Or the Bull Kills You

by Jason Webster

  She pulled his arm down, stopping him as they walked, then leaned over and kissed him, her lips wrapping quickly and delicately around his mouth, tongue flicking gently against his.

  ‘Let’s go and get a drink,’ she said.

  She took him deep into the Barrio Chino – no longer the drug-filled haunt it had once been, but still an edgy, slightly decrepit part of the city. They stood at a grubby bar with broken green-and-white tiles on the walls and floor, waiting for one of the tables in the booths on the other side of the room to become free. Alicia ordered a sweet anís; Cámara a Carlos III. For a moment their fingertips played against each other beneath the bar, until an elderly couple got up to leave and they were able to sit down.

  ‘What were you saying about all that symbolism of the bullfight?’ Cámara said, trying to find something to say: neither had said a word since their mouths had touched in the street. He noticed a silver ring on the little finger of her left hand, the figure of a dolphin curling itself around her knuckle.

  ‘You should talk to an expert about that,’ she said. ‘I don’t know too much about it, but there’s a woman at Castilla-La Mancha University. Margarita de la Fuente. Written a couple of books about it.’

  She seemed businesslike with him all of a sudden. For a brief moment they had come close, and now had retreated. Cámara watched her face closely as she spoke, his vision coming to rest on her lips. Would he like her to kiss him again? Did he want to kiss her?

  ‘Are you listening?’ she asked with a smile.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Cámara said.

  ‘They do good food here,’ Alicia said. ‘I know it doesn’t look much, but we can stay and have a bite if you want. Perhaps a quick dinner?’

  Cámara looked over at the woman behind the bar, with her lank dyed-blonde hair and greasy blue-and-white apron, staring up at the TV on the wall above the door. She could make them some tortilla a la patata perhaps, with maybe some cuttlefish and garlic shrimps. He nodded.

  ‘Looks like the best kind of place,’ he said.

  ‘Good. Then we’ll get some wine. The heavy stuff,’ she pointed down at their drinks, ‘is all right on its own but not with food.’

  She got up to talk to the woman behind the bar, and came back with a bottle of local Valencia wine. Cámara picked the glass up and took a sip, expecting a sharp and unpleasant taste, but the wine flowed smoothly over his tongue, strong and rich.

  ‘It’s time I mentioned the secret I found out about you,’ he said. She glared back at him.

  ‘About your divorce.’

  She frowned.

  ‘These things happen,’ she said. ‘Javier’s a golfo – got an eye for the girls. But that’s why I liked him.’ She took a last drink of anís before pushing the glass to one side and pulling the wine glass closer to her. ‘Or at least at the beginning.’

  ‘No kids,’ Cámara said.

  ‘Are you asking me, or telling me?’ she said.

  ‘Well, I know you don’t have any. At least, that’s what the report said.’

  ‘There you go, then.’ She forced a smile. ‘Let’s not talk about that.’

  Cámara’s thoughts wandered for a moment, images of Almudena appearing unbidden in his mind which he tried to banish with only partial success.

  ‘Do you still see your husband?’ he asked.

  ‘He’s my boss,’ she said. ‘Indirectly, I suppose. At El Diario. Well, you know that already. I try to avoid him inside the office as best I can, but sometimes he comes to my desk, seeks me out, says he just wants to chat and that kind of thing.’

  ‘Is it just that kind of thing?’

  ‘You sound jealous.’

  ‘Just asking,’ Cámara said.

  ‘I’m not in love with him any more. Not for years. A long time before all that business with the girl. I’m not kidding myself, though. I know he’d jump back into bed with me again if he could. But I closed all that off long ago. No return.’

  ‘Did you see him this morning?’

  She smiled at him, pushing a stray hair behind her ear.

  ‘Is it the man I just kissed asking, or Chief Inspector Cámara?’

  Cámara didn’t answer.

  ‘No,’ she said at last. ‘The last time I saw him was the day Blanco died. He came to my desk just after Blanco called me. You know, saying he had something to tell me, about doing an interview.’

