Sebastian Copons so far from a Flemish trench and uttering more than eight words together. It took the captain a few seconds to return to the very recent past: the sea voyage, his recent farewell to Copons in Cadiz, the latter’s intention to spend a few days’ leave there and then to travel up to Seville on his way north.
“It’s good to see you, Sebastian.”
This was both true and not true. It was not, in fact, good to see him at that precise moment, and while they clasped each other’s arms with the sober affection of two old comrades, he glanced over Copons’s shoulder at the far end of the street. Fortunately, Copons could be relied on. He could get rid of Copons without causing offense, knowing that he would understand. That, after all, was the good thing about a real friend: he trusted you to deal the cards fairly and never insisted on checking the deck.
“Are you stopping in Seville?” he asked.
“For a while.”
Copons, small, thin, and wiry, was dressed, as ever, in soldier’s garb, in jerkin, baldric, sword, and boots. Beneath his hat, on his left temple, was the scar left by the gash that Alatriste himself had bandaged a year ago, during the battle at the Ruyter mill.
“How about a drink to celebrate, Diego?”
“Later.”
Copons looked at him, surprised and intrigued, before half turning to follow the direction of his gaze.
“You’re busy.”
“Something like that.”
Copons again inspected the street, searching for clues as to what was keeping his comrade there. Then, instinctively, he touched the hilt of his sword.
“Do you need me?” he asked phlegmatically.
“Not right now,” replied Alatriste with a warm smile that wrinkled his weathered face. “But there might be something for you before you leave Seville. Would you be interested?”
“Are you in on it?”
“Yes, and it’s well paid too.”
“I’d do it even if it weren’t.”
At this point, Alatriste spotted the accountant Olmedilla at the end of the street. He was dressed, as always, entirely in black, tightly buttoned up to his ruff, wearing a narrow-brimmed hat and the air of an anonymous government official come straight from the Real Audiencia.
“I have to go, but meet me later at Becerra’s.”
Placing one hand on his friend’s shoulder, he said nothing more, but with apparent unconcern, crossed the street to join the accountant by the house on the corner: a two-story brick building with a discreet gateway leading to an inner courtyard. They went in without knocking and without speaking to each other, exchanging only a brief, knowing glance. Alatriste had his hand on the hilt of his sword and Olmedilla remained as sour-faced as ever. An elderly servant came out, wiping his hands on his apron and looking anxious and inquisitive.
“We are here in the name of the Holy Office of the Inquisition,” said Olmedilla with terrible coldness.
The servant’s expression changed, for in Garaffa’s house and indeed in the whole of Seville, these were not words to be taken lightly. And so when Alatriste, one hand still on the hilt of his sword, indicated a room, the servant entered it as meekly as a lamb, allowing himself, without a murmur of protest, to be bound and gagged and locked in. When Alatriste came back out into the courtyard, he found Olmedilla waiting behind an enormous potted fern and twiddling his thumbs impatiently. There was another silent exchange of glances, and the two men went across the courtyard to a closed door. Then Alatriste unsheathed his sword, flung open the door, and strode into a spacious study furnished with a desk, a cupboard, a copper brazier, and a few leather chairs. The light from a high, barred window, half covered by latticework shutters, cast innumerable tiny luminous squares onto the head and shoulders of a stout, middle-aged man in silk robe and slippers, who started to his feet. This time Olmedilla did not invoke the Holy Office or anything else, he merely followed Alatriste into the room, and after a quick look around, his eye alighted with professional satisfaction on the open cupboard stuffed with papers. Just the way a cat, thought the captain, would have licked its lips at the sight of a sardine placed half an inch from its whiskers. As for the owner of the house, Jeronimo Garaffa, all the blood seemed to have drained from his face; he stood very quietly, mouth agape, both hands resting on the table on which a sealing-wax candle was burning. When he stood up, he spilled half an inkwell over the paper on which he had been writing when the intruders burst in. His dyed hair was covered by a snood and his waxed mustache by a net. He continued to hold the pen between his fingers as if he had forgotten it was there, transfixed in horror by the sword Captain Alatriste was pressing to his throat.
“So you have no idea what we’re talking about.”
The accountant Olmedilla, as comfortably esconced behind the desk as if he were in his own office, briefly raised his eyes from the papers to see Jeronimo Garaffa, still with his snood on, anxiously shaking his head. He was sitting on a chair, his hands tied to the chair back. It was not particularly warm in the room, but large beads of sweat were already running from his hair into his side-whiskers, and his face smelled of gum arabic, collyria, and barber’s lotions.
“I swear to you, sir . . .”
Olmedilla interrupted this protest with an abrupt wave of his hand and resumed his scrutiny of the documents before him. Above the mustache net, which gave his face the grotesque appearance of a Carnival mask, Garaffa’s eyes turned to rest on Diego Alatriste, who was listening in silence, leaning against the wall, sword sheathed, arms folded. He must have found Alatriste’s icy eyes more troubling even than Olmedilla’s abrupt manner, for he turned back to the accountant like someone forced to choose the lesser of two evils. After a long, oppressive silence, the accountant abandoned the documents he was studying, sat back in his chair, hands clasped, and, again twiddling his thumbs, stared at Garaffa. It seemed to Alatriste that he looked even more the part of the gray government- office mouse, except that now his expression was that of a mouse with very bad indigestion who keeps swallowing bile.
“Let’s get this quite straight now,” said Olmedilla very coldly and deliberately. “You know what I’m talking about and we know that you know. Everything else is a pure waste of time.”
Garaffa’s mouth was so dry that it took him three attempts before he could articulate a word.
“I swear by Christ Our Lord,” he said in a hoarse voice, his foreign accent made more marked by fear, “that I know nothing about this Flemish ship.”
“Christ has nothing to do with it!”
“This is an outrage. I demand that the law . . .”
Garaffa’s final attempt to give some substance to his protest ended in a sob. The mere sight of Diego Alatriste’s face told him that the law to which he was referring—and which he was doubtless accustomed to buying with a few lovely pieces of eight—only existed somewhere very far from that room and that there was no help to be had.
“Where will the
“I don’t know. Holy Mother of God, I swear I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The accountant scratched his nose indifferently. He gave Alatriste a significant look, and the captain thought to himself that Olmedilla really was the very image of Hapsburg officialdom, always so meticulous and implacable with the unfortunate. He could as easily have been a judge, a scribe, a constable, a lawyer, or any of the other insect life that lived and prospered under the protection of the monarchy. Guadalmedina and Quevedo had told him that Olmedilla was honest, and Alatriste believed them. As to his other qualities and attitudes, he was, Alatriste concluded, no different from the rabble of ruthless, avaricious magpies that populated the courts and offices of lawyers and procurators, and where—not even in one’s dreams—would one find more arrogant Lucifers, more thievish Cacuses, or more honor-greedy Tantaluses; no blasphemy uttered by an infidel could ever equal their decrees, which, unfailingly, favored the powerful and damned the humble. They were, in short, loathsome bloodsuckers who lacked all charity and decorum, but who brimmed with intemperance, acquisitiveness, and the fanatical zeal of the hypocrite, so much so that the very people who should be protecting the poor and the destitute were precisely the ones voraciously tearing them apart with their greedy talons. However, the man in their grasp today did not quite fit that image. He was neither poor nor destitute, but he was certainly wretched.
“I see,” concluded Olmedilla.
He was tidying the papers on the desk, his eyes still trained on Alatriste, as if signaling that he had nothing more to say. A few seconds passed, during which Olmedilla and the captain continued to observe each other in
