Drumbeat Madrid

by Stephen Marlowe

  “Supposing,” I said, “Luz Robles had something she wanted done, something illegal. Supposing she asked her brother José for help and José was afraid of the garrote but not exactly displeased with what Luz wanted done. What would José’s move have been?”

  It is almost impossible to read the expression on a one-eyed man’s face, especially if the one eye wears a perpetual squint. There was no expression at all on El Macareno’s face as he said, “Don José might have arranged a meeting with someone who could do it for her.”

  “Who did you have in mind?”

  El Macareno laughed. “Who I had in mind is of no importance. Who Don José had in mind, that is what matters.”

  “I kind of got the idea he might have picked you.”

  El Macareno shrugged. “My trouble, señor, is that I look sinister. Have you ever seen a face such as mine?” He fingered the long, jagged scar. “A bull did this to me, and took out the eye as well, a small matter of the wind blowing the muleta just as I went in for the kill. I always killed truly, going in between the horns with danger to myself.” He sighed. “Six hundred kilos of angry bull, fighting for its life, it was a monstrous cornada. The bull hooked and caught my eye socket. They tell me I was lifted completely off the sands of the arena and carried to the barrier, where the bull released me and hooked again, twice more, before Manolete, who was on the program that day, could remove the bull with a quite. The second thrust made this scar. The third punctured my left lung. They thought I would die. I wished to die. With a scar such as this I could never fight the bulls again.”

  “Why tell me all that?”

  “The bull that gored me was a Miura, of the same breed that killed Manolete a few months later. I never even had a chance to thank him properly for saving my life. Bulls are like human beings: only a very few of them are strong and brave, including every Miura that ever lived. Here in Spain we have a proverb: when there are bulls there are no bullfighters; but when there are bullfighters there are no bulls. An exception like Manolete and the Miura coming together is rare. Manolete and a Miura destroyed each other simultaneously at the ring in Linares.”

  He picked up the guitar and plucked a few chords from it with his ear cocked close to the sound box. “Have you met Luz Robles, señor?”

  “No. Have you?”

  His one eye squinted shut again. “That one is beautiful with the beauty that a Spaniard truly loves, the arrogant beauty of the gypsy dancer. No man can win her, but all men dream of it. Even a man such as I, who must pay for his women because only the women of the street hide their horror at the sight of this face. What would you do if I told you where to find Luz Robles, señor?”

  “Alive?”

  “Very much alive. Like Manolete before he killed the Miura that killed him. What would you do?”

  “I’d find her. That’s my job.”

  El Macareno went to the door. “Perhaps. We shall see,” he said, opening the door about six inches. “Miguel!” he called.

  One of the domino players came back in. He was a small, lithe man, whip-thin. He wore a black bolero jacket, tight black trousers and high-heeled shoes. He looked like a flamenco dancer.

  “Shut the door,” El Macareno said, and Miguel obediently shut it.

  “This man is a norteamericano,” El Macareno said. “Do you like norteamericanos?”

  Miguel giggled. His eyes had an odd, watery look and the pupils were dilated. He sniffed.

  “You are familiar with the scar on my face?” El Macareno asked.

  Miguel giggled.

  “Can the work of a bull’s horn be duplicated by your knife?”

  Miguel just went on giggling.

  “Good. You will mark this man’s face exactly as mine is marked.”

  The giggle dropped to Miguel’s throat. It sounded almost like a death rattle. His right hand moved, behind his back, low. It came up with a switchblade knife, the knife went click, and I was looking at a four-inch blade held low at Miguel’s side.

  He lunged at me, slashing with the knife. I moved aside and he went by, fast but not far, with the quick, graceful, balanced steps of a dancer. He turned, smiling. Tears were streaming from his eyes. While he was turning, I ripped my jacket off and draped it over my left forearm. The only thing I had done so far was improvise a shield, but I was sweating.

  El Macareno said, “Let us see if there are bullfighters when there are bulls,” and Miguel came at me again. I planted my feet and waited. That wasn’t the way to fight a knifer, if he wasn’t particular as to whether he disemboweled you or merely slit your jugular vein. But Miguel had been given very particular instructions, and if his dilated pupils and streaming eyes and sniffing meant anything, he was hopped to the ear-lobes. You keep it simple with a hophead. Tell him to mark the man’s face and he will mark the man’s face. Anything else is superfluous. That is why hopheads make fine hired killers, if the instructions are specific enough. Give them a job and they will do it or die trying, provided the reward is something they can shoot into their veins.

  The knife flashed toward my face. I raised my left arm and caught the blade in the folds of my jacket. Miguel tore it loose and backed off, giggling. He circled me, his heels tapping loudly on the wooden floor. The knife darted at me. again, and I caught it again with the jacket; this time it stuck long enough for me to force Miguel’s right hand high and away from his body. All you can do is parry a knifer’s moves if he keeps the knife low, the blade pointing upward, as though ready to deliver an uppercut. But get the knife high, with his forearm exposed below it, and you can go on the offensive.

