Free Message From Malaga by Helen MacInnes

“Señor Reid will soon be back. He likes to talk with Magdalena, and she has always much to say.”
    Magdalena? Ferrier was no wiser, but he nodded. It seemed simpler for a foreigner not to start talking during a performance. Esteban, as manager of El Fenicio and old bullfighter friend, could do as he damned well pleased and get away with it.
    “You enjoy our flamenco,” Esteban stated, the deep furrows in his face pulling up into a real smile, and his melancholy dark eyes lightening with approval. For a minute or so, he watched the stage along with Ferrier. Then he sensed increasing pressure from the people standing at the side. “Excuse me,” he said, rose, bowed, and turned to gesture to them with his hands. They obeyed him, of course. They moved back against the wall. Perhaps Esteban fixed them with those dark eyes of his in the way he had dominated many a bull in the old days. But, thought Ferrier, I bet they don’t stay fixed; they’ll be back, once Esteban leaves. The thin American with the hunched shoulders was no longer standing near the door. In fact, he wasn’t anywhere in sight. Now where did he go? Ferrier wondered; and then, looking at the stage again, forgot his question, didn’t even think an answer was important. Constanza was finishing her dance with a succession of fireworks from heels and castanets.
    There was a short lull, a sense of waiting, a sudden silence, and then gentle guitars. Tavita rose. She stretched her waist, raised her arms, advanced one thigh. Softly, at first, she began to dance the story of two different loves, a story that had been danced this way for more than four hundred years.
    Where’s Jeff? Ferrier wondered irritably. He was seeing the most wonderful dancing he had ever imagined, and it was being spoiled for him. (There’s something wrong, he kept thinking. Jeff had said he would be back in time to watch Tavita, and he had meant it.) As the dance progressed, from Miguel’s pleading into Pablo’s demands, Ferrier found he was looking at that door near him, almost as if he were trying to will Jeff to appear. But there was no sign of him. Give up, Ferrier told himself angrily: Jeff manages his own life; if he wants to miss Tavita, that’s his business. From then on, almost to the end of the dance, he watched the stage determinedly, ignoring the seepage of people along the wall beside him. They had returned, of course, Esteban now being seated at a table of bullfighters on the other side of the courtyard. One of them steadied himself against the back of the empty chair, as if he had been pressed forward unexpectedly. Ferrier glanced sideways, automatically. And beyond the stranger, who gave him a bow of apology, he saw a shaggy nondescript blond head. Ferrier’s eyes swerved back to the stage, but the last minutes of violent passion and remorse, now being danced so magnificently by Tavita, were completely ruined for him. The young American had come out of that damned doorway: what the hell was he doing, slinking out in that way? Come to think of it, he had been in there quite a while, hadn’t he? If he hadn’t come out so carefully, so unobtrusively, Ferrier would have paid less attention. Hesigned quietly to the stranger who stood by the empty chair that he and his friend could have the table. Then he rose, just as quietly, and made for the doorway.
    He entered a room that was dark and silent. A staircase ran steeply up the wall on his right, barely lighted by two naked bulbs on the landing that ran the full width of this hall. There were two entrances up there separated by a clock on the wall. There seemed to be a doorway, too, underneath the landing, down on this level. He had the uncomfortable feeling of being an intruder, and he hesitated, now mistrusting the instinct that had brought him here in such a hurry. The dusty blond American with the hunched shoulders and narrow chest might only have been searching for a men’s room, although there was one near the