The Siege

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  “Tell her to wait.”

  The midwife, whom he sent for some time ago, is waiting at the far end of the alley with the nightwatchmen, who are keeping back the few curious neighbors awake at this hour. She is ready to give her professional opinion when the comisario calls on her, but Tizón is in no hurry. For some time now he has been sitting stock-still on a pile of rubble, hat tilted down over his eyes, overcoat around his shoulders, hands resting on the brass head of his walking stick. Staring. His doubts as to whether the girl was murdered here or killed elsewhere and brought here seem to melt with the dawn, which reveals blood spatters on the ground and the rocks nearby. Clearly it was here that the girl was bound, gagged to muffle her screams, and whipped to death.

  Rogelio Tizón—as Barrull pointed out last night with caustic candor—is not a man for finer feelings. The routine horrors he has witnessed during his professional career have hardened his gaze and his conscience, and he has played a part in some of those horrors himself. All of Cádiz knows him to be a brutal, dangerous man. Yet in spite of his reputation for violence, the mutilated body next to him stirs a singular unease—not the vague compassion he might feel for any victim, but a curious feeling of reticence or modesty. He feels it more keenly now than he did five months ago when he saw the corpse of the first girl murdered in this way, and more intensely than when he was faced with the body of the girl on the reef. A frightening abyss seems to have opened up before him, a bottomless void that echoes with the sad, haunting notes of the piano in his drawing room that no one plays anymore. The long-ago, never-forgotten scent of a child’s skin, the malignant fever growing cold in the mute pain of an empty room. The solitude of silences without tears that drip like the cruel ticking of a clock. In short, the hollow eyes of the woman who now wanders aimlessly through Rogelio Tizón’s home, through his life, like a reproach or a witness, a ghost or a shadow.

  The policeman gets to his feet, blinking as though he has just returned from somewhere far away. It is time for Tía Perejil to inspect the body. With a wave, he orders his men to bring her through. Without waiting for any greeting or acknowledgment from the midwife, Tizón walks away from the body and spends some time questioning the neighbors who have congregated around the waste ground with blankets, capes and shawls thrown over their nightclothes. No one saw or heard anything. No one knows if the girl is local. No one has heard of any missing girls. Tizón orders Lieutenant Cadalso to have the body removed as soon as the midwife has finished her examination without allowing the neighbors to see it.

  “Understood?”

  “Yes.”

  “What the hell do you mean ‘yes’… Do you understand?”

  “I understand, Señor Comisario. The body is to be covered and no one is to be allowed to see it.”

  “And keep your mouth shut. Don’t say anything to anyone. Is that clear?”

  “Crystal clear, Señor Comisario.”

  “Because the first person to open their mouth will have their tongue ripped out,” he nods toward Tía Perejil. “And you can tell the old whore that too.”

  With matters now under control Rogelio Tizón, cane in hand, wanders off to explore the surrounding area. Daylight is beginning to creep over the sea wall and along the Calle Amoladores, painting the facades of the houses in a gray wash. There are no clear outlines yet, only the shadows of doorways and railings, of nooks and crannies. The comisario’s footsteps echo on the cobbles as he walks, searching for some clue, some sign. He feels like a chess player faced with a difficult situation and no immediate strategy, blankly staring at the pieces waiting for some sudden revelation, some hitherto unnoticed possibility to inspire his next move. It is not a random impression. The memory of his conversation with Hipólito Barrull is still fresh in his mind. The nose of the keen hound of Sparta. Footprints. The professor came with him last night and briefly surveyed the scene of the crime before tactfully taking his leave. “Let’s postpone our chess game,” he said on leaving. “It’s too late to postpone anything now,” Tizón was about to say, his mind on other things. For some time now he has been playing a darker, more complex game. Three pawns lost, an unseen opponent and a city under siege. What the comisario wants to do now is to go home and read the translation of Ajax lying next to his armchair, if only to dismiss the connection as absurd or mistaken. He knows how dangerous it can be to get hung up on intriguing ideas, false leads, dead ends and traps. In criminal investigations, where appearances are rarely deceptive, the most obvious path is usually the correct one. To stray from it is to wander into scenarios that are fruitless or dangerous. But this morning he cannot help but think and worry, and this makes him uneasy. The few short lines he read of Ajax last night echo to the rhythm of his footfalls in the gray dawn of the city. Tock, tock, tock. Now I find thee by the seaward camp. Tock, tock, tock. Scanning the fresh print of his late footsteps. Tock, tock, tock. Footprints and tracks. Cádiz is teeming with them. More numerous in the city than on the shore. Footsteps overlaying each other. Thousands of appearances that cloak or conceal the thousands of realities of complex, inconstant, iniquitous human beings. And everything further complicated by the siege the city must endure. By this strange war.

