THE ENGLISH WITNESS (2 page)

“There are few coincidences in politics, Jack.
May I call you that? And in Basque politics there are none. Nothing is ever
forgotten. Nothing is ever forgiven. But it’s a very private war, Jack—a very claustrophobic,
incestuous war. And I don’t know how the hell you managed to get sucked in. How
did it happen?”

“It all started with a guy named Txako. We
smuggled him across the border and then somehow the secret police got onto us,
or at least onto me, at least I think it was the secret police, I don’t see who
else it could have been. And there was a guy named…hang on, it’s on the tip of
my tongue. Anyway, he...”

“Slow down, Jack,” interrupted the
detective. “You’ve lost me already. We need to start at the beginning, and you
need to explain who people are as you go along. Above we’re going to need a
record. I’ve got a little digital recorder that I’m going to set running while
we talk, and in due course Julio will condense it down into a formal witness statement
for you to sign. He has a gift for interviewing witnesses and a rather elegant
way with words. I’ll be setting the agenda, but I think you’ll find him very
skilful at drawing out half-remembered details and helping you sort them into
their correct sequence.”

“Hang on,” said Jack as Miguel reached for
the record button, “don’t you need to read me my rights or something?”

“You’ve been watching too much
television,” answered Miguel with a smile. “You’re not under arrest. You’re not
even a suspect—just a guest freely helping us with our enquiries.” He pressed the
red button on a small, silver recording device. Then, having recited some legal
details including the date, time and names of those present, he sat back and
nodded at the Englishman to proceed.

The early results were not encouraging. For half an hour they were
swamped with vague reminiscences: a nostalgic catalogue of bars, bar-crawls, reckless
exploits and long-lost friends. From time to time Jack’s sprawling monologue
would seem to be heading in the direction of something darker and more
disturbing, but then his eyes would glaze over for a few moments before he seized
once again at some trivial detail of a life given over to innocent fun.

Visibly frustrated, Miguel called a halt,
switched off the recorder and ushered Julio out of the room. The younger man
pulled the door closed and waited in the apartment’s spacious hallway while the
detective took a comfort break. Then they slipped into a spare bedroom that was
mainly given over to storage, confident that two closed doors would enable to
them talk out of Jack’s earshot.

“This is hopeless,” began Miguel gloomily.
“There’s a real mental block there, you can hear it.”

“It is going to be a long haul,” admitted
Julio. “I think we can get there in time. That is if we have enough time.”

“Time is the killer. We have a few days,
but we don’t have time to let him ramble on in the hope that he might eventually
give us something relevant. And I’ve no idea what questions to ask or how to
ask them. He’s badly damaged, that’s all too clear. And if we ask the wrong
questions, or even the right questions the wrong way, I think we could end up
implanting false memories that will make it impossible ever to get what we need
from him.”

“Would you like me to try?” offered Julio.
“With all due respect, I sense he has his guard up with you. I accept that
there’s a protocol issue here, but if you’re agreeable I can try to steer his
recollections gently down the avenues we can both see he’s trying to steer
clear of.”

“I guess it’s worth trying,” replied
Miguel rather curtly. “We’re certainly not getting anywhere at the moment.”

“Very well. But with respect it means
being gentle with him. He’s not going to confront his anxieties unless he feels
safe and secure. That doesn’t mean we can’t play the nice-cop-nasty-cop game if
we really have to. But if we go down that route, it needs a light touch. And we
need to switch roles from time to time, or it could easily turn into a one-to-one
with Mr. Nasty Cop out in the cold.”

Miguel face was as dark as thunder as they
headed back to the living room, but as the interview resumed they seemed
immediately to make more progress. Jack’s explanations were still oblique,
hesitant and disjointed, but a part of him seemed actually to enjoy flirting
with the darkness he so clearly carried within. As the red light blinked tirelessly
on the recorder, the first hints of an ordered narrative began to emerge.

For Jack it was to be a long drawn-out and
harrowing ordeal. But much later, with the aid of the little recording device, his
fragmented oral account would be edited into a reasonably coherent story.        

JAMES

(Spring
through Autumn, 1973)

I remember the beginnings clearly enough. I
came to San Sebastián in April 1973 with
a group of around two dozen language students from a university in the north of
England. I was James then, or Jimmy to my friends: a stocky twenty-year-old
with a massive IQ but somewhat limited social skills.

Where we came from – a tiny inner-city campus
surrounded by sprawling post-industrial wasteland – it had been cold and wet for
ten months of every year. Down here it was so different. There were plenty of
warm, sunny days even in early spring. We had the run of a beautiful, welcoming
city with fine beaches and a stunning, rugged backdrop. Food and drink cost barely
a tenth of what we were used to. In short, we were in heaven. There was college
to attend during the mornings, but after lunch we had the lovely beach almost
to ourselves. We spent the weekends exploring and night after night on endless
bar crawls. And in the process, we made dozens of new friends.

Of all those exciting new acquaintances, our
favourite was a moody but funny guy in his early twenties named Txako. Frowned
on by the authorities and his peer-group alike for his long hair and hippy clothes,
he looked like one of us and quickly became a close friend.

One day in late spring Txako went missing.
A few of us had arranged to meet up with him and some other local kids for
beach football after college. He didn’t show up, the game went ahead without
him, and afterwards we drifted into the Old Quarter for a late lunch.

One by one, after potato omelette
sandwiches and a couple of glasses of red wine, people began to drift away.
Soon I was left with just two companions: a lovely girl of Italian parentage called
Gina, and a tall, dark chick-magnet named Steve. In hindsight they were
probably waiting for me to leave as well, but after a couple more rounds Steve
suggested that we pay Txako a visit.

