“I’m going to tell him what you’ve told me,” I said.
I buttoned up my doublet and picked up my hat. Rain had started speckling the windows, and so I put on my serge cloak as well. Don Francisco watched as I concealed my dagger amongst my clothes.
“Be careful no one follows you.”
There was every likelihood that someone would. The constables had questioned me at the Inn of the Turk, until I managed to convince them, by lying shamelessly, that I knew nothing about what had happened in Camino de las Minillas. La Lebrijana had been of no use to them either, even though they threatened and abused her, albeit only verbally. No one told her the real reason for the captain’s disappearance. It was attributed to a sword fight in which someone had died, but no further details were offered.
“Don’t worry. The rain will help to disguise me.”
I was less concerned about the officers of the law than I was about the people behind the conspiracy, because they, I imagined, would certainly be watching me. I was about to take my leave when the poet raised one finger, as if an idea had just occurred to him. Getting up, he went over to a small desk by the window and removed what looked like a jewelry box.
“Tell the captain that I’ll do whatever I can. It’s a shame poor don Andrés Pacheco passed away so recently, and that Medinaceli is in exile and the Admiral of Castile has fallen from grace. All three were very fond of me and they would have been perfect as intermediaries.”
It grieved me to hear this. Monsignor Pacheco had been the highest authority in the Spanish Inquisition, higher even than the Court of the Inquisition, which was presided over by our old enemy, the fearsome Dominican friar Emilio Bocanegra. As for Antonio de la Cerda, Duke of Medinaceli—who in time would become a close friend of don Francisco’s and my protector—his impulsive young man’s blood meant that he was now exiled from the court after using force to try to free a servant of his from prison. And the fall of the Admiral of Castile was public knowledge. His arrogance had caused unease in Catalonia during the recent visit to Aragon, after he had squabbled with the Duke of Cardona over who should sit next to the king when the latter was received in Barcelona. (His Majesty, by the way, returned without having extracted a single doubloon from the Catalans, for when he asked them for money for Flanders, they replied that they would uncom plainingly lay down life and honor for the king, as long as it involved no other expense, and declared that the treasury was the patrimony of the soul, and the soul belonged only to God.) The Admiral of Castile’s misfortunes were compounded at the public washing of feet on Maundy Thursday, when Philip IV stripped him of the privilege he normally enjoyed of handing the king a towel on which to dry his hands, asking the Marquis of Liche to do so instead. Humiliated, the admiral had protested to the king, asking his permission to withdraw. “I am the first knight of the kingdom,” he said, forgetting that he was standing before the first monarch of the world. And the king, annoyed, not only gave him permission to withdraw, he went even further. The admiral was to stay away from court, he said, until he received orders to the contrary.
“Do we have no one else?”
Don Francisco accepted that “we” as perfectly natural.
“Not of the stature of an Inquisitor General, a grandee of Spain, or a friend of the king, no, but I’ve asked for an audience with the count-duke. At least he doesn’t allow himself to be taken in by appearances. He’s intelligent and pragmatic.”
We exchanged a none too hopeful look. Then don Francisco opened the small box and took out a purse. He counted eight doblones de a cuatro—more or less half of what was there, I noticed—and handed them to me.
“The captain might well have need of that powerful gentleman, Sir Money,” he said.
How fortunate my master was, I thought, to have a man like don Francisco de Quevedo show him such loyalty. In our wretched Spain, even one’s closest friends tended to be freer with words or sword-thrusts than with money. Those five hundred and twenty-eight reales were minted in lovely pale gold; some bore the cross of the true religion, others the head of His Catholic Majesty, and others that of his late father, Philip III. And each and every one of those coins would have been quite capable of blinding one-eyed Justice and buying a little protection—as indeed would coins bearing the Turk’s crescent moon.
