by David Hewson
‘Why are we looking at people with hoods?’ asked Quemada, and his voice made her jump. Something about the scene, its gripping primeval antiquity, had almost engulfed her, made her part of the canvas, not its observer.
Slowly, she shook her head. ‘They don’t all have hoods.’
‘Our guy has, if he’s out there.’
The red robes of the penitents now formed a long, broad stream behind the platform as they entered the square, a defined scarlet shape that cut through the mass of the crowd.
Menéndez is wrong, she thought. Somewhere in the crowd is the man who tried to kill me. He likes disguises. An electricity man. Make-up. He may not be wearing the red robes, but he’s there. And he’s not finished. Not yet.
‘You look as if someone just stepped on your grave,’ said Quemada, unsmiling.
‘I do?’
‘Yeah. You went all pale. You OK?’
‘I need some water,’ she said. ‘I’ll get it.’
The kitchen was tiny and spotless, not a knife or plate anywhere. She looked in a cupboard, found a glass, pulled a bottle of Lanjarón out of the refrigerator and poured some water. It fizzed in the glass with a sudden energy. From the bedroom next door she could hear Menéndez talking in low, persistent tones. She could almost make out the words. He stopped speaking. She gulped down the water so quickly it made her feel uncomfortable. He came through the door, eyes glinting avidly.
‘You were listening?’ he asked in a quiet, firm voice.
‘I . . . I wanted some water. I felt faint.’
‘You were listening?’
‘No.’
He looked unconvinced.
‘Go back to Quemada. Tell him when they go into the cathedral we move on to the bullring. I want us in position by the start of the first fight.’
Maria nodded and walked out of the room. Quemada was sitting by the window, his face a foot from the glass, looking bored. He glanced at her when she sat down.
‘You missed it.’
‘What?’ she said shakily.
‘The Virgin. They all came past the bishop, or whoever the big guy is up there on the cathedral steps. Jesus, when I was a kid I used to take part in all that stuff. Now I couldn’t remember how to say a Hail Mary.’
‘What happens next?’
‘What always happens with this religious stuff. Lots more of the same. All the guys get turns. It takes hours, but I guess they like it that way. It’s a habit.’
‘You mean a tradition?’
‘Same thing.’
She watched the red flood disappearing out of the far corner of the square, the golden head of the Virgin bobbing down a narrow alley back towards Santa Cruz.
‘He wants us to go to the ring.’
‘Really?’ said Quemada. ‘You think he’ll be off the phone by then? I never knew someone who loved to talk so much to people the rest of us can’t even see.’
‘I’m off the phone already,’ said Menéndez in a voice that made Maria jump. Here, on his own territory, he moved so quietly, with such certainty.
‘Only joking, Lieutenant,’ said Quemada, a simple grin on his face. ‘Mind if we pick up a sandwich on the way? I got a feeling this is going to be a long day.’
FIFTY
The bullring was only half a mile away, but it took them an hour to get there. The streets swam with people. There was no other way to describe it. If they found themselves in a stream going in the right direction, they were picked up and floated along with the mass. Until the next street intersection, where they could only hope to fight their way back towards the right direction. Once, with no choice, they found themselves swept almost off their feet, into a bar full of singing drunks, glasses high in the air, faces red with booze. They poured through the door, clung to the cigarette machine next to the entrance, waited for the pressure to lessen for a moment outside, then launched themselves back into the street. The centre of the city was lost to chaos and anarchy. There was no way of controlling events. And in the crowd that surged around them the mood had changed. Something cathartic had occurred in the square. The mourning, the grief had been purged, to be replaced by an urgent, almost manic, joy. Hysteria hung around the streets, mingling with the sweaty presence of the coming storm, humid, dense and enervating.
After twenty minutes the throng became less confusing, gained more direction. They were approaching the ring now, through narrow winding streets of terraces. Roses, geraniums and lilies decorated battered iron balconies, faces peered from behind curtains. Iron grilles barred the doorways into the old mansions, kept them inviolate from the crowd. The stream of bodies surged past quiet, shaded courtyards, cool watery fountains in their centre, deserted on this, the city’s greatest day.
