A Flag for Sunrise

“Say,” Pablo said after several despairing moments, “you want to go somewhere and have some fun?”

Bobbick looked up from his paper and shuddered visibly.

“It’s been a long time since anybody asked that one,” he said. “I think I must have been eleven.”

Pablo took a deep breath and sat down in the chair opposite Tony’s.

“That’s what you asked me last night, man. Do I look like I’m fucking eleven?”

Tony Bobbick rubbed his eyebrows and took another swallow of water.

“If you say I said it maybe I did. But see, Pablo — I’ve got a friend with me now from the States. We’re leaving for the ruins after breakfast.”

“Aw shit,” Pablo said earnestly.

“You sound really disappointed,” Tony said.

“I am,” Pablo told him. “You better believe it.”

As they spoke, a young American walked into the coffee shop and headed for Tony’s table. The American was tall and muscular with thinning blond hair and a broken nose like a fighter’s. He nodded stiffly to Bobbick and stood awkwardly beside the table since there were only two chairs. Tony stood up and pulled a chair from another table for him to sit in.

“Bill,” Tony said, as the third man sat down, “this is Pablo.”

“Pablo?” the man asked Tony in an amused voice. He did not look at Tabor.

“Hi, there,” Pablo said. He watched the two of them across the plastic tabletop. He felt angry and sick but also faintly relieved. The hustle was off; instead of one maricón, there were two maricones.

“Been having a good time?” Bill asked his friend.

“In a manner of speaking,” Tony said. “We had a little drinking party last night. And now we have Pablo who proposes to go somewhere and have some fun.”

“Really?” Bill said. He turned slowly and looked at Pablo for the first time. “What kind of fun would that be?”

Tabor’s desperate bonhommie was disintegrating like an expended spantial. He blew his last pop on a happy smile.

“Any kind you like.”

Bill did a stylized double take.

“This man is a complete asshole, am I right? A hustler?”

“Well,” Tony said shyly, “I guess so.”

“I guess so,” Bill said. “Take a walk,” he told Pablo.

Pablo swallowed. He stared at Bill for a moment and suddenly the confidence, the assurance in the man’s face struck him as comical. A dry laugh rose in his throat. Bill smiled patiently back at him.

“You know there’s about twenty locals that want a piece of your friend Tony? I already got me a deal to ice him and take his money. That’s how he’s been coming on since he got here.”

Bill gave Tony a quick sidelong glance. Tony sulked in his newspaper.

“Like I don’t want to kill nobody,” Pablo told them. “I’m broke and I need some money.”

“Not from him, good buddy,” Bill said. “And certainly not from me. Take a walk.”

Pablo leaned forward over the table and spoke in a low voice, meeting Bill’s quiet stare.

“This ain’t Coconut Grove, faggot. Where you think you gonna get protection from down here?”

“I know all about down here,” Bill said.

“He’s in the travel business,” Tony informed Pablo earnestly.

“I know all about it,” Bill went on. “I’m down here a lot and I do a lot of business here. So I’ll give you the choice of hitting the street pronto or going straight from that chair to the penal colony. You won’t like it there.”

“You queer son of a bitch,” Pablo said.

Bill raised his eyebrows casually and turned toward the cashier’s counter with his hand in the air. Tony touched his arm gently.

“Wait a minute,” Tony said, “wait a minute, let it go.” Tabor saw that Tony had a bill in his hand. “The poor guy’s all fucked up. I’m going to give him something.” He slid a U.S. twenty along the tabletop. Tabor looked down at it.

“Don’t you give him a thing,” Bill said. “A punk like this?”

“Here,” Tony said kindly, “here you go, Pablo. Take it.”

“No, you don’t, baby,” Bill said. He snatched up the bill from under Pablo’s eyes and stuffed it in his shirt pocket.

“Look,” Tony said. “Maybe I did come on to him. The poor guy’s a mess. Let him have it.”

Bill sighed, took the twenty out of his pocket and threw it on the floor.

“This is a hell of a way to start out,” he said to Tony crossly. He watched Pablo start toward the money on the tile floor. “Pick it up and get out, Pablo. We intend to eat here.”

Pablo crouched over the bill.

This is it, he thought. I’m gonna have to kill these fuckers.

Bill crossed his bare legs while Pablo reached for the bill. The tip of his expensive hiking boot swung casually in front of Tabor’s face.

He pocketed the bill and looked up; Bill was looking down at him with an expression of mild disgust.

“You really wouldn’t like the penal colony, Tex.”

“He wouldn’t,” Tony said. “The wind comes howling off the lake and God knows if they ever heard of lobster Newburg.”

Tabor stood up and staggered toward the door without turning around.

O.K., he told himself when he was outside, with the shoeshine boys clustered around him. Twenty bills is twenty bills. If I’d have killed them I’d be sorry.

Cursing his way through the beggars and shoeshine boys, he decided on a drink. There was a place by the docks called the Paris where he sometimes stopped by in the vague hope of finding a billet. Wearily he took his hard-earned twenty down there and settled himself at the bar. The place was empty except for a few Compostelan Navy sailors crowded about the new pinball machine. Freddy Fender was on the jukebox, singing “El Rancho Grande.” Pablo was on conversational terms with the bartender, a big Belizean, who liked Hawaiian shirts and platform shoes and wore a crucifix around his neck.

“How you doin’, mon?” the Belizean asked him.

“I think I’m on a trapeze,” Pablo said.

“De darin’ young mon,” the Belizean said. Pablo ordered a margarita, the one he got came in a little ready-mix bottle, appropriated from the national airline.

“How you mate today? Mister Tony?”

“He ain’t my mate. He was buyin’ drinks is all. I was drinkin’ em.

“Nothin’ wrong wi’ dat. But now he fren’ come.”

“Yeah,” Tabor said. “His friend come. A couple of cocksuckers.”

“Dat put it harshly,” the Belizean said. “But he’s a bounder, dat Tony. Pretty boys all de time. Mon got no shame.”

“He’s a fool,” Tabor said.

“Dass true, dass true. But he fren’ look out for him now.”

“How the hell do you know all this?” Tabor demanded. “Everybody knows everything in this fucking place.”

“Well,” the Belizean said, “das de entertainment, you know. Got to take it like you fin’ it, bruddah.”

“Shit,” Pablo said.

“Hey, bruddah — you a sailin’ mon?”

“I do a little of everything,” Pablo said cautiously.

“I know where you get a billet, if you de right fella. Mon wid a boat lookin’ for crew.”

“Yeah?”

Cecil brought him another bottled margarita.

“But he nobody’s mark, dis chap. He in business.”

“Shit,” Tabor said, “send him my way.”

“Lemme ask you somethin’ di-rectly, bruddah. You a black or a white mon?”

Tabor nearly fell off his stool. He had been asked the same question once before and it had gone badly for everyone.

“What do I look like?”

Cecil kept his easygoing smile.

“I ain’t no Yankee, mon. People all de same to me. But dis boat chap, he might see somethin’ I wouldn’t notice.”

“I’m a white man,” Pablo said evenly. “Anybody can see that.”

“Den you be O.K. wid dis man. Because I suspect he don’t want colored for his crew.”

He’s just sensible, Tabor thought.

“Lemme put dis to you, bruddah. You lay ten bills on me I make arrangements wi’ dis chap. I tell him you my old times fren’. Squared away sailin’ mon.”

“How come he goes to you looking for crew?”

“Because I know everybody, mon. I help him out in de past.”

“Ten bills,” Tabor said, “that’s a hell of a lot. What if he turns me down?”

“Take it or leave it, mon.”

Pablo leafed through the bills in his wallet, covering the top with his palm, glancing over his shoulder suspiciously. Cecil watched him with amusement. Pablo found a U.S. ten and handed it over.

“This better not be a rip-off,” he told Cecil.

“Put you mind at rest, my fren’,” Cecil said with a contemptuous smile. “Come roun’ after three o’clock and you be talkin’ to de commander.”

He went out and sat in the little square across from the navy base where there was a statue of Morazón. Cecil’s words stayed in his mind; they savored to him of treachery and double cross.

I already talked to enough commanders, he thought. He suspected Cecil of betraying him to American body snatchers.

They were turning Pablo around again. Within the same hour, he had been humiliated by cocksuckers and practically called a nigger to his face. He doubled up on the bench and ran his hands through his hair. The crazy birds in the trees along the Malecón hooted down at him.

Grim and frantic, Pablo set out through the siesta quiet for the drugstore. The druggist was waiting for him, leaning against the shutters of his shop with a singularly geek-like expression. He had taken off his green smock and was wearing a dark sport coat with three or four ball-point pens in the breast pocket. When Pablo walked by, the druggist fell into step with him. They crossed to the shady side of the street.

“Ritalin?” the druggist asked.

“Uh-uh,” Tabor said. “Gotta to be amphetamine, pure and simple.”

“Dexamil?”

Pablo nearly snarled with exasperation.

“No downers in it.”

“Benzedrin’,” said the druggist.

It was the most beautiful Spanish word Pablo had ever heard.

“Benzedrino,” he said. “Fuckin-A.”

“Twenty dollars,” the druggist said as they walked.

“Are you kiddin’ me? For how many?”

“For cincuenta. Fifty tablets.”

