The Siege

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  “Is this your trunk, señor?”

  “A pox on it … Yes, that’s it.”

  Two hours later, filthy, sweaty and resigned, Pépé Lobo—this is not the first time he has been left with little more than the clothes on his back—is walking down by the Puerta de Mar, shouldering a canvas knapsack containing what remains of his personal shipwreck: the handful of belongings he managed to rescue from the flattened trunk. The sextant, spyglass and nautical charts did not survive the fall; the rest of his belongings did, though only just. Then again, had he not taken his time before visiting the Risueña’s owner, things might have been much worse. He might have been buried beneath the rubble. An explosion and he might have found himself among the heavenly choir, or wherever he is destined to go when eight bells toll. In short, he is in an awkward situation. Delicate. In a city like Cádiz, however, there is always room for maneuver; this is some small comfort to him as he visits the streets and taverns around El Boquete and La Merced, filled with sailors, fishermen, whores and port rats, foreigners and refugees in dire straits. Here, on thoroughfares that bear eloquent names such as Coffin Street and Scabies Alley, he knows places where a sailor can find a mattress for the night for a few coins, though it means sleeping next to a woman with one eye open and a knife beneath the folded jacket he sometimes uses as a pillow.

  TIME SEEMS TO be suspended in the silence of the lifeless creatures that line the walls of the workshop. The light streaming through the door glimmers on the glass eyes of the stuffed birds and mammals, on the large crystal jars in which motionless creatures float, chemically suspended in a fetal position. The only sound is the soft, hurried rasp of a pencil. At the center of this curious world, Gregorio Fumagal is writing on a scrap of gossamer paper in his tiny, cramped hand. Wearing a woolen housecoat and nightcap, the taxidermist bends over the tall lectern that serves as a writing desk. From time to time he glances over at the map of Cádiz spread out on the desk and twice he takes a magnifying glass to scrutinize it more closely before returning to the lectern and picking up where he left off.

  The bells ring out at the Iglesia de Santiago. Fumagal looks over at the gilt bronze clock on the bureau, dashes off the last few lines and, without rereading what he has written, rolls the slip of paper into a short tight tube which he slips into a sheath made of feathers he takes from the drawer, sealing both ends with wax. He opens the glass door and climbs the few steps to the terrace. Unlike the subdued light of the workshop, the harsh glare up here hurts his eyes. Less than two hundred paces away the unfinished cupola and half-built spires of the new cathedral, still ringed with scaffolding, are framed against the skyline, the expanse of sea, the sandbar, white and shimmering in the sunlight, that extends beyond the reef, curving toward Sancti Petri and the heights of Chiclana like a dyke whose banks are about to be burst by the deep blue of the Atlantic.

  Fumagal opens the door to the pigeon loft and steps inside. His is a familiar presence, and the birds barely react. A brief fluttering of wings. The cooing of the pigeons, the customary smell of hempseed and dried peas, of warm air and bird droppings enfolds the taxidermist as he chooses a strong cock pigeon with bluish-gray plumage, a white breast and a collar of iridescent green and violet feathers, a veteran of several flights to the far shore of the bay. A fine specimen whose extraordinary sense of direction has made him a reliable messenger in the service of the Emperor, this pigeon has survived sun, rain and wind, and proved invulnerable to the claws of raptors and the mistrustful gunshots of flightless bipeds. Many pigeons have vanished on their perilous missions, but this one always reaches his destination: a flight of some two and a half minutes depending on wind and weather, flying courageously in a straight line across the bay and later secretly brought back in a cage hidden aboard a smuggler’s boat, his fare paid in French gold. Once free, the bird fights his own little war with Spain at three hundred feet.

  He holds the pigeon belly up, checking it is healthy, that its flight feathers are intact. Then, taking waxed silk thread, he ties the message to one of the strong tail feathers, closes the pigeon loft and walks over to the east wall of the terrace where the nearby watchtowers rising above the city blot out the bay and the land beyond. Very carefully, having first checked that no one is watching from a neighboring terrace, the taxidermist releases the bird, which gives a joyful coo and flutters in circles for half a minute, rising in the air, getting its bearings. Eventually, its keen homing instinct pinpoints its precise destination and with a rhythmic beating of wings, it quickly sets off for the French fort at the Trocadero, a speck in the sky growing steadily smaller until finally it disappears.

  Hands in the pockets of his gray housecoat, Gregorio Fumagal gazes out for a long time at the rooftops and towers of the city. Eventually, he turns and goes back down the steps to his workshop, which seems impossibly dark after the bright glare outside. As he does each time he sends a pigeon east, the taxidermist feels a curious exhilaration. A feeling of great power, a spiritual connection to the ineffable magnetic forces unleashed from the far side of the bay by his will and direction. Nothing could be less ordinary, less innocent, he concludes, than the pigeon, by now far away, which blindly carries the key to complex relationships between living beings, between his life and his death.

