Manolo

"You've got fat," Manolo said.

He said it before Yassine had reached the gate, without getting up, in the same voice he had used twelve years ago to tell him his feet were wrong. Then he did get up, slowly, in stages, a hand on each arm of the plastic chair and then a hand on the trunk of the plane tree, and when he was upright he was smaller than Yassine remembered and his moustache had gone entirely white, but his eyes had not changed at all. They went over Yassine the way they used to go over a young bull let into the ring for the first time, from the horns to the hocks and back, assessing, without hurry and without kindness, because kindness could come later if it was earned.

"I've got older," Yassine said.

"Older is fat. Look at your shoulders. You've been sitting."

"I've been working."

"Sitting," said Manolo, and then he put out both hands and took Yassine's face between them, rough as bark, and held it, and looked at it, and said nothing at all for long enough that the boys on the barrier stopped swinging their legs.

• • •

The old man's house was at the back of the arena, behind the pens, a single-storey thing of rough stone with a vine over the door and a kitchen that opened straight onto the yard. It had been his wife's house and then, when she died, it had become simply the place where Manolo slept between days at the ring. There was a calendar on the wall from a feed merchant in Vauvert, still turned to April. There was a television on a cabinet with a lace cloth over it, as though it were sleeping. There were photographs everywhere, on every surface and in rows along the walls, so many of them that they had stopped being decoration and become a kind of plaster: boys in white, young men in white, the same young men older and then in suits at weddings, bulls in mid-turn with their heads low, a crowd on concrete steps under a burning sky, and Manolo himself in almost none of them, because he had always been the one holding the camera or standing just out of frame with his arms folded.

He put a bottle of pastis on the table and two glasses and a jug of water from the tap, which came out cloudy and slowly cleared.

"So," he said. "Lyon."

Yassine had not said anything about Lyon. He looked up.

"The plates." Manolo nodded towards the yard, where the Peugeot was ticking in the last of the heat. "Sixty-nine. I may be old but I can read."

"Lyon," Yassine agreed.

"Doing what?"

He gave it to him the way he had given it to Granier: the warehouses, the night shifts, a security firm that paid late and then stopped paying, the spring, the letter, the flat he could no longer afford. It came out well. He had decided at four in the morning that the trick would be to give it the dullness of the truth, and he did, and he watched Manolo's face while he did it and saw nothing in it but attention.

"And the police?" Manolo said, when he had finished.

There it was.

"I left," Yassine said. "A long time ago. Two years in. It wasn't for me."

Manolo poured water into his glass and watched the pastis go milky. He did not look up from it. "I told you that," he said. "At twenty. I told you it wasn't for you."

"You did."

"You told me I was an old man who didn't understand that a raseteur's knees go at thirty and a policeman gets a pension."

"I said that?"

"Something like that. With more swearing." Manolo drank, and set the glass down, and turned it a quarter turn on the oilcloth, as if adjusting it. "So you left the police and went to Lyon and lifted boxes for ten years. And now you come back here with your fat shoulders. For what?"

"I want to get back on a horse," Yassine said. "Before I'm too old to."

"You're already too old to."

"Then before I'm older."

The old man laughed at that, a short dry bark that ended in a cough, and Yassine felt something loosen in his chest that he had not known was tight.

"And the other thing," Manolo said. "The police. You'll want to keep that in your pocket."

Yassine kept his face very still.

"Out here," Manolo said, "they won't care that you left. They'll only hear the word. Ex-flic. It's like saying ex-priest. Nobody believes the ex." He shrugged. "I'll say you were in Lyon. That's true, at least. The rest is your business. I'm not a talker." He tapped the table with one thick finger. "Ask anybody. Manolo Segura is not a talker."

"I wasn't going to ask you to—"

"You didn't ask. I offered. Drink your drink."

He drank his drink. It tasted of aniseed and of every summer between fourteen and twenty, and he had to put the glass down for a moment because the taste was so exact that it seemed to arrive with its own weather.

Manolo watched him do this and said nothing about it. He got up instead, in his stages, and went out through the door to the yard, and Yassine heard him crossing to the shed beside the pens, the scrape of the bolt, his voice muttering at something in the dark. When he came back he was carrying a hook.

It was a raseteur's crochet: a short steel claw, four-fingered, curved like a cat's paw, on a leather strap meant to go round the wrist and close over the knuckles. The leather had dried and darkened and cracked across the back. Someone had oiled it, not recently, but more than once. On the inside of the strap, where it lay against the palm, there were initials burned into the hide with the end of a hot nail, unevenly, by a hand that had not done it before. Y.B.

"You left it," Manolo said. "On the hook in the shed, with your shoes. Twelve years it's been on that hook. The boys ask me whose it is. I tell them it belongs to an idiot."

He put it on the oilcloth between them. Yassine did not pick it up.

"I thought you'd have given it to someone," he said.

"I don't give away other people's things." The old man sat down again. "Besides. Nobody else could get their hand in it. You had hands like a girl."

"I did not."

"Like a girl. Long, thin. We had to punch two new holes." He nodded at the strap. "Go on."