“Jesus Christ,” Tabor said. “Shit, O.K.” He was in no mood to bargain.

They turned into a narrow dirt street bounded on both sides by corrugated-iron fencing on which there were a great many posters celebrating the party in power. The druggist gave Pablo an unmarked bottle with the tablets inside. Pablo handed over the twenty. The morning’s financial exchanges were making him dizzy.

All anybody cares about in this fucking country, he thought, is money.

When he opened the bottle to inspect the pills inside, the druggist began to hiss and flap at him to put it away.

“Aw, fuck you,” Pablo said, but he stuck the bottle in his trouser pocket.

At the corner, the pharmacist turned away and waddled purposefully back toward his drugstore. There was no one else in sight.

Pablo caught sight of a Coke sign at the end of the next block and trucked on toward it, imagining the rush, hoping to Christ he had not, been taken.

The sign stood over a little flyblown tienda, where there was a counter with some pastries and a coffee machine. Pablo went inside and whistled between his teeth. After a while a sleepy old woman came out from the back of the shop to sell him a Coke.

He gave her one of the coins with the general on it — five ratones, gibrones, whatever — and stared her down in case she decided to fox him out of the change. Nervously, the old woman counted coins into the upturned palm which Pablo held imperiously before her.

Then he went outside, propped the Coke under his arm and took out the bottle the geek had sold him. They were Benzedrino all right, little yellow tablets, three hundred migs.

Hot shit, Tabor thought; he swallowed two of them with his warmish Coke and leaned back in the shade of the corner building.

On his empty stomach, he began to get the rush fairly early on and it felt like the real thing.

“Thank you, Jesus,” Tabor said. His being began to come together. When he had rested against the wall for several minutes, a little boy appeared and approached Tabor with his hand out. Tabor happily doled out a handful of cabrones. But the boy did not go away — he planted himself before Tabor and pointed at the Coke bottle in his hand.

Just as he was about to hand the boy the bottle, Tabor experienced his true rush. He was moved almost to tears.

As the boy watched him wide-eyed, Pablo wound up like Dizzy Dean and sent the bottle hurtling into the wall of the building across the street — where it smashed magnificently, sending thick shards of bottle glass in all directions.

“Ay,” the kid said.

“Ay,” Tabor said. “Aye aye aye.” He gave the kid a thumbs-up sign and set out for the docks with music in his heart.

“Well, he’s gorgeous,” the blond woman said to her companion, “but don’t you think he’s a thug?” Cecil had pointed Pablo out to them at the bar.

The man with her was about fifty, his face deeply tanned and fine-featured. His haircut made him look like a boy in a magazine ad for a military school, gone gray.

He shrugged and lighted a cigarette.

“They’re all sort of the same. If you think he’s gorgeous that’s good enough for me.”

“Cecil is doing one of his Cecil numbers on us,” the woman said. “He’s pissed off because you wouldn’t hire his cousin.”

“Hell,” the man said, “I’m sure he never set eyes on this dude any earlier than last week. I’d just as soon have it that way.”

“You know, he thinks it’s racial. He heard you make that remark about being born on the dark side of the moon.”

“I don’t care what Cecil thinks. If I keep hiring those no good ratones Cecil says are his cousins I’ll really be in trouble.”

“Damnit,” the woman said. “Whatever happened to the carefree college boy we always dreamed of?”

“I don’t want a carefree college boy,” the man said. “I want a bad guy I can keep in line.”

The woman glanced over at Pablo and worried the lime in her Cuba Libre with a candy-striped straw. “But don’t you think this cat looks a little demented?”

“Could be he’s high on something,” the man said, without looking over. “That could be bad. On the other hand — as long as he can work — it could make him easier to handle.”

“Are you sober enough to talk to him? I’d like a closer look.”

“Sure,” the man said. “Let’s run him past.”

The woman picked up her straw and waved it languidly until Cecil caught her signal. He walked over to Pablo, who was beginning to fret over his beer, and leaned toward him.

“O.K., bruddah. Front and center for de mon. I tell dem we know each other from New Orleans.”

Even being ordered front and center did not stay the surge of optimism that flooded Pablo’s heart. He swung off his stool and marched confidently toward the table where the couple sat. He had been watching them, a little greedily. They looked rich and heedless, the lady sexy and loose. They aroused his appetites.

“My name is Callahan,” the gray-haired man said when Pablo stood before him. “This is Mrs. Callahan.”

“Right pleased to meet you,” Pablo said. “Pablo Tabor.”

“Well, we’re right pleased to meet you too, Pablo,” Mrs. Callahan said. “Please have a seat.”

Pablo sat down. Mrs. Callahan called for two more rum and Cokes and another beer for Pablo, while he and Mr. Callahan looked at each other blankly.

“So you’re a buddy of Cecil’s?” Callahan asked.

“No sir, he ain’t my buddy. He knows me, though. From New Orleans.”

“Salvage diving, wasn’t it?” Mrs. Callahan asked brightly.

“Yeah,” Pablo said, confused. “There was a little of that.”

Mr. and Mrs. Callahan looked at each other quickly. Cecil brought the drinks. He had a smile for everyone.

“Well, the thing is, Pablo,” Mr. Callahan said, “that the missus and myself have a boat and we’re looking for a crewman. She’s a powerboat.”

Pablo nodded.

“Do you have any seagoing experience?”

“Well,” Pablo said. “I can steer. I’m pretty handy with engines. I can operate and maintain any kind of radio equipment you got. If you got radar I can work with that too.”

“You must have been in the service.”

“Coast Guard,” Pablo told him, taking the chance.

“Good for you,” Callahan said. “Can you navigate?”

“Guess I could get a fix on a radio beacon. I never used a sextant much.”

“How come they call you Pablo,” Mrs. Callahan asked. “Are you part Cuban or something?”

“I ain’t part anything,” Pablo said. “I’m American.”

“Have a passport?” Callahan asked him.

“They got it where I’m staying. I believe they’re a bunch of crooks over there.”

“I see,” Mr. Callahan said. “Now that could be a problem. We might have to work on that.”

Pablo chewed his thumbnail. “Where is it you and the lady were going to take your boat?”

“Oh,” Callahan said, “up and down the coast. Maybe do a little island hopping. We’d want you for less than a month. You could leave the vessel any number of places.”

“Could I ask you about the salary?”

“Well, I usually leave that to my number one. But I can tell you it’s higher than customary. Because the work is hard and we have our standards.”

“That’d be O.K. with me,” Pablo said.

“I’ll tell you what,” Callahan said. “We have a few things to check out before we can give you the O.K. If you check back here around five — either we’ll be here or we’ll leave a message with Cecil.”

“Jeez,” Pablo said. “I was hoping you could tell me one way or the other.”

Callahan smiled sympathetically. “Sorry, sailor. No can do. But I’ll tell you what”—he slipped Pablo a fistful of local notes across the table—“buy yourself a few beers.”

Pablo sighed behind his Benzedrine and took the bills. Bank notes had slipped back and forth under his hands all day.

“What’s the matter, Pablo?” Callahan asked. “You feeling O.K.?”

“I don’t know,” Pablo said. “Sometimes you get the idea all anybody’s interested in down here is money.”

Mr. and Mrs. Callahan looked at him pleasantly.

“Well,” Callahan said, “that’s because it’s such a materialistic society down here. They don’t have the same kind of spiritual values we have up home.”

“Right,” Mrs. Callahan said, “one gets caught up in it.”

Pablo smiled and stood up, thinking that he might have trouble with these people. “Hope to see you at five,” he said.

On the way out he said so long to Cecil.

When Pablo was on his way, the Callahans drank another round.

“Jesus, it’s depressing,” Mrs. Callahan said. “They’re all such creeps. And what we really need is an extended family.”

“The only question these days,” Callahan said, “is, will they turn on you? It’s sad but that’s the way things are.”

“I think I’ve just decided,” Mrs. Callahan said, glancing toward the bar, “that I don’t like him. I think he’s Cecil’s idea of a gag.”

“He’s a deserter,” Callahan said. “Those guys are usually a good bet.”

“Maybe we’re supposed to think he’s a deserter. Maybe he’s a Fed.”

“He’s too fucked up to be a Fed. I mean, they’re just not that good.”

“Maybe we can get by without him?”

“I don’t think so,” Callahan said.

They sat in silence for a while.

“Look, Deedee, on the level of instinct I go for him. I think he’s the best man we’ve seen. I think he knows how to take orders. I’m sure he doesn’t like it much — but I think he takes them.”

“I don’t like him,” Mrs. Callahan said.

“There’s three of us and one of him — and he can’t really navigate. But I’ve got to get his passport and check him out. Cecil probably knows where it is.”

“It’s your decision,” the woman said.

“I used to like it,” Callahan said, “when the baddest thing around these parts was me. These days I’m just another innocent abroad.”

Mrs. Callahan finished her rum and lit a small thin cigar.

“It’s really scary,” she said. “People are getting to be a disgrace to the planet.”

Callahan smiled dreamily.

“We’ve been lucky, kid. We’ve met some dingalings but we’ve met some sweethearts, too.”

Mrs. Callahan waved the cigar smoke away from their table.

“Don’t get me going,” she said. “I’ll start to cry.”

