I’m 500 pages in; I’m in deep Chips and need a break. Instead of a Kit-Kat, I’m enjoying an Arturo Pérez-Reverte, The Siege.
He has been the subject of posts passim, here and here if you want to read more about the most popular, living, Spanish author. It’s pure pleasure to read about the siege of Cadiz in 1811, inexplicable murders of young women and the flawed investigator, Comisario Rogelio Tizón, struggling to work it out. It’s like a Donna Leon when she was on top of her game.
“At the sixteenth lash, the man strapped to the table loses consciousness. His skin is yellowish, almost translucent now; his head hangs limply over the edge of the table. The glow from the oil lamp on the wall reveals the tracks of tears down his filthy cheeks and a thread of blood drips from his nose. The man whipping him stands in silence for a moment, uncertain, one hand gripping the pizzle, the other mopping from his brow the sweat that also soaks his shirt. Then he turns to a third man leaning against the door in the shadows behind him. The face of the man with the whip bears the hangdog look of a hound cowering before its master. A brutish, lumbering mastiff.
In the silence comes the sound of the Atlantic pounding against the shore beyond the shuttered window. No one has said a word since the screaming stopped. Twice, the dark face of the man in the doorway is illuminated by the glowing ember of a cigar.
’It wasn’t him,’ he says finally.”
(The Siege, Arturo Pérez-Reverte, translated by Frank Wynne)