All That Followed (24 page)

I picked up the photo and held it on my lap. The photograph was of a young man, perhaps in his midtwenties. He had light-brown hair, sun-streaked to blond in places. He had the set jaw and thick neck of a natural athlete, dark eyes, a handsome face.

“No,” I said. “I’ve never seen this man before.”

“His name is Gorka Auzmendi,” Castro said.

“Auzmendi,” my mother said. “The name is familiar.”

Castro nodded.

“You might recognize the name from the newspapers,” he said. “His brother was arrested a few years ago for an attempted car bombing in Madrid. Xabi Auzmendi. And this is where your husband comes in, I’m afraid.”

I put the photo facedown on the low table between us.

“Wasn’t the bombing in Madrid—” my mother said.

“ETA,” the detective interrupted. “Yes. The Auzmendis are associated with ETA-militar, without a doubt. But it seems that Gorka Auzmendi planned Jos
é
Antonio’s kidnapping without the knowledge of ETA’s leadership.”

“And these men?” my mother said, holding up the photographs remaining on the table.

“Mariana, do you recognize anyone here?” Castro asked.

The first photograph was of a boy who couldn’t have been more than eighteen—he had black hair that was cut short except for a long churro hanging from behind his left ear. The photograph was taken at a bar that looked familiar, the boy leaning back against a white plaster wall holding a glass of
kalimotxo
. I shook my head.

“You’re sure?” the detective said.

“Yes.”

“He’s a student at the public school here in Muriga,” he said. “Dani Garamendi.”

“He’s a student?” my mother asked.

“Yes. We believe that at least three of them were recruited by Auzmendi for the kidnapping. Their parents tell us that they haven’t been seen since early this morning.”

I set the photograph facedown on top of the photo of Gorka Auzmendi, then looked down at the next photograph. It was of another young man, this time with neatly cut black hair parted on the side and dark, serious eyes. He wore the light-blue button-down and dark blazer of the private school on the hill, Colegio San Jorge. A jolt came through me, one of panic and of pain, as I realized it was the boy I had seen on the beach a week earlier. I had removed my swimsuit top for him. I touched myself for him. I lurched forward as if I were going to be sick.

“Do you recognize him?” the detective asked. I felt my mother watching me.

“No,” I shook my head. “No. I’ve seen him before, around town. But I don’t know who he is.”

I picked up the remaining two photographs and flipped through them quickly.

“I don’t know any of them,” I said. I felt my voice raising. From the back bedroom, I heard Elena calling for me. “Why are you asking me about these people if you already know who they are? If you know they have my husband?”

44. JONI

Two days after the arrest of Iker Abarzuza, Asier D
í
az, and Gorka Auzmendi, a shrimping boat spotted the body of Jos
é
Antonio a half hour’s walk north of Muriga.
El Diario Vasco
’s account stated only that the body had been recovered with gunshot wounds to the back of the head and the upper torso, but rumors began to circulate that the body had been picked apart by fish and scavenging birds, that his hands had been bound behind his back with electrical tape and laundry line, that his suit had been torn almost entirely from his body by the tide.

Small towns thrive on gossip, and Muriga is no different. In my fifty years here, I’ve continually been struck by the reserve with which gossip had been passed in Muriga, the strict privacy allotted to rumor. But in the immediate wake of Jos
é
Antonio’s kidnapping, Muriga seemed to collectively agree to unseal any information about anyone involved. Men like Santi Etxeberria, who had cursed at the campaign posters Jos
é
Antonio had hung the week before his death, now remembered him as an ambitious young man—perhaps a little out of line with Muriga politically but hardworking and agreeable.

Conversely, Asier and Iker were remembered as more isolated, more mentally unstable, more radicalized than I knew they had really been. Over the course of a few days, they came to be known not as Asier and Iker but as D
í
az and Abarzuza. Not as “the two boys” but as
bi gizonak
. The two men.

And in this way, almost simultaneous with the discovery of the body, Muriga began to construct its mythology. It began to tell, then revise and retell the story, each version spinning another protective layer around the town until any culpability on the part of its residents had been enveloped entirely by this narrative cocoon.

