A Flag for Sunrise

There was a tiny, self-righting aluminum dinghy set in davits just behind the lazaret housing. Pablo went aft for a look and found the davits and the lowering windlass wire rusted and corroded; the only piece of bad maintenance he had encountered aboard the Cloud. It took him the better part of an hour, using engine wrenches and even chain cutters, to get the dinghy over. When it was afloat, he secured it by a painter to the rail. For an outboard and an oil can, he forced himself to go down into the lazaret again but he found none there, nor anywhere else aboard. The lazaret had oarlocks and a set of mismated aluminum oars. Pablo put them in the dinghy.

In the cockpit chair now, he went over Callahan’s Loran charts, trying to find out where he was. The aerial beacon was on all the charts and the town to the north was called Puerto Alvarado. Even on the detailed charts it didn’t look like much but it would have to do. Around his boards it was Reef City. If he put the Cloud on almost any southerly bearing it would hit marbles; a course between two-ten and three hundred would send it into the outer reef and if it went fast and far enough it would strike hard enough to break up and sink in deep water. He saw now that he had made it to the marker buoy by sheer miracle. He would never, he was sure, have made it out.

He spent a few minutes going through the vessel, opening every hatch and porthole and watertight door that he could find. He supposed there might be sea cocks down in shaft alley — but he had no time to find them now. In the saloon he found a life jacket and a laundry bag. He put the life jacket on and tightened the Dacor knife about his good leg. He would leave the guns where they were. They were only incrimination now and excess weight. The diamond, the pills, and the fifteen hundred he wrapped in the laundry bag to stash it in the dinghy.

Pablo gave the Cloud just enough power to set her heading for the outer reefs and took up the anchor. The anchor came up clean, to his relief and gratitude. With the course set he untied the painter that secured his lifeboat, and as the little boat drifted shoreward, he shoved the diesel throttle forward for flank speed.

When he hit the water, he found it warm, although cool enough to make his leg hurt. His wound made him think of sharks, and he paddled breathlessly for his floating dinghy, hauling himself aboard by the strength of his arms and his one good leg.

He was into his second rowing stroke when the shrimper struck. There was a double wall of coral there and it must have been just below the surface because the Cloud barreled over the first barrier as though she had turned amphibian, plowing over it, hardly seeming to slow, but ripping her seams fore and aft. Yet the rudder shaft and the engines had come through and not until she took the second ridge did there sound, together with the tearing of wood, the crash of suffering metal, the hopeless hissing rattle of a smashed machine.

Her guts on the reef, the Cloud raised her forepeak in the moonlight. Pablo, resting for a moment on his oars, watched the bow gradually sink as the weight of water billowing into the after compartments shifted forward on the fulcrum of the coral and commenced to take her down. A few small fires were burning in the after sections, there was a silent explosion, a fiery puffball burst itself to cast a moment’s glow on the bland easy ocean. Then another crash, another little firestorm, and she turned completely over on her bow and settled, upside down, beneath the surface. Pablo, still watching as he rowed, could not be sure whether the white water he saw in the faint moonlight marked the tip of the reef or some exposed part of the vessel. If she had not cleared the second wall altogether she might be settled on a slope, in shallow water, easily visible. He put the thought out of his mind. In time, he hoped, all thoughts of her would pass. Things would be different.

He rested on his oars again, breathing in the sweet smell of land, and checked the bag for his diamond, his money, his pills. They were all in place. So, gritting his teeth, he pulled on for the black shore behind him.

Holliwell found the restaurant hangar of the Paradise aswarm with the people who called themselves contractors. The crowd and the noise surprised him; he had not brought a watch and he had supposed it was the middle of the night.

For a while he stood under the palms outside, looking in at the party. Someone called his name and he turned to see Mr. Soyer smiling at him. Mr. Heath was sitting beside him and across the table from them were Olga and Buddy. They all found him in some way amusing.

“What are you doing out in the dark, Holliwell?” the Cuban asked good-naturedly. “Come in and have a drink.”

He thought it an oddly promiscuous grouping.

Holliwell stood in the darkness where he had thought himself concealed and stared at them.

“Come and tell us how things are,” Mr. Heath said. “Nun-wise.”

He walked away from them and into the bar. It was two-deep there. A man next to Holliwell said: “That fucker needs his hat rung.” He was talking to someone else, of someone else.

Holliwell wanted a telephone and they did not want to give him one. The bartender was unhelpful. There were no representatives of management in view.

He persisted; the bartender led him to an office near the kitchen where a young Spaniard was doing accounts. From the depths of his zombie state, Holliwell summoned up the energy to represent a pain in the ass. He shouted, he could hear himself at it, bullied, threatened and begged for a phone. It developed that the Paradise possessed a radio-telephone hookup; the young Spaniard observed that he could not rely on a connection and that it would be very expensive. He was trying to call the capital and Captain Zecca.

In the end a line was brought him. He stood with his back to the clamor of the bar beyond and listened to the undersea sounds in the receiver.

To his own surprise and relief, he got through. There was a Marine guard on the other end; the connection was adequate. It was fine.

He asked the guard who answered for Captain Zecca’s home telephone number and the guard asked him politely to wait. Then a young woman came on, the embassy duty officer. When he asked for the number, there was a long pause and she said she would see if it was available.

“Captain Zecca speaking,” said the next voice on the line.

“Tom,” Holliwell exclaimed, “you’re there! It’s Frank Holliwell.”

“Yes, sir,” Zecca said. “Yes indeed.”

“I’m down on the coast near Alvarado,” Holliwell said.

“I know where you are, sir.”

“I need your help,” Holliwell said. “There are people here who need protection. Because there’s going to be trouble here.”

“Would you speak carefully, Mr. Holliwell? If you don’t speak carefully I won’t be able to hear you.”

“What?”

“Speak carefully, Holliwell.”

“I have to tell you the situation here,” Holliwell said. “How can I?”

“We know the situation there. This office isn’t handling that.”

“What do you mean, Zecca?”

“I mean we’re not handling it. You’ll have to talk to them. There.”

“Them there? Who where?”

“Holliwell, we can’t have this conversation if you won’t speak carefully. I mean the people who are handling it. Surely you know whom I’m referring to.”

“I don’t think … I don’t think … I know them.”

“You know them, Holliwell. They know you.”

“Oh,” Holliwell said. “Yes. I know.”

“You should. I’m sure you do.”

“They have it wrong,” Holliwell said. “That’s why I’m calling.”

“I can’t believe we’re having this conversation. If you think they’ve got it wrong, man — tell them.”

“I don’t think they’ll want to hear my side of it.”

“Look, old friend — it’s theirs. It’s not mine. It’s yours and theirs.”

“Can’t you do anything?”

“Afterwards. Possibly.”

“After what?”

“Hey, Holliwell,” Captain Zecca said. “Go away, will you, pal?”

“I don’t know what to do, see.”

Zecca sighed at long distance. “Use your judgment. It’s all going down. Talk to them.”

“I understand,” Holliwell said.

“Do you? I don’t. I’m going to hang up.”

“Yes,” Holliwell said.

“See you, schemer. Hang loose.” And he hung up.

When Holliwell went out to the bar, he saw that the Cuban was not at his table beside Heath. He ordered a whiskey and in a moment the man appeared from the direction of the bungalows. He wore a look of concern. Holliwell saw him look at the table where his drinking companions were and then scan the bar. When their eyes met he was waiting. When he saw Holliwell, the Cuban’s worried look turned into a smile that was bright and false and layered with contempt. Holliwell gulped his drink to ease the chill of it. Then he walked past the man and into the darkness outside.

Ashore, Pablo gathered up an oilcloth and an anchor bag and left his aluminum dinghy adrift on the light surf. There was a dirt road beyond the mangrove and he crossed it into a thick wood where treetops closed out the stars and the air was heavy and still. After a while, he found a lean-to at the edge of a burnt-over clearing where melons rotted on the ground and the night’s rats fled from him. He tried to sleep on a ledge of crossed sticks, wrapped in a cloth, a canvas bag under his head for a pillow. There were animals outside.

He dreamt of morning light, fiery columns that blinded. The light was of dreams only. After a while he got himself up and took some of the blue pills to contain his pain. He slipped the bottle and the folded bills in his jeans and put the diamond back in his pocket. He was hearing voices, Deedee’s voice and the old Jew’s. Sometimes he heard his mother’s voice.

He began to feel his way through the forest. The wounded leg was steady under him; the bone was sound and that was good enough for picking it up and putting it down again. His body was functioning well enough but his mind was febrile, ablaze in the rank darkness.

Somehow he found a trail to walk along and true light to follow. Most of the time it was not the distant firelight he saw, but a succession of past darknesses, filled with doings that were lit with their own light. The light of things happening in the dark.

He felt night-sighted like a creature. Before long, it seemed his whole being would be in darkness and he would run from light. His numbed fingers sought the diamond in his shirt pocket, a tiny lamp to think by. He thought of his knife, of bullets, fists and teeth. The voices inside sang and conspired.

The path took him to another clearing where there were fires burning and people gathered around them. Hammocks were strung between boughs. The sight of humankind made him angry.

Gooks, he thought, and then he saw it was Stateside people. There were twenty, there were twice that. The place looked like the bo jungles he had seen as a child. But the people all looked young and tender.

He hung back for a moment and then stepped out among them. One by one, they took notice of him. He was the Darkness King, it was his party.

An older man at one of the campfires addressed him: “Oye, señor.”

A fat Anglo.

“Oye, oye, señor,” Pablo said in his softest voice, “chinga su madre — hijo de la siete leches.”

He laughed at the man’s fleshy face.

“Where’s your prez, fat?” The fat man’s mouth fell shut, his teeth clicked. “Where’s the main person here?”

The man shrugged and turned partly away. Pablo took a step to face him, tilting his head to one side, staring, his brows knit.

“There’s an old fellow who lives here,” a girl at the same fireside said. Pablo turned to her. “He’s over there somewhere.” She pointed across the clearing, to the far side of three stone slabs that stood in the center.

“Thank you,” Pablo said. He held her look to see what her face would do. She looked away. As he walked toward the stone slabs someone called to him.

“Hey, your leg’s bleeding.”

The slabs were like tombstones the height of a man. In the flickering light of the nearer fires, Pablo examined the first one he came to. He saw the profile of a face with the features chipped away. Over the figure’s head was what appeared to be a fanged cat with its mouth open wide. Below the obliterated face was another, upside down; it seemed the same face reversed like the obverse head of a one-eyed jack. Below that face were things like the rattles of a snake, feathers, a lizard.

It was a sign of the place, Pablo thought. The slabs were what everyone was there about.

Some distance beyond the three carved stones, an old man in a white shirt was feeding twigs to a small fire. There was a Bible beside him and a bottle of liquor. Pablo watched him awhile and then approached the fire.

“Say ho,” he said to the old man.

Father Egan looked at him without surprise.

“Hello, son.”

Pablo let himself down across the fire from Egan and leaned his back against a log. He felt, for a moment, as though he would never rise again.

“You know,” he told the priest, “like, I just come out of the ocean here. I was shipwrecked.”

Egan’s face was blank.

“I’m not lying,” Pablo said weakly. “We tucked in a reef a few miles down. I think our boat’s under.”

“For heaven’s sake,” Egan said. He poked at the fire. “Is everyone all right?”

“Yeah,” Pablo said. “It was just me.”

“You’ve hurt your leg.”

Pablo nodded, reached for the priest’s rum and drank.

“I need help,” he said. “I need to lie down. I might need medicine.”

“You’re lucky,” Egan said. “We can provide you with a bed and medicine.”

“No shit?”

“Absolutely not,” Egan said.

Pablo closed his eyes in gratitude.

“The other thing is … we weren’t supposed to be here. We ain’t supposed to fish off here, understand? Ain’t got the papers for it. So we don’t want any cops or coast guard or like that. We don’t want them to know about us being here.” He kept his eyes on the old man’s face. Egan looked untroubled. “I’m asking you because you’re a fellow American. You are a fellow American, ain’t you?”

“More or less,” Egan said. “A citizen, yes. A citizen of no mean city.”

“So if you could help me out, see? I got some money. Coming to me anyways.” He secretly touched the folder of bills in his pocket. “If you could put me up and leave me see to my leg. And you kept it quiet — that would be real good. I could see you got paid.”

“We can do all that for you, I suppose. What’s your name?”

“Pablo,” Pablo said. “Goddamn, that’d be great, bro. That’d be real fine.”

The priest let the fire be and looked at his guest.

“It wasn’t you I was expecting, Pablo.”

Pablo smiled and settled back against the log. It was too good to be true but he was too exhausted for caution. He believed.

“It’s me you got, though,” he said. Then he passed into unconsciousness.

When he came to himself again, he could not remember where he was. He smelled damp wood smoke and heard the night birds, sat up and saw Egan at the fire. He felt as though he were choosing one dream from among many. There were birds in all of them.

“You were angry,” said the priest.

Pablo looked about the clearing and saw few other fires burning now. The strangers had tucked themselves into shadow. Someone was playing chords on a guitar, hammocks were strung between trees.

“I wasn’t anything, mister. I was asleep.”

Egan’s empty gaze was fixed on the fire.”

“Was there a fight on your boat?” he asked Pablo.

Pablo shrugged and frowned.

“No. I mean, I couldn’t say. I don’t remember too well. Maybe I hit my head.”

The priest looked at him thoughtfully. Pablo returned a warning smile but Father Egan went right on staring.

“Where were you coming from? Where were you going?”

Pablo hunched his shoulders as though to throw off the questions.

“Florida,” he said. “You know,” he told Egan after a moment, “you shouldn’t ask me a whole lot of questions. Then you won’t be concerned, you see what I mean? Down here, the way it is, you shouldn’t be.”

“Down here,” Egan said. “Absolutely right. Well, I’m very discreet. I’m known for my discretion down here.”

“You said you could help me out.”

“Yes, I can help you out, Pablo. We have to stay here for a while, though, because I’m waiting for someone.”

“Who?” Pablo demanded.

“No one you have to be afraid of. Wait and see.”

Pablo bent forward to touch the knife strapped to his calf and chewed another pain pill to stay primed for uncertainty. After about ten minutes, Father Egan said: “He’s coming.”

Pablo followed the priest’s gaze and saw a massively tall figure picked up in firelight, a man in bib overalls with a straw sombrero. When he drew nearer, they could see his broad square-boned face. He had a nose that drew attention to itself, being long almost to caricature. His eyes were blue and small and set in a web of fine wrinkles. In age he might have been anywhere between eighteen and senescence.

“His name is Weitling,” Father Egan told Pablo. “I used to call him the Farmer.”

“He ain’t American,” Pablo observed.

“No.”

Pablo watched the Farmer come up to the fireside and look cautiously around. He was very big indeed, six-four or — five. His whole body bespoke physical strength.

“Who is that man?” the Farmer asked in a soft, almost womanish voice. He had reference to Pablo.

“That’s Pablo, Weitling. Are you afraid of him?”

“Yes,” Weitling replied. He gave his answer a faintly interrogative tone.

“Don’t be. He’s a friend.”

“A night friend?”

“Yes, another night friend. Like you.”

Pablo had bared his upper teeth, he was not pleased with Weitling. The huge man hunkered down and removed his sombrero. The fair hair on his head was so fine it seemed to reflect the firelight.

“Tell us, Weitling,” Egan said, “what have you seen and heard and what have you thought about?”

“I’m not to say what I have heard,” the Farmer explained to them. “It’s forbidden. They are secrets.” His English had a Germanic slur. “Sometimes you … I’ve thought about.”

“Very good, Weitling.” Father Egan nodded grave approval. “About what I said to you?”

“Yes,” Weitling said. Then he turned his attention to Pablo, whose face had gradually contorted itself into a mask of hatred beyond loathing. The Farmer faced Pablo’s malevolence with the unconcern of a draft horse.

“Tell me what you’ve decided,” Egan said. He poked at the fire with a long green stick, and as he did so his hand trembled slightly.

“The world is full of devils,” Weitling said. He was looking at Pablo. “He is a devil.” He turned slowly toward Egan, who was looking into the fire. “You also.”

Egan did not look at him. “By your fruits shall ye know them,” the priest said. “Have I told you anything to make me seem a devil?”

“I have heard so,” Weitling said softly. “I have heard tell.”

“From the voices?”

The Farmer uttered his soft questioning affirmative.

“Ah. But of course you can’t tell me what the voices said.” Egan pursed his lips.

Pablo had drawn as far away from Weitling as his posture permitted. Inwardly he made a sign against the Evil Eye. The Farmer’s eyes were like blue buttons. Stuffed-animal eyes.

“Let’s try and remember what we talked about,” said the priest. His voice was informed with a music of few tones; Pablo recognized the calm singsong of the practiced confessor. “I told you I thought when you hurt people it was instead of loving them. That you really wanted to love. Did I not?”

The Farmer was silent.

“I suppose you thought that was nonsense. Maybe it is nonsense. Overwrought pap. Eh?” He looked at both of them in turn. “It didn’t seem so at the time. It seemed vaguely true. What do you think, Pablo?”

“Hey,” Pablo said, “you know, I couldn’t say.”

“Let’s forget that then. A maudlin conceit. But, Weitling, I did tell you that the Lord likes his little creatures as they are and that’s not just an emotional transport of mine. It’s true, believe me. I said, I believe, that he never made anything more wonderful than a small child. You’re forbidden — forbidden, Weitling — to harm a hair on the head of a child. I gave you chapter and verse, didn’t I? Luke 18:16, eh? Matthew 18:6.”

In the great square of Weitling’s face, a turmoil was reflected.

“Ja,” he said. “Ja.”

He seemed excited for a moment; he began to bounce in his squatting position, the muscles in his thighs shifted under his overalls like railway lines.

The sparks of hope were fanned in Egan’s dull eyes.

“Now you’ve thought about all this, haven’t you?”

“Ja,” said Weitling. His hands gripped his knees, he was staring into some distance. “I thought and thought it over. I was in pain from it, yes. I prayed. Then they said you are the devil and you’re tempting me.”

Egan drew in his thin lips and raised a weak hand to his forehead.

“But you know that’s not true, don’t you, boy?”

Then Weitling stopped bouncing on his haunches and turned to Egan with a great glowing smile. His teeth were regular and white.

“I think,” he said, “you are.” And he laughed.

Pablo, to his own confusion, saw that Egan was trembling.

“Weitling,” the priest said. He licked his lips and leaned forward. “Weitling, think of God’s sparrows. ‘Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall upon the ground without your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear ye not therefore, for ye are of more value than many sparrows.’ That’s what the Almighty tells His children, Weitling. You dare not harm them.”

The Farmer laughed again; the laughter came from within his body, it was unlike his thin soft voice. When he stopped laughing, he fixed the old priest with small fiery eyes. “And fear not those who kill the body! Yes? It says, nix?”

“Don’t listen to the voices, Weitling! They’re evil things.”

“No,” Weitling said. “God speaks.”

“God forbids murder, Weitling. God watches over the little children. He is Who loves truly. He made the lamb.”

“One day there will be a ram for sacrifice,” Weitling declared, looking beyond the fire. “When things are made clean I will see a ram with his horns caught. Then sacrifice by bad monkeys will be over and it will be the ram. I am promised this.”

