Three-Cornered Halo

by Christianna Brand

  The patio was enchanting, cool and white and clean as a whistle, bright with great bunches of flowers in coloured clay pots; a table was heaped with fruit and cheeses and spicy little Juanese dishes, there was a cold, clear, sweet white wine in a great carafe. After the fever of the night before, it was wonderfully peaceful: two or three pretty girls, a couple of the charming plump little middle-aged dumplings that Innocenta (not present) typified; half a dozen smiling brown men, the inevitable cat. They sat and talked, idly, in the dying sunshine, they spoke of dancing, a girl got up and, natural as a flower, did a few steps to show the Senorita what she meant, another girl shouldered her aside, laughing, and repeated the steps with variations.… A man produced a guitar and strummed a few bars for the girls to dance to, broke away from the dance and began to play a tune of his own. A girl took up the tune, made words to it, teasing the dancers for being deprived of their music; broke, still singing, into a dance of her own.… Winsome, next to Tomaso who lounged easily in the doorway leading from the room to the balcony, leaned back into the shadows. “What is this ‘trouble’?”

  “What trouble? Oh, yes, the ‘trouble.’ There is no trouble; only the trouble of transporting my valuables down to the boat in the reeds on the Toscanita shore. You said you would help me; I cannot go down there alone.”

  “You brought me here on a trick!”

  “It is all a trick,” he said, laughing. “You and I are playing a little trick on San Juan; to get you to come here, I played a little trick on you.”

  “Well, I am not coming down to Toscanita.”

  “I am not asking you to do anything, Senorita, but to come with me. I must have an excuse. I cannot be seen going down there alone, I am a man from Barrequitas, I do not belong there. But if I care to take a tourista to see the bay by moonlight…”

  “By moonlight?” she said sharply.

  “A carriage is waiting. You long to see Toscanita by the light of the moon.”

  “I couldn’t possibly go, what would my cousin think?”

  “She would think that you long to see Toscanita by the light of the moon.”

  “Alone with you!” said Winsome: unwisely.

  “It would not be the first time you had been alone with me. By the way, your Major,” said Tomaso, innocently, “was also in my shop today …”

  Cousin Hat viewed with some amazement her cousin’s sudden enthusiasm for a drive to Toscanita. “Whatever does this fearful dago want with her?” she said uneasily to Mr Cecil as, with a dreadful assumption of gaiety, Winsome followed Tomaso across the patio and down through the Joyeria out into the street. “He wants to sell her something, it can’t be anything else.” Mr Cecil thought that upon the whole it could not be anything else. “But I’ll go down and wish them God speed.” He followed them out.

  There was a carriage, sure enough, waiting below, with a nodding horse, wearing for the party a wreath of drooping flowers. Tomaso turfed the dozing driver off his seat and hauled her up, with some ungainly struggling, to sit beside him; and took up the reins. From the balcony above them, Cousin Hat looked rather anxiously down and he laughed and waved as they clattered away, flourishing the long, swingy whip, its lash permanently wound, since no Juanese driver would dream of using such a thing. Up the steep cobbled hill, the horse tugging away gallantly, delighted, as is the way of Juanese horses, to be of use. “This whole thing is blackmail,” said Winsome, angrily.

  “Blackmail! What ugly words you use! See how lovely this is, Senorita, looking down at the lights of the farmhouses in the dark plain; there to the left is the Colombaia, if we are quiet for a moment we can hear the music.… Why are you not happy and gay? it is fun, an adventure.” And down, far below, at the water’s edge, he said, nestling among the reeds like a swan on its nest, his boat was lying. The carriage was packed with valuables, all ready, they must take them down to the boat and stow them away: there were many safe hiding places, for, naturally, the boat was used for smuggling. He broke off to address the horse. “Come, friend, you can do a little better than this? It is uphill, we know, but it isn’t such a load, only two of us.…” And sure enough, before they had breasted the rise, the horse shook its head, suddenly, and broke into a trot.…

  “I rode with them a little way,” said Mr Cecil, reporting to Cousin Hat, fifteen minutes later. He looked very dusty, not at all his impeccable self. And he didn’t think Tomaso was trying to sell anything. On the other hand, he added comfortingly, he didn’t think it was anything else, either.

