As with all men when they drink (apart from Jimmy), our talk turned to women. Well, Verboom’s talk; I said nothing about how much I missed Amelis. During the time Verboom had been confined in Barcelona, the Red Pelts even let him receive visits from high-class courtesans.
“Well, just the one,” he said, as though it were nothing. “A harlot in pay of their magistrates.”
“Ha!” I said. “Just one woman to keep you company! Such an eminent hostage, and subjected to the torment of monotony? Doubtless they wanted to make it like being married for you.”
We were drunk enough by this point for him not to pick up on my sarcasm.
“Oh, but she knew all the tricks, that one. The first thing I plan to do when we enter the city is to have her found. A dark-haired beauty, a bit too thin. I like them with a bit more flesh on. My, could she wiggle those hips, though, and her tongue was a miracle worker.”
“Dark hair?”
“Yes, very dark, her hair, but not her skin,” he clarified, rapping the table with his knuckles. “And a body harder than oak. Although, the little slut, she was also stingy as can be.” He laughed. “She always came wearing the same dress, a violet one. No jewelry, never any new attire whatsoever. Oh, but do you want to know what the most unusual thing about her was?” As he spoke, he glanced around in the manner of a man reminiscing. The port had gone to his head, and he hadn’t noticed me looking at him like an animal. “For a woman, she had quite a brain on her. When I was at my lowest points, it was her, her! who came up with the way out of my hardships. ‘Joris, darling,’ she said, ‘if you want to get out of here, propose an exchange. Suggest they swap you for another big fish, someone at your level. Like that general, say, Villarroel, the one the Bourbons have captured. The only reason it hasn’t happened is because no one’s had the idea. Him to Barcelona, you to Madrid. Everyone happy.’ ” Verboom shook his big head in admiration, like a dog shaking water from its fur. “I just hadn’t imagined it would be so easy. I made exactly that suggestion. And here I am.”
How can I possibly begin to describe the pain? It was more than I could bear. The way he’d recounted the intimacy of her “Joris, darling. . ” We were drinking from clay cups. I didn’t realize I was crushing mine in my hand. Suddenly, it shattered into pieces, making a noise like a cracked nut.
This brought Verboom out of his drunken stupor. Looking at me, he saw it in my face. At which his lit up. “No,” he said, “it can’t be.”
I’m ninety-eight years old. And I could live to a thousand and ninety-eight, and still the way he laughed in that moment would resound in my ears as though it were yesterday.
7
Have any of you ever been dead? I have, several times. And such a benign state it is, such a pleasure to be in, that I can well understand why no one comes back from there. Death only kills desires and obligations. And without desires or obligations, why come back to the trifling circumference of this universe of ours?
To recap: Good old Zuvi behind the Bourbon cordon, locked in a room empty except for the dust, my design for the Attack Trench complete. Cannon fire resounding without, monotone and impersonal, as though it were le Mystère itself being racked with laughter. Since I had completed my task, the following dawn was surely to be my last. Verboom consulted me on a last few details, shamelessly scribbling down all my answers. Rubbing his tired eyes, he stowed the notes in a file and then let out a little cry in Dutch.
In came two heavies broader across their backs than I am long of leg. The Antwerp butcher stuffed the sheets of paper into the folder. And as he did so, he coolly leaned his head closer to me.
This small gesture said it all. They were going to kill me there and then. Doubtless they were mercenaries, private thugs hired by Verboom. Four massive hands lifted me up under my arms.
“Wait a moment!” I screeched.
Never has my mind whirred into action so quickly. I elbowed my way out of their grips and forced myself back into my seat. Then, extending a hand across the map, I said in a miserable, pleading tone: “Monseigneur! Et les moulins?”
“What mills?”
“We still haven’t finished planning the attack on Section L here. The rebels will turn these mills into redoubts.”
Verboom blinked. “Ah, yes,” he said, “the mills in Section L. We were going to come back to them and forgot. Well, they aren’t especially important. The attack won’t go very near them.”
Though what I heard him saying was: “No, we won’t defer your execution.” The two mercenaries stood there like hunting dogs straining at their chains. They lifted me out of my seat again. Then I came up with a tall story about the mills: An anonymous genius had come up with a curious system for concealing artillery, I said. The windows in the mills were going to be made into gunwales, and medium-caliber cannons placed inside — inconspicuously, the barrels not sticking out. They weren’t windmills, but the idea was to put sails on them like a windmill, and these, turning in the wind in time with the cannon fire, would serve to disperse the gunpowder smoke. The enemy would take a good long while working out where the deadly shots were coming from.
“How original!” exclaimed Verboom, obviously planning to use the idea himself one day. He made a few notes and, thinking out loud, asked: “Do you know the mad genius who had the idea? Perhaps, when we take the city, I’ll have him spared and offer him the chance to serve under me.” Verboom wasn’t the most intelligent of men. But then, swiveling his big head all of a sudden, he looked on me with renewed spite. His own words had led him to the answer. “It was you, of course,” he said.
That was the last straw. Well, you can’t survive forever, hopping from frying pan to frying pan. Verboom gave the order for me to be taken out, and this time the two giants got a good hold of me.
I had no way of knowing, but my fate had been decided several days earlier. A number of spies who had been caught in Barcelona had been hanged outside the walls as an example. The Bourbons decided to carry out reprisals by hanging prisoners along the cordon. Verboom had my name included in the list. In fact, when I arrived, there was only one noose left, on a fifteen-foot L-shaped stage just behind the edge of the cordon.
There was an uproariousness to this mass execution that didn’t seem much suited to the meting out of justice. The sight of the hanged men on the city walls had stirred the troops, and the officers were having trouble containing them. I was jostled and shoved through a sea of arms; if not for my thug escorts, I wouldn’t have made it as far as the scaffold. My hands were tied behind my back, the noose was dropped down over my head, and the rope was attached to a wooden contraption designed for hoisting infantry out of the trench.
I could see everything from up there. Everything. A westerly wind was blowing the smoke out to sea. My eyes, free from the dust haze of the previous days, scanned the front.
The cordon, the Bourbon cannons. On that day, their gunners seemed subdued in their work, as though Pópuli’s imminent departure had somehow lulled them. Men scurried antlike along the channels that ran from the cordon to the Capuchin convent, arms full of munitions. From the city, Costa’s missiles came in a measure rather than a torrential fashion.
The Two Crowns’ positions were visible, too, and ours I knew from memory. I was certain that the men of the Coronela were behind every rampart face and manning every bastion. In each of the bell towers nearest to the ramparts, pairs of observers. Repair brigades would be emptying detritus from the moat, shielded by welded-together doors.