Then, with a sudden last push, they left the nexus of lanes that formed the barrio of El Arenal and were thrown into the hot, baking sunlight of the riverfront highway. The green placid surface of the Guadalquivir lay ahead, in front of it the massing crowd. A few hundred yards further along stood the low ellipsis of the bullring surrounded by a throng of anxious celebrants buying food from stalls, drinking from the necks of wine bottles passed around from stranger to stranger without a thought. Already the queues were starting to form outside the gates, ‘sol’ and ‘sombra’, sun and shade – those with little money, those with enough to keep them out of the scorching afternoon heat. A band played somewhere outside, its tinny, metallic tune fighting a losing battle with the low roar and guttural chatter of the crowd.
So many people, thought Maria, so little identity. It was as if a single, many-celled beast had assembled for the ritual, and the presence among it of the police, of authority, was no more than the buzzing of a fly around the body of the bull itself.
Menéndez pushed through one of the queues for the gate and they followed him, wading through the swarm of bodies in his wake. Above them loomed the entrance gate, the Puerta del Principe, with its small balcony above and the name, Plaza de Toros. The walls of the building were a searing white, the wooden entrance doors around the side the colour of spilled blood, the decorations yellow, a familiar ochre colour, one she had seen on the brotherhood’s office in Santa Cruz, the colour that served to ward off evil.
Close by there was a smaller, quieter entrance, with a sign reading ‘Administration’ and a gaggle of hangers-on arguing with the officials at the door: free tickets, press passes, favours for an old friend. Menéndez barged his way through, showed his ID. The doorman, a small, thin man of late middle age, dressed in the best suit he could afford, of threadbare blue barathea, looked at the picture on the card, then nodded them through. They passed inside and, in a moment, went from tortured heat and crowds into blackness, cold and slightly damp.
‘Wait,’ said Menéndez. And they did, as their eyes strained painfully, trying to adapt to the sudden absence of light. After half a minute, when the dim light bulbs of the interior corridors had done what they could to illuminate the hidden, secret interior of the ring, he motioned them to follow. Moving into the private, functional part of the arena, they walked to the right, along a narrow, dank corridor no more than six feet wide. Above them they could hear the marching feet of the thousands of spectators making their way to the hard wooden seats in the stands. Then Menéndez came to a junction. A wide arcade, open to the street and the ring, stood in front of them. To the right, hands fast on the tall, iron gate, the crowds waited to be allowed into the stadium. To the left, the ring stood golden yellow in the sun, a handful of attendants carefully raking the sand to a fine, even finish.
‘We’re not there yet,’ said Menéndez and stepped briskly across the arcade, into another dank artery. They followed, crossed a second arcade, walked halfway along the next corridor, then turned into a door marked ‘Police’.
Menéndez opened the door and they walked in. Rodríguez sat at a simple, ancient wooden desk, sorting through a pile of papers. With him were three uniformed men in blue, standing bored to one side of the room, smoking.
T
he captain looked up, smiled coolly for a moment, then motioned for them to sit down.
‘He’s here,’ Rodríguez said. ‘Drawn to this place like a magnet. The insane cannot stop themselves. We should be grateful for that. With the manpower I’ve got inside these walls, there is no way he gets out again.’
He looked at his watch. The corrida was due to begin in an hour, with Mateo the first to fight.
‘We have men in the crowd,’ said Rodríguez. ‘We have people with binoculars on the roof. He cannot escape.’
‘You’re sure?’ asked Menéndez.
Rodríguez nodded and she could sense something new in Menéndez now: an impatience with the older man, one that would never have been so palpable with Bear around, bathing the old man in his loyalty, his vast well of affection. She could feel Menéndez struggling to hold back from saying what he really thought. That maybe the captain was tired and spent and, ultimately, out of his depth.