  “Well, I never really thought that,” said Cousin Hat.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE day of the fiesta dawned like any other self-respecting day in San Juan—cloudlessly blue, with gentle promise of a breeze to blow in later over the sunlit seas and cool down the noonday heat. By six o’clock in the morning, all the world was astir, by seven every door had its garland, every girl a rose in her hair, every cat a blue bow; by eight o’clock there stretched across the great square of the Duomo, up the shallow steps and right through the body of the church to the altar rails, a pathway carpeted with an intricate pattern of the petals of countless flowers; by nine o’clock …

  By nine, El Gerente had his men posted all about the cathedral and had seen them settling down to snacks of bread and garlic and their double-spouted carafes of rough red wine, and was making his way back across the square to drown his own agonised anxieties in arguadiente at a near by albergo. Mr Cecil caught him up and tittupped along beside him. “My dear, you do look gorgeous, positively resplendent!”

  “You think so, Senor?” said El Gerente, gratified. He sat down at a small table and rather ostentatiously crossed his legs, swinging one careless foot in a huge white gym. shoe.

  “But radiant! And the hat!” Mr Cecil looked at it wistfully. The courage!—to take a brim like a large gramophone record and simply break it across the back and turn it up flat against the crown. “If only one could get one’s silly clients … But they won’t. I tried last time.” A waiter approached and he ordered coffee for himself and for the Gerente a brandy.

  Guido shrugged. The hat was a hat. “But the shoes, Senor?”

  “The shoes?” said Mr Cecil. It obviously mattered most dreadfully. He stared with loving concentration at the swinging foot. “Gerente! You’ve had them cleaned!”

  “El Blanco,” said Guido proudly: and it was true for there were little blobs of it, like tears, all round the heels, a cloud of it shot into the air with each swing, and there was a neat white collar round each bare ankle—it had obviously been applied while the shoes were on. “I do congratulate you. They’re simply splendid.”

  “The Senor also is very fine,” said Guido: a chop for a chop.

  Mr Cecil bowed. He said carefully: “And Tomaso di Goya—he also.”

  “Tomaso?” said El Gerente sharply.

  “I saw him just now, hurrying with his parcels off up the hill. Really,” said Mr Cecil languidly, “he’d have done better to borrow Don Isidro’s bicycle these last few days.”

  Don Isidro’s bicycle was by now the joke of San Juan. Tabaqui, the grey secretary, assiduous as ever in his master’s service, had offered to learn to ride it himself, and so give La Madre confidence in its safety: and the Well-Belovéd had lost no time in giving it a shove that had landed rider and all in the nearest lily pool. The Grand Duke, enraged, had commanded El Gerente to drag out the wreck and have the whole thing consigned to the bottom of the sea; first, however, he had added coldly, removing the secretary. “El Bienquisto’s bicycle, Senor, is lying in the harbour. I myself saw it thrown in there. What would Tomaso di Goya be doing with it?”

  “Popping up and down to Toscanita?” suggested Mr Cecil.

  “To Toscanita?”

  “Well—to the boat. You do know, of course,” he said, sweetly, “that your partner in crime has a boat all ready in case?”

  “Has a boat …? My ‘partner’ …? Senor,” stammered El Gerente, as white as his shoes, “what is it you mean?”
>
  “There!—I thought you didn’t know. Well, the meanie!” said Cecil, quite passionately, “not at least to offer you a place in case things go wrong.”

  “Go—wrong?” faltered El Gerente.

  “With the thurible, ducky,” said Mr Cecil.

  It is difficult to call back a Chief of Police and insist on his settling his bill. No doubt he was busy, reflected the proprietor of the albergo, and anxious, shooting off suddenly like that, with the little senor Inghlesi after him; and had quite forgotten. However … He shrugged philosophically. Let God but grant a sign today from Juanita, and any man owning a café in the Piazza di Duomo, could afford to stand treat to the whole of the police force, for the rest of his life. And he had been right to keep quiet, for in a little while El Gerente was back with his friend and they had sunk two double brandies apiece and paid for the lot, before rushing off once more. To the excusados, no doubt: they both looked very ill.