Yassine picked it up. The steel was cool from the shed. He turned it over in his hand and found that his fingers already knew the way the strap went, under and round and over, and that the claw sat across the second knuckles exactly where it had sat when he was nineteen, and that his hand, which had been holding a pen and a steering wheel and a phone for twelve years, closed on it as if it had only been waiting.

He took it off again, quickly, and laid it down.

"Not yet," he said.

"No," Manolo agreed. "Not yet." He looked at it lying there. "But you'll take it with you. You can't leave it here a second time. People will talk."

"You said you weren't a talker."

"I'm not. People are."

• • •

It was Manolo's idea to go that same evening. Yassine had expected to wait, to spend a night on the old man's sofa under the photographs, to be taken round the next day perhaps, or the day after. He had planned for it. Manolo did not seem to plan for anything.

"Plantier," he said, when Yassine asked him, carefully, who might need hands at this time of year. He said it at once, as if the name had been sitting on his tongue. "Fredo Plantier. Past Le Cailar, on the marsh road. He has more work than men. He has more work than money, these days. You know about the insurance?"

"I heard something."

"Everybody heard something. The street runs are finished, nobody will insure them. That was a third of his year. Then last summer the disease came through and half the season was cancelled and the bulls stood in the field eating money." Manolo stood up and found his car keys in a bowl on the sideboard among some screws and a rosary and a small plastic bull with a broken horn. "He can't pay anyone. But he has a list of jobs as long as my arm and he's too proud to ask. And Gaëtan is never there in the day, and the girl does the work of three, and the boy Timéo is seventeen and an idiot." He jingled the keys. "An amateur, he'll take. If I tell him to."

"Will you tell him to?"

Manolo looked at him for a long moment in the kitchen, under all those photographs of other men's sons.

"Bring the crochet," he said.

They went in Manolo's car, which was a small white van with the name of the bull school painted on its side in letters that had flaked away until only the S of Segura and the final -ROS of RASETEUROS remained. It smelled of hay and old leather and the oil Manolo put on his own boots. They drove out of Saint-Laurent with the sun going down behind them, onto the road towards Le Cailar and then off it, onto a narrower road with no line down the middle and then a narrower one again, between ditches full of reeds where the frogs were so loud that Yassine could hear them over the engine with the windows closed.

The land flattened and widened as they went until there was almost nothing on it, only grass and water and sky and the long low lines of tamarisk that the wind had combed all in one direction. A heron lifted from a ditch as they passed and flew alongside them for a moment with its legs trailing, as if racing, then lost interest and banked away. Far off, a herd of white horses stood in a field with their heads down, grey foals among them like smudges of ash.

"There," said Manolo.

The mas sat on the only rise for a kilometre in any direction, which meant it was perhaps a metre higher than the land around it. A long low house, whitewashed once and now the colour of old bone, with a tiled roof that sagged in the middle like the back of a tired horse. A wall of cypress on the north side against the mistral, so dark it was almost black. A single plane tree in the yard, enormous, its trunk patched grey and cream like a map. Behind the house a sprawl of corrals and sheds and loading ramps, and two cattle trucks parked side by side, each with the same word on its flank in faded red: PLANTIER.

A dog came out from under one of the trucks as they pulled into the yard and stood looking at them without barking. Then another. Then the door of the house opened and a man came out onto the step.

Yassine knew him from the photograph: the face like a walnut, the ears too large for it, the shoulders still wide under a faded blue shirt. But the photograph had been ten or fifteen years ago, and it had been taken by someone who wanted to sell a magazine, and it had been taken in daylight. Now, in the long blue end of the evening, Frédéric Plantier stood very still on his own doorstep and looked at the van and the man getting out of it, and the stillness was the same stillness the bulls had had that morning in the field beside the canal, all their heads turned one way.

"Fredo," Manolo said, coming round the van with his hand out.

"Manolo." They shook. Plantier did not take his eyes off Yassine. "Who's this?"

"One of mine. From before. He was good, before he got stupid. He's back from Lyon. He wants to work."

"I can't pay."

"I told him."

"Then he's stupider than you say." Plantier came down the step. He walked round Yassine slowly, once, the way you walk round a horse at a sale, and stopped in front of him. Up close he smelled of sweat and tobacco and the sweet heavy smell of cattle. "Where did you run?"

Yassine told him. The small arenas first, then the bigger ones, the names coming back to him in the order he had run them. Plantier listened without nodding.

"Can you ride?"

"I used to."

"Can you ride now?"

"I don't know."

That seemed, for some reason, to be the right answer. Something moved in the old face, not quite a smile, more as if a muscle there had remembered a smile and decided against it.

"I answer for him," Manolo said quietly.

Plantier looked at his old friend for a moment, and then back at Yassine, and then, briefly, down at Yassine's right hand, where without noticing he had slipped the crochet's strap round his wrist and was turning it, round and round, the way he used to turn it in the minutes before a course, waiting for the bull to come out.

"Unpaid," Fredo Plantier said. "You sleep in the room over the tack. You eat what we eat. You do what you're told, by me, by my daughter, by anyone who has been here longer than you, which is everyone including the dogs. And you go when I say."