Every great city can be evoked by songs and music associated with it––“La  Vie en Rose” with Paris,  “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square” with London, and, of course, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco”––so to listen to Spanish guitar music  by the master Andrés Segovia (though he was actually born in Linares) is to be suffused with the heart and soul of the city of Segovia in central Spain. Sitting in the Plaza del Azoguelo in front of its extraordinary Roman Aqueduct, dating back 2,000 years, and hearing the music of flamenco or Spanish composers like Torroba, Mompou and Albénez played by a street musician is a unique experience.  The Aqueduct’s 170 arches consists of 25,000 granite blocks held together without mortar.

    The city of Segovia is not large, but its old town was declared a UNESCO  World Heritage Site in 1985. Its cathedral is one of the last of the great Gothic churches built in the late Middle Ages, and its Alcázar palace and fortress in the Romanesque has its own stolid magnificence.

    It is an enchanting city to walk around, with two curving avenidas encircling the town, and there are many excellent restaurantes serving traditional Castillian food at La Portada de Mediodia in a 16th century post house as well as modern cuisine at Villena in a former convent.

  
    On a recent trip this year I dined at two large restaurantes known for their conviviality and extensive menus. One was José Maria (Cronista Lecea 11), an asador (grill restaurant) whose suckling pigs come from the owners’ family farm. Opened in 1982 by José Maria Ruiz and his daughter Rocio, the restaurant has eight dining rooms that have been sound-proofed so the noise is kept to a minimum, and they boast of having a defibrillator in premises “becoming a cardioprotected space and honouring the health of its clients and employees.” José Maria is himself an accomplished wine expert, so his cellar is full of the best Iberian bottlings, and Rocio manages the family’s winery, named Pago de Carravejas.

    Of course, I ordered the cochinilla suckling pig, which was superb, seasoned only with salt and pepper and deliberately never served with a sauce, which would compromise the pure flavors of the flesh, the fat and the crisp skin. I began with crispy, piping hot ham croquettes, and a “farmer’s tasting platter” of charcuterie then a main course of marinated partridge  with endives.  A friend ordered rare beef sirloin with foie gras that had been marinated in Port wine. The prices for main courses range from 24.50€ to 36€.

    An equally convivial spot is El Bernardino (Cervantes 2), founded in 1939 by D. Mariano del Pozo Manso (right). It’s a beautiful restaurant, civilized but very friendly, with beige and white linens on spacious tables, a carved timbered ceiling and parquet floors, with the Segovian sun streaming through its large windows.

There is both a tapas menu and a more comprehensive dining room menu from which I chose a dish of mushrooms in puff pastry and a plate of simply grilled sweet red shrimp, then followed with suckling pig––this time fried––and succulent roast lamb. For dessert we enjoyed the cheesecake with mixed fruit marmalade. Main courses run 25.50€ to 50€. There are four set menus of several courses, from 43€ to 58€.

       It had been snowing hard all day and the two men were sitting in leather armchairs before a large fireplace sipping Scotch.

       “Did you see the paper today about Jeffrey Epstein?”

       “No, what about him?” asked the younger man.

       “It seems the Palm Beach police are investigating him for sex trafficking and child abuse.”

       The younger man shook his head hard as if to clear it.       

       The older man took a slug of the whiskey, stared into the fireplace, then said slowly, “This . . . could cause a lot of trouble for us.”

 ❖❖❖

     Katie Cavuto, an investigative reporter for McClure’s magazine, had just read the same story in the tabloid newspaper, the New York Post, while nursing a head cold with a cup of hot tea in her Bronx apartment. She racked her brain trying to remember who exactly Jeffrey Epstein was and only recalled he was a millionaire with a lot of celebrities for friends. The kind of guy who would occasionally make it onto the Post’s gossip section, Page Six, in photos from some gala party. Other than that, she knew nothing about him and was certainly surprised at the investigation of him as a sex trafficker and child molester.
       Katie usually read, or at least glanced at, the Post after going through the New York Times, Daily News and Wall Street Journal, and, given the tabloid’s penchant for sensational news stories, she paid little attention to what it covered. It was the antithesis in content to McClure’s, which was a well-respected investigatory journal for which Katie had won several prizes for her articles. Katie turned the page about Epstein and read the gossip on Page Six as a guilty pleasure. Some Hollywood actress was hooking up with another rap star; some ex-White House aide signed to write a tell-all about the Bush family.

       Katie’s last award-winning story had been about a pandemic deliberately unleashed in Paris that had involved Middle East terrorists, the Marseille Mafia and Russian President Vladimir Putin. She’d also done stories on Al Capone, British double agent Kim Philby, and an exposé of the abuse of young women at Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries.  All of these were undertaken with the help of ex-NYPD detective David Greco, and both of them had escaped being murdered several times in pursuit of those stories.

       Katie hadn’t seen David since the Paris investigation, but they’d kept in touch. He was in his fifties, she in her mid-thirties, and both had grown up in the Bronx, though his neighborhood in the borough’s south had been a lot tougher and grittier than hers in the north. After twenty-five years as a cop—the last few disillusioned by how politics had become so invasive during Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s second term—David had retired to a modest house up the Hudson River near West Point, and it was only because Katie had approached him on the Capone investigation back in 1995––and because she was a very good-looking Italian-American woman––that he’d agreed to help, using his contacts and expertise as a detective. He was also well compensated for his assistance by McClure’s.
       David didn’t read any of the New York papers, except the Sunday Daily News he’d pick up at the local drugstore, and he mostly got his news from cable TV, which had nothing about the investigation of Jeffrey Epstein, who, if he’d seen it, meant nothing to David.
       David’s time with Katie had certainly been the most exciting of his life, although his happiest days were when he was married to a woman who, as a flight attendant, died trying to get passengers out of a burning plane that crashed at LaGuardia.  He’d never dated after that, and, given his age, he allowed himself just to be infatuated with Katie Cavuto but had given up any prospects for a romance. For as long as he knew her she’d been dating off and on an attorney in Boston whom David only referred to as “the lawyer guy.”

       It was bittersweet for David that he had worked so closely with Katie on the McClure’s articles, traveling the world and enjoying  countless meals with her in southern Italy, France, London, Taipei, Hong Kong and elsewhere, but then, with the stories finished, they only kept in touch by phone calls that were always about current events, movies, television series, rarely mentioning what they’d been through while working on the stories. During those months, David fantasized about Katie calling him up and asking him to join her on a new investigation, but it had been a year since that had happened.
       Now, three years after 9/11 and a year after George W. Bush invaded Iraq over assertions that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, Katie was back working on national stories, which had included an investigation into questionable oil leases on Native Americans’ lands, the newspaper and magazine wars in the wake of the dot.com bust, and a story on the outrageous salaries paid to the heads of non-profit hospitals in New York. Her work on those stories was as solid as any she’d written, but none had the magnitude—or danger—of the stories she’d worked on with David. Even though she swore she’d never put herself in harm’s way again for a story—they’d almost been drowned, poisoned and driven over a cliff—she missed the adrenalin of those adventures and found that spending her days going through land grants and hospital accounts was just grunt work.