Shaw made it at last, pushed the other two down on to the seat, which was not far from an exit so that they could make a quick dive out when the time came. The fat ladies were charming, but voluble; every one, they said animatedly, had a right to a seat at the bullfight and no one minded the discomfort, not in the least… the señor must not concern himself…
Shaw watched all the entrances as carefully as he could, though he was half blinded by the glare from the yellow sand and the many bright colours of the dresses, startling beneath the hot, fierce sun.
The excitement was growing around them as the local fire-engine, whose hoses had been damping down the sand, moved away and the picadors came out into the glare. The band seemed to increase its tempo, and the sound thudded into the walls. The President of the fight was in his box now, surrounded by striking girls, some of them turned out in high combs and mantillas and dresses which swept the ground as they moved, chattering like every one else, to their seats. There was a constant click of fans, a fiap-flap of newspapers as the close, sweating bodies who were turning the place into an oven, an oven open to the sun, tried to start a little air moving. The stone seats themselves were hot to the touch after absorbing a full day’s sun. The picadors, fat and greasy men in tawdry finery on thin, scraggy, ramshackle, straw-sided mounts, strutted their weary horses about the ring, the long-pointed lances carried beneath their arms; the crowd roared. And just then Shaw felt the premonition of danger.
He looked round.
The four men were coming in, grim-faced and still with their right hands in their pockets clutching those guns, and this time Karina was with them.
That altered things; Shaw would have to get Karina now, and get her for sure this time, before he could leave that bull-ring. Somehow he didn’t think they’d been spotted; it would be a difficult business to pick out anybody already seated among this vast, roaring, gesticulating crowd, and with any luck they wouldn’t be seen at all — until he was ready.
The reluctant young bull was urged on to the arena’s sand as the cage-doors from the stall were lifted; and it stood uncertainly now before the President’s box, pawing a little at the ground and glaring with its little red eyes at the strange figures moving about before it, the matador making his preliminary passes with the cape to ‘play’ the animal and test its spirit. Somehow it seemed dazed — as well it might — to have been plunged into this noise and colour and light, excitement and blood-lust, from the quiet, cool pitch-darkness of the cell in which it had spent the last twenty-four hours. Soon, whatever the outcome of the fight, however bungling the matador, the bull would be a bloodied mess, would be a corpse dragged by ropes and mules over that sand, which would be red by then, red with its own hard-spilt blood, and out into the dead-meat room to be cut up for the poor.
The bull didn’t know all this, of course, unless a long ancestry, a pedigree of champion bulls who had died in rings all over Spain and South America, could make it instinctively aware, through that blood which as yet flowed in its veins, of its unavoidable fate. But it got its first taste of searing pain a moment later when, the matador having danced away, a picador spurred his horse towards it and dug in the great lance. He dug it in unskilfully, and the bull roared, moved inward so that the picador retreated to the side of the arena. It lunged with its big, sharp horns at the horse, got those horns into the straw padding and lifted a little, until the picador, moving upward in indignity, was wedged — white-faced now — between bull and ringside. The angry clamour of the crowd, who hadn’t liked this early lack of skill, changed suddenly to a happy gale of laughter at the picador’s expense when they saw his predicament.
But, vicious now, the man got his lance in again, and the bull turned away in pain, a great spreading dark patch of red pouring down its flanks and dripping into the yellow of the sand.
The four men left Karina’s side, and carefully, so as not to risk disturbing the patrons of the fight — whose terrible fury might wreck their plans — split up into four separate search-units. Shaw had seen them go, and he and Debonnair tried to watch each one as the people alongside roared and cheered and laughed and groaned and hissed and, now and then, bellowed, “Olé!”
The bull by now had had two picadors at him, and he wasn’t in a very good state. But he was at last getting really angry, which had been the object of the exercise so far, and soon there would be some sport — he was, praise Heaven, showing a fighting spirit. He snorted, and rushed a picador, who dodged nimbly. And then the bandilleros came in jauntily, the brightly coloured bandilleros, and they were not very skilful either; they titupped lightly forward and stuck their heavy-shafted darts into the bull’s neck to lower his head for the matador, and one of them broke off a dart, clumsily, ripping a long tear in the bull’s hide, so that his blood spurted out along the broken stick-end, almost zipping into the sand, and the crowd didn’t like this either.
Hissing, cat-calling, rising in their seats, they let the bandillero know, stormily, that he was not popular. They were red and steamy with anger, taut with contempt; and this whole-blooded concentration on the arena made them impatient when the slow, watchful progress of the four men threatened to interrupt their view as the searchers efficiently quartered the banked seats.
But it wasn’t until that first fight of the series was nearing the Moment of Truth that two of the men, on closing paths after skirting the whole of the Sol, began to draw the net on Shaw. The excitement of the crowd was tremendous now. The bandilleros’ darts were sticking out from the bull’s neck like a ruff which trailed in bloody drips to the ground, a ruff of agony which pulled horribly at the torn flesh; and the animal’s head was down and ready. Just in the dead centre of the neck-muscles at the back, between the bone and the gristle and the sinew, the matador’s sword would slice soon and show its point through the bull’s chest. The matador, a young, saturnine man with his hair bunched blackly in the nape of his neck under the rakish tricorne hat, with his flamboyant jacket and the trousers tight to the knee, stood poised lightly on his toes, holding the red cape. He stood in the centre of the ring, waving the cape provocatively, making passes at the bull, standing neatly aside as the animal blundered at him in its pain, its blinding, bloodied agony. The band started up again now; the drama was intense — was in fact at its intensest, approaching the climax. The atmosphere was vital, almost supercharged, every one living this moment and every eye in the place — every eye save those very few who had something even more important to think about — was on that bloody scene, when Shaw decided it was time to go. He could slip away now, while the crowd’s attention came up to its peak, before a chase, a human fight, became of any interest to the watching thousands and made them interfere.
But first there was Karina.
Shaw touched Debonnair on the shoulder. “Right,” he said, almost having to shout into her ear. “This is it.”
She nodded, got up. Her face was white beneath the sun. They each took one of Mr Ackroyd’s arms and moved up the gangway towards the exit half-way along the stepped slope. No one took any notice of them — no one except the two men, who’d spotted them and were coming for them now. These two men edged along beside the ring at the bottom of the banked rows, collecting curses and dirty looks as they stepped on toes and sprawled over picnic-baskets and bottles of vino. Making rudely for the gangway intersection, they were blocking the good view of the over-excited spectators at the worst possible moment — as Shaw had intended.