Authors: Leif Davidsen
He put the empty glass in front of me and poured another measure. He nodded, and they let go of my arms and my nose.
“Let’s have a drink together, Mr Lime. Like real men,” said the big Irishman in his peculiar, almost comical accent.
I swept the glass onto the floor and it shattered with a loud crash as the wonderful aroma of whisky filled the kitchen.
But I was just delaying the agony. He fetched a new glass, filled it, and the procedure was repeated. They managed to force a few more mouthfuls into me. My body began to relax. After the third dose I realised that I was beginning to swallow voluntarily. My throat and stomach were burning from the unaccustomed, pure spirits. My body hadn’t forgotten. The alcohol was received like an unexpected gift. It went straight to my head which became light and airy and the longed for, familiar feeling of pleasant drowsiness and relaxation set in as if it was only yesterday that I had stood at a bar with my
una copa
. It wasn’t the taste, even though that was also instantly recognisable, but the effect. It was like a comfortable glove which wrapped itself round my body and soul and warmed me up on a cold winter’s day. It was like coming home to a reassuring place after a long and perilous journey. It was so horribly familiar and pleasant.
The cosh fetched another glass. The others were lying on the kitchen floor in a sea of whisky, along with the smashed bottle which I had managed to knock over during the last dosing. My throat and nostrils were burning and my battered body was hurting. My head was buzzing and I was dizzy. In my drinking days, I had been able to take copious quantities of alcohol, now it was as if I was 15 years old and
drinking my first strong lager. He fetched a new bottle and filled the glass again and nodded. They let go of my arms and I lifted up my right arm unsteadily to sweep this one onto the floor too, but my arm had ideas of its own. As if it didn’t belong to me any more. It was as if I was standing alongside watching it approach the glass. I told my hand to hit out hard and sweep it away, but instead it closed around the glass and picked it up slowly, guiding it almost sensually to my mouth, and poured in a little of the liquid which lay like a soft membrane on my tongue and then slipped down my throat like a gentle, yet firm caress, down to my stomach and out into my blood-stream and on towards my consciousness, as if carried along by a beautiful, calm river. Tears came to my eyes, but not because of the whisky. They were the tears of self-contempt. I was a pathetic sight – snot, blood, tears and whisky all over my face and down my t-shirt. I drank again, emptying the glass, and slammed it down on the table.
“Arsehole,” I said. “Fucking arsehole!”
“Cheers, Mr Lime. It’s pleasant drinking with a friend, isn’t it now?” said the big Irishman. He emptied his own and gave us a refill with a cocky, scornful expression which should have made me throw my glass in his face, but instead I watched my hand move downwards, grasp the glass and guide it to my lips, switching on the familiar light behind my bruised eyes.
“Why are you interested in that suitcase?” I remember asking at some point. I have only fragmented, foggy memories of what we talked about. I can see only that pockmarked face and the narrow mouth, and the glass in front of me from which I’m drinking.
“We ask. You answer,” he said.
“It’s nothing more than memories, you fucking arseholes. It’s nothing other than my own lousy, trivial damned memories of a wasted life,” I said, and began swearing in Danish from rage and self-pity.
I can’t remember what else I said. I can’t remember what I told him. At some point I began singing in Danish too. I rambled on and on and must have talked in a big jumble about my suitcase, Amelia, Maria Luisa and Don Alfonzo, about Oscar and Gloria; and about the time I was on a Greek island and quite by chance noticed Jacqueline Kennedy walking along with a bathing towel over her arm, accompanied by a woman of about the same age. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was in shorts and a thin blouse and still had a lovely body. She was wearing large sunglasses and a white hat, and no one seemed to recognise her without make-up. Or was this unspoilt island paradise still a place where people minded their own business? There were very few tourists there.
I had gone to the island to escape the horrors that had chiselled themselves into my mind after a tour in the hell that was Beirut. My nerves were in tatters. I was finished with putting my life in danger to take photographs that none of the newspapers would print anyway, because the media in the West had long since lost interest in the unending Lebanese civil war. The island had been recommended to me by a young stringer from A.P. who, like me, was tired of sending reports home which few sub-editors could be bothered to read, let alone publish, while we spent our days lying in the dust, caught in the crossfire between the warring factions.
