The Siege

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  “It did not have our name on it,” she says.

  She is smiling openly now, almost gently, as she did that day when they talked about the tree painted on her fan. Once again he finds himself admiring her composure.

  “Do you know who rings the bell at San Francisco when the bombs are coming?”

  The corsair says that he doesn’t, so she tells him: a novice from the convent, a volunteer, performs the task. The English ambassador, seeing her from his balcony making obscene gestures toward the French lines between the peals, asked to meet her and gave her a gold piece. Lobo has surely heard the ballads about it, sung to the strains of guitars in the taverns and bars of the city. Nothing, not even war, can silence the local wits.

  “But not all the ballads are so charming,” Lolita says. “People say women are being killed.”

  “Killed?”

  “Yes. Murdered. In horrible ways.”

  The corsair has heard nothing about this, so she tells him what she knows. Which is not much. The newspapers have not published a word about it, perhaps so as not to panic the public. But rumors abound that young girls have been snatched off the streets and beaten to death—at least two of them. And God knows what other atrocities have been committed. With so many strangers and soldiers in the city, there is no way of knowing. Few women dare go out at night anymore.

  Pépé Lobo frowns, ill at ease. “There are times when I am ashamed to be a man.”

  He says it spontaneously, without thinking. Something to fill the silence after what she had said. But he sees Lolita Palma observing him curiously.

  “I don’t think you have anything to be ashamed of.”

  They look into each other’s eyes for a long moment, which the corsair wishes would last even longer.

  “I might surprise you, señora.”

  Another silence. A fine drizzle is falling; tiny raindrops settle on the woman’s upturned face, heralding the coming storm. But she does not move, does not open her umbrella—she simply stands next to the edge of the rampart, framed by the gray expanse of fog and sea behind her. He should offer to shelter her, thinks the corsair. But he does not move. In fact, he should say or do something to defuse the moment, to break the silence. But none of the possibilities tallies with what he wants to do at this moment.

  “Did you buy anything interesting?” he says eventually. For something to say.

  She looks at him, puzzled, not knowing what he is talking about. Lobo gives a faint, forced smile.

  “The bookshop. On the square.”

  The raindrops glitter on Lolita Palma’s face. Behind her, the gray vastness of the sea is now dotted with tiny splashes shifting in flurries on the breeze that blows from the mouth of the bay.

  “We should—” the corsair begins.

  “Oh, I see,” she says abruptly, turning away. “Yes, something very interesting. The complete six volumes of La Flora española by Joseph Quer … A beautiful copy in excellent condition.”

  “Ah.”

  “Printed by Ibarra.”

  “Really.”

  It has begun to rain in earnest. A sudden swell brings waves crashing over the rocks at Las Puercas, out on the bay.

  “We should go back,” murmurs Lolita Palma.

  Lobo nods while she opens her umbrella. It is large enough to cover them both, but she does not invite him to shelter under it. They walk back slowly past the leafless saplings as the rain grows stronger. The corsair is accustomed to braving the elements aboard ship, but is surprised that she does not seem concerned. Glancing sideways, he sees her lift her skirt a little with her free hand to avoid the puddles beginning to form.

  “We have another matter pending,” he hears her say suddenly.

  He turns to her, bemused. He feels water drip from the corners of his hat, soaking his jacket. He should take it off and wrap it around her shoulders to protect her shawl, but is unsure how such a gesture would be seen. Too intimate, probably. Too forward. With or without the rain, Cádiz is a small city. Here, reputations can be made or lost through idle gossip.

  “The dragon tree,” explains Lolita Palma. “Remember?”

  Pépé Lobo smiles, somewhat taken aback. “Of course.”

  “And your botanical expedition. You promised to tell me all about it.”

  Were she any other woman, the corsair thinks, he would have long since wiped the raindrops from her face, her hair, brushed them away with his fingertips. Slowly; careful not to alarm her. But she is not any other woman—she is herself. And that is precisely the problem.

  “Shall we say tomorrow?”

  Pépé Lobo takes five steps before he responds to this question.

