The Seville Communion

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  Gavira felt trapped. He had to keep pedalling, he told himself, or else he'd fall off the bicycle. "The church," he said bitterly, "is their future."

  "And yours, Pencho." Machuca shot him a malicious glance. "Would you sacrifice the church deal and the Puerto Targa operation to get your wife back?"

  Gavira didn't answer immediately. This was the crux of the matter, and he knew it better than anyone.

  "If I lose this chance," he said evasively, "I lose everything."

  "Not everything. Only your prestige. And my backing."

  Calm, Gavira allowed himself a smile. "You're a hard man, Don Octavio."

  "Possibly." The old man stared at the PENA BETICA sign opposite. "But I'm just. The church deal was your idea, and so was your marriage. Although I may have helped things along a little."

  "Then I'd like to ask you something," Gavira said, putting his hands on the table. "Why won't you help me now, if you're so fond of Macarena and her mother? You could make them see reason."

  "Maybe, maybe not," Machuca said, narrowing his eyes. "But if I helped you, you see, it would mean that I'd allowed Macarena to marry a fool. Let's understand each other, Pencho: for me this is like owning a racehorse or a boxer or a good fighting cock. I enjoy watching you fight."

  He made a sign to his secretary. The audience was over.

  Gavira stood up, buttoning his jacket. "Do you know something, Don Octavio?" He put on his Italian designer sunglasses and stood by the table, cool, immaculate. "Sometimes I think you don't want a definite outcome ... As if deep down you don't care about any of it: Macarena, the bank, me."

  Across the street, a young woman with long legs and a very short skirt came out of a clothes shop with a bucket and started washing down the shop window. Old Machuca watched the girl thoughtfully. At last he said: "Pencho, did you ever wonder why I come here every day?"

  Gavira stared at him, surprised, not knowing what to answer. What did this have to do with anything? he thought. Damn the old man.

  There was a glint of mockery in the banker's eyes. "Once, a long time ago," he said "I was sitting at this very table when a woman walked by. She was beautiful, the kind of woman that takes your breath away ... I watched her go by, and our eyes met. I thought of getting up, stopping her. But I didn't. Social convention carried more weight. I was known in Seville . . . She continued on her way. I told myself I'd see her another day. But she never walked past here again."

  His voice was flat as he told the story. The secretary approached, briefcase in hand. With a nod in Gavira's direction, Canovas sat down in the chair that Gavira had just vacated. Settling back into his own chair, Machuca smiled coldly at the young vice-chairman of the Cartujano. "I'm a very old man, Pencho," he said. "In my lifetime, I've won some battles and lost others. But now I don't feel involved in any of it." He took one of the documents his assistant handed him. "What I have now, more than a desire for victory, is a sense of curiosity. Like someone who puts a scorpion and a spider in a bottle and waits to see what happens. With no sympathy for either of them."

  He turned his attention to the document, and Gavira muttered a goodbye before going to his car. He had a deep vertical line on his forehead, and the ground felt shaky beneath his feet. Peregil, smoothing his hair over his bald head, looked away as Gavira approached.

  Sunlight bounced off the corner of the white-and-red-ochre Hospital de los Venerables. Across the street, beneath a poster for that Sunday's bullfight at the Maestranza bullring, two pale-skinned tourists, looking on the verge of sunstroke, sat outside the Bar Roman, recovering. Inside, Simeon Navajo carefully peeled himself a prawn and then looked at Quart.

  "The Computer Crime Department didn't come up with anything," he said. "No previous records."

  He ate the prawn and gulped down half his beer. He was always having extra breakfasts, snacks, sandwiches, and Quart wondered where the skinny deputy superintendent put it all. Even the .357 magnum was so bulky on his slight frame that he carried it in a strong-smelling, fringed leather bag over his shoulder. With his ponytail and baggy flower-print shirt, Simeon Navajo made a sharp contrast with the tall, soberly dressed priest.

  "We have nothing on our files," the policeman went on, "on any of the persons you asked me to check . . . We've got young students playing pranks on their computers, a pile of people selling pirated copies of computer programs, and a couple of guys who get into systems they shouldn't from time to time. But there's no sign of what you're looking for."

  They were standing at the bar, beneath rows of cured hams hanging from the ceiling. The policeman took another prawn, tore off its head and sucked it with relish, and then began expertly peeling the rest. Quart's own glass of beer was almost untouched.

  "Did you make the enquiry I asked you to? Those companies, and Telefonica?"

