Jeopardy Is My Job. Marlowe Stephen

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СКАЧАТЬ times that hot June afternoon I saw him work. He would stand across the ring from twelve-hundred pounds of enraged bull, shout, beckon imperiously and sprint across the sand with a ribboned banderilla held in each hand as daintily as a fairy holds her wand. The bull would snort, and paw, and gallop to meet him, head down, curving horns gleaming in the sunlight. There was a point in the ring where animal and slim gray figure seemed destined to meet. Then Fuentes’ arms went up and the bull’s head went even lower, and then for an instant they hung together, the bull ready to toss its head and gore with those savage horns, the man ready to plant his banderillas. If he did it right, and each time Fuentes did it exactly right, there was a split-second when Fuentes hung poised, high on his toes, arms up-stretched, between the bull’s horns. Then his arms blurred down, the bull bellowed, Fuentes ran clear and the two banderillas, their ribbons fluttering, their barbed hooks trickling blood, hung an inch apart in the center of the ridge of muscle on the bull’s neck.

      There were four matadors and four fighting bulls to dispose of. Two of the matadors were proficient and two were butchers, and Ruy Fuentes, a contemptuous look on his grave, handsome face because he knew the glory belonged to the matadors and he would win no ears or tail or zapata for his work, stole the show. Each time he came out the crowd would sigh to silence as he rushed headlong to meet his destiny between the bull’s horns, and each time they would respond to his work with shouts of “Olé!” and even “Torero!” though young Ruy Fuentes’ bullfighting days already were behind him. He never acknowledged the acclaim with so much as a bow. He just stalked off, a solitary figure in the sun, as the trumpet sounded for the matador.

      At twenty-two he was a has-been, a torero who’d been trampled and had to settle for a secondary role in the fiesta brava. But at twenty-two he had more pride and dignity than you’d expect under those or any circumstances. I found myself hoping he wouldn’t be involved in Robbie Hartshorn’s disappearance even though that would mean my one and only lead had petered out.

      Long late-afternoon shadows were dark under the iron-pipe and wooden slat scaffolding of Fuengirola’s makeshift bull ring when I went below the grandstand and watched a yellow jeep haul the carcass of the final bull out with two urchins dressed in rags riding proudly on its bloody flank and trying to remove the banderillas. A knot of people had gathered around the four matadors whose teeth gleamed in wide smiles. Aficionados mirrored those smiles. They said a word or two, they laughed nervously, their hands reached out to touch the matadors, their heads nodded like corks bobbing on water whenever the matadors deigned to answer them.

      Ruy Fuentes stood off to one side, alone with the picador. He kneeled and helped the horseman remove his greaves. When he straightened up next to the picador, at first I thought Fuentes was unexpectedly small. The picador towered over him. He looked ten years older than Fuentes. His face was long and horse-like and his wide-spaced eyes smouldered with anger and resentment, possibly because of all the men involved in the drama of the bull ring only the picador sitting high on his horse in his armor and with his heavy, eight-foot lance is hated.

      I heard him say, “Those cabrons, those goats, all the world flocks to them and would kiss their rears while it is you who has made the fiesta brava a success.”

      “It is not their fault I was trampled, Paco,” Ruy Fuentes said in a soft, deep voice, and he managed to say that not with self-pity but with a quiet dignity that matched his bearing and his face. His black hair was shorter than a Spaniard usually wears it, almost a brush-cut. His skin was dark, his nose high-bridged and proud. His black eyes just missed being arrogant, his jaw was almost as long as the picador’s but his lips were soft and red, like a woman’s.

      Then, as I reached them, I realized he was no shrimp. I’m six-one, but the picador dwarfed me. Before hanging out my private eye shingle and before my stint with the FBI, I played running guard for William and Mary College and even made All-State, but if he could move I’d have hated having a guy the size of the picador Paco playing across the line from me. He was really big, and he looked as easy to knock down as a cross-country moving van.

      “Señor Fuentes?” I said.

      When Paco looked surprised and Ruy Fuentes nodded curtly, I asked, “Do you speak English? I don’t have any Spanish and I’d like to talk to you.” The first part of that was a lie; my Spanish is pretty good because I’ve knocked around some in Latin America. But working a case in a foreign country, where your P.I. license wouldn’t buy you a loaf of bread if you were starving, you have very few advantages. One of them is pretended ignorance of the language.

      He answered my question by saying in English, “What do you wish of me?”

      Paco surprised me by having English too. He used it to say, jerking a big thumb in the direction of the matadors, “You have made a mistake. You don’t want Ruy Fuentes. He is only a banderillero. Over there are the toreros.”

      “I’ve seen better toreros in Venezuela,” I said, “where they’re just beginning to learn which end of the bull is which.”

      Paco smiled, but Ruy Fuentes still seemed polite but indifferent. The big picador asked, “You have afición then? You love the fiesta brava? You understand it?”

      “No,” I admitted truthfully. “But I recognize a good banderillero when I see one.”

      “Thank you,” Ruy Fuentes said gravely.

      It was a start, and it was the truth, but I didn’t like myself for it. You can get what you want by being ingratiating, just as you can get what you want by using a pair of brass knucks. Neither way was my idea on how to operate, and though Fuentes deserved the compliment and I meant it, I was annoyed with myself—enough to say, “Does Tenley Hartshorn?”

      “Does Señorita Hartshorn what?” Ruy Fuentes demanded, and a chunk of dry ice wouldn’t have steamed on his tongue.

      “Recognize a good banderillero when she sees one.”

      The picador lifted his greaves and tucked them under his arm. They looked like a toy knight’s toy leg-armor there. Ruy Fuentes said, “Who are you, señor?”

      “The name is Drum. I was hired by Governor Hartshorn in Maryland to find his son. Two weeks ago Robbie Hartshorn took the bus from Torremolinos to Fuengirola. He hasn’t been seen since.”

      “Why come to us, hombre?” Paco said in a tight, menacing voice. “Many people ride the bus to Fuengirola.”

      In Spanish Ruy Fuentes said quickly, “I’ll attend to this, Paco.” He told me, “I saw Señor Hartshorn some time ago, yes. It may have been two weeks ago, as you suggest. You say he is missing?”

      I said he was missing. “What did you see him about?”

      “A personal matter.”

      “He came here to tell you to keep away from his daughter, didn’t he?”

      “No one tells me whom to—”

      “I’m not making a moral issue out of it. I’m looking for facts—and Robbie Hartshorn. Did you fight?”

      “He is a middle-aged man,” Ruy Fuentes said.

      “He’s forty-two and from what I hear as strong as an ox. You’d have to be pretty good to take him.”

      Paco rumbled, “You have no right to question us.”

      “I’m not questioning you,” I said. “I wouldn’t know you from any other big stiff who rides a horse and sticks СКАЧАТЬ