City of Silver (21 page)

When she unlocked the vault, Ramirez’s silver ingot was where she had left it. She lifted it onto the proper shelf. Then she felt along the wall that separated the vault from the church. Above the sand on the floor, she found a loose brick, and when she pulled it out, several others came away with it, opening a hole large enough for a person to crawl through. On the other side of the wall was the otherwise locked
guardarropa
where Morada and his bodyguard left their swords and cloaks when they attended Mass in the church each morning. The Abbess put her head through the opening. Except for a bit of red plume that must have fallen off a ceremonial helmet, the room was empty.

She replaced the bricks, took a candle, and checked the bags and boxes of silver on the shelves. They all seemed in order. The obvious had not occurred. No silver had been stolen from the convent’s vault.

On a hunch, she lifted the carpet near the door, found loose floorboards and, under them, a huge excavation filled with silver. Bars, ingots, bags of coins. It struck her dumb how much silver was hidden here. A vast fortune. And in a flash, she knew what it was. Those caravans of Indians that everyone said went out each night into the surrounding plain did not carry Morada’s silver, as rumor had it. Bit by bit, every day for many months, perhaps years, he and his guard had, on entering the church for daily Mass, carried his fortune here.

The enormity of this shook her breath. She was the unwitting guardian of a king’s ransom. Men would kill for far less.

Her mind froze on a thought: Inez’s death must have something to do with this. Any other theory was unthinkable.

The Abbess put everything back as she had found it and relocked the vault and counting room doors. Crossing the cloister, listening to the deep silence of the convent within the vast silence of the mountains, she gazed up at the Cerro Rico. The barren rocks and earth of the mountain shone green, orange, gray, yellow, and red in the pale autumn sunlight. The Cerro dominated the city, like a pagan goddess of good and evil. The cross at its summit seemed too small in the face of its power.

She went to wait her turn for the confessional. Her mind swam in a sea of doubt and speculation. She prayed that this spiritual exercise would somehow prepare her to confront Eustacia, as she knew she must. That would be the most difficult conversation of her life.

When her turn came, she looked into Padre Junipero’s quizzical face. His eyes had a perpetual wariness, as if he held some inner guilt and feared it might be read.

Maria Santa Hilda made the sign of the cross. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

PADRE JUNIPERO HEARD the troubled Abbess’s confession of her failings and doubts. She whispered to him of the weakness of her faith, of her pride, failings that seemed to the priest to have nothing to do with the woman before him. Words of guilt poured forth from her, but the intensity of her feelings did not match her words. Before giving her absolution, he hesitated. “Mother Maria, I sense there is some trouble you are not confessing.”

She did something at that moment that he never expected to see her do. She burst into tears.

Unable to think of a single comforting word, he could do nothing but wait for her to recover herself. Blessedly she did, quickly.

“I forgot myself,” was the only explanation she offered. “I have an idea of why someone might have murdered Inez. I believe it has something to do with her father’s fortune. Please, go and find out if there is anyone she talked to before she came here that night. Find out what she said, what she knew. Find out if she knew the real hiding place.”

“It would help if you told me more about what you suspect.”

“Not yet, Father. I do not want to give you this knowledge if knowing it killed Inez.”

“Do you know where the silver is? I sense you are afraid of something.”

She paused and averted her eyes. “I am upset over something about Sor Eustacia.”

“Does she know where the silver is? Did she—” He could not finish the sentence, but the Abbess knew what he meant.

“No,” she said distractedly, “Eustacia did not kill Inez.” Then, “No,” too definitely.

“Lady Abbess,” he said, “Beatriz Tovar just told me—”

“Stop,” she almost shouted. “Padre, you cannot betray the seal of the confessional.”

He was insulted that she would even think such a thing. “What I am going to say is not a sin of her own that she revealed. It is information about someone else.”

“Oh, Father, I have heard Beatriz’s suspicions. She is a good girl at heart, but she lets her imagination run amok. Please spare me hearing her wild speculations.”

“I suppose,” he said. “She is overly romantic.”

He absolved the Abbess and gave her a small penance. They agreed to meet and exchange information early the next morning, after Mass.