  ‘Did you mention it to Javier?’

  She sighed.

  ‘Yes, Chief Inspector, I did. I thought he should reserve some space for the next day’s edition. I knew it was going to be a big story. Any interview with Blanco was a big story because he never gave any.’

  She swallowed a large mouthful of wine, then uncorked the bottle again and filled their glasses.

  ‘In the end they used all that space to cover his death. And more; I think they cut some pages that night from the international section to make it all fit in.’

  The woman came round from behind the bar and placed a basket of bread on the table in front of them, cutlery clattering on the oilcloth top as she dropped them from underneath her arm.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Alicia said as she sorted them out, pushing a knife and fork in Cámara’s direction. But the woman wasn’t apologising.

  ‘There,’ she said, banging a plate of potato omelette down and turning to walk back to the bar. ‘The rest is coming.’

  The tortilla had already been cut up into squares and Cámara picked up his fork and started. Alicia was already grabbing at the bread.

  ‘Bon profit,’ she said.

  ‘All that bloodshed has given me an appetite,’ Cámara said.

  The tortilla was perfect, made with onion as well as potato, and still just a little moist where the egg had yet to cook all the way through. Cámara’s eyes rolled with pleasure.

  ‘Riquísimo.’

  ‘I told you,’ Alicia said.

  He reached over and took a sip of wine.

  ‘Thank you for bringing me here. I had no idea it existed.’

  ‘Blanco brought me here the first time,’ she said. ‘Must have been over ten years ago. When he was still a novillero. I’d seen him fight a couple of times before, but the evening we came here was special. The way he’d fought that afternoon told me – this kid has got something. And I wrote about it that night. The review was picked up by everyone. No one had spotted him before. But here was I, this female bullfight correspondent saying we had a new genius of the bullfight on our hands. Many laughed – they thought I didn’t have a clue. But Blanco always remembered that article – it’s why he was more open with me than with any other journalist. He trusted me because he knew I could see what he had. Long before everyone else joined in and started to realise. That article put us both on the map.’

  ‘You sound as if you were half in love with him,’ Cámara said.

  ‘I was, but not in any way you’d understand. I was in love with the bullfighter, the person out there in the ring. Not with the man himself. There was never anything like that between us. Not even a spark. But when he was in front of a bull, I could have followed him for ever. There was something so strong, so determined about him that I admired. Almost bull-like himself, in some ways. Stubborn. Once he’d put his mind to something…’

  Cámara stretched his leg over under the table and pressed it against hers. She stopped talking.

  The air was cool on their faces as they stepped out into the street a few minutes later. A brief play-scuffle over who should pay had given them further excuse to press their bodies against each other. Alicia tried to push him out of the way as she insisted that as a regular she should pick up the bill, but Cámara put his arm around her and held her tight against him, preventing her from reaching her purse as he whipped out a handful of notes with his free hand and placed them on the counter of the bar. The woman with the lank hair had finally smiled at them as she handed over the change.

  ‘Great place,’ Cámara said, filling his lungs. ‘We should come ag
ain.’

  They took a few steps away from the entrance and found themselves in the shadow of the doorway of an abandoned building.

  ‘Oh,’ Alicia said, pulling up towards him. ‘I’m sure we shall.’

  Desire pulsed heavily under his skin as he slipped a hand into the small of her back and lifted her closer to press his mouth against hers. He felt her teeth nibbling at his lips, her fingers pressing into the flesh of his shoulders as she allowed herself to be enveloped in his embrace.

  ‘I want you,’ she whispered as their lips parted for a second. He wrapped his arms tighter around her waist.

  With his eyes closed, at first he thought the flash had come from the headlights of a car trying to wend its way up the narrow, uneven street. When it burst again, however, he looked and turned instinctively towards the clicking noise coming from just a few yards away.

  ‘¿Qué cojones? What the fuck?’

  He pulled himself away from Alicia’s embrace as the photographer took one more snap of them and began to back away.

  ‘Hey!’ Cámara shouted.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Alicia was still lost in the kiss, hardly aware that their moment of passion was being recorded.

