The Siege

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  Tizón raises his hand impatiently, brushing aside these excuses. He does not have time for such luxuries tonight.

  “The bombs … Tell me how the before and after came about.”

  This time the silence is brief, thoughtful. Barrull stands frozen again.

  “I can hazard a theory,” he says finally. “A simple hypothesis with no scientific basis. When the French field guns began to fire, the complex world of this chemist-soap merchant changed in ways he could not have anticipated. Perhaps at first he feared he might be a victim of one of these shells. Perhaps he visited the bomb sites, drawn to them by the relief of having emerged unscathed. It may be that, having do so over and over, his sense of relief gave way to other feelings.”

  “The desire to expose himself to danger?” Tizón suggests. “To put himself at risk?”

  “It’s possible. Perhaps he wanted to position himself at the far end of the trajectory, in the danger zone … His instinct, his sensitivity urged him to manipulate these events.”

  “By killing?”

  “Yes. Why not?… Consider his position: a human life in places where bombs have exploded but not killed. Compensating for some flaw in science, complementing an imperfect technology using his innate sense of precision. In this way, a death and a point of impact would correspond with absolute exactitude.”

  “How then was he able to anticipate the bombs?”

  The lantern illuminates a strange expression on Barrull’s equine face; something akin to a smile.

  “You said it yourself, in a way … Obsession when combined with extreme sensitivity can produce monsters. And this man’s obsession did just that. He deduced that there is no such thing as chance, and he felt an aching need to predict precisely where the next shells would fall. To challenge the illusory bastard son of ignorance.”

  “And so he began to think?”

  Tizón notices Barrull is staring at him curiously, as though surprised by his keen understanding.

  “Exactly so. Or that is what I believe—that he simply thought and thought. And with cold precision, his sick mind and his extreme sensibility did the rest. His monstrous crimes became merely …”

  “Technical?”

  The comisario is aware he said this in an authoritative manner. But the professor seems little concerned with his tone; it is the idea that fascinates him.

  “Yes, I think so,” he says. “Technical, objective … He was reasserting the rights of the universe, do you understand?”

  “I understand.”

  And the policeman does understand. He has understood for some time. The distance separating them is being curtailed at a rate that seems astonishing. Even frightening. What were the professor’s words? He remembers: rebelliousness and resentment. A vision of the world in accordance with the laws of Nature. The human condition and the state of the universe. Ants brushed beneath the foot of a cruel God, oblivious to everything. An avenging hand. A whip of steel.

  “He was bringing order out of chaos,” Barrull says, “by means of reducing suffering to simple natural laws. Being intimately familiar with the city, the man began to devise a series of auspicious sites throughout the city. It is possible that the sense of smell required by his job helped him in this: his sensitivity to air, to odors. And he began to wonder: given factors such as wind speed and direction, are there specific points more likely to be hit by the French bombs? And so in his mind he mapped out the places where bombs had fallen and attributed to each a probability. In this way, his mental map would have colored sectors representing greater or lesser probability. His mathematical intelligence analyzed these impact points and pinpointed anomalies, curves and trajectories. He identified gaps in the map that had to be filled. By now, there was no turning back. This was probability, not random chance … precise mathematics—”

  Tizón interrupts him with perverse satisfaction. “Not quite precise,” he says. “He made one mistake. No bomb ever fell on the Calle de Laurel.”

  “That makes our hypothesis all the more likely. It gives him a margin of error, don’t you agree?”

  The policeman does not answer. He remembers his own nervousness, the fruitless waiting and the temptation to redefine everything. He thinks of the sequence of mistakes he himself made on this chessboard, including the last: the queen’s gambit.

  “The fact remains,” Barrull continues, “that it was in these gaps, waiting for a bomb to fall, that the man killed … By now it was no longer a matter of compensating for some flaw in science or technology, nor of using the suffering of others to fill the void left by his dead daughter … Over and over, he wanted to confirm that he, a humble artisan, had penetrated the mysteries of the universe.”

  “Hence the final challenge.”