  This last word hangs in the air among the lifeless animals. The half-dissected dog still lies splayed on the marble table, covered with a white sheet. Like his other work, it is a task that requires patience. Some parts of the body have already been fitted with a wire framework to support the bones and joints, and natural cavities stuffed with wadding. The empty eye sockets are still packed with cotton wool. The animal reeks of the chemicals preserving it from decomposition. Having chopped the soap he bought from Fransquito Sanlúcar and ground it in a mortar with arsenic, mercuric chloride and spirit of wine, the taxidermist has begun painting on the animal’s skin with a horsehair brush, carefully following the nap of the hair, dabbing away any foam with a sponge.

  The clock on the bureau chimes and, without pausing, Fumagal quickly glances at it. The pigeon will have arrived by now, he thinks. With the message that will dictate new lines and curves, new dots marking points of impact and explosions. Once again powerful forces will be set in motion, further extending the spider’s web traced over the map, where the most recent bomb to fall is marked with a cross.

  When night draws in, he will go out for a walk. A long walk. At this time of year, evening in Cádiz is delightful.

  ROGELIO TIZÓN RARELY drinks wine; at most he may have a piece of bread soaked in wine at mid-morning. This evening, as always, he washes down his dinner with water. Soup, a chicken drumstick. A little bread. He is still gnawing on the drumstick when there is a knock at the door. The maid, a morose, elderly woman, answers and returns to announce Hipólito Barrull, who comes in carrying a folder of papers.

  “I didn’t know whether I should disturb you at such a late hour, Comisario. But you seemed particularly interested … traces in the sand, remember?”

  “Of course.” Tizón gets to his feet, wiping his hands and his mouth with a napkin. “And you could never disturb me, Professor. Would you care for something?”

  “No, thank you. I dined a little while ago.”

  The policeman glances at his wife sitting at the other end of the table: she is painfully thin, her lifeless eyes ringed with dark circles that make her seem older. Her thin lips seem harsh. Everyone in the city knows that this dour, melancholy woman was once a great beauty. And happy too, perhaps, once upon a time. Before she lost her only child, some say. Before she married, the scandalmongers say. But this is Cádiz. Being Comisario Tizón’s wife is akin to a life sentence. Is it true that he hits her? That’s the least of it, compadre. I mean. If all he did was beat her.

  “We’ll retire to the drawing room, Amparo.”

  His wife does not respond but simply gives the professor a distracted smile, sitting stiffly in front of her untouched meal, her left hand—the hand that bears her weddi
ng ring—idly rolling crumbs of bread into little balls.

  “Make yourself comfortable, Professor.” Tizón picks up a paraffin lamp, turning the wheel to adjust the flame. “Would you care for some coffee?”

  “No, thank you. I wouldn’t sleep.”

  “It has no effect on me. Coffee or no coffee, I haven’t been able to sleep a wink recently. But you’ll smoke a cigar with me. Forget your snuff for a while.”

  “I wouldn’t say no.”

  The drawing room is cozy, with shuttered windows that overlook the Alameda, carved wood chairs and sofas upholstered in damask, a mesa camilla—a table with a small brazier underneath—and, set against one wall, a piano no one has played for eleven years. A few crude paintings and a handful of engravings hang on the papered walls and there is a walnut bookcase with some three dozen books: some on the history of Spain, a couple of essays about urban sanitation, booklets of royal ordinances, a dictionary, a five-volume edition of Don Quixote published by Sancha, Romances de Germania by Juan Hidalgo, and two volumes about Cádiz and Andalucía from the Chronicles of Spain and Portugal by Juan Álvarez de Colmenar.

  “Try one of these.” Tizón opens a cigar case. “They arrived a couple of days ago from Havana.”

  The cigars, it goes without saying, were free. The comisario accepted eight cases of fine cigars as part-payment—the balance of 200 reales in silver duros—for authorizing a questionable passport for an immigrant family. The two men sit smoking around a large metal ashtray shaped like the head of a hunting dog. Setting down his recently lit cigar, Hipólito Barrull adjusts his spectacles, opens the folder and sets a sheaf of manuscript pages in front of Tizón. Then he picks up the cigar again, takes a deep draw and settles back in his armchair with a satisfied air.

  “Traces in the sand,” he says again, slowly exhaling. “I think this is what you were referring to.”

  Tizón looks at the papers. They seem vaguely familiar, and he recognizes Barrull’s handwriting.

  Oft have I seen thee, son of Laertes,

  Intent on some surprisal of thy foes.

  He knows he has read this before. A long time ago. The pages are numbered but bear neither title nor heading. The text takes the form of a dialogue: Athena, Odysseus. “Right well thy sense hath led thee forth, like some keen hound of Sparta.” Cigar clenched between his teeth, Tizón looks up for some explanation.

  “You don’t remember?” asks Barrull.

  “Vaguely …”

  “I gave you those pages to read a long time ago. My pitiful attempt at a translation of Sophocles’ Ajax.”

