the wrong man and news of that reaches me, even Miguel mentions poor Pablo’s misfortune, never suspecting that it could have had anything to do with the favour he’d asked of me, never connecting the two things, never imagining that I might be behind it, or if he did, he concealed the fact very well, that’s something I’ll never know.’ – I realized that I was getting lost (what favour? connecting what two things? concealing what?), but he continued as if he had suddenly got a second wind and didn’t give me a chance to interrupt. – ‘That idiot Ruibérriz doesn’t trust the other man after that, and because I pay him well and he owes me various favours, he takes over and goes to see the gorrilla himself, just to make sure that Canella doesn’t make the same mistake again and end up stabbing poor Pablo the chauffeur to death, thus ruining all our plans, he visits him cautiously, in secret, and it’s true that there’s never anyone hanging around in the street at night, but it means that the gorrilla sees him in that leather coat of his, I really hope he’s thrown them all away by now. So, yes, I hear, for example, about that particular incident, but to me, it’s just a story recounted to me in the safety of my own home, I don’t move from here, I never go to that street, I don’t soil myself in any way, and so I feel that none of what happens is wholly my responsibility or my work, they are simply remote events. Don’t be so surprised, others go still further: there are those who order somebody’s removal and don’t even want to know about the actual process, the steps taken, the “how”. They trust that in the end some minion will come and tell them that the person is dead. He was the victim of an accident, they say, or of medical negligence, or he threw himself off a balcony or was run over or he got mugged one night and, unfortunately, fought back and was killed by his attackers. And yet, strange though it may seem, the same person who ordered that death, without specifying how or when, can exclaim with relative sincerity or a certain degree of surprise: “Oh dear God, how dreadful!” almost as if he’d had nothing to do with it and fate had conspired to carry out his desires. That’s what I tried to do, to keep as far away from it all as possible, even though I had, in part, planned the “how”: Ruibérriz found out about the big drama in the beggar’s life, the thing that really angered and affronted him, and whether he found this out by chance or not, I don’t know, but, one day, he came to me with this story about how the guy’s daughters had been forced or tricked into prostitution, Ruibérriz’s into all kinds of things and has contacts in every social sphere, and so the plan was mine or, rather, ours. Nevertheless, I kept my distance, kept right out of it: there was Ruibérriz, along with that third party, his friend, and, above all, there was Canella, who would not only decide when to act, he could also decide to do nothing, so really it was completely out of my hands. So much is delegated, so much is left for others to do, so much is left to chance, there’s so much distance between instigator and act, that it’s easy enough to tell yourself, once it’s happened: “What have I got to do with that, with what some homeless nutter has done at an hour and in a street everyone assumes to be safe? He was obviously a public danger, a menace, he shouldn’t have been on the loose, especially not after Pablo was attacked. It’s all the fault of the authorities who refuse to take action, that and sheer bad luck, of which there’s never any shortage in the world.”’
Díaz-Varela got up, took a turn about the room, then again came up behind me, put both hands on my shoulders and squeezed them gently, but not in the way he had gripped my shoulder two weeks before, when he and I were both standing up, that hand, then, had been intent on keeping me there, like a great slab of stone. I wasn’t afraid this time, it felt like an affectionate gesture, and his tone of voice was different too. It