Settling In, part 13

Karen and Rich Irwin wanted to make good on their offer to take us on a tapas crawl—a peregrination among some of the finer tapas bars of the city. We picked a Friday night and drove into town together.

“I have to get to know different police chiefs here, so that they’ll feel comfortable sharing information with me,” said Rich, the terrorism expert. “They all like to take you out for tapas. I’ve been everywhere! I know all the best places.”

“Sounds great!” Mike said. “Lead on!”

We started in Plaza Santa Ana, a short walk from the Plaza Mayor. The square was lined with tapas bars, some with particular specialties. “That one is known for German beers,” Rich said, pointing to a bar across the way, “and this one is the one for pimientos de Padrón.”

“What are those?” I asked.

“They’re tiny green peppers that they fry and salt. You get a whole plate of them. The trick is that some of them are unbelievably hot—you can’t tell which ones by looking. Are you game?”

“Sure!” Mike said, so we started there.

The place was crowded, but we edged up toward the bar and ordered drinks and a plate of the pimientos. “You know the tapas routine, right?” Rich asked. “Just one drink and one snack in each bar, then you move on to the next.”

The bartender pushed a plateful of freshly fried peppers across the counter to us, and we took them to a corner where we could huddle together under a bullfight poster. They were delicious. It wasn’t till the fourth pepper that I got a jolt of heat.

“Oh, man, you weren’t kidding about the spice!” I moaned. My mouth was on fire and my eyes were tearing. Then I saw my companions get hit one by one. We started laughing as we guzzled our drinks—anything to kill the pain.

“Wait, bread is supposed to be better than liquid,” Mike said, so we got a plateful of that from the bartender and tried to soothe our sore mouths.

On we went to bar after bar, around Plaza Santa Ana, on the streets nearby, and around the foundations of the Plaza Mayor. Some of the places looked like normal restaurants, and some looked like hot dog stands or luncheonettes. We had plates of jamón (ham), lomo (cured pork loin), and chorizo (sausage). We had boquerones, tiny marinated fresh anchovies, which I adored. We went to the place that specialized in patatas bravas—chunks of fried potatoes with a spicy red sauce (though not nearly as spicy as the pimientos de Padrón). We kept eating, drinking and walking—a fabulous way to spend an evening, I began to think.

Rich, who was tall and beefy with shaggy light-brown hair, began to tell us a bit about his work. “I go out with these cops and try to get to know them,” he said. “My job is to be a liaison and to try to be helpful with terrorism matters. You know the Basque terrorists—ETA—are a huge problem here, right?”

It was impossible to ignore ETA, whose deadly acts headlined the newspaper almost every day. “Basque separatists” was a term I recognized dimly from the news back home, but here it was clear that a portion of the Basque people were angry at the Spanish government and would do anything to secede from Spain.

As the wine flowed, Rich talked about his previous postings. “We were in Honduras for a few years when the kids were babies,” he said.

“Oh, that was wonderful!” Karen added. “We had a big house there, and lots of servants, and the expat community was really friendly. It was like a country club!”

“And then I had to be away for six months,” Rich said.

“That was really hard,” said Karen. “He couldn’t call home. We had no communication that whole time.”

This started to sound strange to me. “You couldn’t call home for six months?” I said.

Rich smiled a sideways smile but didn’t answer. CIA, I thought. He must be CIA! I didn’t ask any more questions.