  The professor briefly refreshes his memory. For a time in his youth, Barrull devoted himself to the task—never completed—of translating into Spanish the tragedies of Sophocles as collected in the first published edition of the works made in Italy in the sixteenth century. And some three years ago, before war broke out with the French, as they talked about his work over a game of chess in the Café del Correo, Tizón’s curiosity had been piqued by Ajax when the professor explained to him that the play opens with a police investigation of sorts conducted by Odysseus—Ulysses to his friends.

  “Of course. How stupid of me.”

  Rogelio Tizón taps the papers with a finger and sucks on his cigar. He remembers it all now. Barrull lent him the translation of Sophocles’ tragedy, which he read with some interest, though the plot seemed thin. What he remembered was the image of Ulysses, during the siege of Troy, investigating Ajax’s slaughter of sheep and oxen in a Greek camp. Enraged by his companions’ snub in refusing to award him the armor of the dead Achilles and unable to avenge himself, Ajax vented his anger on the dumb beasts, torturing and killing them in his tent.

  “You were right about the beach, the footsteps in the sand … Go on, read …”

  Tizón is already reading, intent on every word:

  Now I find thee by the seaward camp,

  Where Ajax holds the last place in your line,

  Lingering in quest, and scanning the fresh print

  Of his late footsteps in the sand …

  So this is what I have been remembering, he thinks, puzzled. A sheaf of papers I read years ago. A Greek tragedy. Hipólito Barrull seems to sense the policeman’s disappointment.

  “You were hoping for something more, weren’t you?”

  “No, Professor, I’m sure it will prove useful … All I need now is to discover the connection between my memory of Ajax and the present events.”

  “When we spoke the other day, you didn’t tell me much about the nature of these events … Is it something to do with the French siege or with the murder of those poor girls?”

  Tizón stares at the glowing tip of his cigar, groping for an answer. After a moment he shrugs. “That’s the problem,” he says, “I feel as though both things are somehow connected.”

  Barrull shakes his head, his expression skeptical.

  “Are you relying on your policeman’s nose? ‘The nose’—my apologies, I am merely citing the classics—‘of some keen hound of Sparta’? If you’ll forgive my frankness, that seems absurd.”

  A flicker of irritation. “I know that,” murmurs Tizón leafing through the pages, reading lines at random. Still they shed no light. Barrull, with evident curiosity, studies him in silence.

  “Damn it, Don Rogelio,” he says eventually, “you are a box of surprises.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “I would never have expected a man like you to drag Sophocles into this.”

  “What do you mean, ‘a man like me’?”

  “You know … somewhat rough-hewn.”

  He blows smoke rings. Silence. “You’re a police commissioner,” says Barrull after a moment, “you’re accustomed to dealing with real tragedies, not fictions. Besides, I know you: you’re a level-headed man. So I have to wonder whether there can really be any serious connection between the two things. On one hand, you have a murderer—perhaps several murderers—on the other, a siege imposed on us by the French. And how many of them are there?”

  From the corner of his mouth, the comisario gives a brusque laugh, flashing his gold canine tooth.

  “Then, just to complicate matters, I’ve got your friend Ajax. The siege of Troy, the siege of Cádiz.”

  “With Ulysses as detective.” Barrull grins, baring his yellow teeth. “As your colleague, in a sense. Though to judge from your expression, the papers I brought have shed no light on the matter.”

  Tizón makes a vague gesture.

  “I’ll need to read through them some other time. More carefully.”

  The flicker of the lamp glints in the professor’s spectacles.

  “Take all the time you need … Meanwhile, I shall be waiting for you tomorrow morning at the café with my chessboard. Ready to crush you pitilessly.”

  “As always.”

  “As always. Unless you have some more pressing business to attend to, naturally.”

  Tizón’s wife is standing in the doorway of the drawing room. They did not hear her come in. Sensing her presence, Rogelio Tizón turns and scowls as though he has caught her eavesdropping. It would not be the first time. But she steps into the room and, as her face catches the light, the comisario realizes she comes bearing news, and from her expression it is not good.

  “There is a nightwatchman here for you. They’ve found another dead girl.”

  * * *

  * A Letter of Marque and Reprisal was a government license authorizing a person (known as a privateer) to attack and capture enemy vessels and bring them before admiralty courts for condemnation and sale.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Dawn finds Rogelio Tizón half-illuminated by an oil lamp planted in the ground. The girl—or what remains of her—is young, no more than sixteen or seventeen. Light-brown hair, a delicate frame. She is gagged, lying facedown, her hands tied low on her naked back which has been flayed so viciously that bones are visible through the congealed blood of the purple-black flesh. There are no other visible wo
unds. It seems clear that, like the others, she was lashed to death.

  No one—neither neighbors nor passersby—saw or heard anything. The gag, the isolated location and the time at which the crime occurred all contributed to the murder going unnoticed. The body was found on a patch of waste ground off the Calle de Amoladores where locals dump their rubbish for it to be collected every morning by the cart. The girl is still fully clothed below the waist; Tizón lifts her skirt to check. Her underskirts and unmentionables are intact, which in theory rules out the most depraved forms of assault, if most is a word that can be used in such circumstances.

  “Tía Perejil has arrived, Señor Comisario.”