Javier Marias - Your Face Tomorrow 3 - Poison, Shadow and Farewell

'The time I talked to Dearlove longest was in Edinburgh,' I said, 'or, rather, I overheard him talking to an old friend of his, Genevieve Seabrook, which makes it more likely that he was telling the truth because, with her, there would be no reason for him to put on an act; anyway, it seemed to me that he wasn't involved with anyone, still less anyone desirable, that it wasn't even a possibility. He was complaining that in England he had no option now but to pay for sex. I doubt he could have been a serious threat to anyone, certainly not to anyone requiring the protection of the Secret Service. I had the impression that he was a man in decline, but eager to disguise that decline. In fact, he could already see himself disappearing, not so much from the world, but from people's memories. That worried him a lot, made him feel embittered and anxious.'

'As I said, it's highly unlikely that the State would have acted against him in this way. I'm more inclined to think it was a personal act of revenge by Tupra, some unfinished business-after all, they used to see each other socially quite a lot-unless Tupra did it as a favor to someone else. Or maybe it wasn't a favor at all, we shouldn't dismiss the idea of a contract.'

'You mean somebody paid to have it done?'

'Yes, why not, like I said before, this man Dearlove might to all intents and purposes be on the way out, but from what one hears, during his lifetime, he must have been with dozens of minors of both sexes, doubtless with some who were, in their day, desirable, to use your expression, either physically or socially or because of their family connections. Many of them will be adults now, some might be in possession of their own fortunes and would therefore have more than enough money to pay for such a contract killing. Then there are fathers and brothers too. I don't know, maybe Dick Dearlove ruined the life of Tupra's younger brother or sister. Perhaps he corrupted Tupra himself And she laughed at the idea.

'Is that possible, do you think? Tupra can't be many years his junior. And does Tupra have brothers and sisters?'

Young Pérez Nuix laughed again, this time at my naivete or my literal-mindedness.

'No, of course not, I'm sure no one could ever have corrupted Bertie or done anything to him that he didn't want done. To be perfectly honest, I find it hard to believe that he was ever innocent and malleable. Besides, as I'm sure you realize, I was being ironic. I've no idea if Tupra has siblings or not, I've never heard him say a word about his family or his origins, I don't even know where his name comes from.'-'Peter didn't know either,' I thought, 'although he made fun of it.'-'No one knows much about him. It's as if he'd sprung into being by spontaneous generation.' Pérez Nuix had gone back to calling him Bertie and, in doing so, had adopted a slightly evocative tone, without realizing, without intending to; I wondered just what had gone on between them. However, she immediately returned to the matter in hand. 'What I'm trying to say is that the possibilities are at once limitless and secondary, so there's no point delving into it.' Again I noticed that faintly commiserative look and again I felt that it perhaps saddened her to see me going through a process she had already been through herself. It might also be that the subject bored her, even annoyed her. 'Who cares anyway, Jaime. It's none of your business. Even what happened is none of your business, although at the moment you think it is. Well, it isn't. You've got to get used to that fact. It won't happen often, but I suppose it's the first time it has since you joined. It might never happen again. But you have to get used to it, just in case, simply because of those possible exceptions. If not, you won't be able to continue in the job.'

'I don't think I am going to continue,' I said.

Young Pérez Nuix looked surprised, but my feeling was that she was only pretending, as if she thought that not affecting surprise would be rude and show a certain disdain for me. According to Tupra, she was the best, she would know me well, perhaps better than I did, especially since I wasn't interested and had given up trying understand myself-what was the point? ('No one can know you better than you do yourself, and yet no one can know himself so well that he can be sure how he will behave tomorrow,' that, I thought or remembered, is what St. Augustine had said.) Yes, she was pretending, a little:

'Really? When did you decide that, while you were in Madrid or since you got back? Are you sure?'

'I'm almost sure,' I said. 'But I want to talk to Tupra first. He's not in London today'

'And all because of this Dearlove business? And what are you going to say to Tupra? What are you going to ask him: why it happened? That's his affair or possibly someone else's, but he'll never tell you. Sometimes even he doesn't know why; he gets an order, carries it out unquestioningly and that's that.' She looked at her glass. I raised a cigarette to my lips in the hope that she would continue talking, I would pretend ignorance of the hotel's no-smoking rule until someone protested. 'It's your decision,

Jaime, but it does seem a little over the top to me. As Bertie always says, it's the way of the world. Let things settle in your mind. Wait until it's sunk in that you have nothing to do with what happened to Dearlove and the Bulgarian boy. Ideas float, nothing is so easily transmitted. As soon as you put it into words, that idea was no longer yours, it was simply out there. And all ideas have the potential to infect others. Just wait a little, and one day you'll see I was right.'

'That isn't the only reason,' I told her. 'But it's definitely a contributing factor. I don't think I decided here or in Madrid, but in full flight, on the plane.'

'A man of firm principles, eh?' And her voice took on a slightly sarcastic edge, then immediately became more serious. 'They're not really so very firm, Jaime. No one who works in this field can afford to be that principled. You may be valiantly buckling on your principles now, but that's a different matter.' She sometimes used rather literary turns of phrase- 'con denuedo,' 'valiantly'-due to her inevitably bookish rather than real-life knowledge of Spanish. 'I'm not criticizing you; it helps, it has its merits, we should all do it more often. But what you put on can always be taken off again.'

I remembered what Tupra had asked me the first time I was called on to interpret someone (the day when he had first urged me: 'Say anything, whatever comes into your head, go on'), when he asked me to stay behind in his office for a moment so that I could give him my opinion on General or Colonel or Corporal Bonanza or whatever he was, from Venezuela: 'Allow me to ask you a question: up to what point would you be capable of leaving aside your principles? I mean up to what point do you usually do so? That is, disregard it, the theory I mean?' he had asked me. And he had added: 'It's something we all do now and then; we couldn't live otherwise, whether out of convenience, fear or need. Or out of a sense of sacrifice or generosity. Out of love, out of hate. To what extent do you?' And I had responded: 'It depends on the reason. I can leave them aside almost entirely if it's in the interests of conversation, less so if I'm called on to make a judgment. Still less if I'm judging friends, because then I'm partial. When it comes to taking action, hardly at all.' I had answered almost without thinking. When it came down to it, what did I know and what do I know? Perhaps Pérez Nuix was right in a way, and I was merely buckling on my principles or deciding not to set them to one side. However, she was not right about the last thing she had said: not everything that one puts on can be taken off.

'Not everything and not always either,' I said. 'You can't just take off a tattoo, for example. And there are some obligations that can't simply be unbuckled and discarded. That's why some are so difficult to buckle on in the first place and why others must be very firmly buckled on, so that there can be no turning back.'