"What kind of fool do you take me for?" Bautista stepped even closer to Sharpe, the riding crop twitching in his hand. His aides, not daring to move, stood frozen behind the table, while the audience watched wide-eyed. "I know why you came here," Bautista said softly.
"Tell me."
"To communicate with the rebels, of course. Who else was the money for? All the world knows that the English want to see Spain defeated here."
Sharpe sighed. "Why would I bring money to the rebels in a Royal ship?"
"Why indeed? So no one would suspect your intentions?" Bautista was enjoying tearing Sharpe's protests to shreds. "Who sent you, Sharpe? Your English merchant friends who think they can make more profit out of Chile if it's ruled by a rebel government?"
"The Countess of Mouromorto sent me," Sharpe insisted.
"She's English, is she not?" Bautista responded swiftly. "Do you find it noble to fight for trade, Sharpe? For cargoes of hide and for barrels of tallow? For the profits of men like Mister Blair?" He threw a scornful hand toward the Consul who, seemingly pleased at being noticed, bobbed his head in acknowledgment.
"I fought alongside Don Bias," Sharpe said, "and I fight for the same things he wanted."
"Oh, do tell me! Please!" Bautista urged in a caustic voice.
"He hated corruption," Sharpe said.
"Don't we all?" Bautista said with wonderfully feigned innocence.
"Don Bias believed men could live in freedom under fair government." It was an inadequate statement of Vivar's creed, but the best Sharpe could manage.
"You mean Vivar fought for liberty!" Bautista was delighted with Sharpe's answer. "Any fool can claim liberty as his cause. Look!" Bautista pointed at the hugely flagged American brigan-tine in the outer harbor. "The Captain of that ship is waiting for whalers to rendezvous with him so he can take home their sperm oil and whalebone. He comes every year, and every year he brings copies of his country's declaration of independence, and he hands them out as though they're the word of God! He tells the mestizos and the criollos that they must fight for their liberty! Then, when he's got his cargo, he sails home and who do you think empties that cargo in his precious land of liberty? Slaves do! Slaves! So much for his vaunted liberty!" Bautista paused to let a rustle of agreement sound in his audience. "Of course Vivar believed in liberty!" Bautista interrupted the murmuring. "Vivar believed in every impracticality! He wanted God to rule the world! He believed in truth and love and pigs with wings." The audience laughed delightedly. Captain Marquinez and one or two others even clapped at their Captain-General's wit, while Bautista, delighted with himself, smiled at Sharpe. "And you share Vivar's beliefs, Mister Sharpe?"
"I'm a soldier," Sharpe said stubbornly, as though that excused him from holding beliefs.
"A plain, bluff man, eh? Then so am I, so I will tell you very plainly that I believe you are telling lies. I believe you came to Chile to bring money and a message to the rebels."
"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."