The Seville Communion by Arturo Pérez-Reverte Page B

turned to look at Quart, there was a malevolent gleam in her eyes. "Haven't you? Well, you certainly will."
    Quart heard her laugh as she switched off the light. The altarpiece was once again in shadow.
    "What's really going on here?" he asked.
    "In Seville?"
    "In this church."
    She took a few moments to answer. "It's up to you to decide," she said at last. "That's why you were sent."
    "But you work here. You must have some ideas on the subject."
    "Of course I have, but I'm keeping them to myself. All I know is that more people would like to have this church pulled down than to keep it standing."
    "Why?"
    "That I don't know." Her friendliness disappeared. Now it was her turn to become closed off and distant. "Maybe because a square metre of land in this part of Seville is worth a fortune ..." She shook her head as if to rid it of unpleasant thoughts. "You'll find plenty of people to tell you all about it."
    "You said you had some ideas."
    "I did?" Her smile looked forced. "Maybe. Anyway, it's none of my business. My job is to save as much as I can of the building as long as there's money for the work. Which there isn't."
    "So why are you staying on alone?"
    "I'm putting in some overtime. Anyway, since I began working on the church, I haven't found anything else to do, so I have a lot of spare time."
    "A lot of spare time," repeated Quart.
    "That's right." She sounded bitter again. "And I have nowhere eke to go."
    Intrigued, he was about to ask more when the sound of footsteps made him turn. A small, motionless figure dressed in black stood in the doorway. It cast its compact shadow on the flagstones.
    Gris Marsala, who had also turned, smiled strangely at Quart. "It's time for you to meet the parish priest, don't you think? Father Priamo Ferro."
    As soon as Celestino Peregil left the Casa Cuesta Bar, Don Ibrahim began discreetly counting the banknotes that Pencho Gavira's assistant had left them to cover initial expenses.
    "A hundred thousand," he said when he'd finished.
    El Potro del Mantelete and La Nina Punales nodded in silence. Don Ibrahim made three bundles of thirty-three thousand, put one bundle in the inside pocket of his jacket, and passed the others to his companions. He placed the remaining thousand-peseta note on the table.
    "What do you think?" he asked.
    Frowning, El Potro del Mantelete smoothed the banknote and peered at the figure of Hernan Cortes on the front. "Looks real to me," he ventured.
    "I mean the job, not the note."
    El Potro stared gloomily at the banknote and La Nina Punales shrugged.
    "It's money," she said, as if that summed it all up. "But the job looks dodgy, with all those priests."
    Don Ibrahim waved his hand dismissively, dropping ash on his trousers again. "We will proceed with the utmost tact," he said, leaning with effort over his paunch to brush off the ash.
    La Nina Punales said othu and El Potro nodded, still staring at the banknote. El Potro must have been about forty-five, and every one of his years showed in his face. In his younger days, between stints in the
    Spanish Legion, he'd been a luckless apprentice bullfighter. It had left him with the dust of failure in his eyes and throat, and a scar from a bull's horn under his right ear. And all he got from a brief, obscure career as a contender for the bantamweight championship of Andalusia was a broken nose, lumpy scarred eyebrows and a certain slowness in combining thought, speech and action. When he was conning tourists in the streets, he was very good at playing the innocent. His vacant stare was utterly convincing.
    "Very important to be tactful," he said slowly.
    He went on frowning, as he did whenever he was thinking. This was what he'd been doing - frowning and pondering a question deeply -when he came home one day to find his brother, who was in a wheelchair, with his trousers down to his knees and his wife - El Potro's wife - sitting on top of him panting eloquently. Unhurriedly and without raising his voice, nodding as his