Jacqueline was walking along, vulnerable and private with a friend, in a place where she clearly felt at ease. I followed them down to a little sheltered cove a kilometre from the village. She removed her shorts and blouse. She wasn’t wearing a bikini, and as she rubbed suntan oil on her naked body, I lay behind a rocky outcrop with my Nikon and took the series of photographs that turned Oscar and me into millionaires and OSPE NEWS into an internationally renowned agency. She didn’t realise I had been there until she saw herself in magazines all over the world. It was so easy and so lucrative. Why run around taking
journalistic photographs which give prestige among colleagues, but hardly butter on your bread, when the world is craving photographs of the rich and famous going about their private business? I became a paparazzo by chance and over the years I became one of the best, the most proficient and the wealthiest, because I never showed any mercy. I didn’t look at my victims as people, but as commodities.
I know that I rambled on about that story, because I remember the cosh saying:
“We’re not interested in rich women’s bare tits, but in another photograph, Lime. We’re interested in the whole suitcase. We’d like to choose for ourselves, like when you choose which negatives you want printed. So where is it?”
He asked over and over. I can’t remember if I told him, but I must have done, in light of what happened. I remember that I talked and drank and that then there was an enormous crash, and a huge stone flew through the glass door leading to the garden, and that the door smashed into the wall, and two greyish-brown shadows with bared teeth leapt in and went for the Irishmen’s throats. My chair toppled over and I fell into the whisky and broken glass and, from a strange distorted angle, I remember seeing Arregui come in behind his dogs and swing his stout shepherd’s crook, smashing it into the skull of the cropped one who was pulling a gun out of his holster. There was snarling and yelling and swearing in English and Basque and then I went out like a light. It was getting to be a nasty habit.
I woke up on the sofa where we used to sit to watch television. I hurt all over, but I was also still very drunk, so the pain was strangely distant and unreal. The sofa and the room reeled when I tried to get up, and I couldn’t get the face in front of me into focus. It was Tómas, gently pressing me back down. He handed me a glass of water. I was terribly thirsty and drank it in one. I could smell myself.
“Lie still, Peter,” said Tómas.
“Where are they?”
“Two of them have gone. I’ve dragged the third outside. He’s dead.
Suddenly it came back to me.
“You shit,” I said. “You lousy shit.”
He let go of me and stepped backwards. His face began to sharpen up. I could feel the alcohol pumping round my body, but it was more like having a skin full in the old days. My head was clear, and I was bristling with whisky-induced belligerence.
“It’s not what you think,” he said.
“You got hold of your IRA terrorist chums, you fucker,” I said.
“It’s not what you think,” he repeated.
I tried to sit up, but that wasn’t a good idea. The room and Tómas whirled round and landed again. Then I remembered some more snatches.
“I’ve got to ring,” I said.
“Just stay where you are. They really worked you over.”
“Telephone.”
He gave me his mobile, but I couldn’t hit the right keys, so I dictated the number and he called Don Alfonzo in Madrid.
“No one’s answering,” said Tómas.
“What is it with that suitcase?” I said. “Why are you all interested in that suitcase?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s not what you think, Peter.”
“How long have I been lying here?”
“A couple of hours.”
“Shit,” I said.
“Yes,” said Tómas. “Just be glad that my father decided to come down from the mountain with a sick sheep. They’d parked their car down by the bend. The dogs were restless so he came up to see what was going on.”
“He could just have asked you, couldn’t he? You knew what was happening all right,” I said.
“It’s not what you think,” he repeated.
“Call that number again,” I said.
He rang, but Don Alfonzo still didn’t answer. He helped me up and out to the kitchen table. The kitchen stank, but it had been cleaned up. One of the dogs sat in the doorway, its yellow eyes following my every move vigilantly. It was its usual placid, slightly lethargic self. I don’t know where Arregui had got to. At some point I heard a whistle and the dog disappeared from the doorway.
“Where’s Arregui?” I asked when Tómas had got me onto a chair.
