The Siege

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  Pépé Lobo looks across the bows toward Cádiz: the red-brown city walls, the countless watchtowers rising above the whitewashed houses, the fortress of San Sebastián and the lighthouse, the city looks like a ship foundered on the reef.

  Four miles to Las Puecas and the Diamante, Lobo quickly calculates, taking the city and the Rota headland as his markers. The entry into Cádiz is tricky, with dangerous rocks and a treacherous ebb current at low tide; but the wind today is favorable and the tide will be high when the polacca, without changing tack, sails between the sunken reefs and luffs toward the bay and the harbor under the protection of the gun batteries and the anchored Spanish warships and those of their English allies whose masts will soon be visible in the distance.

  English allies. Though this is the fourth year of Napoleon’s war on Spain, the word allies brings a grim smile to the captain of the Risueña. He respects the English as a seafaring nation, but despises them as a people. Were he English himself, he would have no cause for complaint: he would be as knavish and arrogant as they, nor would he lose a moment’s sleep. But chance, which decides such things, has meant he was born a Spaniard in the military port of Havana to a Galician father—a bo’sun in the Spanish Navy—and a Creole mother and, from earliest childhood, the sea has been a constant presence, before his eyes, beneath his feet. He first went to sea at the age of eleven and has spent the better part of his thirty-one years on the oceans—cabin boy, a deckhand aboard a whaling ship, topman, first mate, winning his captain’s license through hard work and sacrifice—years in which he has seen ample evidence of the treason and treachery of the British fleet. He has never sailed a sea where they were not a constant menace. He feels he knows the English now: he considers them avaricious, arrogant, cynical, ever ready to find a convenient excuse to disregard a pact or break their word. It is something he has experienced personally. The fact that the fickle whims of war and politics now mean that Britain is an ally in Spain’s war against Napoleon changes nothing. For Pépé Lobo, whether in time of peace or war, the English have always been the enemy. In some sense, they still are. Twice he has been their prisoner, once in a prison hulk in Portsmouth, the second time in Gibraltar. It is not something he will soon forget.

  “The corsair is rounding the headland, Captain.”

  “I can see it.”

  The first mate seems more worried than angry. His tone is almost conciliatory. Out of the corner of his eye, Pépé Lobo sees the man glancing nervously at the wind pennant, staring at it. Waiting.

  “I think we should—” the first mate begins.

  “Shut up.”

  The captain looks at the sails and then turns to the helmsmen.

  “Hard to windward … that’s it … Now hold her steady … First Mate, are you blind or deaf?… Haul that jib.”

  In fact Pépé Lobo’s present ill-humor has nothing to do with the English. Nor with the felucca which, in a last ditch attempt, is tacking east-southeast to try and intercept them, trusting that a providential cannon shot, a shift in the wind or some injudicious maneuver on their part will cause the rigging of the Risueña to snap. No, this is not what is worrying Pépé Lobo. He is so sure they will leave the corsair standing that he has not even ordered the crew to ready the ship’s two small guns—which in any case would be useless against an enemy who could blast their deck to kingdom come with a single shot from a carronade. The prospect of a confrontation has unsettled an already surly crew: with the exception of a dozen or so expert sailors, the rest are harbor rats who signed up for little more than their bed and board. Nor would it be the first time Lobo has seen a crew take cover belowdecks during a skirmish. In ’97 it cost him a ship and left him bankrupt, to say nothing of the time he spent rotting in that Portsmouth prison hulk. But today all will be well if every sailor holds his nerve and does his job. As for the men under his command, Pépé Lobo’s only wish is to drop anchor in Cádiz as soon as possible and never set eyes on them again.

  Because the captain of the Risueña already knows this will be his last voyage with this crew. When they put out nineteen days ago, relations between him and Ignacio Ussel, a shipowner on the Calle de la Consulado, had already soured; and they will surely get worse when Ussel, or his client, sees the cargo manifest. It has been an ill-starred voyage marred by poor winds and heavy seas off San Vicente, a damaged sternpost that forced them to drop anchor for a day and a half at Cabo de Sines, and administrative problems in Lisbon. All these things have contributed to the polacca arriving late with only half the expected cargo. This will be the last straw. Ussel’s company which, like many others in Cádiz, is merely a front for various French merchant houses—until very recently, no foreign power was allowed to trade directly with Spanish ports in the Americas—has been in trouble ever since the war began. Determined to make the most of the opportunities the war afforded to a merchant with few scruples, Señor Ussel extracts maximum profit for minimum cost at the expense of his employees, using any excuse to pay late and badly. For some time now relations between the ship owner and the captain of the Risueña have been strained. And Pépé Lobo knows that, as soon as he has dropped the anchor over four or five fathoms in the harbor, he will need to look for another ship on which to make his living. No easy task these days in Cádiz. The city has seen its population swell because of the siege and, although any moldering hulk of wood that can float still sails, ships and crews are in short supply while captains are two a penny. And in the alehouses around the harbor, where forced conscription is commonplace, the only men to be found are rabble prepared to sign up for a few coins.

  “The French ship is turning … it’s turning back!”

