Captain Alatriste Read online

  They did not come looking for him at night, as I expected, but in the late afternoon, and more or less officially. Someone knocked at the door, and when I opened it I saw the substantial figure of the head constable, Martin Saldana. His bailiffs were stationed on the stairs and in the courtyard—I counted half a dozen—and some had their swords unsheathed.

  Saldana came in alone, his belt sagging with the metal it held, and closed the door after himself, keeping his hat on and his sword in his baldric. Alatriste, in shirtsleeves, had jumped up and was waiting in the center of the room. As the constable entered, he took his hand from his dagger, which he had quickly grasped when he heard the knocking.

  "Christ's blood, Diego, you are making this difficult for me," said Saldana with bad humor, pretending not to see the two pistols on the table. "You should at least have left Madrid. Or moved to new lodgings."

  "I was not expecting you."

  "Yes, I can believe that I am not the one you were expecting." Saldana finally looked at the pistols, walked a few steps into the room, took off his hat and set it over them, covering them. "Although you were expecting someone."

  "And what am I supposed to have done?"

  I was watching from the doorway to the other room, uneasy about this development. Saldana looked at me a moment and then walked the other way. He had also been a friend of my father's, in Flanders.

  "May I be struck by a thunderbolt if I know," he told the captain. "My orders are to arrest you, or kill you if you resist."

  "Of what am I accused?"

  The lieutenant was evasive. He shrugged and said, "You are not accused of anything. Someone wants to speak with you."

  "Who gave the orders?"

  "That is none of your concern. Those are the orders I was given, and that is enough for me." Again he was looking at Alatriste with annoyance, as if chastising him for creating this mess. "May I know what is going on, Diego? You have no idea what you have stirred up."

  Alatriste gave him a twisted smile, one with no trace of humor. "All I did was accept the assignment you recommended."

  "Well, I curse the hour I did, 'pon my oath, I do!" Saldana sighed a long, loud sigh. "By God, the men who employed you are not at all satisfied with how you carried it out."

  "It was too dirty, Martin."

  "Too dirty? And what does that matter? I cannot remember having done anything clean in the last thirty years. And I believe that may also be said of you."

  "It was foul even by our standards."

  "Say no more." Saldana threw his hands up. "I do not want to know anything about anything. In these times knowing too much is worse than knowing too little." Again he looked at Alatriste, uncomfortable but resolute. "Are you going to come along quietly, or not?"

  "What cards are you dealing me?"

  Saldana had little time to consider, but after a moment he came to a conclusion. "Very well. I can stay here while you test your luck with the men I have outside. They are not very skilled with their swords, but there are six of them. I doubt that even you can get to the street without a couple of souvenir slashes and likely a shot or two."

  "And which way will we travel?"

  "We go in a closed carriage, so you can forget about the route. You should have been away long before we came. You had more than enough time." The look Saldana threw at the captain was heavy with reproach. "Damn my soul if I expected to find you here!"

  "But where are you taking me?"

  "I cannot tell you that. In truth, I have said much more than I should." I was still in the doorway, not moving, not talking, but the high constable noticed me for a second time. "Do you want me to look after the boy?"

  "No, leave him here." Alatriste did not even turn toward me, absorbed in his thoughts. "La Lebrijana will see to him."

  "As you wish. Are you coming?"

  "Tell me where, Martin."

  Saldana shook his head, annoyed. "I have told you that I cannot."

  "It would not be to the town prison, would it?"

  Saldana's silence was eloquent. Then on Captain Alatriste's face I saw that grimace that sometimes took the place of a smile.

  "Do you have orders to kill me?" he asked serenely.

  Again Saldana shook his head. "No. I give you my word that my orders were to bring you back if you did not resist. Whether they will let you leave after I take you in is a different question. But by then you will no longer be my responsibility."

  "If it weren't for the fuss it might make, they would have dispatched me right here." Alatriste pulled his finger across his throat, imitating the path of a knife. "They have sent you because they want official secrecy. Arrested, interrogated, and, they will say, set free afterward, and so on and so on. And in the meantime, who will know?"

  Without hesitation, Saldana nodded his agreement. "That is what I think," he said, matter-of-factly. "I am only surprised that they did not dream up charges; whether true or false, an accusation is the easiest thing in the world to fabricate. Maybe they are afraid you will speak out in public. If truth be known, my orders were to not exchange a single word with you. And they did not want me to list your name in my ledger of prisoners. God help you!"

  "Let me bring a weapon, Martin."

  The constable's jaw dropped open. "A weapon? . . . Not a chance," he said after a long pause.

