by David Hewson
Menéndez thought about it and nodded.
‘Nothing forensic?’
‘Nothing we don’t know already. No prints. Nothing on the weapons to suggest you couldn’t buy them down any market.’
Torrillo shook his head. ‘Is this man clever or just lucky?’
‘Maybe both,’ said Maria. They didn’t stare at her now, when she talked. The scene outside Castañeda’s office seemed to have bound her to them somehow. Or perhaps they just didn’t have the time to think about it, to separate her from what they were doing.
‘The holiday starts to get really busy from now on,’ said Torrillo. ‘We’ve got thousands out there tonight in the church parades alone, all over the city. He couldn’t be more anonymous. We’d stand more chance of finding him if he dressed up as a waiter, for God’s sake. He’s clever.’
The car bumped off the road and onto a makeshift track of dust and stone. They drove along it for 400 yards, then stopped in front of a small, single-storey farmhouse built of pale-brown stone. On the porch, in a large raffia chair, Maria could make out the figure of an old man in a white shirt and pale-grey trousers, cream straw hat pulled down over his eyes.
Torrillo chuckled. ‘You’re going to like this. Believe me. Old Manolo here, in his day, was one of the best bullfighters around. A bullfighter’s bullfighter too, not the Hollywood stuff you see now. So let’s leave El Guapo to the end of the conversation, huh? I got a feeling we might get some fireworks when that name comes up.’
They climbed out of the car and headed towards the pool of shade beneath the straw-covered roof of the porch. Abruptly, from nowhere, she thought again: Will this story let me sleep tonight?
Manolo Figuera sat motionless in the cane chair on the porch. When they arrived he had gone into the house, returned with a half-full bottle of white wine, a glass bowl full of ice cubes, a plate of olives. He had set them down on a small wicker table, then beckoned them to sit down. The house, the chairs, the cracked, white wood porch floor all seemed brittle and aged. Like Figuera himself. In front of the house grew a handful of tomatoes, a few aubergine plants. A stone water tank was half-full, the surface dark green and algaed. Overhead, a party of swifts swooped and sang, high-pitched chitterings against a cloudless cerulean sky.
‘You saw me fight?’ he said to them.
Maria and Menéndez shook their heads.
Torrillo said, ‘They missed something. When I was a boy, my father used to take me to the corrida. In the city. El Puerto, sometimes, Ronda too, once. For the festival. It was . . . something.’
Figuera smiled. ‘It was a long time ago, that something. No one should remember it now. How old do you think I am?’
Maria looked at him and guessed. ‘Seventy?’
He laughed. Then spoke very precisely, showing clean, white, artificial teeth. ‘Eighty-two. Eighty-two. I walk three miles every day. To see my daughter in the village. I keep house. I grow a few vegetables. If you live life like you did in the ring after you stop, you go on forever. Well . . .’
He made a small gesture with his hand towards the table, poured four glasses, then dropped an ice cube in his own. Maria almost gasped. The wine was so chilled it had little taste. Just a hard, flinty feeling on the tongue.
‘I was never a star. Too conventional for that. Even in those days tradition was not something that won the crowds. The purists, the aficionados, they liked me. The crowds, they preferred the handsome boys who flirted and did the tricks. Not so much as today. But it was there. I made a living. I own my home, which is not sumptuous, but you will find no debts when I die.’
‘Don Manolo,’ said Menéndez, and Maria noted the formality, ‘we need your advice.’
Figuera picked at some olives and listened intently.
‘There is a crime, perhaps more than one crime, in the city, which has some connection with the bulls. My sergeant, Torrillo, hopes that you may help us . . . understand it better.’
‘Understand? If I can. But I am an old man. I go to the city rarely. To the bulls never, except for the romería in Ronda, and that is more habit than pleasure.’
‘Be that as it may. I would still appreciate your thoughts.’
‘On what?’
Menéndez played with his glass, swirling the wine around with gentle movements of his hand.
