Hiring of Don Ibrahim's crew

Hiring of Don Ibrahim's crew is the bargain by which Celestino Peregil attempts to carry out Pencho Gavira’s church-related assignment after mismanaging most of the money given to him. His recruitment of Don Ibrahim, Potro del Mantelete, and Niña Puñales joins a powerful banker’s scheme to the precarious lives of three people who are nearly out of options; its apparent informality conceals the lethal stakes of the work.

Peregil and the assignment

Peregil is introduced as Gavira’s bodyguard and assistant, a short, stocky, nervous man with a persistent ulcer, conspicuous taste in white socks and bright silk ties, and a weakness for casino gambling. He is on his way to Casa Cuesta in Triana, crossing the Guadalquivir on a delicate errand he resents. His unease has another source: the Q+S cover shows his employer’s wife with another man, and Peregil himself sold the journalists the information that made the photograph possible. The leak has brought him money, but not security; the gambling table and a creditor are waiting behind the immediate assignment.

Gavira has entrusted Peregil with six million pesetas to settle the church problem and told him to find a professional, leaving him to administer the funds as he saw fit. Peregil has already lost three million in six hours at the casino, at half a million per hour, and spent the proceeds of his tip about Gavira’s wife. He is also being pursued by Rubén Molina, a moneylender to whom he owes nearly twice that amount. The recruitment therefore begins not with a well-financed operation but with Peregil trying to make a job possible after his own gambling and betrayal have depleted the budget.

The meeting at Casa Cuesta

At Casa Cuesta, Peregil approaches Don Ibrahim and his companions with a pitch that makes the danger sound manageable: the job is easy, clean, and without complications. He offers a million pesetas per person. Don Ibrahim asks why they were chosen, and Peregil answers that they are the best, blushing as he says it. The compliment is transparently at odds with his private assessment: he sees three washed-up people, better suited to an old people’s home than the street, and regards them as the only crew he can afford with what remains in his pocket.

The exchange exposes the imbalance between the assignment’s language and its actual circumstances. Peregil calls the work uncomplicated because he needs the three to accept it; Don Ibrahim, by contrast, recognizes that the church makes the proposal ominous. His Quixotic pronouncement that they have run into the Church prompts Peregil to suppress an impulse to walk out. As he studies Don Ibrahim’s cigar and the group’s worn appearances, memories of the casino numbers and the magazine photograph return, and fear turns the bar unbearably hot. He has little room to choose: he must secure people for Gavira’s errand, and they are the people his dwindling funds can reach.

The crew’s first payment

When Peregil leaves, Don Ibrahim discreetly counts the money beneath the marble tabletop. The initial payment is one hundred thousand pesetas. He divides it into three equal bundles of thirty-three thousand, keeping one and passing the other two to Potro del Mantelete and Niña Puñales; the remaining thousand-peseta note he leaves on the table. The small, unevenly rounded advance gives the grand language of hiring a material measure: whatever the promised rate, this is what has actually changed hands at the first meeting.

Potro smooths the leftover note and examines the image of Hernán Cortés, wondering whether it is genuine. Niña reduces the matter to the fact that it is money, but warns that getting mixed up with priests brings bad luck. Neither response turns the job into an abstract cause. The crew needs cash, yet understands that the church is not an ordinary client or target; even the first small disbursement carries an omen.

Don Ibrahim’s purpose and the church’s violence

Don Ibrahim frames acceptance as a matter of strategy, repeating the explanation aloud as much to persuade himself as his companions. Peregil had promised three million, and Don Ibrahim thinks they may be able to extract more. He hears that Peregil serves a banker with money to spare and hopes the work will supply liquidity for the foundations of an old dream. His literary allusions and self-image as a dignified man unlucky in life sit beside the immediate arithmetic of the advance. The dream is not merely his own: he keeps his companions’ hopes alive for them, particularly when their circumstances offer little reason for confidence.

The assignment’s later consequences make Peregil’s sales pitch bitterly ironic. The church has already been associated with deaths that officials describe as accidents: municipal architect Peñuelas falls from a roof when an andamio railing gives way and is impaled on a metal tube; Father Urbizu is killed when a heavy piece of plaster drops from a cornice after scaffolding moves. Later, Honorato Bonafé is found dead in a confessional, with a cut across his hand. Police reconstruction places him on the altar scaffolding beside the Virgin statue, where he falls or is pushed five metres during a confrontation with the parish priest, then crawls to the confessional and dies. These deaths supply the violent context against which the supposedly clean church job must be understood.

The investigation also connects the church’s financial activity to its concealed pearls. Police establish that the Virgin’s original pearls had been replaced months earlier by twenty identical imitations. The sale of the genuine pearls appears to have financed renewed church repairs, including building materials and rented machinery beyond what the parish priest’s salary and the collection box could cover. Sub-inspector Simeón Navajo proposes that Bonafé discovered the substitution and confronted the priest, perhaps to blackmail him; he also allows that the priest may have surprised Bonafé in the act. The account remains a police reconstruction rather than a fully witnessed sequence. In that unresolved chain of money, restoration, and death, the recruitment at Casa Cuesta marks an early point where Gavira’s church business reaches people willing—or forced—to act on it.