The Siege

  Sánchez Guinea lets out a sly, approving laugh. The memory clearly amuses him.

  “The very one. He was held prisoner and he and a number of others stole a tartane and escaped. For the past four years he has been working on merchant ships … He had something of a disagreement with his employer recently.”

  “Who was the shipowner?”

  “Ignacio Ussel.”

  The old merchant raises an eyebrow as he says the name. Everyone in Cádiz knows that there is bad blood between Ussel and the firm of Palma e Hijos. During the crisis of 1796, Ignacio Ussel’s treachery all but bankrupted Tomás Palma, costing him three sizable cargoes. It is a betrayal his daughter has not forgotten.

  “We have a two-year Letter of Marque signed by the Regency,” Sánchez Guinea continues, “a ship almost ready to sail, a captain capable of assembling an able crew, and a stretch of enemy coastline plied by ships owned either by the French or coming from the occupied territories. What more could we ask for? And over and above the value of any captured ships and their cargoes, there are the bounties paid for the capture of enemy prisoners.”

  “You make it sound like a patriotic duty, Don Emilio.”

  The old merchant laughs good-naturedly. “And so it is, hija,” he responds. “And if there is some personal profit, so much the better. Running a corsair brings no dishonor on a respectable business. Remember your father did so without turning a hair. Though it infuriated the English. We are not talking about the slave trade.

  “You know that I would have no problem raising the money,” he goes on, “and I could easily find other partners. The fact is, this is a sound business proposition and, as I have done many times, I feel it my duty to offer it to you.”

  Silence. Lolita Palma is still staring at the closed door.

  “Why not sound him out a little?” Sánchez Guinea encourages her. “He is an interesting man. Plain-speaking. I find him very personable.”

  “You seem to place great confidence in this man … How well do you know him?”

  “My son Miguel sailed with him once, to Valencia and back. It was just before the evacuation of Seville, everything was in chaos. And they weathered a terrible storm. When he got back, Miguel could not speak highly enough of the man’s ability and his composure … In fact it was Miguel’s idea to put him in command of the Culebra as soon as he heard Lobo was in Cádiz and without a vessel.”

  “Is he from Cádiz?”

  “No. I think he was born in Cuba. Havana, or somewhere near there.”

  Lolita Palma stares at her hands. They are still pretty: she has long, elegant fingers and her nails, though not manicured, are neat. Sánchez Guinea looks at her, his smile pensive. At length, he nods good-naturedly.

  “There’s something about this man … He has spirit, and he is a fascinating character. A little rough around the edges when ashore, perhaps, and you could hardly use the term gentleman. In his dealings with women, for example, he is reputed to be less than scrupulous.”

  “Good Lord, what a dashing portrait you paint of him!”

  The old merchant raises his hands in protest.

  “I am simply telling you the truth. I know men who despise him and others who worship him. But, as my son says, there are men who would give the shirt off their backs for him.”

  “And the women? What would they give?”

  “That you will have to judge for yourself.”

  They look at each other and smile. Her smile is vague, a little sad; his is surprised, almost curious.

  “It hardly matters,” Sánchez Guinea concludes. “We are hiring a captain for a corsair, not organizing a society ball.”

  GUITARS. THE FLICKERING glow of oil lamps. The dancer’s bronzed skin glistens with sweat, her hair is plastered to her forehead. She moves like a lubricious animal, thinks Simon Desfosseux. A filthy Spaniard with coal-black eyes. A gypsy, he imagines. They all look like gypsies.

  “From now on, we will use only lead,” he says to Lieutenant Bertoldi.

  The place is heaving: dragoons, artillerymen, sailors, infantry. Only men. Only officers. They are gathered around tables stained with wine, sitting on benches, chairs and stools.

  “Do you ever stop thinking about work, Captain?”

  “Never. As you can tell.”