“Ah, Weitling,” Father Egan said, “we talked it out so carefully the other night. We were both so lucid. I thought you’d listened to me.”

“I have to fool you,” the Farmer said, and his features were illuminated by another witless smile. “I am smart. I was fooling you.”

Pablo Tabor was driven toward homicidal delirium by the Farmer’s manner. He had spent several secret minutes changing his position in order to have a grab at his knife when the time came. Now, Weitling’s smile put him over the top. “Crazy fuck.” He spat bile through his teeth. No one seemed to notice.

“Weitling, son …” Egan stretched a tentative bony hand toward the young man. “What kind of a thing would God be if He made you butcher His innocents?”

As Egan and Pablo, flesh acrawl, watched, Weitling threw back his head and puckered his lips to form a quivering O. From the oval space issued a shrill keening.

“Oooh, he is terrible,” Weitling sang. His face was distended by fear. He folded his arms across his chest and thrust his hands under his armpits. He was in ecstasy. “He is more terrible than you can know. His face is like Indian corn, of colors. Then sometimes invisible, the worst. The hair of him is blue. He is electricity. Arms and legs are made of worms. The power. And it is like space beneath you, you are falling. I fall. I, poor myself, I fall. He crushes me. And he is terrible music, a howling. I am made to see his terrible face and to hear his horrible voice. He makes the noise of a drum. The noise of an organum. Ein flaute, also. Also of parrots, and sometimes is so, a parrot. He says I will fall more and I am squeezed. Poor myself. He says there is not mercy anymore. He says of Jesus Christ — hex not rex. He says that I must see the corn face. He says I am bad Weitling and I am frightened cold.”

Weitling bent his great head as far backward as his neck allowed and uttered another cry.

“Oooh, he says the wine is blood! Eat flesh meat, he says this. He will make blood run out until fields are covered and he will bowl the sun to dry it. He has not mercy for Weitling. Nor for children. They are in depravity, he says. He is free. He takes them up, their bones, their gut bags. He makes rain out of them. The rain, this is him laughing at Weitling. His laughing is rain. He makes the rain of parts of children. The fish are fed with blood. When they see his face their eyes are opened, they eat their teeth. He says Weitling go down. And I go down and do it. We are shit upon the ground to him. This he tells me.”

“Lamb of God who takest away the sins of the world, have mercy on us,” Father Egan said softly, and struck his breast. Pablo could not take his eyes from Weitling’s enraptured face.

The priest reached out with an unsteady hand to touch Farmer Weitling’s shoulder.

“Weitling, the necessary sacrifice was made long ago. No one asks anything of you except that you get yourself healed.”

Weitling rocked to his drummer god; Egan’s hand fell away.

“He is king and I, his bad monkey. I am the bad monkey in the trees. They tell the children run from the bad monkey and the children run. But whose monkey I am, they don’t know. He calls. He screams like a hungry monkey. He must make the rain. In his horrible voice he screams at Weitling.”

“Stop it,” Egan said in a dull voice. “Stop it now, son.”

Weitling kept rocking.

“They don’t know what I, Weitling, know. I make the sun to come up. I hear it come up. Without me there is no rain. When the sun is bowled and the blood is dry things so beautiful will be. Ja, it’s so. No hungering. No wondering. Everything we must have will be.”

Egan watched him for a moment, in silence.

“Well now,” the priest said, “I’ve heard that one before.”

“But if there is not blood everything is destroyed. Darkness and the sun falls and the stars and moon. The ground opens and it is all crushed like Weitling.”

“But you’re deluded, Weitling. It all takes care of itself. That’s the beauty of it — so they say.” He put his hand around the bottle of rum as though he were about to drink but after a second he took the hand away. “Don’t you see that it’s better that the world endures its own destruction than that you make yourself work such cruelties? Or that an innocent child is made to suffer and die?”

Weitling stopped rocking and began to stand up. The mask of celebration dissolved and his broad stolid face relaxed.

“I am small,” he told Egan, looking down on him, “but I’m too big for you. He’s with me and I’m strong.”

“Well, you’re too strong for me but that’s no trick. Go, Weitling. Go back to your people, find your bishop or your elder and let them help to cure you.”

“Where I go,” Weitling said, “They don’t find me.”

He looked about him and then turned on Pablo.

“You,” he told Tabor, “you’re not a good boy.”

Pablo snarled. “Oh yeah?” he said.

The Farmer took a step backward, turned and went his way rejoicing.

“Some big creep,” Pablo said. “You ought to put a fence around this place.”

“You should know,” the priest explained, “that he’s a killer of children. We’re not sure how many he’s done in. He hears voices.”

“He really does that? He kills little kids?”

Egan, looking into the fire, nodded.

“If he does that, man, you got no business letting him run around.”

“What should I do?”

“Well, shit, you oughta tell someone. Or just take him out — bingo.”

“If I told anyone around here, Weitling would be strung up the same day.”

“What’s the matter with that? Then he couldn’t hurt no more kids.”

“Yes. But I’m not sure he’s beyond help.”

“Are you kidding me? You just don’t have any kids, that’s why you can talk like that.”

“Ah,” Egan said. “Maybe you’re right.” He was thoughtful for a while. “You know, I’ve always valued children above everything else — even though I haven’t any. It’s always bothered me that the world hurts them. That they got lost in the bush, wandered into traps, all those terrible things. The thought of those things could always spoil the most beautiful day for me.”

“Fucking-A, man. Kids are the only clean thing in this rotten fucked world. You can’t give a shit about people, they bring their trouble on themselves. But kids, that’s different.”

“But Weitling — he’s a kind of a child himself, isn’t he?”

“A fucking killer ape is what he is. There’s only one cure for him.”

“He’s very sick and his head is full of dreams and stories that went bad on him. He’s not alone in that condition.”

Pablo sighed and turned over to lean on his elbow. “I don’t know, bro,” he said wearily. “I got troubles of my own, you know.”

“I’ve tried to get to the Mennonites about him — I’ve had my friends up-country get in touch. But they don’t have telephones, they live in inaccessible places and some of them don’t talk to strangers.” Egan reached for the bottle again and this time he took a drink. “You’re right, of course. I’ll have to see that he’s picked up. I’m as deluded as he is.”

Talk of being picked up was troubling to Pablo. As he watched the old man’s vacant face, cadaverous even in the firelight, his leg began to hurt and he felt cold. Things were wrong, he thought. Things were wiggy.

Egan was drinking now; he sat with his head lowered, talking softly to himself.

“Again I couldn’t see,” Pablo heard him say. “Could it be that because there was no concupiscence I was …” The priest’s thin voice trailed off.

Pablo sat up.

“Hey, man, you said you could help me out. You said you’d give me a place to crash. You said you had medicine. Now I’m sick, you understand me?”

“The boat,” the old man said, “you fought on the boat. That’s why you’re here.”

“Never mind the fuckin’ boat,” Pablo said. The fear that had been hovering in the surrounding darkness touched him with its feathers. The place was wiggy. There were killers and the old man was stoned mad. He was one of those people — whatever you wanted they had it, but jack shit was what they had. It was a turned-around place, a bad place. Maybe not a true place at all.

“Something’s going on, Pablo,” the priest said. “Something to do with the place we’re in.”

Pablo’s throat was dry as sand; he opened his mouth to breathe.

“What do you mean?” He knew that the pills had started to poison him at last. And people had better beware then and they had better not try to turn him around.

“Did you look at the stones?”

Pablo realized he meant the inscribed upright slabs in the center of the clearing.

“Yeah. Sort of.”

“Did you examine them? Did you read them?”

“It was dark. Anyway, how’m I gonna read that craziness?”

“The stones tell about human sacrifice. All the glyphs and all the figures here are about that and nothing else.”

“Human sacrifice,” Pablo said.

“A man came here once from the national museum. They took rubbings of those stones and they picked up everything that could be moved. They said it was for the museum’s collection but of course it was for the President’s family to sell. They picked up bone carvings and shards with graffiti on them. The man said he thought the graffiti might tell him something about everyday life here long ago, about how people went about life. But it turned out that he was wrong, it turned out that every single stroke represented human sacrifice — even the graffiti. It was as though there was no everyday life. Only sacrifice.”

Tabor looked at him blankly.

“You understand, Pablo? There’s a charge on the place. It draws people like Weitling and people like you. The field of blood. The place of the skull. They played the ball game here, you know.” The old priest frowned and shook his head. “Can that be? A temple? A temple of the demiurge?”

Pablo felt as though the short hairs on the back of his neck were on end. He opened his mouth to breathe. “The ball game,” he repeated.

“But why not?” Egan asked. “Whatever life is, it isn’t rational. Signs and wonders, eh?”

“Now look,” Pablo said, “you’re tryin’ to turn me around.” Something like the taste of an old bad dream stirred under Pablo’s memory. Place of the skull. “What happened on that boat, man, that was the purest case of self-defense you could want. Those people were bad, man, they were wanting to kill me. I’m just lucky I’m alive.”

The old man’s eyes had come to life. He pursed his lips and thumped Pablo on the chest.

“Something’s going on, Pablo. Always. Something taking its course.”

“I don’t …” Pablo began. “I don’t …”

“A process.” Egan took a deep breath, held it and released it in a hoarse whisper. “Measureless.”

I’m in such trouble now, Pablo thought, I might as well be dead. He thought of mornings in the piney woods, of going for quail. But he had shot his dogs.

“Imagine it,” Egan said. “This colossal immanent force and it’s a gleam in the muck. Layer upon layer of intention, consciousness. Measureless will. Unseen and encompassing everything.”

“Could I have some of your rum, bro?” Pablo asked. “See, I don’t feel good.” When Egan did not respond, he reached over and took it.

“It’s woven in,” Egan said. “Hiding in the universe. Everywhere and yet never anywhere. Always present and never available.” Father Egan’s bright gaze fell upon Tabor. He appeared not to recognize him. Yet he called him by name. “Pablo,” he said, “what a mystery, eh?”

“No,” Pablo said, “no, I don’t feel so good and that’s the truth. I don’t like the way I feel.”

“It’s here after all, marking a passage, setting traps. Like insect traps among the leaves. For butterflies. We never find it. Does it ever find us?”

“It’s my leg that’s hurting,” Pablo said. “I think it might be pretty bad.” He reached with difficulty into the pockets of his jeans. “See, all I got is these pain pills and I gotta have more.” He held up the little glass bottle for Egan’s inspection. “And even aspirin, if I had that, see.”

“Telling the dancer from dance, Pablo. That’s what the poem’s about, you know. That’s the problem.”

“You don’t even give a shit,” Pablo said bitterly.

“But I do,” Egan said cheerfully, not looking at Pablo. “Now, listen. A friend of mine, a Maryknoll chap, lived fifty years in Africa. He told me they had a moth there that lived in colonies. The colonies lived in the branches of a certain kind of tree, they would settle on a branch and there they would form a leaf and flower pattern unknown to nature. It was totally their own. Now that’s marvelous, isn’t it? But that’s not the half. If you shook the branch, the moths would fly away. Then in minutes they’d settle down again and form the same leaf and flower. Hundreds, maybe thousands of moths, every one in its exact place. Each moth an exact part of the whole.” He turned toward Pablo. “A jigsaw.”

Desperate, Tabor rolled his eyes and ground his teeth.

“I don’t even know what the fuck you’re talking about, you crazy old bastard. You said you’d help me out.”

Egan patted Tabor’s forearm.

“Inconceivable,” he said. “Credo quia absurdum.”

Pablo was tired of anger. His anxiety was dissolving into a gloom like that of the grave. He would have to take more speed and suffer the loss of rest, risk the terrors at the bottom of the pill bottle. There was rum and that might help. He felt as though he were cringing behind his own eyes.

“Shining,” Egan said. “Shook foil.”

Pablo put the pill in his mouth and tried to swallow it. His mouth seemed to be stuffed with dry straw; the stalks hurt his throat. When he closed his eyes there were small whirling lights. The Place of the Skull. I am the drug, he thought.

“Why are You so unavailable?” Egan sang to the forest. “Why must it be so?”

“Who you talking to?” Pablo demanded.

Egan gave him a sad, reassuring smile. Both of them waited, as though for an answer.

“Pity the Weitlings of the world, Pablo. They’re victims of things as they are. Some chemical in the blood, a shortage of sugar in the brain cells and they get the process whole. What they see is real enough, it’s so overwhelming it must seem like God to them. You can’t look on what they see and not run mad.” He turned in the direction Weitling had gone, watched for a moment and then faced the fire again. “They’ve been elected. Priests, because they’ve seen it, poor bastards. That’s what Satan is, Pablo. Satan is the way things are. Remember Mephistopheles, eh? ‘Why this is hell nor are we out of it.’ ”

Pablo closed his eyes and shivered.

“We say they’re deluded but reality’s their problem. Unlike you and me, they see it plain — no breakdown, no story material to go with it, so they have to make up their own story. It burns out their minds and they have to call it revelation. Primitive association, sympathetic magic — whatever comes to hand. You know how it is, boy, everybody has to make suffering mean something. The other guy’s firstborn, paschal lambs, sacrifice. But that’s not revelation — not by a long shot. Revelation is something else.” Egan was silent for a moment, then he opened his mouth as though he were about to speak.

Pablo was at the point of screaming. “What is it, for Christ’s sake?”

“It’s all right, Pablo, do you see? That’s what it comes to. Everything is all right. In spite of appearances. There’s no other conclusion.”

“I don’t know who you people are,” Pablo said despairingly, “but you all are crazy. I thought you could help me out. I got no business in this freak show.”

“Pablo, listen, it’s all right. It’s all right for you too. We’ll take care of you. You’re among friends.”

The old man’s eyes gave him no peace. He searched the field of vision for escape, a token of reason, a clue, the light of dawn. Things overcame him.

“Hey,” he asked the priest, “what did you say this was a temple of?”

Egan looked blank for a moment.

“Oh. Oh, the demiurge. A kind of metaphor. At least I think so but who knows, eh? Another theological system.” He laughed to himself.

Pablo felt the hairs on his neck rise.

“You said … about Satan. Didn’t you say about Satan?”

“Same sort of thing.”

“Jesus,” Pablo said. His heart beat faster.

“These systems, Pablo … words for the process. It’s what it comes down to that matters.”

Pablo Tabor looked hard into the shadows. A numbing excitement thickened his blood.

“Holy shit,” he said. “I’m in this. Me. I am.”

“Of course,” Egan said.

“Something is going on here,” Pablo said breathlessly. “You’re right, old man. Something far out and special. Things are going on here.”

“Yes indeed,” the priest told him. “You can feel it now, can’t you?”

Pablo trembled, fixed between elation and terror.

“I do feel it,” he declared, nodding furiously. “Fuckin’-A.”

“It’s the world moving in time,” Father Egan explained to him. “One gets these little epiphenomenal jolts. Petty spookery in a way. But underneath it all — there is something.” He clapped Pablo lightly on the shoulder. “It’s in the moment. Take it in your hands, my boy.”

Tabor stared wide-eyed into the fire. In the dancing flames he saw dragons, winged horses, a choir of demiurges and such things.

“It was meant to be,” he said in a choked voice. “It was all meant to be like this.” He put his hand to his face and shook his head. He felt happy.

“This is what I came down here for,” Pablo told Father Egan. “This is how come I went over the hill. It was all leading up to this, see? There was a goddamn planned purpose to everything.” He thought of the diamond in his pocket and touched it.

“Surely,” Father Egan said.

“When I shot those dogs,” Pablo explained raptly, “I started this whole thing going. I was headed here from that time.”

“You were trying to get back, Pablo. Like everyone.”

“Then I came down, see. I got to the Cloud. I was learning all the time but I didn’t know it then.”

Father Egan nodded.

Dizzy with recognition, Pablo stared at him in wonder.

“St. Joost, I met this old Jew. He was dying right in front of me. He was telling me stuff I couldn’t understand, but I understand it now. He gave me something.” Pablo reached into his pocket and took out the diamond. “I wouldn’t show this to nobody down here unless I thought they were all right and I think you’re all right and I’m showing it to you. That old Jew gave me this here.” Egan looked at the diamond. “I ain’t giving this to you, understand? The old man gave it to me for my boy. It’s worth a whole lot of money — you can tell that just by looking — but it means something, I think. It’s got a meaning, like.”

“Let’s see,” Egan said, “what would it mean?” He took hold of Pablo’s hand cupping the stone and held his own hand under it. “The jewel is in the lotus,’ perhaps that’s what it means. The eternal in the temporal. The Boddhisattva declining nirvana out of compassion. Contemplating the ignorance of you and me, eh? That’s a metaphor of our Buddhist friends.”

Pablo’s eyes glazed over. “Holy shit,” he said. “Santa Maria.” He stared at the diamond in his palm with passion.

“Hey,” he said to the priest, “diamonds are forever! You heard of that, right? That means something, don’t it?”

“I have heard it,” Egan said. “Perhaps it has a religious meaning.”

“Listen,” Pablo said, and swallowed. “Can you tell me about my past lives? That’s what I’d really like to know about.”

“Well,” Egan said, “I’m afraid not. I don’t know anything about past lives, or even if we have them.”

“You kidding me?” Pablo said. “I thought you knew about this kind of stuff.”

“Not about past lives. One life at a time with me.”

“Somebody’s gonna tell me someday,” Pablo said. “I’m gonna find it all out, man, because I’m meant to. People gonna be coming to me to find it out.” He yawned. The fever of revelation was a drug of its own, stronger than the Callahans’ pills. It made him feel strong and calm, peaceful, as though he could not be turned around.

“Maybe so, Pablo. Maybe you’re the one with the talent and energy to know about it. We hold our treasure in earthen vessels.”

“Fuckin’-A,” Pablo said.

The fatigue he felt was no longer threatening. He spread himself out on the coarse grass beside the fire and closed his eyes.

Egan put a hand on Pablo’s forehead and saw the youth shiver. For the first time he saw the wound on Tabor’s leg, and though he could not determine its gravity in the firelight, it was obviously dirty and untended.

“We can go now,” the priest said. “I’ve been running on, I’ve talked too long. If you can walk, I’ll help you over to our dispensary. It’s not far.”

Pablo opened his eyes and shook his head.

“You need looking after now. You need some antibiotics.”

“No,” Pablo said. “I want to wait a minute. I’m too wasted right now. What I want to do, I want to lie down here and listen to those birds and I don’t give a shit.” He was looking into the fire, his head turned to one side. A howler monkey screamed an alarm from the edge of the clearing. A girl’s voice seemed to answer — one of the young foreigners, talking in her sleep. “I come a damn long way, you know that?”

“I’ll go back and get help for you. We have a nurse with us and you’ll be all right here.”

Pablo seized Egan’s arm and held it.

“I want you to stay, bro. I want you to tell me everything you can that I’m supposed to know becaue that’s what I’m here for.”

Egan settled down on the log where Pablo had rested and took a drink of Flor de Cana.