“Tell him I’m only sorry I can’t give him double the amount,” added the poet, returning the box to the desk, “but I’m still eaten up by debts. There’s the rent on this house—which I was fool enough to buy simply in order to evict that vile sodomite, Góngora—and that alone drains forty ducats and my life’s blood from me, and even the paper I write on has just had a new tax slapped on it. Oh well. Tell him to be very careful and not to go out into the street. Madrid has become an extremely dangerous place as far as he’s concerned. Of course, he might console himself by meditating on the thought that he is the sole author of his woes:
It’s the mark of both a miser and a louse
To want to buy but not to pay the price.
Those lines made me smile. Madrid was a dangerous place for the captain and for others as well, I thought proudly. It was all a question of who drew his sword first, and hunting a hare was not at all the same thing as hunting a wolf. I saw that don Francisco was smiling too.
“Then again, the most dangerous thing about Madrid is perhaps Alatriste himself,” he said drily, as if he had guessed what I was thinking. “Don’t you agree? Guadalmedina and Saldaña soundly beaten, a couple of catchpoles dead, another well on the way, and all in less time than it takes to say ‘knife.’ ” He picked up his glass of wine and looked at the rain falling outside. “That’s what I call killing.”
He sat for a moment, staring thoughtfully into his glass, then raised it to the window as if drinking a toast to the captain.
“Your master,” he concluded, “doesn’t carry a sword in his hand but a scythe.”
God was hurling the rain down in torrents on every inch of His good earth as I, wrapped in my cloak and with my hat dripping, walked to Lavapiés along Calle de la Com pañía, seeking shelter beneath arcades and eaves from the water that was falling now as if every dyke in Holland had burst over my head. And although I was soaked to the skin and up to my gaiters in mud, I walked unhurriedly through the curtain of rain and the drops that were riddling the puddles like musket fire. Zigzagging up various streets, just to see if anyone was following me, I finally reached Calle de la Comadre, jumping over rivulets of mud and water to do so, and after one last prudent glance around me, entered the inn, where I shook myself like a wet dog.
The inn smelled of sour wine, damp sawdust, and grime. The Fencer’s Arms (which bore its owner’s nickname) was one of the most disreputable drinking dens in Madrid. The landlord had been an out-and-out knave and a cheat—he was also said to have been a thief, notorious for his skill as a picklock—until old age caught up with him. Worn down by a lifetime of poverty and hardship, he had opened the inn and turned it into a receiving house for stolen goods—hence his nickname, the Fencer—sharing any profit he made with the thieves. The inn was a large, dark house built around a courtyard and surrounded by other crumbling edifices; its many doors led to twenty or so sordid bedrooms and to a grimy, smoke-stained dining room where one could eat and drink very cheaply. It was, in short, the perfect place for pilferers and ruffians in search of a little privacy. In their attempts to scrape a living, the criminal world came and went at all hours, swathed in cloaks, swords clanking, or laden down with suspicious bundles. The place was filled with roughs and purloiners and captains of crime, with nimble-fingered pickpockets and ladies of the night, with every kind of no-good bent on dishonoring the Castiles, Old and New, and who all flocked there as happily as rooks to a wheatfield or scribes to a lawsuit. The powers that be were nowhere to be seen, partly so as not to stir up trouble and partly because the Fencer—a wily man who knew his trade—was always generous when it came to greasing the palms of constables and buying the favor of the courts. Furth
ermore, he had a son-in-law serving in the house of the Marquis of Carpio, which meant that seeking refuge in the Fencer’s Arms was tantamount to taking sanctuary in a church. The other denizens, as well as being the cream of the criminal classes, were also blind, deaf, and dumb. No one there had a name or a surname, no one looked at anyone else, and even saying “Good afternoon” could be a reason for someone to slit your throat.