  A cheer goes up from stem to stern along the polacca. A scattering of applause and shouts of relief. The first mate takes off his cap and wipes the sweat from his brow. Crowding over to the port side of the deck, the crew watch as the corsair goes about and abandons the chase. Its jib shivers for a moment over the long bowsprit as the vessel lists to starboard and heads back toward Rota. As it tacks, the shifting light gives a better view of the long lateen yard and the slim, black hull of the felucca with its stern counter beneath the boom. Swift and dangerous. Some say it is a Portuguese merchant ship seized by the French last year near Chipiona.

  “Bear down,” Pépé Lobo barks to the helmsmen, “east by south.”

  Some of the crewmen smile at the captain, nodding and waving their approval. Like I give a tinker’s cuss for their opinion, he thinks. Climbing down from the shroud lines, he rebuttons his frockcoat over the pistol tucked into his belt then turns to the first mate, who has not taken his eyes off the captain.

  “Hoist the flag and trim that sail … In half an hour I want the whole crew ready to take in the topgallants.”

  While the crew trim the sheets and adjust the sails to the new bearing, and a washed-out merchant ensign—two red and three yellow stripes—is hoisted to the top of the mizzen, Pépé Lobo looks toward the corsair felucca, now showing her stern as she heads back to the coast. The Risueña is making good headway, the wind is favorable so they will not need to change tack to clear Las Puercas. This means they should make it into the bay without having to brave the dangerous reefs, or the cannons at the other Santa Catalina fortress, the one near El Puerto de Santa María which is wont to fire on ships that stray too far from land. The fortress, half a league to the west off the polacca’s larboard bow, is on the far side of Rota inlet and the sandbar of the San Pedro River; nor does Lobo need his spyglass to see the Trocadero peninsula, where more French guns are trained on Cádiz. Pépé Lobo takes the telescope from a drawer in the binnacle, opens it out, and scans the coastline from north to south, pausing when he comes to the three strongholds: the derelict Matagorda fort on the shore and, set further back, Fort Luis and La Cabezuela, their cannons peeping through the embrasures. As he watches he sees a soundless flash and for a second he thinks he can even see the French bomb, a black speck tracing a parabola across the sky toward the city.

>   SITTING IN THE courtyard of the Café del Correo, chair tilted back against the wall, long legs stretched out beneath the table—his favorite way of getting comfortable—Rogelio Tizón, Commissioner for Districts, Vagrants and Transients, studies the chessboard in front of him. His right hand holds a cup of coffee while his left strokes his whiskers where they merge with his mustache. The customers who stepped out onto the Calle del Rosario when they heard the bang are beginning to trickle back with news of what happened. Billiard players return to their queues and their ivory balls, customers pick up the newspapers they abandoned in the reading room or on courtyard tables and go back to their seats, groups re-form and there is a murmur of conversation as the waiters begin to circulate again, coffeepots in hand.

  “The bomb came down just past San Agustín,” says Professor Barrull, taking his seat again. “It didn’t explode, they rarely do. Just the shock of the impact.”

  “Your move, Don Hipólito.”

  Barrull studies the policeman, who has not looked up from the chessboard, then studies the position of the pieces.

  “I admire your equanimity, Comisario. You’re as cool as a cucumber.”

  Tizón drains his coffee and sets the cup by the chessboard amid the captured pieces: six are his, six belong to his opponent. In fact the parity is illusory. This game is not looking good for him.

  “My rook is threatened by your bishop and that pawn … I’ve no time to waste worrying about bombs.”

  Barrull makes an appreciative grunt. He has a mane of thick gray hair, a long, equine face, his teeth are stained yellow with tobacco and his melancholy eyes are framed by steel-rimmed spectacles. A connoisseur of ocher snuff, invariably dressed in breeches, rumpled black socks and old-style frockcoats, Barrull runs the Cádiz Scientific Society and teaches the rudiments of Latin and Greek to young men of good breeding. He is also a fearsome chess player, whose usual calm, genial temperament is utterly transformed when he sits down at a chessboard. As a player, he is ruthless, plotting his strategies with almost murderous fury. In the heat of battle, he has been known to insult his opponents, including Rogelio Tizón: May hell itself yawn open and swallow you, confound you, you mangy cur. I’ll have you drawn and quartered before sunup, ’pon my word. I’ll flay the skin from you strip by strip. Bombastic curses of this kind: Barrull is not an educated man for nothing. But the comisario takes such insults in good part. The two men have known each other and played chess together for more than ten years. They are friends … or almost. It is perhaps more accurate to say almost, given the imprecise sense the word friendship has for the comisario.

  “I see you’ve moved that deuced knight.”

  “I had no choice.”

  “Ah, but you had,” the professor cackles under his breath, “but I’ll not be the one to tell you what it was.”

  Tizón signals to the café owner, Paco Celis, standing in the kitchen doorway and he dispatches a waiter who refills the comisario’s coffee and sets a glass of chilled water next to it. Intent on the game, Barrull shakes his head, waving away the waiter.

  “Have at you!” he says, advancing an unexpected pawn.