“All right,” he said. So he began to tell Pablo about the Sacred Pleroma and the Incomprehensible, Inconceivable One within Whom all things were, the Master of the Silence and the Abyss. He told him about the Errant Sophia, the whore of Wisdom, who in her foredoomed passion to comprehend the Holy One underestimated the depths of the Abyss and became lost. Wandering, stricken, Father Egan told Pablo, Sophia found herself walled out from the All, the Ineffable; she encountered, for the first time, Limit. From the torment of her loss, Egan explained, Sophia brought into existence fear and grief and bewilderment and all the things which were to make up the world without Him. Then, from these things came forth the Demiurge, the force of ignorance under whose power Pablo and he himself and everyone else made their blind passage through outer dark. He told these things to Pablo not as he had written about them, but as though they were literal, true things, as one might tell a story to a child. As Pablo had pointed out to him, he had never had a child. Then he thought that perhaps they were true things, real things, as real as the sun which was rising now over the clearing.

Pablo had gone to sleep, so the priest took a ground cloth and wrapped it across a sharp stick to keep the risen sun from the young man’s eyes.

Tabor’s fist was clenched; Egan gently pried the fingers apart and found the diamond. He slipped it back into the shirt pocket from which Pablo had taken it to show him. A curious thing, he thought. He supposed the youth had stolen it. Perhaps had killed for it, on his boat. He shook his head and picked up the bottle and drank.

In the city, in the villages of the coast, Tecan’s children were shouldering their daily burdens, prepared to endure with ancient grace the rule of plunder and violence. Nearby, the touring adolescents stirred at their campfires. At sea, the first light, filtered to green and gray, would begin to penetrate the depths where a murdered girl lay distantly mourned. Nor would she be alone there. And in the forest, Weitling would be looking at the sunrise and taking fire with fantasies of sacrifice and blood. Egan thought of the hunt he would have to set afield now, for the saving of other children.

The priest shielded his eyes and considered the Incomprehensible; he wondered if, across the awesome gulf of the abyss, across the darkness and the silence, he might presume to address toward It a prayer. He thought about it for some little time; in the end, he dared not. He picked up the rum and drank and then the exertions of the night set their weight on him and he fell into a sleep of his own.

Holliwell did not sleep although he lay in bed until dawn. In the slant of the new sun he drove to the mission, parked and walked the narrow beach.

The sight of the ocean oppressed him. He was not deceived by its exquisite sportiveness — the lacy flumes of breaking wave, the delicate rainbows in the spray. He knew what was spread out beneath its trivial entertainments. The ocean at its morning business brought cognate visions to his mind’s eye; a flower-painted cart hauling corpses, a bright turban on a leper.

Beside the beach at Danang he had seen a leper with a “Kiss Me” tee shirt. There was nothing to get angry about; some stern wit had made a statement and the leper had got a shirt.

For a long time Holliwell stood by the water. A few yards away under the slate-blue rollers, the universe was being most spontaneously itself. Its play dazzled. It beguiled temporal flesh with promises and it promised all things from petty cheer to cool annihilation.

Things were a lonely and dangerous business and he was tired of them. He wanted clarity and it was not to be had. It seemed to him that one could not stand in clear light for the twinkling of an eye. Each moment was immediately overrun with chemical illusion flashing up from the sea and its dependent blood, from the great steaming jakes of the mind.

So one had always to wander through vapors among phantoms, one was always just out in it and it never stopped. Illusion compounding illusion, a limitless hallucination without end or reference point — desires, fears, dread shadows and pretty lights, one’s own delirium and everyone else’s. It was what kept you going. It kept you going until your heart burst.

He was in love, he remembered. With May. And she was being hunted down.

He lit a cigarette and smoked and turned to see her standing by the beach road. She was waiting for a jitney bus to pass, shielding her eyes from the sun. He flicked the filtered butt into a crystalline wave.

She came to him across the litter of desiccated palm leaves and dead kelp; his heart raced. What was it then? Love? Another yearning distilled of fancy, another drug in the salt blood. Another passion to whipsaw in the wet cave of consciousness.

Then she was beside him trembling in the morning sun, honey-haired — and you wanted to be with her, of course you did. You wanted to salve the loneliness. You wanted to break down, however you might, the entombed separateness of the two selves there, yourself and May. Anyone would.

He started to speak but the look on her face silenced him. Remembering it, he would think that she looked like a vision — a figure of some other stuff, suddenly manifest. The diluvian chaos he inhabited was alien to her. He thought that she must live in some secret arrangement with the world of things; her beauty was the beauty of inward certainties. Such a woman could live, die, make choices, all those things — with a quiet heart. She could minister, heal the sick, march with apocalyptic legions. She looked like a vision to that degree.

Now, she was certainty confounded. She could not bring experience to bear and she had no guile. Through innocence, she had set herself in his quarter of things where the earth trembled underfoot and there was only seeming. The Queen of Swords betrayed. Or simply common sense at its ultimate reduction, at the end of its tether.

In this aspect, she was a challenge and a provocation to the likes of Holliwell. The impulse stripped down was to love her or destroy her. Stripped further it was toward both those ends, to subsume her in flesh and spirit. It was predatory.

But he was an honest man, known to be such. He was capable of honor and sacrifice. As a result she presented to Holliwell something he dreaded far more than a challenge. She presented a choice.

He closed his eyes and opened them. His mind was unstrung with fear, sleeplessness and booze — not for the first time. He was seeing things.

“You did come back.”

“Of course I did,” he said.

They walked together across the sand and up the steps to the dispensary. There was coffee simmering on the heater; she poured them out two cups.

“I wonder,” he said after a moment, “if you could let me have a nip of brandy to go with this.”

She rose immediately from the chair she had taken. Still shaky, her face almost blank, she brought him the miniature brandy bottle.

“I drink,” he explained.

“I know you do,” she said. “I can tell by your face. Where it’s soft.”

Holliwell drew back, amused and stung.

“Your face is hard and soft,” she informed him. “It looks hard and sort of mean but in some places it’s soft.”

He nodded warily.

“I know your face pretty well by now. I’ve been thinking about you.”

He wondered who it was she thought about. Who she thought she saw.

“I felt very close to you last night,” she said.

“You were.”

“I know. You have to understand that’s a rare feeling for me. And I don’t know how to handle it.”

He drank the fortified coffee. Oh, May, he thought, I’m not your lost Tiger. He was the Adversary. He would not let her go now, although it was within his power. Shown flesh, the Adversary eats; presented with inner space, he hastens to occupy it. The Adversary is a lover.

He drew up the ends of the soft net she had stepped into. He said: “I fell in love with you. That’s the only way I can put it.”

He put out his hand and touched her. Gratitude, joy, remorse struck him all together. There were two hungers and an illusion of fulfillment. He thought he understood hers better than his own.

She did not know the drill and this made it awkward for him but exciting as well. He told himself that he was not trifling with her but taking honorable comfort in a friendly place.

It was not one of those times when one forgot the forest for the trees. She was there, always. If he abandoned her she would intrude herself; her expectations were limitless and she pursued their satisfaction without shame. The satisfactions she pursued were innocent and had to do with her idea of earthly love. At times he thought of her as Eve.

Over and through it all was the beating of her heart. Holliwell felt it throbbing in his own body; he caressed her heartbeat as a sexual exercise. He studied its measure under the warmth of her silken skin; he wanted to hunt it down inside her, to be inside her, where its cadence ordered the scheme of her gut and bone as primum mobile. He wanted to be mastered by her heartbeat. He wanted her heart in his hands.

It was difficult to make it last, he was so inflamed. Her intrusions on his selfishness helped, and he was ready when the time came for the thing he had rather dreaded. The ram beat against the shuddering gate, echoing along the walls. Again, again. She did not hide, she was there.

He thought that he could share her pain. The stabbing aside of virginhood was as it should be — his extended flesh prodding after habitation, inching through blood and tissue after her quickening heart. They experienced it together, an enacted metaphor.

Once inside her he was free. For a moment he could make himself believe that the walls of self were melted and identity overthrown. It was all lyric for him, bloody, lubricious. Her heart kept beating faster and faster. They finished as a process of ocean.

Not for some minutes afterward did he realize that she had eluded him after all. He could not understand how it had happened. He turned to her on the mat beside him and saw that he had lost her. Her teeth were bared, biting into her upper lip. Her eyes were bright with tears. Of course he had expected too much of the act; it had been strangely naïve of him. They had both expected worlds too much.

Stupidly, he asked the tedious questions. Whether it had been all right, if she was hurting, whether she had, as he said, enjoyed it. He was pushing her away, he whose science was Other. Each tedious question, each polite reassurance put them farther apart.

He got up, drew water from the sink to wash himself and walked to one of the windows. She had closed all the shutters. He unfastened the one at the window where he stood and looked to the ocean again.

The sea on one hand, the woman on the other. Himself in between. All separate again in their loneliness and fixedness, illusions of union fled.

When he turned to face her she was sitting on the bed wrapped in the sheet. His eye fell on the bloodstains and he looked away. There was a strange smile on her face. When she spoke it was in a small somehow disembodied voice.

“A Wife — at Daybreak I shall be—” he heard her say. “Sunrise — Hast thou a flag for me?” She looked him in the eye with the cool despairing smile. “Nothing ever goes the way I think it will,” she said.

He turned back toward the ocean.

“I wish you hadn’t said that.”

“Oh no,” she said. She stood up with the sheet draped around her and came over to him. “Oh no. Please don’t misunderstand me. It was pleasurable. It was very pleasurable.”

When he turned his face to her, she stood on tiptoes to kiss him on the cheek.

“Very nice, sir. Very nice and new.”

“It hurt,” he said. “It wasn’t what you expected.”

“That wasn’t what I meant,” she said. “I just didn’t think it would happen like that.”

“Neither did I.” He clasped his hands round the nape of her neck and looked into her tears. “It didn’t happen. We did it.”

“Yes,” she said.

Her body was still when he held her. She delicately stroked his shoulder with three fingers as one might pet a cat. It was an odd hit.

“Wait for me,” she said, gathering the sheet round her. “I have to wash.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

He leaned in the window, smoking, watching the road. He could hear her crying in the shower.

She came out wearing an unadorned light blue dress and her hair was tucked up in a matching scarf. A nurse’s uniform — almost a habit.

“You really are in trouble,” Holliwell told her. “Very serious and dangerous trouble. You’re being watched by some very bad people.”

Justin was looking down at her warped reflection in the surface of a wheeled metal table.

“I know that.”

“Do you know who they are?”

“Sure. The Guardia Nacional and people who work for them.”

He was silent for a moment.

“There are others,” he told her. “Foreigners. They could be the local CIA station assets. They’re cowboys.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means no one much cares what they do. And they’re after you.”

She managed to smile. “Me specifically?”

“They think you’re a subversive element.”

“I am. But I’m not very good at it.”

“Well, you’ve attracted their notice. They want you.”

“Come on,” she said, “it’s not me they’re really after.”

He watched her slowly raise her fingers to her lips.

“Yes, it is,” he said. “It’s you.”

He would not be able to explain it to her. She had aroused an appetite in them as she had in him. He called his hunger love, what they called theirs he had no way of knowing. It was malice, shame — the desperado’s rage at innocence and grace, the villain’s abhorrence of love and life and goodness. Names and words were of no account; it was an old game, older than words.

He thought of her heart beating next to his and the notion came to him of that heartbeat pulsing across silence, its brave flutter sounding in the inward ear of those men like the lateral rhythms of a lost sea creature among the reefs. Of her heart as a magical beast bringing the hunt upon itself. A unicorn.

“Let them be after me,” she said, still staring at the tabletop. “While they’re after me, the people who are really doing something can take this country from under their noses.”

“Are they wrong about you then? Aren’t you involved in any real activity?”

“They’re not wrong. I was involved in the fight here. Was. Formerly. I knew they were casing me. I pulled out. I’ve told the people concerned.”

He shook his head. “It’s too late,” he said. “We have to get you out of here.” He looked down at the road. “If you leave with me we might make it.”

“Oh, Frank,” she said, “I can’t, you know.” She shrugged her shoulders with a wan exasperated smile. “I’m responsible for Father Egan. I’m responsible for everything here.”

“You have to, May. They’ll hurt you.”

She looked at him sharply. She was frightened and angry because of it.

“Why do you keep saying it’s me?”

“It’s you.”

“No,” she said uncertainly, “I’m nothing in this.”

“You could come with me up to Miami. After that … I don’t know.”

Nor did he. He could not imagine a time beyond the moment. He felt her eyes on him.

“That would be something, wouldn’t it?” she said.

“Let’s try it, May.”

“It would be something. But it’s not possible. I can’t leave a sick old man alone. I can’t walk out on people who trust me.” She shook her head slowly. “No, Frank. Not now. I have to tell my friends what you’ve told me. And then I’ll think of something clever, I guess.” She was staring at him wide-eyed, the way she had the night before. “How do you know all this? About these people and who they are? These cowboys?”

“I know one when I see one. I was in Vietnam once.”

“Is that where you got that little scar?”

He touched his earlobe.

“That’s right. In the mountains there. It’s a piki scar.”

“You said … somewhere else.”

“I lied.”

“It must have been bad there,” she said. “Was it bad?”

You’d have liked it, he thought.

“It was all right.”

“I don’t know who you are,” she said.

“May, for Christ’s sake! Let’s get it together and get out!”

“Do you think I’m too dumb to be frightened?” she asked. “I’m plenty frightened. Yes, I’d like to run. I’m scared and I’d like to run. Don’t you see that it isn’t possible?” She shivered and raised her upturned palms. “It’s not possible. I can’t do it.”

She started toward him, he moved to her and held her. She stood in his arms with her shoulder to him, very stiff and frightened, facing the open window. Then he heard her say: “My God, they’re here.”

He released her and stepped back.

“Who?”

Going carefully to the window, he saw a young woman in braids and native dress — a Carib, he thought — walking along the road.

“Who?” he asked. “This Indian kid?”

“She isn’t Indian. She’s from town. She’s my contact.” Justin swallowed and squared her shoulders. “I sent them a note last night that I was pulling out. They wouldn’t send her out here in broad daylight unless something was up.”

“Can you keep her outside?”

“I don’t think so.” She looked at him ashamed. “You’ll have to hide. Sneak out.”

Like a man in a bedroom farce, Holliwell left through a window in the washroom, sliding down a hardwood buttress that anchored the dispensary wing to the overgrown hillside. He made his way through the brush to the trail that ran along the creekside and started inland. He followed the trail for about five minutes and then stopped, sat down under a cocobolo tree on the bank and watched the water insects skim the brown surface of the creek.

He understood that she would not go. He had neither the force nor the moral authority to persuade her. He was in danger himself now; he had gone along too far. What it came to, what he had to face, was that he had somehow supposed that he could run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. Informally of course. In the name of communication. He had imagined a place for himself in the business and then assumed that the place existed.

There would be regrets now and they would be deep and bitter. He knew vaguely that his life would be changed somehow. Whatever happened, he thought, he would not be wiser. He did not suppose that his judgment would improve.

The forest enfolded him, shutting out the mission and the sea. Drawn into its silent airless ambiance, he moved through the shady perfumed spaces like a dreamer. The trail and the river kept him from losing his way.

When he had wandered on for about a quarter of a mile, he was brought up by the prospect of an open space ahead; there were hills beyond it and then a precipitous wall of mountains. In the space were three stelae in a staggered row, quite exposed, as clear of earth and vegetation as though they were on exhibition. The one nearest him was discolored from frequent rubbings. If it was not protected, he thought, it would soon be lost altogether.

He advanced and studied the clearing. One of the hills behind it, Holliwell saw from the contour, was a pyramid covered in jungle. There might be more. It was an impressive site; the manner in which it lay half excavated and unprotected was a measure of the government’s barbarity. Whoever had made the rubbings might just as easily have unearthed the entire stela and trucked it away. He was surprised that Oscar Ocampo had not got round to it; there was a fortune to be made here.

The clearing itself was curiously infertile and the meagerness of soil had helped to keep the stones exposed. The ground was sandy and covered with shells — there would be salt or brackish water only a few feet down and the limestone crust was sterile. Perhaps there was some priestly curse over it.

As Holliwell started from the cover of the forest, he saw a young man asleep on the far side of the clearing. He stayed where he was and then began to back toward the tree line.

In the shadow of the mission building, Holliwell found himself a hiding place beside the creek from which he could see the beach road. Above him, he could hear Sister Justin in conversation with her visitor; the discussion sounded businesslike and cordial.

At length he heard a light sandaled step on the porch stairs and the girl in braids went past him on the road toward town. He waited until she had gone some distance and then went around to the front of the building and up to the dispensary wing. On his way up the steps, he saw Father Egan — in pajamas — standing at the kitchen window, blinking in the hard sunlight. Egan saluted him with a soft disjointed wave.

He found Justin standing where he had left her, beside the window. She watched him come in with a sad smile.

“There are people back at your ruins,” Holliwell told her. “They don’t look very reasonable.”

“We have everyone back there,” she said. “It doesn’t matter now.”

Something about the way she said it frightened him.

“What went on?”

She took a deep breath and exhaled it slowly.

“I’m … back in it, I guess.”

“What do you mean, May?”

“It’s happening tonight.” Her eyes widened. “Do you know what that means? What we’ve all been waiting for. The rising, Frank. They’re going out tonight.”

“Good Christ,” he said.

“They need me,” she said. She met his fearful look. “I asked them and they said they did. They expect me at the company clinic at eight o’clock. They have the guns and the people and they’re going to take the coast.”

“May, can’t you see how crazy this is? For you?”

“Don’t, Frank,” she said. “I’m so happy, see. I’m happier than I’ve ever been.”

He turned from her and began to walk the length of the dispensary. The bed where they had been was stripped.

“It must be that your friends don’t understand the heat that you’ve attracted.”

“The spooks are out of luck,” Justin said. “There won’t be any secrets tomorrow.”

“There are agents and police all over the place,” Holliwell said. “For all you know they may be just waiting for you to make a move so they can come down on you.”

She did not answer him.

“Oh, for God’s sake, May. They can have their goddamn revolution without you. If they win, they’ll expel you anyway.”

“I didn’t come down here to see the world or make my fortune or be educated. I came in my simpleminded way to help people. I’m not going to pull out now.”

“Ah, shit,” Holliwell said.

“I don’t decide what the people here need from me. They decide and I try to do it. Those are the rules. I’ve always accepted them.”

“You’re just being used.”

“Damn right,” she said. “At last, thank God.”

He found another miniature brandy and opened it.

“I’m going to tell you something now, May, that I didn’t want to tell you. I’m telling you so you can have some idea of your situation.” He forced himself to look at her as he spoke. Her face still held a pale defiant smile. “When I came down here I was asked by a man I know to be in the intelligence community to check this place out. I was supposed to find out what you were up to. Do you know what that means?”

“Go on,” she said.

“It means that someone’s been reporting on you — all the way to Washington. Not very long ago I was sitting in a restaurant in New York talking to that man about you. Now go ahead and figure out what your chances are.”

She put her hand over her eyes and leaned against the window casing.

“Well,” she said after a while, “you’ll have a story to tell, won’t you? And a dirty joke to go with it.”

“I refused him, May. I said I wouldn’t do it. Then I was approached in Santiago by another agent. You again. You’re public property, you and your friends.” He finished the brandy and tossed the bottle into a metal GI can. It rang against the ribs of the can with an ugly sound that hung over the long room. “I refused them all. It was for my own purposes that I came here, believe it or not. Maybe I wanted to see somebody doing something they believed in. Maybe I was just curious. They came to me because I did a job for the Company in Vietnam. I don’t work for them now. I’m not making any reports.”

