by David Hewson
‘Police,’ Menéndez said grimly, showing his badge. ‘Did you see where he went? The man who came out of the ring?’
The official nodded, a wild, frightened look in his eyes.
‘He ran in there.’ He pointed to one of three narrow doorways leading to the space beneath the east wing of the arena, the oldest, most labyrinthine part of the ring.
‘This is still the animal area, right?’ asked Menéndez. ‘Where they keep the bulls before they go into the ring?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is there anybody else in there at the moment?’
He shook his head violently from side to side. ‘Not that I know of. The ring handlers go in when the next fight’s about to start. It’s not the sort of place you’d hang around out of choice.’
‘Good,’ said Menéndez. ‘You have a house phone here?’
‘There’s one along the wall.’
‘Ring for Captain Rodríguez. He’s in the police office. Tell him you spoke to Lieutenant Menéndez and he says we’ve got to open the gates. You get that? This crowd’s starting to move. They won’t stay where they are. If they start shifting around this building with nowhere to go, we’ve got another crowd disaster on our hands. You have to open the gates and let people get out of here.’
The official glanced at the public end of the arcade, now a swirl of hot-tempered spectators looking around, getting angry, getting confused, and said, ‘I’ll call him right now.’
Menéndez pointed to a small, cracked door in the wall and said, ‘That way?’
‘Yes,’ the man nodded. ‘You going in there? You know what it’s like? Make the wrong turn in there and you could get lost for hours. This guy’s gotta know . . .’
‘I’ll take a ball of string,’ muttered Menéndez.
‘You could take this,’ the man said. He unhooked a long rubber torch from his belt, tested the light for a second, then held it out in front of him. Menéndez took it, felt its heaviness and passed it to Maria.
The lieutenant shouldered his way through the growing melee, Quemada and Maria at his heels. When he got to the door he took out the automatic pistol from his shoulder holster, checked it, put it back in the grip, then ordered Quemada to do the same. From the crowd, the sound of unrest was growing. It cut through the atmosphere, an unnerving mix of fear, anger and physical discomfort.
‘When we get in there, do as I say,’ said Menéndez, grim-faced. ‘Exactly. Understand?’
‘We don’t need the woman,’ replied Quemada, shaking his head at her.
Maria stood there, silent, wondering.
‘You’re safer with us than on your own,’ Menéndez said. ‘It’s going to be dark and hard to work out what’s going on. There are only two ways in and out, at each end of the section. We have to assume he hasn’t left through the other end, that Rodrí-guez is covering there too. We’ll have to clear each part, area by area. Stay behind me, close in, use the torch when we can’t see. I want you to watch out for us. We’ll need all the sets of eyes we’ve got.’
Quemada glowered at her, then opened the door ahead. Menéndez walked through the narrow stone gateway and they entered a world of near-blackness.
‘Torch,’ yelled the lieutenant.
Behind him, Maria fumbled for the switch, found it and saw a thin yellow beam penetrate weakly into the gloom.
‘Wait,’ whispered Menéndez. ‘Let your eyes adjust.’
They stood, breathless, backs to the cold, damp stone inner wall of the arcade. To their left, a bright, narrow trapezoid of dull white stained the stone floor through the small open doorway. Above them they could hear the tramping of the crowd through the banked rows of benches. They sounded like frightened animals on the move. Water, rain from the storm, dripped relentlessly from the ceiling, making small splashes on the stone floor, dropping, with sudden, tiny shocks, on their faces and hands.
Inside, the place seemed silent at first. Then they began to pick out sounds in the dark. The shuffling of cloven feet in straw, low, panted breathing, animal grunts and groans. They could smell them too, the earthy, warm stench of bulls and their waste.
‘There has to be a light switch here somewhere,’ said Menén-dez in a low voice.
He ran his hand across the wall. Nothing. Quemada and Maria did the same on the other side of the entrance. The stone was cold and dank. They could feel the oily slickness of layers of ancient paint under their fingers, the rippled outline of old brickwork.
