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

The Inspiration

Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, October 1970.

Juliano stirred on the soured straw ticking, the movement of his slender body provoking a creak from the hardness of the crude plank bed. A breeze filtered out of the warmth of the Mexican night through the cracks of the slab-and-sod lean-to. It was tainted with the smells of the nearby bullring, parched sand, horse sweat, the faintest suggestion of old and rotten blood.

Juliano stared into the darkness. The silence seemed to pulse. None of the usual small sounds came from the stable or bull pen, the pawing of a hoof, a whinny, the blowing of slobber. Even the gaunt coyotes in the desolate hills above San Carla de la Piedras were ignoring the fullness of the moon.

Juliano squirmed to a half-sitting position, a premonition chilling him. He glanced at the lax form of Jose, his twin brother, beside him. Burro, his edgy mind formed the thought, one could not look at you and guess that our sister is in trouble.

His angry condemnation was followed by a quick barb of remorse. Jose loved Lista even as he did. It was only that, for all their likeness, they were different. When time came to sleep, Jose slept.

Juliano got up and padded to the open doorway. Clothed in the coarse, gray cotton pantaloons in which he both worked and slept, he was tall and very slender for his fourteen years. The moonlight lent a quality of brown satin to his bony, ridged chest, wiry arms, and an almost gaunt, broad-cheeked mestizo face that was shadowed under a mane of coarse, hacked-off, black hair. His details added up to a look of a particular kind of hunger, the hunger one suspects in the sinewy puma that has survived every hardship.

His large, liquid black eyes searched his surroundings, the shadow of the stable against which the lean-to clung, the barren stretch of dusty earth between him and the bullring thirty yards away, the pens against the wooden wall of the arena where the bulls for Sunday’s fight were black, lurking shadows.

Nothing moved, and the night was as silent as death. The scene was suddenly not good, as it had been three years ago when he and Jose arrived barefoot in San Carla, papa’s gift of twenty centavos easing the pain of papa’s explanation that it was now time for their hungry mouths to leave his table.

San Carla had seemed the jewel of cities to their young, goggling, peon eyes. The sun-baked buildings of board and dusty stucco were two, three, even four stories high. The narrow streets spilled their traffic into a broad plaza where pigeons flew from a towering stone monument and a man of great authority in a brown cotton uniform could make the cars stop by blowing his whistle.

Now, memories of the time before that first day came like a burro’s kick, in sharp pictures. The mud-brick adobe on the rocky farm far back in the hills where one coaxed the straggly corn with a tireless hoe and water carried into the fields. A dung fire burning on the hearth. The pat-pat-pat of mama’s hands making tortillas. The ill-tempered old goat with one broken horn. The treasured red hen that laid eggs with two yolks. The corn-husk doll Lista had played with about the time he and Jose were born...

Juliano went rigid in the lean-to doorway as a weak, gasping outcry came out of the night. A similar note of torment was surely what had awakened him.

He’d taken only a few jerky steps when he saw her, a slender, twisted form on the ground beyond the corner of the barn. He ran, and fell on his knees beside her. His mind whipped away from what his eyes saw. For a second he was about to faint.

“Lista! My sister! Por Dios!”

The soft oval of her face was hot and wet with pain. The cascade of lustrous black hair was tangled about her cheeks and forehead. Her large dark eyes were sunken and filled with the sight of death.

Her full red lips parted. Her beautiful teeth gleamed. “Juliano... I knew I would reach you. Help me, Juliano, help me!”

She was trying to rise to an elbow, her other slender arm reaching toward him. He couldn’t move, held by the sight of so much blood. It stained the cotton dress that clung to her slender, once-vibrant and youthful form. It had run glistening down her calves to dye the edges of the guarachas on her feet.

“Lista...” he said in a disembodied voice. “Lista...” Then he was gathering up the loose lightness of her, staggering toward the lean-to doorway, his hoarse shouts rustling the horses in their stalls and the great dark bulls in the pen. “Jose! Quickly! Wake up, you burro, and help me! Our sister, she is dying!”

Dr. Diego Sorolla de Luz stepped onto the front porch of the long, low, mud-brick building that housed the free clinic for the poor in San Carla. He closed the screen door, squinting as he turned into the glare of the early morning sun.

He was a lean, swarthy man dressed in white ducks, smock, surgical cap. He looked for a moment at the backs of the two boys sitting on the farther end of the porch, their legs dangling. He drew a heavily reluctant breath and started toward them.

