“Whatever else you do, remember this,” adds the professor. “Torture has just been abolished by the Cortes.”
That’s what they say, Tizón is about to reply, but he says nothing. He spent this very afternoon interrogating, in his usual manner—the only effective manner—a foreigner who was found yesterday furtively watching the young seamstresses coming out of the dressmakers’ workshops on the Calle Juan de Andas. It took several hours of rigorous interrogation, much sweat from Cadalso, and much screaming from the suspect, muffled by the thick dungeon walls, to establish that he was not responsible for the murders. Tizón, however, is planning to keep him locked up for a while, in case things become complicated and it is necessary to appease the mob. When you have a suspect in hand, it matters little whether he is guilty, or only seems to be. And a confession made in front of a clerk who is deaf to anything but the jingling of the money he is paid is a confession nonetheless. It has not yet come to this with Tizón’s prisoner—an unmarried, middle-aged worker from Seville, a refugee in Cádiz—but you never know. Tizón does not care that the deputies at San Felipe Neri have spent months debating whether or not to adopt a law similar to the English habeas corpus or to reinstate the Aragonese law, both of which forbid arresting someone without prior inquiries proving they may have committed a crime. His opinion, unlikely to be changed by debates in the Cortes or fatuous liberal nonsense, is that good intentions are one thing, but reality is a very different matter. With or without such new laws, experience has proved that there is only one method of getting the truth from people—it is a method as old as the world, or at least as the policeman’s profession. And the margin of error, inevitable in such methods, is offset by a high rate of success. You cannot make a tortilla without breaking eggs, not in the inn on the Calle Veedor or in a police cell. Tizón has broken a few eggs in his time. And fully intends to go on breaking them.
“With or without the Cortes, I will get inside his head, Professor. I guarantee it.”
“First you have to catch him.”
“I will do.” Tizón looks around, bitter and suspicious. “Cádiz is a small town.”
“But full of people. I fear your claim is uncertain. A voluntarism that is understandable, given your profession and the circumstances, but it is hardly rigorous … You have no concrete reason to assume you will catch him. It’s not simply a matter of following your nose. The solution, if one exists, will be arrived at by more complex, scientific means.”
“The manuscript of Ajax …”
“Listen to me, my dear friend, don’t fall back into your old ways. I know the play; I translated it. It is poetry, not science. You cannot solve this case based on a text written in the fifth century BC … It is all very well for firing the imagination, for conjuring the images and metaphors that permeate the sort of overheated novels read by ladies nowadays. But it leads nowhere.”
They have stopped in front of Tizón’s house and are leaning against a buttress in the ramparts between two watchtowers. The figure of a sentry can be seen moving near the closer of the two, his bayonet glittering above his head. On the far side of the wall are dark shapes, the hulls and masts of Spanish and English ships anchored nearby. The night is so peaceful, even the sea is calm. All is boundless and silent, the dark mass of water, the rocks at low tide, the sand and seaweed.
“Sometimes,” Barrull continues, “when our senses cannot grasp certain causes and their effects, we fall back on our imagination, which is the least trustworthy of guides. Nothing in this world is exempt from the natural order. Every action—and I insist on this—can be explained by invariable, necessary laws … Therefore, let us draw the rational conclusion: there are universal codes we do not understand.”
Tizón tosses the stub of his cigar into the sea.
“Many things, I tell you, can be known by mortal eyes,” he murmurs, “but before he sees it happening, no man can foretell the future …”
Barrull gives a snort of disapproval, or perhaps exasperation.
“You and Sophocles are beginning to bore me. Even in the improbable, though not impossible, event that the murderer is familiar with the text and has been inspired by it, the fact that the fourth girl was murdered before the bomb dropped makes it a rather secondary detail. Small change in this tragedy … If I were you, and were as sure of what I was saying, I would devote my time to establishing where and when future bombs will fall.”
“Yes, but how?”
“That, I don’t know.” Barrull’s laugh rings out in the darkness. “Perhaps you could ask the French?”
* * *
*1 Manuel de Godoy, “Príncipe de la Paz,” prime minister of Spain from 1801 to 1808.