  I grabbed Miguel’s wrist with my left hand and turned it back down, half spinning him around. It was thin and small-boned, like a girl’s. As he turned, I closed the fingers of my right hand on his upper arm and spun him all the way, yanking his wrist up behind him and between his shoulder blades to complete the hammerlock. The knife clattered to the floor. Miguel screamed and stamped down hard with his left heel. All it hit was the floor. I levered his arm higher.

  “Enough?” I said.

  He stamped a second time. I yanked his arm up further. When the fingers reached the back of his neck there was a cracking sound, faint but audible. He shuddered and giggled and sagged against me. His arm had been broken between shoulder and elbow. I stepped back and let him fall.

  I turned to El Macareno. I was panting. He sat on the wine cask with his elbows on his knees, watching me. I nudged the knife in his direction with my right foot.

  “You want a try at it?” I said.

  “I?” he said in an amused voice. “I am no knife fighter. Miguel, I can tell you now, is one of the best. I am impressed.”

  “Was one of the best,” I said. El Macareno shrugged, went to the door, opened it and beckoned someone. Two guys came in, took a somewhat bored look around and carried Miguel out.

  “I am willing to take a chance with you,” El Macareno said.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “The day before yesterday Luz Robles came here to El Pimpi. She offered me five thousand American dollars if I would do two things for her. I refused.”

  I just kept looking at him.

  “Unfortunately, we weren’t alone. My son, who is called El Macareno II, was with us. Antonio is a good boy. He wished to be a matador, and he fought as a novillero for two seasons.” El Macareno shrugged again. “For some, no matter what they have in their hearts, it is impossible. The legs, señor. The legs do not obey. You wish to perform a perfect natural with the left hand, and you stare the bull in the eye, and you plant your legs and raise the scarlet muleta, and you feel that you understand the bull, and you are cold as ice inside, but when the bull charges it is as though your legs belonged to someone else. They are nervous legs. You cannot control them. They move back, destroying the natural, taking you out of the area of danger. What was to be a calm and beautiful encounter with death becomes an awkward foolishness. It was like that with my son Antonio. Obviously it was not like that with you
, when Miguel attacked you with his knife. I had to know.”

  He waited for me to say something. I lit a cigarette and blew a few smoke rings in his direction and remained silent.

  “Antonio’s mother died when he was very young. What can a man do, in my position, to raise a son? You can guess what I am. We Spaniards are the most independent people on earth, but what there is of an organized underworld in Madrid I control. This is the world Antonio knows. And realize that if he could not match his father as a fighter of bulls he at least is determined to match me in this. You understand?”

  He accepted my silence as understanding. “The day before yesterday, here in this room, Luz Robles asked me to kidnap her. I listened to her proposal, neither agreeing to do it nor refusing because as yet I did not understand, and five thousand American dollars is a lot of money. ‘You will send a ransom note to my uncle, the Captain General Santiago Sotomayor,’ she said. ‘You will send another, and a third. Each time he will fail to make contact with my abductors. He will become desperate. Finally contact will be made, in a lonely place of your choosing,’ she said. ‘He will be alone, with the money, as the note will specify. Whatever money you can get for my ransom,’ she said, ‘that is yours, in addition to the five thousand dollars. What you must do to earn it,’ she told me calmly, ‘is simple.’ She smiled when she said that. I thought I understood, but I was wrong.

  “‘You wish me to kill him,’ I said. She smiled again, shaking her head. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I want you to let me kill him.’

  “I knew what my answer would be. Trafficking in smuggled goods is one thing, but being an accessory to the murder of the former chief of the Guardia Civil, that is something else. I told her it was impossible. But then I looked at my son Antonio. Remember that the woman is beautiful, with the aloof gypsy beauty that challenges a man like the straight charge of a good fighting bull. Besides, Antonio no doubt feels that he has been under my wing too long, and the ransom money could help make him independent. He said, ‘I will do it for you, señorita.’

  “I sent the woman from the room. I told Antonio we were finished if he disobeyed me in this. He laughed. He said there was room for two jefes of the underworld in Madrid. I argued, but it was no use. I could have had him stopped bodily, but if I had we would be through as father and son. I knew that. I did nothing. He left with the woman. Now I say he must be stopped. As yet the only crime he has committed is the sending of a ransom note. That is extortion, not kidnaping. And Antonio is no fool; he would have covered his tracks. No one, not even you, could prove that he had done what has been done. You understand?”

  I still hadn’t said a word.

  “You wish to find Luz Robles, señor. I wish to stop Antonio before he is a party to murder. It would seem that the fates have brought us together. Understand that until you came here there was no course of action open to me. My men could have done what I am asking you to do, but what then? They would never take Antonio seriously again, or at the very least there would have been bad feeling between them and him. And in a few years I had hoped Antonio could assume my position as jefe here.

  “What must be done is simple. He must be taught a lesson. You must teach it to him. And the beauty of it is, señor, the utter beauty is that he need never know I sent you. I tell you where to find them, my son returns humbler but wiser, Don Santiago is not murdered, and you rescue Luz Robles. Now that you know all this, will you accept my apologies for the thing of Miguel and the knife?” He waved a hand, as though the thing of Miguel and the knife were of no importance. “I had to know what you were made of. Antonio may at times be a fool, but he is capable and dangerous. You understand?”