  "I did," said Navajo with his mouth full. "Nobody on your list bought any computer equipment from them, at least not using their real name. As for Telefonica, the head of security there is a friend of mine. According to him, your Vespers isn't the only one who gets on the network illegally and makes calls abroad, to the Vatican or wherever. All the hackers do that. Some get caught, some don't. Yours seems pretty sharp. Apparently he uses a complicated loop system to get on and off the Internet. He leaves behind programs that wipe any trace of him and make detection systems go bananas." He ate another prawn and ordered another beer. A piece of prawn shell had got caught in his moustache. "That's all I can tell you."

  Quart smiled at the policeman: "It's not much, but thanks anyway."

  "You don't have to thank me," Navajo said, eating. A pile of prawn shells was growing at his feet. "I wish I could do more. But my bosses made it very clear: I can only help you unofficially. On a personal basis, between you and me. For old times' sake. They don't want to get involved with churches, priests, Rome and all that. It would be another story if someone had committed a crime, within my jurisdiction. But the two deaths were ruled to be accidental. . . The fact that a hacker from Seville is pestering the Pope isn't something we can get too excited about," he said and noisily sucked a prawn head.

  The sun slid slowly over the Guadalquivir, and there wasn't a breath of air. On the bank opposite, the palm trees looked like sentries guarding La Maestranza. El Potro del Mantelete was at the window against the glare from the river, a cigarette in his mouth, as motionless as the bronze figure of his hero Juan Belmonte. Don Ibrahim sat at the table. The smell of fried eggs with morcilla wafted from the kitchen, along with La Nina Punales's song:

  Why do I wake trembling and shaking and look out onto the dark, deserted street?

  Why do I have the feeling that you're going to tell me it's over?

  The former bogus lawyer nodded approvingly, moving his lips to the words that La Nina sang in her husky voice. An apron over her polka-dot dress, spatula in hand, she was frying eggs, making them nice and crispy, just as Don Ibrahim liked them. When the three partners didn't get by on tapas from the bars in Triana, they ate at La Nina's place on the Calle Betis. It was a modest apartment on the third floor, but it had a view of Seville - with the Arenal a stone's throw away, and the Torre del Oro and La Giralda - that kings and millionaires and film stars with all their cash would have killed for. La Nina's window facing the Guadalquivir was the only asset she owned. She bought the apartment years before, with the meagre profits from her momentary fame, and that was one thing at least, as she often said to cheer herself up, that hadn't gone to rack and ruin. She lived there with a few pieces of old furniture, a gleaming brass bed, a print of the Virgen de la Esperanza, a signed photo of Miguel de Molina, and a chest of drawers where the embroidered bedcovers, tablecloths and sheets of her trousseau lay yellowing. With no rent to pay, she could afford the monthly instalments she'd sent for the last twenty years to El Ocaso, S. A., that went towards a humble plot and stone in the San Fernando Cemetery, in the sunniest corner. Because La Nina really felt the cold. She sang:

  You looked at me and your love flowed thr
ough my veins on a river of song . . .

  Don Ibrahim muttered ole automatically and went on with the task at hand. His hat, jacket and walking stick were on the chair beside him, and elastic bands held his shirtsleeves up over his elbows. There were patches of sweat under his plump arms and around his neck, and he'd loosened his blue-and-red-striped tie. He claimed that the tall Englishman, Graham Greene, had given him the tie in exchange for a copy of the New Testament and a bottle of Four Roses when he was in Havana writing a spy novel. The tie, in addition to being of sentimental value, was a genuine Oxford tie.

  Unlike La Nina, neither Don Ibrahim nor El Potro del Mantelete owned his own place. El Potro lived nearby in a houseboat, a dilapidated tourist boat that a friend from his bullfighting and army days sublet to him. Don Ibrahim lodged in a modest boarding house in El Altozano; it was run by the widow of a civil guard who'd been shot by ETA in the north. The other residents were a travelling salesman who sold combs and a mature lady of faded beauty and dubious employment.

  Can't you see how loving you like crazy from my soul to my mouth turns my heart upside down . . .