Six stories below Holliwell’s window, a French teen-ager and her mother were playing in the swimming pool. The women were fair; their bodies were tanned and charged with the sunlit sensuality of fruit in the softening afternoon light. The daughter was doing laps and even within the confines of the Panamerican’s pool it was apparent that she was a fine swimmer. At each length, she performed a racer’s turn while her mother watched her with a brown arm resting on the tiles, shading her eyes from the sun and sipping lemonade from a tall iced glass. Tame parrots wandered among the plants before the poolside suites. Beside the wall that divided the hotel pool from the Compostelan street outside, two Indians in braided uniform jackets hosed down the garden, looking neither at the guests nor at each other.

Holliwell was sitting on his pocket balcony watching the Frenchwomen when it occurred to him that, against safety and reason, he felt like going to Tecan after all. The Corazón Islands stood off her Caribbean coast, enemies to winter and the emptiness that awaited him at home. Tecan was what it was, but it was also, like Compostela, the sweet waist of America. A seductress, la encantada, a place of pleasure for the likes of him.

Beyond the snow bird’s impulse was his mounting curiosity about the Catholics there. It would be strange to see such Catholics, he thought. It would be strange to see people who believed in things, and acted in the world according to what they believed. It would be different. Like old times. He owed nothing to anyone; he could go or not. What he might do and what he might see there would be no one’s business but his own.

He put away the thought and drank more and the pool below him surrendered to shade. He had stayed in his room in the expectation that some sort of social invitation would come from the university, that someone there would at least call to welcome him.

No calls came, however, and he suspected that it must be because of Oscar. Perhaps they imagined that they were being preyed on by a faggot cabal.

Fuck them, he thought, pacing the tile floor drink in hand. They would despise his address. Leftists and rightists alike would find it so much gringo decadence.

The women would be puzzled and threatened, they would turn to their husbands for explanation. The husbands would explain about gringo decadence. That professor, they’d say, smacking their lips, he’s a friend of Ocampo’s, he’s a maricón. It’s no surprise he feels that way.

But hasn’t he a wife? the women would ask.

It proves nothing with them, the men would say. Believe it, he has little boyfriends like Ocampo. The wife undoubtedly has lovers.

Then their poor children, the women would say.

And the men — whether of the left or right would say—Mujer, the children — you can see them for yourself. They come here all the time. Look at their mouths and their eyes. The boys all look like women. They can’t satisfy the girls. All of them are addicted to drugs.

How bitter he had become, Holliwell thought. His own venom startled him.

So be it. If the Autonomous University would not give him dinner, he would come back to the hotel after the lecture and take his dinner there. Perhaps Oscar would join him.

With a drink beside him, he took up his Spanish-English dictionary and worked over the address for a while.

Within the hour there was another bout of hide-and-seek with the hotel phone. He found himself in conversation with a man from the Cultural Affairs section of the American Embassy named Vandenberg. Vandenberg regretted that the Cultural Affairs section had not been able to sponsor his address. He regretted further that he himself would not be able to attend although he understood that there were people from the embassy community who planned to go.

Holliwell explained that it had all been set up very suddenly, through friends; he understood that there had been no time to arrange official sponsorship.

Vandenberg said that everyone was very happy all the same.

“Keep us in mind,” he told Holliwell.

Holliwell assured him that he would indeed.

By six o’clock there were no further calls. Holliwell had a shower to sober himself and then drank more, as though that would further the process. Going along the hallway to the elevator, he observed that his steps were unsteady. On his way across the lobby, he stopped at the bar for a drink, spreading his address out on the polished mahogany before him. He drank two escosses and listened to the voices of the men at the table nearest him; there were four, speaking together in accented English. Turning casually in their direction, Holliwell surmised that two of them were Compostelans. The others, from the pitch of their English and their starched white open-necked shirts, he decided must be Israelis. They were too far away and spoke too softly for him to determine what it was they talked about.

Holliwell gathered up his speech and strode out into the gathering darkness, walking the length of the hotel path to stand beside the policemen who stood at the gate to fend off beggars and shoeshine boys. When a taxi pulled up at the curb, he caught it and set off in a peel of rubber for the Autonomous University.

The palm-bordered blocks of the Central Avenue were deserted as Holliwell’s taxi sped along them. At one intersection, the cab halted to let a column of youths march across the roadway and at first Holliwell mistook the procession for some sort of demonstration. But as the column emerged from the verdant gloom of the dark traffic island, he saw that it was flanked by policemen with carbines and that the boys and the few girls among them marched ten abreast in a quasi-military step, silent and expressionless. Most of the boys long-haired, the girls in jeans. There were couples among them going hand in hand. The policemen marched them on across the right-hand lanes of the avenue and up a darkened side street.

When the cab was under way again, Holliwell asked his driver who they were.

“Jipis,” the driver said. “Youth without morals.” The driver seemed to be something of a philosopher, an elderly Spaniard with clerical steel glasses.

“What will be done with them then?”

The driver shrugged. “No harm.” Then he turned in his seat and smiled. “Perhaps haircuts a la policía.”

At the floral clock, the driver plunged cursing into the maelstrom of rotary traffic. Holliwell held his breath.

“Still,” he suggested to the driver when they had cleared the rotary, “it’s a free country.”

“Claro,” the driver said. “Ever since the Reform.”

At the edge of the university complex, there was a monument to the Reform that had made Compostela a free country. Once past it, they drove among the floodlit fountains and concrete lawns until they had pulled up before the House of the Study of Mankind.

“So here,” Holliwell offered, as he paid and overtipped the driver, “it’s not like Tecan.”

The driver looked shocked.

“No no no,” he said with passion. “It’s not free there. And it’s very bad for the poor.”

The foyer of the House of the Study of Mankind had murals on its walls by a celebrated Compostelan painter, an imitator of Orozco and a habitué of the Brasserie Lipp. The murals contrasted awkwardly with the neo-Florentine design of the building but they did portray mankind in a variety of transcendent postures. The foyer, as Holliwell entered it, was crowded with students who had gathered in conspiratorial groups along the wall. They spoke watchfully and eyed Holliwell as he passed. Many of them appeared to be youth without morals and there were some with the pistolero style. There was a great deal of laughing among them, but it was not pleasant to hear. It echoed in the dead space of the windowed Italianate dome high overhead.

There were two exhibit halls at either end of the foyer, both of them closed off behind gates of metal grill. In one was a diorama portraying the history of the Republic with an emphasis on the treachery of her neighbors and her sufferings at the hands of the church. The Catholic university, in another suburb, had one very like it which recounted the Neronian martyrdom to which the church had been periodically subjected by her ungrateful Compostelan children. The hall on the opposite side of the foyer was a museum, a dull affair of feathered rattles in glass cases. Both halls had been secure behind their grill gates for nearly ten years.

Beyond the entrance hall was a patio with native plants and a Spanish fountain; Holliwell displayed his invitation to a university guard in order to pass. It was a pleasant place, the patio, and Holliwell entered it gratefully, seating himself along the fountain’s edge to listen to the broken rhythm of the water and student voices in the hall outside. He had not sat for longer than a moment when he saw a gray-haired man come down one of the stone stairways from the upper story to approach him. The man was extending his hand but there was a faint posture of disapproval in his manner. The fountains, Holliwell supposed, were not to be sat beside.

“Professor Holliwell?” the gray-haired man inquired.

Holliwell stood up. His stance was unsteady.

“Claudio Nicolay,” the man said, taking Holliwell’s hand. “Associate rector for the discipline of sociology. Welcome again to Compostela.”

Nicolay had the face of the Field Marshal von Paulus, colored in brown.

“I’m very happy to be here,” Holliwell told him. “I thank you for inviting me.”

“Ah yes,” Nicolay said, in what Holliwell thought to be a strangely ambiguous manner. “Will you follow me, please?”

They climbed the stone stairs which Nicolay had descended and walked along a mezzanine lined with open classrooms that exuded a scent of old wood and mold repellent. But the room to which Nicolay finally led him was constructed of bright stainless synthetics and lit with fluorescent ceiling fixtures. There was a podium up front; thirty or so people sat on straight-backed wooden chairs facing it. The audience stirred and turned toward Holliwell as Nicolay conducted him halfway down a side aisle and then leaned against the wall to face him.

“We have expected,” Nicolay said, “that you would speak in English. This will be quite O.K. Our group tonight is for the most part English-speaking.”

“Well,” Holliwell said, “I prepared it in Spanish. I thought …”

Nicolay interrupted him.

“You may give your address as you like. My opinion is that English would be preferred.”

It was all, Holliwell had come to realize, extremely brusque. Even if Nicolay had decided that he was drunk and was resentful, even if he were trying to be informal and Stateside in manner — the whole business smacked of rudeness. People were not casually rude in Compostela.

Holliwell shrugged. “As you like, Doctor.”

“So you will speak and then maybe there will be questions. O.K.?”

“O.K.”

“It was thought afterwards to have cocktails on the terrace. We hope you can stay.”

“Thank you again,” Holliwell said.

“As for your payment — it’s been arranged.”

“That’s fine,” Holliwell said. He was determined not to be made uncomfortable.

“Whenever you’re ready then, I’ll introduce you.”

“Go right ahead,” he told Nicolay.

