The Seville Communion (7 page)

Gris Marsala gazed at the altarpiece as if she hadn't heard the question. Then she rubbed the back of her neck and sighed. "Well, call it what you like." She was trying to sound light-hearted. "The stalemate, you might say. With Macarena Bruner, her mother the old duchess, and all the rest of them."

"I haven't yet met the Bruners, mother and daughter."

When Gris Marsala turned to look at Quart, there was a malevolent gleam in her eyes. "Haven't you? Well, you certainly will."

Quart heard her laugh as she switched off the light. The altarpiece was once again in shadow.

"What's really going on here?" he asked.

"In Seville?"

"In this church."

She took a few moments to answer. "It's up to you to decide," she said at last. "That's why you were sent."

"But you work here. You must have some ideas on the subject."

"Of course I have, but I'm keeping them to myself. All I know is that more people would like to have this church pulled down than to keep it standing."

"Why?"

"That I don't know." Her friendliness disappeared. Now it was her turn to become closed off and distant. "Maybe because a square metre of land in this part of Seville is worth a fortune ..." She shook her head as if to rid it of unpleasant thoughts. "You'll find plenty of people to tell you all about it."

"You said you had some ideas."

"I did?" Her smile looked forced. "Maybe. Anyway, it's none of my business. My job is to save as much as I can of the building as long as there's money for the work. Which there isn't."

"So why are you staying on alone?"

"I'm putting in some overtime. Anyway, since I began working on the church, I haven't found anything else to do, so I have a lot of spare time."

"A lot of spare time," repeated Quart.

"That's right." She sounded bitter again. "And I have nowhere eke to go."

Intrigued, he was about to ask more when the sound of footsteps made him turn. A small, motionless figure dressed in black stood in the doorway. It cast its compact shadow on the flagstones.

Gris Marsala, who had also turned, smiled strangely at Quart. "It's time for you to meet the parish priest, don't you think? Father Priamo Ferro."

As soon as Celestino Peregil left the Casa Cuesta Bar, Don Ibrahim began discreetly counting the banknotes that Pencho Gavira's assistant had left them to cover initial expenses.

"A hundred thousand," he said when he'd finished.

El Potro del Mantelete and La Nina Punales nodded in silence. Don Ibrahim made three bundles of thirty-three thousand, put one bundle in the inside pocket of his jacket, and passed the others to his companions. He placed the remaining thousand-peseta note on the table.

"What do you think?" he asked.

Frowning, El Potro del Mantelete smoothed the banknote and peered at the figure of Hernan Cortes on the front. "Looks real to me," he ventured.

"I mean the job, not the note."

El Potro stared gloomily at the banknote and La Nina Punales shrugged.

"It's money," she said, as if that summed it all up. "But the job looks dodgy, with all those priests."

Don Ibrahim waved his hand dismissively, dropping ash on his trousers again. "We will proceed with the utmost tact," he said, leaning with effort over his paunch to brush off the ash.

La Nina Punales said
othu
and El Potro nodded, still staring at the banknote. El Potro must have been about forty-five, and every one of his years showed in his face. In his younger days, between stints in the

Spanish Legion, he'd been a luckless apprentice bullfighter. It had left him with the dust of failure in his eyes and throat, and a scar from a bull's horn under his right ear. And all he got from a brief, obscure career as a contender for the bantamweight championship of Andalusia was a broken nose, lumpy scarred eyebrows and a certain slowness in combining thought, speech and action. When he was conning tourists in the streets, he was very good at playing the innocent. His vacant stare was utterly convincing.

"Very important to be tactful," he said slowly.

He went on frowning, as he did whenever he was thinking. This was what he'd been doing - frowning and pondering a question deeply -when he came home one day to find his brother, who was in a wheelchair, with his trousers down to his knees and his wife - El Potro's wife - sitting on top of him panting eloquently. Unhurriedly and without raising his voice, nodding as his brother assured him that there was a misunderstanding and he could explain everything, El Potro del Mantelete pushed the wheelchair almost tenderly to the landing and tipped it and its occupant down the stairs. His brother bumped down the thirty-two steps and suffered a fractured skull that turned out to be fatal. El Potro's wife got off more lightly: he beat her methodically, gave her two black eyes and then knocked her out with a left hook. Half an hour later, she came to, packed her bags and left for good.