  No one, not even Concha Piquer or Pastora Imperio, could sing like that, thought Don Ibrahim as he listened to La Nina finish her song with the style and verve that the rabble of critics and impresarios and idlers had refused to recognise. It was a stab to his heart to hear her in Holy Week, when, on any street corner where the fancy took her, she started singing a saeta to the Virgen de la Esperanza or her son, the Cachorro de Triana. It silenced the drums and gave everyone goose bumps. Because La Nina Punales embodied the cante and the copla, and Spain itself. Not the Spain of cheap flamenco for tourists but the other Spain, the real Spain. The legend that smelled of smoky bars, green eyes, and the sweat of a lifetime. The dramatic memory of a people that sang to relieve its sorrows, and exorcised its demons by desperately clutching knives. Knives gleaming like the slices of moon that lit El Potro's way as he jumped over fences at night, naked so as not to tear his only shirt, convinced that he would conquer the world and pave his path with banknotes - before the bulls beat him and left him with a look of defeat in his eyes. The same Spain that ripped down posters of La Nina Punales, the best flamenco voice of Andalusia, of the century, and didn't even give her a pension to get by on. The distant motherland of which Don Ibrahim dreamed during the nights of his youth in Cuba and to which he planned to return some day like the emigres of the past, with a Cadillac convertible and a cigar, but she greeted him with nothing but incomprehension, derision and abuse after the wretched business of his bogus law degree. But even sons of bitches owed a debt to their mothers, Don Ibrahim reasoned. And loved them. And ungrateful Spain did have places like Seville, districts like Triana, bars like Casa Cuesta, faithful souls like El Potro, and beautiful, tragic voices like La Nina's. And even if things didn't turn out well, the three of them would dedicate their Temple to that voice. On nights of fino, Manzanilla, cigarette smoke and conversation, they could picture it: formal, solemn, with wicker chairs and silent old waiters - the impassive El Potro would be usher - bottles on the tables, a spotlight on the stage, and a guitar strumming real tunes for La Nina, now returned to her public with even more talent and more feeling. They would admit who they wanted, allow no tourist parties or bores with mobile phones. All Don Ibrahim asked for was a dark table at the back, where he could sit slowly sipping a drink, a smouldering Montecristo in his hand, listening to La Nina with a lump in his throat. And that the takings should be good. It didn't hurt to dream.

  Very carefully he poured more petrol into the bottle, making sure not to spill any. He'd laid sheets of newspaper on the table to protect the varnish, and he wiped any petrol dripping down the neck of the Anis del Mono bottle with a cloth. The petrol was unleaded and the best, 97-octane, because, as La Nina had so sensibly pointed out, you shouldn't use cheap stuff to set fire to a consecrated church. So they dispatched El Potro with an empty olive-oil can to the nearest petrol station to bring back a litre. A litre would be plenty, Don Ibrahim said. He claimed he had acquired expertise in these matters when Ernesto "Che" Guevara explained to him, as they drank mojitos in Santa Clara, how to make a Molotov cocktail, a Russian invention of Karl Marx's.

  The petrol bubbled and spilled down the side of the bottle. Don Ibrahim mopped it with the already soaked cloth and then put the cloth in an ashtray on the table. The incendiary bomb was intended to function with a somewhat primitive, but effective, device of which Don Ibrahim was the proud inventor: a candle, matches, a wind-up alarm clock and two metres of twine to make the bottle topple. Ignition was to take place once the three partners were sitting in a bar with witnesses, because it didn't do to overlook one's alibi. The pews piled against the wall and the old roof beams would take care of the rest. They didn't need to destroy the church totally, Peregil had said when he gave them their instructions. Substantial damage would do, although if the whole place went up, so much the better. The main thing was - he had said, staring anxiously at each of them - it had to seem like an accident.

  Don Ibrahim poured in more, and for a moment the smell of petrol smothered the smell of fried eggs. He would have loved to light a cigar, but you couldn't be too careful with all that petrol about and the cloth soaked with it in the ashtray. La Nina had been dead set against the plan at first, the church being a holy place. They convinced her only by reminding her that with all the money they'd get from the deal she'd be able to order a truckload of Masses to atone for it. Anyway, according to the ancient principle of ad auctores redit sceleris coacti tamarindus pulpa, or something like that, they were committing a crime on someone else's behalf. The causal party was Peregil. Even after such a legal explanation, La Nina still refused to have anything to do with the incendiary act and agreed to perform only backup tasks, such as providing fried eggs with morcilla. Don Ibrahim respected her views, since he was all for freedom of worship. As for El Potro, his thought processes were hard to fathom. If he had any. He just nodded impassively, fatalistic, ever loyal, always waiting for the bell or bugle to make him spring from his corner or emerge from behind the barrier like an automaton. He didn't object when Don Ibrahim mentioned setting fire to the church. Although he'd been a bullfighter - and, as far as Don Ibrahim knew, all bullfighters believed in God - El Potro wasn't devout. But on Good Friday he donned the navy blue suit he had worn for his ill-fated wedding and a white shirt buttoned to the neck but without a tie, slicked back his hair with eau de Cologne, and joined La Nina amid the candles and drums in the procession behind the Virgen de la Esperanza. As a freethinker, Don Ibrahim could not take part in obscurantist rites, so he just watched them file past behind the Virgin, La Nina in a black mantilla, praying, and El Potro, holding her arm, silent and upright.

