"Is that what he said?"

"Yes. When the archbishop announced you were coming."

Quart looked away, over the woman's shoulder. He could see a window with a grille hung with pots of geraniums and a canary in a cage. "I just want to help," he said in a flat voice that suddenly sounded alien to him. At that moment the church bell began to ring and the canary sang, glad of the accompaniment.

This was not going to be an easy mission.

Eleven Bars in Triana

You have to cut and cut and cut again. You have to fell the trees without mercy, until their rows have been cleared and the forest can be considered healthy.

Jean Anouilh, The Lark

There are dogs that define their masters and cars that announce their owners. Pencho Gavira's Mercedes was enormous, dark and shiny, with its menacing three-pointed star on the front like the sight of a machine gun. Celestino Peregil jumped out before the car had quite come to a halt and held the door open for his boss. The traffic on La Campana was heavy and the henchman's salmon-pink shirt collar was grimy. His red, yellow and green flower-print tie blazed like some monstrous set of traffic lights. The exhaust fumes made his lank, thinning hair flutter, ruining the shape he carefully constructed each morning with much patience and hair gel to hide his bald patch.

"You've lost more hair," said Gavira cruelly. He knew that nothing tormented his assistant more than mention of his baldness. But the financier believed that periodic use of the spur kept the animals in his stables alert. Besides, Gavira was a hard man and given to such exercises of Christian virtue.

It looked as if it was going to be a beautiful day despite the pollution. Standing very straight on the kerb, Gavira adjusted his shirt-cuffs so that his twenty-four-carat gold cufflinks glinted in the May sunshine. He looked like a male model. He touched the knot of his tie and then ran his hand over his thick, black hair, slightly wavy behind the ears and slicked back. Pencho Gavira was dark, handsome, ambitious, elegant. He had money and was about to have a lot more. He was proud of the fact that most of his success was due entirely to his own efforts. Confident and pleased, he looked round before heading for the corner of the calle Sierpes with Peregil trailing behind him.

In the La Campana Cafe, Don Octavio Machuca sat at his usual table, looking through the papers that his secretary, Canovas, passed to him. For several years now the chairman of the Cartujano Bank had spent his mornings at a table on this cafe terrace in the very heart of the city rather than in his office, full of paintings and fine furniture, on the Arenal. He spent the morning reading the ABC newspaper, watching the world go by and attending to business matters until it was time for lunch at his favourite restaurant, Casa Robles. Nowadays he almost never got to the bank before four o'clock, so if there were any urgent matters to be dealt with, his employees and clients had no choice but to go and see him at La Campana. This included Gavira; as vice-chairman and general manager, he had to make the rather inconvenient journey almost every day.

No doubt this was why his confident expression grew dark as he approached the table where the man to whom he owed his present and his future sat in front of a coffee and half a buttered muffin. Gavira's face grew darker still when he inadvertently glanced to his left and saw the cover of Q amp;S prominently displayed at a newspaper kiosk. He walked on as if he hadn't seen it, sensing Peregil's eyes on the back of his head. The black cloud was taking over, and his belly, its muscles firmed by a daily workout, was tense with fury. The magazine had been lying on his desk for two days now, and Gavira was as familiar with the photographs as if he'd taken them himself. The cover picture was slightly grainy from the use of a telephoto lens, but he could clearly recognise his wife, Macarena Bruner de Lebrija, heiress to the tide of El Nuevo Extremo and descendant of one of the three most noble families of the Spanish aristocracy – Alba and Medina-Sidonia were the other two – as she was leaving the Alfonso XIII Hotel at four in the morning with a bullfighter, Curro Maestral.

"You're late," said the old man.

Gavira knew, without even glancing at his expensive watch, that he wasn't. It was just that Don Octavio liked to keep up the pressure. Indeed, Gavira himself used the tactic having learned it from Don Octavio. Peregil, with his ridiculous hairdo, was his victim.

"I don't like people arriving late," Machuca insisted loudly, as if he were telling this to the waiter standing by the table waiting to take his order. They always reserved the same table for him, by the door.

Gavira nodded, calmly taking in Machuca's words. He ordered a beer, unbuttoned his blazer and sat down in the chair the chairman of the Cartujano Bank indicated next to him. After bowing his head abjectly a couple of times, Peregil went and sat at a table further off, where Canovas was putting documents away in a black leather briefcase. Canovas was a thin, mouse-like man, a father of nine and morally beyond reproach. He had worked for the banker since the days when Machuca smuggled cigarettes and perfume from Gibraltar. Nobody had ever seen Canovas smile, maybe because his sense of humour had been crushed beneath the weight of family responsibility. Gavira didn't like Canovas and secretly planned to dismiss him as soon as the old man decided to vacate his office on the Arenal.

Like his boss and patron, Gavira looked in silence at the passing pedestrians and cars. When his beer arrived, he leaned forward and took a sip, taking care not to let any drip on his perfectly pressed trousers. He dried his lips with a handkerchief and sat back.

"We have the mayor," he said at last.

Not a muscle moved in Octavio Machuca's face. He stared straight ahead, at the green-and-white sign of the PENA BETICA (1935) on the second-floor balcony across the street, beside the neo-mudejar building of the Poniente Bank. Gavira considered the old financier's bony, claw-like hands covered with liver spots. Machuca was thin and tall, with a large nose and eyes circled with dark rings as if from permanent insomnia. He scanned his surroundings like a bird of prey. The years had imparted not tolerance or mercy to those eyes but weariness. A lookout and smuggler in his youth, later a moneylender in Jerez and, by the time he was forty, a banker in Seville, the founder of the Cartujano Bank was about to retire. Now his only known ambition was to have breakfast every morning at the cafe on the corner of the calle Sierpes, opposite the Pena Betica and the head office of the rival bank. Which the Cartujano had recently annexed, having engineered its gradual downfall.

"About time," said Machuca, still staring across the street. Following the direction of his gaze, Gavira wasn't sure whether

he meant the Poniente Bank takeover or the fact that they now had the mayor's support.

"I had dinner with him last night," Gavira said, glancing at the old man's profile out of the corner of his eye. "And this morning I had a long friendly chat with him on the telephone."

"You and your mayor," muttered Machuca, looking as if he was trying to place a vaguely familiar face. Anyone else might have thought it a sign of senility. But Gavira knew his chairman too well.

"Yes," he said, appearing keen, alert to nuances – exactly the kind of attitude that had got him where he was. "He's agreed to reclassify the land and sell it to us immediately." He might well have allowed a note of triumph into his voice, but he didn't. This was an unwritten rule at the Cartujano Bank.

"There'll be an outcry," said the old man.

"He doesn't care. His term of office ends in a month and he knows he won't be re-elected." "What about the press?"