When I arrived at Mariana’s apartment the afternoon after Jos
é
Antonio’s disappearance, her mother, Carmen, answered the door. She held Elena on her hip in an old and weary way that reminded me of the work-worn women in the smallest villages of the Basque Country. Two police officers sat on the sofa in the living room, reading Jos
é
Antonio’s sports magazines. I nodded to them, then followed Mariana’s mother into the kitchen.

Mariana barely seemed to register my arrival. She sat hunched in a chair next to the tile counter, her right arm pulled tight across her stomach as if she had just been struck.

“This stress is too much for her,” Carmen said quietly.

I sat at the small table in the corner of the room. The tabletop was covered with empty coffee cups, piles of papers from Jos
é
Antonio’s Party office in Bilbao, pencils with the imprints of teeth marks breaking through the yellow paint just below the erasers.

“Do you want anything, Joni?” Carmen asked. “Coffee? Tea?”

“Thanks,” I said, shaking my head no.

At the sound of our voices Mariana straightened herself in her chair, pushed a hand through the dark thickness of her hair as if to try to make herself more presentable.

“You’ve heard the rumors, I suppose,” she said. “About me and the American.”

I looked uncomfortably at Carmen, who hiked the girl higher on her hip. The police had confirmed the affair between Mariana and the American that morning, I’d learned. Maite Tamayo, the neighbor across the hall, told the detective that she had seen Duarte enter the Torres apartment several times, and (not that she was listening, but…) she had heard what could only be described as obscene noises coming through the walls when he was there. The rumor spread quickly from there. Soon after, Goikoetxea called to tell me that the police had taken Robert to the station in Bilbao for questioning, two officers and a young balding detective escorting him out.

“It’s all right,” Mariana said, nodding toward her mother. “She was the one who told me the rumor was out.”

“Yes,” I said. I watched her carefully, trying to figure out if Castro had told her about our meeting the night before. “Goikoetxea told me that they are questioning him now. I think it’s the same detective, Castro.”

She didn’t seem surprised by this, nor did she seem to suspect my involvement. She appeared resigned to the chaos that had swept into her life, the missing husband, the police officers waiting in her living room.

“It’s true, of course,” she said. “About the American. But he doesn’t have anything to do with Jos
é
Antonio.”

Her confirmation of the affair wasn’t surprising. But I began to wonder if it was possible that the American did have something to do with Jos
é
Antonio’s disappearance. It didn’t seem likely that he would have the sort of connections required to carry out the kidnapping. But then again, he had mentioned family in Nabarniz, and I recalled the walk to the pelota match, when Robert had told me the story of his grandfather kept captive during the war.

“You’re sure?” I asked. “How well do you know him?”

“It’s true,” Carmen said. “You don’t even know this man. You know nothing about him.”

The girl fussed in her grandmother’s arms, and Mariana shook her head.

“Can you take her out for a bit?” she said. She took one of the yellow pencils and placed the eraser in her mouth, biting gently into the chipped wood. “It’s time for her nap, anyway.”

Carmen carried the girl down the hallway toward the bedroom, the afternoon sun flashing off a hanging mirror.

“You know it doesn’t have anything to do with him,” Mariana said.

“He hates Jos
é
Antonio,” I said. “Or at least, he hates what he stands for.”

“To be honest, it was the first thing that occurred to me,” she said. “When I heard the news, he was the first one I called. But even before I spoke to him, I knew that he wasn’t involved.”

“How could you be certain?” I asked.

She shrugged her shoulders, the corners of her mouth lifting into an odd smile. The pencil bobbed up and down like an unlit cigarette.

“Because he doesn’t love me,” she said simply.

45. IKER

After Gorka and I were arrested at the French border in Hendaye we were interrogated separately by the Spanish police for two days. Within the first few hours I had told the young detective, Castro, everything that had happened. They had arrested Daniel and Asier at a roadblock the morning before—this much Gorka had already told me. Dani had spilled everything to them, Castro said. When Castro told me that Dani had admitted to burning the bus in Bermeo and that the rifle I had guarded the Councilman with had been taken from Asier’s father’s closet, I knew that he had confessed, and so I began to talk. Gorka had been more resilient; it wasn’t until the second day of interrogation that he admitted his role in shooting the Councilman.