  On the corner of the Calle de Amoladores and Calle del Rosario, the ruins of a bombed-out building hit him like a slap in the face. Bitter evidence. The comisario stands frozen for a moment, struck dumb by this surprising—or as he concludes a moment later, this singularly unsurprising—discovery. The French shell landed less than twenty-four hours ago, a mere twenty paces from where the dead girl’s body now lies. Carefully, as though afraid he might contaminate the evidence by some ill-judged movement, Tizón studies the ruins, the yawning vertical slash that lays bare three floors of the building, the interior walls shored up with wooden buttresses. Then he turns and looks eastward, across the bay, toward the point from which the shot was fired, calculating the trajectory to the point of impact.

  A man steps out into the street. Despite the dawn chill he is wearing shirtsleeves and a long white apron. It is a baker removing timbers from the doorway to his bakery. Tizón walks over and, as he approaches the doorway, he catches the smell of freshly baked loaves. The man looks at him suspiciously, surprised to see a man in a redingote, a tricorne and a cane walking abroad so early.

  “What happened to the fragments of the bomb?”

  They were taken away, the baker tells him, surprised at being questioned about bombs so early in the morning. Tizón asks for details and the man obliges. “Some of the bombs explode,” he says, “others don’t. This one did. Hit the top of the building on the corner. There were fragments of lead strewn everywhere.”

  “Are you sure it was lead, my friend?”

  “Yes, señor. Slivers of lead about the length of your finger. The kind that get all twisted when the bomb explodes.”

  “Like corkscrews?” says Tizón.

  “Exactly. My daughter brought home four … You want to see them?”

  “No.”

  Tizón turns and heads back down the Calle de Amoladores. Walking faster now, thinking quickly. Two bombs, two girls found dead almost in the same location less than twenty-four hours after each of the bombs fell. It seems too neat to be a coincidence. And there is more, since there have been not two murders, but three. The first girl, also flogged to death, was found in an alley between Santo Domingo and La Merced, in the eastern sector of the city by the docks. At the time no one thought to ask whether there had been any bombs in the area, and this is what Tizón is about to check. Or rather confirm, since he knows in his heart that there must have been an explosion in the area shortly beforehand. That these bombs are killing people in a manner very different to that intended by the French. That on a chessboard, there is no such thing as chance.

  The policeman gives a faint smile—“smile” is perhaps excessive to describe the sullen, angular snarl that reveals his gold incisor—as he walks, amid the echoing footsteps and the gray dawn, swinging his cane. Tock, tock,
tock. Thinking. It has been a long time—he has forgotten how long—since he felt the prickle of gooseflesh beneath his clothes. The cold shudder of fear.

  THE DUCK FLIES low across the salt flats only to be picked off by a bullet. The gunshot sets other birds squawking and flapping in terror. Then silence. A moment later, three figures appear against the leaden dawn wearing the gray cloaks and black shakos of French soldiers. They move cautiously, bodies stooped, rifles in hand. Two of the men remain in the background, standing on a sandbank, weapons raised to provide cover for the third, who is searching in the undergrowth for the bird.

  “Don’t move,” whispers Felipe Mojarra.

  He is lying next to a narrow tidal creek, his bare feet and legs dangling into the salty mud, his gun pressed close to his face. Watching the Frenchmen. Next to him Lorenzo Virués, Captain of Engineers, lies quietly, head down, clutching the leather shoulder bag in which he carries his spyglass, notepads and all his other sketching materials.

  “They’re just hungry. Soon as they find that duck they’ll be gone.”

  “But what if they come this way?” whispers the other officer.

