The Siege

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  The comisario is spellbound by this strange web etched over the original paper—like a cone with its vertex pointing eastward; the codes, the circles drawn with a compass around each point of impact. For a long time he stands in front of the table, staring down at the map, swearing under his breath. It is as if, when looked at as a whole, what at first seems to be a jumble of crisscrossed lines is a second map superimposed upon the first: one that charts a strange, sinister labyrinth Tizón has been unable to see, or even sense, before today. A parallel city governed by dark forces that defy ordinary logic.

  I’ve got you now, he thinks coldly, only to add a moment later: at least, I’ve got the spy. He won’t get away now. He rummages in the drawer and finds a little book in an oilcloth slipcase listing the code of numbers and letters attributed to each point of impact, the street names, the precise latitude and longitude, the distance in toises, so it is possible to calculate the point of impact with reference to buildings and easily identifiable landmarks. All of this is crucially important, and yet the comisario’s eyes keep drifting back to the circles traced around the places where the bombs fell. He has a sudden flash of inspiration and, picking up the magnifying glass, he looks for four specific places: the alleyway between Santo Domingo and La Merced, Lame Paco’s Tavern, the corner of the Calle de Amoladores and Rosario, and the Calle del Viento. All are carefully marked, but there is nothing to distinguish them from the others—only the codes that relate to the data in the oilskin notebook, making it possible to determine which bombs exploded and which did not. All four exploded, as did about fifty others.

  Tizón puts everything back in its place, closes the drawer, locks it again with his picklock and stands for a moment, deep in thought. Then he walks over to the bookcase, takes down each volume and leafs through them to check whether there are any documents hidden between the pages. In the copy of Système de la nature, ou des Lois du monde physique et du monde moral, by a certain M. Mirabaud, published in London, he finds a number of passages underlined in pencil. One of these stands out:

  There is no cause, however minute, however remote, that does not sometimes produce the greatest and most immediate effects on man. It may, perhaps, be in the parched plains of Lybia, that are amassed the first elements of a storm or tempest, which, borne by the winds, approach our climate, render our atmosphere dense, and thus operating on the temperament, may influence the passions of a man …

  Contemplating what he has just read, the comisario is about to close the book when, as he flicks quickly through the pages, his eye falls on another passage, also underlined:

  It is in the natural order that fire burns, because it is of its essence to burn. It is in the natural order that the wicked man should do evil, because he is of his essence evil.

  Tizón takes his notebook from his pocket and jots down the two paragraphs before replacing the book on its shelf. He glances at the clock on the dresser and realizes that he has already been here too long. The owner might come back at any moment, although he has taken precautions against such an eventuality: he has two men trailing the suspect and a boy, a fast runner, who will dash back the moment the suspect starts to head home; he also has Cadalso and another officer posted at either end of the street, ready to give the alert. In principle, such precautions are unnecessary since the map, together with the Mulatto’s confession, are more than evidence enough for them to arrest the taxidermist and hand him over to the military tribunal, where, with no right of appeal, they would snap his neck with a few quick twists of the garrote. Nothing could be easier, especially in these days when Cádiz is particularly sensitive to acts of war and espionage. But the comisario is in no hurry. There are some murky points he would like to clarify first, theories to be tested and suspicions to be confirmed. Arresting a man who stuffs animals, underlines disturbing passages in books and sends messages to the French informing them where their bombs have fallen seems of little importance just now. What he wants is to work out whether there is some different, parallel way of reading the map he has just locked in the desk drawer—a direct connection between the man who lives in this house, four French bomb sites and four murdered girls, three after and one before those same bombs fell. A meaning that is perhaps pulsing underneath the spider’s web of penciled lines that pinions the map from east to west. A premature arrest could change the scenario, leaving the mystery forever unresolved and Tizón with only a captured spy and a host of suspicions that might never be confirmed. This is not what he is looking for today, searching among the bodies of dead animals, through drawers and cupboards for the key to the secrets which, for some time now, have forced him to live among brooding ghosts. The comisario is searching for a solution to the riddle which once seemed simple but which, since the preemptive murder on the Calle del Viento—the bomb falling after, not before—seems unfathomable. In order to be proven or refuted, his theory requires that all the pieces on the chessboard remain in play, each moving freely according to its rules. As his friend Hipólito Barrull would say, he needs empirical evidence. Preventing the potential murderer of four girls from killing again would be a public service, a heroic and a patriotic act. But from another point of view, it would obviate any possibility of testing his powers of reasoning and their limits. This is why Tizón has decided to be patient, to be as still as the animals who even now are staring at him with their glass eyes from perches and display cases. He will keep watch over his prey, do nothing to alert him, and wait for more bombs to fall. After all, Cádiz is not short of targets. And any game of chess requires a piece to be sacrificed sometimes.