  Moving with extreme deliberation, the captain pulled out his slaughterer's knife and showed it to the constable. "Just this one."

  "You have lost your senses. Do you take me for a blockhead?"

  Alatriste shook his head no. "They want to kill me," he replied simply. "That is no surprise in my trade—it will happen sooner or later. But I never like to make things easy." Again that twisted smile flowered. "I swear that I will not use it against you."

  Saldana scratched his soldier's beard, which covered the long scar running from his mouth to his left ear. He had received it during the siege of Ostend, in the attacks on the redoubts of El Caballo and La Cortina, outside the walls. Among his companions on that day—and others—had been Diego Alatriste.

  "Nor against any of my men," said Saldana at last.

  "On my oath."

  The constable still hesitated. Then he turned his back, uttering blasphemous curses under his breath, as the captain slid the knife down the leg of a boot.

  "Damn your eyes, Diego," said Saldana, finally. "Let's get our asses out of here."

  They left with no further conversation. The captain chose not to wear his cloak, to suggest he was defenseless, and Martin Saldana agreed. He also allowed his old friend to wear a buff coat over his doublet. "It will guard against the cold," he said, hiding a smile. As for me, I neither stayed at home nor went to Caridad la Lebrijana's. The minute they started down the stairs, without thinking twice I grabbed the pistols from the table and the sword hanging on the wall, and bundled them all up in the captain's cloak, then tucked them under my arm and ran after them.

  There was very little day left in the sky of Madrid, barely a glow outlining rooftops and bell towers toward the Manzanares River and the Royal Palace. And so, at dusk, with shadows slowly creeping over the streets, I followed behind the closed carriage pulled by four mules, in which Martin Saldana and his catchpoles were transporting the captain. They drove past the Jesuit school, down Calle Toledo, and into La Cebada plaza—undoubtedly to avoid busy streets—then turned toward the small hill of the Rastro fountain before again bearing right. They were almost at the outskirts of the city, very near the Toledo road, the slaughterhouse, and a site that had been a Moorish cemetery long before, but now, because of its bad reputation, was called the Portillo de las Animas. Given its macabre history and the gloomy hour, this Gate of Lost Souls was not the most comforting place in the world to be.

  Night had definitely fallen when the carriage stopped before a deserted-looking house with two small windows and a large carriage courtyard that seemed better suited for horses than for anything else. I guessed that in the past it had been an inn for cattle traders.
I stood at the corner, panting, hidden by a large carriage guard, with my bundle beneath my arm. I saw Alatriste, resigned and calm, get out of the carriage, surrounded by Saldana and his bailiffs. They all went inside, and after a while I watched them come out without the captain, climb into the carriage, and leave. That disturbed me, for I did not know who else might be inside the house. I eliminated the idea of going any closer because I would run the certain risk of being caught.

  And so, twitching with anxiety, but patient, "as every man-of-arms must be"—as I had heard Alatriste himself say—I squeezed back against the wall to blend into the darkness, and prepared to wait. I confess that I was cold and afraid. But I was the son of Lope Balboa, a soldier of the king who had died in Flanders. And I could not abandon my father's friend.

  VIII. THE GATE OF LOST SOULS

  It looked like a tribunal, and Diego Alatriste did not have the least doubt that it was. One of the masked men was absent, the corpulent one who had insisted that there be little blood. His companion, however—the man with the round head and coarse, thin hair—was there, wearing the same mask and sitting behind a long table on which there were a lighted candelabrum and writing materials: goose quills, paper, and inkwell. His hostile aspect and his attitude would have been the most disturbing thing in the world had it not been for someone more disturbing seated beside him. That person wore no mask, and his hands were bony serpents slithering from the sleeves of his habit: Fray Emilio Bocanegra.

  There were no other chairs, so Captain Alatriste stood as he was questioned. It was, in fact, a standard interrogation, a task with which the Dominican priest was well acquainted. It was obvious that he was furious, worlds away from anything remotely related to Christian charity. The wavering light from the candelabrum deepened his sunken, badly shaved cheeks, and his eyes glittered with hatred as they bore into Alatriste. His entire person, from the way in which he asked questions to the least perceptible of his movements, conveyed distilled menace; the captain glanced around, looking for the rack on which, very soon, he would be tortured. He was surprised that Saldana had left with his men, and that there were no guards in sight; it appeared that only the masked man, the priest, and he were present. He sensed something strange, a discordant note in all this. Something was not as it should be. Or seemed to be.