  ‘Son of a bitch.’

  Cámara took a few steps in the direction of the footsteps now running away down the alley. It was dark and he hadn’t been able to see who it was. Should he run after him? By the time he asked himself the question it was already too late. The photographer appeared briefly in the fluorescent lights of the avenue at the end of the street, then disappeared as he turned away from view.

  Alicia was standing behind him, her hand slipping across to grab his arm.

  ‘Was that guy taking photos of us?’ she asked incredulously.

  Cámara breathed heavily, his blood racing.

  There was no sign of the photographer when they reached the avenue: just a new set of whores working the later shift. They stood silently for a moment under the light of one of the lamps, Cámara wondering to himself what happened now. Before he could answer, he heard a car pull up behind and turned: Alicia had hailed a passing taxi.

  He leaned over and opened the door for her to get in. She kissed him on the cheek and then stepped inside.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ she said. ‘Not tonight. Not now, after this. I want it to be—’

  ‘It’s OK,’ he said.

  ‘Come to my place,’ she said. ‘I’ll fix us something.’

  ‘I’ll call you.’

  She closed the taxi door and wound down the window, smiling at him as the taxi indicated to pull away.

  ‘I didn’t know you were such a celebrity,’ she said.

  Fifteen

  For bullfighting, as for marriage, the secret is getting up close

  Traditional

  Thursday 16th March

  The slapping of domino pieces on the hard tabletops created a pattering sound inside the bar that seemed to echo the splashing of heavy raindrops on the pavement outside. Cámara shook the water from his coat, causing a small puddle to form for a moment around his feet before being absorbed by the dirty sawdust that was quickly forming into earth-like clods on the floor. He ordered a carajillo and turned to look around, double-checking that he had arrived first as the coffee machine gave a high-pitched scream before the barman smacked it with his hand and it shuddered back into life. Just the usual groups of old men, waiting their turn to clap their little black-and-white rectangles down with all the bravado they could muster. The roads had been clear and he had got there early: Margarita should be arriving in the next five or ten minutes.

  It had been the first place that had come to mind when she asked where they should meet. Only after he’d put the phone down did it seem an odd choice. He hadn’t been back to Albacete for three or four months now. And when he did come he usually went straight to the flat, not bothering to waste any time in the centre of town. So it must have been years since he’d last seen this place, perhaps even a decade or more since he’d been inside. It had been a regular haunt of theirs when he was younger, Hilario joining in some of the domino games, Cámara wandering around the tables, receiving the occasional consolatory pat on the head from some, a cold shoulder from others. Those were the ones Hilario never spoke to – or even about. Cámara had tried a couple of times to get his grandfather to explain, but the old man had always clammed up. Forbidden territory.

  He’d left his car in an underground car park. His Seat Ibiza was nearing the end of its natural life, and an hour-and-a-half journey like this was about the most it could manage these days. It was almost fifteen years old, and the clutch cable – already its third – didn’t feel as tight as it should. He’d have to get it changed, but somehow he felt that if he used it for anything more than pottering around Valencia, or the odd trip up here, it would let him down. It felt like an elderly donkey or mule, with set habits. Make it divert from the routine and it would probably breathe its last.

  Albacete didn’t have much in the way of monuments. When they were boys, Cámara and his friends had dreamt of moving away. For anyone with any spark about them, life happened elsewhere, that much they understood. Some set their hearts on reaching Madrid, others Valencia on the coast. And at least half of them had made it in the end.

  If anyone from outside had heard of Albacete it was either for the knives that the city made, supposedly the finest in all Spain. Or for it being the headquarters of the International Brigades during the Civil War. As a boy Cámara had often wondered if they’d only been sent here in order to keep them out of the way, although he’d heard later that they had suffered the highest casualty rates in the whole conflict. Doubtless many had wondered what the hell they’d come here for once they’d seen where they were to be billeted.