  * * *

  * Montera—a hat traditionally worn as part of Iberian folk costume, covered in astrakhan fur with an inner lining of velvet. The image of a saint is sometimes printed on the lining as a talisman of good luck; catite—a traditional Andalusian hat with a high conical crown and a wide brim with upturned edges.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The day is cool and cloudy, a light northerly breeze rippling the waters of the canals. Felipe Mojarra leaves his house early—broad-brimmed hat pushed down over his eyes, his gamebag and cape thrown over his shoulders, horn-handled knife tucked into his belt—to walk the quarter of a league of tree-lined road that leads from the village on the Isla de Léon to the military zone and San Carlos hospital. Today he is wearing a pair of rope sandals. He is going to visit Cárdenas, his brother-in-law, who is slowly convalescing from the bullet that grazed his skull as they were bringing the French gunboat back from the mill at Santa Cruz. The bullet merely splintered the bone, but there were complications when the wound became infected, and Cárdenas is still very weak. Mojarra visits him as often as possible, whenever he is not on duty with the guerrillas or accompanying Captain Virués on reconnaissance missions. The salter always brings some food prepared by his wife and chats for a while with Cárdenas over a cigar. But the visits are always grueling, not so much because of his brother-in-law, who is more or less holding up, but because of the atmosphere in the hospital. It is no one’s idea of a good day out.

  Mojarra walks along the straight roads of the military district, between the serried ranks of naval barracks, past the church square and enters the building on the left, after showing his papers to the guard. He walks up the stairs and has hardly crossed the vast hall connecting the two wards before he feels a familiar shiver of unease at being inside this disagreeable place, its constant low, monotonous murmuring, the groans of hundreds of men lying on bare boards on mattresses of straw and corn husks, lined up such that, from the door, they seem to stretch forever. Then comes the smell, also familiar—which, though expected, is no less sickening. The open windows do little to dissipate the fetid odor of rotting, ulcerous flesh and the sickly stench of gangrene beneath the bandages. Mojarra removes his hat and the checked kerchief he wears beneath it.

  “How have you been?”

  “As you can see. Not too good, but still alive and kicking.”

  His eyes are shining and red-rimmed from the fev
er. He looks terrible. His unshaven face is gaunt, his cheeks hollow. His head has been shaved and the wound—exposed, to make it easier to drain—looks trivial when one looks around this ward filled with the injured, the crippled and the maimed. There are soldiers, sailors and civilians wounded not only during the recent fighting along the front line and the incursions into occupied territory, but also from battles fought last year at El Puerto, Trocadero and Sanlúcar, the disaster suffered by Zayas’ Division at Huelva, General Blake’s forays into the Condando de Niebla and the battle of Chiclana; suppurating sores, gaping cuts that have still not healed, amputated stumps with purple suture scars, heads and limbs with wounds from bullets or sabers, patches over blinded eyes or empty sockets. And always the constant, muted moaning that seems like a distillation of all the pain and sorrow in the world.

  “What did the surgeons say?”

  Cárdenas heaves a sigh. “That I’ll have to take it slowly … that I’ll be here for a while yet.”

  “I think you’re looking a lot better.”

  “Come on, don’t treat me like a fool. And give me a smoke.”

  Mojarra takes out two small cigars, handing one to his brother-in-law and putting the other in his mouth, then lights both with his tinderbox. With some difficulty, Cárdenas sits up on the edge of the mattress—the sheets are grubby, the blanket old and threadbare—and takes a deep, satisfied draw on the cigar. The first in two weeks, he claims. Damn tobacco. From his gamebag, Mojarra takes out a package tied with string: cured meat, salted tuna, a small earthenware jar of stewed cod with chickpeas, a flask of wine and a bundle of six cigars.

  “Your sister sent this. Make sure your compañeros here don’t steal it all.”

  Glancing around warily, Cárdenas stows the package under the pallet of his mattress. He sets the earthenware jar on the floor beside his feet.

  “How are your girls?”

  “Good.”

  “And the one in Cádiz?”

  “Even better.”

  The brothers-in-law smoke while Mojarra tells Cárdenas the latest news. There have been more forays into the tidal creeks, and the French are on the defensive—shelling over the Isla de Léon and the city, but causing little damage. There are rumors that General Ballesteros and his men have retreated to Gibraltar and the safety of the English cannons, as the gabachos have been threatening to take Algeciras and Tarifa. A military expedition has set sail for Veracruz to fight the Mexican insurgents. Mojarra himself narrowly missed being forcibly enlisted with some of the other villagers, but Don Lorenzo Virués rescued him, insisting he was needed here.