During the fourth day of the trial the
fiscal
handed a transcript of my interview with Detective Castro to the judge before asking a judicial assistant to play the audiotape. There was static, followed by Castro reading the date of the interview into the recorder, and then the courtroom was filled with a voice both familiar and foreign. The courtroom watched me as my voice came through the monitors.

We covered his eyes with an old beach towel
, my voice said.

Who?
asked the voice of the detective.
Who put the towel over his head?

Gorka
, my voice answered.
Gorka covered his head. He was squirming, trying to make noise. Gorka hit him once through the towel. I was the one who put the clothesline around his hands.

In the recording, I recalled how Asier and I had spent the night with the Councilman in the bunker as Gorka and Dani drove to Bermeo and made calls to the Ertztainza headquarters in Bilbao as well as to the offices of the newspapers
El Diario Vasco
,
El Pa
í
s
,
Egunkaria
, and
El Mundo
, demanding the release of five political prisoners, including Gorka’s brother, Xabi Auzmendi. The recording ended with my voice telling the courtroom about the morning when I had been left alone to guard the Councilman—how after he was dead, we had pushed the body over the edge of the cliffs and down into the sea. But the recording captured just a series of facts, of events. It was incomplete. Everything important had happened in between.

*   *   *

THE MIGRAINE
had just begun to pass when I heard my name being shouted from the trail. I had pulled my shirt over my head to escape the sunlight, the rifle on the ground next to me. I pushed my head through the shirt and squinted against the landscape; there was a scraping noise coming from behind me in the bunker, and I struggled up to my feet.

“There he is!” I heard Gorka yell across the pasture, and when I turned I could make out the Councilman’s dark silhouette running from the bunker, his hands still bound behind his back, taking off toward the cliffs. I picked up the rifle and stumbled after him, closing my eyes against the whiteness of the morning sun, running blind for a few steps.

Gorka overtook me in less than a hundred meters, cutting powerfully through the grass like a shark through the dark waters of the harbor below. As he passed to my left, he reached behind his back to pull a revolver from the waistband of his pants. There was only forty meters separating Gorka from the Councilman when I saw the Councilman trip over the eroded wall of another bunker. His body pitched awkwardly into the grass beyond, unable to catch himself with his hands still bound behind his back.

I knew the chase was over. I held on to the rifle as a crutch and closed my eyes tight again. The pain radiated around the left side of my head, into my neck and jaw. I listened, waiting for Gorka to drag the Councilman back to the bunker, waiting to hear Asier approaching from the trail.

When I forced my eyes open Gorka was standing behind the Councilman, who was trying to get to his feet. Gorka yelled something at him that I couldn’t make out. The Councilman’s head moved as if he were saying something in return. Behind the two men the sun glared off the surface of the harbor, and gulls circled in the empty air. I turned back toward the bunker, wondering where Asier and Dani were, what we would do now. But I saw only the gray, crumbling walls of the bunker, the green stretch of pasture leading into the dark rows of ash and birch, and, somewhere beyond, the tall fortress walls of San Jorge.

Even now, six years away from that morning, this picture of the empty bunker and the trees comes as a flash, as I wash out the green plastic cup in the sink of our cell or as I lie awake in bed listening to the rise and fall of Andreas’s breathing in the bunk above mine. In this flash I don’t just see the abandoned building and the blowing grass but also the smoothness of Nere’s shoulder half-covered by the blanket we had carried to the beach from her father’s house. I breathe in the burnt-coffee smell of the old American professor, feel the sting of my father’s aftershave as he holds my head tight against his shoulder after the verdict is read. I hear the cries of the gulls and shorebirds and feel the salt air and watch the empty spot in the cold green water of the harbor where the Councilman disappeared, a trail of white air surfacing in his place. All of this in an instant, and then Gorka lifts the pistol to the head of the Councilman. The pistol jumps in his hand, and a moment later the sound of the shot arrives. In the seconds that follow the world seems to stop, as if to take a breath; the wind stops blowing and the sea no longer pitches against the cliffs below us. The gulls pause in midair to watch, and then the pistol jumps once more in Gorka’s hand and the world begins again.