The inn smelled of sour wine, damp sawdust, and grime. The Fencer’s Arms (which bore its owner’s nickname) was one of the most disreputable drinking dens in Madrid. The landlord had been an out-and-out knave and a cheat—he was also said to have been a thief, notorious for his skill as a picklock—until old age caught up with him. Worn down by a lifetime of poverty and hardship, he had opened the inn and turned it into a receiving house for stolen goods—hence his nickname, the Fencer—sharing any profit he made with the thieves. The inn was a large, dark house built around a courtyard and surrounded by other crumbling edifices; its many doors led to twenty or so sordid bedrooms and to a grimy, smoke-stained dining room where one could eat and drink very cheaply. It was, in short, the perfect place for pilferers and ruffians in search of a little privacy. In their attempts to scrape a living, the criminal world came and went at all hours, swathed in cloaks, swords clanking, or laden down with suspicious bundles. The place was filled with roughs and purloiners and captains of crime, with nimble-fingered pickpockets and ladies of the night, with every kind of no-good bent on dishonoring the Castiles, Old and New, and who all flocked there as happily as rooks to a wheatfield or scribes to a lawsuit. The powers that be were nowhere to be seen, partly so as not to stir up trouble and partly because the Fencer—a wily man who knew his trade—was always generous when it came to greasing the palms of constables and buying the favor of the courts. Furthermore, he had a son-in-law serving in the house of the Marquis of Carpio, which meant that seeking refuge in the Fencer’s Arms was tantamount to taking sanctuary in a church. The other denizens, as well as being the cream of the criminal classes, were also blind, deaf, and dumb. No one there had a name or a surname, no one looked at anyone else, and even saying “Good afternoon” could be a reason for someone to slit your throat.
I found Bartolo Cagafuego sitting next to the fire in the kitchen, where the coals beneath the cooking pots were filling half the room with smoke. He was drowning his sorrows with sips from a mug of wine and some quiet talk with a comrade; he was, at the same time, keeping a watchful eye on his doxy, who, with her half-cloak draped over her shoulders, was agreeing on terms with a client. Cagafuego showed no sign of recognizing me when I went over to join him and to dry my wet clothes, which immediately began to steam in the heat. He continued his conversation, the subject of which was a recent encounter with a certain constable. This, he was explaining, had been resolved not with blood or shackles, but with money.
“Anyway,” Cagafuego was saying in his potreño accent, “I goes over to the chief rozzer, gets out my purse, takes out two nice gold ducats of eleven reales each, and I says to the man, winkin’ like, I says: ‘I swear on these twenty-two commandments that the man you’re lookin’ for ain’t me.’ ”
“And who was he, this rozzer?” asked the other man.
“One-eyed Berruguete.”
“A decent son of a bitch, he is. And accommodatin’ too.”
“You’re tellin’ me, my friend. Anyway, he pocketed the cash and that was that.”
“And the pigeon?”
“Oh, he was tearin’ his hair out, sayin’ as how it was me what stole his purse and that I had it on me still. But Berruguete, good as his word, just turned a deaf ear to him. That were a year ago now.”
They continued for a while in quiet and distinctly un-Góngoresque fashion. Then, after a while, Bartolo Cagafuego glanced across at me, put down his mug, stood up very casually, and stretched and yawned extravagantly, thus displaying the inside of his mouth with its half-dozen missing teeth. Then in buffcoat and breeches, his sword sheathed, he swaggered over to the door with all his usual bluff and bravado. I went to join him in the gallery of the courtyard, where our voices were muffled by the sound of the rain.
“No one at your heels, was there?” he asked.
“No one.”
“You sure?”
“As sure as there’s a God.”
He nodded approvingly, scratching his bushy eyebrows, which met in the middle on his scarred face. Then, without a word, he set off down the gallery, and I followed. We hadn’t seen each other since he’d had his sentence as a galley slave lifted after the attack on the Niklaasbergen and was granted a pardon, courtesy of Captain Alatriste. Cagafuego had pocketed a tidy portion of that Indies gold, which allowed him to return to Madrid and continue in his chosen criminal career as ruffian or pimp or protector of prostitutes. For all his solid build and fierce appearance, and although he had acquitted himself well in Barra de Sanlúcar and slit many a throat, exposing his own throat to danger wasn’t really his line. The fierce air he adopted was more for show than anything else, ideal for striking fear into the hearts of the unwary and for earning a living from women of the street, but not when it came to confronting any real toughs. So profound was his ignorance that only two or three of the five Spanish vowels had reached his notice, yet despite this—or perhaps precisely because of it—he now had a woman posted in Calle de la Comadre and had also come to an arrangement with the owner of a bawdy house, where he kept order by dint of a great deal of swearing and cursing. In fact, he was doing very well. With a record like his, though, it seemed to me even more remarkable that such a tavern-bound tough should risk his neck to help Captain Alatriste, for he had nothing to gain and a great deal to lose if anyone went bleating to the law. However, since their first meeting, years before in a Madrid dungeon, Bartolo Cagafuego had shown a strangely steadfast loyalty toward my master, the same loyalty I had observed often amongst people who had dealings with the captain, be they army comrades, people of quality, or heartless delinquents, or even, occasionally, enemies. Every now and then, certain rare men emerge who stand out from their contemporaries, not perhaps because they are different exactly, but because, in a way, they encapsulate, justify, and immortalize the age in which they live; and those who know such men realize or sense this, and take them as arbiters of how to behave. Diego Alatriste may well have been one of those unusual individuals, but even if he wasn’t, I would say that anyone who fought at his side or shared his silences or met with a look of approval in his green eyes, felt bound to him forever by strong ties. It was as if gaining his respect made you respect yourself more.
“There’s nothing to be done,” I said. “You’ll just have to wait until the air clears.”
The captain had listened intently, not saying a word. We were sitting next to a rickety table spattered with candle wax and on which stood a bowl containing some leftover tripe, a jug of wine, and a crust of stale bread. Bartolo Cagafuego was standing a little apart, arms folded. We could hear the rain on the roof.
“When is Quevedo going to see the count-duke?”
“He doesn’t know yet,” I replied. “But The Sword and the Dagger is going to be performed in a few days’ time at El Escorial, and don Francisco has promised to take me with him.”