The light inside the brothel was red, and Julio Iglesias was playing on the stereo. Dolores la Negra put more ice in Celestino PeregiPs glass of whisky.
"You look great, Loli," said Peregil.
Dolores wiggled her hips behind the bar and ran an ice cube over her bare navel. Her enormous breasts, inside a very short T-shirt, swung in time to the music. She looked like a Gypsy; she was a large woman well into her thirties who'd had more men than were in the army.
"I'm going to give you the fuck of your life," announced Peregil, smoothing the hair over his bald patch. "It'll take your breath away."
Accustomed to such protocol and to Peregil's sexual prowess, Dolores took two dance steps, looking straight into his eyes. She stuck out the tip of her tongue, dropped the ice cube she'd rubbed over her navel into her glass, and went to pour another glass of Catalan champagne for one of the other customers. The girls had already brought out two bottles for the man and he was now well on his way to a third. Iglesias sang on. Peregil swallowed some whisky and eyed Arab Fatima, who was dancing by herself on the dance floor, wearing a skirt that barely covered her bottom, knee-high boots and a low-cut top that showed her merrily jiggling tits. Fatima was his second choice for the evening, and he seriously started to weigh the pros and cons of each girl.
"Hello, Peregil."
He hadn't heard them arrive. They came and leaned on the bar, one on either side of him, and looked straight ahead at the rows of bottles on the mirror-lined shelves. Peregil could see their reflections in front of him: to his right, the Gypsy Mairena, dressed in black, thin and dangerous, with the manner of a flamenco dancer, wearing a huge gold ring beside the stump of his little finger. He'd chopped it off himself during a riot at Ocafla Prison. To Peregil’s left, El Polio Muclas, fair-haired, neat and slight. The cutthroat razor he carried in his left-hand trouser pocket made him look as if he had a permanent hard-on, and he always said "Excuse me" before slashing someone.
"Aren't you going to buy us a drink?" asked the Gypsy slowly, amicably. He was enjoying himself. Peregil suddenly felt very hot. With a despairing look, he called Dolores over. A gin and tonic for Mairena, the same for El Polio Muelas. Neither touched his drink. Both stared at Peregil in the mirror.
"We've come to give you a message," said the Gypsy.
"From a friend," added El Polio.
Peregil swallowed, hoping that in the red light of the bar they wouldn't notice. The "friend" was Ruben Molina, a moneylender from El Baratillo. For months Peregil had been writing IOUs, and he felt quite faint when he thought how much he owed Molina. Ruben Molina was well known in certain circles in Seville. He sent his debtors only two reminders: the first by word, the second by deed. Mairena and El Polio Muelas were his errand boys.
"Tell him I'll pay him. There's money coming in."
"That's what Frasquito Torres said."
El Polio smiled, menacingly sympathetic. In the mirror, the Gypsy's long, ascetic face was about as cheerful as if he'd just returned from his mother's funeral. Peregil saw his own reflection between the two of theirs. He wanted to swallow again but couldn't, the mention of Torres had made his throat dry. Frasquito came from a good family and was well known in Seville as an idler. For a time, like Peregil, he'd called on the services of Molina. But when the time came, he wasn't able to pay up. Somebody waited for him at the entrance to his house and broke every tooth in his head. They left him there, with his teeth inside a cone of newspaper tucked into his top jacket pocket.
"I just need another week."
Mairena put an arm round Peregil's shoulders, in a gesture that was so unexpectedly friendly that Peregil almost lost his head with terror. Mairena stroked Peregil's chin with the stump of his little finger. "What a coincidence," said the Gypsy. His black shirt smelled of stale sweat and cigarette smoke. "Because that's exactly what you have, my friend. Exactly seven days and not a minute more."
Peregil gripped the bar, trying to stop his hands from trembling. On the shelves the bottle labels merged. Life is dangerous, he thought. It always ends up killing you.
"Tell Molina that's no problem," he stammered. "I'm a man of my word. I'm about to clinch a good deal." He grabbed his glass and downed the drink. An ice cube crunched in a sinister fashion against his teeth, reminding him how Frasquito Torres had had to borrow from another moneylender to pay for a set of false teeth that cost him nearly half a million pesetas. The Gypsy still had his arm round Peregil’s shoulders.
"That sounds so pretty," mocked El Polio Muelas. "To clinch."
Julio Iglesias sang on. Swinging her hips in time to the music behind the bar, Dolores La Negra came up to make conversation. She dipped a finger in Peregil’s whisky and sucked it noisily, rubbed her stomach against the bar, and then shook the contents of her shirt with consummate professionalism before stopping to stare at the three men, disappointed. Peregil was as pale as if he'd just seen a ghost, and the other two didn't look at all friendly. They hadn't even touched their drinks. So Dolores turned and walked away, still moving her hips in time to the music. After a lifetime on one side of a bar or the other, she knew when to get out of the way.
V
Captain Xaloc's Twenty Pearls
I've also loved women who were dead. Heinrich Heine, Florentine Nights
Deputy Superintendent Simeon Navajo, head of investigations at police headquarters in Seville, finished eating his tortilla and glanced amicably at Quart.