  With a shrug, Bertoldi drains his glass and pours more wine from the pitcher in front of him. The place is shrouded in a gray fog of tobacco smoke, the air thick with the stench of sweat from frockcoats unbuttoned to reveal waistcoats and shirtsleeves. Even the wine—coarse and acrid, the sort that numbs rather than stimulates—has a pungent smell and is as cloudy as the dozens of eyes turned to watch the woman as she writhes and sways, slapping her hips provocatively to the rhythm of the guitars.

  “Pig …” mutters Bertoldi, who cannot take his eyes off her.

  He watches her for a moment. Finally he turns back to Desfosseux.

  “Lead, you say?”

  The captain nods. “It’s the only solution,” he explains. “Using bombs of eighty to ninety pounds packed with lead—no powder charge, no fuse—we could increase our range by at least a hundred toises. More if the wind is with us.”

  “The damage would be minimal,” protests Bertoldi.

  “We can worry about damage later. What’s important now is getting the bombs to hit the center of the city … To hit Plaza de San Antonio or somewhere near there.”

  “Then it’s decided?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Bertoldi raises his glass, shrugs his shoulders.

  “In that case, a toast to Fanfan.”

  “Yes, indeed.” Desfosseux gently clinks his assistant’s glass. “To Fanfan.”

  The guitars fall silent and the men erupt into thunderous applause, with lewd comments in every conceivable European language. Standing frozen, back arched, hand still raised, the dancer moves her coal-black eyes over the audience. She looks defiant. Confident. Having whipped up their desire she knows that she could have any man she wishes. Her instinct, or her experience—she is very young, but age has little to do with such things—tell her that any man here would toss money at her feet merely to get her to notice him. These are good times for her: the right men in the right place. War does not have to mean poverty, at least not for everyone. Not for a woman with a body as beautiful and eyes as dark as hers. Simon Desfosseux is thinking this as his eyes linger on the dancer’s bronzed arms, the beads of sweat glittering in the plunging neckline that shamelessly reveals the tops of her breasts. This woman may well die of starvation in another war when she is wizened and old, but she will not die in this one. That much is obvious from the lustful eyes all staring at her, from the greedy calculations being made behind the apparent modesty of the two guitarists—father, brother, cousin, lover, pimp—sitting on stools, guitars on their knees, looking around smiling at the applause as they hungrily try to work out the location of the pocket jingling loudest this evening. Wondering how much the French gentlemen in this flamenco show in Puerto Real might be prepared to bid—in the current market where fresh meat is in short supply—for the spurious “honor” of their daughter, sister, cousin, lover, protégée … Though patriotism and King Fernando are all very well for those who care about such things, a man still has to earn a living.

  Simon Desfosseux and Lieutenant Bertoldi step out into the street, feel the relief of the cool breeze. Everything is in darkness. Most of the town’s inhabitants fled when the Imperial Army marched in and the abandoned houses have been converted into barracks and billets for soldiers and officers, the courtyards and gardens into stables. The imposing church was quickly looted, the altarpiece turned into kindling, and now it serves as a storehouse for weapons and gunpowder.

  “That gypsy whore has got me all worked up,” says Bertoldi.

  Walking farther down the street, they come to the shore. There is no moon, and the vault of the heavens above the flat roofs of the houses is strewn with stars. Half a league east, on the far side of the black expan
se of the bay, they can see scattered lights near the enemy arsenal at La Carraca and the village on the Isla de Léon. As usual, the besieged seem more relaxed than their besiegers.

  “It’s nearly three months since I last had a bloody letter,” Bertoldi says after a while.

  In the darkness Desfosseux makes a wry face. He has no trouble following his companion’s line of thought. He has also been thinking about the wife waiting for him back in Metz. About the son he barely knows. It has been almost two years now. And there may be many more to come.

  “Those bastard manolos,” mutters the lieutenant bitterly. “Mean bastards.”

