Drumbeat Madrid

by Stephen Marlowe

  It was cool in the tent and not quite dawn outside when I awoke. April nuzzled against my neck and sighed contentedly. We had danced in the streets all night and made love and slept perhaps an hour. Soon the bulls would be running again.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” April asked with a sleepy smile as I got to my feet.

  “The bulls,” I said.

  “The bulls can wait.”

  I still felt a little drank from the night before. April was waiting for me in the open sleeping bag. I went to her.

  Later, but it hardly seemed later at all, we stood pressed against the wooden barrier on Estafeta Street. The rocket had already been fired and the crowd was pushing and shouting all around us. On the other side of the barricade we could see men running over the cobblestones, shoving, tripping, scrambling to their feet, looking over their shoulders with a strange eager fear. The bulls appeared at a gallop, herded by the steers and the herdsmen carrying long poles, the bulls bunched tightly, massive black shoulders and flanks brushing, great horns bone-white in the early morning sunlight. A man went down and a woman screamed. Then the man was up, a surprised look on his face, rising, feet off the ground, as a bull found and hooked him with a horn and tossed its huge head, the man rising higher, seeming to sit astride the moist dark muzzle of the bull, higher and then finally clear of the horn, still looking surprised as he struck the barricade, dazed but unhurt because the horn had caught only his clothing. Then the bulls rushed past, the clatter of their hooves on the cobblestones receding, the clanking of the steer bells growing fainter.

  I watched Santiago Sotomayor, in his wheel chair, at the edge of the barricade. It was the third day of the running of the bulls. In his eyes I saw a look of intense longing. He half rose as he gazed across the barricade, then dropped back into his wheelchair.

  I watched Luz Robles. We all met at the same part of the barricade on Estafeta Street every morning. She was standing with her brother Ray, her arm linked in his. She smiled up at him. It was not the smile of a sister. I heard her say something, softly, in a teasing voice.

  “You won’t catch me going in there,” he said, laughing nervously. He was very drunk.

  “What kind of a man are you?” she asked, still teasing.

  They were both wearing the white blouse and white ducks of a bull runner. So was I. I didn’t remember where I had gotten them.

  “When you’re this drunk it’s safer to watch,” Ray Moyers said.

  “They’re all as drunk as you are,” Luz told him. “If I were a man, I’d be running.”

  On the fourth morning MacNeil Hollister didn’t show up at his usual place at the barricade. It was almost a relief. All along he had been sullen and ugly. Luz was spending all her time with her brother, and Hollister must have suspected what was going on between April and me.

  “There’s Neil!” Luz cried as the bull runners came streaming by.

  Sure enough, Hollister was running with the bulls.

  “If Neil can do it,” Luz said contemptuously, drawing away from Ray Moyers, taunting him.

  Six bulls rushed past, herded close by the steers. I heard stouts of warning. The last bull was not running with the pack. He trotted up then, hooking and tossing, surrounded by more bull runners. They waved their berets before his eyes and he slashed with his horns, like a swordsman riposting. They pounded his flanks and back. Someone pulled his tail just as he hooked and caught a man. This time, though, it was no mere tossing. You could see the horn entering the man’s thigh, high up. He whirled around and dropped, a spreading stain of red on the white duck trousers. Too eager to gore, the bull butted with his head. The herdsmen came running back with their long poles. Suddenly Santiago Sotomayor was up, holding the barricade with his left hand and swinging the aluminum crutch with his right, striking at the bull’s withers. The bull turned and Sotomayor, leaning far out, calmly prodded his muzzle with the crutch. By then the herdsmen had arrived, using their long poles to guide the bull away. There were shouts of ole! and someone cried Sotomayor’s name. The old man smiled a thin smile, very pleased with himself. But that night we learned that the man who was gored died in the hospital. He was the first casualty of the fiesta. He would not be the last.

