by Matthew Carr
He sat La Moraga’s daughters on his lap and drank wine, then brandy, then more wine, and brought drinks for anyone who came by. He stayed there till the evening, and then he ate some supper and drank some more and rolled on the little bed with La Moraga’s elder daughter, the one they called La Sirena—the Mermaid. For a few seconds, he really did forget everything else except the young woman who lay dutifully beneath him as he spent himself inside her, but as soon as it was over, the fear and guilt returned and the images of charred bodies passed through his mind once again in a dismal procession.
He went downstairs and tried to drink it away, until his companions drifted off and finally La Moraga told him that he should leave, too. Now the church bell pealed ten times before it stopped as he lurched out into the street and untethered his horse. The surrounding houses were dark and silent, because the people of San Antonio were for the most part simple, God-fearing folk who went to bed early so that they could rise early to work in the fields the next day. He hoisted himself up onto the saddle, nearly falling over the other side before he was able to sit himself upright and steer the horse out along the road to Belamar.
He had made this journey so many times that the horse could almost do it without him, and no matter how dark it was or how much he’d had to drink, he always managed to remain in the saddle and never got lost. He heard an owl hoot as he left the last house behind him, and then he saw the horseman in the middle of the road in front of him, his face obscured by the wide-brimmed hat and the upturned cloak collar.
“Hello, Pepe,” he said. “We’ve been looking for you.”
Franquelo heard the snort of a horse behind him and knew without turning around that his route back was blocked.
“I’ve been busy with Alcalde Mendoza,” he said, “I couldn’t get away.”
“But still you managed to find your way to the whorehouse. And you didn’t even go to your friend’s funeral.”
Franquelo tried to swallow back his fear as the Catalan came closer.
“The boss was offended, Pepe. Didn’t we take care of your del Río problem for you?”
“You didn’t have to kill his whole family!”
“You know we don’t like to leave things to chance. But the jefe was worried about you. He thought you might be avoiding us.”
Franquelo was almost sober now and conscious of the sweat trickling down his neck. Ahead of him, just behind the Catalan, he saw the outline of the road that could take him to Belamar, to his sleeping wife and children, and he felt an overwhelming desire to be in a warm, secure place with stone walls around him, away from these savage creatures whose motives he had never understood.
“Ventura discovered our camp,” the Catalan went on. “He got away, and now we’ve had to move.”
“I didn’t know anything about that. I haven’t been back to Belamar today.”
“Well, you can’t go back there now.”
“Why not?” Franquelo replied in a high-pitched, almost girlish voice.
“Because Mendoza will want to talk to you about del Río. And then he’ll want to talk to you about other things. And the boss is worried that he might be able to make you say things you don’t want to say.”
“Not a chance. Not even if he burned me with hot irons.”
The Catalan chuckled. “You’re a brave man, Pepe. I don’t know if I could be that strong.”
“So let me join you. I’ll come to the mountains.”
“The boss has decided on a different solution.”
“Hombre, please. I’ve got children.”
“Sorry, Pepe, but these are difficult times.”
Franquelo took one last despairing look at the open road behind the Catalan and thought once more of his wife and children before the noose dropped around his neck and unseen hands pulled it taut, dragging the alguacil backward from his horse and down toward the darkness and the hard, cold ground.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
hat night Mendoza lay awake for a long time thinking about the wood-carver Vicente Péris. The information that Segura had given him was difficult to reconcile with the pious, serious man described by the countess and the bailiff, who lovingly carved angels in the choir gallery and questioned Father García about the Trinity and the Resurrection. Segura described a Morisco who had been a Moor and a Christian at various times in his life, without ever fully belonging to either religion, and had only recently come to embrace the faith of his ancestors with a fervor that was almost entirely due to Panalles and the Inquisition. Before his punishment, Segura said, Péris had been only sporadically devout and had sometimes confided in the mayor of his fear that he would not be saved in either faith. He returned from the galleys a very different person. He no longer came to the mayor for spiritual advice. He had begun to associate with some of the more hotheaded elements from Belamar and the surrounding villages, who liked to talk about the old days that they had never known, long before the Catholic monarchs had conquered Granada, when the Moors had ruled the whole of Spain.
Some of these malcontents had dreamed of bringing those days back and begun to talk of rebellion, Segura said, and Péris had approached him to try to get his support. Segura insisted that he had refused. He told Péris that it was still possible to be a Moor even in a Christian state and that if the Moriscos rebelled, they would be killed or banished like the Moriscos of Granada. Péris said he was a traitor and that people like him had polluted the faith of their fathers by submitting to the Christians. Despite these conversations, Segura doubted whether such discussions would have had any practical consequences, and he remained convinced that neither Péris nor his companions were capable of rape, murder or sedition. Yet the mayor also said that Péris had often traveled to Béarn to work and that he had fled there from Vallcarca.
