The Devils of Cardona (13 page)

Mendoza looked at the leather doublet, the white Gascon beret and the short, well-groomed beard and mustache. “I am. And you must be Jean Sánchez.”

The bailiff's haughty expression remained unchanged. “In the name of Doña Isabel María Barruela y Ibarra del Cardona y Castillo, I must inform you that you have no right to conduct an investigation anywhere in Cardona without the permission of the countess and authorization from the justiciar of Aragon.”

Mendoza was astonished at such insolence. He wondered whether Mercader and Calvo were right after all and whether the whip might in fact be required to restore some humility and obedience to these people.

“And I must inform you,” he said, holding up the royal baton, “that I am here on the authority of His Most Catholic Majesty Philip II.”

Sánchez looked unimpressed. “In Aragon we have our own courts and our own laws. You must leave Belamar now.”

“I have no intention of doing anything of the kind. I am here in the service of the Crown, and I will not leave this place until my investigation is concluded. Tell your mistress I shall come and visit her in order to discuss this matter. And never think a bailiff can tell the King of All the Spains where his officials have jurisdiction!”

Ventura and Necker were standing on the balcony now, with their swords and pistols prominently displayed. The bailiff glanced at them with studied indifference and then without a word abruptly turned his horse and left the square. His companions immediately followed him. Within a few minutes, the square was empty again, and Mendoza went back inside, where Gabriel and Inés were standing by the window, and told his page to finish taking the witness's statement.

The maid had nothing further to reveal, and Mendoza ordered Franquelo to take her back to her village. For the rest of the afternoon, the witnesses continued to come to the village hall, and their statements became so similar that Mendoza told Gabriel to stop writing them down in order not to use up paper and merely to record their names and the name of the offense. By the time he told Gabriel that they had done enough for the day, it was clear that there were dozens of people who might have wanted to see
the priest dead, but there was no information to suggest that any of them had killed him.

He had no doubt that some of them must have heard what was happening inside the church, but indifference was not the same as collusion. Gabriel packed away his writing materials, and Mendoza sat looking through his reports while Gabriel took the
escritorio
back to the dispensary. The boy had worked well. He had written quickly and neatly, with few mistakes and crossings-out, and accurately transcribed most of the salient facts from each deposition. Mendoza was still reading through them when Franquelo entered the room and asked if he had finished with him for the day.

“Not quite, Constable. I have a question. I assume that you yourself heard nothing on the morning of the murder?”

“No, sir. I was in bed with my wife, sir.”

“Asleep, I suppose. Like everyone else?”

“No, sir.” Franquelo smirked. “And my wife was not asleep either, sir.”

Mendoza's face showed no sign of amusement. “People say you were a friend of Panalles,” he said coldly. “Were you?”

“We played cards and dice sometimes, that's all.”

“And did you ever make any money from Father Panalles's dealings with the Moriscos?”

“Absolutely not, sir.” Franquelo looked scandalized at the thought. “As an
alguacil
, it's my duty to support the parish priest and enforce the laws of the Church when fines are not paid. But all fines are written down in the priest's book.”

“I'm sure they are,” Mendoza said. “But not everything is written in books, is it? Constable, let me make something clear to you. I don't care what little games you were playing before I came here. But if I find out that you are concealing anything of importance to this investigation, I will come down on you very hard indeed. Do you understand me?”

“Perfectly, Your Honor. But I must insist—”

“You may go now,” Mendoza said, and returned to his papers.

•   •   •

T
HE
NEXT
DAY
he and Gabriel continued to take depositions at the village hall while Franquelo took Ventura and Necker to some of Panalles's haunts in the surrounding villages. In the afternoon Mendoza decided to conduct some door-to-door inquiries of his own, accompanied by his page. Most of the men and many of the women were out in the fields or working at their trades, and the Moriscos he spoke to emanated the distrust of officialdom that he had often encountered among the Moriscos of Granada until he asked them about Father Panalles. All of them testified to the priest's bad character, and no one expressed any regret about his death.