‘As I have said repeatedly,’ Rodríguez replied, and the way he kept shaking his head, with more force than she had ever seen, made her think that he realized something had changed. ‘He’s a lunatic. A lunatic who came out of history, perhaps, but a lunatic all the same. Once we have him, this nightmare is finished. An hour ago we found where he was living. It wasn’t that hard. Antonio is a dope dealer. We traced him through some contacts in the drugs people. He had an apartment in Santa Cruz. Not far from Cristina Lucena’s home. We found the weapons. The robe. It’s enough to get a conviction, even if we find nothing else. I’m pulling in that shit of a bullfighter too. He knows more than he’s saying.’
‘But how do you know he’s here?’ asked Maria.
‘On the wall. He had one of those poster calendars. From a beer company. It was written in for today. The time. The place.’
Menéndez blinked, looked briefly at her, then said, ‘He wrote this down.’
‘Do not expect logic from the insane,’ Rodríguez muttered. ‘Are you questioning this too, Lieutenant?’
‘No, sir,’ said Menéndez. ‘What do you want us to do?’
Rodríguez passed over three sets of army binoculars.
‘Take these. There’s an observation box. In the canopy scaffolding behind the “shade” seats. You’ll get a good view. I want the three of you in there. We have a discrete radio frequency for everyone in the ring. It’s going to be hard, I know, but I want you to scan the crowd. Face by face. You’ve seen him, Professor. You know what he looks like. Start with the first row of the “sun” seats, then work right to left, up and down. I’ve got other people doing the same working the other way. If you don’t see him from this platform, we’ll swap you around to one on the other side sometime during the intervals between fights. We’ve got time. The ring is sold out. Once they close the doors, no one gets out until they’re opened again, and they won’t open until I say so.’
‘Good planning,’ said Menéndez.
Rodríguez smiled over the desk. ‘Thank you, Lieutenant. Now shall we begin?’
‘You understand the layout of the ring?’ asked Menéndez as they ducked underneath some low beams in a barely lit bend of yet another narrow corridor.
Maria was following him. Quemada was some feet behind.
‘No. I’m lost,’ she said. ‘I hate these narrow spaces. Almost as much as I hate bullfighting.’
Menéndez rounded the corner, opened a door that she could hardly see in the dark, and light burst on their faces. There was a stepladder on the far side of a narrow alley leading to the ring. He motioned to her to go first. They climbed up several sets of twisting ladders, then finally clambered onto a flat scaffolding platform, fronted by a low iron guardrail. Five cheap metal seats stood up at the back of the observation deck. They were next to a set of vast sail-like fabric wings extended to bring shade to the crowds below.
Maria walked to the front and peered over. The breath disappeared from her lungs. They were above the very top of the ring, the rim of the shallow roof. Beneath, the spectators’ seats ran out in concentric circles, band after band of them, half in sun, half – the half beneath her – in afternoon shade. The ring itself, a golden ellipsis of sand, seemed tiny in the vast, enclosing bulk of the stadium.
‘I didn’t realize we were so high,’ she said, still half in shock.
Menéndez watched Quemada climb onto the deck, pull out a chair and collapse on it, then he came to the front of the platform and leaned over the edge with her.
‘No. I didn’t the first time, either. You see the ring from the outside and all you notice are the walls. You see it from the inside, as a spectator, and all you see is the bullfight. This is a huge building. Underneath the seats there’s a hell of a lot of space. Some of it just empty, some of it used for storage. Then there’s the dressing rooms, the area where they keep the animals. Administration offices. You get to them, almost all of them, along corridors, the little ones like we used today. Parts of this building are almost two hundred and fifty years old. It’s a maze down there. We’ve got police IDs, we can go anywhere we want, but don’t wander off without me.’
‘Like the Minotaur’s labyrinth?’ she murmured.
Menéndez smiled. ‘Yes. If you like. Like the labyrinth. When I was a kid I was a ring junkie. I used to hang around, help clear up the mess, do anything to get free tickets, to be near it all. I know my way around maybe half the places you just saw. And still I take it easy. Whatever happens, stay in the public areas, the well-lit parts, and then you’ve got no problems.’