  “So how is your captain?”

  “Same as always, you know … Still sketching, still getting me up before dawn …”

  “Have we lost any battles lately?”

  “Every one, except Cádiz and the Isla.”

  Cárdenas gives a bitter scowl, baring his gray, fleshless gums. “They should line up twenty generals and shoot them all for treason.”

  “It’s not just the generals, Bartolo. The problem is no one can agree what to do—it’s every man for himself. The soldiers do their best, only to get themselves killed; they decide to pull together, and still they are slaughtered … It’s hardly surprising so many are deserting, running off into the mountains. The way things are we have more and more guerrilleros and fewer soldiers.”

  “And the Redcoats?”

  “Still here, still doing what they always do.”

  “At least the English know exactly what they want.”

  “That they do. They do their job and they don’t give a shit about us.”

  A pause. The two men smoke in silence. Mojarra cannot help but stare at the cross-shaped wound on his brother-in-law’s head, which looks like an open mouth whose lips have been slashed. Inside the wound is a dirty, oozing scab.

  “I heard they shot Father Ronquillo,” says Cárdenas.

  Mojarra nods. Ronquillo, the parish priest in El Puerto, hung up his cassock the day the French burned down his church and led a group of men who started out as patriots and ended up as cutthroats, ruthlessly robbing and murdering travelers and peasants. Eventually, the ex-priest and his men defected to the French.

  “About a month ago, our guerrillas laid an ambush for him near Conil,” Mojarra explains. “They gave him a good hiding, then shot him.”

  “He’s better off dead. He was a bad lot.”

  A sudden howl makes Mojarra turn his head. Lying on his back, writhing naked on the bed, is a young man whose arms and legs have been strapped down. He arches his body violently, grinding his teeth, clenching his fists, every muscle tensed, eyes bulging, letting out short, staccato cries of rage. No one else seems to pay him any mind. A soldier from the Cantabria battalion, Cárdenas explains, wounded seven months ago during the battle of Chiclana. He has a French bullet in his brain that cannot be removed, and now and then it triggers these terrible convulsions. There he is, not healing, not dying, one foot on either side of the abyss. He is moved from bed to bed so his screams and howls are distributed equally around the ward. Some talk of suffocating him with a pillow in the night, so the poor bastard might rest in peace, but no one has dared do it because the surgeons seem particularly interested in his case; they come to see him regularly, take copious notes, and show him off to visitors. When they moved him here, his fits and convulsions kept Cárdenas awake for three nights, but eventually he grew accustomed to it.

  “You can get used to anything,” he tells Mojarra.

  At the mention of the battle of Chiclana, Mojarra pulls a face. Quite recently it was discovered that men injured in the battle were dying of neglect and starvation here in San Carlos hospital, and that the money raised to buy bacon and chickpeas for the stewpot had been embezzled by officials. The minister at the Royal Treasury responsible for the hospital reacted immediately, condemning the Cádiz newspaper that had published the story. Thereafter, everything was settled through bribes, visits by members of the Cortes, and there was a slight improvement. Thinking about the scandal, Mojarra looks around at the bedridden men, and at those who stand by the windows or move about the ward like ghosts, propped up by walking sticks and crutches—giving the lie to words like “heroism,” “glory” and other such terms used and abused by the young and the credulous, by those who are in no danger of ending up in a place like this. Those Mojarra sees are men like himself who have fought for their captive king and their subjugated country, brave men and cowards, brought low by cold steel or a bullet. The ill-fated defenders of the Isla de Léon, of Cádiz, of Spain itself. He could easily have been one of them, he thinks. It might have been him lying here in place of his brother-in-law, his head split open with a wound that refuses to heal, or the poor wretch strapped to the bed, writhing, an ounce of lead buried in his brain.

  Suddenly, Mojarra feels afraid—not the ordinary fear he feels when bullets whistle by, when every muscle and tendon tenses, waiting for the one that will knock him over. Nor is it the slow dread of waiting for a battle to begin—the most terrible fear of all—when the landscape, even in brilliant sunlight, seems gray and you feel a strange ache creep up through your chest to your mouth and your eyes, forcing you to take slow, deep breaths. The fear he feels now is different: it is sordid, petty. Selfish. He feels ashamed of this inchoate fear that turns the cigar smoke bitter in his mouth, that urges him to leap to his feet, rush out of here, run home and hug his wife and daughters so that he might feel whole. Alive.

  “What happened about the gunboat?” asks Cárdenas. “When are they going to pay us?”