Arturo Perez-Reverte: The Seville Communion

As for the irregularities for which the present vice-chairman is directly responsible, the investigation has uncovered a general lack of financial prudence. Considerable sums have been paid to professionals and private individuals without due documentary proof. These include cases of payments to public figures and institutions that can only be described as bribery. The investigation has also discovered…

He looked at Macarena, then at the duchess. This was a shot straight at the ex-husband's fleet. He remembered the banker the night before on the quay, and the brief sympathy established between them as they joined forces to free the old priest. "What are you intending to do with this?" he asked.

Macarena shrugged. It was Cruz Bruner who answered. "I just want to even things out a little. People have done so much for the church. You yourself gained us another week by conducting Mass yesterday. I suppose that's why Macarena thought you deserved to come here tonight."

"He won't tell anyone," said Macarena.

"Good," the duchess said. She studied her daughter, frowning, then turned again to Quart. "Although I feel the same as Father Ferro. At my age, many things no longer matter, and you fear less." She stroked the keyboard absent-mindedly. "Now, for instance, I'm about to see that justice is done. Not a very Christian action, I know, Father Quart." She sounded harder now, more determined. "After this, I imagine I'll have to go to confession. I'm about to sin against charity."

"Mother."

"Leave me alone, dear, please." She pointed at the text on the screen. "This is a report on an internal audit of the Cartujano Bank. It exposes all Pencho's machinations involving Our Lady of the Tears. Making it public would be slightly damaging to the bank and extremely damaging to my son-in-law." She smiled. "I'm not sure Octavio will ever forgive me for it."

"Will you tell him?" asked Macarena.

"Of course."

"Where did you get this report?" asked Quart.

"From my son-in-law's computer. His password wasn't hard to crack." She shook her head. "I'm sorry, because I always liked Pencho. But it's the church or him."

A light flickered on one of the devices. Cruz Bruner glanced at it, then turned to the priest with all the haughtiness of generations of dukes of El Nuevo Extremo. "It's the modem," she said, her eyes sparkling. Her smile was cruel, contemptuous. "I'm faxing the report to all the newspapers in Seville."

Standing beside her mother, her face in darkness, Macarena had stepped back and was staring into space. The English clock struck downstairs, among the dark paintings mounting guard in the shadows of the Casa del Postigo. Quart felt sure that at that moment Carlota Bruner's ghost was smiling up in the tower, while a schooner glided upriver, its white sails filled by the breeze that rose every night from the sea.

Cruz Bruner died at the beginning of winter. By then Quart had spent five months as third secretary at the apostolic nunciature in Bogota. He read about it in the international edition of ABC. The death notice gave the long list of the deceased's tides and included the request of her daughter Macarena, heir to the dukedom, that prayers be said for her soul. A couple of weeks later he received an envelope with a Seville postmark, containing only a small printed card edged with black and showing more or less the same text as the death notice. It was accompanied not by any letter but only by the postcard of Our Lady of the Tears that Carlota Bruner sent to Captain Xaloc.

In time, Quart learned about the fates of several of the players in the story. A letter from Father Oscar, having followed a circuitous route from a little village in Almeria to Rome and then on to Bogota, said that Our Lady of the Tears was still open for worship and functioning as a parish. The assistant priest added that he had radically revised his opinion of Quart.

The only news of Pencho Gavira was a brief item in the financial section of the Latin American edition of El Pais, about Octavio Machuca's retirement from the Cartujano Bank in Seville and the appointment of a new chairman of the board. Quart did not recognise the appointee's name. The article also mentioned Gavira's resignation as vice-chairman and general manager of the bank.

Quart received sporadic information about Father Ferro. The verdict was involuntary manslaughter, and Father Ferro was moved from the prison hospital to a rest home for elderly priests in the diocese of Seville. He was still there, in poor health, at the end of that winter, but according to a brief, courteous note from the director of the home, in response to Quart's enquiry, it was unlikely that the old priest would survive until spring. He spent his days in his room and had nothing to do with anyone; at night, in good weather, he went out into the garden, accompanied by a nurse, and sat in silence on a bench watching the stars.

Of the remaining characters whose paths crossed Quart's during his stay in Seville, Quart heard nothing more. They gradually faded from memory, together with the ghosts of Carlota Bruner and Captain Xaloc, who often accompanied him on his long evening walks through the colonial district of old Bogota. All but one of them disappeared. He caught only a brief glimpse of her and was never absolutely sure it was she. This happened some time later. Quart had just been transferred to another even more obscure secretariat in Cartagena and was leafing through a local paper when he saw a report on the peasant revolt in the Mexican state of Chiapas. The report described life in a small, remote village under guerrilla control. At the local school a group of children were photographed with their teacher. The picture was blurred, and even with a magnifying glass Quart couldn't be sure, but the woman looked very familiar. She was wearing jeans, and her grey hair was gathered in a short plait; her hands were resting on her pupils' shoulders, and she stared defiantly at the camera with cold blue eyes. The eyes that were the last thing Honorato Bonafe saw before he was struck down by the wrath of God.