The more Mendoza pondered what Segura had told him, the more it seemed to him that the wood-carver was not just a person eminently worthy of suspicion but that he was also crucial to the investigation. Were Péris and his companions members of the Catalan’s band? If so, why had they gone to Vallcarca by themselves to carry out such an attack? And why was Vallcarca so convinced that Péris was the Redeemer when Ventura had made it clear that he could not be? By the time Mendoza fell asleep, he still had not decided how he might act on the information the mayor had given him, but he felt pleased that the investigation had at least produced another potential line of inquiry. In the morning he came downstairs to find his page sitting in the alcove in front of the unlit fire, reading The Abencerraje.
“Are you enjoying that?” he asked.
“Well, it is a love story,” Gabriel said disdainfully.
“And a very beautiful one. But it’s also a tale of honor and friendship. I read it when I was a student, shortly before I went to Granada to fight the Moors.”
“And was the war like the book?”
“You mean did the Moors and Christians become friends and respect one another even as they fought one another? Would a Christian knight release his Moorish captive to allow him to marry his beloved princess on condition that he return to prison? No, boy, it wasn’t like that. There was no respect and very little honor. The book is much prettier. Books always are.”
Gabriel nodded. “Sir, the Moriscos you fought in Granada, were they like the Moriscos here?”
“No. They were more like Moors. Some of them anyway. Many of them spoke Arabic and wrote in it, too. They used to have public baths, and many of the women covered their faces with the white head scarf. During the rebellion they went back to being Moors. They prayed and worshipped like Moors.”
“Magda says they were like devils.”
“Some of them certainly behaved like devils,” he said. “Some terrible things were done in the early days of the rebellion. The Moriscos murdered priests and nuns. But they were provoked. Had they been treated with justice, they would not have rebelled—and I doubt they woul
d have behaved so cruelly.”
Gabriel was listening with intense interest, and Mendoza could not help thinking that the boy’s curiosity was not entirely concerned with the Moriscos themselves. Until now he had never shown any interest in Granada or in the fact that he came from there, not even when they’d returned to visit his mother five years earlier. The conversation made Mendoza feel uncomfortable and he felt a sense of relief at the sound of Necker and Martín returning from patrol. He looked up hopefully as they entered the room, but Necker said that Franquelo still had not come home and that his wife was worried about him. Mendoza was concerned, too. He was looking forward to making his first arrest, and he now felt grimly certain that Franquelo would not be seen alive again.
These suspicions were confirmed a few hours later, when the alguacil from San Antonio came riding into town with a mule bearing Franquelo’s body. The corpse had been found lying in the main street by peasants leaving for work that morning, the alguacil said, before adding almost as an afterthought that the dead man’s heart had been cut out.
“And where is the heart?” Mendoza asked.
“We haven’t found it, Your Honor. But San Antonio is an Old Christian village, and some of the people are saying that Pepe was killed by Moriscos in revenge for the del Río family. Now they’re talking about taking revenge themselves.”
“What was Constable Franquelo doing in San Antonio?”
The alguacil looked embarrassed and reticent. “I believe he was at La Moraga’s tavern, sir.”
“A tavern, you say?”
“A brothel, sir. Pepe often went there.”
“Thank you, Constable. And please make it known in your village that this crime was not carried out by Moriscos and that I will not tolerate acts of vengeance.”
“Yes, sir.”
The alguacil took the body to the mortuary shed and went to inform Franquelo’s wife, and Mendoza ordered Necker to return with him to San Antonio afterward to make his own inquiries. The day was not beginning well, and already the brief optimism that Mendoza had felt the previous evening was beginning to recede.
Shortly after midday two members of the Cardona militia came to Belamar to report that a group of Dutch and German pilgrims had found what appeared to be a human heart nailed to a roadside cross with a wooden carving of Jesus on the road to France. Mendoza, together with Martín and the two militiamen, went out to visit the scene. The pilgrims had gone, but they found two members of the militia guarding the cross, where the organ was still obscenely nailed to Christ’s chest.
“May God curse these devils and their damned Redeemer,” Martín said, and made the sign of the cross. Mendoza ordered the militiamen to retrieve the heart. He watched as one of them reached up from his horse and pulled the heart down, using a sack to cover his hands.
Mendoza had no doubt that it was Franquelo’s. He felt sorry for the constable, and also for his wife and children, and he wondered if he should have arrested him sooner, because he knew that he could have made him crack, if only to save his own skin. It had seemed a logical strategy to let him sweat and see what he might do or reveal, but in the end the alguacil had revealed nothing at all, and whatever he had been involved in, this latest outrage had effectively closed the last remaining door that the investigation had to offer in Belamar itself.
There seemed little doubt now that the Catalan was responsible for the murder of the smuggler del Río and his family. The gruesome mutilations of Franquelo and the Quintana brothers suggested that he had probably carried out those murders as well. And it was more than likely that the mace that had killed the tailor had cracked open Panalles’s skull. But a Morisco avenger could not simultaneously avenge Old Christians, too. The two things canceled each other out. There was now only one conclusion that could be drawn from these events: that the Catalan was not the Redeemer but a man pretending to be one.
As he rode back to Belamar with Martín and the militiamen, Mendoza pondered everything he knew and thought he knew about the investigation. From the moment he was sent to Cardona, everything had pointed toward religion as a motivation for the unfolding mayhem in the demesne. He’d been sent to Aragon to prevent another Granada, and had Ventura not found his way to the Catalan, Mendoza still would have believed that was what he was trying to do.