  Mojarra runs his finger around the trigger guard of his flintlock: a fine Charleville musket captured from the enemy some time ago near Zuazo Bridge, it fires spherical lead bullets almost an inch in diameter. In the cartridge belt around his waist, next to his water gourd, he has nineteen more rounds wrapped in wax paper.

  “If they come much closer, I’ll kill one of them and that should keep the others at bay.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Captain Virués take out the pistol he carries in his belt and set it down on the sand within easy reach, just in case. He is an experienced soldier, so Mojarra does not feel the need to remind him to cock his weapon only at the last minute since, in the silence of the salt flats, the slightest sound will carry. Besides, Mojarra would much rather the French soldiers find their duck and head back to the trenches. When it comes to a shooting match, everyone knows how it starts but no one knows how it will end and the salter doesn’t much like the idea of having to make it back to the Spanish lines half a league away from this no-man’s-land of swamps, canals and quagmire with the gabachos on his tail. He has spent four hours guiding his companion through the San Fernando canal to arrive at dawn at the perfect spot: an observation point where the officer can make sketches of the fortifications of the enemy stronghold known as Los Granaderos. Later, when they are safely back behind their own lines, these sketches can be transformed into the detailed plans and charts in which Captain Virués—or at least this is what was said to Mojarra, whose skills are limited to negotiating his way through the swampland—is a master.

  “They’re leaving. They found the duck.”

  The three Frenchmen depart as cautiously as they came, rifles cocked, on the alert. From the careful way they move, Mojarra can tell they are veterans—fusiliers from the 9th Line Infantry Regiment which holds the nearest line of trenches—accustomed to being ambushed by the gangs of guerrilleros that operate along the fortified line of the Isla de Léon, beyond the meandering course of the Sancti Petri canal and the tidal creek of Santa Cruz. He knows about the 9th Regiment because a month ago, spotting the shako of a French soldier who was squatting in the undergrowth to relieve himself, Mojarra had crept up and slit his throat.

  “Come on. Stay six or seven paces behind me.”

  “Is it far?”

  “We’re nearly there.”

  Felipe Mojarra gets to his feet, carefully crouching so he can survey the territory then, knee-deep in water, he wades slowly through the creek clutching his musket. The water in the marshes is so thick with saltpeter that in a few short hours it would flay the skin off any man foolish enough to walk through it barefoot. But Mojarra was born on the salt flats. Weathered by a life spent hunting, the soles of his feet are yellow and callused, tough as old leather, impervious to stones and thorns. As he moves, Mojarra hears the soft squelch of his companion’s boots behind him. Unlike Mojarra, who is wearing knee-length shorts, a coarse canvas shirt, a short flannel jacket and a jackknife with a four-inch blade tucked into his belt, the captain is dressed in a blue uniform whose purple collar and lapels bear the insignia of the engineering corps. He is a handsome man, about six foot tall by Mojarra’s reckoning, and long past thirty, with dark blond hair and mustaches and impeccable manners. This is their fifth reconnaissance mission together, and the salter is no longer surprised to see the captain wearing full uniform—excepting the regulation tie. Few Spanish soldiers are prepared to venture abroad without their uniform on irregular maneuvers. Should they be captured, their uniform is a guarantee that the French will treat them as equals, as prisoners of war; a very different fate from that which awaits local men like Mojarra. It does not matter what they wear. Should they fall into French hands, they would be greeted with a noose around their necks and the nearest tree branch. Or a bullet through the back of the head.

  “Careful, Captain. Go round the other side … That’s it … If you go that way, you’ll sink. The mud here would swallow a jockey and his horse with him.”

  Felipe Mojarra Galeote, forty-six and a native of the Isla de Léon, has never ventured farther than Chiclana, the Puerto Real and the city of Cádiz where his daughter, Mari Paz, works as a lady’s maid for a family of wealthy merchants. He has raised his daughter and his three other children—all girls, his only son died before the boy was four years old—and provided for his wife and his elderly half-crippled mother-in-law by working as a salter supplemented with a little illicit poaching along the creeks and salt marshes whose twists and turns he knows better than his own thoughts. Like all those who made their living here in peacetime, a year ago Mojarra signed up with the Salt Marsh Fusiliers, a troop of irregulars set up by his neighbor Don Cristóbal Sánchez de la Campa. The troop brings a little pay from time to time and gives them food. Besides, the salter has no love for the French, they steal bread from the mouths of the poor, string people up, rape women, they are enemies of God and the king.

