Captain Alatriste Read online

  "The art of the simple," his companion added.

  Now the captain looked at the masked man. "There is one thing that worries me," he said. "The caballero who just left seems to be a man of high caliber, and he said that he does not wish us to kill anyone. I do not know what my companion thinks, but I would prefer not to get on the wrong side of someone whom you yourself addressed as 'Excellency,' whoever he may be, in order to do Your Mercies' bidding."

  "There could, perhaps, be more money," the masked one said, after a slight hesitation.

  "It would be helpful to know exactly how much."

  "Ten additional four-doubloon pieces. With the ten still to be paid, and these five, that will be twenty-five doubloons for each of you. Plus the purses of the most excellent Misters Thomas and John Smith."

  "I am comfortable with that," said the Italian.

  It was obvious that two or twenty made no difference to him: wounded, dead, or put up as pickles. As for Alatriste, he reflected again for a moment, then shook his head. That was a lot of doubloons for making sieves out of a pair of nobodies. And there, precisely, was the hitch in such a strange business: It was too well paid not to mean trouble. His instinct as a former soldier signaled danger.

  "It isn't a question of money."

  "There are swords to spare in Madrid," hinted the man with the mask, annoyed. The captain was not sure whether he meant in regard to looking for a substitute or for someone to settle scores if they refused the new arrangement. Alatriste was not pleased by the possibility that it was a threat. Out of habit, he twisted his mustache with his right hand as he slowly rested his left on the pommel of his sword. No one failed to register his move.

  The priest whipped around to face Alatriste squarely. The ascetic's face had hardened, and his arrogant, sunken eyes bored into the captain's.

  "I," he said in his disagreeable voice, "am Fray Emilio Bocanegra, president of the Holy Tribunal of the Inquisition."

  With those words, an icy wind seemed to blow across the room. The priest made clear to Diego Alatriste and the Italian, succinctly, and menacingly, that he did not need a mask to hide his identity, or come to them like a thief in the night, because the power God had placed in his hands was sufficient to annihilate any enemy of the Holy Mother Church or His Catholic Majesty, the King of all the Spains. That said, while his listeners swallowed nervously, he paused to assess the effect of his words, then continued in the same threatening tone.

  "Yours are sinful, mercenary hands, stained with blood like your swords and your consciences. But the Omnipotent Heavenly Father writes straight with crooked lines."

  The crooked lines exchanged an uneasy glance as the priest continued. "Tonight," he said, "I am entrusting to you a task of sacred inspiration," and he added, "You are to fulfill it regardless of the cost, because in so doing you serve divine justice. If you refuse, if you cast aside the burden, the wrath of God will fall upon you through the long and terrible arm of the Holy Office. We are like muleteers. Ubiquitous and persistent."

  With that the Dominican was silent, and no one dared speak a word. Even the Italian had forgotten his tra-la-las, and that said a lot.

  In the Spain of that day, to quarrel with the powerful Inquisition meant to confront a series of horrors that often included prison, torture, the stake, and death. Even the toughest men trembled at the mention of the Holy Office, and for his part, Diego Alatriste, like all Madrid, knew very well the infamous reputation of Fray Emilio Bocanegra, president of the Council of Six Judges, whose influence reached as far as the Grand Inquisitor, and even the private corridors of the Royal Palace. Only a week before, because of a so-called crimen pessimum, Padre Bocanegra had convinced the tribunal to burn four young servants of the Conde de Monteprieto in the Plaza Mayor when, after being subjected to the Inquisitorial rack, they denounced each other as sodomites. As for the aristocratic count— himself a bachelor and a melancholy man—his title as a grandee of Spain had saved him from an identical fate by only a hair's breadth. The king contented himself with signing a decree to seize his possessions and send him into exile in Italy. The merciless Bocanegra had personally conducted the entire proceedings, and that triumph was the last step in securing his fearsome power at court. Even the Conde de Olivares, a favorite of the king, tried to please the ferocious Dominican.

  This was no time to so much as blink. Captain Alatriste sighed deep inside, realizing that the two Englishmen, whoever they might be and despite the good intentions of the heavier masked man, had been sentenced without reprieve. They were dealing with the Church, and arguing any further would be, in addition to fruitless, dangerous.

  "What are we to do?" he said finally, resigned to the inevitable.

  "Kill them outright," Fray Emilio replied instantly, the fire of fanaticism blazing in his eyes.

  "Without knowing who they are?"

  "We have already told you who they are," the masked man with the round head reminded him. "Misters Thomas and John Smith. English travelers."

  "And ungodly Anglicans," added the priest, his voice crackling with anger. "But you have no need to know who they are. It is enough that they come from a land of heretics—a treacherous people, anathema to Spain and the Catholic religion. By executing God's will, you will render a valuable service to the All Powerful and to the crown."

  Having said this, the priest took out another purse containing twenty gold coins and disdainfully tossed it on the table.