The professor doctor conducted him to the dais and he looked over the house. More than half of his audience were women. At least a third appeared to be North American. Their faces were indistinct under the fluorescent lights. Holliwell owned a pair of reading glasses which he used on occasions when innovative lighting or his own intemperance baffled vision; he had left them in his hotel room, beside the scotch.

Nicolay’s introduction was as suitable for Holliwell as for anyone else and when it was concluded there was polite applause.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Holliwell declaimed, “esteemed colleagues.” Who in hell, he wondered, are these people? He looked helplessly down at his laborious espanished address and paused.

“I see before me,” he told them, after an awkward moment had passed, “I see before me, imperfectly, the notes which it had been my purpose to deliver in the language of this country. I must tell you that to put it back in English as I speak seems a very daunting business. I think it is an impossible business.”

He looked at Nicolay, who was sitting in the last row and was recognizable to Holliwell only by his dark complexion and iron-gray hair. As he looked, his Compostelan colleague appeared to undergo parthenogenesis; two Dr. Nicolays looked up at him, their grave expressions only to be imagined. In the blurred faces of the audience, he presumed to read geniality and patience.

“Allow me to share, as we say in my country, this experience. The sharing of this experience will constitute an inter-American, intercultural act. In performing together an intercultural act, ladies and gentlemen and esteemed colleagues, we may capture the workings of culture in vivo. On the hoof.”

There was a little uncertain laughter.

“The address I have here,” Holliwell announced, “as I consider retranslating it into English, seems very portentous. Culture, as we know, is very much a matter of language and the language before me seems at the moment to be operatic and mock-Ciceronian and absurd. Looking at it, thinking about speaking it, makes me angry. Not,” he hastened to assure them, “that I find Spanish itself mock-Ciceronian and absurd, because I yield to no one in my affection for the tongue of Cervantes and Lorca and the immortal Darío. Only my thoughts, my circumlocutions, my artfulness, seem so in that language.”

Someone slapped his palm against a leather armrest. There were sighs of obscure significance.

“Another dissatisfaction, friends, another dissatisfaction for me is that the subject of this address was to be Culture and the Family or vice versa or the Family in Culture or some construction of that sort. I tell you in sincerity that I am not the man to speak about such things. I know nothing about families — certainly no more than anyone else here tonight. For a large part of my life I had no family at all. The word ‘father,’ for example, was an abstraction to me. I associated it only with God.”

A single Spanish word he could not make out echoed against the polished surfaces of the room. It was answered with a guffaw. Holliwell did not look up. A sadness descended on him.

“When I learned about families — The Family, La Familia—I found only that it was an instrument of grief. That’s all I can tell you about The Family and I assume you already know that much. Moreover, in my culture, we are doing away with grief, so the future of the family there is uncertain. As a consequence the topic may not be relevant, and relevance, surely, is what we require here this evening. In this intercultural exercise of ours.

“But seriously … seriously, my friends …” He paused, stunned for a moment at the wreckage he had piled on himself. “I can certainly talk about culture. It’s my bread and butter and I have no hesitation in talking about it. For example, popular culture is particularly fun. In my country we have a saying — Mickey Mouse will see you dead.”

There was silence.

“There isn’t really such a saying,” Holliwell admitted. “My countrymen present can reassure you as to that. I made it up to demonstrate, to dramatize the seriousness with which American popular culture should be regarded. Now American pop culture is often laughed at by snobbish foreigners — as we call them. But let me tell you that we have had the satisfaction of ramming it down their throats. These snobbish foreigners are going to learn to laugh around it or choke to death. It’s in their gullets, it’s in the air they breathe and in the rich foreign food they eat. They better learn to love it.”

Someone called Holliwell by name but he affected not to hear. A party of Americans in one of the forward rows stood up to leave.

“Our popular culture is machine-made and it’s for sale to anyone who can raise the cash and the requisite number of semi-literate consumers. Compostela is one of the progressive nations that have been successful in this regard.”

People in the back were hissing him.

“Bear with me,” Holliwell begged his audience. “I don’t mean to sentimentalize the various popular cultures that ours has replaced. You can be sure that in their colorful ways they were equally mean and vulgar and trashy. They simply didn’t have what it takes.”

He stopped again, dry-throated, to watch the brisk traffic toward the door.

“Yet I would like to take you into my confidence in one regard, ladies and gentlemen and esteemed colleagues — and here I address particularly those of my listeners who are not North Americans — we have quite another culture concealed behind the wooden nutmeg and the flash that we’re selling. It’s a secret culture. Perhaps you think of us as a nation without secrets — you’re wrong. Our secret culture is the one we live by. It’s the one we’ve beaten into wave upon wave of immigrants who have in turn beaten it into their children. It’s not for sale — in fact it’s none of your business. But because we’re involved in this inter-American intercultural exercise I’ll tell you a little about it tonight.”

A general stir, of hostile ambiance, had taken possession of the room.

“Allow me to recite for you the first poem ever printed in what became the United States of America. It goes like this:

“ ‘I at the burial ground may see

Coffins smaller far than I

From death’s embrace no age is free

Even little children die.’

“Friends, children in the English-speaking colonies of North America didn’t go to heaven to become angelitos. What became of them was terrible to ponder. The pondering over what became of them is part of our secret culture. Our secret culture is as frivolous as a willow on a tombstone. It’s a wonderful thing — or it was. It was strong and dreadful, it was majestic and ruthless. It was a stranger to pity. And it’s not for sale, ladies and gentlemen. Let me tell you now some of the things we believed: We believed we knew more about great unpeopled spaces than any other European nation. We considered spaces unoccupied by us as unpeopled. At the same time, we believed we knew more about guilt. We believed that no one wished and willed as hard as we, and that no one was so able to make wishes true. We believed we were more. More was our secret watchword.

“Now out of all this, in spite of it, because of it, we developed Uncle Sam, the celebrated chiseling factor. And Uncle Sam developed the first leisured, literate masses — to the horror of all civilized men. All civilized men — fascists and leftist intellectuals alike — recoiled and still recoil at Uncle Sam’s bizarre creation, working masses with the money and the time to command the resources of their culture, who would not be instructed and who had no idea of their place. Because Uncle Sam thought of nothing but the almighty dollar he then created the machine-made popular culture to pander to them. To reinforce, if you like, their base instincts. He didn’t think it was his job to improve them and neither did they. This debasement of polite society is what we are now selling you.”

Again Holliwell paused. Voices were being raised but he was not being shouted down. He could make himself heard.

“I have the honor to bring you hope, ladies and gentlemen and esteemed colleagues. Here I speak particularly to the enemies of my country and their representatives present tonight. Underneath it all, our secret culture, the non-exportable one, is dying. It’s going sour and we’re going to die of it. We’ll die of it quietly around our own hearths while our children laugh at us. So, no more Mickey Mouse, amigos. The world is free for Latinate ideologies and German ismusisms … temples of reason, the Dialectic, you name it …”

He became aware of a more substantial disturbance and was compelled to face the room. At the rear, across the heads of those remaining, stood a young man in dark glasses wearing a black shirt and a Richard III haircut. The young man had risen to confront him.

“Is not this facile nihilism, Mr. Holliwell, a screen for Communistic theory?”

A guerrilla of Christ the King, Holliwell thought. The White Hand. He had an instant’s inward vision of his corpse rolling from a speeding car onto the lawn of the Panamerican.

“Isn’t nihilism, sir, a way of discrediting our Western Christian culture which the Communists seek to displace?”

“You can’t be serious,” Holliwell said.

“Oh, yes, sir,” the young man said, with a hint of unpleasant laughter. “Quite serious.”

Stricken by the recklessness of his conduct and reminded of where he was, Holliwell lamely sought a route back toward pedantic convention.

“Do you think that as a replacement for anything lost, I’m proposing Marxism? Do you think that despair leads me to cast envious eyes on Latvia or Kirghizstan?”

“Perhaps you feel for our people,” the young man suggested. “Perhaps you feel that we should look to Latvia or Kirghizstan.”

“What I feel is that I’ve offended you and you’re getting me back. I regard Marxism as analogous to a cargo cult. It’s a naïve invocation of a verbal machine.”

“But heroic? Perhaps inevitable?”

Idiotic as their exchange was, Holliwell considered, he had had it coming. It would teach him. But he was still drunk enough to be angry.

“Sure,” he said. “Perhaps. It’s a funny world, son.”

Now a middle-aged American was on his feet, encouraged by the young fanatic. Faced with revolt, Holliwell increasingly regretted his folly.

“I’d like to apologize to all the Compostelans here,” the American said. “And I want to ask you a question, Holliwell. Did the United States government pay for the display of bad manners you’ve just treated us to?”

“That’s correct,” Holliwell said.

“Well, I’m tired of apologizing for all the so-called experts who come down here on the taxpayers’ money and give the States a bad name. The only time I hear this kind of garbage is when I come to an event like this.”

“Once upon a time,” Holliwell told the man, “there was a chartered aircraft carrying American businessmen and their wives over Japan. The businessmen were insulation dealers from the northern Midwest. They were on a cultural tour of the Orient.”

“What do you bet,” the American asked someone who was with him, “that this little story has an anti-business moral?”

“How can I give you your money’s worth,” Holliwell said, “if you won’t listen to me?” The man sat down in disgust.

