Read When I Was Mortal for Free Online Page B

and place a bet, you go ahead and then come back for the race. I’ll stay here with the binoculars, just in case anything should happen.”
    “I’ll just nip down and place my bet. I don’t need to see the horses.”
    He gave me ten thousand pesetas for the first two past the post, another five thousand for a winner, I went down to place my bets, I was only gone a matter of moments, the queue hadn’t started yet. When I got back to the stand, the bodyguard was still sitting with his head down, he didn’t seem particularly alert. He was stroking his sideburns, absorbed in thought.
    “Has he arrived yet?” I asked, just to say something.
    “No, not yet,” he replied raising first his eyes and then the binoculars to the grandstand. It had become an almost mechanical gesture. “I might not have to do it after all.”
    The man still seemed depressed, he had suddenly lost all his bonhomie, as if a cloud were hanging over him. He no longerchatted to me or paid me any attention. I felt tempted to say that I would prefer to see that race by the track, where I could manage perfectly well without binoculars, and leave him to himself. But I feared for his job. He was sunk in thought, and not at all vigilant, just when he needed to be.
    “Are you sure you’re all right?” I said, and then, more than anything in order to remind him of the imminence of his task. “If you’re not feeling well, do you want me to watch for you? If you tell me who your boss is …”
    “There’s nothing to watch,” he replied. “I know what’s going to happen this afternoon. It may have happened already.”
    “What?”
    “Look, you don’t get fond of someone who pays you to protect them. Like I said, my boss doesn’t even know I exist, he barely knows my name, I’ve been as invisible as air to him for the last two years, and from time to time he’s bawled me out because I was over-zealous. He gives orders and I carry them out, he tells me when and where he wants me and I go there, at the time and place indicated, that’s all. I take care that nothing happens to him, but I don’t feel fond of him. On more than one occasion, I’ve even thought of attacking him myself just to ease the tension and make myself feel necessary, to create the danger myself. Nothing serious, just rough him up a bit in the garage, do a bit of play-acting, hide somewhere and pass myself off as a mugger in my spare time. Give him a fright. I never imagined that the day would come when we’d have to knock him off for real.”
    “Knock him off? And who’s we?”
    “My colleague and me. Well, either him or me. He might have managed to do it already; I hope so. If he has, the boss won’t appear for this race either, he won’t even have left the house and he’ll be lying on the carpet, or stuffed in the boot of the car. But if he does come, you see, it will mean that my colleaguedidn’t manage to do it, and then I’ll have to, on the way back from the race course, in the car itself, while my colleague does the driving. With a length of rope, or a single shot once we’re off the road. I really hope they don’t come, I don’t much like him, but the idea of having to kill him myself … It makes me feel ill.”
    I thought he was joking, but until that moment he hadn’t seemed like a man much given to jokes, he’d seemed almost incapable of them, that’s why – I thought fleetingly – he had laughed so much when I made that one rather unfunny remark. People who don’t know how to make jokes are so surprised and grateful when others do.
    “I’m not sure I understand,” I said.
    He kept rubbing furiously at his sideburns. He looked at me out of the corner of his eye and remained staring at me like that.
    “Of course you do, I explained it perfectly clearly. Like I said, I don’t much like him, but I’d be relieved if they didn’t come, if my colleague had already done it.”
    “Why are you doing it?”
    “It’s a long story. For money, well,