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Coming here on such a regular basis has been a risk, but chess at Comercial is a luxury that I will not deny myself; it is three hours of old-world charm and decency, uninterrupted by regret or solitude. I know most of the men here by name, and not an evening goes by when they do not seem pleased to see me, to welcome me into their lives and friendships, the game merely an instrument in the more vital ritual of camaraderie. Still, back in 1999, I introduced myself to the secretary using a false name, so it’s necessary for me to stop Saul halfway up the stairs and explain why he cannot call me Alec.
‘Come again?’
‘All of the guys here know me as Patrick.’
‘Patrick.’
‘Just to be on the safe side.’
Saul shakes his head with bewildered, slow-motion amusement, turns, and climbs the remaining few steps. You can already hear the snap and rattle of dominoes, the rapid punch of clocks. Through the doorway opposite the landing I spot Ramón and a couple of the other, younger players who show up from time to time at the club. As if sensing me, Ramón looks up, raises his hand and smiles through a faint mist of cigarette smoke. I fetch a board, a clock and some pieces and we settle down at the back of the room, some way off from the main action. If Saul wants to talk about his marriage, or if I feel that the time is right to discuss what happened to Kate, I don’t want any of the players listening in on our conversation. One or two of them speak better English than they let on, and gossip is an industry I can ill afford.
‘You come here a lot?’ he asks, lighting yet another Camel Light.
‘Twice a week.’
‘Isn’t that a bad idea?’
‘I don’t follow.’
‘From the point of view of the spooks.’ Saul exhales and smoke explodes off the surface of the board. ‘I mean, aren’t they on the look-out for that sort of thing? Your pattern? Won’t they find you if you keep coming here?’
‘It’s a risk,’ I tell him, but the question has shaken me. How does Saul know a tradecraft term like ‘pattern’? Why didn’t he say ‘routine’ or ‘habit’?
‘But you keep a look-out for new faces?’ he says. ‘Try to keep a low profile?’
‘Something like that.’
‘And it’s the same thing in your normal life? You never trust anybody? You think death is lurking just round the corner?’
‘Well, that’s putting it a bit melodramatically, but, yes, I watch my back.’
He finishes arranging the white pieces and my hand shakes slightly as I set about black. Again the nonsensical idea arises that my friend has been turned, that the breakdown of his marriage to Heloise is just a fiction designed to win my sympathy, and that Saul has come here at the behest of Lithiby or Fortner to exercise a terrible revenge.
‘What about girlfriends?’ he asks.
‘What about them?’
‘Well, do you have one?’
‘I do OK.’
‘But how do you meet someone if you don’t trust her? What happens if a beautiful girl approaches you in a club and suggests the two of you go home together? Do you think about Katharine? Do you have to turn the woman down on the off-chance she might be working for the CIA?’
Saul’s tone here is just this side of sarcastic. I set the clock to a ten-minute game and nod at him to start.
‘There’s a basic rule,’ I reply, ‘which affects everyone I come into contact with. If a stranger walks up to me unprompted, no matter what the circumstances, I assume they’re a threat and keep them at arm’s length. But if by a normal process of introduction or flirtation or whatever I happen to get talking to somebody that I like, well then that’s OK. We might become friends.’
Saul plays pawn to e4 and hits the clock. I play e5 and we’re quickly into a Spanish Game.
‘So do you have many friends out here?’
‘More than I had in London.’
‘Who, for instance?’
Is this for Lithiby? Is this what Saul has been sent to find out?
‘Why are you asking so many questions?’
‘Jesus!’ He looks at me with sudden despair, leaning back against his seat. ‘I’m just trying to find out how you are. You’re my oldest friend. You don’t have to tell me anything if you don’t want to. You don’t have to trust me.’
There’s genuine pain, even disgust in this single word. Trust. What am I doing? How could I possibly suspect that Saul has been sent here to damage me?
‘I’m sorry,’ I tell him, ‘I’m sorry. Look, I’m just not used to conversations like this. I’m not used to people getting close. I’ve built up so many walls, you know?’
‘Sure.’ He takes my knight on c6 and offers a sympathetic smile.
‘The truth is I do have friends. A girlfriend even. She’s in her early thirties. Spanish. Very smart, very sexy.’ It wouldn’t, given the circumstances, be politic to tell Saul that Sofía is married. ‘But that’s enough for me. I’ve never needed much more.’
‘No,’ he says, as if in sorrowful agreement. With my pawn on h6, he plays bishop b2 and I castle on the king’s side. The clock sticks slightly as I push the button and both of us check that the small red timer is turning. ‘What about work?’ he asks.
‘That’s also solitary.’
