Drumbeat Madrid

by Stephen Marlowe

  He jumped almost a foot when the rocket went off.

  That gave us about a minute before the first runners would reach Estafeta Street. April’s hand was on my shoulder, holding tight. The idea of the Miuras had gotten to her. I had enough time to wonder what I was doing there. Moyers was a nice enough guy in a sad-sack way, but I wasn’t his keeper. But I remembered what I’d told Axel Spade. Luz had already committed one murder and gotten away with it. I hadn’t been able to stop her, and I couldn’t blow the whistle on her now. When you’re on a case you get to know the people involved. You buy a little bit of their lives. Or maybe it’s the other way around.

  “They’re coming,” April said.

  The first runners exploded into sight up the cobblestone street, berets clutched in their hands, feet flying. These were Miura bulls chasing them today. Then for a few seconds there were only the bare cobbles, and then another group of runners, many more of them, packed closely together. Moyers’ knuckles were white on the barricade. Maybe they won’t, I thought. Maybe they’re not going to do it.

  Up the street, a few men ducked under the barricade and joined the runners who had started at the corrals. Sotomayor was on his feet, leaning over the barricade, his cold eyes staring steadily in the direction the Miuras would come from.

  I heard Luz say two words to Ray Moyers. What she said was, “You promised.”

  “Tomorrow,” he told her. “They won’t be Miuras tomorrow.”

  Luz just gave him a scornful look and ducked under the barricade.

  “Qué pasa?” Sotomayor cried, reaching out too late to stop her.

  Moyers got one leg over the lowest rail of the barricade.

  “Hold it,” I told him. “You don’t want to go out there.” I grabbed his arm.

  His eyes were on Luz’s slim form. She had reached the second group of runners, who had slowed almost to a standstill in a bottleneck like the one we’d witnessed yesterday. In their eagerness to keep their distance from the bulls, many of them had fallen. They were stacked like cordwood near the barricade on the far side of the street, pinned down there by other runners surging against them. Only two things could clear that bottleneck in a hurry. The first was a bulldozer. The second was a herd of bulls.

  Moyers shook my arm off. “Get your hands off me,” he said, and slipped through the barricade and was running. His legs weren’t steady. He lurched to one side, staggered and almost fell. He was drunk, as Luz had hoped he would be.

  I vaulted the top rail of the barricade and went after him. I heard April shoat my name. Someone who liked the way I’d gone over the rail instead of under gave me an ole! and for a moment I told myself, okay, hero, don’t take any bows, you’re just like five thousand other guys who have been running every morning, the only difference being you’re trying to stop a foolproof murder that may not even happen.

  And then I saw the Miuras. They didn’t come fast. They couldn’t. The first realization I had that they were on the way was when the mass of bodies packed together at the far barricade began to move. It began to move the way coal in a scuttle begins to move when you tip the scuttle to let the coal pour into the furnace. Arms and legs flailing, mouths open and shouting, eyes wide with fear, the crowd still managed to give the impression of a single body as it came. It didn’t run, or crawl, or creep, or slither. It came sliding across the street, shoveled by the seven Miura bulls.

  They were not quite black, but a very dark gray against the bright red and white costumes. They were massive. I did not believe that bulls could be so large. They made the four steers that were trying vainly to herd them look like hides stretched on wire frameworks. The first four hit the crowd like a wall, heads down, horns close to the cobblestones. That was when the crowd began to slide.

  Then those huge heads started tossing, and from the fallen, tangled mob, bodies rose like hydrogen-filled balloons to gyrate in the air before hitting the cobblestones again. One bull got through, and another, with all four of the steers. The crowd came toward me like lava rolling down a hill.

  Luz and Moyers were still on their feet, not ten yards from where I stood. Moyers had a bewildered, stricken look on his face, like an innocent man facing a firing squad. He began to run clumsily in my direction. So did Luz, light on her feet. I had expected an expression of calculation on her face or maybe, in the end, fear. I saw neither. What I saw was a look of elation. I think she even forgot what she’d gone out there for.

  Moyers’ clumsy running attracted a Miura the same way that a cape in the deft hands of a matador can. Huge tossing muscle rising angrily, horns wide and thick at the base but narrowing to stiletto points, he lowered his head and charged. Moyers reached me, turned and saw what was behind him. His drink-heavy legs did a little dance to the left and back to the right, and then the bull’s muzzle hit him with a dull thud and Moyers went up, untouched by the horns, and landed in a heap. I got around behind the bull and slapped his flank. That sounds suicidal but is not. A fighting bull kills with his horns, not his hooves.