  Bertoldi’s habitual good humor seems to have soured in recent weeks. Like the lieutenant, like most of the 23,000 men holed up between Sancti Petri and Chipiona, Captain Desfosseux has no idea what is happening back in France or in the rest of Europe. All he has are speculations, suppositions, rumors. Smoke and mirrors. There have been no recent newspapers, no pamphlets, no letters; such things do not make it this far. The men have had no news of their families, nor their families of them. The guerrilla gang operating along all their lines of communication make it impossible. Traveling in Spain is like travelling in Arabia: couriers are ambushed in the mountains and the forests, captured and brutally slaughtered. Only those under heavy escort can travel about without risking some deadly encounter. The roads leading to Jerez and Seville are lined with blockhouses where small, demoralized garrisons, constantly on the alert, muskets primed, live in permanent fear of the enemy all around them and of the villagers nearby. And after dark, the roads and the fields become the province of the rebels, a deathtrap, and those foolhardy enough to venture abroad without adequate protection are likely to be found at dawn on the edges of the forests of holm oak and pine, having been tortured like brute animals. This is the reality of war in Spain, in Andalucía. The troops of the Premier Corps laying siege to Cádiz are an occupying force in name only, feared more for their reputation than their deeds; they are cut off from everything and everyone, their future uncertain, exiled in this hostile terrain where the narcotics of apathy and boredom can carry off even the best soldiers and where disease and homesickness can claim as many victims as enemy fire.

  “They buried Bouvier yesterday,” says Bertoldi gloomily.

  Desfosseux says nothing. Bertoldi is not relaying news, he is simply thinking aloud. Louis Bouvier, an artillery lieutenant they traveled with from Bayona to Madrid, and met again at the San Diego artillery unit in Chiclana, had been suffering from a nervous condition that plunged him into a profound melancholy. Two days ago, just as he was finishing his duty, Bouvier seized another soldier’s musket, holed up in the bunkhouse, jammed the barrel in his mouth, put his big toe on the trigger and blew his brains out.

  “God. This is the asshole of the universe.”

  Still Desfosseux says nothing. The gentle breeze coming off the sea smells of low tide, of silt and seaweed. At the edge of the town, where the last houses peter out, rise the dark shapes of the camp tents and the fortifications protecting the beach against a possible enemy landing. Desfosseux hears the voices of sentries, the soft whinnying of horses in courtyards that have been converted into stables, a vague rumor made up of the countless unidentifiable noises of thousands of men, some sleeping, others wide awake and staring into the darkness, an army run aground before a city.

  “It sounds like a good idea, using lead,” Bertoldi says, but his tone is that of a drowning man clutching at straws.

  Desfosseux takes a few steps then stops, gazing at the city lights in the distance. Mentally working out new trajectories, perfect curves, beautiful, flawless parabolas.

  “It’s the only way … Tomorrow, we’ll start work on shifting the center of gravity. Giving it a little rotation by sanding down the bore should do it.”

  There is a long silence.

  “You know what I’m thinking, Captain?”

  “No.”

  “I’m thinking you’ll never put a bullet in your brain like that poor bastard Bouvier.”

  Desfosseux smiles in the darkness, knowing that his assistant is right. Never—not at least while there are still problems to solve. Not for him the perils of boredom or despair. The steel thread that binds Desfosseux to life is braided with concepts not emotions. Words such as duty, patriotism, solidarity, the concepts Bertoldi and the other men cling to, are irrelevant to him. He cares only about mass, volume, longitude, elevation, specific gravity, air resistance, spin. The slate and the slide rule. It is these things that make it possible for the artillery captain to remain untroubled by any uncertainty that is not strictly mathematical. Obsession can be the ruin of a man, but it can also be his salvation. Desfosseux’s obsession is increasing his range by 750 toises.

  THREE MEN IN an office beneath another portrait of Fernando VII. Early morning sunlight streaming diagonally through lace curtains, shimmering on the gold collar, cuffs and the lapels of the frockcoat worn by Lieutenant General Juan María Villavicencio of the Royal Armada, Commander of the Fleet and political and military governor of Cádiz.

  “Is that all?”

  “For the moment.”

  The governor carefully sets down the report on the green Morocco leather of his desk, allows his spectacles to fall and dangle from the chain threaded through the buttonhole of his lapel and stares at Comisario Rogelio Tizón.

