Free The King's Gold by Arturo Pérez-Reverte Page A

before had vanished. I couldn’t see his face clearly, but I’m sure he was smiling.
    “The accountant Olmedilla will provide you with money to recruit a select group of men, old friends and so on—professional swordsmen, to put it bluntly. The best you can find.”
    There came the singsong voice of a beggar standing at the end of the street, an oil lamp in his hand, calling on us to pray for the souls in Purgatory. “Remember the dead,” he was saying. “Remember.” Guadalmedina watched the light from the lamp until it was swallowed up by the darkness, and then he turned again to my master.
    “Then you will have to board that wretched Flemish ship.”
    Still talking, we reached the part of the city wall near El Arenal, by the little archway known as El Golpe, with its image of the Virgin of Atocha on the whitewashed wall above. El Golpe provided access to the famous Compás de la Laguna bawdy house. When the gates of Triana and El Arenal were closed, that archway and the bawdy house were the easiest way to slip out of the city. And as he hinted to us, Guadalmedina had an important appointment in Triana, at La Gamarra tavern, on the other side of the pontoon bridge that linked the two banks of the river. La Gamarra stood next to a convent whose nuns had all reputedly been sent there against their will. The Sunday-morning mass attracted even larger crowds than the latest play at the playhouse; it positively seethed with people; there were wimples and white hands on one side of the grille and young men sighing on the other. And, or so they said, such was the fervor of certain gentlemen from the best society—including distinguished strangers to the city, such as our king—they even came to worship there during the hours of darkness.
    As for the bawdy house, a popular expression of the day, más puta que la Méndez —more of a whore than La Méndez herself—referred to a real woman called Méndez, whose name was used by don Francisco de Quevedo in his famous ballads about a celebrated figure from the criminal classes called Escarramán, as well as by other men of letters. She had worked as a prostitute in the bawdy house, which offered to the travelers and merchants staying in nearby Calle de Tintores and in other city inns—as well as to locals—gaming, music, and women of the kind described by the great Lope de Vega thus:
How foolish, how mad of a silly young man
To chase, helter-skelter (how he pants and drools),
After one of those women who’ve already been
Bait to a thousand other young fools.
    And which the no less great don Francisco finished off in his own inimitable style:
Stupid the man who trusts in whores
And stupid the man who wants them;
Stupid the money handed over
To pay for whorish flotsam.
Stupid the desire, stupid the delight
The whorish moment imparts,
And stupid the man who doesn’t believe—
Madam—you’ re the queen of tarts!
    The bawdy house was run by one Garciposadas, from a family notorious in Seville for two of its brothers: one was a poet at court—a friend of Góngora’s, as it happens—who had been burned that very year for sodomizing a mulatto, Pepillo Infante, also a poet and a servant of the Admiral of Castile, and the other had been burnt three years before in Málaga as a Judaizer; and since misfortunes always come in threes, these antecedents had earned Garciposadas the nickname of El Tostao, or Garciposadas the Scorched. This worthy fellow performed the duties of pimp or father of the bawdy house with great aplomb: he kept the authorities suitably lubricated to ensure that his business ran smoothly; and so as not to contravene the regulations laid down by the city’s corregidor, or governor, he always ensured that weapons of any kind were deposited in the hallway and he forbade entry to any customers under the age of fourteen. The said Garciposadas was also on good terms with the constables and catchpoles, who quite blatantly protected him and his business, a