“Means you won’t be able to loaf around in Ecija just yet. Where did that woman go?” Shaw, his eyes dangerous, ran across the room. Andres didn’t answer, and it would be useless to waste time on him now. The scent was strong, and he knew he hadn’t been mistaken. There was only the one way she could have gone, too. He went up to Andres, pushed him from the doorway with his gun-muzzle, ran into the courtyard.
Naturally enough, there was no one there.
Shaw ran to the end, found a small arched doorway set in the high back wall and covered with creeper. The door was unlatched. Shaw pulled it open, dashed into a narrow alleyway. There were dozens of doors through which Karina might have gone; there was obviously no time now in which to search that alley when Debonnair and Ackroyd were waiting and unprotected — and anyhow Karina could have gone right along and out at either end, making for the Calle Jose Antonio. Shaw had a sudden fear that Debonnair might be in danger already, and he ran back up the courtyard, into that room behind the bar. There was no sign of Andres now. As he came out through the bar into the street, into the Calle de Las Flores, Shaw felt his guts twisting with a dreadful feeling that he’d been enticed away from the girl and Ackroyd. Then he looked along to the left, and, quite close to the bull-ring, he saw Debonnair and Ackroyd sauntering along slowly, as though waiting for some one else to join them before taking up their seats for the fight.
He felt an overwhelming sense of relief as he caught up with them. In spite of her casual bearing, he could see the easement in Debonnair’s smile, too, and in her eyes.
She said, “I thought you’d never come out of that place again, darling. You shouldn’t give me these frights, they aren’t good! Anyway — what’s the news?”
“Karina.” He told her quickly what had happened. “I never got a sight of her, I’m afraid, but I know she was there.” The grey-blue eyes were troubled with a sense of failure, and he had that damned pain in his guts again now. “We’re just no better off than we were before — except that we keep clear of the Calle Jose Antonio for a while longer. I had a feeling it might be a trap.”
“How are we going to get a line on Karina again, then?”
He felt hopeless, but he said, “She won’t be far away now, Debbie. We’ll just have to keep our eyes skinned and watch out.”
She said, “But — I don’t understand. Or do I?” She wrinkled up her nose. “I mean — if that fat Andres was a double-agent they’d know at the Consulate.”
“Not necessarily — there mightn’t have been time. Don’t forget, Karina hasn’t been in Algeciras long. It’s sheer cash at the bottom of Andres’s tactics, and he may not have had the opportunity for the double game before. I’ll have the Consulate warned as soon as we’re back in Gib—”
He broke off suddenly, and stiffened, feeling a curious sense of unease. Debonnair looked at him in alarm. He was glancing behind now; an awareness, some deeply ingrained instinct, that he was being followed had made him do that, and he saw that his instinct hadn’t let him down.
Four men were coming along the road behind them.
Of course, there was nothing suspicious in that fact, just by itself. But it was the whole aspect of those men. Their purposeful, alert faces had something to do with it, the eyes so steadily watching, the fact that they walked abreast and with a firm, unshakeable intent, the fact that each had his right hand in his coat-pocket and was quite plainly holding something there, something that bulged out the fabric. But the deciding factor was that a car was edging slowly along behind them, and that car was Don Jaime’s that he’d left on the Jerez road last night. Karina, he realized, must have been waiting in Andres’s bar for the ‘kill’…
Shaw’s grip tightened on Debonnair’s arm. She looked up questioningly into his eyes, her lips parting. Shaw muttered gruffly, “We’re being followed, darling, that’s all. But this time I think they mean to get us. Don’t look round. Just keep on at this speed and do what I say. I want to think for a bit.”
She nodded.
Shaw’s glance flickered from left to right ahead of them along the road, his mind assessing the possibilities. Could he jump a car and get to San Roque? Unfortunately, tonight being the night of the bullfight, the traffic was almost nose to tail and heading the wrong way — the whole of the Campo, the coastal strip, seemed to be converging on Algeciras this Sunday evening and making for the bull-ring, the family cars bulging with people. The fight did not take place every week, and the excitement whenever there was one became intense, had an English Cup Final knocked cold. In any case, Shaw still had to get that missing part back from Karina, so that was no good; and he had a nasty feeling, too, that the moment they tried anything like that they’d get a stream of lead in the back — all except Ackroyd, who’d be whisked into Don Jaime’s car for a quick tearaway.
They were close to the bull-ring now, could hear the tinny strains of the local cavalry regiment’s band playing away inside the building.
Once more Shaw took a quick glance to the rear. The four men had a section of the excited crowd in front of them now, were having some difficulty in forcing their way through. Shaw put on a spurt, drew ahead a little until the men behind were momentarily lost to sight round the circular side of the big, poster-splashed bull-ring. The stalls of the market outside helped to shield him; then, making up his mind and committing them all finally, he grabbed Debonnair’s arm again and hissed:
“Come on — we’re going to the bullfight. Once we’re in we can lose ’em and slip out by another exit.”
Quickly, dodging into the crowds, Shaw led the way to the nearest of the many entrances, up the stone steps to the box-office, paid for three seats in the sol or sunny side— which was all one could get without booking in advance, and though he’d have preferred to keep on the shady side, the sombra, where there was less chance of being picked out, it couldn’t be helped. Shaw knew he couldn’t risk going out again too soon, either; the men, if they suspected what he’d done, could watch at least some of the entrances, and he wouldn’t know which. He’d have to wait and see if they came in after him, then he could slip away behind their backs when the moment seemed right. Then, with those men safely in the bull-ring, he’d make for the Calle Jose Antonio and hope to catch up with Karina — alone.
The place, shimmering in its day-long heat, was absolutely jam-packed with sweating, yelling, chattering humanity, rank on rank of people sitting on the banked stone seats with their backs pressed in between the knees of the men and women on the row behind them like sardines sizzling in their oil. Shaw had been to a bull-fight only once before, and that was some years earlier. He remembered the general layout of the place, but he’d forgotten the noise, the stupendous deafening noise of thousands of people opening their mouths simultaneously and continuously. Now he found that sustained din stupefying to the senses, a continual battering of sound on the eardrums which inhibited thought, and the heat was really terrible — the Zoo in a heatwave had nothing on this at all. Ackroyd, he saw, was opening and closing his mouth, but Shaw couldn’t hear a thing that came from it. Debonnair was being pushed this way and that by the seething crowds milling along the hot stone seats. She was hanging grimly on to Ackroyd, and Shaw grabbed her and fought his way along through the hordes of gaily dressed Spaniards, making for where there seemed to be room on the outside of a row near a gangway if two fat ladies could be persuaded to push along a little. Bottles of vino were already clinking against glasses, vendors of nuts and sugared almonds, cushions, straw hats, and aguardiente (a kind of aniseed liqueur) shouted their wares, their cries mingling with the excited shrieks of the audience as greetings were roared out to friends glimpsed in the ocean of bodies moving to the benches.