The Devils of Cardona (25 page)

“This judge of yours is a capable man, is he not?” he said finally.

“He comes highly recommended.”

“Well, we agreed to your suggestion to carry out an investigation in Cardona in order to make ourselves acquainted with all the facts. That objective has not yet been achieved, and I think it best if we wait for his reports, as well as the Inquisition's. For now you must impress upon this alcalde the urgent need for this matter to be resolved quickly. Should the situation continue to deteriorate, then we may reconsider our options. But on no account will we ourselves undertake any precipitous action.”

“As you wish, Majesty.”

The king looked down at his desk to signify that the audience was over, and Villareal bowed once more and left the room to make way for the next visitor.

•   •   •

“S
O
, D
OCTOR
, am I going to die?”

Ventura sat up shirtless on the priest's bed as Segura tightened the bandage around his shoulder while Mendoza and Gabriel watched from the other side of the room.

“Not this time, Sergeant,” Segura said, “but you've lost a lot of blood. And your wound could become infected despite the poultice. That donkey did you a great favor.”

“I thought a little bleeding was supposed to be good for you. And believe me, Doctor, I've lost more blood than this. Isn't that true, Bernardo?”

Mendoza nodded. He did not speak to Segura, and the doctor did not look at him as Juana gathered up Ventura's bloodstained shirt and the cloths and the bowl of water that he had used to clean the wound.

“Well, cousin,” he said when they had left the room, “first you come back on a stolen horse, then you come with a stolen donkey. What animal will you bring back next?”

Ventura laughed weakly. “Those inbreds nearly took my life. The least they could do was get me to a doctor.”

“I can send Necker to arrest them.”

“Don't bother. You couldn't make things much worse for them than they already are. And Luis de Ventura is not going to have it said that he was nearly killed by two damned goatherds. Besides, you have more important things to worry about.”

In his usual deadpan manner, Ventura described his fight in the forest, his entry into the camp and his subsequent escape. Gabriel looked awestruck with admiration, but Mendoza shook his head in exasperation.

“Didn't I tell you not to take any unnecessary risks?” he said wearily.

“They were necessary!” Ventura indignantly insisted. “If I hadn't gone to the camp, you wouldn't have known what kind of people you're dealing with. And it isn't rebels or Moriscos. Those were Old Christians up there. Shepherds and bandits looking for Morisco blood.”

Mendoza listened with growing incredulity and amazement as Ventura described the Catalan's call to exterminate the Moriscos, and his cousin looked equally astonished when Mendoza told him about the massacre at the del Río farm.

“I shit on my hands!” Ventura exclaimed. “
That's
where those villains were headed. So one day this Catalan is preaching holy war against Christians and the next he's sending his army of shepherds to wage holy war on the Moriscos? It makes no sense.”

“It doesn't,” Mendoza agreed. “But there is nothing holy about any of this. And whether he is Morisco or Christian, this Catalan is not avenging anybody. This Redeemer has other purposes.”

“There was a man up there in the camp,” Ventura said. “He seemed to be watching when the Catalan was speaking. I didn't get a chance to see his face. Maybe we should get Calvo to call out the militia and go up into the mountains?”

Mendoza shook his head. “Even if we sent an army up there, they'd be gone before we reached the camp. These bandits are only part of the problem.”

He told his cousin what he'd seen in Las Palomas the previous night and about his conversation with the countess that morning. Gabriel had not heard this before and looked increasingly dismayed when he told them what he expected of Segura.

“Sir, you're not going to report Dr. Segura to the Inquisition, are you?” he asked anxiously.

Mendoza knew that his page's concern was not unconnected to the mayor's daughter. “That depends on Segura,” he replied.

“What about Franquelo?” Ventura asked. “Isn't it time to bring him in?”

“He hasn't been in the village all day. Necker will arrest him when he returns. Come, Gabriel, we must eat and allow my cousin some rest.” Mendoza paused in the doorway. “I'm glad you made it back alive, Luis,” he said. “Next time please obey my orders. You won't always be so lucky.”

Ventura gave a mock salute with his unbandaged arm. They shut the door behind them and returned to the village hall, where they found Segura waiting outside with the resigned and gloomy expression of a condemned man.