"Listen, Padre," he said. "I don't know if it's the church itself, mere chance or the Archangel Gabriel." He paused and took a swig from the bottle of beer on his desk "But there's something sinister about that place."
Navajo was a small, thin, amiable man, constantly gesticulating. He wore round steel-rimmed glasses, and his bushy moustache seemed to sprout from his nose. He looked like the caricature of a seventies intellectual. This impression was emphasised by his jeans, baggy red shirt, and receding hair, worn long and in a ponytail. For the past twenty minutes he and Quart had been going through reports on the two deaths at Our Lady of the Tears. The police investigation had come to the same conclusion as the forensic reports: accidental death. Navajo was sorry he didn't have a handcuffed culprit to parade before the envoy from Rome. Just bad luck, Father, he was saying, a loose handrail, a chunk of plaster coming away from the ceiling. Poor devils, their number was up. Wham, straight to heaven. At least, the deputy superintendent assumed they'd gone to heaven, since they'd been in church.
"We know exactly how Penuelas, the municipal architect, died." Navajo walked two fingers along his desk to illustrate his account. "He spent half an hour wandering about under the roof of the church looking for evidence to support a condemnation order and then leaned against one of the wooden handrails up in the belfry. The wood was rotten and gave way. Penuelas fell and was impaled on one of the metal poles sticking out of the half-assembled scaffolding below, like a kebab." The deputy superintendent now held one finger up, as if it were the pole, and slammed the palm of his other hand down on it. Quart assumed the hand was meant to represent the skewered architect. "There were witnesses present when it happened, and on subsequent inspection the handrail didn't appear to have been tampered with."
The deputy superintendent took another swig of beer and wiped his moustache with the finger on which Penuelas had been impaled. Then he smiled enthusiastically. He and Quart had met a couple of years before, during the Pope's visit. Simeon Navajo had been acting as liaison for the Seville police, and the two had got along famously. The envoy from Rome let the policeman take the credit for all the spectacular successes, such as catching the priest who planned to stab the Holy Father or finding the Semtex hidden in the basket of laundry at the Convent of the Holy Sacrament. Navajo was personally congratulated by the minister of the interior and His Holiness himself. His photo was on the front page of the newspapers and he was awarded a special commendation. Now, nobody at headquarters dared call him Miss Magnum for wearing his hair in a ponytail. The magnum, a .357-calibre
, lay among a pile of papers on his desk. He only wore it when he went to his ex-wife's house to pick up his kids. That way, he said, she respected him. And the kids thought it was cool.
Quart looked around the office. Through a glass partition he could see a North African with a black eye. The man sat facing a thickset police officer in shirtsleeves. The officer was saying something to him and didn't look too friendly. It was like a silent movie. On this side of the partition, a framed photograph of the king and a calendar, its passing days energetically ticked off, hung on the wall. There was a grey filing cabinet with an Expo '92 sticker and a sticker of a marijuana leaf, a fan, a pin-board covered with photographs of criminals, a dart-board with holes in the wall all around it, and a poster of some American policemen beating the daylights out of a black man under the words TOUGH LOVE.
"What about Father Urbizu?" asked Quart.
The deputy superintendent scratched his ear. "It seems his death was accidental too, Padre. For him there weren't any witnesses, but my people went over every inch of the church afterwards. Maybe he leaned against part of the scaffolding or knocked it accidentally." He imitated the motion of swaying scaffolding with his hands so realistically that he stopped, as if it gave him vertigo. "The top of it could have knocked off a section of the cornice. The cornice might already have been loose, and by some miracle - if you'll excuse the word -only the scaffolding was keeping it in place. So when the scaffolding got knocked, ten kilos of plaster came down on his head. He must have heard the sound, looked up, and then splat."
He illustrated his story with the appropriate hand movements. At the end, he lay one hand palm upwards to show Father Urbizu passing to a better life. He looked for a moment at his dying hand, then took a swig of beer. "Another case of bad luck," he said thoughtfully.
Quart took out a couple of name cards, to take notes. "Why did the chunk of cornice come down?" he asked.
"Depends." Navajo glanced suspiciously at the cards. He brushed some tortilla crumbs from his shirt. "According to Newton, the attraction of the earth causes any unsupported object to acquire vertical velocity and fall on the heads of archbishops' secretaries who got out of bed on the wrong side that morning." He looked to see Quart's reaction. "I hope you've written that down. And people say the police don't base their work on scientific principles."
Quart got the message. He laughed and put his cards and pen away. "So, why do you think it happened?" he asked.
Navajo shrugged. None of this information was particularly important or confidential, but he obviously wanted to keep things on an official footing. Since the investigation confirmed that the two deaths were accidental, Our Lady of the Tears was still exclusively a matter for the Church. There were rumours that the council and the banks were bringing pressure to bear, and the deputy superintendent's bosses wanted to keep well out of it. Quart may have been a Spaniard, a priest and an old friend, but he was still an agent for a foreign state.
"According to our experts," answered Navajo, "the chunk of cornice was already loose. This was proved by an inspection after the accident. We found a pocket of damp behind it. The roof had been leaking for years."