  I spoke for the first time since Miguel had been carried from the room. “What would have happened if I couldn’t handle Miguel?”

  “Haven’t I made that clear? You would have been of no use to me.” He grinned, happy that that alternative had not come to pass.

  “The next time you want to try my mettle, why not try it like this?” I suggested, and hit him as hard as I could in the pit of his stomach.

  He was tough. He could take a punch. He stumbled to one knee and his mouth flew open as he lurched against the wine cask, embracing it with both arms to keep from going all the way down. The guitar fell, and he went down after it on one elbow, smashing the sound box. Two strings twanged loose. He looked up at me, trying his best to breathe and not having a great deal of success.

  “You pass muster,” I said. “It will be a pleasure to work for you, señor. I’ll find Antonio and Luz Robles and I’ll break up that little old scheme they hatched. But the next time you want to see if I’ve got what it takes, don’t send a hophead at me with a knife.”

  He struggled to his feet. I didn’t help him. He threw himself on the wine cask and sat there with his head low between his knees, breathing raggedly. He managed a small and tired smile that must have cost him plenty.

  “Luz Robles and my son are in this together,” he said in a hoarse croak of a voice. “Never forget that. It is my guarantee you won’t go to the authorities. If Antonio were to be found guilty of extortion, then so would the woman.”

  “I get you. One hand washes the other,” I said. “Where are they?”

  He got to his feet and stood in a slight crouch, holding the left side of his abdomen. “We have … a small business enterprise on the outskirts of Zaragoza, the Garaje del Macareno. It is the land of our birth. I have traced Antonio that far. He feels confident there, like a bull in his querencia. You will disillusion him. You would also be wise, amigo, to ignore anything else you might see at the garage.”

  “If I ever need a smuggled part for an expensive sports car I’ll know where to go, is that what you mean?”

  He took me seriously. “Succeed in what you are trying to do for both of us, and I’m sure we could do business in automotive parts and other interesting items.”

  “There is one thing, now that you mention it,” I said, remembering. “I need some marijuana.”

  “It is a grave crime for a Spaniard to traffic in marijuana, amigo. Fifteen years in prison at the very least. How much do you need?”

  “A couple of decks will do, I guess.”

  He was gone for a few moments. When he returned he gave me what looked like two packs of Bisonte cigarettes. “The finest quality,” he assured me, and I thanked him. “The same quality that the woman of Don José smokes, in fact.”

  I wondered if there was anything he didn’t know. He said, “Some day I will decide whether I deserved that punch.”

  I told him to let me know when he did, and got out of there with my torn jacket.

  NINE

  The phone in my room at the Hilton rang at 12:45 that night. I had already paid my bill and packed, and was ready to go. It was Axel Spade calling me back.

  “Why’d you want me to call from a public phone?” he asked.

  “They probably still have the phones tapped at the ranch,” I said.

  “You’re onto something?”

  “You’re not going to like it,” I said, and told him what I’d learned from El Macareno, leaving out the location of the garage and the identity of my informant.

  He seemed to take it calmly enough. After all, he’d been married five times to an assortment of international beauties, all of whom had given him a rough time in one way or another.

  “You’re sure?” he asked.

  I said that my information was probably correct.

  “What do you want me to do?” he asked.

  “What you want me to do is more important. We can assume Luz is in no danger, but her uncle is a different story.”

  “We can’t assume anything of the sort,” Axel Spade said testily. “Her accomplice may decide to double-cross her and merely hold her for ransom. A man unscrupulous enough to do what she asked would be unscrupulous enough to do anything. Who is he, by the way?”

  “His name wouldn’t mean anything to you.” I didn’t bother to point out that, compare
d to Luz Robles, her accomplice was probably a babe in the woods. “But I think we can figure he’ll go along with Luz. He’s a guy out to prove something to himself.”

  “Then Luz is still in danger—from herself. We can’t let her go through with this.”

  “I kind of thought that’s what you’d say.”

  “What else can I say?”

  “You could say forget the whole thing. You could warn the old man and hightail it back to Switzerland. You could say you didn’t cotton to the idea of marrying a woman who could use your wedding as a foil for cold-blooded murder.”

  “Is that what you want me to do?”

  “I said what I wanted didn’t matter. I’m not in love with the girl, you are.”

  “You don’t understand. You don’t know what she’s like. She is a passionate girl, a magnificent woman. When I’m with her there is a constant, well—excitement, like a flow of electricity between us. I can’t live without her.”

  He had probably felt the. same way about at least five other women. For a guy who could use his brain like an IBM 360 computer when it came to international finance, he sure was a pushover with women. The one thing he had never had, thanks to his amorous entanglements, was a dull life.

  “Besides,” he said, “how can you blame her? The old man ruined her life. He killed her father, destroyed her mother and sent her into exile in a foreign country. And her mother was mentally disturbed, don’t forget. Maybe the old woman poisoned her mind. You’ve got to have compassion for her.”

  “Okay, okay,” I said. “But we’ll leave the compassion to you. I’ve got a job to do.”

  “You know where she is?”

  “I think so.”