Hemingway Cutthroat - Hardcover

1
At about the same moment José Robles Pazos was murdered, Ernest Hemingway was drunk on sangria. He would soon become a hunted man, and of course it was the sangria’s fault.
Earlier, just as Robles was being led down a mountainside cut with runoff trenches now dusty in the early spring, led down by a rope tied to his wrists, blindfolded with the torn sleeve from his own shirt, Hemingway was 174 miles away in Madrid, riding in the backseat of an old, roofless Fiat Zero. The car was issuing backfire blasts so loud it occurred to him that the locals might think the Fascists had marched on the city again and were lobbing grenades into the street. It belonged to a flabby, unemployed Spanish journalist named Albarran, whom Hemingway had met the night before at a smoky basement game of Mus, several blocks from the Hotel Florida. Hemingway, in Spain only three days and looking for old-fashioned trouble, lost almost all of his pocket money because he never quite fathomed the game, which smelled like poker but kept involving bridge-style partnerships, and Albarran promised the American he’d take him to see a bullfight in the morning.
But there were of course no bullfights in Spain in 1937, because of the war. Albarran insisted he would make good on his claim, and so before lunch the next day Hemingway found himself horrifyingly sober and tortured by a migraine, driving northeast through the cloudy, bomb-pocked city. In the front seat next to Albarran was another fat Spaniard, older, who only whispered to Albarran in guttural hisses even when spoken to in ordinary tones.
The longer the drive, the more Hemingway began to seethe.
“C’mon, Albarran, tell me.”
“No, no, señor, you will see when we get there, I tell the truth.”
“I shoulda seen this coming.”
Martha was shopping. Until lunch.
The Fiat parked in front of a broad, seemingly abandoned expanse of bombed-out apartment buildings. The three men got out, instinctively hunching and hustling over to the building’s facade. Shells were known to sometimes fall. Albarran knocked on the door, traded a few Catalan obscurities with another man through the crack, and the door opened wide. They walked down a hallway, down a staircase that stank of mold.
“What the,” Hemingway said.
Another door, and then the basement. They walked down a worn set of wooden steps into a vast cellar, its low ceiling supported by massive pine joists and columns that looked positively medieval. The space was empty, save for some rusty petroleum barrels and stacks of empty egg crates. And for the bull, who was tethered to a central column with a thick barge rope.
Hemingway could see immediately, even in the low light from the strung-out wire of bulbs lining the ceiling, that the bull was old, twenty years if it was a day, emaciated, and probably sick. Its ribs were visible and heaving from its breath, and its coat was shaggy. Its eyeballs were milky with cataracts.
How’d they even get the animal down here? he wondered. There were twelve or so other men in the basement standing around, drinking rum from unmarked bottles. Hemingway looked around—there were no seats, no area to watch. If you were in the basement, you were part of the show.
“Una gran corrida!” Albarran chortled.
“You’ve got to be shitting me.”
“It is course libre, señor.”
“I’m out of here,” he said, turning just as a boy ran over to the daydreaming bull and with a quick gesture untied the rope from the column. As the boy dove back into the perimeter shadows, another man raised a pellet rifle and shot the wheezing bull in the flanks.
The bull instantly bellowed and launched into a furious, confused charge, foam flying from his parched nostrils, coming right at Hemingway and Albarran before hooking its whitened horn on another column and tripping, crashing onto its side. Hemingway had to dive away from the stairs, and every man on the room was on the balls of his feet as the bull stood up again, pissed and aching and half blind, and came at them in a vicious gallop, horns out, crushing the egg crates and bumping into the rough stone walls with a startled yelp. Hemingway and the other men ran around the perimeter or sometimes across the open middle, and the bull tried to chase them, always coming faster and sooner than you’d think, so the diving, sprinting, laughing Spaniards were often enough caught on its head, ripped by its horns, and thrown into the air.
“Jesus Christ,” Hemingway growled, keeping one eye on the staircase and trying to dash in inconspicuous bursts clockwise around the room, as the weathered old animal ran more or less also clockwise but intersected the room haphazardly in a homicidal rage, hitting the columns at random and shaking the rafters, looking for the nearest man to gore.
Hemingway didn’t get far at first, spending a long minute huddling in the shadows behind the other men. If anyone is going to catch a horn in the ribs, he thought, it’s going to be one of these nutless scamps.
But then Hemingway pushed Spaniards out of his way, which the men took to be part of the game, pushing each other as well into the line of fire. Crouching down behind a column, he took a rum bottle offered by a shirtless teenager covered in sweat, but before he could bring it to his lips the bull hit the opposite side of the column with the full force of his skull. The bottle shot out of Hemingway’s hand, and the column gave way in a thunderous shredding of old, dry wood. It crumbled in half. Hemingway bolted and leaped for the retaining wall, and the ceiling above the column shuddered and gave off plumes of dust and bowed down some two feet with epic structural screaming.
The Spaniards just whooped it up and kept running, taunting the bull. All Hemingway could focus on was the stairs.
But then the bull took them out—the boy who’d untied the rope ran scrambling up the steps, and the bull came at him and hit the staircase with its crown, and as the boy flew over the last step, up and through the doorway, the whole apparatus splintered around the bull, the beam joints falling over his neck and tripping up his front hooves, so he bucked and crashed, and broke the joints and planks up into kindling in just a few jerks of his massive body.
Hemingway couldn’t believe it. Now what? Edging close to the shattered wood now, Hemingway recalculated—could he move the old barrel over and jump up on it? But how, without getting nailed? Maybe I’ll just have to kill that bull, he thought, with a pipe or something, but he didn’t remember seeing anything like that in the semidarkness. Only bottles. A pike or something, a blade, that’s all it would take, I’ve seen it done enough times. Of course, I’ve seen men die trying, too.
If that fucking beast takes out one more column, we’re all dead.
All of those things I should be doing. This is a new low. I won’t be even able to tell Joe Russell about it.
He stepped toward the broken stairs—he reached up to the fractured wood step under the doorway, but it came off in his hand.
The Spaniards leaped around and hooted. The bull caught one of them on its head, the drunken fellow was lucky to avoid the horns, but then the bull heaved and threw the guy up and behind him, and before the flying man hit a low joist and broke his jawbone on it, his body snagged and ripped the wire that juiced the lightbulbs, and in a snap the room was pitch-black.
Except for the doorway at the top of the erstwhile steps, from which light flowed onto Hemingway, the bull turned.
Fuck, he dove again into the darkness, and the bull hurtled by him with a hairbreadth to spare, the horn brushing his jacket. Then the...