  “So I believe. He knew that you were on his trail, and he accepted the challenge. This was why he waited so long before killing again. He was hunting the hunter. And when he believed he was ready, he decided to capture a different pawn to the one you offered him. He succeeded, but misjudged his play by a few short minutes.”

  Tizón’s laugh echoes around the dark walls of the castle, as sinister as the scene itself. “Random chance! Cadalso’s desperate need to piss!”

  “Exactly. The soap merchant did not factor this into his probabilities.”

  The two men stand in silence. The air is still, not a breath of wind. The sky is a black curtain dotted with pinpricks.

  “I am convinced,” Barrull adds after a moment, “that he felt no pleasure when he killed.”

  “Probably not.”

  The sound of footsteps. Two shadows appear from the street, emerging through the gap in the wall. One of them, tall and lumbering, steps forward, outlined in the darkness. Tizón recognizes Cadalso.

  “Señor?”

  “Did you come alone?”

  “Yes. As you ordered.”

  The policeman turns to Hipólito Barrull.

  “I’m afraid I must ask you to leave now, Professor … I am very grateful, but you have to go.”

  Barrull looks at him curiously, anxiously. The lantern reflects in the lenses of his glasses. “Who is the other man?”

  Tizón hesitates for a second. What difference does it make now? he thinks. “The father of the last girl who was murdered.”

  Barrull takes a step back, seeking out the shelter of the darkness—seeking to distance himself. A knight on a chessboard, thinks Tizón, retreating from an attacking rook.

  “What do you intend to do?”

  This is one of those questions that, deep down, requires no answer. And Tizón does not bother to give one. He is so calm that, although it is a warm night, his hands feel cold.

  “Go,” he says. “You were never here. No one knows about this meeting.”

  Barrull hesitates, then finally steps past Tizón; as he does so, his face is framed in the lamplight, grave, streaked with shadows.

  “Take care,” he whispers. “These are different times. The Constitution … You know. New laws.”

  “Indeed. New laws.”

  They shake hands: a contract, one drawn up by Barrull, who stares at Tizón as though for the last time. For a moment he seems about to say something, but in the end he simply shrugs.

  “It has been a privilege to help you, Comisario.”

  “Goodbye, Professor.”

  Barrull turns on his heel, steps through the breach in the wall, and disappears into the Calle del Silencio. Tizón takes the leather case from his pocket and extracts a cigar as Cadalso and the other shadow step forward. Next to Tizón’s henchman the lantern set on the ground reveals a humble man of average height, who takes a few steps before stopping, silent.

  “You can go,” the comisario tells his assistant.

  Cadalso obeys, disappearing through the gap in the wall. Then the comisario turns back to the newcomer. He notices a flash of cold steel tucked into the man’s belt.

  “He is downstairs,” Tizón says.

  THE STAIRCASE PLUMMETS like a black spira
l into some nightmare. Felipe Mojarra gropes his way blindly, leaning against the dank walls, avoiding the rubble on the steps. From time to time he stops to listen, but he senses only the rarefied air of the hollow into which he is descending. Shock and pain—the passing hours and the habit of living reconcile a man to everything—have now given way to a cold, inexorable desperation, as dark and still as stagnant water. He realizes his mouth is dry, his skin numb, insensible to everything but the slow, powerful throb of the pulse in his wrists and temples. At times, the beating seems to stop for a moment and he feels a sudden emptiness in his chest, as if his lungs and his heart are paralyzed.

  Felipe Mojarra takes another step, and another. However often he blinks, however much he closes his eyes against the dark, dizzying, seemingly endless descent, still an image hovers clearly before his eyes: an image of cold, dead, naked flesh laid out on a white marble bench. His own wail of shock still burns in his throat, a hoarse, desperate, defiant howl at the unfathomable nature of what has happened—at the injustice. And then, like a sliver of ice in his gut, the anguish of being unable to recognize in this pale, mutilated corpse—reeking of human entrails, sluiced with water that has pooled on the stone floor of the morgue—the small, warm, sleeping body he once held in his arms. The smell of gentle fever, of dreams. The warm, slender girl he will never again be able to remember as she was.