The blacksmith spat on the ground at the mention of his name, and the village cooper agreed that whoever had killed him had done the village and the world a favor. An elderly Morisca silk weaver made the horned sign of the evil eye at the mention of him. Even the Old Christian shoemaker agreed that Father Panalles was not a good priest and would certainly have gone straight to hell. This opinion was not shared by all Old Christians. Mendoza spoke to the baker Romero outside his shop, where Morisca women were lining up to buy bread from his wife. He was a short, self-important man who reminded Mendoza of an overgrown rodent as he stood there in his flour-stained apron with his arms crossed.

The baker conceded that Father Panalles was not a perfect priest, but he insisted that he was not as bad as the Moriscos said. The main reason his parishioners hated him, Romero said, was not for his morals but because he knew what the Moriscos were doing in secret and tried to stop it.

“And what were they doing?” Mendoza asked.

“Worshipping the damned sect of Muhammad, Your Honor! Plotting against the king and the Holy Mother Church! Father Panalles's predecessor was less attentive to these matters. But Panalles was different, and the Moriscos wanted him removed from the moment he came here.”

“I understand that you also played a part in these efforts,” Mendoza said.

“That is true, Your Honor. I consider it my Christian duty to assist the Inquisition in the service of God and his Church.”

“I assume you were rewarded by the Holy Office for these services?”

The baker did not notice the sarcasm. “The rewards I receive are small compared with the services I have provided and the risks I have taken, living here among these heretics. Without the eyes of people like me, the Holy Office would be blind. Inquisitor Mercader knows how valuable I am.”

Mendoza had used informants himself, but he did not admire them as a breed, and Romero did not strike him as the most reliable witness. And despite his unlikely depiction of the priest as a martyr for the faith, Romero had not seen or heard anything on the day of the murder and had no idea who had killed him. In the late afternoon, Franquelo, Ventura and Necker returned to the village. They had visited a tavern, a brandy house and a brothel and spoken to men who had played cards and drunk with Panalles and whores who had slept with him. None of them had any idea why he'd been killed, and all of them had alibis for the day he was murdered.

The next day Mendoza asked Franquelo to take them to the place where the Quintana brothers had been found. They rode slowly back down the drover route the brothers had taken, past the neat and well-ordered fields of wheat, sorghum, hemp and barley, past orchards and vegetable gardens and rows of mulberry and almond trees, pausing to ask the gardeners and laborers if they had seen the brothers on the day they were murdered or whether they'd had any altercations with them. No one had seen or noticed anything unusual that day. After about an hour, they came back around the valley to the entrance to the ravine below the medieval wall, where they encountered an old man hoeing a well-tended vegetable garden with the help of his wife and children.

“Good day, señor,” Mendoza called.

“Good day, Your Mercy.” The old man doffed his tattered straw hat respectfully. His face and arms were burned the leathery brown that spoke of a man who had spent his life in the fields. Mendoza knew many Christians in Valladolid who regarded such work as beneath them, regardless of the fact that there would be no food on their tables if men did not work the land, but he found such men more admirable—and often more essential—than many of the lawyers and
letrados
who filled the king's administration.

“A fine garden you have here. Enough to feed two families.”

“A third of what we grow goes to the countess, sir. And there are also church tithes. And the payments to the new monastery. But still we manage, with God's grace.”

“Is a third the usual rate?”

“It is in Cardona, Your Grace. In Vallcarca they pay more. The countess is a good mistress, may God bless her.”

“This is the king's special justice, Alcalde Mendoza,” said Franquelo. “He's here to find out what happened to the Quintana brothers.”

“A bad business.” The old man sighed. “I saw those boys go up into the ravine. I recognized them from previous years. They used to come up here with their father when they were children. To die like that . . .”

“You didn't see anyone speak to them or follow them?” Mendoza asked.

