Jeopardy Is My Job

by Stephen Marlowe

  “What do you think?”

  “Tenley’s a good girl,” she said frostily. “Fuentes lives in Fuengirola. He’s quite young, only twenty-one or -two. Two weeks ago Robbie took the bus to Fuengirola to talk to him.”

  “Just talk to him?”

  “Well, thrash him maybe. Robbie could do it. He’s got a temper, and he’s strong. He never got there. Or if he got there, Fuentes lied and said he never got there. And that’s it, Mr. Drum.”

  “Where’s Tenley now?”

  “In Fuengirola for the féria. Bullfighting is one of her two passions. The other one is skiing. She learned that in Switzerland.”

  “She’s there by herself?”

  “Is that some kind of an insinuation?” Mrs. Hartshorn said hotly.

  “Just a question.”

  “Then yes. By herself because she can take care of herself.”

  “You tell the Guardia about Fuentes?”

  “How could I? Tenley’s only nineteen. It would be all over Torre before I could blink my eyes.”

  “Some Guardia,” I said.

  “They trade information for information. Real-estate men, hotel conserjes, bodega proprietors, members of the dear old fraternity of remittance men who don’t like the way you mix a martini—everyone and everyone’s best friend can be an informer in Spain. That’s something you come to accept. Will you go to Fuengirola?”

  Money or sex. In a disappearance there’s usually a pattern. This time it looked like sex—with nineteen-year-old Tenley Hartshorn up to her bullfighting passion in it.

  I nodded. “And thanks for your trust.”

  Then her face crumpled. “Find Robbie. Find him. I love him. I’ve been so frantic.”

  chapter two

  It takes an expert to tell the work of a superb matador from the work of a merely adequate one who knows his limitations and is in there to punch his time clock and collect his pesetas, but you don’t have to be an afficionado with a seat in the sun and a Hemingway beard and a wineskin slung over your shoulder to separate the men from the boys when it comes to the dangerous skill of charging at a tangent into the path of a galloping bull and planting a pair of barbed spikes called banderillas in the ridge of muscle behind its huge head.

  Ruy Fuentes was a banderillero. I first saw him plying his deadly trade the next afternoon in the bull ring at Fuengirola. His job, like that of the picador who sat astride a padded and blindfolded nag and wore armor from the waist down, was to weaken the bull, and particularly the ridge of muscle on the bull’s neck, for the sword of the matador. Ruy Fuentes wore an Andalucian costume—dark gray suit with cutaway jacket, frilly shirt and narrow-legged trousers, cowboy boots and a broad-brimmed, flat-crowned black hat.

  Four times that hot June afternoon I saw him work. He would stand across the ring from twelve-hundred pounds of enraged bull, shout, beckon imperiously and sprint across the sand with a ribboned banderilla held in each hand as daintily as a fairy holds her wand. The bull would snort, and paw, and gallop to meet him, head down, curving horns gleaming in the sunlight. There was a point in the ring where animal and slim gray figure seemed destined to meet. Then Fuentes’ arms went up and the bull’s head went even lower, and then for an instant they hung together, the bull ready to toss its head and gore with those savage horns, the man ready to plant his banderillas. If he did it right, and each time Fuentes did it exactly right, there was a split-second when Fuentes hung poised, high on his toes, arms up-stretched, between the bull’s horns. Then his arms blurred down, the bull bellowed, Fuentes ran clear and the two banderillas, their ribbons fluttering, their barbed hooks trickling blood, hung an inch apart in the center of the ridge of muscle on the bull’s neck.

  There were four matadors and four fighting bulls to dispose of. Two of the matadors were proficient and two were butchers, and Ruy Fuentes, a contemptuous look on his grave, handsome face because he knew the glory belonged to the matadors and he would win no ears or tail or zapata for his work, stole the show. Each time he came out the crowd would sigh to silence as he rushed headlong to meet his destiny between the bull’s horns, and each time they would respond to his work with shouts of “Olé!” and even “Torero!” though young Ruy Fuentes’ bullfighting days already were behind him. He never acknowledged the acclaim with so much as a bow. He just stalked off, a solitary figure in the sun, as the trumpet sounded for the matador.