“Well, sir,” Holliwell continued, “these folks were being rewarded with this trip for having sold great quantities of insulation. But just as their plane flew over Mount Fuji it broke apart and all the dealers and their wives fell out. They and their plastic cups and their Kodachrome slides and their wallets full of pictures of the folks back home fell onto Mount Fuji. On the slopes, their bodies were collected by Buddhist monks and the monks laid them out and burned incense over them and that was how their cultural tour of the Far East ended. Now,” Holliwell said to the American, “is there a lesson in that or not?”

Dr. Nicolay was approaching him.

“I see no point in continuing,” Nicolay said. “I think you should go and rest, eh?”

Before Holliwell could respond, a red-haired woman with broad shoulders and a sad smile rose in the center of the diminished audience. “What about God?” she demanded in an Australian quaver. “Is there a place for God in all this?” Holliwell realized gratefully that she must be as drunk as he.

“There’s always a place for God, senora. There is some question as to whether He’s in it.”

Dr. Nicolay glowed with a smiling revulsion that Holliwell imagined must be Central European. He was at the point of allowing the doctor to supervise his removal when he saw that a honey-haired Compostelan lady had come down along the side aisle and was poised to address him. The lady was striking and her aspect amiable. He waited.

“I could be forgiven, Dr. Holliwell, could I not, if I inferred from your manner and the tone of your remarks that your attitude toward my country is ambiguous?” Her smile was demure, conventual and unthreatening. Holliwell blushed.

“My attitude is friendly,” he said. “I’m sincere.” He had already set in motion the processes by which he hoped in time to forget utterly the evening behind him. It was not pleasant to be compelled to a defense. “I thought I would improvise. I was after a deeper seriousness that I may not have … If my countryman hadn’t already done so I’d consider apologizing.”

“No need for that, sir,” said the smiling young woman. “But isn’t this stylized despair an excuse for immorality? Doesn’t it explain away all duty? Don’t you think your attitude reflects the decadence of your own society?”

“Shall I answer in any particular order?” Holliwell asked.

“The libertine and the Communist are the one hand washing the other!”

It was the young blackshirt, who was lounging by the door in a pistolero’s crouch. There were several men with him who also favored dark shirts and tinted glasses.

“I’ve tried to answer your political objections,” Holliwell said evenly. “I’m not a political man.”

The politiques left looking unhappy. A whiff of Spanish menace, like cordite and jasmine, hung in the air. Holliwell, sobering up, was more and more driven into confrontation with the heedlessness of his demonstration.

The beautiful Compostelan lady in the aisle continued to smile on him.

“You were saying, Doctor?”

Holliwell looked at her blankly for a moment.

“The answer to all your questions is probably yes. Everything that’s known is someone’s excuse for something.”

The woman sat down in a chair that had been vacated. Holliwell was completely taken with her. He permitted himself to wonder if the debacle might not be turned around, if instead of waking up hung over and humiliated in his overpriced hotel room … it might be otherwise. Not a chance, he thought. Not this woman, not in this country. And not with him. He became once again aware of Nicolay, who was still beside him.

“I beg you,” he said to the doctor, “to accept my remarks as a foreign novelty. Like grand opera.”

“You are a master of insult, Professor. You would have made a duelist.”

“I understand Caruso sang in Compostela,” Holliwell persisted. “In your wonderful opera house. Before the earthquake. That’s what I’ve been told.”

“You’re told incorrectly,” Nicolay said. He was looking into what remained of the audience. The few people who remained could not hear their exchange. The young woman had risen once more.

“I think we should say,” she declared, addressing herself to Nicolay, “I would like to say — that if we have been disturbed by what Professor Holliwell has had to say this is all to the good. We must thank him.”

But there was no one to applaud. Everyone who had not left was moving toward the table on which the drinks were set.

She was nothing short of marvelous, Holliwell thought. In a few strokes she had rebuked his arrogance and brought him into line, rewarded his gesture of remorse and then practically blanded out the whole affair. He bowed to her and walked unescorted to the scotch. Pouring himself a drink, he found himself across the table from her. Her eyes were gold-spotted. She extended her hand.

“Mariaclara Obregón.”

“You’re very skillful, Miss Obregón.”

“We don’t avoid controversy,” Mariaclara Obregón told him. “But on the other hand, we don’t want to leave a bad feeling either way.”

“I’m very glad you were here.”

“I am too,” she said. “I have what you said on tape. I’ll listen to it another time at my leisure.”

“I hope it’ll make sense.”

“I’m sure it will,” she said. “Spontaneity is sometimes difficult.”

“Yes, indeed,” Holliwell said.

“We have political tensions here, I’m sure you know.”

“I understand completely.” His desire for her made him feel suddenly shabby and absurd. Drunk.

“The academic circles of a country are not the most considerate. I’m sure you know that also.”

“The libertine circles are pretty rough too.”

He was aware of a young North American couple standing just behind her, waiting as though to speak with him. He was careful to ignore them. Nicolay had produced two attendants in beige uniforms, their heads no higher than his shoulders. He directed them toward the table; they bowed to him and began removing glasses.

“Are you in fact a libertine, Professor?” Miss Obregón asked him playfully.

“Yes, I am,” he told her. “In that way I predate the industrial age. I am a man of the enlightenment and a libertine.”

“An illuminatus?” she suggested.

“I’m a middle-class professor,” he told her. “In every regard. No more than that.”

“A leftist?”

“A liberal is what they call people like me.”

“Here,” the woman said, “to be a liberal you must be a Mason.”

Holliwell moved around the table and past the American couple to stand beside her.

“Listen,” he said, “is it possible for us to take coffee? If not tonight, then sometime else?”

“I think unfortunately not, Professor. I wanted only to say thank you for speaking to us.”

Her hand was in his again; he forced himself to let it feather away.

“But you’re not just leaving?”

“It’s too bad but I have to go. Please let me thank you again.”

And to his dismay she turned away, leaving him with the porters, the two young Americans and Nicolay. He took a step in Nicolay’s direction and stumbled.

“Miss Obregón,” he demanded of the doctor, “who is she? Is she a member of the faculty here?”

Dr. Nicolay calmly took him by the arm and walked him toward a large soiled window that looked out on the sculpture garden of the university plaza.

“Whether we like each other is not a question, is it, Holliwell?”

“Certainly not,” Holliwell said.

“Certainly not. But I hate to see a man, a colleague — a guest, if you like — make a fool of himself. This is fellow feeling. Allow me to tell you that the party is now over and it is time for you to go home. If you require a taxi, we’ll see that you get one. Don’t embarrass yourself further.”

Holliwell looked over his shoulder; she had vanished. He would never see her again. How, he wondered, if he had pursued her down the stairs and into the lobby. Insisted. Dramatically. Romantically. With impetuosity and flair, like a lover. He felt like a lover.

Detaching himself from Nicolay, he returned to the table.

Only the porters remained, removing the tablecloth and folding it like a banner. And the American couple, still loitering awkwardly.

Presently, Dr. Nicolay joined him again.

“One,” Nicolay said as though he were declaiming poetry, “for the road.”

Nicolay looked over the single bottle of scotch and the several decanters of Spanish brandy that had been set out, and then at his watch.

“Another for the road,” Holliwell said, pouring a second drink.

“Another for the road, of course,” Nicolay said. “You’re our guest. For better or worse.”

“Thank you, Doctor,” Holliwell said. He moved the bottle across the table toward Nicolay and looked about the room. Oblivious of the little doctor’s curled lip.

“I believe,” Nicolay said, “that you are a friend of Dr. Ocampo? Is this true?”

“An old friend,” Holliwell said. He was hoping that somehow the woman would come back.

“From university, eh? Roommates.”

“No,” Holliwell said. “Not roommates.”

“Companions,” Nicolay suggested.

“Asshole buddies,” Holliwell told him.

Dr. Nicolay’s expression looked strained, as though his hearing were failing him.

“I think it best to prepare more for an address,” he told Holliwell. “Even before a small audience. Even in a small country of little importance I myself would not have drunk so much. Perhaps you were nervous.”

“Yeah,” Holliwell said, without looking at him. “That was it. Take your hand off my arm.”

Nicolay withdrew his firm proprietary hand and walked away. It was a low point in inter-American cultural relations.

“The thing to do with embarrassment,” he told the young American couple who seemed determined to engage him, “is work it all the way to humiliation.”

The Americans looked concerned. They were both dark, small-boned and sharp-featured — the woman indeed could have passed for a Spanish Compostelan but her expression was eastern collegiate.

“Oh, come on,” the young man said. “It wasn’t that bad. It was stimulating.”

“Stimulation,” Holliwell said. “That’s what I was after.”

“Can we give you a ride downtown?” the young woman asked. “We’re driving that way.”

Holliwell examined them. They seemed good-natured. Educated. Nice.

“Thank you,” he said. “That would be very helpful to me.”

The Americans conducted him downstairs and across the patio and through the foyer of the House of the Study of Mankind. Nicolay, who had been standing near the door with a group of students, turned his back on them.

Outside it was chilly, a wind off the cordillera blew spray from the illuminated fountain on them. They led him to a four-wheel-drive Honda with Tecanecan plates.

