toilet three or four times one after the other, the rush of blue water was so strong and so prolonged that I was once more briefly filled by terrible alarm -'He's going to drown him, he'll fill his lungs,' I thought, 'no, he can't, he won't' – and it occurred to me that, anyway, all it takes is two inches of water, a puddle in which to submerge mouth and nose and thus stop someone ever breathing again; and that the momentary rise in the water level, with each flush, would bring Rafita a sure sensation of drowning, or, at the very least, of choking; and in the toilet for the disabled too: with luck there would be no remnants of fetid smells, and with even more luck, it would never have been used.
'I don't want to see Tupra as Sir Death,' I thought, 'with the cold arms of a disciplined sergeant, always brisk and busy; but that is how I'm beginning to see him, given his many abilities and the variety of his threats, decapitation, strangulation, drowning, to name but three, how many more are there, which one is he going to choose, if he does choose, which one will he select to finish his expert work or task, which one will become accomplished fact and not just a feint or an attempt.' He did not hold De la Garza under the water for very long, therefore that would not, it seemed, be the definitive form, although he might at any moment change his mind and all it would take would be for him to allow the seconds to pass, a few more, just a few, the seconds that normally pass so quickly that we don't even notice them, time's crumbs, he would only have to let those seconds pass while my compatriot's face was in the water – nose and mouth, that was all it would take – and life and death often depend on those scorned, wasted seconds or on a few centimetres that are often given away, or conceded to our rival for nothing – the centimetres that the sword declined to travel. 'yqu had two henchmen plunge me head first into a butt of your disgusting wine and drown me, poor me, poor Clarence, held by the legs, which remained outside the butt and flailed ridiculously about until my lungs' final intoxication, betrayed and humiliated and killed by the black, opaque cunning of your hideous, indefatigable tongue.' But this was not stagnant wine in a butt, it was blue water falling in torrents, and he was not George, Duke of Clarence, but the idiotic De la Garza, and we were not two henchmen, still less those of a murderous king. Or perhaps I was Tupra's or Reresby's henchman, I received small-scale orders from the former every day, and those issued by the latter that night were on a larger scale and of an unforeseen nature, utterly different from the kind of work I was paid to do, they had either released me from my normal commitments or had violated my contract, not that anything had ever been set down in writing or clearly stipulated. Or perhaps we were both henchmen, even though I didn't know it, of the State, of the Crown, of MI6, of the army, of the Foreign Office, of the Home Office, of the navy, I could be at the service of a foreign country and not even be aware of it in my foreign dream, and in a way, perhaps, that I would never have agreed to had it been my own country. Or we might be the henchmen of Arturo Manoia (according to Perez Nuix, our employers, at the time, varied) and there we were beating Rafita to a pulp on his orders, wreaking revenge on his behalf, I had no idea how Manoia had reacted to his wife's return to the table with, on her cheek, a sfregio or scar, she had gone off to have fun and to dance and come back with a mark on her face, Manoia would not have liked that at all. And make-up could only do so much.
Suddenly, I heard the sound of squeaky, tinny music, like the tone of a mobile phone, it took me a while to recognise it – it wasn't easy – the hackneyed notes of a famous and terribly Spanish paso doble, it was probably that tired old tune 'Suspires de Espana' which is so often used in my country by novelists and film-makers in order to create a certain tacky, ersatz emotion (people with left-winger stamped on their foreheads love it as much as cryptofascists do), a ghastly thing, he must have chosen it for his mobile phone out of pure racial pedantry, De la Garza I mean, poor De la Garza, and to think only a while ago I had thought 'I'd like to smash his face in', I had thought it on the dance floor and afterwards too, with that business of the shoelaces, and perhaps before as well; but it was just a manner of speaking, a figurative use of words, in fact, it's very rare that anyone actually means, literally, what he or she is saving or even thinking (if the thought has been sufficiently clearly formulated), almost all our phrases are in fact metaphorical, language is only an approximation, an attempt, a detour, even the language used by the most ignorant and illiterate, or perhaps they are the most metaphorical of all, maybe only the technician and the scientist are safe from it, and even then not always (geologists, for example, are very colourful in their use of language). Now I was watching as he was being beaten – not slapped, Tupra had not once attacked him directly with his hands, not even now that he had his gloves on, they were getting wet, they would have to be thrown away -and I was very frightened and shaken, not only because I didn't know just how much harm Tupra was going to inflict on him – if he would be transformed before my eyes into Sir Death or if he would remain plain Sir Blow, which was quite enough, or Sir Wound or Sir Thrashing (he was, in any case, already Sir Punishment), it was unpleasant to discover any of these characters in someone who was a close acquaintance, and even more so to have to observe his actions – but also because the long habit of seeing violence on screen, and of hearing every punch and kick as if it were a thunderbolt without the lightning or a dynamite blast or a collapsing building, has led us to believe in a rather venial form of violence, when there is nothing venial about it at all, and seeing it for real, perceiving its emanations from close to, feeling it physically throbbing beside you, smelling the immediate sweat of the person getting angry and hitting out and of the person who shrinks back and is afraid, hearing the creak of a bone as it dislocates and the crunch of a broken cheekbone and the tearing of flesh, seeing fragments and slivers and getting spattered with blood, isn't just horrifying, it simply makes any normal person feel ill, physically sick, apart, that is, from sadists and those who are used to it, those who live with it every day or every so often, and, of course, those who make a profession of it. I had to assume that Tupra belonged to this latter category, having seen how determined and expert he was, his movements almost routine.