  "You see now," he added, "that divine justice, unlike the earthly kind, pays in advance, although over time it collects its return." He stared at the captain and the Italian as if engraving their faces in his memory. "No one escapes His eyes, and God knows very well where to come to collect His debts."

  Diego Alatriste made as if to nod in agreement. He was a man with brass, but actually the gesture was an attempt to hide a shudder. The lamplight made the priest look diabolical, and the menace in his voice would have been enough to alter the composure of the bravest of men. Standing beside the captain, the Italian was pale, without his ti-ri-tu, ta-ta or his smile. Not even the round-headed man dared open his mouth.

  III. A LITTLE LADY

  Perhaps because a man's true homeland is his childhood, despite all the time that has gone by, I always remember the Tavern of the Turk with nostalgia. The place, Captain Alatriste, and those hazardous years of my boyhood are all gone now, but in the days of our Philip the Fourth, the tavern was one of four hundred in which the seventy thousand residents of Madrid could quench their thirst. That comes to about one tavern for every one hundred and seventy-five citizens. And that is not counting brothels, gaming houses, and other public establishments of, shall we say, relaxed or dubious moral ambience, which in a paradoxical, unique, and never-again-to-be-the-same Spain were visited as frequently as the churches—and often by the same people.

  La Lebrijana's enterprise was in fact a cellar of the sort where one came to eat, drink, and burn the night away, located on the corner of Calles Toledo and Arcabuz, about five hundred steps from the Plaza Mayor. The two rooms where Diego Alatriste and I lived were on the upper floor, and in a way the den below served as our sitting room. The captain liked to go down there to kill time when he had nothing better to do—which was often. Despite the smell of grease and smoke from the kitchen, the dirty floor and tables, and the mice running around, chased by the cat or looking for bread crumbs, it was a comfortable-enough place. It was also entertaining, because there were frequently travelers brought by post horse, and magistrates, tipstaves, flower vendors, and shopkeepers from the nearby Providencia and La Cebada plazas, as well as former soldiers drawn by the proximity of the principal streets of the city and the mentidero at San Felipe el Real, a center where idlers gathered to gossip. Not to disdain the tavern's attractions—a little faded but still splendid—and the longtime fame of the tavernkeeper and the Valdemoro wines—a muscatel as well as an aromatic San Martin de Valdeiglesias—but the place had another drawing card. It was blessed with a back
gate that opened onto a courtyard and the next street, a very handy feature when one was slipping away from sheriffs, catchpoles, creditors, poets, friends in need of money, and other miscreants and inopportune guests.

  As for Diego Alatriste, the table that Caridad la Lebrijana reserved for him near the door was commodious and sunny, and sometimes the wine brought with it a meat pie or some cracklings. The captain had carried over from his youth—something he said very little or nothing about—a certain taste for reading. It was not unusual to see him sitting at his table, alone, his sword and hat hung on a peg in the wall, reading the printed version of Lope's latest play—he was the captain's favorite author—recently performed in El Principe or La Cruz. Or it might be one of the gazettes or broadsides featuring the anonymous satiric verses that circulated at court in that time that was at once magnificent, decadent, mournful, and inspired—a time that cast a shadow as black as a curate's cloak over the favorite, the monarchy, and the morning star. In many verses, in fact, Alatriste recognized the corrosive wit and proverbial bad temper of his friend the unredeemed grumbler and popular poet Don Francisco de Quevedo:

  Here lies Senor Perez, the swine

  Whose life was Satan's appetizer

  While his devil's broth was stewing.

  No pussy ever meowed to him.

  How he rued Herod's misconstruing

  The use of power; so much wiser

  Not to have slaughtered innocent lambs:

  Forsooth! Such succulent cherubim

  Should be spared and saved for screwing.

  And other pretty bits of the sort. I imagine that my poor widowed mother, back there in her tiny Basque town, would have been alarmed had she had a hint of what strange company my serving as the captain's page had led me into. But as for the young Inigo Balboa, at thirteen he found that world to be a fascinating spectacle, and a singular school of life.

  I mentioned a couple of chapters ago that Don Francisco, along with Licenciado Calzas, Juan Vicuna, Domine Perez, the pharmacist Fadrique, and others of the captain's friends, often came to the tavern, and engaged in long discussions about politics, theater, poetry, and routinely, a punctilious appraisal of the many wars in which our poor Spain had been or was then involved. She may still have been powerful and feared by other nations, but she was touched with death in her soul. The battlefields of those wars were skillfully re-created on the tavern table by Juan Vicuna, using bits of bread, cutlery, and jugs of wine. Originally from Extremadura, and badly wounded at Nieuwpoort, he had once been a sergeant in the horse guard, and deemed himself a master strategist.