She looked at the stadium. People were starting to filter through, men in black suits, women in colourful fiesta costumes, with high mantillas, all distant, like gaily painted ants. On the horizon, the clouds were bunching together, roll upon roll of cumulus with lowering, dark stains underneath.
‘How many people will there be?’
‘Capacity crowd today. More than fourteen thousand.’
‘And I’m supposed to pick out one person?’
Menéndez shrugged. ‘Lot easier than you might think. Do it methodically. Scan one row, scan the next. Ninety-eight per cent you’ll be able to reject straight away. Then you concentrate on the rest. Put that way, you’re just looking at not a lot more than two hundred and fifty people. It’s not so many.’
‘And if he’s disguised?’
Menéndez looked at her and she almost had to pinch herself, had to think twice: What was this look? Was it really something akin to admiration?
‘If he’s disguised . . . then I guess we’re wasting our time. But we have our orders.’
‘Yeah,’ said Quemada. ‘And a cop always obeys his orders. So we might as well get started.’
He picked up a pair of the binoculars, put them to his face and started to adjust the focus wheel. Across from them the top few rows of the stadium were beginning to fill up.
‘Let me start with the cheapskates?’
‘The what?’ she asked.
He took away the binoculars and looked at her.
‘You really don’t know a thing about the bulls, do you? The high seats don’t cost so much. Particularly if they’re in the sun. If you’ve got real money . . .’ Quemada leaned over and indicated some narrow wooden benches at the very edge of the ring. ‘You pay to be down there on the “sombra” side. Close enough to the ring to smell the blood.’
She picked up one of the spare pairs of glasses and started to scan the faces: ordinary people, a little bored, more than a little tired, looking for some spectacle to end the week. They shuffled to their reserved seats, then sat quietly, waiting. No one looked familiar, they were just a mass of unknown faces. She put the binoculars down.
‘This isn’t going to be easy,’ Maria said, playing with the focus ring.
‘Tell me what is,’ Quemada grunted.
He laughed, took the glasses away from his face and pointed across the ring. ‘See that guy? The one in the second row down from the upper gate, three seats along? I know him. Runs the grocer’s store near my sister’s. And
that is not his wife. These guys kill me.’
Menéndez looked at his watch. ‘Twenty minutes,’ he said. ‘Then the first fight should begin. Mateo. His first animal. Let’s make the most of it.’
‘OK,’ said Maria and turned the glasses back on the restless, growing crowd.
FIFTY-ONE
Two floors below and four hundred yards to the west, in the small ornate chapel reserved for the matadors before they entered the ring, Jaime Mateo looked at his watch too, saw the minutes ticking by, and felt the fear cold and hard in his belly. The iron reja, the screen that separated the altar from the spectators, was open. He was alone, wearing a silver suit of lights that clung tightly to his body, white socks that gripped his ankles firmly and trim black shoes. His montera, the small velvet matador’s hat, lay on the bench beneath the small statue of the Virgin, red-robed, surrounded by fancy gilt ornamentation. He put it on last, before he went out of the gate, and always, always, he threw it away before the kill. The corrida was a public ritual, but within it lay a private ceremony too. Acts that he had always done before, habits that kept him alive. No sex the night before, no drinking, no dope. The watch, the old, cheap Timex he’d had since he was a teenager ripping off handbags from tourists, was strapped to his wrist, as it always was, although the mechanism had long since given up the ghost and the minute hand flapped uselessly, half-attached to the pivot.
Mateo ran through the minutiae of his own private liturgy, checked each detail, satisfied himself it was complete. And still he sweated. He looked into one of the two silver chalices on the altar, using it as a mirror, seeing the crudeness of the make-up he had applied to his face. This was what they wanted: the boy wonder, the young, handsome hero. The face beneath the mask . . . they had not paid for this. They must not see it. He looked harder at his reflection in the metal, wondered if the mask was good enough. How long it could be maintained. How many fights, how many years before the deception became impossible to hide?