  A light below illuminates the final steps. Felipe Mojarra stops, one hand on the wall, as he waits for his heart to slow, for his pulse to return to normal. He takes a deep breath and then descends the last few steps. He finds himself in a vaulted, empty space, dimly lit by a half-burned tallow candle set into a niche in the wall. In the faint light, he sees a man naked but for a blanket around his shoulders and a soiled bandage wrapped around his hip. Shackled at wrist and ankle, he sits on a straw mattress, his back to the wall, his head drooping onto arms that rest on his knees, as if he is half asleep. Seeing him, Mojarra suddenly feels his legs give way and slowly lowers himself to sit on the bottom step. For a long time, he does not move but sits, staring at the man. At first the other man seems unaware of his presence, but finally he raises his head and looks at the salter. Felipe Mojarra finds himself face-to-face with a stranger: middle-aged, with red hair and freckled skin. His whole body is a mass of bruises. His lower lip is split, and a trickle of dried blood extends to the tip of his chin.

  Neither says anything. They stare at each other for a moment, then the man listlessly rests his head upon his arms again. Felipe Mojarra waits for the emptiness of his heart to fill and then struggles to his feet. The warm slender body, he remembers, the smell of a sleeping child. As he opens his knife, there is a soft click from the safety catch and the shackled man looks up.

  ROGELIO TIZÓN LEANS against the wall, smoking. The moon, appearing from behind the ruined battlements atop the tower of the Castillo de Guardiamarinas, casts a milky glow that throws the rubble of the courtyard into sharp relief. The tip of Tizón’s cigar, glowing intermittently, is the only thing about him that seems alive; were it not for this point of light, a casual observer would not see the comisario for the shadows, in spite of the lantern that is now guttering out.

  The screams stopped some time ago. For almost an hour, Tizón listened with a professional curiosity. Muffled by distance and the thick walls, they came from the stairwell to the basement a few feet away. Some were sharp, short cries; brief, stifled moans. Others were longer: howls of agony that seemed to go on forever, finally faltering when whoever was screaming had expended every ounce of energy and despair. There is no sound now, but still the comisario does not move. He waits.

  Slow, uncertain footsteps. A presence nearby. A shadow emerges from the stairwell, moving toward Tizón. Finally it stops next to him.

  “It is done,” says Felipe Mojarra.

  His voice sounds tired. The policeman makes no comment but offers another cigar from his case, patting Mojarra’s shoulder to get his attention. It takes a moment before the man reacts. He takes the cigar. Tizón strikes a match on the stone wall and holds the flame close. In the flickering glow, he studies Mojarra’s face as he bends to light the cigar: the whiskers framing his hard features, eyes staring into space, still filled with horror—his own and that of the other man. Tizón notices a slight tremble in the damp fingers that smear the cigar with blood.

  “I didn’t think it was possible to scream with no tongue,” Mojarra says finally, exhaling smoke.

  He seems genuinely surprised. Rogelio Tizón laughs in the darkness—his habitual dangerous, wolfish laugh, baring his teeth. A flash of gold on one side of his mouth.

  “Well, now you know. It’s possible.”

  EPILOGUE

  Rain is falling over the inlet at Rota. A warm summer drizzle—the sky will clear to the southwest before sunset—its small droplets speckling the glassy waters. There is not a breath of wind. The low, mournful sky is reflected on the bay, framing the distant city like an engraving or a painting in white and gray. At one end of the beach, where the sand is broken by a line of black rocks and dead seaweed, a woman gazes at the wreck of a ship grounded near the shore: shorn of its masts, the blackened timbers are charred and riddled with cannonfire. The hull, which still offers some sense of its original length, is canted on its side to reveal the keel, the battered deck, a section of the internal frame and cross-timbers, like a skeleton gradually stripped by time and weather.