The business with his brother didn't work out so well. It was only thanks to the skill of El Potro's lawyer that the judge was persuaded to change the charge from murder (with a possible thirty-year sentence) to involuntary manslaughter, resulting in an acquittal
in dubio pro reo.
The lawyer was Don Ibrahim. The Lawyers' Association of Seville didn't yet have doubts as to the authenticity of the diploma issued in Havana. But El Potro didn't care whether Don Ibrahim was a bona fide lawyer or not. The former bullfighter and boxer would never forget how Don Ibrahim had made an impassioned defence and won him his freedom. A home torn apart, Your Honour. A cheating brother, the heat of the moment, my client's intellect, the absence of
animus necandi
,
the lack of brakes on the wheelchair. Since then, El Potro del Mantelete had been blindly, heroically, unfailingly loyal to his benefactor. And his devotion became even greater, if that was possible, after Don Ibrahim's ignominious expulsion from the legal profession. Faithful as a hound, silent and unswerving, El Potro would do anything for his master.

"Still too many priests for my liking," said La Nina, her silver bracelets jangling as she twirled her empty glass.

Don Ibrahim and El Potro exchanged glances. Then the bogus lawyer ordered three more fino sherries and some tapas of spicy pork sausage. As soon as the waiter put the sherries on the table, La Nina emptied her glass in a single gulp. Don Ibrahim and El Potro averted their eyes.

Sour wine, so full of happiness,

though I drink to drown my sorrows,

I will never forget. . .

She sang low and from the heart, licking her red-painted lips moist with sherry. El Potro whispered
ole
without looking at her, gently tapping the rhythm on the table. As she sang the folk song her eyes - dark, tragic, rimmed with too much eyeliner - showed enormous in a face once beautiful. When she had too much sherry, she would recall how, as in the song, a dark man had once stabbed another to death over her. And she would search her handbag for a newspaper cutting she'd lost long ago. If it had ever really happened, it must have been when La Nina appeared on posters for shows in all her Gypsy glory, wild and beautiful, the young hope of Spanish song. The successor, they said, of Dona Concha Piquer.

Now, three decades after her brief moment of fame, she worked in seedy clubs and bars on the tourist circuit - dinner and a show included, Seville by night - the tired stamp of her dancing shoes making the rickety stages splinter.

"Where do we start?" she asked, looking at Don Ibrahim.

EI Potro glanced up too at the man he most respected in the world after the late bullfighter Juan Belmonte. Aware of his responsibility, the bogus lawyer took a long drag on his cigar and twice read the list of tapas on a blackboard behind the bar. Croquettes. Tripe. Fried anchovies. Eggs in bechamel. Tongue in sauce. Stuffed tongue.

"As Caius Julius Caesar said, and he put it well," Don Ibrahim said when he judged enough time had elapsed for his words to have greatest impact,
u'Galia est omnia divisa in partibus infidelibus
.'
In other words, before taking any action, ocular reconnaissance is recommended.'' He looked round like a general before his staff officers. "Visualisation of the territory, if you see what I mean.*' He blinked doubtfully. "Do you see what I mean?''

"Othu."

"Yes."

"Good." Don Ibrahim stroked his moustache, satisfied with troop morale. "What I mean is, we have to go and take a look at that church and all the rest of it." He glanced at La Nina, knowing she was devout. "With due attention to the fact that it is a sacred building, of course."

"I know the church," she said in her gravelly voice. "It's old and always has the builders in. I go to Mass there sometimes."

Like a good flamenco singer, she was highly religious. For his part, although he professed to be agnostic, Don Ibrahim respected freedom of worship. He leaned forward enquiringly. Rigorous research was mother to all victories, he'd read somewhere - Churchill, perhaps, or Frederick the Great.

"What's he like, the parish priest?"

"Old-school." La Nina frowned in concentration. "Ancient, bad-tempered . . . He once threw out some tourists, young girls, who came in during Mass. He got down from the altar, in his chasuble and everything, and gave them a real scolding for wearing shorts. This isn't the beach, he said to them, off you go. And he chucked them out."

Don Ibrahim nodded, pleased. "A holy man, I see. A man of God." "To his fingernails."

After a thoughtful pause, Don Ibrahim blew a smoke ring and watched it float away. He appeared preoccupied. "So what we have here," he said, "is a clergyman of character."

"I don't know about character," said La Nina. "He certainly has a temper."