Juliano and Jose turned their heads toward the sounds of tired footsteps on gritty planking. They read the pity and sympathy in the doctor’s face. Juliano paled a little. Otherwise, they reacted outwardly to their sister’s death with the stoicism of their ancestors.

“I am sorry to be a doctor whose best was not good enough,” he said.

“Gracias, Señor Doctor,” both boys said. Juliano added, “We shall pay you when...”

“It is all paid, my young friend.”

“How? Muno Figero hasn’t been here, and no one else would bother.”

The doctor wedged himself down between them, Jose on his right, Juliano on his left. “Muno Figero? The young torero? Was he the prospective father?”

Juliano nodded. Jose leaned and spoke across the doctor’s chest. “Shhh, Juliano! Lista asked us not to tell.”

“Your sister mentioned her troubles?” the doctor asked.

“Lista and I were very close,” Juliano said. “She always turned to me when the trouble was bad — even at the end. Not to mama, or papa, or Muno, who she loved. But to me...”

“Juliano,” Jose said.

Juliano looked at his brother. “What does it matter now? It is right for the doctor to know.” Juliano lifted his eyes to the man’s. “She was not really a bad woman, Señor Doctor, even though she lived with a man not her husband.”

“I’m sure of that. She was the loveliest of young women. I want you always to remember her that way.”

“I shall remember her grief,” Juliano said. “She was to have a baby, which Muno didn’t want.”

De Luz’s hawkish face with its beaked nose became almost saturnine for an instant, the dark eyes angry and hooded. “I’m sure our torero will be in the clear.” He didn’t say the rest of it, the part that experience and medical knowledge had taught him. The girl, undoubtedly on her lover’s insistence, had crept to some dark hole where some dirty-fingered old woman had used a sharpened stick or filthy hatpin to start the flow again, to abort the living thing in a womb. Then, when things had gone wrong, the old woman, thinking only of her own safety, had abandoned the girl. And the pain-wracked girl had somehow dragged herself to the one person on earth she believed in.

The doctor laid his hand on Juliano’s shoulder, feeling the bony, wiry strength of it. “Don’t brood, my young friend. It won’t help — and she wouldn’t want it.”

“I try to tell him so,” Jose said, “but he thinks of little else for two, three days, since Lista came and told us.”

“Burro,” Juliano said, “she needed to tell someone. Can’t you understand?”

“Did she tell you she was planning an abortion?” the doctor asked.

“Abortion, Señor Doctor?”

“A way of doing away with the thing before it became a baby.”

“She mentioned it.”

“Did she say who, where, or how she planned to go about it?”

“She said Muno knew of such things. I begged her not to do it.”

“I see.” De Luz got up heavily. “The matter will of course be reported to the police, but I doubt that anything will come of it. The young man involved will doubtless exhibit a great shock, and one might as well try to run down an individual rat in the garbage heaps of San Carla as to hope to nail the dirty-fingered old woman. Half the crones in town would take the assignment, for a price.”

Juliano stood up on the edge of the porch. “Well, it will soon be forgotten. We are but peons.”

The doctor looked at him quickly and started to say something, obviously in denial of the boy’s wisdom-hard statement. Instead, he said, “There are details. Your papa will have to be notified. The funeral arrangement must be made. I will see to it.”

“You are most kind,” Juliano said.

Noontime came and went, and Juliano continued to sit in a dark silence on the bench in the city square. Jose grew increasingly alarmed at the change in his brother.

“Juliano, I’m hungry...”

“Then go and eat!”

“But you, Juliano...”

“Shut up, Jose,” Juliano said. Papa and Mama, he thought, I meant for nothing like this to happen when I brought together Lista and Muno. I only meant good... Was it I who ignorantly started it all? Or was it a tale written by a finger in the sky?

They had squandered the twenty centavos, he and Jose, the first day in San Carla, on cakes of brown sugar candy sold by sidewalk vendors from fly-specked glass showcases.

Their third day in the city, Juliano and Jose had met three others like themselves. The belly cramps were now urgent, and the others were wise in the ways of urban life.

The five spotted a well-dressed man staggering from a cantina. They followed him, invisible shadows on the dark street, and when the moment was right, they sprang on him, beat him down, and ripped the wallet from his pocket. They divided the fortune, forty-three pesos, in the sanctuary of an alley.

Later, bedded for the night in a culvert, Jose patted his comfortably rumbling stomach. “This is a good thing, I think.”