She was crying silently. She took her hand from over her eyes and walked up to him.

“You’re very convincing, mister,” she said. And then she punched him across the bridge of his nose, a hard stiff-armed punch that numbed him. She hit him twice more, right hooks with a windup. His nose began to bleed. He put his handkerchief to it.

“I’m telling you the truth. You can have me killed if you want to, you’ve got time.”

“Do you know something?” she said. “I almost went with you. I almost did.”

“I wish you had, May.”

“You’re just another one of those bastards,” she said. “I can see that now. I don’t care what you say.”

“You’re wrong. I told you I was in love with you and I meant it. I’m not sure what falling in love is. It’s probably something trivial and foolish. But for what it’s worth I love you, I swear.”

“I thought I was dumb,” she said. “You’re worse than me.”

“I didn’t want to tell you. I wasn’t going to. Apparently it wasn’t necessary.”

“Oh, but I’m glad you did. So we know who we are — just a little.”

They stood in silence, both of them looking at the scrubbed wooden floor of the dispensary.

“There’s not much I can do for you at the hotel. Just be warned. The people over there think they know why I’m here but they’re not taking me into their confidence.” He smiled. “I suppose they don’t trust me.”

“Well,” she said, “you’re in a bit of a spot. If you’re telling me the truth.” She looked at him as though she were ashamed. “I have to presume you’re telling me the truth about not working for them. I wouldn’t know what to do otherwise, I’m new at this.”

“I’m in a bit of a spot, yes.”

“We’re going ahead, Frank. I’m going where I’m told. This place is going to blow up and it’s you that better be out of it.”

She went to a refrigerator in one of the closets, brought out a shard of ice wrapped in gauze and handed in to him. He held it under his nose and brushed at the congealing blood.

“God doesn’t work through history, May. That’s a delusion of the Western mind.”

“Too metaphysical for me,” she said. “I don’t know how God works.”

“The things people do don’t add up to an edifying story. There aren’t any morals to this confusion we’re living in. I mean, you can make yourself believe any sort of fable about it. They’re all bullshit.”

“Like love,” she said.

“Yes. Like love.”

Justin smiled. She was looking at the ocean.

“When I was a little girl I was riding my pony up along the wire one time — and I saw this thing coming down the road and I couldn’t tell what it was. So I stopped and got down and watched and what I saw was an enormous house being pulled along by a truck. It was a big old farmhouse, Frank, it was set on a flatbed that took up the whole road and these old boys were pulling it along taking it somewhere else and all of them looking so tickled with what they were doing. Tickled at me watching them.” She turned toward him and laughed; his heart rose up as he watched her. “I was so thrilled! I couldn’t believe that men could move a house. It was like they were moving a mountain. It made me feel proud. It made me feel like people could do anything in the world if they put their mind and their strength to it.” She looked at him amused. “You don’t know what I mean, do you?”

“No,” he said. He laughed himself. “I don’t have a clue what you mean.”

“We don’t think much alike,” she said. She shook her head. “God, that was crazy of us hopping into bed like that. Strangers. Like a couple of rabbits. My fault, I guess. Land, that was unconscious.”

“I didn’t think so,” he said.

“You see, I don’t have your faith in despair,” Justin said. “I can’t take comfort in it like you can.”

He wet his handkerchief on the melting ice and threw the ice and the gauze into the GI can.

“It was a dishonest thing you did to me, Mr. Holliwell. You really ought to be ashamed.” He saw her passing beyond him, out of reach, out of life.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “But I’m not sorry.”

“I believe everything you say,” Justin told him. “I don’t pretend to understand you though. Are you always going to be the way you are?”

He shrugged and she put out her hand and touched his face. He was surprised at the tenderness with which she touched him.

“I think despair and giving up are like liquor to you. You get high on it. But it’s not for me, Frank. I don’t have the temperament. I don’t have the sophistication to bring it off.”

When he started toward the door she came with him. She took hold of his hand for a moment and then let it go.

“We’ll both have to explain your being here if anyone saw,” she said. “We’ll both have to think of lies.”

“So you won’t denounce me to the revolution?”

“No,” she said. “I won’t denounce you. I want you to come back when we’re finished. I guarantee you won’t know the place.” She stopped and he stopped with her. “I’m trusting you now. Please tell me I’m doing right.”

“You’re doing right to trust me,” he said. “I love you, don’t I? I told you that.”

“What a funny word,” she said.

Holliwell learned that the Río de la Fe would bear no passengers that day. The boats had not come through from the city on the lake and in the tin-roofed offices of the steamship company there were not two who would agree as to the reason. A clerk from the offshore islands said the problem was paperwork. An Indian from the mountains said the river was bad that day. It was all in the hands of God, the Indian said.

The Vietnamese woman at the airlines office told Holliwell that there were no planes. She invited him to imagine there might be one on Thursday. He drove his jeep back to the hotel and found its precincts quiet; the spies and the contractors were in cover. He bought a bottle of light rum at the bar, went to his bungalow and drank himself insensible.

Sometime after dark a group of men came into his room to awaken him. There were three of them; they turned on his bedside lamp and shook him. In the warm lamplight he recognized Mr. Heath and Soyer. There was a Guardia officer with them, a short, broad-shouldered man with soft eyes.

“Hello, Holliwell,” Mr. Heath said. “Sorry, but we’ve some work to do.”

Holliwell swung his feet onto the floor. The three men who had come into his room watched him as he sat, blinking and nauseated, on the edge of his sweated mattress.

“Dress, will you?” Heath said. “We’re going out.”

Holliwell helped himself to some water from the pitcher on the night table and stood up. The Cuban took a tin of Anacin from his own pocket and offered the pills around. Holliwell took two.

“What’s the difficulty?” he asked them as he put his shirt on.

“Just,” Heath said, “that the job’s over where you’re concerned.”

“I don’t know what you mean by the job.”

“I should pack if I were you,” Mr. Heath told him. “You won’t be coming back here.”

Holliwell discovered that he was still fairly drunk.

“Am I being turned out of the country?” he asked.

The Cuban answered him.

“You’re in danger. We protect our friends. You are our friend, sir.”

When he had packed his bag, he followed them outside; the clamor of night creatures was almost alarming. There was a Guardia jeep at the door.

“What about my bill?”

“Let’s make it quick, Holliwell,” Heath said. “There’s a good fella.”

Holliwell climbed into the rear seat; Heath got in beside him. The Cuban and the Guardia officer sat in front, the officer at the wheel. As they rolled past the main building, Holliwell saw that it was darkened, the tables stacked, the bar closed. When they made the road, a second Guardia jeep fell in behind them, carrying three men in helmets and camouflage fatigues. It carried a mount with a 7.62 machine gun.

“What’s going on?” Holliwell asked Mr. Heath.

“Treason,” Mr. Heath said, in a mock-heroic manner.

“I’m not sure what it has to do with me.”

“Well, you’ll have to be debriefed before you leave. Then we’ll find out, won’t we?”

On the way to town, they passed a Guardia roadblock which had established itself behind two wooden sawhorses and an Aduana sign. Two lines of young Guardia troopers crouched Indian fashion along the edges of the road, squinting into the jeep’s headlights as it approached them. Seaward, a helicopter with a spotlight dodged between the beach and the reef line in figure-of-eight patterns, its light sweeping like a tentacle.

Along the riverfront of Puerto Alvarado there were half a dozen LCVM’s tied up at the docks. The town itself appeared to be going dark although it was only just after seven; the Syrians were locking fast their shutters and the few small neon signs around the plaza were dimmed and the shops closed. The square itself was jammed with soldiers turned out for combat, standing in loose ranks or crouching on the grass. Above them, the cathedral was dark and unavailable behind its great oak door.

At the west end of the plaza, upwards of twenty trucks were parked in rows, and as Holliwell watched, new ones would pull up carrying yet more Guardia. The trucks would be coming from the airport or from some disembarkation point upriver. There were very few civilians on the street.

The jeep in which Holliwell rode pulled up in front of the Municipalidad, escorting jeep behind. As he stepped out, he saw that a crowd of women had gathered in front of the doors of the police station; a Guardia sergeant was addressing them in a low voice. Heath got out after Holliwell, then the Guardia officer and Mr. Soyer. A trooper ran across the street from the square, got behind the wheel of their jeep and drove it out of traffic. The escort jeep pulled out after him. It was all peculiarly efficient.

The crowd of women was blocking the doors of the police station and the sentries began, fairly gently, to clear a way for Holliwell and his party. The sergeant was telling the women that the people they inquired after were not to be found. They were town women of mixed blood for the most part and though it was hard to tell, they appeared to be mainly over thirty. Holliwell glanced over the crowd and recognized among them the young woman who had visited Justin that morning and whom he had taken for a Carib. She was staring at him and her stare was intense, its informing emotion uncertain. As far as he knew she had never seen him before but the look she gave him betrayed recognition. It was a troubled stare and trouble, he thought, was what it portended. The company he was in would not recommend him to associates of Justin.

There were more men on guard inside the police station; its spare outer office looked readied for a siege. Sandbags were stacked around the barred shuttered windows and the Guardia detachment on duty were in jungle fatigues and carried grenades on their belts. The non-com in charge saluted as Holliwell and his acquaintances came in. Holliwell reflected that he had taken a few too many Guardia salutes to be altogether uninvolved in Tecanecan history. The door to the street remained open behind them; their Guardia lieutenant was in a state of some agitation over someone he had seen outside. Holliwell thought it must be the young girl in braids.

Heath went back to see what the trouble was and the Guardia lieutenant pulled him outside.

“Happen to see anyone you know out here?” the Englishman called to Holliwell. Holliwell walked to the door and looked over the sentries’ helmets at the dispersing group of women. He did not see her any longer.

“No. I don’t know many people here,” he said.

“No?” Heath asked.

The Guardia officer jogged across the street to the square and out of Holliwell’s sight. The sentries held the door open until he came back in, then bolted it down.

Holliwell followed them through the barricaded outer office and into a strange windowless room in the center of the building. The oddness of the room was disorienting and it made him even more uneasy. It had stone floors and damp walls of whitewashed brick, the roof was of corrugated metal over a netting of barbed wire that made it feel like a cage. There were two overbright institutional lights in green-painted housings at the center of the metal ceiling such as one might see on factory fences or prison yards. In one shadowed corner was a litter of what appeared to be electrical equipment — extension wires, hand generators and disused batteries lay in a cluster on the slimy floor. Looking more closely at the walls, he saw that there had once been windows along the two longer walls, but the window space and casements had been plastered over. Blackened chips of spackle lined the edges of the floor. There were two desks in the middle of the room — on one was a telephone.

The odd room smelled of mildew and disinfectant and of other things as well, familiar but unpleasant things which he could not quite identify. As soon as it struck him that the room was in fact the central patio of the building nailed down and sealed off from air and light, he realized that the dark stains on the stone floor were bloodstains.

Soyer had Holliwell’s suitcase on one of the desks. He thrust a hand toward Holliwell’s face and rubbed his fingers together.

“He’d like the key,” Heath said helpfully.

“I hate to spoil his number,” Holliwell said, “but he’ll find it’s open if he tries it.” Holliwell was drunk and disgruntled but he was growing more and more fearful.

The Cuban looked at Holliwell and then at Heath. Heath had a soothing half smile.

His suitcase was indeed open and Mr. Soyer examined the contents deliberately. The contents were innocent enough; there were only toiletries, cigarettes and clothes. The clean clothes were neatly folded, the soiled ones in their hotel laundry bag. But Mr. Soyer took his time.

“You’re impatient with us,” Mr. Soyer said. “Anxious to be on your way. We understand.”

“He’s a bit pissed in the bargain,” Heath said.

“Yes,” Soyer said, affecting to sound the suitcase for false bottoms, feeling the lining, messing about with the laundry bag. “There is something — about our part of the world — that makes the North Americans — reach for a glass. Isn’t there, Holliwell?”

“Could we have it straight, Soyer? Without the flourishes and games?”

Soyer closed the suitcase.

“Straight?” he asked. “Straight is how you would like it?” The man’s eyes drifted to a point behind Holliwell’s head. Holliwell remembered that the Guardia lieutenant was behind him.

“I don’t think I want to talk to this man,” Soyer said to Heath. “I find him crude and insolent.” Heath grinned.

“In technology they are giants,” the Guardia officer behind Holliwell said in Spanish, “but in culture — pygmies.”

Mr. Heath spoke.

“Know what happened to Ocampo, Holliwell?”

“What?”

“He’s dead.”

“He was a friend of mine,” Holliwell said after a moment. “I was very fond of him.”

“This chap Cole you came into the country with — he’s dead as well.”

“Cole was just a reporter. There was no reason for anyone to kill him.”

“Think not?”

“I told him not to go up to Tapa by himself,” Holliwell said. “The guy was sort of unsound.”

“Was he?” Heath asked. “He’s sound enough now. But dead. We think someone may have mistaken him for you.”

“There isn’t,” Holliwell said, “a reason for anyone to kill me either.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” Heath said. “Eh, Miguel?”

“Next to certain,” Soyer said.

“But the thing is, Holliwell — with Ocampo dead and Cole dead and you messing about with Mistress Feeney down coast — what the fuck is going on?”

“There’s no mystery,” Holliwell said. “Marty Nolan asked me to have a look at that mission when I came down here.”

“You declined. Remember?”

“I declined. But I got curious. I’m an anthropologist, after all.”

“And this was a field trip, was it, Professor? A sabbatical adventure?”

“Call it what you like,” Holliwell said.

Soyer rendered his dull smile.

“Be careful, Professor,” he said. “Be careful of what you allow us to call it. We may call it something you don’t like.”

“Ocampo also asked you to come down here,” Heath said. “Do you mean to say he didn’t tell you why?”

“He told me it was enough that I be seen to go. Those were his words. I was curious and I wanted to do him a favor to that extent.”

Heath grunted unhappily.

“Damn it,” Holliwell said, “I don’t know quite why I came.” He looked into Heath’s wine-dark face. “Come on, Heath! People do such things, you know. You may live in a world of absolute calculation but I don’t. For one thing I didn’t expect to get down here for the goddamn …” But by the time he cut the word off it was too late. He became afraid, really afraid — for the first time. It seemed to him that he had nearly talked his way out of it and then lost it all at the very last. He was drunk and he had vainly imagined that truth was on his side — but of course there was no truth. There were only circumstances.

“The goddamn revolution,” Heath said. “But you did. Sorry. And what you’ve been up to here, Holliwell — uncharitably interpreted — smacks of a double game.”

The Guardia lieutenant came forward and stood in front of Holliwell; there was a look on his face that suggested acute physical pain, manfully subdued. He lit a cigar and tossed the match, almost by accident it seemed, at Holliwell’s shirtfront. The extinguished match stayed there, resting in a crease. Holliwell did not brush it away.

“We’re not in a position to extend charity,” Soyer told him. “We interpret actions strictly. We’re trying to be serious.”

“It’s like this, Holliwell,” said Mr. Heath patiently. “While you’re observing the situ-a-shon actu-well and thinking deep thoughts, people are fighting quite desperately over things they believe in. I hope you won’t think I’m sentimental. But with you having all these moral adventures you can dine out on in the States — it’s really very difficult to wish you well.”

“But we do,” Mr. Soyer said, “because you are North American and all the world loves you. We try to understand.”

“And do we succeed?” Mr. Heath asked.

“Claro que sí,” the Cuban said. “Indeed we do. We know our good neighbors the North American people who are allied with us for progress. We know their profound concern for international morality. Their sense of brotherhood. Their dedication to human rights. Sometimes we find them difficult to understand, we who are only what we are. But understand we must.”

As Mr. Soyer concluded, he was unable to keep smiling.

“If you expected me to work with you,” Holliwell said, “you should have taken me into your confidence.”

“We couldn’t, you see.” Mr. Heath had a small metal flask half covered with worn leather. He took it from the side pocket of his dark lightweight jacket, shook it and drank from it. “We’ve had our fingers burned. They send some of you chaps down here — well honestly, it’s frustrating. You speak with two voices, frankly. Makes it very hard going for us. I mean — whose side do you think we’re on after all?”

“So,” Soyer said, “we couldn’t take you into our confidence. However, others did, am I right to think so? Sister Justin? We believe you know something about what she and her friends are doing tonight.”

“I don’t know anything about their plans,” Holliwell said.

Mr. Soyer’s jaw seemed to tighten with a little tremor. He turned to Heath. Heath sniffed and drummed his fingers on the desk top.

“Really, Holliwell, that’s very difficult to believe.”

Soyer moved closer to where Holliwell stood.

“Because we’re so ready to understand, Professor — that’s why we don’t believe you. But I assure you, sir, that you’ll tell us what you know.”

The Guardia lieutenant spoke for the first time.

“We have to know where the nun will be,” he said in Spanish. His air of stolid resolution was impressive, even daunting.

“I can’t give you the answers you want,” Holliwell said. “I don’t know them.”

Heath’s eyes went out of focus and he looked away. Soyer was tapping his knuckles against his own forehead.

“Holliwell,” he said, “not everyone will be alive in the morning. In Yanquiland it’s true that no one dies. Here life is sordid.”

“Sorry,” Holliwell said.

“Sorry,” Mr. Soyer repeated. “Sorry?” His pistol was out and he put the barrel gently against Holliwell’s lips. “The next thing out of your mouth, you overfed son of seven tits, will be God’s truth or I’m going to tear it out of your throat.”

When Soyer withdrew the pistol, Holliwell took a cigarette out of his pocket and put it in his mouth. He realized from the taste that the cigarette was in backwards, filtered end out.

“Don’t be a bloody fool, Holliwell,” Heath shouted at him. “Get that fag out!”

Holliwell was glad to oblige as though that were the only problem.

“He thinks he’s a hero,” Heath said. “He thinks he’s at the fucking matinee.” He shook his head in disappointment. “Leave us together, Miguel, there’s a good fella.”

“He’s going to tell me about that hole he puts it into,” Soyer said.

“In the interests of time,” Heath said to Soyer. “As a favor.”

Soyer wiped his forehead, swallowed hard and went out of the peculiar room. The lieutenant followed him.

When he was alone with Holliwell, Heath took out his flask, shook it and put it on the desk with the phone.

“Give it up, chum,” he said. “Everybody talks.”

“Do you really think I’m party to all the other side’s secrets?” Holliwell asked. “Do you think she gave me their order of battle?”

“You don’t understand the situation,” Heath said, “so I’ll explain. I’ll do it clearly if I can but I’ll only do it once. Soyer is going to kill you if you don’t help him. The only reason he hasn’t already is that he’s afraid he’ll get in trouble with his higher-ups and his higher-ups are basically your government. Plus he doesn’t trust me not to tell what I see — but he’s wrong about that. I’d cover for him absolutely. Clear so far?”

“Yes,” Holliwell said.

“Good. You, Holliwell — so far as we’re concerned — are a source. Soyer is for practical purposes your case agent. He has a request from the authorities of the host country — namely Lieutenant Campos — concerning the activities of Sister Whatsit and he wants to comply with it. Understand, please, that no one is in any doubt about what she’s up to or the people she’s tied in with. Nor are we wondering where to find her — I’m sure she’ll be at the mission wrapping bandages for the boyos and looking marvelous. However, since she and the priest are U.S. citizens and the mission is an American entity, Soyer is involved directly and so are you. With all you Yankees involved we have to approach the situation in a rather cumbersome bureaucratic fashion. You are paying attention, aren’t you, Holliwell?”