  Luz stood watching me. Two more of the bulls and most of the crowd went by. Distracted by the movement, our bull trotted off. Moyers got up, groggy. Someone shoved against me and fell and scrambled to his feet and ran for it. I felt punchy. Like Luz, for a moment I just stood there.

  Then I heard a shout. It was a desperate sound, with all of a man’s hopes and dreams in it, ending on a terrible note of despair. The single word shouted in Spanish didn’t register right away, but the voice I knew. It was Santiago Sotomayor. He had struggled through the barrier on his aluminum crutches, because Luz was out in the street. I turned and saw him coming across the cobbles as quickly as he could, gasping with the effort, his broad shoulders heaving, his muscular torso thrusting forward. The one word he had shouted in that terrible voice was hija. It is the Spanish word for daughter.

  There was nothing he could do, and nothing I could do. Luz never even saw the bull coming.

  The head went down and the right horn hooked and caught her in the buttocks. She shot upward, feet off the ground and arms waving wildly. She flipped over once in midair and came down. The bull was waiting with his left horn. It caught her in the throat and drove her to the cobblestones. The great head smashed forward again, and after that it was all left horn, driving into Luz’s face over and over, shattering it against the cobblestones like an eggshell.

  TWENTY-THREE

  The first Axel Spade knew about it was when they brought the old man and Luz’s body back to the ranch.

  Spade hadn’t come to Pamplona once for the fiesta. He’d closeted himself with the thick sheaf of papers I’d found in the oilskin pouch. That was the only thing that mattered until he saw Luz’s body on a stretcher, with a sheet draped over it, the ruined face covered. He lifted the sheet. Nobody stopped him. He let it drop and walked to a window and looked out at the bright late morning sunlight.

  It was two days before he asked me how it had happened. I told him, as honestly as I could. I left out nothing.

  “She was Santiago Sotomayor’s daughter, of course,” he said in a flat voice. “I wonder if she ever knew it.”

  Sotomayor was a broken man who, overnight, was well advanced into premature senility. He craved company. He would sit under the Miura head in the grand salon of the ranch, talking endlessly of what it was like to kill that Miura on horseback as a rejoneador. He told the story over and over again. He didn’t leave the wheelchair, except when his manservant put him to bed at night. When he spoke, he dribbled saliva.

  “To rejón,” he would say, in almost a singsong voice, grinning vacuously, “with a fine string of horses, that is the thing. That is what life is all about.” He told his manservant, “We must invite that French military attaché to the ranch more often—what was his name? He knew, he could understand what it is to rejón. A fine man, that one.”

  Spade went on being morose and uncommunicative until the day after the funeral. He was in his bedroom at the ranch, packing. I sat with a martini i
n my hand, watching him. He snapped an expensive cowhide bag shut and stared for a moment at the ace-of-spades hallmark on it. When he looked up, there was just a suggestion of the old Axel Spade twinkle in his eye.

  He said, without any preamble, as though I had asked him a question, “There were a hundred pages, typed half in Spanish and half in Russian. My Russian isn’t very good, but I could manage it. At least I got the gist. What would you say if I told you that a daring man who had nothing to lose and thought this the most important thing in the world might be able to reclaim the Spanish gold?”

  “A billion dollars,” I said.

  “All I said was might. It isn’t likely, but it’s possible.” The twinkle in his eye grew more pronounced. “Naturally, it would be extremely hazardous. Hernando Sotomayor tried to insure the gold the only way he could, by involving the lives and reputations of a lot of important people.” He lit one of his thin black cigars and added musingly, “I wonder how many of them are still alive.” He said nothing else.

  “I’m listening,” I said.

  He laughed, taking the oilskin pouch from his pocket and slapping it against his palm.

  “Not yet, my friend. I haven’t decided whether I’m the man to do it. For the first time in my life, I’m almost afraid.” He studied the cigar. He put the pouch away.

  “But should I ever decide to undertake it,” he said slowly, “I would need the kind of help you can give me.”

  “You know where to get in touch with me,” I said.

  A half hour later we were in the Jaguar driving north. In the three days it took us to reach Geneva, Spade never mentioned the gold again. But I could tell he was thinking.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  copyright © 1966 by Fawcett Publications, Inc.

  This edition published in 2012 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media

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