“No,” Juliano said, “it is a bad thing.”

“Well, what are we to do?”

“We’ll find work.”

Jose grunted his disbelief and went to sleep. Juliano lay wakeful, feeling dirtied, remembering the sudden sober, pitiful look on the big, dumb animal’s face when the young wolves had dragged him down.

The day after the robbery was a Sunday, and Juliano and Jose followed the crowds to the bullring. Juliano soaked in every detail, from the tinny trumpet announcing the processional of the costumed matadors to the dragging away of the last dead bull.

“Jose,” Juliano said when it was all over, “we shall be toreros. It is the only way the likes of us can hope to be rich and famous.”

“Not I,” Jose said.

“You will follow where I lead,” Juliano’s voice left no room for compromise. “Come. We are going to see the manager of this place.”

The impresario, located after asking directions of countless people, turned out to be a stooped, sallow man with incredible pouches under his eyes. “So you would go to work?”

“Si, Señor.”

“Doing what?”

“Anything for a start, Señor. Someday I will be a matador.”

“You and a million others of your kind,” the manager sneered. “Would you shovel manure from the stables?”

“Until our arms fell off, Señor.”

“Mend the padding the horses wear? Sharpen the pikes the mounted picadors carry? Curry horses and tend the tame steers we use as Judas goats to lead the bulls into the pens when they’re shipped in from the ranches?”

“Anything, Señor. Any work!”

“Well, muchacho, you challenge me. So I’ll accept, because there is always work for willing hands who don’t demand a fortune. But jump when you’re told, mind you!”

“Forever, Señor!”

“And if I catch you stealing or loafing on the job, I’ll cut off your ears and feed them to my dog.”

“The dog will die of starvation,” Juliano laughed.

“Where do you live, muchacho?”

“In a huge stone pipe that passes under a street.”

“You’ll catch your death in that. You can use the lean-to beside the stable.”

“Gracias, Señor!”

After a hard day’s work, Jose was always ready for his bean bowl and bed, but Juliano enjoyed the evening hours. As the sun set, he was a slender figure in the empty arena fighting imaginary bulls. His weapons were a ragged, cast-off cape, a wooden sword, a muleta made from a piece of sacking. He practiced everything he had seen and been told, and one evening when he turned in a series of veronicas the silence was broken by an “ole” and the clapping of a pair of hands. He looked up in surprise.

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.”

Muno was knotting a black string tie about the collar of a white silk shirt when the knock sounded on the door of the bed-sitting room of his cubbyhole kitchenette apartment.

With a final quick glance at his black-haired reflection, he turned from the bureau and crossed the room, picking his way through a small space crowded with sofa, chairs, table, the bureau, floor lamp, a wardrobe made of corrugated cardboard, and a wall bed that was still unmade.

He opened the door and stiffened slightly at the sight of the two boys in the sultry, dim hallway.

“Juliano, Jose...” he murmured. He stood aside and motioned them in, his face a shade lighter than normal. “Has something happened?” he asked, sensing that something had, indeed.

“She is dead, Muno,” Juliano said.

“Oh.” Muno drifted to the worn blue sofa and sat down slowly. He moved as if all of his joints were dry, the sockets grating. “Where is she?”

“At the clinic. The thing went badly, Muno. She won’t have a baby. She bled to death.”

Muno raised a hand and fingered sweat beads from under his eyes. “I’m sorry, Juliano. Truly, I am.”

Juliano looked about the room, at the clothing tossed over a chair, the socks crumpled beside the bed, the bureau where her powder, lipstick and cologne lay as she had last touched them. “Yes, Muno, I suppose you are. She was beautiful, and young, and gave you all of herself.”

Muno bit his lips and moved his head numbly from side to side. “Do you hate me, Juliano?”

“Hate? No. I despise you!”

“You don’t understand,” Muno said. “A baby would have messed up everything, right when I’m on the edge of better things. Did you know that a famous manager has come all the way from Mexico City to watch me in the arena tomorrow?”

“I see.” Juliano made a slight motion of his hand to Jose and they started toward the door.

Muno jerked himself upright from the sofa. “Juliano...”

Juliano pushed Jose into the hall, then stopped and turned in the doorway.

Muno held out a hand. “Juliano, hatred will not bring her back.” Juliano stood and looked at him. “Please, Juliano...” Muno said. “It is over, done. Nothing can change that.”

“How quickly will you forget her, Muno?”