"You've definitely ruled out human intervention?"
The deputy superintendent began to sneer but caught himself. After all, he was in Quart's debt.
"Listen, Padre, we're the police. We wouldn't even rule out a hundred per cent that Judas wasn't actually bumped off by one of his eleven colleagues. So let's say we're ninety-five per cent sure. It's hardly likely that someone said to the poor bastard, 'Hey, stand there a moment,' climbed up the scaffolding, pulled off a chunk of cornice, and dropped it on him while he just stood there looking up." Navajo's fingers illustrated the climb up the scaffolding and the cornice crashing down. Then a finger lay inert, waiting for the forensic people. "That only happens in cartoons."
When he left the deputy superintendent, Quart felt sure that Vespers had been exaggerating. Maybe the statement about the church killing to defend itself - freely interpreted, metaphorically, symbolically -was true. It was quite another thing to establish how a dilapidated three-hundred-year-old building could, either on its own or with the help of Providence, do away with anyone who threatened it. Establishing that was no longer a matter for Quart, or even the IEA. The supernatural was the province of another kind of expert, closer to Cardinal Iwaszkiewicz's sinister brotherhood than to the rough centurion embodied by Monsignor Spada. In the monsignor's world, and in the good soldier Quart's, two and two always added up to four.
He was turning all this over in his mind when he thought he heard footsteps behind him as he entered the narrow streets of Santa Cruz. He stopped a couple of times but could see nothing suspicious. He walked on, keeping to the narrow strip of shade provided by the eaves of the houses. The sun beat down on Seville, and the white and ochre facades shimmered in the heat like the walls of an oven. Quart's jacket felt as heavy as lead. If there really was a hell, he thought, sinning Sevillanos would feel quite at home - having already lived in an inferno for several months each year, here on earth. When he came to the little square with the church, he stopped before the railing hung with geraniums. He watched enviously as a canary dipped its beak into a bowl of water in its shaded cage. There wasn't a breath of air and nothing stirred, neither the curtains at the windows nor the leaves of the geraniums and orange trees. Sails on the Sargasso Sea.
It was a relief to cross the threshold of Our Lady of the Tears. Inside he found an oasis of cool shade that smelled of wax and damp. He stopped to catch his breath, still dazzled by the sun outside. By the door there was a small carved figure of Jesus of Nazareth. A tormented baroque Christ who'd been put through the third degree in the judgement hall: How many of you are there? Where do you keep your followers' gold and silver coins? What's all this about you being the son of God? Guess who ratted on you. His wrists were bound with rope, and large drops of blood dripped from his crown of thorns. He was looking up, hoping for someone to get him out of there on a habeas corpus. Unlike his peers, Quart had never felt a link with this man whose image he now had before him. Not even at the seminary, during the years of what he thought of as his breaking in, where his theology teachers meticulously took apart and reassembled the mechanisms of faith in the minds of young men destined for the priesthood. "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" was the question to be avoided at all cost. But for Quart, who had already posed the question by the time he entered the seminary and was convinced there was no answer, this theological programming was superfluous. Being a prudent young man, he said nothing.
He glanced at the carved figure again. The Nazarene certainly had had guts. Nobody need feel ashamed to carry His Cross like a flag. Quart often regretted not having another kind of faith. Men black with dust beneath their chain mail had once shouted the name of God as they charged into battle, to win eternal life and a place in heaven with their slashing swords. Living and dying had been so much simpler then.
Mechanically, he made the sign of the Cross. Around the figure of Christ, which was in a glass display case, hung fifty or so ex-votos: brass or wax models of hands, legs, eyes, children's bodies, locks of hair, letters, ribbons, notes, and plaques giving thanks for a healing. Even a military medal from Africa tied to an old bridal bouquet. As always when he came across such devotion, Quart wondered how much anxiety, how many sleepless nights by a sickbed, how many prayers or stories of hope, pain, life and death were summed up by each of those objects that Don Priamo Ferro, unlike other priests more in tune with the rimes, allowed people to place around the figure of Christ in his small church. This was old-style religion, with a priest in a cassock intoning Mass in Latin, the vital link between man and the great mysteries. A church of faith and solace, when cathedrals, gothic windows, baroque altarpieces, images and paintings depicting the glory of God served the same purpose as television screens nowadays: to reassure man confronted with the horror of his own solitude, death and the void. "Hello," said Gris Marsala.
She had climbed down from the scaffolding and now stood before him expectantly, hands in the pockets of her jeans. As before, her clothes were covered with plaster.
"You didn't tell me you were a nun," Quart said reproachfully.
She suppressed a smile, smoothing her grey hair tied in a plait. "True, I didn't," she said, surveying him with a friendly expression, as if she wanted something confirmed. "I assumed a priest would sense it without anyone's help."
"I'm a rather slow-witted priest."
There was a brief silence. Gris Marsala smiled and said, "That's not what I've heard." "From whom?"
"You know . . . Archbishops, angry priests." Her American accent was more pronounced with certain words. "Attractive women who ask you out to dinner."