  We were drinking at the Tortuga that night. I recognized the girl Concha as she came toward us. She had spotted Ray Moyers through the crowd. But then she saw Luz and the way they were together, and she turned away. I wondered what Luz had up her sleeve. Moyers’ attitude had always bothered her, but now she seemed to be encouraging it. I stuck close to them, and it annoyed April. After a while she went to the plaza with Hollister to see the fireworks. You could hear the explosions faintly inside the bodega.

  What had driven Concha away was the fact that Moyers and Luz looked more like lovers than brother and sister. They were sitting on a wine cask, close together, hips and flanks touching, staring into each other’s eyes. Luz caressed Moyers’ cheek with her hand.

  “We’d better get going,” she said. She stood up, and Moyers heaved himself to his feet.

  He looked too drunk to drive, and I pointed that out with the wisdom and candor of someone not quite sober himself.

  “I’ll do the driving,” Luz said. “It isn’t far to the ranch.”

  “See you in the morning then. Same place?”

  “Hasta mañana,” Ray Moyers said. He went off with Luz, looking at her the way an alcoholic who has been ordered to stop drinking looks at a bottle of his favorite Scotch.

  I started back through the still-crowded streets toward the football field. A man called my name, a small, bookish-looking Spaniard with narrow shoulders. It was Captain Primo de la Vaca, the Guardia officer who had questioned me after José Sotomayor was shot.

  “I have much to thank you for,” he said.

  “Such as what?”

  “El Macareno. We have wanted to put that one away for a long time. He had much to say about the kidnaping, señor. He claims his son was working for Luz Robles.”

  “You’d never be able to prove it.”

  “I know that,” he admitted sadly in his deep voice. “But still, it is what brings me to Pamplona. I hope to catch a murderer.”

  “How would that be?”

  “If Luz Robles tried to kill her uncle, she would have had even more reason to kill her brother José. Not to mention the other one, the norteamericano named Moyers.”

  I said nothing, and Primo de la Vaca continued, “Consider. A Swiss named Kohler, a banker from Geneva, flies to Spain. He visits Don Cayetano Prieto y Azaña, and a meeting is arranged with the surviving heirs of Hernando Sotomayor. A meeting, señor, which you attended. Shall I guess what occurred at that meeting, or will you enlighten me?”

  His knowledge hardly surprised me. Kohler of course would have been checked in by the Guardia at the Madrid airport.

  “They were settling Sotomayor’s legacy,” I admitted.

  “Naturally. That can be of no importance to us. There is no way we can stop a citizen of Venezuela and one of the United States from going to Geneva to collect their fortune.” He smiled. “We can only hope that some of it finds its way to Spain, to be spent here. However, has it occurred to you that there is a very good chance Luz Robles will make an attempt on the life of her one surviving brother?”

  “Or the other way around,” I suggested.

  “That one? Never. But the Robles woman is a different story. We cannot prove she tried to kill her uncle. We have been unable to establish that she was even in Madrid when her brother José was murdered. The American army officer MacNeil Hollister was, by the way. Or at least he was there the day the Robles woman disappeared. They were overheard at the bar of the Ritz having what sounded like a lovers’ quarrel.”

  “That’s what it was,” I said, glad that Primo de la Vaca had cleared up that loose end for me. “He had hopes of being Luz Robles’ novio before she was engaged to Spade.”

  “At any rate, this time the Robles woman will find the circumstances le
ss to her liking. This time we will be ready.”

  “This time she has too much to lose,” I said. It was what I’d told myself before, but it no longer rang true.

  “No, señor. If she was clever in the past, this time she will have to be ever so much more clever.”