“Juliano...”

“Will you bring home another tomorrow night?”

Muno’s face hardened. “Get out! Get out! You are a fool, like your sister. Get out, and don’t come back!”

When the full moon was at zenith that night, Juliano nudged Jose awake.

Jose sat up on the straw ticking, rubbing his eyes with his knuckles and making gulping noises. “What is it, Juliano?”

“Come on, we are going across to the arena. It is as bright as day outside. I can’t lay here.”

Jose’s hands fell limply from his face. “What? What is this?”

Juliano was already standing beside the bed, pulling his cotton blouse over his head and shoulders.

“Muno Figero has drawn the bull called Santiago for tomorrow.”

“Si, but what has this...”

“I would try Muno’s shoes,” Juliano said. “I would test this bull. Now. In the arena. Will you help me chute the bull and work him back into the pen — or must I do it all by myself?”

Jose’s eyes showed white with fear. “You are crazy, Juliano. You will kill yourself!”

“But I won’t argue,” Juliano said. “Are you coming to help me or not?”

Mumbling an incoherent prayer, Jose leaped out of bed.

Shortly, the bull Santiago took his first exploratory steps into the strange, new world of the arena when Juliano shouted to Jose to open the gate.

Limned in the moon glare in the center of the arena, Juliano watched the bull pause and paw the sand. He knew that Santiago had seen him and was taking a moment to size up the enemy, the situation. Santiago was a sleek, black Piedras Negras, almost nine hundred pounds with horns that swept dangerously outward and upward at the tips, a far better bull than was usually seen in San Carla.

Afraid that his dry mouth and constricted throat had lost the power to speak, Juliano lifted his threadbare old cape with trembling hands. He stomped the sand. “Toro!” he said “Toro!”

Santiago circled as if unaware of the two-legged creature’s existence. Then the night exploded with the thunder of his hoofs.

Juliano choked back the urge to bleat and flee. Sweat burned his eyes. His hands were shaking the cape almost uncontrollably.

Santiago grew to monstrous size as the charge closed the distance. His eyes threw back red moonbeams. Juliano kept his gaze fastened on the needle-sharp horns. They dipped, hooking, and a flick of the cape changed their course by a scant degree.

Suddenly, the bull was past, and Juliano realized he was in one piece. He turned. Santiago was already wheeling, charging again. This time, it was less frightful. Juliano’s heart ceased to be a choking mass in his throat.

Another pass, with the cape swirling. Then again, and again.

Juliano dared a laugh. He stomped his bare foot. “Toro!”

The seconds became minutes, and a thin haze of dust clouded the surface of the sand. Santiago turned, hooked, and the cape swept him safely past.

“Toro! Toro!” Juliano flaunted the cape. He turned the bull in half a dozen more passes, working toward the side of the arena. Santiago was beginning to lather. It is enough, Juliano decided, and he leaped behind the barricade.

Jose, who had watched it all from the safety of the wooden shelter, pounded Juliano on the shoulder. “You were one of them, Juliano! A real torero.”

“I have practiced the cape many months.” Juliano was out of breath and soaked with sweat. “Now we work Santiago into the chute, back into the pen so that no one will ever know he was in here tonight.”

Jose shook his head, still dumbfounded. “My brother — and a real live bull.”

“Perhaps I had not only much practice but the strongest of inspirations,” Juliano said.

“Did you not feel alone and naked?”

“As naked as Belmonte must have felt.” Juliano’s eyes met his brother’s. “When he was a boy, the Great One would swim a river on a bull ranch at night and fight the bulls alone, secretly. It is the way Belmonte learned. He was too young to know then that he was sending many matadors to their deaths. If he had only known...”

Juliano turned, craned, looking over the top of the barricade. Santiago claimed the center of the arena, head lifted, horns gleaming, forehoof pawing, challenging all comers.

“When they first face a man, they think he and the cape are one. So the cape distracts them,” Juliano explained. “But the second time around — should there be one — the bull in his wisdom knows the truth. This is the reason great care is taken from the day of their birth to keep them from facing a cape, until they go into the arena. Nothing is more deadly than a cape-broken bull such as Muno Figero will face when he meets Santiago in the arena tomorrow.”

Jose nodded in slow comprehension of truths his brother had learned while he, Jose, slept the evenings away.

“I think Muno Figero will not live to see Mexico City,” Jose decided.

And for once Juliano was quite certain that his duller brother was right.