‘We have a man who has murdered two people, tried to murder another, using something I can only describe as a kind of simulation of the corrida.’
‘You mean he kills people in the ring?’
‘No. But he uses the weapons – the darts, the lances, the sword.’ A pause. ‘He removes their ears.’
The old man’s face grew stony.
‘The ears are not the matador’s to take,’ Figuera said. ‘They’re in the gift of the president of the corrida. A reward for bravery, for some extraordinary effort.’
‘He removes the ears,’ Torrillo repeated. ‘Leaves one at the scene. The other . . .’ The cop shrugged. ‘However we look at it, there seems to be some deliberate attempt to make the deaths resemble the ring.’
Figuera shook his head and emitted a long, croaky sigh. The muscles relaxed, making the flesh hang on his cheeks like leather on a frame. He reached for the table, picked up a pair of sunglasses, then put them on. ‘It becomes bright for these old eyes sometimes. You were saying.’
‘We were wondering, firstly, if you knew of a case in which someone connected with the ring, in whatever capacity, had done something similar,’ Menéndez said.
‘You have no records?’
‘We have records. But they go back only a few years. Paperwork is not a strong point in the city. We can see no parallels, but even if they existed, they might be hard to find, and if there was a parallel elsewhere it would be impossible. You travelled throughout Spain in your career. You know many people. What could take us a year to find, you might be able to point out for us very quickly.’
Nothing was intelligible behind the sunglasses. The old man drained his glass, poured another one, dropped in two more ice cubes.
‘Bullfighting is about honour. Not crime. Even today, even with the fancy boys you see on the TV – oh, I watch them still, I have television, a video recorder – even with them, it is a question of honour. Without honour you fail in the ring. This goes without question. You speak of crime. You know, bullfighting is a legal matter. The president may, if he wishes, jail any matador who refuses to fight the bull. Now that would be a crime, and while I have heard it has happened, I have never witnessed it myself. But for a matador to commit the kind of crime you see in the streets? Never.’
‘It doesn’t need to be the matador,’ said Torrillo. ‘There are others. Maybe a picador. Maybe an administrator.’
‘No one, no one who goes into the ring would do this kind of thing. For what reason? As for the hangers-on, well, perhaps, but it does not convince me. There’s petty crime in bullfighting from time to time. Embezzlement, corruption, a little dipping of the beak here and there. What do you expect? The corrida is part of the world at large. But never, in my experience, any more than this. These administrators are little people, essential I suppose, but little people. Bank clerks. Accountants. Lawyers. Do you know what it’s like to kill a bull with a sword? No. No one knows until you’ve done it. It’s a question of strength, physical and spiritual too. To kill a man this way . . . I cannot imagine. You would need such steel in you. These little creatures do not have it.’
He paused, put the glass down. ‘You say he has killed more than one person in this way?’
‘Yes. Two that we know of, one he tried to kill.’
‘And you think he may kill more?’
Menéndez drained his glass and declined another. ‘You read us as well as you used to read your bulls, Don Manolo.’
‘A lieutenant in the police force does not come all this way with his sergeant and his charming companion to talk to an old man without good reason.’
‘We think that this may be linked in some way to Sema
na Santa and, yes, we fear there may be some sort of cycle involved.’
‘I see.’
‘There is one other factor, too. It appears the man wears the robes of a penitent, as a disguise presumably. Scarlet robes. We presume those of the Brotherhood of the Blood of Christ, though we’re not sure, and in any case that doesn’t suggest with any certainty that he’s a member.’
‘Ah.’
They waited, in vain.
‘Might this mean something to you, Don Manolo?’ asked Menéndez at last.
‘I seem to be drinking most of the wine. It’s a hot day, but this is unusual for me. Perhaps the lady would fetch a fresh bottle from the refrigerator. It’s in the kitchen, to the right. There’s a corkscrew in the drawer.’
From behind the dark glasses he read her expression. ‘Do not worry, my dear. I shall wait until you return.’