“I’m paying attention.”

“War is hell as I’m sure you know. Things have their own momentum. In the face of all this promiscuity we need a coherent version of events that may someday find its way into someone’s files. Some bloody politician or other asks what happened in Tecan at such and such a time. We say what happened is this — blah blah blah. We say what happened is: Soyer debriefed Holliwell. Holliwell fingered Justin and her mission. Soyer passed the information as requested to the friendly service of the host country. Follow? Soyer needs this chain of circumstance. He wants, as you say, to be seen to do it this way. Appearances if you like. It’s part of his job.”

“It’s supposed to be me that tells him what he already knows, is that it?”

“That’s it. To his mind that’s what you’re here for, and as we know, he hates your guts. He wants to see you shop her.”

“It’s foolish of him to push people that far,” Holliwell said.

“That may be, cock, but don’t tell me. And for Christ’s sake don’t tell him.” Heath shook the flask again and, this time, drank.

“What happens to her then?”

“She’ll be expelled. At least she will if we can get to her before Campos does. She’s better off with us, you know.”

“Are you telling me you’ll protect her from Campos?”

“Why not? Soyer works for your government. I should think they’d rather not have a dead nun on their hands after the fact. And from our point of view we’d be well pleased to talk to her. We’re trying to get the big picture pieced together and it’s not easy from here. We don’t have to tell the Tecs everything we find out.”

“What if she doesn’t want to talk to you? I don’t think it’s likely she will.”

“Think I’m going to put a sister of mercy to the third degree at the risk of my immortal soul? Why, Holliwell, I wouldn’t know how to start.”

“I think you would. So would your friend.”

“We won’t harm her, Holliwell. Come on, man, it’s her best bet. And it’s your only bet because you won’t leave here alive if you don’t do it. You’re ours now.”

“How do I know you won’t feed her to the lieutenant?”

“It would be more convenient not to. Anyhow it won’t matter much to you if you’re pushing up daisies. Look, Holliwell,” Heath said, “we’re just asking you to do a little more of what you’ve been doing all along. Preserve the forms, eh?”

“Will you give me your word that she won’t be harmed?”

“My word?” Mr. Heath asked. He laughed a little but he looked rather sad. “No one’s ever asked me for my word before. But if you want to put it like that — sure, Holliwell. We’ll look after her.”

“All right,” Holliwell said.

“Ah,” Heath said. “Good lad.”

He offered Holliwell a drink from his flask and Holliwell was happy to have it.

Then Heath summoned Soyer and Campos back into the room and Holliwell explained to Soyer that he had discussed local political issues with Sister Justin Feeney of the Devotionist mission at Las Ruinas and that she had admitted to him her involvement in a conspiracy against the stability and integrity of the Republic.

Soyer listened cheerfully; his eyes were moist and his questions were soft and polite. He translated the answers for Lieutenant Campos, who listened impatiently.

“What else can you tell me, Professor?” Soyer asked after Holliwell had made his deposition. “Surely she’s told you her hopes and dreams? What does she understand will happen in the country as a whole?”

“She doesn’t know any of that,” Holliwell said. “She’s only a nurse. She wants to be where she’s needed.”

Having said that much, he glanced uneasily at Campos. The lieutenant’s lips were rolled back over his white teeth.

“Pure,” Soyer said. “Eh, Holliwell?”

“Yes,” Holliwell said.

Soyer smiled broadly.

“That’s good, Professor. And it’s very good of you to share with us. I think your only problem in life is that you can’t recognize your friends. We are your friends here — and you betray us.”

Holliwell took a cigarette from the pack and put it in his mouth, correctly this time. Soyer lit it for him.

“We do your dirty work here, gringo. When you go through attacks of cowardice and remorse, it’s we who pay, not you. One day if you keep up this way your enemies will put your entire fatuous country to sleep and there won’t be many tears, believe me.”

Holliwell looked at the cigarette between his fingers.

“Rest assured,” Soyer said, “that it’s not for you I’m fighting. I’m not such a fool as that. It’s for my country — and the bad of it is that we have to depend on you. A nation of betrayers,” he said to Heath. “Without pride. Whiners. I hate them all.”

Heath finished off the contents of his flask. He winced afterwards as though the liquor hurt him inside.

“I don’t know about that,” he said. “All kinds in every country. All the same, I do remember that a chap I knew in the army used to say — When you’ve heard what a Yank has to say in the first five minutes, you’ve heard everything he’ll say the rest of his life.”

Soyer was only half listening; he snorted happily.

“Garrulous. Like this professor.” He stood in front of Holliwell; he was about an inch shorter, a tall man. “So, Professor, want to give me an abrazo now? The Americans,” he told Heath, “love most of all to give abrazos. They—” Holliwell threw his cigarette in Soyer’s face and struck him above the mouth with a straight-armed right. In a second, Heath and the lieutenant had pinned him. The lieutenant had the strength of a weight lifter; Holliwell’s arm went numb in his grasp but the shoulder to which it was joined hurt quite a lot.

He was pleased to see that Mr. Soyer had stopped smiling. Mr. Soyer was several feet away now, his lip bloody and his face pale. But he held a gun in his hand that was pointed at Holliwell.

“Steady on, Miguel,” Heath said.

Holliwell immediately regretted his rashness. He watched the gun in the Cuban’s hand as the man walked toward him again. If he was not shot, he thought, he would be struck across the face with the gun, and hitting Soyer was not nearly satisfying enough to buy that. But Soyer did not hit him.

“He wants to act like a man,” the Cuban explained. “Too late, Holliwell,” he said, putting the gun away. He touched his swollen lip. “Too late for that.”

“By Christ,” Heath said disgustedly, “you’re a bloody fool, Prof. You’re asking for it, you know.” They let go of him.

“I’m not offended by his bad temper,” Soyer said. “He’s going to take a ride with me. That’s right, Holliwell,” he said. “We’re going out to the mission, you and I together, and we’ll bring in Sister Justin. Then you can explain yourself to her as you have to me.”

Soyer and Campos went out again — Campos to communicate with his force at the mission, Soyer to clean up. Mr. Heath looked morose.

“Very foolish of you, Holliwell. Mind you, he was provoking. But very foolish all the same.”

“Of course,” Holliwell said.

“You’re in luck, you know. We may get your friend out of the shit. Suppose you hadn’t run into us?”

“Then who knows,” Holliwell said.

“The evening’s business won’t be pleasant for either of you. But you’ll really be better off.”

“Maybe I should be grateful.”

“You should,” Heath said. “One day you will be.”

There was a small dry food stain on the sleeve of his dark cotton jacket. He began to chip it away with his fingernail.

“Miguel can’t help feeling the way he does, you know. He’s lived out some bad history and he’s bitter. Actually he’s not bad as these fellas go.”

“What about you?”

Heath smiled.

“Oh me. I’m just standing my lonely vigil. The watch on the Rhine.”

“This is a bit far-flung for Six, isn’t it?”

“Six? I’m not Six, Holliwell. Well, not really. Not that I mind making my services available to the British taxpayer. Or the U.S. taxpayer. But I work for Investors Security International. We in turn work for the corporations that own land here. It’s a very large investment that’s under consideration on this coast, converting to tourism and so forth. Lot of money’s been paid out. They want to know what’s going on, eh? If we can help them maintain a favorable environment for their business, we do it. Nothing wrong with that, is there?”

“You enjoy it so much,” Holliwell said, “it must be all right.”

“That’s exactly the way I see it. I do like my work, you know. Now and again I can right a few wrongs. Make a little dent in our far from perfect old world.”

“Tell me about your friends Buddy and Olga. Are they helping you straighten things out?”

Heath laughed silently, in the way of someone caught out in guilty pleasure.

“Oh, they’re a project of mine. My next project — after you and the sister. They’re in the way of business for me because they’ve got themselves a local partner and bought a thousand hectares just north of here. That sort of people always has money, eh, Holliwell?” He shook his head and his faded flannel blue eyes came alive slightly. “But I’d go after them on my own time, if I had to. They’ll come to grief with me, don’t worry. I won’t have people like that about, chum — not in my bailiwick. Not running free.”

“It’s an interesting life you lead.”

Heath slipped away from the desk where he had been leaning and walked toward the door to the outer office. “I was never for the quiet life,” he said. “Life in the stockbroker belt was not for the likes of me. But never mind.” He stood in the open doorway looking out; the noise of cartridge clips being loaded and the cackle of a shortwave sounded from the adjoining space. “They’ll want you shortly,” he told Holliwell.

Holliwell stayed by the desk looking down at the black unmarked telephone that rested on it.

“You see,” Heath said, “I’m the wrath of God in my tiny way. I don’t go seeking out the misguided and the perverse, not at all. Those afflicted find me. I’m the shark on the bottom of the lagoon. You have to sink a damn long way before you get to me. When you do, I’m waiting.”

“That’s very good,” Holliwell said. “But don’t you think your clients may be out of luck with their investment here?”

“Very possibly. Still, they can’t say we didn’t try, can they?”

“No, they can’t.”

“It’s a war, Holliwell. Goes on all over the world. And, I suppose, in the long run the other side will win it. When they do, like all winners, they’ll find that things aren’t the way they’d planned and it didn’t turn out quite right. Then in a thousand years it’ll all be ancient history if there’s anyone to read it.” Mr. Heath pulled a long face. “But,” he said, “am I downhearted? No! The wicked flee when no man pursueth but the righteous are bold, Holliwell.”

He stood with Soyer on the colonnaded sidewalk in front of the Municipalidad, waiting for the dispatch of a jeep to take them up the coast. Military runners went back and forth between the Guardia station and the troop formations drawn up in the darkness of the square. The only lights to be seen in town now were the headlights of military vehicles and the yellow-faced flashlights of the Guardia MP’s who were directing the traffic.

Around the plaza itself, the troops awaited their orders in an uncanny silence that was broken only by the shouted instructions of an officer or the sullen, deep-throated uno-dos-tres of a platoon sounding off by number. From time to time one could hear the rhythmic tramp of a rifle squad moving at the double, as units separated themselves from the main body of troops to take their places in one of the trucks that were parked by the dozen in front of the cathedral steps. There were mounted troops as well; Holliwell could not see them but he could hear the clatter of shod horses’ hooves on the stones of Alvarado’s single paved street. Officers in braided high-crowned caps were appearing now, exchanging abrazos in the street — and a few civilians in guayaberas who looked like heroin dealers from the Bronx. The officers and their civilian associates seemed elated. None of them paid any attention to Soyer or Holliwell.

This tight deployment of many soldiers in a small closed space made Holliwell uneasy; his uneasiness was the result of previous conditioning. For the moment the fortunes of the Guardia Nacional were Holliwell’s fortunes — he had a side at last. He was fairly certain that from somewhere in the darkness beyond the occupied square he was being watched. He thought of the girl with braided hair and of the stare she had fixed upon him. From time to time he would see the same stare quicken in the eyes of a passing Guardia private; always it would fade when he met it, to be replaced by blankness, nada—or a guilty smile.

Presently two jeeps pulled up at the sidewalk where Holliwell and Soyer waited. Campos was in the lead jeep beside the driver; the escort carried four troopers and a 7.62. When Holliwell climbed into the rear seat, Soyer walked around to the passenger side for a minute’s guarded conversation with the lieutenant, then swung in beside Holliwell.

“Your nun is in her nunnery,” Soyer told him. “Campos has the place surrounded by Guardia but they’ll wait for us in deference to your nationality.” He took an automatic rifle from the rack behind the front seat and cradled the stock on his knee.

“You’re responsible for her,” Holliwell said.

“No,” said Soyer. “You are.”

The jeeps started up; a few deserted corners turned and they were climbing the tangled hill over the river. The road narrowed and descended into mangrove swamp and they could hear the sound of the ocean over their engines. Clear of the swamp they hit the beach strip. The darkness beyond their headlights was scented and absolute.

When they had driven for about twenty minutes, Holliwell found himself listening to the sound of a motorcycle somewhere ahead of them. The machine seemed to be holding a constant distance, leading them at their own speed. He began to sense the phantoms of Route Three, that paragon of war trails through night’s jungle. The escort jeep behind them followed close. Too close, Holliwell thought. At night in the jungle one always had a side to be on.

The report of the first mortar was so inevitable that Holliwell failed, in the first seconds, to take note of it. It had struck a good distance inland, far enough so that the charge echoed in the folds of the mountain wall. There was a second, then another, then the rattle of a machine gun — three long bursts. From a different quarter altogether came the single-minded wack wack wack of a rifleman with a target. The firing came in waves of varying frequency but once it started it did not stop. None of it was very close by. Through it all, Holliwell could hear the steady drone of the motorcycle ahead.

He turned toward Soyer but could not see his face for the darkness, only that the Cuban had drawn his rifle closer and that his right hand rested over the trigger housing. Lieutenant Campos turned around in the front seat as though he were about to consult with Soyer, but then turned back again to face the road in silence. Holliwell, behind the driver, had sobered to a state of tortured alert. The dreadful visit they were about had receded from his mind; he stared into the shifting dark beside the road as though he could force its secrets to his senses. He noticed that the motorcycle preceding them was no longer to be heard.

As soon as he saw the mangrove log loom across the road at the extent of the headlights’ scan he knew exactly what would come. The log blocked the road at the neck of a curve; it had never been there before. Thinking back on it just afterwards, he would convulse in horror at the time he allowed to pass between his first sighting of the barrier and his leap into darkness. But in fact there had not been much; he was rolling on the packed sand and crawling for cover well before the two jeeps pulled up short and the machine guns opened up from the bend and from the inland side of the road approaching it.

The ambush had the form of an L, as he had somehow known it would. The L’s short horizontal bar enclosed the turn parallel with the barricade, the vertical bar lined the dozen feet or so in which the vehicles would have to decelerate. The gunners had nothing but time, Holliwell thought, frantically elbowing his way over the soft sand. They would have opened up before the tires stopped rolling; before them, two excellent Detroit jeeps, packed together immobile and neatly defined in their own light like a pair of squid cooked in the ink.

There was fuck-all cover on the open beach. Pressing himself into the contours of the sand he listened wild-eyed to the devouring enfilade, the shells ringing on metal, the screams. There was no moon, the stars were faint and cold in a sky ablaze with lights and colors from behind his own eyes. In that hallucinatory darkness, he could not tell sea from shoreline or even distinguish the outline of palm groves. It seemed to him, when he thought over the instants just past, that at least one other passenger had jumped for it — it would have been seconds after his own dive. Whoever it was, if he had escaped, would be with him in the darkness now, out between the ocean and the hostiles.

The shooting on the road had stopped and he raised his head to look over his shoulder. One of the jeeps was burning; he saw a figure outlined for a moment against the flames. Men were laughing, speaking in excited voices. Two short bursts sounded — they were not taking prisoners that evening. Then the voices grew fainter as the ambush party retired, inland, toward the higher ground.

Holliwell crawled a little farther from the road and then stood up cautiously. He was about fifteen yards from the water’s edge. For a moment he stood still and listened hard — but he could hear no movement nearby, only the small waves laving the shore and the intermittent gunfire. He was alone and lost, in outer darkness without friend or faction. It was a frightening place — the point he had been working toward since the day he had come south. It was his natural, self-appointed place.

He hunkered down by the water’s edge and tried to decide on a course. He could not go back to town, both sides would be hunting him there, and now that there was blood upon the ground, explanations would not be suffered nor bargains struck. He might try to hide in the bush, where there were tiny plantation villages. But that would be unwise, he thought. They would know him for a survivor of the ambush. He would go the way of Cole.

At last he decided that he would walk to the mission. It seemed to him he had some claim on companionship there. He would tell her what had happened if he reached her in time, and if she could not or would not help him and he remained free — he might somehow lose himself among the other foreigners scavenging in the ruins there. He struck out along the shoreline.

He would not remember how long he walked before he came to the buildings at Las Ruinas. They had arranged hurricane lamps on the front steps in the form of a cross and these lights were the first he had seen since leaving Alvarado. He had followed the faint broiling glow of the tame surf, wetting his shoes, sinking, at places, to the calf in soft sand. On his left, the dark ocean played out its infinity of time; inland, men played out their lives in a less patient darkness. Where he walked was no-man’s-land. Sometimes he felt free; at other times fear overcame him, waves of fear, congruous with the rise and fall of firing. He stopped only once — to watch two helicopters swing in tandem along the mountain slope, made visible for a moment in their searchlights.

In the cover of the mission boathouse, he stopped and tried to spy out the state of things. Thin lines of light showed behind the fastened shutters of the dispensary wing but the rest of the building was dark beyond the span of lamps along the stairs. He could hear voices and laboring footsteps on the veranda. The arc of a tossed cigarette appeared for a second at the window of the priest’s apartment. There were two dark pickup trucks parked along the road out front.

He moved away from the boathouse and had started to advance along the beach when he saw two dead men at the water’s edge. One lay face up with his arms outstretched as though he had rolled off the dock; his chest was destroyed. The other was on his knees, a bloodied face half buried in sand. The two dead men wore the helmets and camouflage fatigues of the Guardia. Holliwell paused for a moment and then walked on. He would be visible from the building now. He took the chance.

Shadows appeared suddenly from the tree line by the mission garden. Someone shouted. A burst of machine-gun fire exploded from the edge of the veranda and he threw himself to the sand. The firing was in his direction but aimed high. Armed men were advancing from the woods around the garden, but they were civilians, he saw, not Guardia.

“May!” he shouted. He could feel a line of guns turn on him.

A lone man in dark slacks walked from the road and across the beach toward him.

“That you, Holliwell?” the man asked. It was Father Egan.

“Yes, it’s me.”

“You shouldn’t be here,” the priest said.

Holliwell stood up and brushed the sand from his shirt.

“Want to talk with the boss?” Egan asked. “Come on.”

As he walked with Egan to the mission steps, sentries tracked him with their weapons. On the steps themselves, men in Guardia uniforms emerged from the darkness of the veranda, carrying cardboard boxes. They were unarmed and without helmets; thus dispossessed, they did not seem to be Guardia any longer but only frightened young Indians. They carried their burdens in silence, moving carefully through the cruciform arrangement of lamps to stack the cardboard boxes in the parked trucks.

Holliwell looked up through the lamps’ glare and saw Justin at the top of the steps. Her hands were thrust in the pockets of her white smock; he could not quite see her face. For the first time since he had met her she seemed at ease. After a moment she came down to him.

“What happened?”

“They took me out of the hotel about seven o’clock. To the justicia. They have thousands of troops in Alvarado.” He brushed a loose hand toward the invisible mountains. “They’ve got choppers.”

“I know,” she said. She turned partly away, pivoting on a hip, her hands still in her pockets. He understood that she would not want to face him now and be undone, and have her pride of battle spoiled by intimacy with him, thoughts of the morning. “How did you get away?”

“We were coming … they were coming out to get you. We were ambushed.”

“Campos?” she asked.

“He was there. I think they got him.”

She gave a whispered gasp. There was a roll of automatic fire from the direction of town.

“I tried to get out,” Holliwell said. “Alvarado was closed down by noon. They just took me in.”

“You talked to them.”