“Go back to the dispensary, boy,” Mendoza said grimly.

Gabriel smiled reassuringly at Segura, but the mayor's expression did not change as Mendoza ushered him into his office and sat down behind his desk.

“The countess said you wanted to see me,” Segura said, sitting down in front of him.

“I did,” Mendoza said, “but first I have a question for you. What do you think Inquisitor Mercader would do if he knew that you were burying your dead as Moors while pretending to bury them as Christians? I tell you what I think he would do,” he went on without waiting for an answer. “I think that he or Commissioner Herrero would go to Las Palomas and dig those bodies up. And then they would take you and your sons to the Aljafería. And then your sons would denounce you, and you would denounce the countess and all the heretics in Belamar. Am I not correct?”

Segura said nothing.

“So let me tell you something else. I don't care how you bury your dead or whether you worship Jesus or Muhammad, but you better have something to tell me, or so help me God I will tell Mercader what I know.”

Segura seemed to be weighing his options as Mendoza's fierce, dark eyes bored into him. Mendoza felt a twinge of remorse at the sight of his white hair and beard and the thought of what had already happened to his family, but he repressed it, because the law was the law and justice was not always compatible with kindness.

Finally Segura let out a sigh that expressed both surrender and resignation.

“I can tell you where you can find Vicente Péris,” he said.

•   •   •

P
EPE
F
RANQUELO
was afraid of many things. He was afraid of the murdered men and women whom he now saw in his dreams almost every night. He was afraid of the magistrate Mendoza. He was afraid of being tortured. But most of all he was afraid of the Catalan and Vallcarca. There had been a time, not very long ago, when there'd been no reason to be afraid of anything, when he, Panalles and Romero had milked the Moriscos without fuss, when all he had to do was collect his percentages from the fines or the horses and the payments from La Moraga's brothel.

These were little ways of making small amounts of money, not enough to make a man rich but enough to supplement the salary of an
alguacil
that even a single man would struggle to live on, let alone a man with a wife and children. But now that life was gone forever, and the fear and dread had become a permanent part of him, lodged in his stomach like bad meat, dampening his clothes and twisting his guts till he was obliged to head for the privy or into the bushes to relieve himself.

And it was all his own fault, because the Catalan had promised him more money than a man such as Franquelo had any right to expect, and he had reached out like a fool and taken it, without noticing that he was sinking deeper and deeper into shit. It had been fine in the beginning, when all they wanted was information about travelers on the roads who were worth robbing. Whenever they profited from the information he gave them, he got paid something for it, and if people sometimes were killed in the course of these robberies, it was usually because they had resisted and was nothing to do with him.

But now people were dying all around him, and he did not even know why they were being killed, and he knew that Mendoza suspected him.
That was why he had stayed away from the del Ríos' funeral, because he could not stand to think of those black eyes staring at him, and because he could not stand to attend the funeral of eleven people whose deaths he had helped to bring about. Instead he spent the afternoon at La Moraga's place, drinking, whoring and playing
naipe
and dice, trying to pretend that everything was the way it used to be.

He sat La Moraga's daughters on his lap and drank wine, then brandy, then more wine, and brought drinks for anyone who came by. He stayed there till the evening, and then he ate some supper and drank some more and rolled on the little bed with La Moraga's elder daughter, the one they called La Sirena—the Mermaid. For a few seconds, he really did forget everything else except the young woman who lay dutifully beneath him as he spent himself inside her, but as soon as it was over, the fear and guilt returned and the images of charred bodies passed through his mind once again in a dismal procession.

He went downstairs and tried to drink it away, until his companions drifted off and finally La Moraga told him that he should leave, too. Now the church bell pealed ten times before it stopped as he lurched out into the street and untethered his horse. The surrounding houses were dark and silent, because the people of San Antonio were for the most part simple, God-fearing folk who went to bed early so that they could rise early to work in the fields the next day. He hoisted himself up onto the saddle, nearly falling over the other side before he was able to sit himself upright and steer the horse out along the road to Belamar.