For the past two years I have been employed by Endiom, a small British private bank with offices in Madrid, performing basic due diligence and trying to increase their portfolio of expat clients in Spain. The bank also offers tax-planning services and investment advice to the many Russians who have settled on the south coast. My boss, a bumptious ex-public schoolboy named Julian Church, employed me after he heard me speaking Russian to a waiter at a restaurant in Chueca. Saul knows most of this from emails and telephone conversations, but he has little knowledge of financial institutions and precious little interest in acquiring any.
‘You told me that you just drive around a lot, drumming up clients in Marbella…’
‘That’s about right. It’s mostly relationship driven.’
‘And part-time?’
‘Maybe ten days a month, but I get paid very well.’
As people grow older they tend to display an almost total indifference to their friends’ careers, and certainly Saul does not appear to be concentrating very intently on my replies. A few years back he would have wanted to know everything about the job at the bank: the car, the salary, the prospects for promotion. Now that sense of competition between us appears to have dissipated; he cares more about our game of chess. Stubbing out his cigarette he slides a pawn to c4 and nods approvingly at the move, muttering ‘here it comes, here it comes’ under his breath. The opening has been played at speed and he now looks to have a slight advantage: the centre is being squeezed up by white and there’s not much I can do except defend deep and wait for the onslaught.
‘I’ll have that,’ he says, seizing one of my pawns, and before long a network of threats has built up against my king. The clock keeps sticking and I call for time.
‘What are you doing?’ he asks, looking at my hand as though it were diseased.
‘I just need a drink,’ I tell him, balancing the timer buttons so that the mechanism stops working. ‘There’s never a waiter up here when you need one.’
‘Let’s just finish the game…’
‘…Two minutes.’
I spin round in my seat and spot Felipe serving a table of players. Behind me Saul clicks alight another cigarette and exhales his first drag with moody frustration.
‘You always do this, man,’ he mutters. ‘Always…’
‘Hang on, hang on…’
Felipe catches my eye and comes ambling over with a tray full of empty coffee cups and glasses. ‘Hola, Patrick,’ he says, slapping me on the back. Saul sniffs. I order a beer for him and a red vermouth for me and then we reset the clock.
‘Everything all right now?’
‘Everything’s fine.’
But of course it’s not. The position on the board has become hopeless, a phalanx of white rooks, bishops and pawns bearing down on my defences. I hate losing the first game; it’s the only one that really matters. For an instant I consider moving one of my pieces when Saul is not looking, but there is no way that I could get away with it without risking being caught. Besides, my days of cheating him are supposed to be over. He was always the better player. Let him win.
‘You’re resigning?’
‘Yeah,’ I tell him, laying down my king. ‘It doesn’t look good. You did well. Been playing a lot?’
‘But you could win on time,’ he says, indicating the clock. ‘That’s the whole point. It’s a speed game.’
‘Nah. You deserved it.’
Saul looks bewildered and essays a series of lopsided frowns.
‘That’s not like you,’ he says. ‘I’ve never known you to resign.’ Then, with mock seriousness, ‘Maybe you have changed, Patrick. Maybe you have become a better person.’
SIX
The Defence
Whenever I’ve thought about Saul in the last few years, the process has always begun with the same mental image: a precise memory of his face as I confessed to him the extent of my work for MI5. It was the morning of a summer’s day in Cornwall, Kate and Will not twelve hours dead, and Saul drinking coffee from a chipped blue mug. By telling him, I was placing his life in danger in order to protect my own. It was that simple: my closest friend became the guardian of everything that had happened, and the Americans could not touch me as a result. To this day I do not know what he did with the disks that I gave him, with the lists of names and contact numbers, the Caspian oil data and the sworn statement detailing my role in deceiving Katharine and Fortner. He may even have destroyed them. Perhaps he handed them immediately to Lithiby or Hawkes and then hatched a plot to destroy me. As for Kate, the grieving did not properly begin for days, and then it followed me ceaselessly, through Paris and St Petersburg, from the apartment in Milan to the first years in Madrid. The loss of first love. The guilt of my role in her death. It was the one hard fact that I could never escape. Kate and Will were the ghosts that tied me to a corrupted past.
But I remember Saul’s face at that moment. Quiet, watchful, gradually appalled. A young man of integrity, someone who knew his own mind, recognizing the limits of a friend’s morality. It was perhaps naïve to expect him to be supportive, but then spies have a habit of overestimating their persuasive skills. Instead, having tacitly offered his support, he took a long walk while I packed up the car and then left for London. It was almost four years before he contacted me again.
‘So, do you miss London?’ he asks, pulling on his coat as we swing back out through the revolving doors, heading south down Calle Fuencarral. It’s approaching ten o’clock and time to find somewhere to eat.
‘All the time,’ I reply, which is an approximation of the truth. I have come to love Madrid, to think of the city as my home, but the tug of England is nagging and constant.
