Pencho Gavira and Celestino Peregil's employment relationship

Pencho Gavira and Celestino Peregil’s employment relationship is a bargain in which money, deadlines, and deniable violence are meant to serve Gavira’s plan to remove Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas from the way of redevelopment. Peregil is hired to produce a specific result: prevent the Thursday Mass that keeps the church protected under an old privilege. But when his agents kidnap the parish priest, the hired solution becomes a threat to Gavira himself. Their dealings show both the power and the instability of a relationship built on command without clear accountability: Gavira demands results, while Peregil’s actions give his employer room to disown their consequences.

The Church and the Contract

The immediate business at stake is not simply the church’s demolition but the ritual condition that obstructs it. Under a privilege granted in 1687, Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas must retain its rights so long as Mass is celebrated there each Thursday for the soul of Gaspar Bruner de Lebrija. Macarena explains that the memorial service takes place at eight in the morning on the day of Gaspar’s death, and that both an emissary of the archbishop and a notary paid by Gavira watch for a mistake or omission. A missed service could allow the church to be demolished and clear the way for those seeking to develop the site.

The procedure makes the relationship between employer and hired operative concrete. Gavira does not merely want Peregil to exert pressure in the abstract: he gives him six million and expects the Thursday service to be stopped. The exact sum turns the assignment into a measurable transaction, while the approaching Mass supplies its deadline. The weekly recurrence also raises the stakes. If the priest says the required Mass correctly, the obstacle remains; if he does not, the church may lose the protection on which its survival depends.

Pressure and a Failed Assignment

Peregil’s failure to deliver results for a week brings the arrangement into the open. After reprimanding him, Gavira tells him that he has until Wednesday to solve the problem and warns that there must be no Mass in the church on Thursday. He also insists that Peregil will have to account for the six million, demanding the money back gram by gram if the assignment remains unresolved. The threat makes clear that Peregil is answerable not only for the desired outcome but for the money advanced to obtain it.

When he returns to his own crew, Peregil is furious and visibly discomposed. He rebukes them for the botched business, while one of his associates remarks that dealings involving priests bring bad luck. The sequence places Peregil between two kinds of pressure: the employer who has paid him to achieve a result, and the subordinates whose performance he has failed to control. His authority over the crew does not protect him from Gavira’s demands; it is precisely the means by which Gavira expects him to make the assignment succeed.

Kidnapping and the Meaning of “Neutralize”

The next report initially sounds like success. At a restaurant, Gavira is preoccupied with an impending struggle for his future at Banco Cartujano, using pressure on board members while waiting to meet three councillors. Peregil appears and announces that he has good news. In private, Gavira pushes him into the men’s room and asks where he has been. Peregil replies that he has been making sure there will be no Mass the following day.

Gavira’s immediate reaction is not relief but fury. Peregil explains that he did what Gavira told him: he “neutralized” the priest. The verb conceals the gulf between the employer’s objective and the operative’s method. Gavira had demanded that the service not take place; Peregil has interpreted that as grounds to kidnap the parish priest. In that moment, an assignment designed to affect a church service becomes a criminal operation that can expose and implicate its sponsor. Gavira’s anger does not erase his earlier instruction, but it shows that he did not expect—or cannot accept—this particular execution of it.

Deniability and Recalculation

Once Peregil has described what happened, Gavira tries to establish whether the kidnapping and the murder of journalist Bonafé are connected. The timing leaves the priest without an alibi: Bonafé’s death is established in the late afternoon, while the priest’s disappearance, according to Macarena and the priest from Rome, occurs only after midnight. Gavira weighs the possibility that Peregil’s people kidnapped the priest shortly after the priest killed the journalist, though he cannot determine whether the sequence is coincidence or something more. The disappearance therefore creates a new danger: the priest is now a suspect, and the police are looking for him.

Gavira then turns that danger into a revised calculation. Keeping the priest hidden is risky, he decides, but releasing him could serve the original scheme. If the priest is freed at night and becomes occupied with police inquiries, he may be unable to celebrate Thursday’s Mass. Gavira imagines that an anonymous call or complaint might further keep the priest out of action, while the archbishop would have little urgency to find a replacement. The plan shifts from physically preventing the service to exploiting the consequences of the kidnapping and the investigation. Peregil’s act has endangered Gavira’s position, yet Gavira searches for a way to make it useful.

Responsibility Without Clarity

The relationship’s accountability remains deliberately unstable. When Macarena reports that Gavira apologizes and says he had nothing to do with the kidnapping, he claims that people working indirectly for him exceeded their authority without his consent. Quart treats that denial as a question to investigate rather than as proof of innocence: his priority is to reach the priest before the police. The episode thus distinguishes Gavira’s formal denial from the pressure he had in fact placed on Peregil—six million, a Wednesday deadline, and an explicit demand that no Mass take place on Thursday.

Peregil is neither a simple independent criminal nor a transparent extension of Gavira. He acts under an employer’s pressure, but interprets the instruction in a way that creates consequences his employer cannot openly embrace. Gavira, in turn, condemns the method, assesses the risks, and considers how to benefit from the result. Their arrangement depends on this gap between the desired outcome and the means used to achieve it. The church’s Thursday observance makes the stakes unusually precise: one missed Mass may remove a legal and ecclesiastical obstacle, while the attempt to guarantee that absence exposes how much power Gavira exercises—and how carefully he tries to separate himself from the violence done in his interest.