‘Got it,’ she said. Beneath her fingers lay the round shape of an old-fashioned Bakelite switch. They heard it click, then click again.
‘It doesn’t work.’
Menéndez crossed back over the doorway, joined her, tried it for himself.
‘There has to be another one.’
They searched again, everywhere around the door.
‘No other switch,’ said Quemada. ‘That’s got to be it. Either it don’t work or he’s disabled it somehow.’
‘Shit!’ spat Menéndez, and there was some added bitterness to his voice that neither of them could understand. He was silent for a moment, then muttered something to himself, turned away from them and yelled, as loudly as he could, into the empty blackness, ‘Police! We’re armed. Make your presence known now!’
The noise reverberated around the cavernous space, shattered into a chorus of different voices. It died slowly, hovering on the rank air.
When the last traces of Menéndez’s shouts had gone they listened so hard they thought they might be hearing their own breathing. There was nothing but the nervous shuffling of the animals, their low breaths and the endless drip-dripping from the ceiling, rumbling to the sound of a crowd on the move.
Then it came, faintly at first. The sound of laughter, low-pitched, deliberate, calculating. Maria felt her senses leave her for a moment, felt the world dissolve into craziness. It wasn’t the sound of a trapped man, the voice of defeat.
Menéndez reached into his jacket and took out his gun. Quemada did the same. The lieutenant’s voice boomed out again into the darkness.
‘Antonio. We know your name. We know your address. We know what you’ve done. There is no way out of this enclosure. For your own sake, stand up and make yourself known.’
The laughter came again, a little louder. It bounced around the walls, taunting them with its presence.
Then he spoke. ‘Fucking cops!’
The words brought it all back to her. The phone calls. The night of the attack. When he spoke, she could see his face clearly etched in her memory. ‘Fucking cops, you know nothing. Nothing.’
Something moved. Something solid. The animals began to low, started to become restless.
‘He’s in with the bulls,’ said Quemada. ‘In the pen. The captain’s right. This guy’s a lunatic.’
‘The torch, Maria. The torch. Try it in front of us, to the left.’
The thin yellow beam shot out wildly into the dark. She had difficulty controlling it at first. It dashed too high, illuminating the curved brick ceiling of the enclosure. Then she took hold of the heavy rubber body with both hands, pointed it down, moved it slowly one way, then the other.
Across the chamber dark shapes moved anxiously from side to side. When the light caught them, the beasts’ eyes flashed back like dead mirrors, silvered in the beam. There were barriers, horizontal and vertical lines that cut across them like black stencils. It looked as if there were a small herd of powerful, muscular animals corralled for the market. Their shapes, the curves of their horns, the long, sleek lines of their backs intermingled in the dark, silhouettes covering and re-covering each other constantly, tramping to and fro with a nervous, impatient frequency.
Briefly, for less than a second, something else flashed through the beam: a different shape, a different colour. It reflected the light. It was the outline of a man crouching.
‘You see him?’ asked Quemada.
‘I see him,’ said Menéndez. ‘Keep the torch on the animals. He’s using them for cover.’
‘Some kind of cover,’ mumbled Quemada. ‘How the hell do we get him out of there?’
‘We wait. He’s not going anywhere.’
At the end of the chamber, on the far side, there was a sound and then a sudden flash of daylight. The shadows of men darkened the door, their soft voices bounced around the velvet blackness, then they disappeared into the dark.
‘Captain?’ shouted Menéndez.
‘Lieutenant. You’ve found him?’ Rodríguez’s voice sounded cracked and tense. ‘You think he’s here?’
‘He’s in the animal pen. We’ve seen him.’
There was a pause, then Rodríguez said, ‘You are near the other door? He cannot get out?’
‘He can’t get out. All we have to do is wait. The lights are down. We need to fix them or bring in some floods.’
‘This is good. I have plenty of men here, uniformed men. We have him.’ Rodríguez’s voice took on a kind of old-fashioned theatricality. ‘You hear us in there? You hear all this?’
From the blackness, from nowhere in particular, came a subdued, sullen voice. ‘Why don’t you just fuck off? I killed one of you guys already. I stuck him like a pig. You want to know what he sounded like?’
