The Second Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 20 More Classic Mystery Stories

So it was that Juliano met Muno Figero, who would fight the next day and had come to the pens to see the bull he had drawn.

Muno was six years older, tall and slender, with devilish eyes and strong, square teeth flashing black and white in a V-shaped brown face. Already he was making a name for himself with his graceful and daring capework.

That season, whenever Muno was in San Carla, Juliano was his dogged shadow. Muno enjoyed the adulation. He coached Juliano and took him sometimes to the cafes where toreros and their followers gathered to sip wine and talk. In these wonderful hours, Juliano soaked up the lore of the ring. He learned of Belmonte, who helped father modern bullfighting, of Procuna, refiner of the dead man’s pass, of Perez, who fought the terrible bull Machin and was killed because a breeze brushed a corner of his cape and exposed him, of Saleri, who defamed the classic art with a cheap, spectacular trick, using a pole to vault over the bull’s head. Saleri got his when he made the mistake of trying the trick twice on the same bull, finding the horns waiting when he descended the second time.

“Which proves,” Muno remarked, “that the bull may be smarter than the man. They are quick to learn — and they never forget.”

“Neither shall I,” Juliano said.

The broadening of knowledge destroyed the illusion that San Carla and its bullring were the center of everything. Indeed, there were dozens of such rings scattered all over Mexico in grubby little cities. Rings whose walls were of weathered clapboard and rusting tin signs exhorting one to Tome Coca Cola, whose seats were tiers of unpainted planking worn smooth. Matadors fought in such rings at two points in their careers, if they weren’t killed in between. They started here, young and eagerly confident. Or here they ended, old, scarred and bitter, gloomily fighting bulls they once would have ridiculed for the uncouth, bumpkin crowds they despised.

During this period, Juliano heard nothing from his family. It was the natural order of things. Each had his or her way to go; mama and papa on the farm and Lista with her husband, an old widower who came one day and gave papa ten pesos for permission to marry Lista, who was fifteen at the time.

Their faces all became affectionate memories; and then one afternoon Lista was waiting when Juliano and Jose returned to the lean-to. They had spent the afternoon spreading fresh sand in the arena. Their sweaty, parched, gritty discomfort vanished when they saw her standing beside the uncovered doorway, a pasteboard suitcase at her feet.

She held out her arms and ran to meet them. The three merged into a confusion of hugs, shouts, laughter. Then Juliano held her at arm’s length. “What a fine woman is our elder sister, Jose!”

With rare vivacity, Jose laughed his pleasure. “But she isn’t real, Juliano. She is too beautiful to be real.”

The thought struck Juliano: “What of your husband, Lista?”

“He is dead,” she said quietly. “He drank too much pulque in the village and fell from his horse and broke his neck.”

Juliano closed the chapter in his mind without regret or sorrow. After all, the old man had had three wives.

“I had no place,” Lista said, “so I came to you, Juliano.”

He put an arm about her shoulders. “You did right. Tonight we go to the Cafe de los Toros and buy a bottle of wine to celebrate the reunion!”

She met Muno that night. After the old man, the dazzling, ardent, young one aroused her love quickly.

Now she was dead.

Juliano raised his head slowly, aware of Jose fidgeting worriedly beside him. He looked about the plaza, at the cars in motion, the pigeons swooping from the stone monument. He felt the sun hot on his face and thought of the coldness of her in the clinic.

He uncoiled his lean body slowly, standing. Jose jumped from the bench beside him.

“Shall we eat, Juliano?”

Juliano gave him a long, baleful look. “No. We go to see Muno.”