Jeopardy Is My Job. Marlowe Stephen
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 good 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