Free The Follower by Patrick Quentin

Sombrao.’
    ‘I’m her husband. Can you get me a seat near them?’
    The girl glanced at a book in front of her. ‘I think I can.’ She ran a painted fingernail through a box of tickets. ‘Here. I have AL45 8. Is right next to them, I think.’
    Thanks.’
    Mark bought the ticket. The bellhop hovered. Mark gave him his suitcase and topcoat and told him to take them up to Ellie’s suite. Downstairs he found an American soda fountain. He had a hamburger and a milk shake and then told one of the taxi-drivers waiting outside the hotel to take him to the bullring.
    He relaxed against the torn upholstery. He could afford to let himself be happy. The man with Ellie couldn’t have anything to do with Victor. No henchman of Victor’s would be taking Ellie to the bullfight. She was being just an ordinary tourist. Probably by now she’d completely forgotten Victor and her gambling debt. She was quite capable of that sort of convenient amnesia.
    Smiling, he started to hum the Toreador’s Song from Carmen.

9
    THE great circular structure of the Plaza de Toros loomed over a white, unfinished suburb. Mark paid off the taxi in front of a gate in the high concrete wall. Broad sidewalks alternated with areas of dust and rubble. The feeling was of a city that had been bombed rather than of a town which was catching up with itself. The little stalls selling fruit, candy, cold meat and weird omelets which sizzled over charcoal braziers looked improvised after disaster. Even the people who were storming the gates seemed a refugee-mixed swarm … fashionable women, bare-foot Indians, men in prosperous business suits, girls with rebozos over their heads, half-naked children and dogs.
    His ticket was rejected at the first gate and he was waved towards another entrance further around the wall. He bucked the crowd. A little boy selling lottery tickets whined after him.
    Chickens squawked away from him and almost got run over by a passing limousine. Music, blaring from a loudspeaker, was incongruously American.
    ‘Candy, I called my sugar candy…’
    Mark reached the next gate and presented his ticket. He was let into a spacious parking area jammed with expensive automobiles. The great wall of the bullring reared ahead of him, split with stairways and entrances. He was jostled towards cement stairs and up them. He passed through one of the gaps, to find himself half-way up one side of a monstrous cup of stone. Far below, the circle of the arena itself looked hardly bigger than the cardboard cap of a milk bottle. Tiny men in red coats and white pants were scurrying around smoothing the sand. A brass band was playing a paso doble . The stone tiers of seats, beveling the huge crater, were already a third full. Clusters of people alternated with great grey gaps of stone. Ribbons of bright advertisements stretched around the circumference of the arena — Carta Blanca Beer, Gayosso, Buy Adam’s Hats.
    Mark pushed his way around the circular walk, searching for his seat. If Ellie and the unknown gentleman’ had left the hotel half an hour before him, they must certainly be here by now. He found his section. He started down steep stone steps towards his row. ‘L ‘was much nearer the ring. There was an iron railing to help the descent. The music stopped. One patch of people on the far side of the arena were mad about something. They started to whistle and shout. Mark reached Row L’. The outside seats were occupied. He eased past Mexican knees, looking ahead for Ellie. There was no sign of her.
    A little boy, staggering under an immense basket, screamed: Cerveza. Hay cerveza. Bohemia. Dos Equis. Hay cerveza.’
    Ahead of Mark were three empty seats. he struggled to them. He looked at the numbers 454, 456, 458. A man selling cushions was wandering in the next aisle. Mark signaled him. The man scrambled through the tier below and threw him a cushion.
    Mark handed down a peso, dropped the cushion on his scooped-out cement seat and sat down. He