  From the corner of his eye he spotted a movement near the door. He turned to see a stocky woman in a raincoat and wide-brimmed hat trying to shake herself dry. The cut of her short grey hair and the half-steamed glasses pressed high up her nose gave little room for doubt who she was. He took a step in her direction and she spotted him, walking towards him with small, delicate footsteps and a wide smile on her face.

  ‘Profesora de la Fuente.’

  ‘Margarita, please.’

  ‘You’ll be wanting something hot,’ Cámara said.

  ‘They do a very good carajillo here,’ she said.

  Cámara smiled.

  ‘A proper one. Not just a café solo with a splash of whisky or cognac in it.’

  He lifted his half-empty glass, the toasted coffee bean still floating around the top.

  ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘I see you’ve beaten me to it.’

  Cámara signalled to the waiter that they were going to go and sit down at a small table in a quieter part of the bar, and they shuffled through the steaming, smoky air, hanging their coats up on a couple of hooks on the wall.

  ‘So,’ Margarita said as they sat down. Her face looked brighter without the hat, Cámara noticed. There was a playful curiosity in her eyes. Probably in her late fifties, unmarried, if the absence of a wedding ring indicated anything. He’d been concerned she might be a dry, pompous academic, but there was a liveliness there. ‘Are you any closer to finding your killers?’

  The use of the plural was clear and deliberate.

  ‘Of course I’ve been following it in the newspapers,’ she continued. ‘Who hasn’t? And once I received your phone call this morning I spent the whole time going back over the news reports. Of course I don’t know how much information you’re giving out.’

  The barman came over with her carajillo and placed it down on the table in front of them along with a couple of biscuits on a small plate.

  ‘Thought you might like those to go with it,’ he said.

  Margarita smiled at him.

  ‘They treat me well,’ she said. ‘Not many women come in here – it’s a bit of a man’s bar, as you’ve seen. But my father was a bullfighter in his time and he and a group of aficionados used to come here regularl
y for the tertulia after the fight – talking and analysing the afternoon’s bullfight well into the early hours. So they have a soft spot for me.’

  Cámara tried to remember if there had been a girl there when he had come in with Hilario all those years before. But Margarita would have been a grown woman by then, probably exploring worlds other than this.

  ‘This conversation and our meeting,’ Cámara said with a lowered voice, ‘are not entirely official.’

  ‘Oh, I gathered as much.’

  ‘Not that there’s anything wrong in it, but some of the people I work with are sticklers for doing everything by the book. You understand.’

  Margarita nodded.

  ‘So I have to be confident that what I tell you here doesn’t go beyond this table.’

  ‘I give you my word.’

  ‘I’m sorry to have to be so circumspect, but it’s just the way things are.’

  She raised her carajillo in salute.

  ‘However I can be of assistance to you. Really.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Cámara said. ‘I appreciate it. Now what’s been appearing in the newspapers is, as you’ve guessed, just part of what we know. But it seems to have been enough for you to reach your own conclusions about how many murderers we’re talking about.’

  ‘It was the mutilation of Blanco’s apoderado – Ruiz Pastor – that got me thinking,’ Margarita said. She took a sip of the carajillo and then put it down on the table. ‘It is true, isn’t it? What they say? That his genitals were removed?’

  Again the image of the misshapen form floating in the Albufera lake flashed through Cámara’s mind. He lowered his eyes.

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Yes, it’s a delicate subject,’ Margarita said, sensing his discomfort. ‘And not just for a man, believe me.’

  But more than you can imagine, Cámara thought to himself.

  ‘This detail caught your attention, then,’ he said aloud. ‘Why?’

  Margarita leaned in.

  ‘I don’t know how much you know about the symbolism behind bullfighting,’ she said. Cámara shrugged. ‘I assume that’s why you’re here, to pick my brains,’ she went on. ‘You were lucky to catch me, in fact. I’m supposed to be speaking at a symposium on religious iconography in the Bronze Age in Rome. Except that the airline went bust at the last minute. There’s a car coming tomorrow to drive me all the way to Madrid to catch another plane from there. They know how to treat their academics, those Italians.’