“Don’t forget,” she said. “You must find the people Inez spoke to before she came here.”

“I will,” he said. Having blessed her with God’s forgiveness, he watched her leave the confessional obviously as troubled as
she had been when she entered. I have failed her, he thought. But I will save her. I will.

He hurried from the convent, along the Calle Real toward the theater.

In this very street only yesterday, he had joined his fellow Jesuits in a penitential procession of more than two hundred Potosinos. Dressed in prickly hair shirts, they had performed harsh acts of self-discipline—lashing themselves savagely with metal-tipped scourges. Marching behind banners bearing the images of San Ignacio, the Apostle of the Indies, he and his brother priests wore ashes on their heads and crowns of long thorns. His temples still bore the wounds of the barbs; his shoulders still ached from the heavy cross he had carried. Such penance was supposed to remind him of the pain of Christ’s suffering, to cleanse him. It had only deepened his guilt. The procession had seemed just another form of masculine excess. Men could go too easily out of control with self-abnegation or to the opposite extreme with sex and violence.

His mind tumbled, like the rock slides one heard from time to time echoing across the Altiplano. He feared for the Abbess’s life, for his own, and for his city’s future. Like the war between the Basques and the Vicuñas twenty-five years ago and the bursting of the Caricari dam that had once flooded the city and killed so many, the coming devaluation would devastate the city, cause enormous suffering among the rich and even more among the poor. The most destitute might starve to death. In Potosí, the richest city on earth. City of churches glistening with gold and silver, of underfed Indians, of ladies of easy virtue and holy women in ecstasy before the martyred Christ, of smugglers toiling ceaselessly in pursuit of fortune, Mestizos fuddled by coca, artists who carved stone into patterns as delicate as lace. Magnificent music in the cathedral; snide, satiric verses posted on the street corners. Children squealing with delight as they played—or dragging themselves home at night after a day of work that
would exhaust an adult. Potosí had a Spanish soul: proud, greedy, cruel, and noble. It had beauty. Grandeur. Chaos. The rhythm of Potosí was the rhythm of his heart, which swelled with love of all of it. Each time he extended his arms in the form of the cross at his daily Mass, he wanted to embrace the whole city—the lowest and the highest. The impossibly blue sky, the filthy beggars, the covetous, jealous, and zealous. He loved them all. And they were all threatened. And none more than the Abbess.

He knew where to find the person he was sure was the last to see Inez before she went to Los Milagros and her death.

The façade of the theater was one of the city’s wonders. Under its soaring arch were three stories of graduated columns, built and decorated in the Baroque style but carved with Indian and Mestizo motifs. Instead of the fruits and flowers and baby angels one saw on buildings in Rome, here were Inca figures and leaves and vines found in the jungles of coastal Perú. Near the red-wood brass-studded doors, a hand-painted sign read, “Antonio Encenas and Francisco Hurtado present Troupe Astilla in Mareto’s
Trampa Adelante,
staged in honor of the arrival of Doctor Francisco de Nestares, Visitador General. Admission: fifty pesos.” Fifty pesos! Such a price. A man could buy three or four shirts for less.

Padre Junipero swung the thick knocker and after a few moments was let in by a statuesque African who wore a red-and-gold silk turban and doublet of the same fine fabric. This resplendent porter showed him into the auditorium, where a rehearsal was in progress under the proscenium. At the rear of the hall, painters decorated a canvas. The odor of their paint brought back a powerful, deeply buried image of a soft, shapely young actress sprawled naked on a couch. The priest banished the memory.

The African, who evidently was more than a porter, climbed onto the stage. In the seats for the audience, a group of barbers and hairdressers watched the proceedings and General Juan Velarde Treviño, a knight of the Order of Calatrava and a former
magistrate of the city, lounged with two blowsy farceuses of the company.

Padre Junipero excused himself and called out for Sebastian Vázquez. The actors stopped reciting and scowled at him. A woman in a bright red wig sitting with General Velarde raised her index finger to her lips and waved him toward a door that led backstage.

