'The day after tomorrow or the day after that, I think, or next week at the latest,' Perez Nuix began, after all, she had been given the green light and wasn't going to miss the opportunity, 'you'll be asked to interpret someone I know, probably in person and possibly on video too. I want to ask you not to spoil his chances, not to let Bertie rule him out, I mean, not to let Tupra just dismiss him or give a bad, overall final report either because he doesn't trust him or because he trusts him too much. He'd have no reason to do so: I know this acquaintance of mine is not the deceitful sort, I know that, I know him. But Bertie can be very arbitrary at times, or else when he does see something very clearly, he sometimes goes against that clarity, precisely because he sees it so clearly. I mean, oh, I don't know, but anyway.' She herself noticed how lacking in clarity her own last sentence was. I realised that, despite the long build-up, what Perez Nuix did not as yet know was in which order to expound, tell, persuade, ask. Hardly anyone knows that, and so they fail. Even those who write. But she carried on, she wasn't going to start all over again. 'I've seen someone make such a horrendous impression on him that he's decided, out of hand, to help him and to offer him some incredible opportunity; and vice versa too, with someone who had everything to recommend him, I've seen him refuse to have anything to do with him or even to accept his help, again completely out of hand. He doesn't like things too clear or too simple, or anything that is apparently unmixed, because he's convinced that there is always some admixture and that the only reason we cannot see it is because of some very clever concealment or because of some momentary laziness on the part of our own perspicacity. And so if he isn't offered any doubts, he creates them himself. When we're the ones who lack the doubts – Rendel, Mulryan, you, me, the out-of-house people, Jane Treves, Branshaw, or whoever – he provides them. He sets them out for us, invents them. He so distrusts the indubitable that he modifies his verdict accordingly, contrary to his own certainty, not to mention ours. It doesn't happen very often because such total conviction is so rare, and he would never put his hand in the fire for any human being. Tupra knows very well that no one is as straight as a die, that no one is consistently the person he is or even was, not even the person he aspires to be and has not yet been for a single day. "It's the way of the world," he says and then he moves on, he expects nothing and nothing surprises him.' – 'It's the way of the world', yes, I, too, had heard him say it a couple of times. – 'But when he thinks he can affirm something with utter conviction, then he denies or suspends that affirmation, which is precisely what we are not allowed to do. That's what he's there for, to introduce an objection, a suspicion, to contradict us and contradict himself and, where necessary, to correct. Certainty in him is very rare, but it has occasionally happened: and if someone strikes him as utterly decent and trustworthy, in practice, he probably treats him like a scoundrel on the make and advises whoever has requested the report not to trust him. And the other way round too: if he finds someone to be irremediably, almost constitutionally disloyal, shall we say, he might well suggest using him at least once, just to try him out. That is, he warns the client: once and once only, just to see, in some minor deal that involves no major risks.’
Young Perez Nuix had launched into her request but had immediately left it vaguely floating, without completing it or focusing on it, then she had gone on postponing it or measuring it out or preparing me for it, so that talking to me would not take only 'a moment' as she had announced from the street. Or was it simply that other thing, that she didn't know in what order to approach the topic, and the sentences all crowded into her head, and then branched off and diverged, causing isolated, preliminary questions to arise in my mind relative to what she was saying? I was struck by various things she mentioned without intending to mention them or unaware that I did not know about them. The conversation would be even less brief if I was to linger over all of them.
'Jane… Treves, Branshaw?' was my first question. I lingered over those names, I couldn't just let them pass.
'Yes, t-r-e-v-e-s,' she replied, perhaps judging by my brief pause that I had not quite caught the names, and she automatically spelled them out in English, spelling in Spanish came less naturally to her: 'ti, or, i, vi, i, es', that's how it would sound to a Spaniard (and I had, in fact, assumed that it would be written as Trevis or Travis). Biographically, she was quite a lot more than half-English. She spoke my language as fluently as I did or just a touch more slowly, and she had a good, even literary vocabulary, but from time to time she slipped in some odd word or expression or used an Anglicism or was drawn into an English pronunciation; her c or z was softer than the norm, as it is with Catalans when they speak Castilian Spanish, as was her g or her j; fortunately, her t was not fully alveolar nor her k as plosive as it is among the English, because that would have made her diction in Spanish unbearably affected, almost irritating in someone with such a mastery of the language. However, it was the other surname, Branshaw, that had amused me, although I wasn't going to start enquiring about him nor explain my interest, it wasn't the moment, one must always be careful with talk, a second's distraction and it can become infinite, like an unstoppable arrow that never reaches its target and continues flying until the end of time, never slackening its pace. I did not, therefore, insist, I did not linger any longer, that has to be avoided, opening up more and more subjects or parentheses that never close, each one containing its own thousands of digressions. 'They're people Bertie uses, occasional informants, from outside, more or less specialised in certain areas, certain fields. Oh, that's right, you haven't come across them yet,' she added as if the penny had just dropped and, judging the matter to be closed, she didn't want to spend any more time on it, and nor did I. She kept calling Tupra 'Bertie', then correcting herself and slipping up again, that was doubtless how she thought of him, that is how he presented himself to her in her mind, even though at work she addressed him as Bertram, at least in my presence, still friendly but more formal, it would be equivalent in my language to a respectful use of the familiar 'tu’. He had not yet given me permission to go that far, that would come later, and at his urging not mine.
'What do you mean "whoever has requested the report"?' That was my second preliminary question. 'What do you mean by "client"? I thought there was only one and that it was always the same one, albeit with different faces, I don't know, the navy, the army, such-and-such a ministry or one of the embassies, or Scotland Yard or the judiciary or Parliament, or, I don't know, the Bank of England or even Buckingham Palace. I mean the Government.' I had been about to say 'the Secret Service, MI6, MIS', but that would have sounded too ridiculous on my lips, and so I avoided it and replaced it as I went with: 'Or the Crown. The State.’
It seemed to me that young Perez Nuix did not want to spend time on this subject either, she had launched into the first part of her speech and had not reckoned on the possible side effects of my curiosity. Perhaps she was formulating her request in calculated stages, perhaps she was getting me accustomed to it first, getting me used to the idea in several phases (the main drift of the request was already clear); or its nature – but she would not want to lose her way among unexpected matters of procedure, in preambles and long explanations.