*2 Pajarete, sometimes called “blended sherry,” is a vinous liqueur to which boiled must is added.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Ite, missa est. The eight o’clock mass at San Francisco ends. At this hour, the faithful are few: some men standing or sitting in the side pews and about twenty women in the nave, kneeling on cushions or on mantillas laid on the ground. With these last words and the priest’s blessing, Lolita Palma closes her missal, makes the sign of the cross and walks toward the door, dipping her hand in the font of holy water set against a wall covered with votive offerings in wax and brass. She does not come to mass every day, but today would have been the birthday of her father—a devout man, though not excessively so, he always attended mass before beginning his day’s work. Lolita knows that Tomás Palma would be pleased to see her here, commemorating his birthday this way. At other times, she is reasonably faithful to the precepts of her Catholic education, goes to mass on Sundays and sometimes takes communion after confessing to an elderly priest, an old friend of the family who does not ask impertinent questions and dispenses light penances. Nothing more. She read widely even as a girl; the product of a modern education, like many middle-class women in Cádiz, the heiress to the Palma fortune has a liberal view of the world, of business and of life. This is consistent with the formal practice of Catholicism, which in her case is sincere, but tempers its extremes, freeing her of the sanctimonious attitude customary to her sex and her times.
The square is bustling with people. The sun is not yet high and the temperature is pleasant.
A number of foreigners from a nearby boardinghouse—the Posada de París, now renamed the Posada de la Patria—are sitting around tables set out in the street, having breakfast, watching the passersby. The local shopkeepers open their doors and take down the wooden shutters from their windows to show off their merchandise. Women kneel to scrub the doorsteps in front of their houses. Others are sprinkling water on the pavement to keep down the dust or are watering plants on their balconies. Lolita lifts her mantilla and allows it to fall back onto her shoulders—she is wearing her hair in a braided coil, pinned with a mother-of-pearl comb at the nape of her neck. She slips the missal into a black satin bag, lets her fan dangle from the cord on her right wrist and walks toward the shops between the corner of the Calle de San Francisco and the Calle del Consulado Viejo, where there are secondhand bookshops and shops selling prints and engravings. Before going home, she plans to walk down to the Plaza de San Agustín to collect some books and order some foreign newspapers. Then, as every day, she will go back to her office.
She does not see Pépé Lobo until he is right in front of her, coming out of the bookshop with a package under one arm. The corsair is wearing a frockcoat with gilt buttons, long nankeen breeches that reach his ankles, and buckled shoes. When he sees her, he stops dead and doffs his bicorn hat.
“Señora,” he says.
Somewhat flustered, Lolita Palma returns the greeting. “Good day, Captain.”
She was not expecting this encounter. Nor, it seems, was he. He looks uncertain, hat in hand, as though trying to decide whether to put it on again and carry on walking, or stay put and exchange pleasantries. She too is hesitant, ill at ease.
“Taking a stroll?”
“I have just come from mass.”
“Oh.”
He looks at her curiously, as though he was expecting a different response. I hope he doesn’t take me for some Holy Mary, Lolita thinks fleetingly, and is immediately irritated by the thought. What do I care what such an individual thinks of me?
“Are you a regular patron of bookshops?” she asks pointedly.
The corsair does not seem to notice the insolence. He turns and looks back at the shop he has just left, then gestures to the package under his arm. He smiles to defuse the situation—an ivory-white slash across his tanned face.
“Not really, excepting for my work,” he says simply. “This is the Naval Gazetteer, in two volumes. An English captain died of a fever and they auctioned off his belongings. I knew some of the books would end up here.”
Lolita nods. Such auctions are frequent in the little market down by the Puerta de Mar when ships arrive after long, insanitary voyages. The stark stories of a life spread out on canvas groundsheets, like flotsam from a shipwreck: a carved whalebone, some rope, a pocket watch, a knife with a grimy handle, a pewter mug engraved with initials, a miniature portrait of a woman and sometimes a book or two. A sailor’s trunk holds very little.
“How sad,” she says.