  At twenty-two he was a has-been, a torero who’d been trampled and had to settle for a secondary role in the fiesta brava. But at twenty-two he had more pride and dignity than you’d expect under those or any circumstances. I found myself hoping he wouldn’t be involved in Robbie Hartshorn’s disappearance even though that would mean my one and only lead had petered out.

  Long late-afternoon shadows were dark under the iron-pipe and wooden slat scaffolding of Fuengirola’s makeshift bull ring when I went below the grandstand and watched a yellow jeep haul the carcass of the final bull out with two urchins dressed in rags riding proudly on its bloody flank and trying to remove the banderillas. A knot of people had gathered around the four matadors whose teeth gleamed in wide smiles. Aficionados mirrored those smiles. They said a word or two, they laughed nervously, their hands reached out to touch the matadors, their heads nodded like corks bobbing on water whenever the matadors deigned to answer them.

  Ruy Fuentes stood off to one side, alone with the picador. He kneeled and helped the horseman remove his greaves. When he straightened up next to the picador, at first I thought Fuentes was unexpectedly small. The picador towered over him. He looked ten years older than Fuentes. His face was long and horse-like and his wide-spaced eyes smouldered with anger and resentment, possibly because of all the men involved in the drama of the bull ring only the picador sitting high on his horse in his armor and with his heavy, eight-foot lance is hated.

  I heard him say, “Those cabrons, those goats, all the world flocks to them and would kiss their rears while it is you who has made the fiesta brava a success.”

  “It is not their fault I was trampled, Paco,” Ruy Fuentes said in a soft, deep voice, and he managed to say that not with self-pity but with a quiet dignity that matched his bearing and his face. His black hair was shorter than a Spaniard usually wears it, almost a brush-cut. His skin was dark, his nose high-bridged and proud. His black eyes just missed being arrogant, his jaw was almost as long as the picador’s but his lips were soft and red, like a woman’s.

  Then, as I reached them, I realized he was no shrimp. I’m six-one, but the picador dwarfed me. Before hanging out my private eye shingle and before my stint with the FBI, I played running guard for William and Mary College and even made All-State, but if he could move I’d have hated having a guy the size of the picador Paco playing across the line from me. He was really big, and he looked as easy to knock down as a cross-country moving van.

  “Señor Fuentes?” I said.

  When Paco looked surprised and Ruy Fuentes nodded curtly, I asked, “Do you speak English? I don’t have any Spanish and I’d like to talk to you.” The first part of that was a lie; my Spanish is pretty good because I’ve knocked around some in Latin America. But working a case in a foreign country, where your P.I. license wouldn’t buy you a loaf of bread if you were starving, you have very few advantages. One of them is pretended ignorance of the language.

  He answered my question by saying in English, “What do you wish of me?”

  Paco surprised me by having English too. He used it to say, jerking a big thumb in the direction of the matadors, “You have made a mistake. You don’t want Ruy Fuentes. He is only a banderillero. Over there are the toreros.”

  “I’ve seen better toreros in Venezuela,” I said, “where they’re just beginning to learn which end of the bull is which.”

  Paco smiled, but Ruy Fuentes still seemed polite but indifferent. The big picador asked, “You have afición then? You love the fiesta brava? You understand it?”

  “No,” I admitted truthfully. “But I recognize a g
ood banderillero when I see one.”

  “Thank you,” Ruy Fuentes said gravely.

  It was a start, and it was the truth, but I didn’t like myself for it. You can get what you want by being ingratiating, just as you can get what you want by using a pair of brass knucks. Neither way was my idea on how to operate, and though Fuentes deserved the compliment and I meant it, I was annoyed with myself—enough to say, “Does Tenley Hartshorn?”

  “Does Señorita Hartshorn what?” Ruy Fuentes demanded, and a chunk of dry ice wouldn’t have steamed on his tongue.

  “Recognize a good banderillero when she sees one.”

  The picador lifted his greaves and tucked them under his arm. They looked like a toy knight’s toy leg-armor there. Ruy Fuentes said, “Who are you, señor?”

  “The name is Drum. I was hired by Governor Hartshorn in Maryland to find his son. Two weeks ago Robbie Hartshorn took the bus from Torremolinos to Fuengirola. He hasn’t been seen since.”