“I was under some compulsion. I tried to make a deal with them. They told me you wouldn’t be hurt.”

“You talked to them.” There were men with guns watching them from both sides of the building as they spoke. Justin sighed and put her foot on the bottom step. “Oh, Frank. You betrayed me then, didn’t you?”

“I don’t know,” Holliwell said. “I didn’t think so.”

“But you did,” she said calmly. “Imagine not knowing.”

“If you’d been there you might think better of me. Of course, it hardly matters now.”

“Doesn’t it matter to you?”

“What matters to me isn’t important,” he said.

He was suddenly impatient with her. Watching her stand cool and brave amid her war, he had been awed and moved at the measure of her courage and her delusion. He felt envy and admiration and love for her. He considered the tremor of concern he detected in her voice as she asked after his conscience unworthy of the moment.

“When I decide what happened,” he said, “I’ll decide to live with it.”

Apparently it was his fate to witness popular wars; Vietnam had been a popular war among his radical friends. As a witness to that popular war he had seen people on both sides act bravely and have their moments. Popular wars, thrilling as they might be to radicals, were quite as shitty as everything else but like certain thrilling, unperfected operas — like everything else, in fact — they had their moments. People’s moments did not last long.

“You can’t stay here,” she told him. “We’re pulling out of here when we get the trucks loaded.”

“I can’t go back. I was seen at the justicia by your friends.”

“My friends,” she said, “my friends will be where we’re going.”

“I hope so, May, for your sake. The government’s out in force here and you may not win this round. They claim you’re surrounded.”

She had started up the steps, Holliwell following. As she stooped to pick up one of the hurricane lamps she glanced at him over her shoulder; on her face in the flickering light was the immanence of a smile.

“We were never surrounded. We disarmed the Guardia force that came out.” She raised her chin toward the defanged troopers loading the trucks. “We killed some,” she said when she had turned away.

In the dispensary, the lights were on behind the shutters. Beds had been crowded to one end of the room; against two of the walls sat a dozen or so more men in Guardia fatigues. Across the long room, two black Caribs in sport shirts and Guardia helmets watched the prisoners with Uzi’s across their knees.

The bed in which Holliwell and Justin had made their gesture at love was occupied by a dark, hard-faced young man who was sitting up in it, smoking. His leg was wrapped in clean bandages, there was an anchor tattoo on his left arm. Father Egan, who had followed them up, sat down on the foot of the young man’s bed. Holliwell looked about the room and his gaze fell on two small bottles of the medicinal brandy which were under the bed behind Egan’s feet. Happily and without ceremony, he reached down past the priest’s soiled, sandaled feet to grab them. Father Egan sighed.

He opened one of the brandy bottles and put the second in his trousers pocket. Justin watched him drink. He looked back at her, thinking to see her look away. He remembered now how her eyes had no edge to them, behind them she was naked.

“Well,” he said, when he had finished drinking, “a terrible beauty is born.”

She held his look steadily, then her sober fateful expression broke into a bright young smile, unexpected and unashamed.

“Isn’t it something?” she said.

“Yes, it is.”

“What am I supposed to do with you now?” she asked. “You’re in it.”

“I guess that’s not your problem. I’m not in it with you.”

“You’ll just have to keep talking, won’t you? Explaining yourself.”

“If I had explanations left,” Holliwell said, “I would make all of them to you. If it mattered.”

“And I would believe them, Frank. You could get me to believe them all, if it mattered. But I’m the only one who would.”

“I’m going to lose another war all by myself,” he said. “This is the second.”

Justin looked at the floor while he emptied the brandy bottle. Seconds passed before she spoke.

“You’re a good loser,” she said. “You’re a lucky man. You’ll live longer than you deserve if you help me out.”

“So now we’re tough guys.”

“That’s right,” she said, and smiled a little. Her smiles were like mercy. “We have to be tough guys now. I’m going to give you the mission’s boat. This kid”—she nodded toward the wounded young man—“is named Pablo and he’s American.” Pablo in the bed mumbled something inaudible and tried to smile. “I want you to get him down to the boat and get the two of you out to sea. Get clear of the coast before daylight.”

Holliwell looked at the young man on the bed and back at Justin.

“Would we really have a chance?”

“I think you’d have a very good chance,” she said.

Pablo stirred himself.

“That’s the truth,” he said. “The weather’s nothing but beautiful. I could get a good sound boat mostly to Florida.”

“Inside of a day,” Justin said, “you should run across one of the steamers coming up from the canal. We can see them right off the beach here every day of the week. If you meet rough weather you can turn south and if you still have enough gas you might make Limón in Costa Rica.”

“I don’t have much choice, do I?”

“I don’t think so, Frank. You’re lucky. You’ll make it.”

“Me, too,” Pablo said. “Always been.”

“Christ,” Holliwell said. He glanced at the priest at the foot of Pablo’s bed. “What about you, Father?”

“I’m not as lucky as you two. Anyway I’m staying here.”

“It’s the best thing, Frank. I was going to leave Pablo with Charlie but it’ll be better for both of them if he goes with you.”

“All right,” Holliwell said. “Let’s do it.”

While the Caribs stared their prisoners down, Justin and Holliwell set about gathering such supplies as would be needed for the passage out to sea. In the kitchen they loaded a crate with fruit: pineapples, papayas, a few dozen lemons. Half the canned food left in the larders went in with it, mainly the corned beef and beans on which Egan subsisted. They took turns laboring over the kitchen pump, bringing up enough water to fill a fifty-liter drum. When they had enough of everything, they pressed two of the captured troopers into service to help them carry the lot to the boathouse; one of the rebel gunmen posted on the road went along as escort. The small procession marched across the beach, past the corpses of the slain Guardia men and onto the small dock. With Holliwell standing in the whaler, they passed the provisions along hand to hand, feeling out each load from each other’s arms in nearly complete darkness. From the open boat-house, they took the last half-filled drum of gasoline, some kerosene, a plastic funnel.

When they got back to the road, the two pickup trucks stood loaded and the insurrectionist commander was bringing his men in from the surrounding woods to gather along the road. The commander was a bookkeeper in the employ of an Alvarado brothel and he was still in shock as a result of his earlier successful skirmish with the Guardia. His eyes were glazed with nervous fatigue, he continually ran his hand across his face in the manner of one disoriented. In fact his sense of reality had been subverted by the action; his upbringing had been gentle by the standards of Tecan and his only prior experience of massed weaponry and its effects had been at the cinema. He did not know what to make of Holliwell and consequently ignored him. The bookkeeper was a short heavy young man with a jowly spoiled-child’s face. Holliwell found him sympathetic.

As Holliwell stood by, he told Justin that there was not room in the trucks for his men, the medical supplies and the prisoners together. Justin suggested that the prisoners would have to walk. This made the bookkeeper unhappy; he had spoken eloquently to them and they had listened to him and enlisted under his command and he did not want to lose them. Nothing of the sort had ever happened to him before. Listening in, Holliwell envied him too. He had had a moment.

Justin and the bookkeeper agreed that it was necessary to abandon the mission now. The volume of fire from the direction of town seemed to have decreased but it was heavier in the hills behind them. And there was heavy firing now to the south, where there had been little before. It was the direction in which they were headed.

They went upstairs to the dispensary and the bookkeeper began to address his huddled prisoners. He told them what his job had been until the day before and how never before had he known who he was, but in the revolution he had found his freedom as they would find theirs. He hoped that they would keep faith with him and take their place in the revolution even though it meant they would have to walk to it and surrender all over again. If he were an evil man like their officers, he told them, he might simply have killed them. If he had been captured by them, he pointed out, they would certainly have been ordered to kill him and would have done so under compulsion. Saying so much, the bookkeeper seemed hardly to believe it, although it was true enough. He was an eloquent young man. He had been overqualified as a brothel’s bookkeeper but one often met over-qualified people in that part of the world.

While Justin went off to get a reserve of clean bandages and some antibiotics for Pablo, Holliwell walked to the young man’s bedside to see who it was he would be sharing an pen boat with. Father Egan was still sitting at the foot of the bed.

“You two haven’t really met, have you? This is Holliwell, Pablo. He’s an anthropologist. And this is Pablo.”

“How’re you feeling, Pablo?” Holliwell asked.

“Could be better,” Pablo said. Holliwell came to the disturbing conclusion that he was being sized up for a mark. It occurred to him that Pablo might not even realize what he was about, that it was simply his manner. “What you doin’ in this here shithole, cousin?”

“I was doing a study,” Holliwell said.

Pablo laughed, after a fashion. “Yeah?”

Holliwell walked away and met Justin halfway across the room, carrying Pablo’s medicine.

“Who is this kid?” he asked her.

“Nobody exactly knows. Charlie Egan says the law’s after him and that’s good enough for me. He’s probably off a boat.”

Holliwell said nothing.

He and Justin lifted the young man out of bed and stood him on his feet as the Indian prisoners and the bookkeeper watched. When he was upright, the young man turned to Father Egan.

“You think it’s gonna be all right?” He asked the priest. Holliwell was touched.

“Yes, it’ll be all right, Pablo. It’ll always be all right for you.”

Pablo smiled; he looked at Justin and Holliwell with what Holliwell would have sworn was triumphant malice. Then his features clouded.

“Where’s my knife?” he demanded.

Father Egan reached under the bedclothes to withdraw a huge diver’s knife in a plastic sheath.

Pablo took it from him.

“You gotta have a knife, right? To cut stuff with.”

“Want me to carry it?” Holliwell asked.

“That’s all right,” Pablo said, and took it.

The three of them walked down to the boat. From time to time, Pablo put his hand on Holliwell’s shoulder and leaned his weight on it. Behind them, the trucks started their engines. The bookkeeper and his prisoners descended from the dispensary, picking up the hurricane lamps as they came.

Holliwell and Justin helped Pablo down into the whaler. He crawled to the bow and worked the forward seat out of the bulkheads and lay down on a damp tarp.

“Can you … run it?” Justin asked Holliwell.

“Sure.”

“There’s a compass in it for what that’s worth. Keep to the right going out. There are reefs.”

“Do you think I betrayed you?” Holliwell asked her. “I didn’t mean it to be like that.”

“I’m sure you didn’t. I know you didn’t. Like you said, it doesn’t matter.” She touched him very lightly on the arm. “Who knows where we’re both going?”

“I’ll met,” he said.

“I have no regrets now. Not now.”

“Goodbye. Love.”

“Oh, Frank,” she said quickly, as though she were embarrassed. She turned away and he could hardly hear her. “Sure. Goodbye, Frank.”

When he started up the engine, he tried to watch her walk off, but the darkness swallowed her at once. Someone called to her, the headlights of the pickup trucks went on.

As he nosed the boat away from the dock, he thought of the reefs and swallowed hard. He could feel the young man, Pablo, watching him from the bow, seeing, somehow, through the darkness.

In the gathering heat of day, they brought May Feeney to the justicia. She rode beside a Guardia lieutenant with fair, freckled skin, light blue eyes and a tweedy brown moustache. The lieutenant said not a word to her but for the whole dreadful length of the ride he kept his hand under her skirt. Poking, idling there. She could only sit as far away from him as there was space in the seat and she kept her eyes down, from shame and so as not to see him.

In the square where everyone had come to see the waxen Christ, the vultures had come down from the treetops and were hopping delicately about the walks and lawns. There was a long line of them on the roof of the Municipalidad. They moved their necks from side to side like mechanical creatures to fix their bright bead eyes in turn on every aspect of the scene below. But the streets and the square were deserted now.

The blue-eyed lieutenant conducted her past the ocher columns and under the flattened arch surmounted with the seal of the Republic. His demeanor was formal; his hand on her arm was different, his touch neither gallant nor brutal but strangely correct. It was as though to touch her any place but where he had in the car was distasteful to him.

Inside the Guardia’s building a half dozen corporals in fatigues were listening to the radio. An actor was addressing the nation, encouraging its continuing struggle for liberty. The Communist aggressor was defeated, he assured it, and was fleeing before the Guardia’s victorious arms, wielded in the name of civilization and Christianity. The Guardia corporals watched May come in; all of them had moustaches, which in the mountains were an emblem of white blood. Some smiled, others seemed uninterested.

They went beyond the outer office into a long room with bricked-over windows and a bad smell. Campos was there. She had known when they took her that he would be waiting somewhere.

“You shudder,” he said.

It was true. Her knees trembled. She could feel the blood leave her face. Her heart turned.

“I had her up the ass, so you’re too late,” the blue-eyed officer said. He was merry. He did a business with his finger, flourishing it under his nose, thrusting it before Campos. He laughed and May thought it odd to hear a human laugh and to be so utterly outside the laughter, as excluded from the impulse that quickened it as the lizards on the wall.

Then Campos touched her under the elbow, rather as the other officer had done, and drew her to an unpainted door that opened to a shed and a courtyard. Before her were lines of coffined dead in the uniform of the Guardia and beyond them, in the courtyard, the bodies of peasants stacked in piles, swelling in the sun, stinking and beset with flies. One of the bodies was that of the bookkeeper who had commanded for a while. She turned away.

“The dead,” he told her. “On account of you.”

As hard as she could, she tried to make herself speak, to shout, to answer, to give him the lie. But at the sight of the corpses she was so undone and her fear of him so great that she could not utter a sound at first. When she tried too hard, a sob broke from her throat and echoed in the stone room. She hated to hear it. It dishonored her. Yet she needed to hear it — a token of herself, a sound — even if it was her own crying. It was all of her that was there. The rest was Enemy. The blue-eyed officer threw back his head and softly made the howl of a wolf, in mockery of her. Then he went out and she was alone with Campos.

The sound of the radio carried through, very faintly, from the outer office. It seemed to catch Campos’ attention for a moment; he walked to the door that led to that office and opened it, standing with his head cocked to hear an exalted female voice complete an announcement. Then he closed the door and walked back to where she stood. She saw now what he plainly was and why she had always been so afraid of him. She saw that she would be spared nothing and that she must try to be ready.

When he began, she thought: I must do this, I must finish this, not him. She cast the compassing of her mind as high and wide as she could reach toward strength and mercy. She cried because, at first, there was nothing at all. Only the blows falling.

Though he beat her beyond fear, she kept trying. Until she was awash in all the shameful juices of living and she still kept on. Though she forgot in time who he was and what the pain was about she was able to think of the tears, the blood, and mucus and loose teeth in her mouth: these are not bad things, these are just me and I’m all right.

His electricity was shaking her loose of her bones. She never worried about screaming. The shocks blinded her, they were going to kill her.

“My dad would fix you, you sucker,” she said.

He had hurt her head somehow and closed off light. She knew it would not get better and that she would never come back. She reached out as she had to the unresponding sea in the empty afternoons of the past months and still there was nothing and she cried. She could only live between shocks and the time was so precious. She was no hero.

Sometimes the best I’m capable of, she told him, is a little quiet probity. Tried to tell him.

Once she saw her fingers moving and she knew the electricity must be moving them. Her ring was gone. Then something began to come and she did not recognize it. She asked herself what it was when she had the time, in between. Whether it was inside or out there. Whatever it was, there was hardly anything else. It was greater than electricity and electricity was strong. It was stronger than the strong, stronger than love. It seemed as though it might be love. She was too weak to bear it. Too tired for it.

You after all? Inside, outside, round and about. Disappearing stranger, trickster. Christ, she thought, so far. Far from where?

But why always so far?

“Por qué?” she asked. There was a guy yelling.

Always so far away. You. Always so hard on the kid here, making me be me right down the line. You old destiny. You of Jacob, you of Isaac, of Esau.

Let it be you after all. Whose after all I am. For whom I was nailed.

So she said to Campos: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord.”

At dawn Tecan was only a wall of richly green mountains. Holliwell had never seen her in that aspect. The sight aroused in him something that was, against reason, like desire.

Lighted ships had been passing in sight of them all during the night, but never close enough to threaten or tempt them to shout in hope of rescue. Holliwell had found a flashlight in a gear locker beside the fuel tank and tried to signal; there had been no result. He supposed that the beam was too weak or that it appeared to be a coastal light. Now, under the radiant dawn, there was plenty of shipping about. Three small freighters were steaming northward, outlined against rosy clouds; none of them was more than a few miles away. In daylight, it seemed unlikely to Holliwell that one would stop, even if a lookout saw the whaler.

His companion, Pablo, seemed untroubled by their situation. Some private emotion was aboil in him. He lay spread out in the bow while Holliwell steered, his eyes fixed on the sky. Holliwell watched the young man for a while, then looked away.

The sea’s surface had turned a gentle aqua green; within minutes it would be the mirror of a burning sky. Holliwell felt for his sunglasses and found them in his shirt pocket. Miraculously, absurdly, he had preserved them unbroken.

“There’s so much stuff,” Pablo said. There was a small vial in his hand; he was preparing to take another of his pills. The pills had made him talkative during the night and Holliwell had pretended sleep. But he had listened well enough to be disturbed by Pablo’s talk and eventually to be frightened. Pablo, whoever he was, appeared to be crazy, constantly stoned and fired with indiscriminate violence.

“More stuff in the world than anybody could imagine, brother.”

“Indeed,” Holliwell said.

Pablo unfurled a daft threatening smile.

The morning sun came down on them like a blow. The wind and the ocean were gentle; a mild offshore zephyr kept them rolling slowly north by east without benefit of the engine. Holliwell turned from Pablo’s jeering face to scan the horizon for signs of shifting weather. By any auguries he knew, the sky portended nothing sinister.

“What do you think, Pablo?” Holliwell asked. “Good weather hold?”

He kept trying to start useful conversations with the youth, trying to discover an aspect in which Pablo did not seem demented and dangerous. He had not been having much luck.

“Yeah,” Pablo said carelessly. “Weather’s fine.”

He leaned back against the boards and let his eyes roll heavenward.

“I mean there’s more stuff, man … nobody knows.”

Holliwell shivered in spite of the heat. He took a Dramamine from his own pill bottle.

“Well,” he told Pablo after a while, “I’m going to start the engine up. Maybe we can get ourselves out in the shipping lane. If they see us that close up, maybe they’ll stop.”

Pablo nodded, smiling ambiguously. How mad can he be? Holliwell wondered. Doesn’t he care?

The engine declined to turn over. For nearly a quarter of an hour Holliwell labored over it without effect, then, covered with sweat, he sank back against the side of the boat. Pablo crawled aft, removed the engine cover and wiped the inside with the edge of a tarp. He checked the hose connections, squeezed the pump and returned to his space in the bow.

“Try it now, Doc.”

Holliwell pulled the cord; the Evinrude roared to life.

“Points were wet,” Pablo said. “That’s all.”

“Thanks,” Holliwell said. He felt as though his bad luck with the engine would make him seem more vulnerable and quicken Pablo’s madness. They exchanged looks. Pablo had never stopped smiling. Holliwell was learning to hate him.

“You know about those Indian carvings, right?”

“No one understands them completely. Only a few things about them.”

“Tell me,” Pablo said.

“Well,” Holliwell said with a thin smile, “a lot of them are about a rain god we call God Seven.”

“God Seven? That’s all?”

“We don’t know how to say his name.”

“Not even you?”

“No.”

Pablo looked thoughtful.

“That old man back there,” he said, “I bet you he knows.”

“There’s a king on some of the stones — well, maybe he’s a god too — but we think he’s a king. Somebody had it in for him because everywhere he’s represented they’ve chipped away his face. Nobody knows who he really was. We call him Stormy Sky.”