He had made this journey so many times that the horse could almost do it without him, and no matter how dark it was or how much he'd had to drink, he always managed to remain in the saddle and never got lost. He heard an owl hoot as he left the last house behind him, and then he saw the horseman in the middle of the road in front of him, his face obscured by the wide-brimmed hat and the upturned cloak collar.

“Hello, Pepe,” he said. “We've been looking for you.”

Franquelo heard the snort of a horse behind him and knew without turning around that his route back was blocked.

“I've been busy with Alcalde Mendoza,” he said, “I couldn't get away.”

“But still you managed to find your way to the whorehouse. And you didn't even go to your friend's funeral.”

Franquelo tried to swallow back his fear as the Catalan came closer.

“The boss was offended, Pepe. Didn't we take care of your del Río problem for you?”

“You didn't have to kill his whole family!”

“You know we don't like to leave things to chance. But the jefe was worried about you. He thought you might be avoiding us.”

Franquelo was almost sober now and conscious of the sweat trickling down his neck. Ahead of him, just behind the Catalan, he saw the outline of the road that could take him to Belamar, to his sleeping wife and children, and he felt an overwhelming desire to be in a warm, secure place with stone walls around him, away from these savage creatures whose motives he had never understood.

“Ventura discovered our camp,” the Catalan went on. “He got away, and now we've had to move.”

“I didn't know anything about that. I haven't been back to Belamar today.”

“Well, you can't go back there now.”

“Why not?” Franquelo replied in a high-pitched, almost girlish voice.

“Because Mendoza will want to talk to you about del Río. And then he'll want to talk to you about other things. And the boss is worried that he might be able to make you say things you don't want to say.”

“Not a chance. Not even if he burned me with hot irons.”

The Catalan chuckled. “You're a brave man, Pepe. I don't know if I could be that strong.”

“So let me join you. I'll come to the mountains.”

“The boss has decided on a different solution.”

“Hombre, please. I've got children.”

“Sorry, Pepe, but these are difficult times.”

Franquelo took one last despairing look at the open road behind the Catalan and thought once more of his wife and children before the noose dropped around his neck and unseen hands pulled it taut, dragging the
alguacil
backward from his horse and down toward the darkness and the hard, cold ground.

hat night Mendoza lay awake for a long time thinking about the wood-carver Vicente Péris. The information that Segura had given him was difficult to reconcile with the pious, serious man described by the countess and the bailiff, who lovingly carved angels in the choir gallery and questioned Father García about the Trinity and the Resurrection. Segura described a Morisco who had been a Moor and a Christian at various times in his life, without ever fully belonging to either religion, and had only recently come to embrace the faith of his ancestors with a fervor that was almost entirely due to Panalles and the Inquisition. Before his punishment, Segura said, Péris had been only sporadically devout and had sometimes confided in the mayor of his fear that he would not be saved in either faith. He returned from the galleys a very different person. He no longer came to the mayor for spiritual advice. He had
begun to associate with some of the more hotheaded elements from Belamar and the surrounding villages, who liked to talk about the old days that they had never known, long before the Catholic monarchs had conquered Granada, when the Moors had ruled the whole of Spain.

Some of these malcontents had dreamed of bringing those days back and begun to talk of rebellion, Segura said, and Péris had approached him to try to get his support. Segura insisted that he had refused. He told Péris that it was still possible to be a Moor even in a Christian state and that if the Moriscos rebelled, they would be killed or banished like the Moriscos of Granada. Péris said he was a traitor and that people like him had polluted the faith of their fathers by submitting to the Christians. Despite these conversations, Segura doubted whether such discussions would have had any practical consequences, and he remained convinced that neither Péris nor his companions were capable of rape, murder or sedition. Yet the mayor also said that Péris had often traveled to Béarn to work and that he had fled there from Vallcarca.

The more Mendoza pondered what Segura had told him, the more it seemed to him that the wood-carver was not just a person eminently worthy of suspicion but that he was also crucial to the investigation. Were Péris and his companions members of the Catalan's band? If so, why had they gone to Vallcarca by themselves to carry out such an attack? And why was Vallcarca so convinced that Péris was the Redeemer when Ventura had made it clear that he could not be? By the time Mendoza fell asleep, he still had not decided how he might act on the information the mayor had given him, but he felt pleased that the investigation had at least produced another potential line of inquiry. In the morning he came downstairs to find his page sitting in the alcove in front of the unlit fire, reading
The
Abencerraje
.