  El Gerente and Mr Cecil, however, had retreated to a spot less frequented than a public excusado (mixed) in the cathedral square on fiesta day; poor Guido trembling in every limb and Mr Cecil hardly less exercised. For a fine situation Mr Cecil’s piece of innocent mischief had landed him into! “I assure you, Gerente, I knew nothing about any bomb.…”

  “Of course I thought, Senor, it was this you were speaking of.”

  “No, no, I just thought it was going to be a pellet.…”

  “Well, now you know, Senor. So what are we going to do?”

  “What I ought to do, is go straight up and tell the Grand Duke.”

  “Per Dios, Senor Thetheelah, I beg, I beseech you …! We have been friends, Senor, good friends over the years; many an arguadiente you and I have swallowed together, have you not been out in my boat with me, sat with me in my patio with my Pepita … Pepita! It is for her, Senor, for my wife, for my innocent daughters.…”

  “Well, then, you go and tell him. You’ll have saved his life, then; he won’t punish you.”

  “Tell him! Senor, you do not know our Exaltida. The Grand Duke,” said El Gerente, with a touch of understatement, “is not a reasonable man.”

  And there was Winsome: poor silly Foley with her goose-gog eyes, caught up in the toils of an assassination plot. Not that she would know for one moment that murder was intended: but the Grand Duke, as El Gerente had most truly said, was not a reasonable man. “We must get hold of Tomaso di Goya. Let him remove the bomb and make the censer safe and perhaps we need say nothing.”

  “Senor, there is less than an hour to go before the Mass begins.”

  Less than an hour. Already the thurible swung from its golden chains on its golden stand before the Grand Duke’s prie-Dieu, already an altar boy, efficient on this great occasion as never before, had ignited the charcoal which would smoulder there, lazily glowing, till the sprinkled incense sent up its aromatic fumes to heaven.… “And Tomaso has gone down to Toscanita; I told you, I saw him going.”

  “You don’t know where this boat is?”

  “No, no, I just heard him telling the Senorita about it. I dropped off the back of the carriage, once I found where they were going.” He did not take time off to explain. “And I’ve idly kept an eye on him since, dashing backwards and forwards—he must have found more and more stuff that just had to be taken.” He thought it over anxiously. “He won’t get in touch with you, when he comes back?”

  “We planned to keep apart, not to be seen together; and in these crowds …”

  “Send out men to find him, tell them to give him an urgent message to come to you; say you’ll be with the Arcivescovo in the Duomo. We must see the Arcivescovo.”

  “Si, Senor,” said Guido, humbly. He called his lieutenants to him, issued instructions and sent them off at the double; and hastened, shoving his way with his great shoulders through the packed crowds in the square, to follow the popinjay figure that minced ahead of him, picking its way across the cobbles like a cat in the rain.

  Precious minutes were lost in locating the old man, found at last on his knees in a dark little room off the main sacristy; many more precious minutes in reviving him from the fainting fits that followed on the revelation of the plot in which, so innocently, he had been involved. Outside, the crowds surged and jostled in the square, fighting their way good-temperedly through the bronze doorways, swarming up to the galleries, packing themselves away into two solid masses of humanity, one on either side of the flower-petal pathway that led from the main door to the two carved prie-Dieu. The choir was assembling, the organ broke into a tentative rumbling, in the sacristy the officiating priests knelt at their prie-Dieu offering up the Prayers before Mass. In their hidey-hole, the three conspirators entered into agitated counsel. There was no sign of Tomaso. “Had we not better, at least, remove the thurible in case he does not come?”

  “Arcivescovo, what then shall we explain to El Exaltida?”

  “Some story. Anything is better than leaving it there.”

  “But … Serenity, by now the hot coals have been burning, may not this effect the sensitivity of the bomb?”

  “I suppose it may be so,” said the old man, slowly.

  “Who, therefore, dare move it? It may explode at a touch.”

  “Nevertheless, we cannot leave it there. So, Gerente …”

  “Arcivescovo, per Dios! … Serenity, it is not of myself that I think, it is of my Pepita, it is of my little Giulietta, my Manuela, my Consuelo, my Quita.…”

  Mr Cecil had not spoken; but now he said: “Very well. I’ll move it.”

  “You, my son? Certainly not.”

  “And yet, Arcivescovo, it is true that the Senor Thetheelah has no wife, no daughters …”

  “God forbid,” said Mr Cecil, shuddering. He got to his feet. It was very odd to feel so cool and strong, so little afraid.

