'I did. That is where I was stuck.'
        Michael Donnellan does not reply. He finishes his salad, drinks some water, chats with Javier, the proprietor. The food is served and they eat in silence. As usual, Hugh eats twice as much as Donnellan, whose appetite is as slim as his figure.
        'We need to take a trip to Galicia,' Michael says when he has cleared his plate. There is no longer the slightly jocular request in his tone, this is take it or leave it. Fed now, Hugh's mood is calmer; he slightly regrets his earlier outburst. After all, he owes a lot to Michael.
        'Right,' he says.
        Michael spends the next half an hour, while they drink a café solo each, explaining what he wants him to do. Hugh is to get as much done as possible next week, then prepare for their trip the following Monday.
        After they part, Hugh wanders along the narrow streets until by chance he reaches the Plaza Mayor. He thinks about going home to his apartment in the northern suburbs, in one of the many tower blocks, featureless, anonymous, with the view from his windows of the brick wall of the next building. He puts it off, because he senses he may still be in for one of his bad nights. Maybe he will drift towards the Plaza Chueca, where he'll either meet somebody he knows or pick up a man. Hugh feels he has blended into life in Madrid, never more so than in the gay quarter. Here he is Antonio Marías Roland. For years he has not been Hugh O'Neill, son of Irish emigrants to London, who sent him 'home' as they always called it, every summer to spend part of the holiday with his grandparents. Where his grandfather instructed him in the republican history and folklore and groomed him as a recruit for the IRA. In this new life, Antonio is the offspring of parents who worked in restaurants in Lyon, his mother as a waitress, his father as the cellar man, not that any of it matters these days, as nobody asks. He is just Antonio, another regular in the gay scene in Madrid.
        As he meanders, without any real idea of where he intends to go, but not to Plaza Chueca, he decides, he is thinking back to their conversation over coffee.
        'Drugs? You're fucking joking, Michael, I hope.'
        'No joke. I mean it.'
        'For the money?'
        'That is a big part of it.'
        'You've not become a policeman in your old age.'
        'Not that either.'
        Mystified, Hugh listens as Donnellan gives him an outline of what he has in mind. 'It's a long shot, a gamble, I know. But if it comes off, we can retire.'

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