'So you believe in pigs with wings too?'
Bautista ignored the sneer, striding instead to the table where he opened a writing box and took out an object which he tossed to Sharpe. 'What is that?'
'Bloody hell,' Harper murmured, for the object which Bautista had scornfully shied at Sharpe was the signed portrait of Napoleon that had been stolen in Valdivia.
'This was stolen from me,' Sharpe said, 'in Valdivia.'
'At the time,' Bautista jeered from the window, 'you denied anything more was missing. Were you ashamed of carrying a message from Napoleon to a mercenary rebel?'
'It isn't a message!' Sharpe said scornfully. 'It was a gift.'
'Oh, Mister Sharpe!' Bautista's voice was full of disappointment, as though Sharpe was not proving a worthy opponent. A man carries a gift to a rebel? How did you expect to deliver this gift if you were not to be in communication with the rebels? Tell me!'
Sharpe said nothing.
Bautista smiled pitifully. 'What a bad conspirator you are, Mister Sharpe. And such a bad liar, too. Turn the portrait over. Go on! Do it!' Bautista waited till Sharpe had dutifully turned the picture over, then pointed with his riding crop. 'That backing board comes off. Pull it.'
Sharpe saw that the stiffening board behind the printed etching had been levered out of the frame. The board had been replaced, but now he prized it out again and thus revealed a piece of paper which had been folded to fit the exact space behind the board.
'Open it! Go on!' Bautista was enjoying the moment.
At first glance the folded paper might have been taken for a thickening sheet which merely served to stop the glass from rattling in the metal frame, but when Sharpe unfolded the sheet he saw that it bore a coded message. 'Oh, Christ,' Sharpe said softly when he realized what it was. The-ink written code was a jumble of letters and numerals and meant nothing to Sharpe, but it was clearly a message from Bonaparte to the mysterious Lieutenant Colonel Charles, and any such message could only mean trouble.
'You are pretending you did not know the message was there?' Bautista challenged Sharpe.
'Of course I didn't.'
'Who wrote it? Napoleon? Or your English masters?'
The question revealed that Bautista's men had not succeeded in breaking the code. 'Napoleon,' Sharpe said, then tried to construct a feeble defense of the coded message. 'It's nothing important. Charles is an admirer of the Emperor's.'
'You expect me to believe that an unimportant letter would be written in code?' Bautista asked mockingly, then he calmly walked to Sharpe and held out his hand for the message. Sharpe paused a second, then surrendered the message and the framed portrait. Bautista glanced at the code. 'I believe it is a message from your English masters, which you inserted into the portrait. What does the message say?'
'I don't know.' Sharpe, conscious of all the eyes that watched him, straightened his back. 'How could I know? You probably concocted that message yourself.' Sharpe believed no such thing. The moment'he had seen the folded and coded message he had known that he had been duped into being Napoleon's messenger boy, but he dared not surrender the initiative wholly to Bautista.
But Sharpe's counteraccusation was a clumsy riposte and Bautista scoffed at it. 'If I planned to incriminate you by concocting a message, Mister Sharpe, I would hardly invent one that no one could read.' His audience laughed at the easy parry, and Bautista, like a matador who had just made an elegant pass at his prey, smiled, then walked to one of the high arched windows which, unglazed, offered a view across the harbor and out to the Pacific. Bautista turned in the window and beckoned to his prisoners. 'Come here! Both of you!'
Sharpe and Harper obediently walked to the window, which looked down onto a wide stone terrace that formed a gun battery. The guns were thirty-six-pound naval cannons that had been removed from their ship trolleys and placed on heavy garrison mounts. There were twelve of the massive guns, each capable of plunging a vicious fire down onto any ship that dared attack Puerto Crucero's harbor.
Yet Bautista had not invited Sharpe and Harper to see the guns, but rather the man who was shackled to a wooden post at the very edge of one of the embrasures. That man was Ferdinand, the Indian guide who had brought them through the misted mountains ahead of Dregara's pursuit. Now, stripped of his tattered uniform and dressed only in a short brown kilt, Ferdinand was manacled just seven or eight feet from the muzzle of one of the giant cannons. Dregara, who was clearly an intimate of Bautista's, stood holding a smoking linstock beside the loaded gun. Sharpe, understanding what he was about to see, turned in horror on Bautista. 'What in Christ's name are you doing?'
'This is an execution,' Bautista said in a tone of voice he might use to explain something to a small child, 'a means of imposing order on an imperfect world.'
'You can't do this!' Sharpe protested so strongly that one of the infantrymen stepped in front of him with a musket and bayonet.
'Of course I can do this!' Bautista mocked. 'I am the King's plenipotentiary. I can have men killed, I can have them imprisoned, I can even have them broken down to the ranks, like Private Morillo who is being sent to the mines to learn the virtues of loyalty.'
'What has this man done?' Sharpe gestured at Ferdinand.
'He has displeased me, Mister Sharpe,' Bautista said, then he beckoned the other men in the room forward so they could watch the execution from the other windows. Bautista's eyes were greedy. 'Are you watching?' Bautista asked Sharpe.
'You bastard,' Sharpe said.
'Why? This is a quick and painless death, though admittedly messy. You have to understand that the savages believe their souls will not reach paradise unless their bodies are intact for the funeral rites. They consequently have a morbid fear of dismemberment, which is why I devised this punishment as a means of discouraging rebellion among the Indian slaves. It works remarkably well.'
'But this man has done nothing! Morillo did nothing!'
'They displeased me,' Bautista hissed the words, then he looked down to the gun battery and held up a hand.
Ferdinand, his lips drawn back from his filed teeth, seemed to be praying. His eyes were closed. 'God bless you!' Sharpe shouted, though the Indian showed no signs of hearing.
'You think God cares about scum?' Bautista chuckled, then dropped his hand.
Dregara reached forward and the linstock touched the firing hole. The sound of the cannon was tremendous; loud enough to rattle the iron chandelier and hurt the eardrums of the men crowded at the windows. Harper crossed himself. Bautista licked his lips, and Ferdinand died in a maelstrom of smoke, fire and blood. Sharpe glimpsed the Indian's shattered trunk whirling blood as it was blasted away from the parapet, then the smoke blew apart to reveal a splintered stake, a pair of bloody legs, and lumps and spatters of blood and flesh smeared across the cannon's embrasure. The rest of Ferdinand's body had been scattered into the outer harbor where screaming gulls, excited by this sudden largesse, dived and tore and fought for shreds of his flesh. Far out to sea, beyond the rocky spit of land, the cannon-ball crashed into the swell with a sudden white plume, while in the nearer waters, scraps of flesh and splinters of bone and drops of blood rained down to the frenzied gulls. Men had rushed to the rail of the American brigantine, fearful of what the gunfire meant, and now they stared in puzzlement at the blood-flecked water. Bautista sighed with pleasure, then turned away as the white-faced gun crew heaved the dead man's legs over the parapet.
There was a stunned silence in the hall. The stench of powder smoke and fresh blood was keen in the air as Bautista, half smiling, turned to his audience. 'Mister Blair?'
'Your Excellency?' George Blair ducked an eager and frightened pace forward.
'You have heard my questions to Mister Sharpe today?'
'Indeed, Your Excellency.'
'Do you confirm that I have treated the prisoners fairly? And with consideration?'
Blair smirked and nodded. 'Indeed, Your Excellency.'
Bautista went to the table and held up the signed portrait of Napoleon and the folded message. 'You heard the prisoner's assertion that Napoleon wrote this message?'
'I did, Your Excellency, indeed I did.'