  “It will still be raining tomorrow,” he says gently.

  “Of course. How foolish of me … Let us say the first fine day, then. Before you put out again, or when you return.”

  The silence is broken only by the patter of raindrops. They walk along the glistening pavement of the Calle de los Doblones, in the shelter of the houses. On the corner, some twenty paces away, is the Palma house. When Lolita speaks again, her manner has changed.

  “I envy you your freedom, Señor Lobo.”

  The tone is colder, more neutral. The word señor restores order.

  “That is not what I would call it,” says the corsair.

  “You don’t understand, Captain.”

  They have reached the front door of the house, in the shelter of the wide, dark passageway which leads to the railings and the inner courtyard planted with ferns. Pépé Lobo removes his hat and shakes it while Lolita closes her umbrella. He can feel the weight of his wet jacket on his shoulders. His waterlogged silver-buckled shoes create a puddle on the tiles.

  “A man is free when his life is how he wishes it to be,” she says. “When he is held back by no one but himself.”

  At this moment, in the dim light that streams from both courtyard and doorway, framed by the shadows behind her, raindrops still glittering on her face, she is truly beautiful, thinks Lobo. She stares up at him, seeming to look right through him to somewhere distant, remote. To distant seas and boundless horizons.

  “Had I been born a man …”

  She breaks off, and fills the silence left by her words with a wistful, barely perceptible smile.

  “Fortunately, you were not,” says the corsair.

  “Fortunately?” She looks at him surprised, almost shocked, though he cannot understand the reason. “Oh no, oh heavens. You …”

  She has raised her hand, as though to stop her mouth, to prevent it uttering another word. But the hand hovers in midair.

  “It is getting late, Captain.”

  She turns, opens the gate and vanishes into the house. Pépé Lobo is left standing in the passageway, contemplating the empty courtyard. Then he puts on his hat and goes out into the street, into the rain.

  WEARING AN OILSKIN carrick coat and hat, huddled close to the wall to shelter from the rain, Comisario Tizón stares down at the body lying a few feet away, alongside the pile of rubble it was found under some three hours ago. The bomb fell last night, bringing down part of a house on the alleyway behind the Divina Pastora chapel. Four of the residents were injured, one of whom is in critical condition—an elderly man already in bed, crushed when the building collapsed. But the shock came this morning, when the rubble was being cleared and the building shored up by residents attempting to salvage their possessions. The woman whose body was discovered among the ruins of the ground floor—formerly a carpenter’s workshop—was not killed by the explosion, nor by falling debris: she was gagged and bound and her back had been flayed raw with a whip. The driving rain that sluices the body sprawled amid the wreckage and soaks its blood-matted hair gradually washes away the brick and plaster dust to reveal a back so viciously mutilated that bones and entrails are visible, glistening under the rain, from the base of the skull to the hips.

  “Her head was partly crushed by falling debris, so it won’t be easy to identify her,” comments Cadals
o, who comes over dripping wet and shaking himself. “She looks young, like the others.”

  “Maybe someone will be looking for her. Take down anything you can and have someone investigate.”

  “Yes, señor, right away.”

  Rogelio Tizón steps away from the wall, around the rubble, and walks down the alleyway to the Calle del Pasquín. The rain continues to fall, more gently in this part of the city whose streets, laid out at right angles to each other, create an effective windbreak. Swinging his cane, the comisario looks at the neighboring houses, the damage caused by the bomb, the narrow doorway at the end of the alley that leads into a church whose facade overlooks the Calle de Capuchinos. Obviously the woman died before the bomb fell. The murder again preceded the impact, just as it did on one of the two previous occasions: the Calle del Viento. But on the Calle del Laurel no bomb fell, either beforehand or afterward—something which leaves the comisario even more puzzled. All this will further complicate matters when he meets with the governor and the Intendant, he thinks uneasily; he will have to decide what he can and cannot tell them. But that will have to wait. Right now, he is looking for something the precise nature of which he does not understand, but he is convinced he will find it nearby, in the air, in the streets. A sensation similar to the one he experienced at the other crime scenes: that fleeting, almost perfect vacuum, as though in that precise spot a bell jar had extracted all the air, or conferred on it a sinister stillness. An empty space, devoid of movement, of sound; he believes he will recognize it.