“Stormy Sky,” Pablo said, and then repeated the words under his breath. “Hey, tell me about those human sacrifices. What were they about?”

“Whatever they’re always about. The Indians didn’t invent human sacrifice.”

“I understand why they did it,” Pablo told Holliwell. “I can feel inside me why. I think it’s in my blood.”

Holliwell watched the young man and said nothing.

“You know about the magic they got there?” Pablo asked.

Holliwell reached for the jug and took a swallow of water.

“What magic?”

“I don’t mean the old-time stuff,” Pablo said. “I mean the bad shit that goes on now. The sacrifices.”

“I’m not sure I follow you,” Holliwell said.

Pablo shrugged. “You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to, mister. But you might as well know the old man talked to me. I know what goes on in that place. The Demiurge and that.”

“I’m afraid you’ve lost me,” Holliwell said. He had come to realize that Pablo affected to regard him as party to some freemasonry of his own imagining. He could not decide whether the wiser course was to let him continue in that impression or to try and set him straight.

“I guess you’ll talk to me when you’re ready,” Pablo said. “When the times comes. We could be a long time in this boat.”

Holliwell interpreted Pablo’s statement as threat. He figured the young man’s weight at about a hundred and fifty pounds — but a hard case, sinewy and mean with enough concentrated malice and nervous energy to make him more than difficult. Moreover he was young and crazy and Holliwell growing weak with the sun and the lack of sleep. Holliwell avoided looking at him, trying to be ready and to hope for the best. They might yet be picked up.

Surely, he thought, they must have known at the mission that this boy was mad and dangerous? It might be that he was not as deranged as he seemed. He could not be sure; they were do-gooders there, bien pensants. There was a terrible justice in it that he was not in the mood to savor.

A small freighter had come up on the southern horizon, taking what seemed to be an inshore course. Holliwell licked his lips and fixed his concentration on the ship, holding the throttle on full.

“They say what you don’t know can’t hurt you,” Pablo said, “but that’s not so. You get turned around when you don’t know anything.”

“Right,” Holliwell said.

“Man, I’ll tell you, I found out so much since I come down this way I can’t believe it. The world ain’t anything like I thought it was.”

Holliwell was intrigued. “Is it better or worse?”

Pablo’s face broke into an adolescent smile.

“Uh … let’s see.” He thought about it for a moment. “Better and worse, I guess. There’s more to it. For me, better.”

“Good,” Holliwell said.

“I see what you’re doing,” Pablo said slyly. “You’re playing me along. I’m supposed to learn from you.”

Holliwell looked at him then, studied the spare contours of his brown face, his overheated eyes. It was like looking into some visceral nastiness, something foul. And somehow familiar.

“You know a hell of a lot more than you’re letting on, mister. I can tell that by now.”

As the sun’s force flattened out over the subject ocean, Pablo took off his shirt and pants, dipped the shirt in sea water and wrapped it around his head like a turban. He stretched himself out across the forward part of the boat and it seemed as though he were enjoying himself, enjoying the sun. Holliwell saw that the diver’s knife was strapped to his leg.

The freighter Holliwell had singled out was still coming on. He fixed his eyes on its black hull now, trying to capture the ship with his will. He could see the faint diesel smoke above her funnel. His hand ached as he gripped the engine’s throttle; he was trying to wrestle the boat beyond flank speed.

Pablo was watching him.

“We’re gonna be O.K.,” he told Holliwell.

“That’s what I like to hear,” Holliwell said.

“I’m tellin’ you, man, you got nothing to worry about. We’re going home. At least I am.”

For more than an hour, Holliwell fixed his concentration on the freighter, trying to get some measure of its bearing and speed. Only when his eyes flooded with sweat did he turn away, steadying the throttle with the crook of his arm, to clean his sunglasses and wet his face with a little fresh water. Fresh water afforded only the briefest relief. He could feel his face swelling, heat and salt were marinating his exposed flesh. Lifting the jug, he drank sparingly, thinking of the wasted water. He felt sick and afraid.

Pablo had gone into something like a sleep. His yellow eyes were blank, half covered by twitching lids and shaded by the fold of the shirt tied over his brow. Though Holliwell tried his best to put Pablo’s presence from his mind, it was hard for him not to look at the knife that was secured to the young man’s calf. The knife had a plastic hilt and handle and a wide heavy blade. To Holliwell’s mind, there was something of Pablo himself about it.

In the depths of his sun-stricken panic, a monster image began to form compounded of Pablo and his blood-guttered, Day-Glo knife. For hours he had been hearing the slurred slow speech, trying to read the murky hooded eyes, watching the muscles tense and relax in his companion’s lean brown face. It was as though he had been cornered after a lifelong chase by his personal devil. All his life, he thought, from childhood, the likes of Pablo had been in pursuit of him. But he had not come so far to be trapped like this, at noon, in a lonely place. He resolved that although the ocean might get him, the sun, thirst or starvation, Pablo would not. He would see them both dead first. The resolution gave him a bitter satisfaction that was, after hope, his only comfort; he knew he would hold to it.

The distant ship was still miles away and hardly any bigger on the horizon. He felt like shouting.

“You ain’t gonna make it,” Pablo said to him.

The words froze his blood but he kept his eye on the ship.

“What do you mean by that, Pablo?”

“He changed course is what I mean,” Pablo said. He was looking past Holliwell at the freighter. “You won’t cut across him now.”

Holliwell could almost make out the company signature painted in yellow letters across the sky-blue superstructure. She was such a pretty thing, he thought.

“Maybe he can see us,” Holliwell said.

“If he can, he’s not stopping.”

“He must see us.”

“Well, it’s funny down here,” Pablo said. “Anywhere at sea these days. Just because a man sees you don’t mean he’s gonna come your way. And if he does, that ain’t always good.”

Holliwell kept watching the ship; her angle had shifted so that the letters under the fantail that spelled out her name and port of origin were partly visible. In desperation, he looked to other quarters. There were two other ships in view but they were very far away. He looked at his watch; the hands showed half past noon. The watch seemed a foolish thing, a little tin register of the immensities that surrounded them. And there was only so much daylight. So much fuel, so much water.

Pablo was peeling an orange. Holliwell watched him, mastering his own anger and revulsion.

“We’re in a spot, Pablo, don’t you think?”

Pablo passed him half of the peeled orange and nodded toward the east.

“Look there.”

“What is it?” Holliwell was aware of the faint quaver in his voice. “Is the weather changing?”

Pablo smiled comfortably.

“Islands,” he said. “If we don’t see one today, we will tomorrow. Real pretty islands, too.”

Holliwell made one last attempt to persuade himself of Pablo’s rationality; it failed. He could see nothing but delusion and menace in the animal eyes.

“Well,” he said after a minute, “I’ll take us out for another hour. Then we better wait and see.” He had the sense that Pablo found his firm reasonableness amusing. “If we don’t get any help by four o’clock, I’ll head north and see if we can get a start toward the coast of Compostela.”

“That’s against the wind,” Pablo said. “We’ll never get up there. We’re going to the islands.”

Holliwell put the orange section in his mouth, chewed the pulp and spat it out.

“I don’t understand why you’re so sure of that.”

“Because it’s meant to be,” Pablo told him. “That’s why.”

He made no reply but Pablo seemed disappointed in his response.

“You better take it easy, Doc. A man as smart as you, you oughtn’t to be so antsy.”

“I’m fine,” Holliwell said. “You take it easy.”

Pablo’s eyes went cold. A little ripple of anger flashed across their surface, a knife glint.

“Maybe you ain’t who I thought you were,” he said to Holliwell.

“I’m the other guy in your boat,” Holliwell said. “That’s got to be good enough.”

Pablo watched him unhappily for a while and then eased himself aft.

“Take a break,” he told Holliwell. “I’ll steer for a while.”

Holliwell could not bring himself to let go of the throttle.

“What the hell’s the matter?” Pablo said. “Afraid I’ll run us off the road?”

Holliwell gave over and let Pablo replace him in the stern. When they had crossed he spread his shirt over his face and lay back, resting his head on the tarp. He was exhausted but afraid to sleep.

“I thought you were one of those people,” Pablo was saying to him. “I figured you were all right.”

“What people?”

“One of those people from that place there. I thought you were part of it.

“Just passing through,” Holliwell said.

“You got to understand something, Holliwell. There’s a process and I’m in the middle of it. A lot of stuff I do is meant to be.”

Holliwell was not surprised by this declaration; he had been expecting something of the sort and he was ready. The loathing he felt braced his blood like an antitoxin. He would stay ready. In spite of the sun and the heat he would not lose consciousness. He lifted the shirt from his face and, turning on his side, looked across the bow. Another ship had passed them by, gone north.

“You know what I’m talking about,” Pablo said. “I know fucking well you do.” Then he cut the engine and lapsed into silence.

Gradually, Holliwell gave in to his weariness and let his mind spin out of focus. His dreams, if dreams they were, came as salted and sun-drenched as the waking world around him. He saw ships where there were none. One seemed to loom above them less than an arm’s span away; he saw it in the clearest detail, red lead on the rails, rust under the waterline when she rolled, paintwork and polished brass on the flying bridge.

When he came out of it, some of the heat and light had ebbed from the day. Heavy ridges of cloud were forming ahead and a steady wind had come up that drove the boat before it, misting them with spray at every fifth wave and hurrying them ever farther from the coast. There were no more ships in sight.

Pablo made a sea anchor of a bucket to hold the stern out of the wind and dry his clothes for the coming night. Without speaking, he took Holliwell’s shirt and spread it out beside his own.

“You faked me out, mister,” he said. “If you ain’t part of it you better not fuck it up. You fuck it up — that’s turning me around and I don’t permit that.”

“You have to trust me,” Holliwell said. “We need each other out here.”

“I don’t need anybody,” Pablo told him. “Not no more. Boy, I could tell you the shit trusting people has got me into. I don’t even like to think about it.”

“I’m on your side,” Holliwell said. “Where else could I be?”

As the sun declined, color returned to the sky. A thin green haze seemed to float over the surface of the ocean.

“I don’t feel good,” Pablo said suddenly. “My leg … I got fever, I think.”

Holliwell took heart; he was all concern. He wet his handkerchief in the fresh water and gave it to Pablo for a salve. They traded places and Holliwell took back the tiller. The wind was noticeably cooler now. Pablo put his shirt on and lay back in the bow, resting on the tarp and his folded trousers.

“You’ve got penicillin there,” Holliwell told his shipmate. “You ought to take it.”

Pablo found the pills and Holliwell observed that his fingers trembled as he lifted the plastic top from the tube. He followed the penicillin with one of his other pills, the ones that made him talkative.

“I’m hurting for sure,” Pablo said.

Glancing at the boat compass, Holliwell saw that their drift was dead east. Pablo was probably right then, Compostela would not be for them. Whatever was in store would reveal itself in unbounded ocean.

Pablo struggled up and propped himself on an elbow.

“You wouldn’t try and turn me around, would you, Doc?”

“Of course not,” Holliwell said.

“ ’Cause that’d be the last goddamn thing you ever tried, Jim. You better believe it.”

“Just take it easy, Pablo.” Holliwell’s chest was spongy with fear. The wind chilled him and he began to shiver. Pablo sank back down to his rest and seemed to sleep. Holliwell eyed the knife strapped to his leg; it was held in the sheath by a rubber noose that circled the handle. Getting it loose would be a delicate and extremely dangerous operation. And the little bastard never properly slept, Holliwell thought. His eyes stayed open.

He was no better than an animal. He was an animal.

The lower hemisphere of the sun was almost touching the line when Tabor roused himself again.

“You said you betrayed her.”

For a moment, Holliwell had no idea what he was speaking of.

“You said to her: ‘I betrayed you.’ What’d you mean?”

“Nothing serious,” Holliwell told him. “It was a bet we had.”

Pablo’s eyes were vacant and confused.

“You know,” he said, “I’m part of the process and you ain’t.”

“That’s my loss I’m sure,” Holliwell said.

“I thought I was just anybody.” Pablo spoke in a febrile whisper. “I thought I was this loser.”

“But instead you’re part of the process.”

“Everything,” Pablo insisted, “everything that happened, man, happened for a purpose. To teach me. So I could learn. Everything that happened. Everybody I met.”

“Except me,” Holliwell said.

“I ain’t saying that, Holliwell. I ain’t sure of that. Maybe you too. You know, he told me — that old man told me — the eye you look at it with, well, that’s the eye it sees you with. That’s what he told me.”

Holliwell was moved to recall an experiment he had once read about; he had clipped the report of it for his class. An experimenter endeavoring to observe chimpanzee behavior had fashioned a spy hole in the door of the animals’ chamber through which he might watch them unobserved. Putting his eye to it, he had seen nothing more than what he finally identified as the eye of a chimpanzee on the other side of the door. Ape stuff. Another spasm of trembling overcame him; his teeth chattered.

“I think I might be part of the process too,” he said, when he had recovered. “I learned a few things down here.”

Wrapping his shirt around his blistered body, he turned back toward the coast of Tecan, little more than a green line now on the misty horizon. He had learned what empty places were in him. He had undertaken a little assay at the good fight and found that neither good nor fight was left to him. Instead of quitting while he was ahead, he had gone after life again and they had shown him life and made him eat it.

He turned away from Tecan and faced his fellow traveler.

The prospect was death now, after all, sudden or slow, neither earned nor undeserved. And he would have to face it listening to the voice of this pill-brained jackdaw, this jabbering shitbird with his pig sticker and his foul little eyes.

“Me, I was so turned around,” Pablo was saying. “I was so fucked up. I mean I’m sick now but I’m a lot better off than I was.” He looked over his shoulder and then back to Holliwell. “I’ll be glad to get home,” he said. “Things gonna be a lot different for me.”

Holliwell, shivering in a burst of spray, only nodded.

“I don’t know what you’re gonna do, Holliwell, but I’m goin’ home, goddamn right. I’m goin’ home and it’s gonna be all different. Because I scored, you know what I mean?” He grinned; his teeth were white and regular, the only healthy part of his face, Holliwell thought. “I got regular material things to take back with me. Plenty, Holliwell — never mind asking. And I got spiritual things.” Holliwell watched him repeat the words “spiritual things” under his breath. “And I got a little lady up there, yes sir. And I got a boy and he’s a good boy, too.”

Then a look of alarm came over his face and he touched the breast pocket of his shirt. Whatever he was feeling for was in its place.

“You just keep looking for that island, Holliwell. You’re gonna see it!”

Holliwell again studied the mean contours of his companion’s face and found himself beset by scruple. From sentiment, conscience, a debilitated failure of will, he suddenly recoiled from the thing he had intended. The hope flared up in him that they might survive together. He was thinking now that the boy on the boat with him was no more than a crazy kid, than whom he was older, harder, tougher, that for all Pablo’s bloody prattle he did not really seem bent on murder, that he might even be seen as well-intentioned in his foolish paranoid way. Then too, she had trusted Pablo and taken him in, had given him into Holliwell’s care. Perhaps, Holliwell thought, he owed her. He had an impulse to turn again toward the distant green coast but he did not. Everything there was lost now.

The act itself, the doing of it, repelled him. There might be a ship. Or even, absurdity of absurdities, an island. He decided he would keep his head and a close watch on Pablo and endure the oncoming night.

The colors of dusk shaded the sky. The sun was tame again, fixed to the textured horizon. Steady, Holliwell thought. Live in hope.

“You hear them?” Pablo Tabor asked him.

“Hear what?”

Holliwell listened hard. There were the waves, flumes of spray striking the fiber-glass. Nothing else.

“Sure you do,” Pablo insisted. “The hell you don’t.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“It’s for me,” Pablo said. “They belong to me now.” He forced himself up again. “That’s just the same as me you’re hearing.”

“What are you hearing, Pablo?” He himself listened again, half hoping that there would be something to hear. “Are they … voices?”

“You’re a card,” Pablo said. “You’re a shrewd son of a bitch.” He grinned. Holliwell’s heart sank.

“They’re nothing but beautiful,” Pablo said. “Beautiful is what they are.”

Holliwell, nodding, despaired and agreed.

“We’re buddies now,” Pablo declared. “We’re brothers.”

“Absolutely,” Holliwell said. He was trying to convince himself that the wound and infection had rendered Pablo too weak to be threatening. But as he looked at Pablo sitting upright across from him, charged with deluded passion, he knew that he himself was the weaker, with his chill, his burn, his sentimentality.

“I was gonna kill you, Holliwell. No shit.”

“Now, now,” Holliwell said. “Aren’t you sorry?”

“I ain’t ever sorry,” Pablo told him. “You know why?”

“No,” Holliwell said.

Pablo laughed. “Because I got nothing to be sorry about.”

“Aha,” Holliwell said.

Pablo’s lean brown face was all youth and strength and chemical good nature. In time, Holliwell knew, the chemistry would turn, the creature in there would turn on him and require, as such creatures always required, an external victim. Then it would be his role to speak softly, to mouth little smiles in solicitation of pity which would not be forthcoming. With all the goodwill in the world, Holliwell thought, he was not up to it.

“I killed people,” Pablo declared. “I don’t give a shit. They were turning me around. They asked for it.”

“I’m not turning you around.”

“No,” Pablo said. “And I been looking for it. Don’t think I ain’t been.”

Evening brought forth the wind without remission. The power of Pablo’s madness and the chill on his braised body laid Holliwell low. He steadied himself on the side of the boat; he could not stop shaking.

I know you now, he thought, watching Pablo. Should have known you. Know you of old.

He felt the force he had encountered over the reef.

The stuff was aqueous, waterborne like cholera or schistosomiasis. He had been around; he had seen it many times before. Among swarms of quivering fish, in rice paddies, shining in gutters. It was as strong as anything in the world. Stronger perhaps, when the illusions were stripped away. It glistened in a billion pairs of eyes. Comforting to think of it as some aberration, a perversion of nature. But it was the real thing, he thought. The thing itself.

“What’s the matter with you?” Pablo asked.

“I guess it’s the sunburn,” Holliwell said. “The chill.”

Pablo drew up the tarp on which he had been resting and handed it to Holliwell. He started undoing the top button of his work shirt.

“Hey, you want to wear my shirt on top of yours? I don’t need it. I’m fine.”

“Thanks. Keep your shirt.”

The failing sun glowed like an ingot plunged in clear liquid, casting its refracted light on them. Pablo sat facing it.

“Your regular run of people,” Pablo said, “I don’t care about them. They’re no goddamn good.”

Tabor closed his eyes for a moment and opened them.

“Nothing can stop me now, Holliwell. I got it all together. Like there are ten million people think they got it all together but I’m the one who has. That’s how it was meant.”

“Good,” Holliwell said. “Good.”

“We’re gonna stick together, us two. You’re gonna tell me what you’re supposed to — I’ll make you. And then,” he said, “I’ll do the same for you.”

He leaned forward and took Holliwell by the arm.

“When you got the mojo, brother — when you’re on the inside — the world is fantastic.” He surveyed the empty sea, the sky, the violet clouds, with a look of triumph. “It’s mellow, it’s all a high. It’s wonderful.”

“Good,” Holliwell said.

