you and I and others like us have been removed too long from pastoral duty. We have lost touch with the people who keep us in touch with God. We have reduced the Faith to an intellectual conception, an arid assent of the will, because we have not seen it working in the lives of the common folk. We have lost pity and fear and love We work by canon, not by charity.
He put the novel back and checked the telephone. It had an old-fashioned, fixed connection. Nowhere to plug in a modem. He went out of the room, leaving the door exactly as he'd found it, at an angle of forty-five degrees, and walked along the passage to a bedroom he guessed was Father Ferro's. It smelled stale, like a priest's solitude. It was a simple room with a window looking on to the square. There was a metal bed with a crucifix on the wall above it, and a wardrobe with a mirror. He saw a book of prayers on the bedside table and, on the floor, an old pair of slippers and a chamber pot. He smiled. Inside the wardrobe he found a black suit, a cassock hardly in better condition than the one Father Ferro wore every day, a few shirts and some underwear. One of the only other personal possessions was a yellowish photograph in a wooden frame. It showed a man and a woman they looked like peasants in their Sunday best standing beside a priest.
Despite the black hair and grave young face, Quart easily recognised the priest of Our Lady of the Tears. The photograph was very old and stained. Quart guessed it must have been taken forty years ago. The look of solemn pride on the faces of the man and woman on whose shoulders the young cleric was resting his hands suggested that the snapshot had been taken to celebrate his recent ordination.
The other bedroom was without doubt Oscar Lobato's. On the wall was a lithograph of Jerusalem
seen from the Mount of Olives, and an Easy Rider poster with Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper on motorbikes. Quart also saw a tennis racket and a pair of trainers in a corner. There was nothing of interest in either the bedside table or the wardrobe, so he searched the desk at the window. He found various bits of paper, books on theology, on the history of the Church, Royo Marin's Moral Doctrine, Altaner's Patristics, the five volumes of Mysterium Salutis, the lengthy essay Clericsby Eugen Drewermann, an electronic chess set, a guidebook to the Vatican, a small packet of antihistamine pills and an old copy of one of the adventures of Tintin, The Sceptre of Ottokar. And in a drawer a reward for Quart's patience -twenty pages on St. John of the Cross printed in New Courier font, and five plastic boxes each containing a dozen 3.5" diskettes.
He might be Vespers or he might not. This was pretty slender proof; anway there was too much to go through then and there, Quart realised, annoyed, as he looked quickly through the boxes. He'd have to find a way to come back and copy the contents of the diskettes on to the hard disk of his laptop, to search them for clues later at his leisure. Copying the diskettes could take an hour, so he'd need to devise another excuse for getting the priests out of the way.
Quart could feel the heat of the sun through the curtains, and he was sweating beneath his lightweight black alpaca jacket. He mopped his forehead with a tissue, then rolled the tissue into a ball and put it in his pocket. He put the diskettes back and closed the drawer, wondering where Father Oscar kept his computer. The hacker would have needed a very powerful computer connected to an easily accessible telephone line, as well as additional equipment. Such facilities were not to be found in these quarters. Whether he was Oscar Lobato or someone else, Vespers obviously didn't work from here.
Quart looked round indecisively. It was time to leave. And at that moment, just as he glanced at his watch, he heard footsteps on the stairs. He realised that his problems had only just begun.
Peregil hung up and stared thoughtfully at the telephone. Don Ibrahim had just called from a bar near the church to give him the latest report on the movements of each of the characters in the story. The former bogus lawyer and his henchmen were taking their commission very seriously. Too seriously, in Peregil's view. He was fed up with receiving calls every half hour telling him that such-and-such a priest had just bought a newspaper, or that such-and-such a priest was sitting on the terrace of the Laredo Bar enjoying the evening air. So far, the only valuable information was that Macarena Bruner had met the envoy from Rome at the Dona Maria Hotel. Peregil reacted to this news with disbelief at first, then with a kind of expectant satisfaction. You could bet this would be interesting.
And speaking of betting. In the last twenty-four hours the gaming tables had brought him a few more problems. After paying Don Ibrahim and his companions the hundred-thousand-peseta advance on the three million promised for the entire job, Pencho Gavira's assistant gave in to temptation: he used the remaining two million nine hundred thousand to try to repair his dire financial situation. The idea had come to him in a flash, with the dangerous intuition that some days are special and that this was one of them. Also, a certain Moorish fatalism stirred in the man's Andalusian blood. Luck will not knock at the same door twice unless you do something to attract its attention. That was the only piece of advice his father gave him when he was little, the day before his father went out for cigarettes and ran off with the butcher's wife. So, as Peregil stood eating tapas at the bar, he suddenly realised, although he knew he was walking along the edge of a precipice, that if he didn't act on his instinct, he'd spend the rest of his life regretting what might have been. Because he, the sidekick of the strong man at the Cartujano Bank, could be many things: a scoundrel, a man ashamed of his baldness, or a gambler who would sell his old mother, his boss or his boss's ex-wife for the price of a bingo card; but just imagining the sound of a rolling roulette ball made him brave as a lion. So that evening Peregil put on a clean shirt and a tie with mauve and red flowers, and headed for the casino like a Greek on his way to Troy. He nearly pulled it off, and that said much for his intuition as an habitue of the gaming tables. But, as Seneca said, what isn't to be isn't to be. Or maybe he never said anything of the sort. The two million nine hundred thousand went the way of the other three million. So Celestino Peregil was without a cent, and the shadows of Mairena the Gypsy and El Polio Muelas hovered over him like a black