  In the morning on Estafeta Street, Ray Moyers was so drunk he could hardly stand, even when holding the top rail of the barricade. The bulls that would be killed in the arena later in the day came galloping shoulder-to-shoulder between the steers. Moyers watched them, his face pale. He was fascinated. Several runners went down at once, forming a bottleneck in the cobbled street. The bulls plowed into it, trampling, unable to get through. They milled about, calmed by the clanking of the steer bells, but still the great heads tossed, and bodies flew in all directions. One bull broke away from the herd near where a runner had fallen on the edge of the crowd. The man clasped his hands over the back of his head and lay absolutely still, playing dead. The bull sniffed at him and trotted off, and a few seconds later the bottleneck was cleared and the herd forced its way through. The man who had played dead got up and dusted himself off. Miraculously no one had been badly hurt.

  “God, did you see that?” Moyers asked Luz. “The one who didn’t move. I thought he was done for.” He shook his head. “It was really something to see.”

  The spectators at the barricade began to disperse. Sotomayor wheeled off with a man I didn’t know, talking. Luz asked her brother, “Don’t tell me seeing it’s enough for you? I’m disappointed.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You ought to want to be part of it. I do.”

  “I’ll stick to being a spectator, thanks.”

  “Well, I’m not going to.”

  Moyers laughed his nervous laugh. “You’ve got to. They don’t let women out there.”

  Luz laughed too. “What will they do, fine me? Tomorrow I’m going to run.”

  “I won’t let you,” Moyers said.

  “No? Try and stop me.”

  He couldn’t stop her, of course, not unless he held her by force at the barricade. All she had to do was duck under the rails when the bulls came by.

  “Or better still,” Luz suggested, “come with me.”

  “Me? Forget it.”

  “Are you scared?”

  “Sure I’m scared.”

  “Well,” Luz said, turning her back on him and watching Neil Hollister, who had run again that morning, come back up Estafeta Street with a look of elation on his face, “it takes all kinds.” She greeted Hollister, who was panting, with an enthusiastic hug. Moyers watched them, his face bleak.

  What Luz was trying to do was obvious then. If by taunting him she could get Moyers out on the street when the bulls were running, if she could get him there caught in the press of runners, too scared to think straight, too drunk to be light on his feet, just waiting in the milling crowd with everyone shoving and fighting to get clear of hooves and horns, anything might happen.

  It wasn’t cut and dried, like putting cyanide in his coffee or a bullet in his brain. She had no guarantee it would work, but it had this one advantage—whatever happened would be part of the innocent fun and games that was the running of the bulls in Pamplona. If Luz remained calm, if she waited for the right moment, if she was lucky and Ray was not, she would walk off the street thirteen and a half million bucks richer and with her hands absolutely clean. The danger to herself was slight too. Nobody would be trying to kill her.

  At midnight in the Tortuga I told April I was going to hit the sack.

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “I’m beat,” I said. That wasn’t true, but I didn’t want Luz to be the only one with a clear head in the morning.

  “These older men,” April said with a chuckle. “My mother always warned me about decrepit types in their thirties. Did you know you actually have two gray hairs on your chest?”

  “No!” I said, aghast.

  “Or maybe it’s three. Seeing as I’m a little bit beat too, why don’t we go and count them?”

  We returned to the tent. The camp grounds were silent and deserted. We began to make love but at first I wasn’t with it, thinking about tomorrow. Then April’s big and. lovely and familiar but somehow always new body took over, and it was very fine for both of us. We lay the whole night in each other’s arms. I slept like a baby.

  TWENTY-TWO

  We reached the barricade at a few minutes before seven the next morning. It was still night-cool, and a low mist hung over the cobblestones. The wooden fence, already jammed with spectators, rose out of the mist surrealistically. More onlookers were perched on window ledges on both sides of the street. I had gone cold turkey since midnight and I wanted a drink. I didn’t take one.

  Santiago Sotomayor’s wheelchair was at its accustomed place along the barricade, but neither Luz, Moyers nor MacNeil Hollister had come yet. Sotomayor’s cold blue eyes were staring fixedly at the mist. It was like thick smoke roiling along the ground.

  “They are Miura bulls today,” Sotomayor said tensely. The big Miuras bear the same relation to run-of-the-ranch fighting bulls that Willie Mays does to a Little League ball player.