  But the Archbishop stopped him. “If anyone moves the censer, it shall be me, who am old and have nothing to lose. But, Senor, after all, what El Gerente says is true. May not the bomb now be liable to explode at a touch? And the church is crowded, packed tight with men, women and children.…”

  “Tomaso did say,” said the Gerente, doubtfully, “that when it went off it would effect none but the Duke himself.”

  “My son: the Grand Duke lifts the thurible, he takes a pace or two forward—away from the crowds—he swings it: all the people standing well back, out of respect for him; and the thing goes off. A different matter from carrying it right out through the crowds, all craning forward no doubt out of curiosity, and so to a place of safety.”

  “El Gerente must have the people kept back,” said Mr Cecil. “We’ll have to explain things afterwards; you can say a tourista went mad and tried to run off with the treasure.” He said urgently: “It’s decided. Come on, quick! Tell your men to force the people back towards the West door and to clear the sacristy. I’ll take it forward, up across the altar steps, out that way, away from the people. You must keep them back.…”

  “My son …”

  “Arcivescovo, you’re ill, you’d faint with the weight of the thing and the strain; you wouldn’t get a yard with it, you’d fall and it would explode beneath you. Quick, let’s waste no more time. Come on, Gerente.…” But he paused, lifting his head. “What’s that noise?”

  A sound of people cheering. “It is too late,” said the Archbishop. “The Grand Duke has arrived.”

  They stood for a long moment, paralysed into silence. “Very well, then. We shall have to warn him.”

  “Senor, for the love of God, my Pepita, my little ones …”

  And poor old Foley. “Well, all right then. There’s only one other way. Arcivescovo …”

  Voices were calling. A head was popped round a door. “Has anyone seen El Anit——…? Oh, per Dios! Arcivescovo, pardon me, excuse me, I did not observe you in the darkness. Your Grace, Your Serenity, everyone is searching for you, the Grand Duke is arriving.”

  “Very well, child; ‘El Anitra’ is coming.” He sketched a tiny cross in th
e air with two fingers. “Go in peace. You are forgiven.” He turned to Mr Cecil. “Quick, Senor, what then?”

  “El Patriarca sings the High Mass. At the time of the incense making—where will you be?”

  “To one side of the altar, about to read the Gospel for the day.”

  “Before the Grand Duke takes the censer, you must interfere. Give any reason or none, protest, make a fuss: say you are ill and faint, you can’t stand the incense, say you have had a message from Juanita discouraging incense, say—yes, if it comes to it at last, say that this is Juanita’s Sign! She has revealed to you that if the Grand Duke touches the thurible he is in danger. And, in the last resort …”

  “In the last resort … My son, I am an old man, a dying man. In the last resort, I will take the thurible out of the Grand Duke’s hands.”

  The cheering outside had grown to a great roar, there were more voices urgently calling. “I must go, my children. Leave it to me. He shall be safe.” He raised his hand in a blessing. El Gerente fell to his knees and Mr Cecil to his own rather discomfited amazement, found himself doing the same. The old man laid a hand on each bowed head. “My son, Guido: God forgive you and protect you. My son, Thetheelah—God bless you and reward you.” He smiled at them both, a smile of great peace and sweetness on his ugly old, ravaged face, and made the sign of the cross again; and was gone.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE interior of San Juan, ordinarily so splendidly hideous, was today transformed to a miracle of loveliness: for instead of the blood-bath of red brick, one entered a vast domed pillared hall in which every inch of wall, every black-and-white striped convict’s-leg, was hung with a watered silk brocade in the clear, deep green of the leaves of roses, all lit by the shimmer of a hundred chandeliers. Beneath its baldachino of barley sugar pink and white marble, the altar was massed with roses, pink and white, the national flower of San Juan; within the church, only rose petals had been used for the carpet of flowers, under her black veil, every woman wore a rose in her hair—the very air was so sweet with the scent of them that it was hard to see how anyone could have expected for one moment that Tomaso’s poor pellet could even have been observed. The grand ducal carriages, arriving at the broad front steps, were festooned with them, the horses wore rose-wreaths in their Sunday-go-to-Meeting straw hats, the grooms had each a rose nodding gaily at the top of his tight-furled whip.…