  The comisario studies the board in astonishment. Barrull drums his fingers on the table, glaring at his opponent as though prepared to shoot him in the chest at the first opportunity.

  “Check in one,” Tizón admits grudgingly.

  “And mate in two.”

  The vanquished player sighs and begins to put away the pieces. The victor, with a malicious smile, looks on. “Vae Victis,” he says. In the face of his enemy’s triumphalism, the comisario’s demeanor is fatalistic. He has become stoic by force of habit; his opponent invariably trounces him in three games out of five.

  “You are a scurvy knave, Professor.”

  “Cry if you must, weep like a weak woman incapable of defending herself.”

  Tizón lays the remaining black and white pieces in the box, like corpses in a mass grave awaiting the first shovelful of quicklime. The chessboard stands empty, desolate as a beach at low tide. The image of the murdered girl comes back to him. Slipping a hand into his pocket, he fingers the twisted shard of lead he found next to the body.

  “Professor …”

  “Yes?”

  Tizón hesitates a moment. It is difficult, he realizes, to put into words the feeling that has been troubling him since his visit to Lame Paco’s Tavern. The strange impression he had kneeling next to the dead girl, amid the murmur of the sea, the traces in the sand.

  “Footsteps in the sand,” he says aloud.

  Barrull’s cruel smile vanishes; he is himself again. He looks at the policeman in astonishment.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  His hand still in his pocket, touching the sliver of metal, Tizón makes a vague, helpless gesture.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t know how else to explain it … Something to do with a chess player staring at an empty chessboard. And traces in the sand.”

  “Is this some jest?” Barrull laughs and adjusts his spectacles. “A puzzle? A riddle?”

  “Not at all: just a chessboard, traces in the sand, as I said.”

  “And what else?”

  “Nothing else.”

  “Is it somehow related to science?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The professor, who has taken an enamel snuffbox from his jacket, pauses as he opens it.

  “When you say a chessboard, to what exactly are you referring?”

  “That is something else I do not know. Cádiz, I suppose. The dead girl on the beach.”

  “Damn it all, my friend!” Barrull takes a pinch of snuff. “You are exceptionally mysterious this afternoon. So Cádiz is a chessboard?”

  “Yes. No … I don’t know. In a sense, perhaps.”

  “What then are the chess pieces?”

  Tizón glances around him at this perfect microcosm of life in the besieged city: the courtyard and the café are teeming with citizens, merchants, ne’er-do-wells, refugees, students, clerics, workers, journalists, soldiers and members of the Cádiz Cortes—the Spanish parliament—which has recently relocated to Cádiz from the Isla de León. There are marble counters, wood and wicker tables, cane chairs, ashtrays, copper spittoons, some jugs of hot chocolate and many more of coffee as is the custom here: bushels and bushels of ground coffee in the kitchen, served scalding hot, the air is suffused with the smell of it, it even masks the pervasive aroma of tobacco smoke that paints everything in shades of gray. The Café del Correo is the preserve of men—women are admitted only during Carnaval—who come from all walks of life: here, a penniless immigrant’s threadbare rags sit cheek by jowl with fashionable suits and discreetly patched frockcoats, new boots with well-worn soles, the garish uniforms of the local volunteer force with the tattered, darned uniforms of Navy officers who have not been paid in more than a year. These men greet each other, ignore each other, gather in groups according to their affinities, their dislikes or interests; they chat between the tables, discuss the contents of the newspapers, play billiards or chess, kill time alone or in groups talking about the war, about politics or women, about the price of dyewood, tobacco or cotton or about the latest libel published—thanks to a newly emancipated press which many applaud and many more deplore—against Fulano, Mengano, Zutano or anyone under the sun.

  “I don’t know what the pieces are,” says Tizón. “Them, I suppose. Us.”

  “The French?”

  “Perhaps. I’m not ruling out the idea that they may have something to do with it.”

  Professor Barrull is still bewildered.

  “With what?”

  “I don’t know how to explain it. With what is going on.”

  “Of course they have something to do with it, they have us under siege.”

  “But that’s not what I’m talking about.”

  Barrull looks at the comisario attentively now, leaning across the table. Eventually, he picks up the glass of water Tizón has not touched and drinks it slowly
. When he has finished, he wipes his lips with a kerchief he has taken from a pocket of his frockcoat, glances down at the empty chessboard, then up again. The two men know each other well enough to know when things are serious.

  “Traces in the sand,” he says gravely.

  “Exactly.”

  “Can you give me any other details … It might help.”

  Tizón shakes his head uncertainly.

  “It somehow feels related to you … to something you did or said a long time ago. That’s why I’m telling you.”

  “And yet, my dear friend, you are not actually telling me anything.”

  Another bomb, further off this time, interrupts the hum of conversation. The impact, muffled by the distance and the intervening buildings, still makes the panes in the café windows shudder.

  “That one was a long way off,” says one man. “Must have come down near the port, and it exploded.”

  “French pigs,” says another.

  This time fewer people go out to see what is going on. After a moment, someone wanders back and explains that the bomb fell next to La Cruz, just outside the city walls. There were no victims, and no damage.

  “I’ll see if I can remember anything,” says Barrull doubtfully.