  “The gabacho stronghold is over there, Captain.”

  “That’s Los Granaderos? You’re sure?”

  “It’s the only one around here … about two hundred feet away.”

  Lying on a narrow sandbar, musket laid between his legs, Mojarra watches as the officer takes his drawing tools from his knapsack, opens his telescope and smears mud on the barrel and the lens, leaving only a small clean circle in the center. He then crawls to the crest of the ridge and trains his lens on the enemy position. He is wise to be cautious: the dawn sky is clear and cloudless and the sun glimmering on the horizon will soon rise between Medina Sidonia and the pine groves of Chiclana. This is the perfect time of day for sketching, as Captain Virués once explained to Mojarra, because the horizontal light emphasizes shape and detail.

  “I’m going to check whether there are mosíus on the coast,” whispers the salter.

  He grabs his rifle and crawls on all fours through the salt marshes and the wild asparagus growing along the ridge. Around him are small sand dunes, shrubs, reed beds, flat stretches of mud dotted with flashes of white where the salt crust crackles underfoot. There are no French soldiers outside the fort. By the time he returns, Virués has set down his spyglass, picked up a pencil and is sketching. Not for the first time, Mojarra admires the man’s skill, the deft, precise manner in which he draws the lines of the fortifications on the paper, the mud ramparts, the gabions, the fascines, the cannons poking through the embrasures. A scene repeated, with little variation, from trench to trench along an arc that spans some twelve miles encircling the Isla de Léon and the city of Cádiz from the Trocadero to the fortress of Sancti Petri. This offensive arc is mirrored by a Spanish line running parallel, a dense network of gun emplacements, cannons crisscrossing all approaches, making a direct assault by the Imperial troops impossible.

  At the fortress, a trumpet sounds. Mojarra pops his head above the undergrowth and watches as a limp red, w
hite and blue flag is hoisted up the flagpole. Time for breakfast. He slips a hand into his bag-cum-cartridge-belt and takes out a hunk of stale bread, soaks it in a few drops of water from his gourd, and nibbles on it.

  “How is it going, Captain?”

  “Excellent,” the officer replies, not looking up, concentrating on his drawing. “Anything happening?”

  “All quiet as a millpond.”

  “Good. Another half an hour and then we can head back.”

  Mojarra notices that the water level in the nearby creek has begun to ebb, a sure sign that in the bay the tide is beginning to go out. The flat-bottomed boat they left half a mile back will soon be grounded in the mud. Some hours from now, on the last leg of their journey back to La Caracca, the current will be against them, making headway more difficult. This is an aspect of the curious war being fought in the salt marshes. The rhythmic ebb and flow of the Atlantic tides adds to the singular nature of this military campaign: guerrilla sorties, counterattacks, gunboats that draw little water moving stealthily through the labyrinth of marshes, tidal creeks and channels.

  The sun’s first rays, red-gold and almost horizontal, pierce the undergrowth, illuminating the face of Captain Virués, intent on his sketches. Sometimes, in quieter moments—and the early morning sorties of Felipe Mojarra and his companion are filled with prudent pauses and cautious delays—the salter has seen the soldier sketch items from nature: a plant, an eel, a salt-flat crab. Always with the same swift dexterity. Once, at New Year, when they had to spend a whole day hiding out in the ruins of a salt mill, shivering with cold, waiting for nightfall so they could leave unnoticed by the French gun emplacements in the inlet at San Diego, the captain made a sketch of Mojarra himself. It was quite faithful: the thick muttonchop whiskers vying with his bushy eyebrows, the deep furrows of his brow, the laconic, obstinate expression of this man born into a country of sun and wind, of the coarse salt of the marshes. When they had safely arrived back behind Spanish lines, Captain Virués gave Mojarra the portrait as a gift. Satisfied with the likeness, Mojarra now keeps the portrait in a tattered frame with no glass in his humble home on the Isla de Léon.