  But this time, he feels nothing. Tizón paces the street from end to end, step by step, sniffing around stubbornly like a bloodhound. He studies every detail of his surroundings. But the rain and the damp obscure everything. Suddenly he realizes that yesterday afternoon and last night, when the girl was probably murdered, it had not yet begun to rain. Perhaps this is what it is, he thinks: some peculiarity of the air, or the temperature. Or God knows what. It may be that his imagination is making absurd connections; maybe he is going mad. Ready to be locked up in Caleta asylum.

  Beset by these disturbing thoughts, the comisario has made his way around the block to the whitewashed stone portico of the Divina Pastora, where there is a shrine with a seated figure of the Virgin stroking the neck of a lamb. The chapel door is open and, without taking his hat off, the policeman peers inside and looks around. At the far end, beneath the barely visible gildings of the high altar, burns a lone sanctuary lamp. A kneeling figure in mourning dress gets to her feet, blesses herself with holy water from the font and walks out past the comisario. It is an old woman wearing a black shawl and carrying a rosary. When Tizón goes back into the street, the woman is walking away toward the Capuchin monastery. The comisario watches her until she disappears from view. Then, in the shelter of the doorway, he lights a cigar and smokes, watching the whorls as they dissolve slowly in the damp air. He wishes he could feel no regret, no disquiet at the scene he has just left behind in the rubble of the narrow alley. One dead woman, or six, or fifty, changes nothing: the world still turns, wheeling toward the abyss. Besides, he thinks, all things have their allotted time in the suicidal order of things—in life, and in its inexorable outcome, death. Every event when observed moves at its own pace, with its own particular rhythm. Every question must give ample opportunity for its answer. He is not the guilty party here, thinks Tizón, exhaling another plume of smoke. He is merely a witness to these events. It is a thought he hopes he can cling to with equal conviction tonight, at home, in his bare living room, as his wife stares at him silently, reproachfully, next to the closed piano. And all these fine words do not change the fact that yesterday the dead girl in the alley was still alive.

  “Fuck!” he says aloud, grim and glowering.

  He takes his pocket watch from his jacket and studies the hands. Then he drops the stub of his cigar and crushes it beneath the wet heel of his boot.

  The time has come, he thinks coldly, to pay someone a little visit.

  RAIN PATTERS OVERHEAD, on the terrace and the bare boards of the empty pigeon loft. Next to the door, whose panes of colored glasses do nothing to enliven the hazy gray light from outside, Gregorio Fumagal, wearing a dressing gown and a woolen nightcap, is burning the last of his papers in the stove. There is little left: a handful of notebooks which record the places where bombs landed, their geographic coordinates, estimated distances, dates and sundry other details. Page by page, everything is burned as the taxidermist opens the iron grille and, after a quick glance, tosses loose sheets and ripped pages into the flames. Earlier, having stripped them of their innocuous covers and torn them to shreds, he burned a number of prohibited books by French philosophers. They were longtime companions of his thoughts, of his life, yet today he watched them burn with little regret. None of this must be found here.

  He is not some naïve fool, nor is he blind. The unfamiliar people who discreetly dog his steps every time he goes out have not escaped his notice. Every night before he retires, he has observed from his bedroom window—the only one that directly overlooks the street—the same figure, standing motionless in the shadows on the corner where the Calle de las Escuelas meets the Calle de San Juan. And as he wanders through the city, stopping nonchalantly in front of some shop or tavern, a sideways glance is enough to confirm the presence of ominous companions: silent men with plain clothes and fearsome faces. All these things mean that he no longer harbors any illusions about the future. In fact, when he considers the situation objectively—what he has done and what they could do to him—he is surprised that he is still a free man.