“For the Englishman, of course.” Lobo pats his package. “But fortunate for me. It is a fine book to have aboard …”
The corsair trails off, the last word dying on his lips. He seems to hesitate over whether to conclude matters or talk a little more, trying to find a happy medium between politeness and expediency. Lolita also hesitates, and begins to be amused by the situation.
“Cover yourself, Captain, please …”
Pépé Lobo is still bareheaded; finally he puts his hat on. He is wearing the coat he always wears, frayed at the sleeves, but the fine cambric shirt is new and freshly laundered and his white tie is knotted at two points. Now it is her turn to smile to herself. The nervousness she senses in him moves her a little—this vague, acutely masculine clumsiness, combined with that calm expression which now and then intrigues her—and I cannot think why, she says to herself. Or perhaps I can. An individual in his profession is accustomed to women of a very different class. I suppose he is not accustomed to dealing with women as employers or business partners. To women having the power to give him work or take it away.
“Do you speak English?”
“I can get by, señora.”
“Did you learn it in Gibraltar?”
She said this without thinking. Or almost without thinking. He looks at her thoughtfully. Curious, perhaps. Those green eyes, so feline, now hold her own. Wary. A cautious cat.
“I spoke a little English before that. But yes, in Gibraltar, I improved it.”
“Of course.”
They stare at each other a moment longer, silent once more. Studying one another. In Lolita’s case, she is also studying herself. She feels a singular combination of curiosity and suspicion that is both irksome and pleasant. The last time she saw the corsair, the tenor of their conversation was very different—professional, in front of others. It occurred a week ago at a meeting in her office. The Sánchez Guineas were in attendance to finalize the sale of the French místico Madonna Diolet, which, after two months before the Prize Court—and after greasing the palms of sundry court officers—had finally been declared a fair capture, with its cargo of leather, wheat and aguardiente. The king’s share having been paid to the Treasury, Pépé Lobo took the third due to the crew—of which, in addition to the 25 pesos per month he is paid as an advance against captures, he will take seven parts. He also takes charge of the monies owed to the families of crew members who died or were injured during the captures: two parts each, in addition to a share of the general kitty set aside for invalids, widows and orphans. In her office, the corsair’s manner was brisk and efficient and particularly scrupulous about the state of the accounts; he meticulously checked every digit of the monies owed to his men before appending his signature on each page. His attitude, Lolita noticed, was not that of a suspicious man worried about being cheated by the shipowners; he was simply confirming the figures, calculating the amount for which he and his men had risked their lives, within the cramped confines of the cutter. Outside, the wind, the waves, the enemy; inside, the smell and the damp and the overcrowding. One tiny cabin in the stern for the captain, another with bunks separated by curtains for the first officer, the bo’sun and the ship’s clerk; the rest of the crew took turns sleeping in the shared hammocks on the open deck, with no protection from wind or sea, while the cutter pitched and rolled at the whim of the ocean and the war, constantly on the alert, in keeping with the old sailor’s maxim: “One hand for you, the other for the king.” As she watched him read and sign the papers in her office, Lolita realized that a man is not only a good captain at sea, he must also be one on land. She also realized why the Sánchez Guineas held Pépé Lobo in such high esteem and why, in times like these with sailors in short supply, there was no shortage of men willing to sign up aboard the Culebra. As Miguel Sánchez Guinea once said to her, “Pépé Lobo is the sort of man the girls in port go crazy about, and men would give their shirt for.”
They are still standing in the street outside the secondhand bookshop. Staring at each other. The corsair tips his hat to indicate that he must be on his way. Suddenly, Lolita Palma finds herself wishing he would not go. At least not yet. She wants to prolong this curious sensation, the unfamiliar tingle of fear or wariness that so kindles her curiosity.
“Would you walk with me, Captain? I have some packages to collect. Books, in fact.”