We’d never asked our friend about his
freedom to join us on the beach when others of his age were at work, and he’d never
opened up about himself or his home life. But Steve had once walked back with
him after a bar-crawl to an address in the drab residential district of Gros, and
thought he could find the right block if not the actual apartment.

The three of us turned up at the block
that Steve remembered as Txako’s around mid-afternoon. At that point, we realised
to our own surprise that we had no idea of his surname. We hovered there in the
foyer for several minutes, and we were just scanning the nameplates on the
mailboxes when the warped front door squealed again and a white-haired old man
hobbled in. “
Buenas tardes
,” said Steve, his speech still mildly slurred
from lunchtime. “We’re looking for a friend named Txako. Do you have any idea
where he might live?”

“
Buenas
,” replied the man. “Txako?
Sorry, means nothing.” But then he paused. “Unless that’s what young Santiago
calls himself these days. Pretty boy in number eight. You can try his door but
I haven’t seen him for a couple of days.”

We waited patiently for the old man to
climb the narrow, dusty staircase, and at last we heard a door slam somewhere
up inside the building. Then we made our own way up three flights to flat
number eight, where Steve rang the bell. There was no answer. We rang again at
least three times, and then Steve called aloud, “Come on, Txako, where the hell
are you?”

There was no response for a moment, then we
heard a door being unlocked at the far end of the landing. It opened a crack,
and a voice whispered in English, “Thees way, queeckly.”

The door swung open a little further, and
we stepped through one by one into a completely empty apartment—no furniture,
no rugs, not even light bulbs. Through an open doorway in one of the rooms we
could see a pile of blankets and clothes. It was cold, and Txako was wearing an
outdoor coat. He looked tired, scared and unwell.

As we pieced the story together, it
emerged that he was involved with one of the region’s countless Basque separatist
cells. His father had disappeared following a police raid while Txako was still
at school. Now, barely out of his teens, he was getting paid by one of his
father’s old associates to run errands. His mother led a complicated life that left
him free to come and go as he liked.

The previous afternoon, Txako and two other
aspiring urban guerrillas had staged a pathetic raid on a bank out near the
docks. We’d heard a politically spun version of events on the evening news. Armed
with nothing more than sticks and a cheap replica pistol, they’d thought they
could relieve the bank of some cash for the separatist cause without anyone
getting hurt.

It had never occurred to them that the police
would have no such scruples. Only Txako had escaped. One of his associates was
dead, and our friend was certain that the police would beat his name out of the
other. In desperation, he’d clambered between balconies and forced his way into
the empty neighbouring apartment. Only once inside had he found a key to the
front door.

Later on there would be no shortage of
people calling what we did heroic, but to be a hero you have to understand the
danger. We were simply reckless. I came up with a plan that the others liked, and
we had a whip-round for cash. Gina went shopping and came back with a shaving
kit, scissors and a pair of swimming trunks. Txako shaved for what must have
been the first time in months, and Gina cut off some of the long hair that along
with the beard had made him so instantly recognisable. And Steve donated a bright
red Manchester United tee-shirt that he’d been wearing under a baggy open-necked
shirt.

The makeover and the swimming trunks were my
idea of a double bluff. The Civil Guard were notoriously intolerant of improper
dress but under orders not to harm the all-important tourist trade. We calculated
that if we could make Txako look enough like a foreign student, they’d look the
other way. And it nearly worked. We passed a civil guardsman without being
stopped; he shook his head in disapproval as we strolled past in the direction
of the beach, but then turned his back and walked away. We were just debating
whether to head straight to the railway station, which was our real objective,
when we heard a shout from behind us.

“Halt!” the voice bellowed, and Txako
flinched. “Keep going. Don’t look round,” urged Steve, but when a whistle
started blowing we turned to see a military policeman glaring at us. Officially
his jurisdiction would have been limited to off-duty soldiers from the nearby barracks,
but I guess bullying foreign kids was his idea of fun.

“Where do you think you’re going, dressed
like a whore?” shouted the soldier. Gina flinched, but the question had been
addressed to Txako with his subversively bare legs. He made a brave attempt to
speak Spanish like a foreigner, stammering that he no understand, he tourist,
he no speak Spanish. Then in a stroke of genius, seeing Txako start to panic,
Gina interrupted him: “My friend does not speak very good Spanish,” she purred
with her flawless accent. “What is the problem,
Señor Soldado
?”

For a moment I thought she might have
defused the situation, but the soldier’s mean streak ran deep. “He’s not
properly dressed. It’s disgusting—an insult to everybody.”

“We’re just on our way to the beach,”
explained Gina,

“You are not at the beach now. Tell your
friend to cover himself up properly.”

Gina cleverly took the time to translate
this into English, ostensibly for Txako’s benefit. Then she turned back to the
soldier and explained that our friend did not have any other clothes with him.

“That’s his problem,” replied the man with
a smirk. Then the smirk turned to a wide leer. “You’d all better come down to
the barracks, and we’ll give you some lessons in how to dress.”

“This is bad,” muttered Steve. “When I say
run, run.”

I’d been looking the soldier up and down.
He was wearing a sidearm, but I doubted he’d fire it in the street over a pair
of swimming trunks. And tough as he was, he wasn’t built for speed. I nodded at
Steve. The soldier noted this and began shouting again. “Run!” yelled Steve in
his face.

We sprinted down the street half-expecting
to be shot at, but all we heard was the whistle blowing furiously behind us.
Knowing that any civil guardsmen nearby would hear the whistle and that running
would attract their attention, we returned to a normal walk as soon as were out
of his line of sight.

“Brilliant, Steve,” I said when we had got
our breath back, “but we need to split up. If he reports us they’ll be looking
for three blokes and a girl. What say we meet at the station in an hour?”