“I’m Tom Zecca,” the young man said as he unlocked the car. “Z-e-c-c-a. This is Marie.”

Holliwell shook hands with Tom and Marie and settled himself in the back seat.

“Tom always spells it out,” Marie explained to him. “People tend to think it’s Zecker — you know, with an e-r.”

“But we’re mountain guineas,” Tom said, “and we insist on the fact.”

“I had a student by that name,” Holliwell said, as Tom Zecca took the Honda around the circle of the fountain and onto the empty boulevard that connected the city center with the university grounds. He wondered if this were not the very student. He often ran into former students and failed to recognize them.

“Yes, you did,” Tom said. “That was my kid brother Rich. You really did a job on him.”

“I did?” Holliwell asked.

“Well, he still talks about your class. You really impressed him a lot.”

Of the student Zecca, Holliwell could only remember that he wore a McGovern button and was very polite.

“That’s why we came tonight,” Marie Zecca said. “We saw your talk in the embassy bulletin, so we thought — that’s the guy Rich is always talking about — we’ve got to go and see him.”

“Well,” Holliwell said, “I’m sorry it turned out the way it did.”

“Whataya talking about?” Tom said. “It was fine. You pissed people off, so what?”

“How drunk did I look?”

The Zeccas deliberated.

“A little high,” Marie said.

“I was shit-faced. It was purely accidental.”

“So,” Tom said, “a little shit-faced. You have to watch it with the altitude here. The booze can hit you hard.”

“I should have remembered that,” Holliwell said. He thought of the Tecanecan plates on the car. “You’re not with the embassy here, are you?”

“No, we’re stationed down in Tecan. It gets slow down there, so we drive up here every few weekends for a little R and R.”

They were pulling into the night’s downtown traffic. Holliwell considered the concept of Tecan as “slow.”

“San Ysidro doesn’t offer much,” Marie said of Tecan’s capital.

“Not unless you like midget wrestling or cockfights,” Tom said. “Or other pleasures we won’t get into. You can get all of those you like.”

“But Tecan has nice beaches,” Marie said. “Really the nicest beaches in the world.”

The floral clock sped by them on the left. Signs flashed. Sony. Sears Roebuck. Eveready. He could see the neon signatures of the downtown hotels.

“I know people down there,” Holliwell heard himself saying. “I may go down there before I go home.”

The Zeccas were silent for a moment.

“If you were going down tomorrow,” Tom Zecca told him, “you could drive down with us. We’re starting out around the middle of the day.”

Holliwell was troubled by the feeling that he had expected the Zeccas to say something of the sort.

“I couldn’t ask you to do that.”

“Why the hell not? You’d have to share the back seat, though, because we already promised this reporter a ride.”

“No. It would crowd you.”

Marie Zecca turned in her seat.

“Listen,” she said, “if you really want to go down tomorrow we don’t want you going any other way. We would really genuinely like to have your company.”

“It’s very nice of you to say that.”

“It’s the truth,” Tom said. “You know, the lady beside me is an old social worker type from way back. We’d enjoy rapping on the way down and we’d enjoy showing you our part of the country.”

“The dusty part,” Marie said.

“I couldn’t get a visa in time for tomorrow.”

Tom shrugged. “The Tecanecans have a consulate at Zalteca on the way. They’ll write you a visa. No problem.”

“Hey, that’s me on the right,” Holliwell said as they came up to the Panamerican block.

Tom Zecca pulled over. “Nice place,” he said.

A question occurred to Holliwell as he was about to get out of the Honda.

“Marie,” he asked, “where were you a social worker type?’

“Well,” Marie said slowly. “I worked for AID in Vietnam for a while. But it’s family therapy that interests me.”

“I understand,” Holliwell said. “How about you, Tom? Were you over there?”

“Sure was,” Tom said. “You?”

“Yes,” Holliwell said. “Me too.”

The three of them sat in a charged silence that filled the car. In the instant they were bound, in excuses and evasions, in lost dreams and death. If any of them were to speak it would come forth, the place names of that alien language, the mutual friends and betrayals and crazy laughter. It would end, as it always did, in that dreadful nostalgia.

Holliwell climbed out of the car.

“I don’t think I can make it,” he told them. “But if I change my mind maybe I can call you in the morning.”

“That’ll be fine,” Tom said. He had taken out a card and was writing on it. He handed Holliwell the card through the open door. “Just call as early as you can.”

Holliwell put the card in his pocket and stood in the Panamerican’s driveway waving goodbye to them. Marie Zecca called something he could not make out.

What a curious evening, he thought. Shivering in the cold wind, he took the card Zecca had given him and read it.

THOMAS ZECCA

UNITED STATES EMBASSY

SAN YSIDRO, TECAN

That was all it said. There was a local address written across the back.

Holliwell went inside and walked across the lobby toward the elevators. The restaurant beyond the bar was crowded now; it was Rotary Club night. Compostelan Rotarian couples were dancing and it would not be too much to say that they swayed to the music of the marimbas. They were better dancers than one might expect Rotarians to be. Closer to their folk roots than the pale Rotarians of the North, Holliwell thought.

The adjoining bar was almost empty; there were deep plush banquettes and idle waiters. He straightened up, sauntered into the bar and sat down where he could watch the dancers. He was into his second scotch and considering the practical wisdom of ordering something to eat when his waiter inquired whether or not he were Mr. Holliwell.

He was. The waiter brought him a telephone, its signal button flashing silently. Holliwell assumed it must be Oscar — but a wild hope soared in him that it might, by some magic, some mercy of travel, be the Señora Obregón.

“You fuck,” the voice on the line said. “Communist son of a whore. You fuck your mother and you’re going to die in Compostela.”

Holliwell’s eye had been following the undulations of a Compostelan Rotarian rump, encased in beige silk.

“Who is this?” he asked.

The man on the phone did not hang up. Holliwell sat holding the receiver to his ear, frozen before his drink and his little dish of peanuts. The marimbas rose and fell.

“You Communist pig bastard. We shall kill you slowly. You shall die here. Die and long live the nation!”

He put the receiver down and rapidly finished his drink. Another was on the way when Oscar came in smiling and patted him on the shoulder.

“I wish I could have been there,” Oscar said earnestly. “It would have been a great pleasure.”

“Apparently I got through to somebody,” Holliwell said. “My life’s just been threatened. Just now. Over this telephone.”

Oscar looked at him. “You’re very white.” He walked down the bar to where the phone had been set and dialed the operator. He was asking if the call for Mr. Holliwell had been directed to the bar and whether it had come from outside the hotel.

“I don’t think you have to worry, Frank. It came from outside and they called your room. It’s only because of the lecture.”

“It was a really innocuous drunken lecture,” Holliwell said.

“They won’t do anything to you. They can’t harm an American. Everyone knows who they are.”

“It’s extremely unpleasant,” Holliwell said, “to get a call like that.”

“But of course,” Oscar said, “that’s why they do it. It’s more unpleasant to get a bullet in reality. Be grateful you are protected. Be grateful you’re not me.”

Oscar ordered them more to drink.

“Frank, I have to beg a favor of you. I ask you to go to Tecan for me.”

Holliwell leaned his chin on his hand.

“Do a favor for me, Oscar. Don’t get me involved in your games.”

“My games? Whose games, Frank? You know they want you to go. You can do anything you like down there. You can warn these Catholics about their situation, you can conspire with them, make them a donation — who cares? Only go and be seen and this resounds to my credit. You see,” Oscar explained, “it’s someone’s idea. That’s what makes it important.”

“You’re talking nonsense.”

“Yes,” Ocampo said. “Nonsense. Ridiculous. They are ridiculous and I am ridiculous. But that’s how it goes. Someone has an idea, Frank, and that someone has to have his way all down the line.” He moved closer to Holliwell with one of his opaque Indian smiles. “There are just a few steps, understand? You go. You are seen to go. You get home and someone asks you what you saw and you can tell them Russian submarines or you can tell them the heavenly chorus — it doesn’t matter. Yes, it’s ridiculous but these people control my life. I get the credit if you go.”

“I’m afraid,” Holliwell said, “that you’re deluded.”

“I assure you,” Ocampo told him, holding the strange smile, “that I’m not.”

“I mean that literally,” Holliwell said.

He had clutched for a moment on the notion that Oscar Ocampo was now insane. But there was Marty Nolan. And Tom. And Marie, the social worker type.

“There are delusions, Frank, but not mine. Believe me when I tell you my life is in danger. You risk nothing but I have to get out of here. And I have Patrick. And they can get me a job in the States.”

“No, they can’t.” He was trying almost desperately to sober. Very deliberately he pushed the drink in front of him toward the bar and closed his eyes for a moment. “They can’t do that anymore.”

Oscar spoke to him in a low voice, the smile closing.

“I see more clearly than you. I beg you.”

Holliwell took Tom Zecca’s card from his pocket and held it flat against the bar where Oscar could see it. With all the concentration he could summon he tried to read Oscar’s expression as Ocampo looked down at the card.

“Who is this? Do you know the man? Have you heard of him?”

Oscar read the card, looked away and shrugged.

“Never. I don’t go down there. I have no idea who he is.”

“What if I tell you that he came to my lecture and that he offered me a ride to Tecan tomorrow?”

Ocampo was confused, plainly; he looked unhappy.

