The deputy superintendent took another swig of beer and wiped his moustache with the finger on which Penuelas had been impaled.
Then he smiled enthusiastically. He and Quart had met a couple of years before, during the Pope's visit. Simeon Navajo had been acting as liaison for the Seville police, and the two had got along famously. The envoy from Rome let the policeman take the credit for all the spectacular successes, such as catching the priest who planned to stab the Holy Father or finding the Semtex hidden in the basket of laundry at the Convent of the Holy Sacrament. Navajo was personally congratulated by the minister of the interior and His Holiness himself. His photo was on the front page of the newspapers and he was awarded a special commendation. Now, nobody at headquarters dared call him Miss Magnum for wearing his hair in a ponytail. The magnum, a.357-calibre, lay among a pile of papers on his desk. He only wore it when he went to his ex-wife's house to pick up his kids. That way, he said, she respected him. And the kids thought it was cool.
Quart looked around the office. Through a glass partition he could see a North African with a black eye. The man sat facing a thickset police officer in shirtsleeves. The officer was saying something to him and didn't look too friendly. It was like a silent movie. On this side of the partition, a framed photograph of the king and a calendar, its passing days energetically ticked off, hung on the wall. There was a grey filing cabinet with an Expo '92 sticker and a sticker of a marijuana leaf, a fan, a pin-board covered with photographs of criminals, a dart-board with holes in the wall all around it, and a poster of some American policemen beating the daylights out of a black man under the words TOUGH LOVE.
"What about Father Urbizu?" asked Quart.
The deputy superintendent scratched his ear. "It seems his death was accidental too, Padre. For him there weren't any witnesses, but my people went over every inch of the church afterwards. Maybe he leaned against part of the scaffolding or knocked it accidentally." He imitated the motion of swaying scaffolding with his hands so realistically that he stopped, as if it gave him vertigo. "The top of it could have knocked off a section of the cornice. The cornice might already have been loose, and by some miracle if you'll excuse the word -only the scaffolding was keeping it in place. So when the scaffolding got knocked, ten kilos of plaster came down on his head. He must have heard the sound, looked up, and then splat."
He illustrated his story with the appropriate hand movements. At the end, he lay one hand palm upwards to show Father Urbizu passing to a better life. He looked for a moment at his dying hand, then took a swig of beer. "Another case of bad luck," he said thoughtfully.
Quart took out a couple of name cards, to take notes. "Why did the chunk of cornice come down?" he asked.
"Depends." Navajo glanced suspiciously at the cards. He brushed some tortilla crumbs from his shirt. "According to Newton, the attraction of the earth causes any unsupported object to acquire vertical velocity and fall on the heads of archbishops' secretaries who got out of bed on the wrong side that morning." He looked to see Quart's reaction. "I hope you've written that down. And people say the police don't base their work on scientific principles."
Quart got the message. He laughed and put his cards and pen away. "So, why do you think it happened?" he asked.
Navajo shrugged. None of this information was particularly important or confidential, but he obviously wanted to keep things on an official footing. Since the investigation confirmed that the two deaths were accidental, Our Lady of the Tears was still exclusively a matter for the Church. There were rumours that the council and the banks were bringing pressure to bear, and the deputy superintendent's bosses wanted to keep well out of it. Quart may have been a Spaniard, a priest and an old friend, but he was still an agent for a foreign state.
"According to our experts," answered Navajo, "the chunk of cornice was already loose. This was proved by an inspection after the accident. We found a pocket of damp behind it. The roof had been leaking for years."
"You've definitely ruled out human intervention?"
The deputy superintendent began to sneer but caught himself. After all, he was in Quart's debt.
"Listen, Padre, we're the police. We wouldn't even rule out a hundred per cent that Judas wasn't actually bumped off by one of his eleven colleagues. So let's say we're ninety-five per cent sure. It's hardly likely that someone said to the poor bastard, 'Hey, stand there a moment,' climbed up the scaffolding, pulled off a chunk of cornice, and dropped it on him while he just stood there looking up." Navajo's fingers illustrated the climb up the scaffolding and the cornice crashing
down. Then a finger lay inert, waiting for the forensic people. "That only happens in cartoons."
When he left the deputy superintendent, Quart felt sure that Vespers had been exaggerating. Maybe the statement about the church killing to defend itself freely interpreted, metaphorically, symbolically -was true. It was quite another thing to establish how a dilapidated three-hundred-year-old building could, either on its own or with the help of Providence, do away with anyone who threatened it. Establishing that was no longer a matter for Quart, or even the IEA. The supernatural was the province of another kind of expert, closer to Cardinal Iwaszkiewicz's sinister brotherhood than to the rough centurion embodied by Monsignor Spada. In the monsignor's world, and in the good soldier Quart's, two and two always added up to four.