The Last King of Texas (Tres Navarre #3)(76)

At the steps of the main sanctuary, I looked back. The old bartender was a tiny figure in the cantina doorway. He was looking in my direction.

I walked inside the church entry hall, past marble columns, oil portraits of archbishops, and polished oak tables neatly stacked with bilingual Catholic newsletters.

Beyond the lacquered interior doors, the sanctuary opened up into a cavern of gilt and air. Angels laced the domed ceiling. Candlelight glittered in every recess, and far up ahead the altar was bedecked for Sunday service.

I walked up several pews and sat down, my eyes fixed on the distant central crucifix.

I didn't know why I wanted to be in a Catholic church after an absence of over fifteen years. Maybe it was my visit to George Berton's bedside the night before. Maybe it was just something Kelly Arguello had said.

In the pew rack was a Bible, a folded program adorned with doodles by some bored child. A broken pencil. A single rosary bead.

I closed my eyes and the sanctuary doors sighed open behind me. Steps clicked down the aisle — two sets. The pew across from mine creaked.

I looked over and saw the old bartender, kneeling stiffly. He crossed himself with a bony hand. Five rows back, the woman from the bar was settling into a pew. Her face was blotchy from new crying. She frowned straight ahead, then forced her eyes shut and started mumbling a silent prayer.

I looked at the bartender.

His smudges of hair glowed like candle glass. He had leathery skin, deeply wrinkled. He looked frail — probably no more than a hundred pounds. His green slacks and black-striped shirt reminded me of something George Berton would wear.

"You are Catholic?" he asked me.

The broken English was gone, replaced by beautiful Castilian Spanish, the kind you rarely hear in Texas.

"I used to be," I answered, also in Spanish. "I suppose I still am."

He slid back from his knees onto the pew cushion. The effort made his leathery face tighten. He laced his hands over his belly as if holding in an appendix pain. "That red car on the street. The man you mentioned... he was driving it Wednesday night."

"You've got a good memory."

"It's a nice car. His name was Berton, si?"

"Did you speak to him?"

The old bartender gestured toward the woman behind us. "I didn't say anything. He spoke with Mami."

I looked back at the middle-aged woman in red. She was still praying in a long, continuous whisper, her eyes and hands squeezed tight. The way the old bartender had spoken her name...

"You two are married?" I asked.

The bartender gave me a slight smile, like he was used to hearing that question, spoken with the same amount of disbelief. "Ten years."

"What did Mami tell my friend George?"

The bartender winced. "Mami is foolish enough to sit on the porch most afternoons — at the house, there behind the bar. She was an easy victim for conversation."

He probed his belly gently with his fingers, trying to relocate the source of the pain. "She wants to know if your friend is all right, you see. She heard he was shot, and she had told him things that might get him into that kind of trouble. She has a big heart, and is foolish about talking."

Mami's plum-meat-colored lips kept moving to the Ave Maria.

"What things did she tell Mr. Berton?" I asked again.

"About the man Hector Mara met in the bar — two weeks ago. Rey Feo."

Rey Feo, the "ugly king," was a title for one of the rulers of San Antonio's fiesta week, but I had a feeling that wasn't what the old man meant.

"A nickname," he explained. "I don't know the man's real name. He only came to the bar that once. I asked Mr. Mara about him — Rey Feo is what he said."

"A heavyset Anglo," I guessed. "Dark-haired."

The old man shrugged. "I only tell you all this because Mami already made the mistake of talking. Mami's got a big heart. There isn't much lying in her."

"Did she tell my friend anything else?"

The bartender stared at the crucifix over the altar. The gilded-wood Christ looked centuries old, his face as stoic and emaciated as the Mission Indian who had probably carved him.

"Do you understand how this could be bad, me talking to you?"

"But here you are."

He massaged his belly, sighed. "I love her, you see. I can't give her much — not my body, most nights not even my time. I want to at least give her some peace. She wants to know she didn't get your friend killed with what she said. She gets like this over things."

"What did she say?"

"That she recognized a woman. A woman in the photograph your friend had."

My blood slowed to syrup. "Who?"

"There is a man called Zeta Sanchez. This was a picture of his wife. It was a bad photo, but Mami said yes, it was the right woman. Is your friend healing, mister? I want to tell Mami."

I got up, didn't answer him, then walked down to Mami's pew. I knelt next to her. I could hear a faint tremble in the prayer she was whispering.

"It's okay," I said. "The man you spoke to will be fine. He told me to say thank you. To you and your husband, he said to say, 'God bless you.'"

She shuddered, but kept her eyes closed, still praying.

When I looked back from the doorway, the old man was kneeling where I'd left him, facing the altar now, still five rows ahead of his young wife. They both looked at peace, completely unaware of each other or any purpose other than communion with God.