  Everything in the stove has been turned to embers and ashes. All that remains is the map of the city, his masterwork. The key to everything. Fumagal looks sorrowfully at the folded sheet of paper, worn now with use, on which penciled lines and curves, spreading out from the east, form a complex conical web overlaying the urban tracery of Cádiz. This is the fruit of a year of meticulous and dangerous work. Day upon day of endless walks, of calculations and covert observations that give the map extraordinary scientific value. Every detail is set down here, or is effectively referenced: the geographic disposition, angle of incidence, the speed and direction of the prevailing wind for almost every impact, blast radius, areas of uncertainty. The military importance of this map for those laying siege to Cádiz is incalculable. This is why, in spite of the dangers he has faced recently, Fumagal has held on to it until today in the hope that eventually his contact with the far side of the bay—interrupted when the Mulatto left—will be reestablished. But nothing happened, and the danger has escalated. The last pigeons he sent to the Trocadero, carrying messages in which he outlined the critical nature of the situation, were met with silence. Every day that passes serves merely to reinforce the taxidermist’s belief that he has been abandoned to his fate. A fate that, in this perilous period of his life (the days pass like a strange dream, through which he wanders uncertainly like a sleepwalker), he has deliberately forced. But there are some aspects that are inevitable. Circumstances that no one can choose or spurn. Or not entirely.

  He rips the map of Cádiz into four pieces, crumples each into a ball and tosses them into the stove. That, he thinks, is everything. A whole life, a whole worldview reduced to ashes. The cold, implacable geometry of a universally ordered system taken to its logical, necessary conclusion, but whose savage finale remains incomplete. The word finale reminds him of the small black vial, its glass stopper sealed with wax, that he keeps in one of his desk drawers: a concentrated opium solution that represents his gentle, peaceful route to freedom and equanimity, should the worst come to the worst. The flames blaze more intensely now, illuminating Gregorio Fumagal’s haggard face and, behind him, the display cases and perches from which the glassy eyes of stuffed animals stare vacantly into space—witnesses to the tragedy that has befallen the man who rescued them from putrefaction, dust and oblivion. There is nothing on the marble table now. It has been some time since the taxidermist has felt able to work. He lacks
the necessary concentration to wield the scalpel, the wire and the oakum wadding. He lacks the peace of mind. And for the first time that he can remember, he lacks the determination. Perhaps courage is the word he cannot bring himself to say. In recent weeks, the empty pigeon loft has chipped away at too many foundations, too many convictions. When he contemplates what he has become, his urgent need to face the immediate future and the rest of his life—if either of these extend beyond a few short hours—Fumagal cannot find the strength to overcome his own apathy. Even burning the compromising documents and books does not seem imperative. It is simply a logical act, the consequence of previous actions. An almost instinctive reflex born of loyalty or allegiance to those on the far side of the bay, or perhaps—and this seems more likely—to himself.

  The doorbell rings. A single, brief peal. Fumagal closes the stove door, gets to his feet and goes out into the hallway. He slides back the grille of the peephole. Standing on the landing is a man he does not recognize, wearing an oilskin hat and a carrick coat that drips water on the floor. He has a strong, aquiline nose, like the beak of some bird of prey; his face is framed by bushy whiskers connected by a mustache. He carries a heavy cane, topped by a fearsome brass pommel.

  “Gregorio Fumagal? This is the Comisario of Police. Can you open the door, please?”

  Of course he can, the taxidermist silently decides. Not to do so at this stage would be futile and grotesque. What is happening is simply what was bound to happen, eventually. Surprised by his own calm, he draws back the bolt. As he opens the door, he thinks again about the small glass vial in the desk drawer of his workshop. Perhaps it will soon be too late to avail himself of it; but an insatiable curiosity overshadows all other thoughts. Curiosity, he concludes—perhaps he is using the word simply as a justification, as a cowardly excuse to go on breathing, to go on observing for a little longer.

  “May I?” says the comisario.

  Without waiting for an answer, he steps indoors. As the taxidermist moves to close the door, Tizón blocks him with his cane, forcing him to leave it open. Before following him, Fumagal glances down the stairs to the next landing, where he sees two men with round hats and dark capes.