“He’s getting rid of the trash,” he said with a coldness and nonchalance that I hadn’t noticed in him before, but he couldn’t have got to where he had in ETA without a very brutal streak.
He put a big mug of black coffee in front of me.
“I’d rather have a proper drink,” I heard myself saying.
“Later. Come on, drink,” I heard like an echo from the nightmare.
“Why are you interested in my suitcase, Tómas? Why didn’t you just ask me? Why did you set IRA thugs onto me? I thought we were friends.”
I could feel self-pity, my old companion in the land of the drunk, tapping on my shoulder, but I didn’t want it back. I took a gulp of the hot and sweet triple espresso. I was still drunk, but at least I would be an alert drunk.
“It wasn’t the IRA,” said a voice behind me. A younger man was on his way down the stairs from the first floor. He must have been listening from the landing. I recognised the voice. He had spoken to me on the wasteland in Renteria. He wasn’t much more than 25 years old, with an angular, pale face below his crew cut. He was wearing a thin black leather jacket over a grey t-shirt. He had slender, olive-coloured hands and his pallor suggested that he spent a lot of time indoors.
“So you’re here too. Are we going to carry on in Spanish now?” I asked.
“Tómas rang us. We’ll see to it that one of the shitbags disappears in the mountains. He won’t be missed. The other two won’t get out of Euskadi. They carry the scars of Arregui and his dogs. You’d better think about what you’ll tell the police, for Arregui’s sake.”
“I hadn’t reckoned on talking to the police. Who did Arregui kill?” I asked.
“They weren’t carrying any identification. He was fair-haired. Does it bother you?”
“I hope he rots in hell. I’d just hoped it was someone else,” I said thinking about the big Irishman with the cosh. But I was rather surprised that I felt nothing, even though someone had lost their life. Just disappointment that it hadn’t been all three of them. We all wear a civilised coat of varnish. It might be a thick layer, but if you’re pushed far enough, it peels off, and naked aggression raises its ugly head.
He came to the bottom of the stairs, sat down at the table and took the little cup of coffee which Tómas offered him. He leant across the table and spoke insistently.
“Peter Lime. I’ve said it before. I’m happy to repeat it. We had nothing to do with the death of your family. Nothing. We have nothing to do with the three Irishmen who were here this evening. They’re not IRA. I can’t tell you where my information comes from. But they weren’t from the Republican Army. They’re freelance. We’ve heard about them. They’ve shown up in Euskadi before and let it be understood that they were part of our Irish brothers’ and sisters’ struggle, but they’re common criminals. They’re hitmen. Their guns and fists are for hire to anyone who asks. So, señor Lime. What is this suitcase you talk about? I have no idea. You do, so you should ask yourself why someone is so interested in it that they would kill you.
And who else knows that you have the suitcase. We didn’t know. How could we? Tómas is your friend. He came immediately when Arregui rang. They’re good patriots. In a couple of hours every trace will have disappeared. Every trace!”
It was a long speech. I believed him.
“Who says they were going to liquidate me?” I said. “They gave me a beating and got me drunk. I’ve been there before. Just a long time ago.”
He looked at me and smiled.
“The others who’ve seen them without their masks on are no longer alive to tell the tale. You are, Peter. So I’d look over my shoulder in the future. Until we get them. At some point we will. We’ll keep an eye on Arregui. Besides, he’s not afraid of anything on this earth.”
I wouldn’t bet money on that. His organisation was divided and under pressure and more or less driven underground. But, like every self-proclaimed revolutionary, he had to believe in his cause and his potential for victory in order to survive the double life he lived.
“And the fair-haired one?” I said.
“He’ll disappear. You don’t need to know.”
I finished the coffee. My body ached all over and I was tanked up like I used to get in the old days before running amok and drinking myself senseless. The alcohol also deadened both the physical and mental pain. He got up, and so did I, but I had to sit down again. It hurt too much and I was too dizzy, but I took his outstretched hand and shook it.
“It’s not us. You should be looking elsewhere. If we hear anything we’ll contact Tómas. We keep Euskadi’s soil tidy. We remember our friends,” he said.
“OK,” was all I said, and he slipped out into the early dawn, like a shadow that could exist only at night.