"I see." Don Ibrahim blew another smoke ring, but this time it didn't come out right. "So this honourable priest may cause problems. I mean, he may hinder us."

"He could ruin the whole thing." "And the young priest, his assistant?"

"I've seen him helping during Mass. Nice and quiet he looks. Not so tough."

Don Ibrahim glanced across the street, at the knee-high leather boots from Valverde del Camino hanging outside the La Valcnciana Shoe Shop. Then, with a melancholy shudder, he turned back to El Potro and La Nina. At any other time he would have told Peregil where to put his little job. Or, more likely, he would have asked for more money. But as things were, he had no choice. He stared sadly at La Nina with her fake beauty spot, her chipped nail varnish, her bony fingers clasping the empty glass. He looked to his left and met the faithful gaze of El Potro. Then he regarded his own hand resting on the table. The ring he wore was a fake.
Every
so often he managed to sell one - he had several like it - for five thousand pesetas to some sucker in a bar in Triana. El Potro and La Nina were his people, his responsibility. El Potro, for his loyalty in adversity. La Nina, because Don Ibrahim had never heard anyone sing "Cape of Red and Gold" the way she sang it, in a
tablao
,
on his arrival in Seville. He didn't meet her until much later. She was playing a really seedy club and was already wrecked by alcohol and by the years, the embodiment of the songs she sang in a cracked, sublime voice that made the hairs stand on the back of your neck. "The She-Wolf", "Ballad of Bravery", "False Coin", "Tattoo". The night they met, Don Ibrahim swore to himself that he would save her from oblivion, to do justice to her art. For despite the calumny heaped upon him by the Lawyers' Association and the articles in the local papers when he was thrown in jail over an absurd diploma that nobody else gave a damn about, and despite the scams he'd had to set up to earn his living ever since, Don Ibrahim was not a scoundrel. He held his head high as he adjusted his watch chain. He was simply an honourable man who'd had no luck.

"This is merely a matter of strategy," he said thoughtfully, to convince himself more than anything else. He felt his companions' hopes pinned on him. Peregil had promised three million, but Don Ibrahim had heard that he worked for a banker who was really loaded, so there might be more money where that came from. And he and his companions needed funds to make a long-cherished dream come true.

Don Ibrahim had read extensively - how else could he have practised law for so long in Seville without being exposed? - if superficially, and he hoarded quotations as if they were gold dust. The best quotation about dreams came from that Thomas D. H. Lawrence, the one from Arabia who wrote
Madam Butterfly
,
men who dream with their eyes open, will always succeed, or something like that. He doubted whether El Potro and La Nina had their eyes open, but it didn't matter, he'd keep his open for them.

He looked affectionately at El Potro, who was slowly chewing a slice of sausage. "What do you think, champ?"

El Potro went on chewing in silence for half a minute. "I think we can do it," he said at last, when the other two had almost forgotten the question. "If God gives us luck."

Don Ibrahim sighed. "That's the problem. With all these priests involved, I don't know whose side God will be on."

El Potro smiled for the first time that morning. His smile always seemed be a great effort for his face, battered by bulls and other boxers. "Everything for the Cause," he said.

La Nina Punales let out a low, tender
ole:

A man without fear of death

swore his love to me . . .

She sang quietly, laying her hand on the hand of El Potro. Since his divorce he had lived alone. Don Ibrahim suspected that he silently loved La Nina but had never declared himself, out of respect. She, for her part, remained faithful to the memory of the man with green eyes still waiting for her at the bottom of every bottle. As for Don Ibrahim, nobody had definite evidence of his love affairs. On evenings of Manzanilla and guitar, he liked to talk vaguely of the romantic adventures of his youth in Cuba, when he was a friend of Beny Moré, the Brute of Rhythm, and of "Carafoca" Perez Prado, and of Jorge Negrete, the Mexican actor - until they had words, that is. He liked to talk of the time when Maria Felix, the divine Maria, the lady Maria, gave him an ebony walking stick with a silver handle, on the night she was unfaithful to Agustin Lara with him and a litre bottle of tequila. And slim and elegant Lara, devastated, wrote an immortal song to case the pain of being deceived. Don Ibrahim's smile became young again at the supposed memory of Acapulco, the nights, the beaches, Maria my love, pretty Maria. Between glasses of Manzanilla, La Nina softly hummed the song in which he was the guilty seducer. And El Potro sat there with his hard, silent profile.