  Don Ibrahim smiled to himself, with fatherly tenderness, as he watched El Potro's hard profile at the window. He was proud of El Potro's loyalty. Many of the earth's powerful men could not have purchased such devotion. But maybe some day, when he was on his last legs, Don Ibrahim would be asked if he had done anything worthwhile in his life. And he would answer, with his head held high, that he had had a faithful friend in El Potro del Mantelete, and that he had heard La Nina Punales sing "Cape of Red and Gold".

  "Come and get it," said La Nina at the kitchen door, wiping her hands on her apron. Her black kiss-curl, fake beauty spot and blood-red lipstick were all immaculate but her eyeliner was somewhat smudged, because she'd been chopping onion for the salad. Don

  Ibrahim noticed that she cast a critical glance at the bottle of Anis del Mono. She still didn't approve of what they were doing.

  "You can't make an omelette," he said in a conciliatory tone, "without breaking a few eggs."

  "Well, the ones I've just fried are getting cold," answered La Nina, setting her jaw stubbornly.

  Don Ibrahim sighed resignedly and poured the last few drops of petrol into the bottle. He mopped up the spillage and put the cloth back in the ashtray. Then he placed both his hands on the table and leve
red himself with effort out of his chair.

  "Trust me, my dear. Trust me."

  "Churches shouldn't be burned down," she insisted, frowning. "That's for heretics and communists."

  El Potro, silent as ever, moved away from the window and raised his hand to the cigarette in his mouth. I must tell him not to come near the petrol, Don Ibrahim thought fleetingly, still concerned with La Nina.

  "God works in mysterious ways," he said, to say something. "Well, this way doesn't look good at all."

  La Nina's failure to understand pained Don Ibrahim. He wasn't the kind of leader who imposed decisions on his troops. He preferred to reason with them instead. They were his tribe, his clan. His family. He was searching for an argument that would settle the matter, at least until after their fried eggs, when out of the corner of his eye he saw El Potro head past the table on his way to the kitchen, and instinctively go to stub out his cigarette in the ashtray. Just where the petrol-soaked cloth was lying.

  Ridiculous, Don Ibrahim thought. Of course El Potro wouldn't do such a thing. But he turned to him anxiously anyway.

  "Hey, Potro," he said.

  But El Potro had already thrown his cigarette end into the ashtray. Don Ibrahim, trying to stop him, knocked over the bottle of Anis del Mono with his elbow.

  VIII

  An Andalusian Lady

  "Can you smell the jasmine?"

  "What jasmine? There isn't any."

  "The jasmine that used to be here in the old days."

  Antonio Burgos, Seville

  If there was such a thing as blue blood, then the blood coursing through the veins of Macarena Bruner's mother, Maria Cruz Eugenia Bruner de Lebrija y Alvarez de Cordoba, Duchess of El Nuevo Extremo and twelve times grandee of Spain, must have been navy blue. Her ancestors had taken part in the siege of Granada and the conquest of America, and only two ancient houses of the Spanish aristocracy, Alba and Medina-Sidonia, could claim longer histories. The wealth that went with her titles, however, had long since disappeared. The estates and assets were gradually swallowed up over time and history, so that the tangled lines of her family tree were like strings of shells washed up empty on the seashore. The lady who sat sipping Coca-Cola opposite Lorenzo Quart in the courtyard of the Casa del Postigo was one month and seven days away from her seventieth birthday. Her ancestors could travel all the way from Seville to Cadiz without leaving their own land. King Alfonso XIII and Queen Victoria Eugenia held her over the baptismal font. And after the Spanish Civil War, General Franco himself, despite his dislike of the old Spanish aristocracy, couldn't avoid kissing her hand in that very same Andalusian courtyard, bowing reluctantly over the Roman mosaics that had paved the patio since they were brought straight from the ruins of Italica four centuries earlier. But time moves on relentlessly. So read the motto on the English clock in the gallery of mudejar columns and arches decorated with rugs from the Alpujarras and with sixteenth-century bureaux that would have ended up in Seville auctions had it not been for the generosity of the banker and family friend, Octavio Machuca. Of past splendours there remained only the fragrant courtyard full of geraniums, aspidistras and ferns, the plateresque railings, the garden, the summer dining room with its Roman busts, a few pieces of furniture and some paintings on the walls. And in the midst of it all, with only a maid, a gardener and a cook in the house where she'd grown up with a staff of twenty, lived the white-haired lady with a string of pearls round her neck, a tranquil shadow leaning over its past. She offered Quart more coffee and cooled herself with an old fan decorated, with a personal dedication, by Julio Romero de Torres.