THE ENGLISH WITNESS Read Free Page B

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