“I don’t know what to say. Maybe they do everything by multiplicity. You know? Maybe everything is multiple.” He was silent for a moment. “Clearly, if you go — I want it known it was for me. But maybe it’s coincidence, no? There is still coincidence, is there not?”

“Maybe there isn’t,” Holliwell said. “Maybe we’ve located ourselves beyond coincidence. You see more clearly, Oscar — you tell me.”

Ocampo did not answer him but ordered them both another drink. Holliwell declined. As Oscar’s drink came, the bar telephone began to flash again and they both watched it.

“Señor Holliwell?” the waiter called out over the music. They shook their heads; Oscar held up his hand in a gesture of refusal. The waiter, who had brought the phone, looked at them both and then walked off with it, saying something into the receiver.

“It’s not bad they think you’re a leftist. In reality it’s safe.”

“You don’t know what you’re doing, do you, Oscar?”

“Yes, Frank. What I’m told. To escape.”

“Some lecture you got me,” Holliwell said after a moment. “Who in hell were those turkeys?”

“Turkeys?” Oscar asked. “Pavos? Well, usually it’s the same faces. People with little to do.”

“But these days,” Holliwell said, “it would seem that everyone has something to do.”

Ocampo drank.

“There was a woman there who was very beautiful indeed and her name was Mariaclara Obregón. Back there in the happy realm of coincidence. I imagined that you might introduce us further.”

Oscar smiled and nodded.

“Mariaclara. The most beautiful and intelligent. Our Minister of Social Services. This is progressive no? A woman, beautiful?”

“Well,” Holliwell said, “that was then.”

“In my present circumstances,” Oscar told him, “there is nothing I wouldn’t do for you, Frank. In any circumstances, truly. But Mariaclara — you have to take my word because I know — unavailable. Committed. Without hope.”

“It doesn’t matter now.”

“All the same,” Oscar said dreamily, “we’re all whores here. Because of you. I mean, of course,” he explained, “because of the U.S.”

“That’s your story.” It was an old taunt of Holliwell’s. Meaningless now.

“It’s too bad, eh, Frank?” Ocampo took his thought. “We no longer can argue.”

The drink was closing in on Holliwell again. He took the bar with both hands to fight it off.

“All right. What about Nicolay? Who’s Nicolay?”

“Ah, Nicolay,” Oscar cried. He laughed with such contempt that it was almost affectionate. “Nicolay is just a …” He shook his head to find the word. “Just a turkey.”

When Pablo returned to the Paris Bar, the Callahans were nowhere in sight. Cecil, still working the bar, paid him no attention. He sat down on a stool, his eyes fixed on Cecil’s round bland face, working himself into a tight-lipped exaltation of rage.

“What the fuck, man?” he demanded of Cecil at length.

“Keep you voice down and you damn head on straight,” Cecil said without looking at him. “You been hired.”

“Yeah?” Pablo asked. “No kidding?”

Cecil shook his head at Pablo’s fecklessness.

“No kiddin’. Anythin’ wrong wif dat?”

“Not a thing,” Pablo said.

“Den you and me got no problem, eh? So if I tell you what you gone to do you gone to sit and listen and not sell me no tickets, ain’t dat right?”

Pablo laughed. “Sure, bro.”

“In de mornin’ I gone to have your passport and your gear for you. You take it, you go to de bus terminal and you get de bus to Palmas. Palmas, you understandin’ me?”

“I understand you.”

“Dat bus under way at ten in de mornin’ and you got to be on it because de commander say so and you best do it. Dese people don’ wait on you desires.”

“The thing is — what about tonight?”

“You can sleep up topside here tonight,” Cecil told him. “And you don’t say nothin’ to a soul about your billet or how you come to get it. When I give you you gear you pay me twenny dola.”

“I thought I paid you, Cecil.”

“Eh, I don’ wan’ you tickets, mon,” Cecil said. “I ’splain dat one time. Dis here is trouble. I be goin’ to trouble on you behalf. Natural ting is you pay me for it.”

“You’re the only game in town, ain’t you, Cecil?”

“Precisamente, mon.”

Pablo went out and found another bar and watched darkness fall over the piers. With the quick failing of light, the place filled with banana loaders. Feeling crowded out, Pablo went to sit in the park beside the navy building where he had spent part of his afternoon. The stations of the afternoon birds in the ceiba trees were taken up by the birds of night.

Gypsy, Pablo thought. Gypsy mongrel like my mother. He could remember very clearly his morning walk with the dogs in the brake outside of town and the cold inside him when he shot them down. Then the sun on the scaled skin of the trailer going home.

His line was playing out; there was poison in his blood. For the sake of the little boy it was better that he not be there. Better that the woman abuse him with her damned unconsciousness, leave him without clothes, leave him to ratburgers and television all night, than that Pablo be there to bring the curse down, bring the knowledge of bad blood, bring murder.

From the naval barracks there sounded a bugle call, and the sentries at the gate were relieved with a halfhearted precision that would have given the loosest Coast Guard admiral a case of the chokes. Pablo thought the bugle call was the saddest sound he had ever heard.

Son of a whore. The words made him tremble and he repeated them to himself with a fascination that chilled his blood. Pablo, son of a whore. Hijo de puta. Pablo. Sometimes it seemed that was the world’s whole message to him — that was all it ever told him. He could catch it in every roll of laughter and see its meaning framed in the mildest eyes.

Let one of these half-nigger gibrones try it on me, he thought in a sudden rage. Let one.

Let one and the strange metal figure would form under his hide and death be.

He looked around the darkened park in alarm; he had not checked it out when he sat down. There were a few rummies settled with their bottles on the guano-dappled benches. Two of them were watching him. He smiled at them. The smile seemed serene. Try it, scumbag, was what the smile said. Whatever you got, try it and see.

Son of a whore. Even my fucking dogs know it, he thought, and suddenly, absurdly, he was mourning his dogs, numb with grief, and in a moment he was crying for his son, smiling at the two rummies, waiting for a move. Try it and see. The two rummies stood up and wandered toward the pierside.

Pablo, son of a whore himself, now father to another one.

Well, Pablo thought, maybe he won’t know it or maybe he won’t care, he won’t think that way. Maybe the world will be different then. But it won’t, he thought, it won’t ever be except the way it is with people fucking you over and putting their handles on you to turn you around by. Mex mestizo mulatto nigger spic. Malinche. “Tell me, brudduh, you a black or a white mon?” Gypsy mongrel. Son of a whore.

Now, why, Jesus, Pablo asked from his bench in the Parco de los Heroes de la Marina, Puerta Vizcaya, Compostela — why in the fucking fire do you run it this way? In need of quietude now — the hard-bought speed rattling in his skull — he walked the half block to a tienda, bought a bottle of Flor de Cana and returned to the darkness of his bench. Brown-bagging it, only in this fucking country they didn’t give you no bag.

He drank his rum and watched the running lights on the little draggers that ran beyond the breakwater, and the freighters, lit like pinball machines along the wharves. The naval sentries before the gate of the naval barracks paid no attention to him.

What if the world got different? If it was different it wouldn’t have me in it, I’m nothing anybody wants and that’s for sure. I damn sure ain’t anything I want, he thought, so what the hell is the use of me? No use at all.

Unless maybe. He reached into his pocket and bit a piece off the little yellow pill; he was drunk enough, it seemed to him, for it not to send him spinning through the impending night in a state of whacked-out hyperanimation. Unless maybe something comes along. And he began to dream of a sunup when something had come along and the world was different and he was in it after all. There would be a great summoning of powers and dominations; Pablo himself would be a power and a domination, a principality, a mellow dude. Big easy Pablo, the man of power. It was a warm happy vision but it went funny on him as such things often did. For the first time in a while, however, he was not angry.

He stood up, waved to the sentries and marched with his bottle straight into the Paris Bar. Cecil looked unhappy with him. But the wariness, the genuine caution with which Cecil watched him sit down was pleasing. At the far end of the bar, a drunken man was playing a tape recorder he had somehow acquired.

“Chinga,” the drunken man said into his recorder and pressed the replay button. “Chinga,” the machine replied.

“Maravillosa!” cried the drunken man.

Pablo laughed and the man laughed back, unthreatening, unafraid. A happy thief.

“Hey, that’s good,” Pablo said. “You teach him how to work that, Cecil?”

Cecil only looked vexedly at him.

“Hey, Cecil,” Pablo said, “I want to ask you something, man. Promise you won’t get pissed?”

Cecil took the cigarette he was smoking out of his mouth and set it in an ashtray. He raised his boxer’s jaw toward Pablo.

“What do you think is the use of me?” Pablo asked.

For a long time Cecil stared at him, then slowly his shoulders sagged and a smile spread across his wide scarred face that lit it from chin to hairline.

“De use of you?” Cecil asked, incredulous.

“Yeah, man. What do you think the use of me is?”

Cecil, in a moment, was wary again but his smile held.

“You mean to me, brudduh?”

“No, no,” Pablo said. “The use — you know. The use of me.”

“Well now …” Cecil began. A throb of laughter trembled in his throat. “Dat be hard to say, you know.”

“Cecil, I’m the first fucker in the world knows that. But right off … what would you say the use of me was?”