A thin animal screeching noise pierced the gloom, then subsided into ironic laughter.
Quemada sucked in air between his teeth and whispered to Menéndez, ‘I got to tell you, when this guy finally gets to the station, he’s gonna have a hard time walking up and down the steps without falling.’
Rodríguez’s voice echoed down the hall. ‘Lieutenant? You say he’s in with the animals? In the enclosure?’
‘We’re sure of it. We’ve seen him. I guess he thinks we won’t come for him there.’
‘He’s mistaken,’ yelled Rodríguez, his voice full of anger.
Menéndez stood up in the daylight of the arch, heard the click, metallic and unmistakable, found himself saying, ‘No. This isn’t necessary. We’ve no reason to think he’s got a gun. Even if he has, we can wait . . .’
The roar of the weapon drowned out everything. A yellow flame shot through the blackness, momentarily lighting up the entire cavernous hall. Then another, then a third. The fleeting images they revealed stamped themselves on Maria’s mind like photographs: the animals shocked, scared in the enclosure; a figure, prone – prone? – in their midst; Quemada, Menéndez, covering their ears to keep out the sound; faces contorted in pain. And at the end of the chamber, outlined in the pale-yellow light, frozen, three or four faceless men scattered around the captain, who had a hand raised, a pistol pointing across the pens.
There was another shot. Something ricocheted, whistling around the stone walls.
‘Ground!’ yelled Menéndez and they dived to the floor, listening as they did to the roar growing in front of them. The wild, relentless bellowing of the bulls, in fury, in rage, in fear, and over them the screaming of a man, loud, full-throated, agonized.
‘He’s killing him,’ said Quemada, crouching on the ground. ‘He’s gonna drive them so mad the bulls will kill him.’
They were close enough to see the dim reflections of light in each other’s eyes. There was something in Menéndez’s blind, blank stare that Maria did not recognize, did not like. The noise from the animal enclosure was excruciating. The confidence, the arrogance of the man there was gone. He was screaming to be released, to be saved.
In a single, swift movement Menéndez stood up and walked into the arch of the doorway. His outline was silhouetted against the light. His voice boomed through the long, brick cavern. ‘Antonio. Walk towards me. Walk towards the door. You will be safe, I guarantee . . .’
She had the torchlight on the enclosure, she was trying to see, to comprehend everything that was to be seen there. Nothing human moved an inch.
‘Menéndez . . .’ she began.
And then the world roared again with the sound of a gun, louder than ever; the animals themselves began to scream; pitiful, primal sounds came out of the pen; they were trampling, goring, savaging each other in the beam of the torch. Behind the hulking shadows, a dim white, was the form of a man, being crushed underfoot in the panic, dark stains growing large upon his torso, body bouncing up and down beneath the stampeding hooves.
‘Oh, my God,’ said Quemada and she felt something soft fall next to her, hit the ground with a sickening, physical thump.
She turned the torch away from the savagery and looked to her left. A foot away from her Menéndez lay curled in a foetal position, mouth and eyes wide open, half his head blown away, the shattered brain, the ridge of broken white skull given an unreal filmic quality in the thin light of the torch.
It was a short distance to the door, a space she covered in an instant. Then Quemada held her as everything erupted from the pit of her stomach and she choked and vomited an acid stream of bile onto the damp and sand-covered ground.
FIFTY-FIVE
The storm was spent. It had moved on, taking with it the stifling heat and the pressure. In its place was a fine, warm drizzle, and a flat overcast sky the colour of watered-down milk. Maria sat on the steps to the terraces, covered in cold sweat, the taste of vomit still burning in her throat. Quemada pulled a little silver flask out of his jacket pocket and offered it to her. She shook her head.
‘Don’t mind me,’ he said, yanked off the top and knocked back a big draught. The smell of coñac came drifting across. She changed her mind, reached over, took the flask and tipped it into her mouth. It felt like liquid fire, and the pain, fierce and shocking, was good, cleared her mind, made her try to think straight, try to control the whirr of semi-formed ideas and misshapen images buzzing around her head.