‘What do you miss about it?’
I feel like Guy Burgess being interviewed in Another Country. What does he tell the journalist? I miss the cricket.
‘Everything. The weather. Mum. Having a pint with you. I miss not being allowed to be there. I miss feeling safe. It feels as though I’m living my life with the handbrake on.’
Saul scuffs his shoes on the pavement, as if to kick this sentiment away. Two men are walking hand-in-hand in front of us and we skirt round them. It is becoming difficult to move. I know a good seafood restaurant within three blocks–the Ribeira do Miño–a cheap and atmospheric Galician marisquería where the owner will slap me on the back and make me look good in front of Saul. I suggest we eat there and get away from the crowds and within a few minutes we have turned down Calle de Santa Brígida and settled at a table at the back of the restaurant. I take a seat facing out into the room, as I always do, in order to keep an eye on who comes in and out.
‘They know you here?’ he asks, lighting a cigarette. The manager wasn’t around when we came in, but one of the waiters recognized me and produced an acrobatic nod.
‘A little bit,’ I tell him.
‘Gets busy.’
‘It’s the weekend.’
Resting his cigarette in an ashtray, Saul unfolds the napkin on his plate and tears off a slice of bread from a basket on the table. Crumbs fall on the cloth as he dips it into a small metal bowl filled with factory mayonnaise. Every table in the place is filled to capacity and an elderly couple are sitting directly beside us, tackling a platter of crab. The husband, who has a lined face and precisely combed hair, occasionally cracks into a chunky claw and sucks noisily on the flesh and the shells. There’s a smell of garlic and fish and I think Saul likes it here. Using his menu Spanish he orders a bottle of house wine and shapes himself for a serious conversation.
‘Out on the street, when you said you missed not being allowed to go home, what did you mean by that?’
‘Just what I said. That it’s not possible for me to go back to England. It’s not safe.’
‘According to who?’
‘According to the British government.’
‘You mean you’ve been threatened with arrest?’
‘Not in so many words.’
‘But they’ve taken your passport away?’
‘I have several passports.’
The majority of madrileños do not speak English, so I am not too concerned about the couple sitting beside us who appear to be lost in an animated conversation about their grandchildren. But I am naturally averse to discussing my predicament, particularly in such a public place. Saul rips off another chunk of bread and inhales on his cigarette. ‘So what exactly’s the problem?’
He may be looking for a fight.
‘The problem?’
The waiter comes back. Slapping down a bottle of unlabelled white wine, he asks if we’re ready to order and then spins away when I ask for more time. It is suddenly hot at our table and I take off my sweater, watching Saul as he pours out two glasses.
‘The problem is straightforward.’ It is suddenly difficult to articulate, to defend, one of my deepest convictions. ‘I worked for the British government in a highly secret operation designed to embarrass and undermine the Yanks. I was caught and I was fired. I threatened to spill the beans to the press and told two of my closest friends about it. In the corridors of Thames House and Vauxhall Cross, I’m not exactly Man of the Year.’
‘You think they still care?’
The question is like a slap in the face. I pretend to ignore it but Saul looks pleased with himself, as if he knows he has landed a blow. Why the hostility? Why the cynicism? Short of something to say, I pick up the menu and decide, more or less at random, what both of us are going to eat. I don’t consult Saul about this and gesture at the waiter with a wave of my hand. He comes over immediately and flicks open a pad.
‘Sí. Queremos pedir pimientos de padrón, una ración de jamón ibérico, ensalada mixta para dos y el plato de gambas y cangrejos. Vale?’
‘Vale.’
‘And don’t forget the chips,’ Saul says, the sarcasm drifting away.
‘Look.’ Suddenly the absurdity of my situation in a stranger’s eyes has become worryingly clear. I need to get this right. ‘We’re America’s only friend in the world, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health. They do what they like, we do what they tell us. It’s a one-way friendship which nevertheless needs to look rock solid or Europe will be singing the “Marseillaise”. So having somebody like me at large is potentially a huge embarrassment.’
Saul actually smirks. ‘You don’t think you’re slightly overestimating your importance?’
It’s pure goading, poking around for a reaction. Don’t rise to it. Don’t bite.
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning things have moved on since 1997, mate. Men have flown large planes into very tall buildings. The CIA is looking for anthrax in downtown Baghdad. They’re not worrying about whether Alec Milius is getting cleared through customs at Gatwick airport. We’re days away from invading Iraq, for Christ’s sake. You think your average MI5 officer is concerned about a tiny operation that went wrong five years ago? You don’t think he’s got other things on his mind?’
I drain my glass and refill it without saying a word. Saul breathes a funnel of smoke at a fishing net tacked erratically to the wall and I am on the point of losing my temper.