She says the words with a self-assurance that surprises even her. She is calm, or at least that is the impression she wishes to convey. But the pulse at her wrists quickens. Pépé Lobo looks at her, unsettled for a moment, then smiles again. A sudden, candid smile. Or so it seems. Lolita looks at his firm jawline, the shadow of stubble already visible, although he doubtless shaved this morning. His bushy dark-brown sideburns are long, as is the fashion, half covering his cheeks. Pépé Lobo is not a sophisticated man, a gentleman like Captain Virués, nor is he a man of good family accustomed to frequenting the cafés of Cádiz and strolling along the Alameda. Not by a long chalk. There is something crude about him, accentuated by the strange paleness of his feline eyes. Something primitive, perhaps dangerous. A broad back, strong hands, a solid presence. In short, a man. And yes, dangerous is the word. It is not difficult to imagine him in shirtsleeves, hair wild, covered in sweat and salt spray, shouting orders and curses amid the smoke of cannonfire, with the wind whistling in the rigging on the cutter where he earns his living. Nor is it hard to imagine him on rumpled sheets beneath the body of a woman.
This last thought unsettles Lolita Palma. She tries to think of something to say to hide her confusion. She and the corsair are walking down the Calle San Francisco—not looking at each other, not speaking, a hand’s breadth apart.
“When do you put out again?”
“Eleven days from now. If the Armada gives us the necessary permissions.”
She clasps her bag in front of her. They come to the corner of the Calle del Baluarte and walk on. Slowly.
“Your men will be happy. The French místico turned a generous profit. And we have another capture still to be adjudicated.”
“Indeed. The problem is that many of them have already sold their share of the capture to various merchants in the city. They would rather have money now, even if it is less, than wait for the decision of the Prize Court … And, of course, many have already spent it …”
Lolita can easily imagine the sailors of the Culebra squandering their money in the backstreets of El Boquete and the sordid dives of La Caleta. Nor is it difficult to picture Pépé Lobo squandering his.
“I suppose that is good for business,” she ventures. “They will be eager to put out to sea again to earn more.”
“Some, yes; others less so. It is not an easy life.”
Above their heads, on every balcony, plan
ts spill through ornate railings of wrought iron, like a hanging garden along the length of the street. In front of a toy shop, a group of filthy urchins wearing tattered caps peer enviously at the pasteboard figurines and horses, at drums and spinning tops and toy wagons hanging from the doorjamb.
“I fear I am distracting you from your business,” she says.
“Don’t worry. I was heading back to the port. To the ship.”
“You have no home here in the city?”
The corsair shakes his head. When he was on land he needed a place to live, he tells her, but not now. Especially given the prices in Cádiz. Keeping a home or a room here costs a lot of money, and everything he possesses will easily fit in his little cabin.
“That’s true. But you have money now.”
Once more the white slash of a smile opens in his tanned face.
“A little, yes. As you say … but one never knows. Life, like the sea, can be a bitch.” He touches his hat. “Please forgive my language.”
“Don Emilio tells me you deposited all of your money with him.”
“Yes. He and his son are decent men. They give a fair rate of interest.”
“Might I ask a personal question?”
“Of course.”
“What drew you to the sea?”
Pépé Lobo pauses for a moment before answering, as though weighing the matter.
“Necessity, señora. Like almost all the sailors I know … Only a fool would go to sea by choice.”
“Perhaps I would have been such a fool, had I been born a man.”
She says it as she walks, looking straight ahead. And she can feel Pépé Lobo staring at her. When she turns toward him, she can still see a hint of astonishment in the sailor’s eyes.
“You are a curious woman, señora, if you will permit me to be so bold.”
“Why would I not permit it?”
On the corner of the Calle de la Carne, by the Iglesia del Rosario, a group of locals and passersby are discussing a poster on the convent wall. It is a message from the Regency concerning the recent military operations, including the failure of General Blake’s foray into the Condado de Niebla and the fall of Tarragona to the French. Next to the official poster is another; this one is anonymous, commenting in caustic terms that responsibility lies with the English General Graham and his lack of interest in saving the Spanish garrison. With the exception of Cádiz, which, thanks to its ramparts and its cannons, is still free, the news from elsewhere in the Peninsula is frequently bad: incompetent generals, undisciplined troops, the British acting according to their own whims, and a blurring of the boundaries between guerrillas and gangs of murderous highwaymen. From one defeat to another, as cousin Toño quips, and so on to the final victory. Which is surely out there somewhere.
The Siege Page 26