I found Bartolo Cagafuego sitting next to the fire in the kitchen, where the coals beneath the cooking pots were filling half the room with smoke. He was drowning his sorrows with sips from a mug of wine and some quiet talk with a comrade; he was, at the same time, keeping a watchful eye on his doxy, who, with her half-cloak draped over her shoulders, was agreeing on terms with a client. Cagafuego showed no sign of recognizing me when I went over to join him and to dry my wet clothes, which immediately began to steam in the heat. He continued his conversation, the subject of which was a recent encounter with a certain constable. This, he was explaining, had been resolved not with blood or shackles, but with money.
“Anyway,” Cagafuego was saying in his potreño accent, “I goes over to the chief rozzer, gets out my purse, takes out two nice gold ducats of eleven reales each, and I says to the man, winkin’ like, I says: ‘I swear on these twenty-two commandments that the man you’re lookin’ for ain’t me.’ ”
“And who was he, this rozzer?” asked the other man.
“One-eyed Berruguete.”
“A decent son of a bitch, he is. And accommodatin’ too.”
“You’re tellin’ me, my friend. Anyway, he pocketed the cash and that was that.”
“And the pigeon?”
“Oh, he was tearin’ his hair out, sayin’ as how it was me what stole his purse and that I had it on me still. But Berruguete, good as his word, just turned a deaf ear to him. That were a year ago now.”
They continued for a while in quiet and distinctly un-Góngoresque fashion. Then, after a while, Bartolo Cagafuego glanced across at me, put down his mug, stood up very casually, and stretched and yawned extravagantly, thus displaying the inside of his mouth with its half-dozen missing teeth. Then in buffcoat and breeches, his sword sheathed, he swaggered over to the door with all his usual bluff and bravado. I went to join him in the gallery of the courtyard, where our voices were muffled by the sound of the rain.
“No one at your heels, was there?” he asked.
“No one.”
“You sure?”
“As sure as there’s a God.”
He nodded approvingly, scratching his bushy eyebrows, which met in the middle on his scarred face. Then, without a word, he set off down the gallery, and I followed. We hadn’t seen each other since he’d had his sentence as a galley slave lifted after the attack on the Niklaasbergen and was granted a pardon, courtesy of Captain Alatriste. Cagafuego had pocketed a tidy portion of that Indies gold, which allowed him to return to Madrid and continue in his chosen criminal career as ruffian or pimp or protector of prostitutes. For all his solid build and fierce appearance, and although he had acquitted himself well in Barra de Sanlúcar and slit many a throat, exposing his own throat to danger wasn’t really his line. The fierce air he adopted was more for show than anything else, ideal for striking fear into the hearts of the unwary and for earning a living from women of the street, but not when it came to confronting any real toughs. So profound was his ignorance that only two or three of the five Spanish vowels had reached his notice, yet despite this—or perhaps precisely because of it—he now had a woman posted in Calle de la Comadre and had also come to an arrangement with the owner of a bawdy house, where he kept order by dint of a great deal of swearing and cursing. In fact, he was doing very well. With a record like his, though, it seemed to me even more remarkable that such a tavern-bound tough should risk his neck to help Captain Alatriste, for he had nothing to gain and a great deal to lose if anyone went bleating to the law. However, since their first meeting, years before in a Madrid dungeon, Bartolo Cagafuego had shown a strangely steadfast loyalty toward my master, the same loyalty I had observed often amongst people who had dealings with the captain, be they army comrades, people of quality, or heartless delinquents, or even, occasionally, enemies. Every now and then, certain rare men emerge who stand out from their contemporaries, not perhaps because they are different exactly, but because, in a way, they encapsulate, justify, and immortalize the age in which they live; and those who know such men realize or sense this, and take them as arbiters of how to behave. Diego Alatriste may well have been one of those unusual individuals, but even if he wasn’t, I would say that anyone who fought at his side or shared his silences or met with a look of approval in his green eyes, felt bound to him forever by strong ties. It was as if gaining his respect made you respect yourself more.
“There’s nothing to be done,” I said. “You’ll just have to wait until the air clears.”