  The questioning by the Inquisitor and his companion, who from time to time bent over the table to dip a feather pen into the inkwell and jot down some observation, lasted half an hour. In that time the captain had woven together a fabric of places and circumstances, including why he found himself there, alive, able to move his tongue and articulate sounds, instead of sprawled on some dumping ground with his throat cut like a dog.

  What most concerned his interrogators was the question of how much he had told, and to whom. Many questions were directed toward the role of Guadalmedina on the night of the adventure of the Englishmen, and especially toward establishing how the count had become implicated, and how much he knew about the matter. The inquisitors also showed special interest in learning whether other parties had been informed, and the names of any who might have partial knowledge of the affair.

  For his part, the captain kept his guard high, not admitting any act or divulging the identity of any person. He continued to maintain that Guadalmedina's intervention had been coincidental—although his questioners seemed to be convinced otherwise. Without a doubt, the captain reflected, someone inside the Alcazar Real had been informed of the comings and goings of the count that night, as well as the morning after the skirmish in the lane. But he held firm, sustaining that neither Alvaro de la Marca nor anyone else knew of his interview with the two masked men and the Dominican. For the most part, he answered in monosyllables, or by nodding or shaking his head. He was beginning to feel hot in the buffcoat, or perhaps it was only apprehension. He looked around the room, wondering which direction the executioners—who must be hidden somewhere—would come from, to take him prisoner and lead him in manacles to the anteroom of Hell.

  There was a pause as the masked man took notes in a very deliberate and correct hand, that of a professional scribe, and the priest stared at Alatriste with that hypnotic, feverish gaze that would raise gooseflesh on the bravest of men. In the interim, the captain wondered when someone was going to ask him why he had blocked the Italian's sword. Apparently his personal motives in the matter were not worth a fart in a windstorm. At just that instant, as if he were able to read the captain's thoughts, Fray Emilio Bocanegra put out his hand and rested it on the dark table, with his waxy index finger pointed at the captain.

  "What impels a man to desert the legions of God and pass into the iniquitous ranks of the heretics?"

  It was nearly comic, thought Diego Alatriste, for the priest to qualify as God's legions the unit formed by him, the masked scribe, and that sinister Italian swordsman. In other circumstances, he would have burst out laughing, but this stage was not set for comedy. He choked back his laughter and, unflinching, met the Dominican's eyes, and then those of the scribe, who had stopped writing. The eyes glinting through the holes of his mask showed very little sympathy.

  "I cannot say," said the captain. "It may have been because although the man was facing death, he asked for mercy for his companion, not himself."

  The Inquisitor and the masked man exchanged incredulous looks.

  "God save and protect us," muttered the priest. Eyes filled with fanaticism and scorn measured the captain.

  I am a dead man, thought Alatriste, reading his sentence in those black and pitiless pupils. Whatever he did, whatever he said, his doom was written in that implacable stare and in the icy calm with which the man in the mask again put pen to paper. The life of Diego Alatriste y Tenorio, soldier of the Tercios Viejos in Flanders, hired swordsman in the Madrid of King Philip the Fourth, was worth only whatever those two men still wanted to learn. As one could deduce from the turn the conversation was taking, that was very little indeed.

  "Your companion that night"—the scribe spoke without interrupting his writing, and his surly tone sounded a death knell for the captain—"did not seem to have as many scruples as you."

  "I give faith to that," the captain admitted. "He seemed even to be enjoying it."

  The writer's quill paused a moment in midair, as he flashed a look of irony toward the captain. "How wicked of him. And you?"

  "I do not enjoy killing. For me, taking a life is a business, not a pleasure."

  "Yes, so we noted." The man dipped the quill into the inkwell and turned back to his task. "And next, I suppose, we shall learn that you are a man given to Christian charity."

  "You err, Your Mercy," the captain responded serenely. "I am known to be a man more inclined toward the sword than toward sentiment."

  "That is why you were recommended to us as a man of the sword. To our misfortune."

  "But in truth, it is so. Fortune has reduced me to this sad estate. I have been a soldier all my life, and there are certain things one cannot avoid."

  The Dominican, who had been as quiet as the Sphinx during this exchange, sat straight up and leaned across the table toward Alatriste as if he would obliterate him on the spot. That instant.

  "Avoid? You soldiers are offal," he declared with infinite repugnance. "Rabble ... blaspheming, looting, wallowing with women. What infernal 'sentiment' do you refer to? Taking a life is as easy as breathing to you."

  The captain received the reproof in silence, and only when the priest had finished did he shrug.

  "You are undoubtedly right," he said. "But some things are difficult to explain. I was going to kill that Englishman. And I would have, had he defended himself or sought mercy for himself. But when he pled for mercy, it was as I told you, he pled for the other man."