The priest went through, up a few steps, and along a musty hall. At the end of the corridor, he found a room with the door ajar. Inside, a strikingly handsome blond man sat on a packing crate and ate from a plate he held in one hand. He was left-handed. The aroma of beef told the priest the man was not keeping the fast. This one would not be intimidated by priestly robes. He was studying a book propped up on a bench before him.

“Excuse me, sir,” Padre Junipero said. “I am looking for Sebastian Vázquez.”

The man leapt to his feet, hurriedly set aside the plate, and bowed graciously. “At your service, Padre.” He was graceful and lithe and spoke with a perfect Castillian accent. His elegant black doublet might have been a costume, but it fit him too well. This was no theatrical roustabout. It was easy to see he was a nobleman. A great many such men wandered Perú—men whose fortunes had run out and who could no longer live in Spain. But one did not usually find them in acting troupes.

Vázquez pushed a sack onto the dusty floor and offered the priest a rough bench. “I am sorry we have no fire. The impresarios are afraid of burning down the theater.” He pulled his cloak around him. “Why is it always so cold here? Why didn’t they build the city on the southern slope of the mountain?”

“You forget,” the priest said, “that you have crossed the equator. Here the north side is the warmer.” He sat and studied the young man’s steady dark eyes. “Are you the Sebastian Vázquez who knew Inez Rojas de la Morada?”

Wariness and fear crossed the man’s classic features. “I don’t believe I have ever heard the name.”

The priest raised an eyebrow. “Your expression has already betrayed you. I would have thought an actor could better conceal his feelings.”

The man laughed heartily. “You are a smart one, Father.” He stood and paced to the wall. “If the truth were known, I have spent more time in the prompter’s box than on the boards.” He glanced at his image in a mirror. He had the vanity if not the proper skills for his profession. He was also unnerved.

“Please sit down, my son, and speak to me,” the priest said softly.

The actor paused for a moment, gazing at the crate as if he were assessing its ability to hold his weight. He sighed and sat. He leaned forward with his elbows on his thighs. His dark eyes were resigned and a little bored, as if he knew what the questions would be. “What do you want of me?”

“First of all, tell me who you are. Your accent and your mannerisms betray a certain lineage.”

Sebastian smiled in surrender. “I am the son of a Castillian nobleman, but alas, my mother was not his wife. My father took a liking to my blond locks and deigned to educate me, but that only made my life more frustrating—to know so well what I could not have.”

The priest thought he saw the type of young man he was dealing with. “Did you then do something to incur your father’s wrath, so that he cut off your allowance?” The actor’s beauty and grace were the obvious attractions he held for Inez. Now, the priest understood that along with her beauty and charm, her father’s enormous fortune would be a powerful inducement for this man.

“My father died.” Vázquez’s sadness seemed authentic. “My brothers—his legitimate sons—did not see fit to continue his generosity. In Spain, I worked as secretary to a
conde
for a while,
but I decided to try my fortune in the New World, where I had heard the cobblers eat off silver and the common people live much at their ease and have their soup year-round, as only the richest do in Spain.”

“How did you cross the ocean?” Everyone, even priests, required a license to take passage on a Spanish ship. The House of Trade scrutinized credentials.

The actor shifted the crate and leaned against the wall behind him. “In the usual way of men like me, by bribing the ship’s officers to transport me under the guise of a personal servant. Are you going to report me to the authorities? Condemn me to rot in their jails?”

The question displayed no fear, as if he already knew this priest would never do such a thing. “No,” the priest said. “Not on that count. How did you meet Inez?”

Sebastian’s confident expression turned sheepish. “The only place a man like me can meet a girl like her—in church.” He looked as if he expected the priest to be shocked.

Padre Junipero gave him a reluctant smile. “Would it surprise you that I was a man before I was a priest? I know about such approaches. Please tell me more.”

The actor leaned forward again. “It was shortly after I arrived in Potosí, on the feast of the Epiphany. In the cathedral. I saw Inez enter with her mother. Actually, it was the mother who first attracted my attention. An extraordinarily beautiful woman. And she wore one red glove, the other white. I thought it was a fashion. Indeed, I admired the idea, until I saw the daughter was sullen and mortified and realized the mother was . . . shall we say, under the spell of Bacchus?”