"Aren't you going to buy us a drink?" asked the Gypsy slowly, amicably. He was enjoying himself. Peregil suddenly felt very hot. With a despairing look, he called Dolores over. A gin and tonic for Mairena, the same for El Polio Muelas. Neither touched his drink. Both stared at Peregil in the mirror.
"We've come to give you a message," said the Gypsy.
"From a friend," added El Polio.
Peregil swallowed, hoping that in the red light of the bar they wouldn't notice. The "friend" was Ruben Molina, a moneylender from El Baratillo. For months Peregil had been writing IOUs, and he felt quite faint when he thought how much he owed Molina. Ruben Molina was well known in certain circles in Seville. He sent his debtors only two reminders: the first by word, the second by deed. Mairena and El Polio Muelas were his errand boys.
"Tell him I'll pay him. There's money coming in."
"That's what Frasquito Torres
said."
El Polio smiled, menacingly sympathetic. In the mirror, the Gypsy's long, ascetic face was about as cheerful as if he'd just returned from his mother's funeral. Peregil saw his own reflection between the two of theirs. He wanted to swallow again but couldn't, the mention of Torres had made his throat dry. Frasquito came from a good family and was well known in Seville as an idler. For a time, like Peregil, he'd called on the services of Molina. But when the time came, he wasn't able to pay up. Somebody waited for him at the entrance to his house and broke every tooth in his head. They left him there, with his teeth inside a cone of newspaper tucked into his top jacket pocket.
"I just need another week."
Mairena put an arm round Peregil's shoulders, in a gesture that was so unexpectedly friendly that Peregil almost lost his head with terror. Mairena stroked Peregil's chin with the stump of his little finger. "What a coincidence," said the Gypsy. His black shirt smelled of stale sweat and cigarette smoke. "Because that's exactly what you have, my friend. Exactly seven days and not a minute more."
Peregil gripped the bar, trying to stop his hands from trembling. On the shelves the bottle labels merged. Life is dangerous, he thought. It always ends up killing you.
"Tell Molina that's no problem," he stammered. "I'm a man of my word. I'm about to clinch a good deal." He grabbed his glass and downed the drink. An ice cube crunched in a sinister fashion against his teeth, reminding him how Frasquito Torres had had to borrow from another moneylender to pay for a set of false teeth that cost him nearly half a million pesetas. The Gypsy still had his arm round Peregil's shoulders.
"That sounds so pretty," mocked El Polio Muelas. "To clinch."
Julio Iglesias sang on. Swinging her hips in time to the music behind the bar, Dolores La Negra came up to make conversation. She dipped a finger in Peregil's whisky and sucked it noisily, rubbed her stomach against the bar, and then shook the contents of her shirt with consummate professionalism before stopping to stare at the three men, disappointed. Peregil was as pale as if he'd just seen a ghost, and the other two didn't look at all friendly. They hadn't even touched their drinks. So Dolores turned and walked away, still moving her hips in time to the music. After a lifetime on one side of a bar or the other, she knew when to get out of the way.
V
Captain Xaloc's Twenty Pearls
I've also loved women who were dead. Heinrich Heine, Florentine Nights
Deputy Superintendent Simeon Navajo, head of investigations at police headquarters in Seville, finished eating his tortilla and glanced amicably at Quart.
"Listen, Padre," he said. "I don't know if it's the church itself, mere chance or the Archangel Gabriel." He paused and took a swig from the bottle of beer on his desk "But there's something sinister about that place."
Navajo was a small, thin, amiable man, constantly gesticulating. He wore round steel-rimmed glasses, and his bushy moustache seemed to sprout from his nose. He looked like the caricature of a seventies intellectual. This impression was emphasised by his jeans, baggy red shirt, and receding hair, worn long and in a ponytail. For the past twenty minutes he and Quart had been going through reports on the two deaths at Our Lady of the Tears. The police investigation had come to the same conclusion as the forensic reports: accidental death. Navajo was sorry he didn't have a handcuffed culprit to parade before the envoy from Rome. Just bad luck, Father, he was saying, a loose handrail, a chunk of plaster coming away from the ceiling. Poor devils, their number was up. Wham, straight to heaven. At least, the deputy superintendent assumed they'd gone to heaven, since they'd been in church.
"We know exactly how Penuelas, the municipal architect, died." Navajo walked two fingers along his desk to illustrate his account. "He spent half an hour wandering about under the roof of the church looking for evidence to support a condemnation order and then leaned against one of the wooden handrails up in the belfry. The wood was rotten and gave way. Penuelas fell and was impaled on one of the metal poles sticking out of the half-assembled scaffolding below, like a kebab." The deputy superintendent now held one finger up, as if it were the pole, and slammed the palm of his other hand down on it. Quart assumed the hand was meant to represent the skewered architect. "There were witnesses present when it happened, and on subsequent inspection the handrail didn't appear to have been tampered with."