  “Why come to us, hombre?” Paco said in a tight, menacing voice. “Many people ride the bus to Fuengirola.”

  In Spanish Ruy Fuentes said quickly, “I’ll attend to this, Paco.” He told me, “I saw Señor Hartshorn some time ago, yes. It may have been two weeks ago, as you suggest. You say he is missing?”

  I said he was missing. “What did you see him about?”

  “A personal matter.”

  “He came here to tell you to keep away from his daughter, didn’t he?”

  “No one tells me whom to—”

  “I’m not making a moral issue out of it. I’m looking for facts—and Robbie Hartshorn. Did you fight?”

  “He is a middle-aged man,” Ruy Fuentes said.

  “He’s forty-two and from what I hear as strong as an ox. You’d have to be pretty good to take him.”

  Paco rumbled, “You have no right to question us.”

  “I’m not questioning you,” I said. “I wouldn’t know you from any other big stiff who rides a horse and sticks a stopped lance in a bull’s back. I’m talking to Señor Fuentes.”

  “He is my brother,” Paco said, more tightly. He hadn’t liked my dig at his unappreciated line of work, but I hadn’t liked the menace sprouting like a weed in his voice.

  “I wouldn’t fight with Señor Hartshorn,” Ruy Fuentes told me. “All the time he is muy borracho—very drunk. We argued, yes. He left still angry. Tenley is a woman. No man, not even her father or perhaps least of all her father, can guide her steps. We are in love.”

  “That’s all that happened? An argument?”

  “Yes, I have told you. And then he left.”

  “Where’s Tenley Hartshorn now?”

  As if in answer to my question, a girl’s voice called, “Ruy! Oh Ruy, you were magnificent!”

  I didn’t watch her approach, but looked at Ruy Fuentes’ face instead. It was as if the soft, sensitive, girlish mouth had taken over from the proud masculine eyes, nose and jaw. Ruy Fuentes looked suddenly shy. He held his hat in front of him and fingered the broad brim nervously. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other and smiled like a sub-deb greeting her first date. Then he walked past me. As far as it mattered to him, I was no longer there.

  And then I saw why. A girl, and from the look on Ruy Fuentes’ face she had to be Tenley Hartshorn, was crouching at the end of one of the grandstand benches on a level with my shoulders. She reached her hands out, but he caught her above the hips with his own hands and gently lowered her to the sand. She smiled at him as if he had performed an act of gallantry meriting knighthood. He smiled at her as if his world was complete for the first time today.

  I didn’t blame him. Even the aficionados still jabbering away at the toreros stopped to stare. She was a tall and slender sun-tanned brunette in a simple summery dress the green color of the Mediterranean under a bright sunlit sky—which is like saying Dominguén kills cattle for a living. She moved lithely and unself-consciously, like a cat. Her eyes were the same green as her dress and their whites were very white against the tan of her face. The rest of her features were nice enough, but nothing to make an aficionado forget what had brought him to the iron bull ring in Fuengirola. Still, there was something intangible about her that really got you. She was beautiful the way a painting you don’t quite understand can be beautiful. Maybe it was those eyes. Maybe it was the way her high and wide-spaced cheekbones made those big green eyes seem even bigger, or the way they drew her tanned skin taut, or the way they shadowed her cheeks and accentuated the ripe red surprise of her lips. Or maybe I was staring too much, because Tenley Hartshorn’s radiant smile changed to a wry one, and the wry smile was one she had used before and for the same reason, a wry acceptance of the fact that men will be men, and Ruy Fuentes cleared his throat and said, “Tenley, this is Mr. Drum. He says he is looking for your father.”

  “What for?” Tenley Hartshorn said, not smiling.

  “He’s been missing two weeks. The Governor was worried.”

  “He’ll come home when he runs out of money. He always does, after one of his benders.”

  “You think he’s on a bender?”

  “If you knew my father,” Tenley Hartshorn said sullenly, “you wouldn’t have to ask that question. He’s gone off on them often enough when my mother can’t keep up with his drinking. Not that she doesn’t try,” Tenley added spitefully.

  “Admire them both, do you?” I said.

  “Is that supposed to be funny?”