“Are you enjoying that?” he asked.

“Well, it is a love story,” Gabriel said disdainfully.

“And a very beautiful one. But it's also a tale of honor and friendship. I
read it when I was a student, shortly before I went to Granada to fight the Moors.”

“And was the war like the book?”

“You mean did the Moors and Christians become friends and respect one another even as they fought one another? Would a Christian knight release his Moorish captive to allow him to marry his beloved princess on condition that he return to prison? No, boy, it wasn't like that. There was no respect and very little honor. The book is much prettier. Books always are.”

Gabriel nodded. “Sir, the Moriscos you fought in Granada, were they like the Moriscos here?”

“No. They were more like Moors. Some of them anyway. Many of them spoke Arabic and wrote in it, too. They used to have public baths, and many of the women covered their faces with the white head scarf. During the rebellion they went back to being Moors. They prayed and worshipped like Moors.”

“Magda says they were like devils.”

“Some of them certainly behaved like devils,” he said. “Some terrible things were done in the early days of the rebellion. The Moriscos murdered priests and nuns. But they were provoked. Had they been treated with justice, they would not have rebelled—and I doubt they would have behaved so cruelly.”

Gabriel was listening with intense interest, and Mendoza could not help thinking that the boy's curiosity was not entirely concerned with the Moriscos themselves. Until now he had never shown any interest in Granada or in the fact that he came from there, not even when they'd returned to visit his mother five years earlier. The conversation made Mendoza feel uncomfortable and he felt a sense of relief at the sound of Necker and Martín returning from patrol. He looked up hopefully as they entered the room, but Necker said that Franquelo still had not come home and that his wife was worried about him. Mendoza was concerned, too. He was looking
forward to making his first arrest, and he now felt grimly certain that Franquelo would not be seen alive again.

These suspicions were confirmed a few hours later, when the
alguacil
from San Antonio came riding into town with a mule bearing Franquelo's body. The corpse had been found lying in the main street by peasants leaving for work that morning, the
alguacil
said, before adding almost as an afterthought that the dead man's heart had been cut out.

“And where is the heart?” Mendoza asked.

“We haven't found it, Your Honor. But San Antonio is an Old Christian village, and some of the people are saying that Pepe was killed by Moriscos in revenge for the del Río family. Now they're talking about taking revenge themselves.”

“What was Constable Franquelo doing in San Antonio?”

The
alguacil
looked embarrassed and reticent. “I believe he was at La Moraga's tavern, sir.”

“A tavern, you say?”

“A brothel, sir. Pepe often went there.”

“Thank you, Constable. And please make it known in your village that this crime was not carried out by Moriscos and that I will not tolerate acts of vengeance.”

“Yes, sir.”

The
alguacil
took the body to the mortuary shed and went to inform Franquelo's wife, and Mendoza ordered Necker to return with him to San Antonio afterward to make his own inquiries. The day was not beginning well, and already the brief optimism that Mendoza had felt the previous evening was beginning to recede.

Shortly after midday two members of the Cardona militia came to Belamar to report that a group of Dutch and German pilgrims had found what appeared to be a human heart nailed to a roadside cross with a wooden carving of Jesus on the road to France. Mendoza, together with Martín and the two militiamen, went out to visit the scene. The pilgrims had gone, but
they found two members of the militia guarding the cross, where the organ was still obscenely nailed to Christ's chest.

“May God curse these devils and their damned Redeemer,” Martín said, and made the sign of the cross. Mendoza ordered the militiamen to retrieve the heart. He watched as one of them reached up from his horse and pulled the heart down, using a sack to cover his hands.