  War had soon become a real and pressing concern, for it was during the affair of the masked men and the

  Englishmen, as I recall, that hostilities were renewed in the Low Countries, after the expiration of the twelve-year truce that our deceased and peaceful King Philip the Third, the father of our young monarch, had signed with the Low Dutch. That long interim of peace, or its effects, was precisely the reason so many veteran soldiers were wandering without employ through the Spains and the rest of the world, swelling the ranks of idle braggarts, bullies, and blusterers disposed to hire out for any petty villainy. And among them we may count Diego Alatriste. However, the captain was one of the silent variety, and in contrast to so many others, no one ever saw him boasting of his campaigns or his wounds. And then when the drumrolls of his old company sounded again, Alatriste, like my father and many other brave men, rushed to reenlist beneath the old general of their old tercio, Don Ambrosio de Spinola, and to play their part at the beginning of what today we know as the Thirty Years' War. He would have served on and on had he not received the serious wound at Fleurus.

  At any rate, although the war against Holland and in the rest of Europe was the topic of conversation those days, I rarely heard the captain refer to his life as a soldier. That made me admire him even more, accustomed as I was to crossing paths with a hundred swaggering braggarts who, talking out of both sides of their mouth and fantasizing about Flanders, spent the day trumpeting their supposed feats at full pitch, clanking their swords through the Puerta del Sol or along Calle Montera, and strutting like peacocks on the steps of San Felipe. Their sashes were stuffed with tin tubes filled with documents praising their campaigns and their bravery, all of them ringing falser than a lead doubloon.

  It had rained a little, early that morning, and there were muddy tracks on the tavern floor, and that smell of dampness and sawdust that public places get on rainy days. The clouds were breaking, and a ray of sun, timid at first but soon after very sure of itself, framed the table where Diego Alatriste, Licenciado Calzas, Domine Perez, and Juan Vicuna were chatting after a meal. I was sitting on a tabo-ret near the door, practicing my penmanship with a quill, an inkwell, and a ream of paper the licenciado had brought me at the captain's suggestion. "So he will be able to instruct himself and read law and bleed the last maravedis out of clients, like all you lawyers, scribes, and other bloodsucking varlets."

  Calzas had burst out laughing. He was a pleasant fellow with a kind of cynical good humor, and his friendship with Alatriste was old and trusting. . "My faith! What a great truth that is," he had replied, still amused, and winking at me. "The pen, Inigo, is a better source of income than the sword."

  "Longa manus calami," the good father put it.

  A principle about which all those gathered around the table were in agreement, either in cordial accord or to hide that they did not know Latin. The next day the licenciado brought me a gift of writing materials, which no doubt he had skillfully extracted from the courts, where, thanks to the corrupt practices of his office, he earned an easy livelihood. Alatriste said nothing, and he did not offer me counsel on what use to make of the pen, paper, and ink. But I read the approval in his calm eyes when he saw me sitting beside the door practicing my letters. I did that by copying a few of Lope's verses I had sometimes heard the captain recite on nights when the Fleurus wound tormented him more than usual.

  The bastard has not come, as planned,

  Whose design it was on this fair day.

  To die by my genteel and noble hand

  And, in so doing, gain cachet.

  The fact that the captain would occasionally laugh quietly as he recited those lines, perhaps to gloss over the pain of his old wound, was not enough to cloud the fact that I longed for pretty verses. Like others I applied myself to copying that morning, having heard them also during the captain's long, sleepless nights.

  Hand to hand I must duel with him

  Where all Seville may see,

  In the plaza or in the lane;

  For he who kills with treachery

  Will ne’er outlive the shame,

  And he whose blood is vilely spilled

  Gains more than him by whom he's killed.

  I had just finished writing the last line when the captain, who had gotten up to get a drink from the water jug, took my paper to look it over. Standing beside me, he read the verses to himself and then fixed his eyes on me: one of those gazes I knew so well, serene and prolonged, as eloquent as the words I grew used to reading on his lips though they were never voiced. I remember that the sun, still an I-want-to-but-I-can't between the roof tiles of Calle Toledo, aimed an oblique ray at the rest of the pages in my lap, as well as the captain's gray-green, almost transparent eyes, and dried the last of the fresh ink of the verses Diego Alatriste held in his hand. He did not smile, or make a single gesture. Without a word he handed me the sheet of paper and went back to the table, but from there he sent me a last long look before again joining in conversation with his friends.

  Then, only a brief interval apart, came El Tuerto Fadrique, his one eye a little red, and Don Francisco de Quevedo. Fadrique had come straight from his apothecary shop at the Puerta Cerrada; he had been preparing specifics for ailing clients, and his gullet was burning from the effects of vapors, elixirs, and medicinal powders. Thus the minute he walked in the door, he wrapped an arm around a large bottle of Valdemoro wine
and began to detail to Domine Perez the laxative properties of the hull of a black nut from Hindustan. That was the scene when Don Francisco de Quevedo stepped inside, scraping the mud from his shoes.

  "The mud that serves me, counsels me"