  “It doesn’t seem to amount to much.”

  Tizón gives a sidelong glance to his direct superior, Eusebio García Pico, General Intendant and Judge overseeing Crime and Policing who is sitting a little to one side, legs crossed, right thumb hooked into his waistcoat pocket. His face is impassive, as though he is thinking about distant matters: the face of someone who is merely passing through. Tizón, who has spent twenty minutes waiting in the vestibule outside the office, is now wondering what the two men were discussing before he was shown in.

  “It is a difficult case, General,” says the policeman warily.

  Villavicencio continues to stare at him. He is a seaman of fifty-six with gray hair, a man of the old school and veteran of numerous naval campaigns. Forceful, but with a keen sense of diplomacy, despite being a staunch conservative and fiercely loyal to the young king now being held prisoner by the French. Artful, manipulative and wielding the prestige he has earned in military life, the Governor of Cádiz—the beating heart, one might say, of patriotic, revolutionary Spain—gets along with everyone, even the bishops and the British. His name is writ large among those destined to play a role in the new Regency when it comes. A powerful man, as Tizón knows only too well. A man with a future.

  “Difficult,” echoes Villavicencio pensively.

  “That’s precisely the word, señor.”

  A lengthy silence. Tizón would like to smoke but no one indicates that he may do so. Toying with his spectacles, the governor peers again at the report—four scant pages—then sets it down again, carefully aligning it two inches from the edge of the desk.

  “And you’re certain that all three cases are related to the same murderer?”

  The policeman briefly explains himself. Certain, no, one can never be certain of anything, but the method in each case is identical. As is the choice of victim: very young, from humble background. As it says in the report, two servants and another girl it has not been possible to identify. Probably a refugee with no family and no known employment.

  “There was no … eh … physical violence?”

  Another sidelong glance. Brief this time. The General Intendant remains mute and still as a statue. As though he were not here.

  “All three were lashed to death with a whip, señor. If that does not constitute violence, let Christ himself come down from heaven and say otherwise.”

  This last comment does not please the governor, whose religious convictions are well known. He sucks in his cheeks, knits his brows and studies his pale, slender hands. Aristocratic hands, notes Tizón, of the sort common among naval officers. Riffraff do not become officers in
the Royal Armada. On his left hand is a ring set with a magnificent emerald, a personal gift from the Emperor Napoleon when Villavicencio served with the Franco-Spanish fleet in Brest … before everything went to hell, before the battle of Trafalgar, the imprisonment of Fernando VII and the war against France.

  “I was referring … you understand … to a different kind of violence.”

  “They were not raped—at least there is no evidence that they were.”

  Villavicencio remains silent, his eyes fixed on Tizón. Waiting. The policeman feels obliged to give a more detailed explanation, though he is not sure that this is what the governor wants. It was the Intendant who brought him here. “Don Juan María,” García Pico had said as they climbed the stairs—his use of the governor’s first name seemed to be a stern reminder of their respective positions—“has requested a direct, verbal account in addition to the written report. A broader picture. He wants to know whether there is any danger of this business slipping out of his control. Or of yours.”

  Tizón steels himself and begins again. “It might be said that the last victim was a stroke of luck—no one has claimed her body, no one has reported her missing … which means we have been able to hush things up. To avoid panic.”

  An imperceptible nod from the governor tells him he is on the right track. So that is what this is about, Tizón thinks, quickly suppressing a smile. It all makes sense now, García Pico’s remarks, his oblique comment on the stairs.

  As if to confirm this, Villavicencio gestures casually to Tizón’s report with the hand that bears the emerald.

  “Three girls murdered in such a manner is not merely a … difficult case. It is an outrage. One that would cause a public scandal if news of the matter should leak …”

  Finally we get to the crux of the matter, thinks Tizón. I could see you coming, you son of a bitch.

  “I must admit that it has leaked to a certain extent,” he says tactfully, “though only a little. There are rumors, gossip, old women prattling … Inevitable, as I’m sure you know. The city is small and overcrowded.”