Mendoza had no doubt that it was Franquelo's. He felt sorry for the constable, and also for his wife and children, and he wondered if he should have arrested him sooner, because he knew that he could have made him crack, if only to save his own skin. It had seemed a logical strategy to let him sweat and see what he might do or reveal, but in the end the
alguacil
had revealed nothing at all, and whatever he had been involved in, this latest outrage had effectively closed the last remaining door that the investigation had to offer in Belamar itself.

There seemed little doubt now that the Catalan was responsible for the murder of the smuggler del Río and his family. The gruesome mutilations of Franquelo and the Quintana brothers suggested that he had probably carried out those murders as well. And it was more than likely that the mace that had killed the tailor had cracked open Panalles's skull. But a Morisco avenger could not simultaneously avenge Old Christians, too. The two things canceled each other out. There was now only one conclusion that could be drawn from these events:
that the Catalan was not the Redeemer but a man pretending to be one.

As he rode back to Belamar with Martín and the militiamen, Mendoza pondered everything he knew and thought he knew about the investigation. From the moment he was sent to Cardona, everything had pointed toward religion as a motivation for the unfolding mayhem in the demesne. He'd been sent to Aragon to prevent another Granada, and had Ventura not found his way to the Catalan, Mendoza still would have believed that was what he was trying to do.

Now, as he looked over at the bloodied sack dangling from the
militiaman's saddlebag, it seemed to him that Franquelo's heart was little more than a prop in a Fanini troupe
comedia
, along with the letter to the Inquisition that Villareal had shown him, the sacrilegious mutilations of the Quintana brothers, the Arabic on the church wall in Belamar, the mutilations of Christian statues and the cross in the yard at the del Río farm. Unless the Catalan was a maniac who took pleasure in such things for their own sake, there had to be some explanation as to why he had gone to these lengths and adopted these pretenses, and there were too many people in this affair who seemed to know one another for Mendoza to believe that the Catalan was acting on his own. But with Franquelo dead, another line of inquiry had closed, and there was no one who could tell him what this so-called Redeemer was doing except the Catalan and his army, and there was no way of catching him without an army of Mendoza's own.

By the time he returned to the village, there no longer seemed any other option beyond the plan that he had considered the previous night. He went first to Segura's house to speak to the mayor and then continued on to the rectory. The curtains were drawn, and he and Gabriel heard the faint sound of female giggling as he knocked loudly on the door. A moment later a disheveled Beatriz appeared in the bedroom doorway and hurried past them, carrying a tray with an empty bowl and cup, while Ventura appeared behind her.

“I'm glad to see that you're getting better, cousin,” Mendoza said.

“She is an angel of mercy.” Ventura sighed. “I hear that our
alguacil
can no longer be arrested.”

“No, he can't.”

Mendoza told him about the heart, and Ventura pulled a face and shook his head. “These people never seem to want to just kill someone, do they?” he said wonderingly. “They always have to make a show of it.”

“They do,” Mendoza said. “And I think I might have thought of a way to find out why. You don't play chess, do you, cousin? You know what my favorite piece is? The knight. It's the only piece that doesn't move in a
straight line, the only one that can step over others. It threatens a square by coming at it from the side.”

“Bernardo, please. I'm not good at riddles.”

“Vicente Péris isn't in Aragon. He's in France. He's gone to Béarn to seek sanctuary with his Huguenot friends. Segura told me. He got it from Péris's wife. I've checked it with her.”

“So?”

“So I'm going to find him.”

Ventura stared at him. “You're going to France?”

Mendoza nodded and told him about his conversation with Segura the previous day.

“All this makes Segura appear rather virtuous, doesn't it?” Ventura asked. “How do you know he's telling the truth?”

“He has no reason to lie. He's more or less admitted that he himself is an
alfaquí
. With the evidence I have, I could denounce him to the Inquisition and he would go straight to the fire.”

“But you're not going to.”

“Not if his information is correct.”

“And you're prepared to go all the way to France to find this out?'”

“We have no choice. You're in no state to go anywhere, or I would have sent you. With Franquelo dead we're blocked here. But Péris knows things. He went to Vallcarca for a reason—a reason that turned out to be different from what he thought—because someone persuaded him to go there. I need to know who that person was. If we find that out, we'll find the key to unlock this Redeemer business. He's my knight, and I intend to play him.”