When she came back, she poured him a fresh glass, then sat down. Menéndez’s hand hovered over his notebook, pen poised.
Figuera sipped. ‘It is a good wine. From one of the sherry houses at Jerez. You know, they have so many grapes they do not know what to do with them these days. No one wishes to drink fino any more, not even the English. So they turn them into this and I, for one, will not complain.’
He removed the sunglasses, put them on the table, then rubbed his eyes. They were darting: alert, observant.
‘There’s only one occasion of which I am aware when people, more than two people in this case, were killed in anything like the way you’ve described. You won’t find it in your records, though there may be a few still alive who could tell you much more accurately than I what occurred. If they’re willing, and that I somehow doubt. Besides. This was a long time ago. Before any of you were born.’
‘I think we should know,’ said Menéndez.
‘I thought you would,’ Figuera replied curtly. ‘We have spent the best part of half a century politely refusing to talk about, to think about, the war. And now there are always ears that wish to listen. Now that it is too late.’
During the war, said Figuera, the people of the city were divided. Into three: the right, the left, and those who lived in between, the great, hushed majority for whom life was enough of a struggle already, without the need for fighting.
‘It was into this category that I fell. When people ask me where I stood in the war, I look them in the eye and I say “indoors”. Read that as cowardice if you like, but I think I am no coward. It is just that I could never kill another Spaniard for such a petty reason as politics. So I killed bulls, not that there were many rings that had the money to pay in those days. Of course, if the Germans had invaded, or the British, or anyone, then I would have fought. But for the bandits we had running Spain then, no. I was young, I was newly married and we hoped for a family. I was determined that I would not become involved. But then, so were most of us. The middle was an uncertain place to be. It shifted, almost by the day. As they fought, the Falange and the communists, it changed so that you became marked not for what you did, but for what you did not do. My enemy’s enemy is my friend – you know this saying? This was what it was like. However much you tried to stay aloof from it all, they would come on both sides to try to ensnare you. I had a little local fame from the ring. It gave me a measure of charmed protection. Had I been a different kind of artist, a painter, perhaps, or a poet, like Lorca, I would have been a marked man. Many were much less fortunate and became swept up, against their will. And this is why we did not speak of it for so long. You may read of the atrocities today, the death camps, the assassination squads, and think that these must have been special men, hard, political men with fire in their bellies. No. They were you and me mostly. Postmen, bakers, waiters, shopkeepers. Men in the middle who had been swallowed up by one side or the other and suddenly found themselves in this violent new world. Men who, before the war, would never have hurt anyone, even in anger, became creatures who would kill a woman, a child even, without a thought, just because of their name or the place where they lived. This was a civil war. There is a difference.’
‘La Soledad,’ said Menéndez. ‘You saw this place.’
‘Never.’ The old man spat out the word. ‘Never. We knew it was there, everyone did. That it was an abomination. But no one in their right mind went near the place, except for those whose relatives were inside. They would go to the gates – it was very well protected – and try to pass food in through the guards. I doubt that much of it arrived. At first, La Soledad was simply a prison, you understand. The Falange made it a holding point for those soldiers it captured in battle. Then something changed. The soldiers went, shipped to the fighting elsewhere probably. Civilians took their place. I remember the time. It was May 1936. For a whole month no one in the city spoke of La Soledad, but everyone knew, understood that something shocking and shameful was happening there.’
‘For a month only?’
‘When Franco heard the rumours, the gossip, in Madrid, he sent one of his officers to investigate. The entire camp command was changed, the men in charge disappeared. Then it became simply another prison camp. There were executions still, of course. And local people continued to disappear, though I doubt to La Soledad. Franco owned Andalusia by then. Even he had his limits.’
‘And what happened,’ said Maria, ‘was that during this month, before things changed, people were killed as if they were in the ring? As we’ve described?’