  “If you think it’s funny. The Hartshorn women, mother and daughter, throw me. You mother wouldn’t cooperate at first because she didn’t want to drag you into this. You’re convinced your old man’s on a harmless bender even though the Governor was worried enough to send a detective three thousand miles to find him.”

  “I’ll start worrying when I think there’s something to worry about.”

  “Your grandfather does.”

  “He hasn’t spent his life with them, and neither have you. But I have. Starting before breakfast they drink themselves into a stupor all day—until it’s time to brush their teeth with Fundador before going to bed.” I must have given her a funny look, because she went right on, “And if you think I have no right telling this to a stranger, it’s no secret. It’s something the whole Costa del Sol knows—when the whole Costa del Sol isn’t doing likewise. Have you been here long enough, Mr. Drum, to see the pathetic little feral-eyed and dirty-faced children slinking around all the patios on all the villas on the hills over Torremolinos? They can’t speak English and the Spanish they learn from the servants is gutter Spanish, and maybe if they’re lucky they can read and write by the time they’re nine or ten. Their parents are too drunk to care about them, you see. When you’re an alcoholic expatriate in Spain, mañana isn’t just a word, it’s a way of life. I was one of those kids until the Governor sent me off to school in Switzerland. If he hadn’t, the monthly checks would have stopped coming, so Andrea and Robbie gave him the green light. Come to think of it, they were probably glad to be rid of me for a few years.”

  That was quite a speech. It left her with a flush under the tan of her cheeks, and her green eyes looked two shades darker.

  “Why’d you bother coming back from Switzerland?” I asked.

  She looked at Ruy Fuentes, and the way she looked at him was answer enough, but she told me, “Because I feel sorry for them. I guess pity’s the worst emotion you can feel for someone you love, but that’s the way I feel.” Her almost pulverizing beauty and her indictment of the expatriate set made me forget she was just a kid, but when she spoke of her own feelings with a teen-ager’s grave and somehow weary self-assurance, I remembered she was only nineteen. I forgot it again when she displayed a bear-trap brain by asking, “Andrea didn’t want to drag me into what?”

  When I told her, she turned angrily to Ruy Fuentes. “You never said my father came to see you.”

  “It would only have upset you, Tenley.”

  “How Spanish can you get? I’m not in a cloister. I’
m living the only life I’ll ever live. Let me decide what’s going to upset me and what isn’t, will you?”

  “I am Spanish,” Ruy Fuentes said gravely.

  She glared at him, and then the glare became a grin, and then the grin faded and the way she looked after that was very much in love. “Sure,” she said. “You are Spanish. Maybe that’s why I love you. Take care of me, Ruy. Take care of me always.”

  If the look that passed between them meant anything, that would be easy. Then Ruy Fuentes told her to wait outside.

  “Does that come under the heading of taking care of me?”

  Ruy Fuentes said that it did.

  “All right, but first I want to ask Mr. Drum something. Are you going to keep on looking for him? You’ll be wasting your time. He’ll come home. But the Governor’s got lots of money, hasn’t he, and you earned a free trip to Spain as well. I can see I’m really going to like you.”

  “Like mother like daughter,” I said, though of course she wouldn’t understand. Instead of trying to, she walked out under the grandstand and through the gate where the bull truck had been backed earlier.

  There was a silence which Paco broke by asking his brother in Spanish, “Does the little one know?”

  “No. How could she? You heard her say it. There is no need to worry. She did not know her father was at the cueva.” At first I didn’t know what the word cueva meant, but then it came to me. In Spanish cueva is cave.

  “Seguro?” Paco asked doubtfully.

  “Claro, mi hermano. You have no need to worry.” To me Ruy Fuentes said in English, “She is a very high-strung girl, my novia. You have upset her. I think it would be better if you flew home to America. Here you have no authority.”

  “I’ve been paid to do a job.”

  “And I have Tenley’s feelings to consider. I have warned you, señor.”

  He went out after Tenley, leaving his big gun behind. His big gun told me, “If you upset Señorita Hartshorn, you upset my brother as well. Three more days he must stick the bulls, señor. He must be calm, and of a single purpose. Go back where you came from, or go back to Torremolinos. That is where Señor Hartshorn lives, and where you should look for him. My brother must remain calm. I would not wish him to have an accident.”