  “Have you ever seen the Miuras?” Sotomayor asked me. Not waiting for an answer, he went on, “They are big, and the bloodline goes all the way back, it is claimed, to prehistoric times. A four-year-old Miura weighs close to six hundred kilos, and the shoulders are as high off the ground as a tall man’s chest, and the horns are wide with points as sharp as a razor. They are brave, the Miuras, and the only thing they know is to fight until they die. I have seen matadors who have cut ears in Madrid on lesser bulls quake at the sight of the toril gate opening for a Miura. I was there in Linares when Manolete, the best bullfighter that ever lived, was gored to death by a Miura after he had put the sword in to the knuckles. That bull was already dead but did not know it.”

  He sighed, looking at the mist and remembering. “Once when I was a child my father took me to a feria in Estremadura. It was illegal, but in the plaza they had placed an iron cage, and in the cage they put a Bengal tiger and a bull. They fought. The bull, all bloody from a dozen fang and claw wounds, killed the tiger. Then he broke the iron bars of the cage and ran across the sand and jumped the barrera. Four people were destroyed by those horns before they shot him. It was a Miura bull.”

  The old Captain General’s words weren’t the only indication that the bulls this morning would be Miuras. There was a tension in the crowd. They all knew what the bulls would be. Waiting for the sound of the rocket, you heard the word on every side—Miura. It was almost as though, till now, the bull runners had been running an infiltration course where the guns fired just over their heads were loaded with blank cartridges. Now they were ready. Now for the first time the guns would be loaded.

  I looked at my watch: five to seven. Still no sign of Luz and Ray Moyers. Maybe they weren’t going to show up, I thought.

  Primo de la Vaca, in uniform, made his way through the crowd to Sotomayor’s side.

  “Miuras,” the old man said.

  “Sí, Don Santiago. Miuras.”

  The first rays of the early morning sun hit the cobblestones. The mist began to lift.

  “What’s the matter?” April said. “You look nervous.” She had a wineskin in her hands. “Here. You look like you can use some.”

  “No, thanks.”

  April took a long squirt and passed the skin to Primo de la Vaca. I was stone sober. So was Santiago Sotomayor, who was abstemious. That made two of us. I wanted to stay that way. Yesterday what Luz was trying to do had seemed obvious. But now, the morning after, I wasn’t so sure. You could even stretch a point and say she had timed it perfectly, goading Moyers just so much every day, building it, letting it grow, waiting for the Miuras. But even if she could get him out there in the street, nervous, his legs leaden from lack of sleep and too much wine, there was no guarantee it would work. Other inept bull runners, even with monumental hangovers, had
survived the running, even, probably, with Miuras. It was leaving too much to chance.

  But then I began to speculate on what she might do once she got him out there, lost in the crowd of frantic runners. If she had timed her campaign, she could also time a push, just one little push at the right split second, when the Miuras were charging up the street. It would be like shoving Moyers in front of an express train. Still, it didn’t have to work. He could be lucky. He might escape those horns. That would give Luz a few moments of regret because she’d have to settle for half of her father’s fortune.

  The point was, if she tried it, she had absolutely nothing to lose.

  “Here we are,” Luz said brightly to her uncle.

  For a moment her presence made me relax. If she were going to try it, wouldn’t she make her move elsewhere? On Mercaderes Street maybe, closer to the corrals, away from the eyes of her uncle? But no, I decided, she’d do everything the way it had been done before. We expected her here with Moyers. Everything open and aboveboard. If they slipped under the barricade this morning, as so many other people would, who could blame Luz for what happened?

  Her eyes were bright. She was wearing the Navarrese costume, and she had caught her hair up and tucked it under the red beret. Moyers looked awful, his eyes bloodshot, his hands clenching and unclenching on the top rail of the barricade, his face unshaven and sallow. He kept staring up the street and trying to swallow. He looked like a man going to his own execution.