A Most Wanted Man by John Le Carré

Author:John Le Carré
Language: es
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2009-04-10T22:00:00+00:00

9

Assemble your facts clearly and calmly.

You’re a lawyer.

You may be an outraged woman with a volcano of fury in you waiting to erupt, but it’s the lawyer, not the woman, who will speak for you.

This plonking iron lift you are riding in is conveying you upward, not downward. You know this from the feeling in your stomach, which is separate from other things you feel, such as nausea, and the aching pain of violation.

You are therefore about to be delivered to an upper floor and not a cellar, for which you are cautiously grateful.

This lift does not stop at intermediate floors. It has no controls, no mirrors, no window. It smells of diesel oil and field. It is a cattle lift. It smells of your school playing field in autumn.

Those who ride in this lift do so at the will of others. You are standing between two women who abducted you by pretending to be your friends. They were then assisted by a third woman who did not pretend to be your friend. Not one of them identified herself. Not one used any name in your hearing except your own.

Nobody, not even Issa, can describe to you what it feels like to lose your freedom but now you are beginning to learn.

You are a lawyer beginning to learn. With the black Saab ahead of them to lead the way, they had made a stately procession past church steeples and dockyards, paused correctly at red lights, indicated right and left, traversed at moderate speed avenues of comfortable villas with lighted windows, entered an industrial wasteland, negotiated ruts of iron dragon’s teeth that had lain down before them, slowed but not stopped at a guardhouse flanked by rolls of razor wire, watched the red-and-white boom rise at the instance of the Saab and arrived in a floodlit asphalt courtyard of parked cars and black-eyed office blocks on one side, and on the other an ancient riding stable that was a distant cousin of the stables on the family estate in Freiburg.

But the van didn’t stop. Selecting the darker side of the courtyard it continued, slowly and, as it seemed to Annabel, furtively, to pull up a few meters short of the stable. Releasing her hands from the locks between the seat cushions, her captors pulled her out onto the tarmac, and frog-marched her to a man-sized doorway. The man-door was opened from inside, she was bundled through it. A third, freckle-faced, younger woman with a boy’s haircut was waiting to help out. They were in a harness room without harnesses. Iron pegs and saddle racks sticking out from the walls. An old horse bucket with a regimental number stenciled on it. A low padded bench with a single blanket. A hospital basin of water. Soap. Towels. Rubber gloves.

Each woman was guarding a third of her. The freckled woman’s eyes were the same color as Annabel’s. Perhaps that was why she was the one delegated to address her. She was a woman of the south, perhaps from Baden-Württemberg, where Annabel came from, another reason.

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