The old man shook his head. “We don't have much to do with the
montañeses
. We're always glad to see the back of them, if you want to know the truth, and they don't like us either. The only people I saw go into the ravine were charcoal burners and woodcutters.”

“I've already spoken to them,” Franquelo said. “They didn't see anything either.”

“Does the Redeemer mean anything to you?” Mendoza asked the old man.

“Only our Lord Jesus Christ, Your Grace.”

Necker's eyes narrowed, but the old Morisco's expression was absolutely earnest and deadpan. Mendoza thanked him, and they rode down
into the ravine and followed the path as it climbed up into the forest. After about ten minutes, they smelled smoke and passed a small track leading off toward the clearing where the charcoal burners worked. An hour later they emerged onto the flat plain where the brothers had made their last camp. Franquelo showed them the remains of the campfire where the recovery party had found some of their possessions and cooking utensils, which had been returned to their father. The Quintanas' sheep had not been found, he said, but some of the
montañeses
were looking for them and had promised to take them back to the father as well.

Mendoza told them to dismount and spread out in a circle from the remains of the fire to examine the surrounding ground. It was not long before Necker gave a shout and drew their attention to a scattered pile of branches near the edge of the forest.

“It looks like one of them was attacked here, sir,” he said, holding up a small ax. “He must have been coming back with firewood.”

“Good work, Constable. Form a line and keep looking, gentlemen.”

Mendoza stood by the horses as the others advanced slowly across the field, looking down at the ground. It was a perfect spot for a camp, with a stream nearby and plenty of grass for the cattle, but it was also an excellent place for an ambush. After a few minutes, Daniel came back with a lone cloth sandal
,
and Franquelo said it probably belonged to the eldest brother, who had been found with one shoe missing.

“If this was the Redeemer, he must have had a lot of helpers to trap three men in a field this size,” said Ventura. “Especially if they weren't even standing in the same place. They must have come at them from different directions.”

Mendoza agreed, and a quick search of the nearby forest uncovered numerous broken twigs and branches and small fragments of white clothing. Afterward they rode on toward the shrine where the bodies had been found. As Franquelo had said, it was located half an hour away, where the well-beaten track that curved down to Belamar intersected with the road
from Huesca to the French frontier. The shrine was a typical roadside sanctuary, consisting of a rounded stone monument large enough to house a small statue of Christ, with little bundles of crushed flowers on the floor that had been left by passing travelers. The statue was now lying headless and facedown in front of it and was covered in holes where it been stabbed and chopped.

“May God curse them,” said Necker as Mendoza squatted and examined the cross on which Simón Quintana had been crucified. It had clearly been put together quickly for the purpose from spliced tree trunks, with a crossbar that had been roughly chopped in the middle to allow it to sit against a thicker supporting pole and be nailed on. Beneath it lay the bloodied ropes that had held the murdered shepherd fast. Franquelo showed them the position of the bodies and heads and explained how hard it had been to get the body down from the cross.

“Why would anyone go to such trouble to bring them up here if they'd already killed them?” Necker asked.

“So that they could be seen by as many people as possible,” replied Mendoza. Just then he noticed that Ventura was staring intently toward a rock face rising up out of a clump of trees on the other side of the road about three hundred yards away.

“What is it, cousin?”

“There's someone up there,” Ventura said.

“On that cliff?” Franquelo peered up dubiously at the bare rock. “There can't be. It must be a bird or a goat.”

“No. There's a cave, and there's someone in it.”

•   •   •

B
EFORE
ANYONE
COULD
SAY
ANYTHING
, Ventura was back on his horse and riding toward the cliff face. The others followed in his wake, and as they drew closer, Mendoza saw that the cliff was not quite as steep as it
seemed from a distance and that there was indeed a shallow cave about halfway up, where a narrow ledge, barely wide enough for a man to walk on, led to an opening in the rock face. By the time they reached the base of the cliff, Ventura was already scrambling up through the opening while the others waited down below.