‘So the street gossip claimed. And much more. Some, they say, were put into a makeshift ring with a bull that had already been enraged, and forced to fight it without weapons. Others were treated as if they themselves were bulls. The camp people would attack them with darts, with lances, and finally kill them, with a sword through the heart. These were the stories we heard that month. At first no one could believe them, but then people reported seeing bodies, hearing screams. We knew it was true. You only had to look into the faces of the men who came back. The men who were responsible and lived among us, took coffee and a coñac by our sides. We knew.’
Maria shook her head. ‘And this was the time that Cristina Lucena’s family was killed? When she somehow managed to escape from the camp?’
Figuera reached for his glass, took a deep swig.
‘Doña Cristina is an honourable old woman from one of the greatest families in Spain. What happened to her family was a disgrace.’
‘But how did she escape?’
He toyed with the sunglasses. ‘Why ask me? The woman can speak for herself. It’s not my business to spread tittle-tattle about such individuals.’
‘We’re talking about murders, Manolo,’ said Torrillo. ‘We need to know.’
‘If the good lady herself has chosen not to speak about what happened all that time ago, it’s not for me to betray her confidence, even if I knew something. Which I don’t. I say again, you must ask her.’
‘She’s old,’ said Maria.
‘She’s younger than me,’ he said with a twinkle in his eye.
‘She’s frail. Perhaps we should spare her the pain.’
Figuera snorted and it was not a pleasant noise. ‘She’s Cristina Lucena. She’s stronger than any of us and, if you ask, she will tell you. If she wishes to do so.’
‘We will,’ said Menéndez. ‘And the brotherhood?’
‘The brotherhood.’
His head rolled back on its shoulders. The sky was full of swifts now. Their cries made a chorus of high-pitched squeals above them.
‘You know the answer,’ said Figuera eventually. ‘Why ask? You do not need me to say it.’
‘When the war was over, the brotherhood was formed by the leaders of the local Falange,’ Menéndez said. Maria watched him, thinking as he spoke, trying to make the connections. ‘Among those in the brotherhood were men who had been in the camp. Men who knew about the atrocities, who had taken part in them.’
‘And others too,’ said Figuera. ‘Innocent men. Men who did not appreciate what they were doing. Don’t forget that. But yes. Ther
e were those in the brotherhood who had no place in any organization that bore the name of Christ. We all knew that. And did not dare speak a word. This was Franco’s Spain, a bad dream that went on rather too long. Or so some would have you believe.’
‘I see,’ said Menéndez.
She wondered if this were true.
THIRTEEN
At six in the evening, as Torrillo’s car was bumping along the dusty road to Manolo Figuera’s country house, the processions were beginning to assemble across the city. Beneath penitents’ hoods and priests’ caps, beneath lace mantillas, bare-headed and solemn, on foot, on the saddles of slow, noisy motorcycles, they came in their thousands, cramming the narrow streets of the barrios, the broader, scruffy thoroughfares of the working-class suburbs. In dark and dusty halls men shouldered the gilt-and-silver carriages, grunted, strained and heaved them into the streets, great gaudy magnets for the crowds who gathered and pressed around them.
Semana Santa was in full flow. Tempers and emotions rose, between men and women, between parishioners and priests. Beneath the interior cover of the week’s relentless blanket of sanctity, passions flared, lives took new courses, vows were made and broken in the unmoving, impassive heat of the night.
In Santa Cruz the celebrants gathered around the three iron crosses in the triangular plaza at the heart of the barrio, in white, in scarlet, in plain and holy dress, jostling for position, waiting for the Virgin to move among them. The excitement was muted, almost guilty. From this point on the pageant would darken, become more intense, until the tragedy of Good Friday, when death would be triumphant, as always, victorious for two days until the world was created anew on Easter Sunday. And then the bulls would run, the feria would begin, and life would return, reinvigorated, sanctified again, made whole by the annual ritual of devotion and power and love.
From the building on the corner came a cry that was lost in the chaos. It was an hour before the first policeman managed to make his way through the crowds.