The captain had listened intently, not saying a word. We were sitting next to a rickety table spattered with candle wax and on which stood a bowl containing some leftover tripe, a jug of wine, and a crust of stale bread. Bartolo Cagafuego was standing a little apart, arms folded. We could hear the rain on the roof.
“When is Quevedo going to see the count-duke?”
“He doesn’t know yet,” I replied. “But The Sword and the Dagger is going to be performed in a few days’ time at El Escorial, and don Francisco has promised to take me with him.”
The captain ran a hand over his unshaven face. He seemed thinner, more haggard. He was wearing darned stockings, a collarless shirt beneath his doublet, and breeches made from cheap cloth. He did not look well, but his soldier’s boots were standing in one corner, newly polished, and his new sword-belt on the table had just been freshly treated with horse grease. Cagafuego had bought him a hat and cloak from an old-clothes shop, as well as a rusty dagger that now lay sharpened and gleaming next to the pillow on the unmade bed.
“Did they give you much trouble?” the captain asked.
“No, not much,” I said with a shrug. “Besides, no one can prove I was involved.”
“And what about La Lebrijana?”
“The same.”
“How is she?”
I gazed down at the puddle of water on the floor, beneath the soles of my boots.
“You know what she’s like: lots of tears and threats. She swears blind that she’ll be there in the front row when they hang you. But she’ll get over it.” I smiled. “She’s softer than molasses, really.”
Cagafuego nodded gravely, as if he knew exactly what I meant. He looked as if he were about to offer his views on women and their jealousies and affections, but restrained himself. He had too much respect for my master to butt into the conversation.
“And is there any news of Malatesta?” asked the captain.
The name made me fidget in my seat.
“No, not a word.”
The captain was thoughtfully stroking his mustache. Now and then he studied my face closely, as if hoping to read in it anything I might be keeping from him.
“I might know where to find him,” he said.
These words suggested to me some mad plan.
“You mustn’t run any unnecessary risks.”
“We’ll see.”
“As the blind man said,” I commented bluntly.
He looked at me again, and I rather regretted my impertinence. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Bartolo Cagafuego’s reproving glance, but it was true that this was no time for the captain to be prowling the streets or lurking in the shadows. Before he did anything that might compromise him further, he should wait and see what progress don Francisco de Quevedo could make. And I, for my part, urgently needed to talk to a certain maid of honor, for whom I had been watching out for days now, without success. As regards the information I was keeping from my master, any remorse I might feel was somewhat tempered by the thought that, while it was true that Angélica de Alquézar had led me into the trap, that trap would never hav
e been possible without the captain’s stubborn or suicidal collaboration. I had sufficient judgment to make these distinctions, and when you are nearly seventeen years old, no one is entirely a hero, apart from yourself, of course.
“Is this place safe?” I asked Cagafuego, as a way of changing the subject.
Cagafuego gave a fierce, gap-toothed smile.
“Tight as a drum. The law wouldn’t come around here, not even if you paid them. And if some snitch was to peach on him, the captain can always climb out of the window and onto the roof. The captain’s not the only one in trouble around here. If any bluebottles was to turn up, there’s comrades aplenty to sound the alarm. And if that happens, he just has to scarper.”
My master had not ceased looking at me all this time.
“We have to talk,” he said.
Cagafuego raised one huge hand to his eyebrows by way of a farewell.
“While you’re talkin’ and if you don’t need anythin’ else, Captain, this here herdsman’s goin’ to take a turn around his pastures to see how Maripérez is gettin’ on with the little bit of business she’s got in hand. Like they say, the eye of the master fattens the mare.”
He opened the door and stood silhouetted for a moment against the gray light of the gallery.
“Besides,” he said, “and I mean no disrespect, you never can tell when you might run headfirst into the law and however plucky you might be and however hard you hold out when they plays you like a guitar, it’s always easier to keep quiet about what you don’t know than to keep quiet about what you do know.”
“An excellent philosophy, Bartolo,” the captain said with a smile. “Aristotle couldn’t have put it better.”