‘I want to see him,’ she said.
‘The lieutenant? They took him away. You don’t want to see him again.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Him.’
Quemada looked at her and shook his head. ‘Antonio? You’re sure? Menéndez was no picture, but this guy . . . I tell you, it’s not nice.’
‘I want to see him.’
Her face looked as if it was made from stone, pale and hard.
‘Stick with me,’ Quemada said. ‘At some point they’re probably gonna bounce you out. They’ve got scene-of-crime guys going all over the place. There’ll be an inquiry, you know. The captain shouldn’t have been going round shooting like that. I don’t care what the guy was saying about Bear. You don’t do that kind of thing.’
They got up and walked back to the little doorway. Inside, the place was well lit now. Forests of bare light bulbs made it look like a Christmas cavern getting ready to be decorated.
‘What was wrong with the lights?’ she asked. ‘Menéndez wondered that.’
‘The guy had taken out the fuse. Boy, was he prepared. Got himself in there using someone else’s ID. Somehow worked his way in as a banderillero. Guess he had the time to do pretty much as he liked.’
A group of men in plain suits and jackets hovered around the central enclosure making notes, taking photographs. The bulls had been cleared away. The floor was covered in bloody straw and excrement. It smelled like an abattoir. Quemada wandered over nonchalantly, and she followed on behind.
‘Excuse me,’ Quemada said, then pushed to the front of the group and leaned on the metal bars of the enclosure. ‘Lady here could identify him, if you like, boys.’
A man with a cold, sour face and neatly trimmed goatee beard shrugged and said, ‘Really? Now that would be something.’
She joined Quemada at the railing.
In the centre of the stall lay the body. It wore the same golden suit of lights she had seen in the ring, now dirty and bloodied and contorted beyond belief. One leg was broken and turned around on itself, shattered at the knee. Bone and gristle showed through the flesh. There were big bloody stains, which she presumed to be puncture marks, in the groin, the stomach and the upper chest. The head was twisted grotesquely to the left, the neck clearly broken.
She stared at the face. Beneath the dark wavy h
air, starting a little short of the forehead, it was torn in two. A large wad of flesh running from above the mouth, through the nose, to the left eye, had been honed off the front of the skull, exposing the bone and brain behind. It sat back on the head like a flap of meat, flesh side uppermost. Flies fed and buzzed happily around the blood and gore.
‘Seen enough?’ asked Quemada. ‘Believe me. This man is dead.’
There was movement through the group. Rodríguez walked to the front and stood by the railing next to them. His face was immobile, passive, unreadable. He looked at the pile of meat on the floor and his chin sagged down onto his neck.
‘You killed him,’ she said and she could hear the strangeness, the odd pitch in her own voice. ‘You killed them both, and all you had to do was wait.’
Rodríguez closed his eyes briefly. She watched his hands grip tightly on the dirty metal railing, tried to imagine what he might be thinking. Struggled to find some sympathy for him.
‘I made a mistake,’ he said and his face seemed impassive, incapable of expression. ‘When he started to speak . . . about Torrillo, I made a mistake. I thought I could frighten him out of there. I was wrong. These men?’
He jerked a thumb back at the team working behind him.
‘You see them? You know who they are? The investigations people. They were here already. I’d called them in as support. There’s an irony for you, Professor. They’ll have my job for this if I don’t resign first. I will pay the price. Menéndez . . . was a good man. How could I know? It’s a tragedy. For him. For me. And all for . . . This piece of scum.’
He pointed at the heap on the floor, distaste evident in his face.
She could feel the blood pounding in her head, could feel herself dancing at the very edge of her sanity.
‘This,’ she said, and hoisted herself onto the railings.
It took them a moment to realize, and then they were shouting, screaming at her to come back. She swung one leg, then the next, over the metal bar, dropped gently onto the bloody straw of the pen, then walked over to the body. Slowly, recording every image, she bent over, picked up the flap of bloody flesh on the corpse’s face, pulled it over and let it fall back into place.