He was not seeing Pablo any longer; it could have been anyone there. His heart beat faster. An old anger was quickening it. If we could get them all together in one place, he thought, all these inspired, these bright-eyed ones, they might no longer make us tired of living.

When Pablo sank back to his rest, Holliwell watched the knife in its sheath as he had watched the ship that passed them in the afternoon. Then, his eyes on Pablo’s flickering lids, he reached down, and as gently as he could, lifted the rubber noose that held the hilt and drew the knife out of its bright plastic sheath. The blade shone, in the last of the sunlight. When he had it, he put it behind him, on his belt. Within minutes, Pablo roused himself. Holliwell waited for him to notice the missing weapon but he never did.

“You know anything about people’s past lives?” Pablo asked him.

“Not me,” Holliwell said.

Something about Holliweill’s look disturbed Pablo. His eyes narrowed.

“You O.K., brother?”

“I have a dream,” Holliwell said. He shuddered, not with the chill but with fear and revulsion. He laughed. “I mean I keep having this dream. It recurs.”

“What dream?” Pablo pulled himself upright along the thwart.

“In my dream,” Holliwell explained, “I’m different from everyone else. Maybe I’m on the subway, understand, and everyone in the car is black except me. Something really lousy is about to happen to me — only nobody cares. Everybody’s laughing because they’re not like me.” He was trembling and dry-mouthed, his heart beat so hard that he felt he could barely contain it. “Or else I’m on a ship. The crew are Chinese or Malays, Indians, anything, something that I’m not. That thing’s about to happen. No one cares. It’s funny to them. I’m different from what they are.”

Pablo nodded, wide-eyed.

“Oh, you got it,” he said. “You got your finger on it.”

“Do I?”

“Because that’s me,” Pablo said excitedly. “That’s what I been running into all my life.”

“That’s what things are like,” Holliwell said.

“I’m Spanish, see? Or my mother was. She was … I don’t know, Indian, Spanish blood. So I never been what anybody else was. And down inside me, I never been. That’s why all these people turn me around.”

“A terrible thing,” Holliwell said.

“It’s the worst thing in the world when people turn you around because you’re something else than them. It hurts you. It fucks you up so bad. You just go round and round.”

“There’s a story about how people are,” Holliwell told Pablo. “You hear it a lot of places. You used to hear it in Vietnam. They probably tell it in Tecan as well.”

“I’m free and clear,” Pablo said, looking at the ridge of violet cloud ahead of them. “Free, man.”

“It’s about a buffalo and a scorpion. I’m sure you’ve heard it.”

Pablo turned his attention back to Holliwell and he shook his head absently.

“What is it?”

Holliwell put his hand behind his back to touch the knife. His arms tensed. He took a deep breath.

“A scorpion comes up to a buffalo on a riverbank. Please, sir, says the scorpion — could you give us a ride across? No way, says the buffalo. You’ll sting me and I’ll drown. But the scorpion swears he won’t. Why would I, he asks the buffalo, when if I did, I’d drown along with you? So off they go. Halfway across the scorpion stings the buffalo. And the poor buffalo says, you bastard, you killed us both. Before they go under, the scorpion says — it’s my nature.”

Pablo looked blank and nodded.

“You get it, don’t you, Pablo? That’s how it is, right?”

“It don’t have to be like that,” Pablo said.

Holliwell licked his rope-dry lips.

“I’ll tell you what, Pablo, I think you’re right after all. I think each of us has something to offer the other.”

“Damn right,” Pablo said.

“But what you offer, Pablo — I’m not having any, understand? Because in my lifetime, boy, I’ve had fucking enough of it. So let me offer you something while you’re still in the mood to learn.”

Pablo was perplexed. “Say what?”

“Call it,” Holliwell said, “the abridgment of hope.” He braced his legs against the stern.

After a moment, Holliwell saw Pablo’s lips move. He was repeating the phrase silently. The abridgment of hope.

Holliwell sprang forward from the brace; his left hand clutched at Pablo’s throat, his right, bent at the elbow, held the knife. In the next second, he made the thrust and felt the horizontal blade strike resisting bone. He shoved harder and the tip worked free of the rib and went in. He pushed until the hilt was against Pablo’s shirt. He was shouting; exhausted, he leaned his full weight on Pablo, forcing him back against the side. Pablo’s hand was gripping his left arm, twisting it numb. When the hand relaxed, he drew back and then he met Pablo’s eyes. In their look was surprise and also disappointment, yet beyond all that something expectant, as though there might be a good part yet to come. Holliwell pulled the knife out and Pablo grunted. There was no good part to come and Holliwell felt sorry.

“Sorry,” he said. Then he punched Pablo across the face to turn away the wrenching accusatory stare, and in a long straining wrestler’s roll, he heaved Pablo out of the boat and into the darkening water. One of Pablo’s hands was reaching for the side; he had an impulse to strike it away but he could not bring himself to do so. He was spent, in shock. Scarcely able to breathe, he watched Pablo’s head and struggling shoulders drift away from the stern. If there was blood he could not see it against the color of the sea.

The last of the sun shone on Pablo Tabor. He brought his arms up once — but only once — in a single feathery stroke, trying to tread water. Then he threw his head back, keeping his open mouth above the surface.

Against his will, Holliwell looked at Pablo’s face. He was at a loss now to find the shimmering evil he had seen in it before. The stricken features were like a child’s, distorted with pain and fear yet still marked with that inexplicable flicker of expectation. It was a brother’s face, a son’s, one’s own. Anybody’s face, just another victim of ignorance and fear. Just another one of us, Holliwell thought.

I get the joke now, he said to himself. We’re all the joke. We’re the joke on one another. It’s our nature. In the same moment, he thought of May. What a misfortune, he thought, that we have only each other.

The boat drifted further and Pablo was gone. Small swells, borne on the offshore breeze, closed the tiny rent in the seam of ocean where he had been suspended.

When the sun was down, a thin stream of low clouds moved north across its azimuth and were lit to red and gold beyond imagining. Holliwell had started the engine out of an impulse to escape; he held the throttle at full, riding the breeze eastward. When he saw the illuminated clouds he began to recite.

“See, see,” he said aloud, “where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament!

“One drop of blood will save me.”

In Vietnam he had recited the lines in company to amuse and they became a little sunset superstition, a formula in times of stress, never remotely a prayer. He said them now, over and over until the words were purged of meaning. There was blood on his shirt. He took it off and, shivering, scrubbed the wet stains in sea water. Then he saw that there was blood in the boat as well; he cleaned it up with more salt water, using Pablo’s trousers and the bilge pump and the bailing can. After dark, he was still looking for blood; he cut the engine, took a flashlight from the gearbox and inspected the deck for traces of it. Under the bow, he found a small sparkling stone. It appeared to be a rhinestone when he examined it in the beam of his light. He threw it overboard, together with Pablo’s bloodstained pants.

Half an hour later, the lights of a passing ship came in sight and Holliwell signaled S O S with his light until it was apparent that there would be no result. He was feeling very cold and sick now; even the warm drinking water in the jug made him shiver. He lay across the tarpaulin and tried to sleep.

During the night, things overtook him. There was music that had somehow to do with the passage of the stars overhead and there were jokes. In one of the jokes a shark passed near the boat, on his way to a feeding frenzy.

“What is there?” the shark asked a companion.

“Just us,” the other shark said.

Holliwell laughed in his thin sleep.

“She’s dead,” Lieutenant Campos told Father Egan, “your nun.” In the surrounding woods ramon nuts were falling from the higher boughs, an unceasing rain that rustled the leaves softly.

“I knew it,” Egan said.

Campos had come weaving into the clearing where the stelae stood, thrown himself upon his knees and demanded Penance. He was pointing his service revolver at the priest; it was a sacramental hijacking. He had not made it to Miami like the President, so he was forcing Jacob’s ladder.

“The Lord who loves tricks,” he said bitterly, “has played a trick on me.”

Campos was wearing a jaunty lemon-colored yachting cap with crossed anchors, badly soiled above the visor. It was the kind of cap that street-corner sports in Alvarado favored. His white shirt and trousers were caked with red mud. All that remained of the former official Campos were the one-way sunglasses. When he removed them to wipe his face, Egan saw that the pupils of his eyes were dilated. He would have taken Justin’s bag for the drugs, the priest thought.

The lieutenant’s pit-centered lustrous eyes rolled under his brows.

“Such a thing as you — how can you understand? A coward is degenerate. I am a man that knows who he is and you want to make me ridiculous. A man of stern formality with a responsibility for order. You’re not worthy to kiss my prick but I’m on my knees to you.”

Egan was bemused.

“You did kill her, didn’t you?”

“I killed her. She was a dilettante.” He sniffed ferociously and spat on the ground. “How many deaths were caused by her? Hundreds? Thousands? She herself didn’t know how evil she was.”

“Oh, Campos,” Egan said.

“Confess me!” Campos shouted, waving the pistol loosely. “It’s my right.”

Egan drew a benediction on the air. You who love tricks, he prayed silently, who made Leviathan — why will you confront us in these monstrous aspects? Who made the lamb?

It was His way of not listening, the priest thought. On the field of folk He is never at home, never available. Reach out a hand and there’s only the terrifying touch of flesh, nothing firmer or finer. Ask questions and the answers are veiled in illusion, words from a fever dream.

“She was tortured, I presume?”

“In the Guardia we’re serious. It wasn’t a birthday party.”

Egan bent forward over the flat stone on which he sat and leaned his forehead on his fist.

“Why confess, Campos? I’m not your judge.”

“For my peace,” Campos said thickly. “You see what’s happened, priest? I was what I was and now I’m poorer than the poorest Negro. My life is in danger. My soul also. The church exists for people like me.”

“Oh, the church,” Egan said, and smiled. “Of course.”

“Before she died, she said, ‘Behold the handmaid of the Lord.’ ”

Egan raised his head. “Justin did? Good heavens. How about that, eh?”

Campos curled his moustache and looked at the ground.

“She said that, did she? You beat her lifeless and you did your business with the cow prods and she said that? Good girl.” Egan wiped his eyes. “She was special, young Justin. Well,” he said to Campos, “I guess that showed you, eh?”

“It showed me up,” Campos admitted. “It put me in the wrong. Then I knew that God had played a trick on me.”

“Maybe you’re just being superstitious.”

“I?” said Campos, outraged. “It was a sign from God!” he shouted. “Don’t dare deny it! A sign from God to me.”

“Of what?”

“You don’t even know how to be a priest, you maricón! A sign that I would have to ask forgiveness.”

“Oh, I see.” Egan found himself looking at the purple flowers growing from the vine on one of the pyramids. “I suppose Justin would forgive you if she could. She’s all right now. But you have a debt to discharge to her.”

“I’ll swear,” Campos said.

“If you want Justin to forgive you, you’ll have to stop murdering young women. They may be well out of it, see, but it’s very hurtful to their families. That kid you had in the freezer couldn’t have been more than twenty and that’s awfully young to be terrified and murdered.”

“It happens everywhere,” Campos said.

“All the same, Lieutenant.”

Campos crossed himself and squinted ardently at the flawless sky.

“But I must have comfort,” he said when he had sworn.

“If you want comfort along with Justin’s forgiveness you’ll have to embrace a vision. Could you?”

“With ease,” Campos said. “That’s the sort of man I am.”

“You must concentrate as hard as you can and imagine a world in which you don’t exist. A world in which there is no trace of you whatsoever.”

Campos crossed himself again and closed his eyes.

“Just a moment,” he said. “I don’t understand this.”

Egan, looking at the flowers, was impatient. “Oh,” he said. He thought he had been clear.

“I must know that God forgives me,” Campos insisted. “I’ve come. I’ve humiliated myself before a maricón of a priest. Now it’s up to Him.”

“Campos, God doesn’t care what you do.”

“Not care?”

“Of course not. Why should he?”

“Don’t tell me God doesn’t care what I do,” Campos said indignantly. “He must. He must or … there can be no mercy.”

Egan turned to the lieutenant and smiled.

“There is no mercy. Not the kind you’re talking about. Not in this place. We can’t bestow it and we can’t receive it. It’s just not available at this level.”

“But I believe in it,” Campos said. “I believe in mercy.”

“One as experienced as you should know better.”

“What is there, then?”

“Oh,” Egan said with a shrug, “you know, don’t you, Campos? Half moments. Glintings. A little rising of the heart, eh? It’s dappled.”

Dappled, he thought, looking at the web of vine and flowers. Good.

“But mercy in that sense? Oh, no, I don’t think so. One does what one can.”

Campos stared at him and struggled to his feet.

“I’m on my knees before a devil,” he said. A shudder seized him. Breathing hard, he backed away from the rock on which Egan sat and leveled his service pistol. A convulsive giggle rattled in his throat and he pulled the trigger. The weapon clicked in a businesslike manner. He pulled the trigger again with the same result.

“Holy Mother,” he said, “my cartridges are gone.” He lowered the gun and felt the pockets of his shirt. “I’m disarmed,” he told Egan in a tone of apology. “I have no more cartridges.”

“Well,” Egan said, “I haven’t any.”

Campos put the pistol in his belt and looked about in despair.

“Look,” he exclaimed in a stricken whisper, “there’s someone there!”

Egan turned to see. A few hundred yards away, at the base of an unexcavated pyramid, two men were digging with pickaxes and shovels. The men had arrived immediately after the battles, while the shooting was still going on, and commenced to circle the overgrown structure with a trench. They worked with great single-mindedness; from time to time one of them would climb the wall of red earth their digging had thrown up to put a pot or a piece of copal jewelry in the flour sack they kept nearby. They had been hostile to Egan at first, they had threatened him. Now they ignored him. They had not seen Campos yet. Both of them wore holstered pistols.

“They’re huaqueros,” Egan told the lieutenant. “Robbers.”

“Ah,” Lieutenant Campos said. He began to back silently away in the direction from which he had come. His eyes, fixed on the laboring huaqueros, were wet with rage and desire.

Egan watched him go. By the time the huaqueros spotted him he was passing into the cover of the trees. The two men stood motionless for a moment, hands on their weapons. Then one gathered up the half-filled flour sack, and they dodged out of the clearing.

When they were gone, the priest’s attention returned to the net of flowers enclosing the ancient stones. In the days since the battle, the flowers had seemed to spring from their pods almost as he watched. Their odor was heavy and sweet; it hung like a Mystery over the clearing and the surrounding forest.

He had seen the tracer bullets in the distance on the night the company’s plant was stormed by the Guardia. Justin had been there and they had captured her. Then, during the next day, there had been more shooting, and when it stopped the motif of a Schubert trio had settled on his inner hearing and stayed. He could not think where he had heard it first; long before, in another place. It was just a little jig of a thing, a ditty, but its particles of sound were so wondrously conjoined that the sensing of it was delicious, an ineffable pleasure. Egan wondered what made him feel so happy at times.

“Never a dull moment,” he said to himself.

It was true. His moments were never dull since he had come to occupy them one by one. Something was always happening and he passed many of the daylight hours without a drink. But happy as so many moments might be, he was not yet proof against sadness. It was not the same consuming soreness of heart that had poisoned his life before, but it came and he had to endure it. He was able to examine it now.

Oppressed, he would consider the quickening decomposition of his body and its attendant faculties. He could hardly recognize his own image in a glass. His hands shook constantly, his fingers were numb, his heart fluttered. All the keepers of the house were trembling. This relentless failing of life was comforting in its way. It reminded him that however desperate and alone one single creature might feel, creation looked after its own and brought everything round full circle.

He had been elected to awareness, and while awareness had its satisfactions, it was not easy to watch all the world’s deluded wandering across the battlefield of a long-ago lost war. One had to close the heart to pity — if one could. The truth was a fine thing, but it had to be its own reward.

Much later the edges of the world came alight and Holliwell was relieved at first, but soon he realized that there was much to dread. Fearfully he looked eastward, knowing the sun would rise there. He felt afraid of sunrise.

When the first burning sliver came out of the sea, he knew that he would see the eye of the world, and the knowledge made him tremble more violently than he had throughout the long imprisoned night. He turned his back on it.

In the core of the risen sun, it would be there for him to see — the eye of things. Blue, yes. Boiled clear. A guileless stare. He would be transfixed before the eye and every cell of his identity would rise up in recognition of itself. He, Holliwell, was things. There was nothing better. The absence of evil was the greatest horror.

Then out of the sky suddenly blue as the eye of things there came in dogged laboring flight, heavy-winged, a pelican with a spot of blood at its breast. His head snapped back to follow it, but he dared not turn full round and face the eye in the sun.

A little later, a yellow bird, a tiny thing, came and stood on the edge of his boat. It took a few hopping steps, inches from his face, and cast its eye, the size of a flower seed, on him. In the trifling lizard glance, the world’s eye was fleetingly reflected. Yet, he could confront it there, he thought. It was only a little yellow bird.

Keeping his flayed back to eastward, he turned in a crouch and saw with astonishment that there was an island close by. There were low sandy bluffs and above them low hills covered with bright green and yellow vines. There were cacti and sea palms. Coconut trees. Light surf rolled gently toward a leeward shore and he was drifting in. He looked over the side and saw coral heads only a few feet beneath his keel. It was the island Pablo had promised him.

He reached out and groped about him for the water jug, still afraid to see the sun. When he had drunk and put the jug by, there was another sight to amaze him.

A hundred feet away swung a boat, scarcely larger than his own whaler but with a forward superstructure and two fishing chairs mounted aft, fast to the deck. Between the chairs and a cooler in the stern three people stood watching him, mute and motionless.

A black man in a blue captain’s hat held the wheel. Beside him was a middle-aged white American, very tall and balding, in steel-rimmed glasses and wearing a long-sleeved white shirt. A tourist — a visitor to the island out fishing.

The third person in the boat was a child, a boy of eleven or twelve. The boy held a red Coca-Cola can in one hand and a long sport rod in the other. He was staring straight at Holliwell and his expression was beyond surprise, the expression of someone seeing such a sight as he had never seen or thought to see. His face reflected the sun; the look of its eye was in the boy’s eye.

A trick, Holliwell thought. In desperation he turned at last to face down the sun and it was only a glare, a blind star.

Holliwell began to laugh until the spasms froze his jaw and he clenched and ground his teeth.

“Ho,” he called across the water.

The helmsman kept the fishing boat well off, as though he were afraid that Holliwell would try to board them.

“It’s just us, kid,” Holliwell said. He looked into the boy’s fearful eyes and it was all there — all of it. We look at us. The thing looks at itself. It’s as innocent as daylight.

What is a good word, he wondered, to say to them?

“American,” he called out. That was a good enough word for his purpose.

“Hey, brother”—he directed his question at the boy’s father — know the one about the three monkeys?” He was only mumbling.

Know the one about the Demiurge and the Abridgment of Hope?

They all went on staring. The eye you see it with, he told them, is the one that sees you back.

Nor, he thought, am I going to tell them stories about murder. This is another day.

“I’m glad to see you well,” Holliwell called. “I require rescue here.”

The helmsman gunned his engine and hung back. They were floating a little fiber-glass minuet. Holliwell tried to stand but the sun beat him down.

“Why is he looking at me like that?” Holliwell asked.

As though I should be something else. Because it’s not as if I haven’t tried.

She has her sunrise, he thought, and I have mine.

Holliwell knew that he was home; he had nothing to fear from the sun. A man has nothing to fear, he thought to himself, who understands history.