  Before the remains of the Culebra, Lolita Palma stands, impassive; the drizzle soaking the mantilla covering her head and shoulders. She is clutching a purse. For some time she has been trying to re-create in her mind the last moments of the vessel that lies before her. Her calm gaze moves across the scene, calculating the distance from land, the proximity of the rocks, the range of the cannons that until very recently stood in the empty embrasures of the forts ringing the inlet. She tries to imagine the darkness, the danger, the din of battle and the blaze of cannonfire. And each time she manages to catch a glimpse, to conjure some image, some concrete moment, she bows her head in grief—astonished, in spite of herself, at the darkness, the terror and lies in the hearts of men. Then she raises her eyes and forces herself to look again. The air smells of damp sand and seaweed. On the steel-gray water, the concentric circles made by each drop of rain ripple out with geometric precision, overlapping with others, covering the surface between the shore and the ravaged hulk of the cutter.

  Finally turning her back on the sea, Lolita Palma walks toward Rota. On the left, by the jetty, small boats lie at anchor, their lateen sails hoisted, washed by the rain, hanging from the yardarms like wet laundry. Next to the jetty are the remains of a dismantled bastion—probably one of the gun batteries that protected this stretch of coastline. The walls are still hung with withered garlands of flowers placed there by the people of Cádiz; on the very day the French retreated, beneath a blazing sun, with every church bell in the city tolling victory, they set off across the bay in hundreds of small boats or along the reef road in carriages and on horseback, making a pilgrimage to the abandoned military posts to celebrate their liberation. But the official jubilation was tempered by a barely concealed feeling of frustration that they were witnessing the end of an era marked by market speculation, lucrative rents and exorbitant leases. As cousin Toño, seeing the long faces of some of his friends, succinctly remarked between two bottles of sherry—now finally available in Cádiz without restriction—patriotism is never far from the pocket.

  On the far side of the curved ramparts, up the hillside, the streets of Rota still bear the scars of looting and pillaging. The ashen sky, damp air and drizzle underscore the tragic scene: ruined houses, streets filled with rubble, scenes of desperate poverty; people bankrupted by war beg in the doorways or eke out a living in the shells of houses with roofs made of sailcloth or makeshift timbers. Even the railings have disappeared. Like all the villages in the area, Rota was devastated by the last spree of looting, murder and rape that marked the French retreat. And yet many women
left with the Imperial Army of their own volition. Of fourteen such women who were traveling in the carriages captured by guerrilleros near Jerez, six were shot and eight exposed to public shame, their heads shaven, beneath a sign reading Gabacho Whores.

  Walking between the parish church—its doors smashed, its interior plundered—and the old castle, Lolita Palma stops for a moment, trying to get her bearings; then, taking the street on her left, she heads for a large mansion that still preserves some of the old white and dark-red rendering that once decorated its brick walls. Santos, her manservant, is standing in the vaulted doorway, smoking, an umbrella tucked under one arm. Seeing his mistress arrive, the old sailor drops his cigar and rushes forward, struggling to open the umbrella, but Lolita waves him away.

  “Is he here?”

  “Yes, señora.”

  The interior of the building—a former wine store with blackened barrels still lining the walls—is lit by narrow slits high up on the walls. The ghostly gray light gives the place a mournful atmosphere, made worse by the acrid stench of sick, maimed and filthy bodies that emanates from the hundreds of poor wretches who lie in piteous rows on thin straw mattresses or on blankets laid on the floor.

  “It is not a pleasant place,” Santos says.

  Lolita Palma does not respond. She has removed her mantilla to shake it dry and is holding her breath, not allowing herself to be overcome by the grim scene and the nauseating stench. Seeing her enter, a surgeon’s mate in the Royal Armada—a haggard young man wearing a dirty apron over his blue uniform, his jacket sleeves rolled up—comes to meet her, pays his respects and points to a spot at the far end of the ward. Leaving Santos and the surgeon’s mate behind, Lolita walks alone as far as the mattress against the end wall, next to which someone has just placed a low wicker chair. On the mattress, a man is lying on his back, draped with a sheet that molds itself to his body. In his ashen face, its gauntness emphasized by a beard that has not been shaved in several days, the eyes are shining with a feverish glow. A thick, ugly purple scar slashes his whiskers, running from the left corner of his mouth to his ear. He no longer looks handsome, thinks Lolita with a surge of pity. He no longer looks like himself.