Now, as he looked over at the bloodied sack dangling from the militiaman’s saddlebag, it seemed to him that Franquelo’s heart was little more than a prop in a Fanini troupe comedia, along with the letter to the Inquisition that Villareal had shown him, the sacrilegious mutilations of the Quintana brothers, the Arabic on the church wall in Belamar, the mutilations of Christian statues and the cross in the yard at the del Río farm. Unless the Catalan was a maniac who took pleasure in such things for their own sake, there had to be some explanation as to why he had gone to these lengths and adopted these pretenses, and there were too many people in this affair who seemed to know one another for Mendoza to believe that the Catalan was acting on his own. But with Franquelo dead, another line of inquiry had closed, and there was no one who could tell him what this so-called Redeemer was doing except the Catalan and his army, and there was no way of catching him without an army of Mendoza’s own.
By the time he returned to the village, there no longer seemed any other option beyond the plan that he had considered the previous night. He went first to Segura’s house to speak to the mayor and then continued on to the rectory. The curtains were drawn, and he and Gabriel heard the faint sound of female giggling as he knocked loudly on the door. A moment later a disheveled Beatriz appeared in the bedroom doorway and hurried past them, carrying a tray with an empty bowl and cup, while Ventura appeared behind her.
“I’m glad to see that you’re getting better, cousin,” Mendoza said.
“She is an angel of mercy.” Ventura sighed. “I hear that our alguacil can no longer be arrested.”
“No, he can’t.”
Mendoza told him about the heart, and Ventura pulled a face and shook his head. “These people never seem to want to just kill someone, do they?” he said wonderingly. “They always have to make a show of it.”
“They do,” Mendoza said. “And I think I might have thought of a way to find out why. You don’t play chess, do you, cousin? You know what my favorite piece is? The knight. It’s the only piece that doesn’t move in a straight line, the only one that can step over others. It threatens a square by coming at it from the side.”
“Bernardo, please. I’m not good at riddles.”
“Vicente Péris isn’t in Aragon. He’s in France. He’s gone to Béarn to seek sanctuary with his Huguenot friends. Segura told me. He got it from Péris’s wife. I’ve checked it with her.”
“So?”
“So I’m going to find him.”
Ventura stared at him. “You’re going to France?”
Mendoza nodded and told him about his conversation with Segura the previous day.
“All this makes Segura appear rather virtuous, doesn’t it?” Ventura asked. “How do you know he’s telling the truth?”
“He has no reason to lie. He’s more or less admitted that he himself is an alfaquí. With the evidence I have, I could denounce him to the Inquisition and he would go straight to the fire.”
“But you’re not going to.”
“Not if his information is correct.”
“And you’re prepared to go all the way to France to find this out?’”
“We have no choice. You’re in no state to go anywhere, or I would have sent you. With Franquelo dead we’re blocked here. But Péris knows things. He went to Vallcarca for a reason—a reason that turned out to be different from what he thought—because someone persuaded him to go there. I need to know who that person was. If we find that out, we’ll find the key to unlock this Redeemer business. He’s my knight, and I intend to play him.”
“Why don’t you just go
directly to Vallcarca himself? He’s only in Huesca. Go and arrest him.”
“On what basis? Speculation and supposition? If he does have anything to do with the Catalan, he has no reason to tell me. and I haven’t enough evidence to arrest him for anything. I need witnesses, and Péris is the only one left.”
Ventura still looked unconvinced. “Béarn is a big place.”
“Péris’s wife says there’s an address in Pau where he usually stays. I’ll be back in a week. I’ll take Daniel as an escort. The rest of you can stay here. I need you to recover, cousin, so that I can send you back out into the field. I shall leave first thing tomorrow morning.”
“But you don’t speak French. And the roads are dangerous.”
Mendoza smiled. “I know that, cousin. But I have an excellent guide.”
• • •
AT FIRST LIGHT THE NEXT DAY, Gabriel saddled Ventura’s Andalusian stallion, which his cousin had persuaded him to take with him. It was difficult even to make the fretting animal stand still, but Ventura insisted that Andaluz was more suited for a journey into the mountains than was Mendoza’s own horse. Gabriel, Necker and Martín also watched them go, and Segura’s entire family came to say good-bye to their father. Mendoza watched Segura embrace his children one by one and ignored the angry looks from Juana and the oldest sons. It was not pleasant to deprive a family of their father, but Mendoza needed to speak to Vicente Péris and Segura was the best man to help find him. Not only did he speak French, but he had also been to Béarn himself and knew the mountains well.
Segura had agreed that there was no other way to find out what had happened in Vallcarca and that a journey to Béarn might be the only thing that could save Belamar from an inquisitorial investigation, but Mendoza knew that one or all of them might not come back. It was also possible that they might not find Péris and that the entire journey might turn into a futile diversion. He had spent much of the night turning over these possibilities in his mind, and he dismissed them now as they trotted slowly down the road, past the trickle of peasants heading into the fields and out through the ravine toward the looming peaks and cliffs that separated them from France.