“Oh, you just drunk,” Cecil declared. But he could not control himself. “De use … imagine askin me dat? De use … de use of you?” He slapped the bar and gave a quiet whoop.

Pablo shrugged and drank from his bottle. Reassured, Cecil brought him a glass. They poured one out for Pablo, one for the bartender, one for the thief with the tape recorder.

“De use of you, mon? Same as everbody. Put one foot to front of de other. Match de dolluh wif de day.”

“That’s all?”

“Sure dat’s all. Good times, hard times. Mos’ certainly dat’s all.”

“Don’t you think everybody got some special purpose?”

“Hey,” Cecil demanded, “what I look like — a preacher, mon? Purpose of you and me to be buried in de ground and das hard enough to do. Be buried in de sweet ground and not in dat ocean.” They drank their rum together.

“Dreamin’ be de ruin of you, sailor. Be de ruin. Old chap, you too young to be worryin’ after dose tings. Be burnin’ out your mind.”

“It is burning,” Pablo said. “Burning out.”

“Go to sleep, Pablo,” Cecil said, not unkindly. He handed Pablo a key across the bar. “Go upstairs and sleep it off, mon.”

Pablo took the key, surprised that Cecil did not charge him further for it. As he went up the narrow stairs, he heard Cecil in a low voice explaining to the thief in Spanish what it was that Pablo had asked him. The thief giggled.

“Y yo?” the thief asked after a moment. “Para que sirvo? What about me?”

As Pablo was prowling the rat-infested darkness over the bar, a door opened and a girl in a tight blue dress looked at him from her lighted doorway. There was a little statue of the Niño de Praha on a dresser beside her. Pablo stumbled toward her, then, mindful of his wallet, turned away.

“It’s a Walt fucking Disney true life adventure, sweetheart,” he told her. “That’s all it is.”

The mission’s mail that morning was wedged to the rail at the bottom of the steps leading up to the veranda. From the top step, Justin could see that among it was a letter with a Canadian stamp — for Egan from his nonagenarian mother, and the monthly newsletter of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. This door delivery service was something new; until a month or so before it had been necessary to drive to Puerto Alvarado for mail. Justin suspected that the extension of postal convenience did not indicate any advance in the state services of the Republic, but rather that the Guardia, probably in the person of Lieutenant Campos, was opening and reading, however imperfectly, their mail.

Out beyond the road and the narrow beach, the ocean had assumed its winter’s morning contour — it was pale and flat, mild-seeming, without affect. Within two months, the spring winds would be up and there would be storms and rain. The days might be easier to get through.

It had been weeks since she had heard from Godoy. On the rare occasions when they met, they exchanged polite, ecclesiastical greetings. This might be sound strategy — but Justin, who was as prudent and sensible as anyone, found it wounding and frustrating. And there was no work at the mission. No one came. No one. They were not needed.

She went listlessly down the steps and gathered up the mail. In addition to the letter from Egan’s mother and Fellowship she found a second one for him, from the Devotionist provincial in New Orleans. There was also one for her, in a yellow flower print envelope, from her sister. The tab seal on the magazine was broken; all the letters had been opened and resealed with wads of soiled Scotch tape.

Back upstairs, she sat down in a wicker chair with the mail in her lap and leafed through it again. The clumsiness of the resealing, the absurdity of the dirty tape made her shake her head in contempt.

You bastard, she thought, enlarge your lousy life. Egan’s ancient mother, my worn-down sister — they have no secrets from you. But the provincial’s letter might be another matter.

The letter columns of Fellowship were filled with a controversy over whether or not the antiwar movement in the States should use its supposed influence with the Provisional Government in Saigon to implore a degree of clemency for the new regime’s enemies. The An Quang pagoda had been closed. Justin put the magazine aside. Her long tanned fingers, clipped and scrubbed, tore the wads of tape from Veronica’s daisy-patterned envelope and she lifted out the letter inside, handwritten on personalized stationery in the same design. The letters from Veronica arrived, or at least went forth, about once every two months. Often when pictures had been enclosed, the letters arrived with the pictures removed. During her best years there, Veronica’s letters had sometimes made her feel like crying for the two of them; on this particular morning she was certain that she would never get through the three daisy-dappled sheets without coming apart. But she read.

Veronica had at last joined the Purple Sage Cowbelles. She was not the only Catholic woman in the Cowbelles — there were two Basque ladies who went to the same church, Our Lady of Mercy in Tatum, eighty miles away. Veronica drove the children there and back each Sunday morning. The stock were, for the most part, healthy and thriving in their winter pasture. But the coyote problem was bad, their population had increased and with calving time coming up the darn things would be a menace. Morton had shot eight of them one day, contrary to federal law, but they were prowling the edges of the spread as though they knew that calves were soon due. She herself had shot a few.

The winter was fairly mild, with the temperature above zero most of the day and fairly little snow. Down south, the ski resorts were hurting and the summer pasture might be drier than it should be. But the sunny days made you gay instead of gloomy; she and the younger children had done some Nordic skiing and Morton and the boys were enjoying their snowmobiles.

The library in Arrow had spent the last of its budget getting its collection of Star Trek books up to date — it was enough to make you scream the way that library wasted its funds on trash books and detective stories and the blandest best sellers. Their collection of Dickens was falling to pieces, they had no Stendhal, not a single Thomas Hardy, no Thomas Wolfe, no F. Scott Fitzgerald and Joyce, forget it. There was nothing worthwhile for the kids to read, to cut their teeth on in a literary way. The kids watched crap on television, and it was really crap too.

The trouble with the library, Veronica said, was partly old Mrs. Rand’s ignorance and partly the blessed Mormons and their vigilant censorship. As if the television wasn’t bad enough, they used their influence in Boise to force the really interesting network shows off the local stations. Justin could be sure they weren’t waning in power in that part of the country; still they weren’t as bad arid as bigoted as they’d been in the old days, in their parents’ days. And even if everything that people said about Catholics were really true about the Mormons, it shouldn’t be forgotten that they had their good points, that there were plenty of fine decent people among them, no one should ever call them hypocrites, though some did.

Like most of the Gentiles in Idaho, Veronica was forever damning the Mormons with one breath and commending their rectitude with the next. Justin herself had not been so even-handed. It had been her habit at home to refer to the tablets presented to Joseph Smith by the angel Moroni as the Moronic tablets; in her junior year of high school a girl named Ada Bengstrom had had the wit to punch her in the mouth for saying it once too often. Ada Bengstrom, Justin reflected, was Veronica’s nearest neighbor now. Her name was Ada Parsons and she belonged to the Purple Sage Cowbelles.

When the stock were in summer pasture, if they took on help, Veronica hoped she might get Morton to take two weeks off and they might go to New York, which she loved — if not there then to Palm Springs, where they had spent their honeymoon, or even to Maui, where she had always dreamed of going.

It had been two years since Justin had seen her sister — during the last trip home. And Veronica had looked lovely with her tanned country face and her horsewoman’s slow grace and an expression of such despair in her light eyes that Justin could hardly speak to her without stammering. It was self-pity really, Justin thought, that made Veronica’s letters so oppress her. The forlornness she read into her sister’s life was as much her own.

Of the two of them perhaps Veronica was the plainer, the less ambitious, certainly the less arrogant. But it was she who had more knowledge of the world, at least in its North American manifestation.

She had worked in New York, as a publisher’s reader after college; she had spent three years working for a community newspaper in Los Angeles. But she was back home now — a rancher’s wife with too many kids, married to a good-natured incipiently alcoholic Finn whom she pestered toward Catholicism. Arrow’s own culture vulture who would drive most of the night to see a dance company, drive as far as Salt Lake for the national company of an O’Neill or a Chekhov play or a touring opera.

She could, Justin thought, indulging her own fantasies, have got herself a newspaperman. Or even a doctor, some kind of professional capable of conversation beyond cursing out the posy pickers in the Sierra Club or the price of feed.

Little enough she herself knew about that kind of thing. On one of the visits home, when Justin had been lecturing — handing out threadbare pastoral advice and textbook family counseling — Veronica had turned on her. “Christ, I wish I knew as little about it as you do,” Veronica had said.

Justin put the letter aside.

And what did either of them know and where had it gotten them? The promising, brainy Feeney sisters — May now called Justin playing Sister of Mercy in the crocodile isles and Veronica playing Carol Kennicott in Arrow, pop. 380.

Before her, the ocean rolled lightly against white sand, the plantain leaves hung still. The inaction after such elation, the delay, most of all Godoy’s intrusion into and subsequent disappearance from her life weighed her down. How stupid it was, she thought, how adolescent and egotistical to invest such promise in a single man when the suffering of Tecan had been before her so long and she had done nothing but simmer in indignation and go by the book: But she was lonely too, on one level it was as simple as that, she needed a friend, a guide. The blank soulless world she had confronted at twenty lay again before her like the limitless unmoving sea; she would have to reconcile herself to it again, as she had then, to find in it meaning and self-transcendence, to make the leap of faith. Again.

There had been child murders along the coast, cruel and gruesome. Local children called the undetected killer The Bad Monkey and that was what the cries of “mono malo” were about. Someone was killing children. She was alone, the sun rose and set over the ocean. She picked up Egan’s mail and went inside to his quarters.

You can go along for years, she thought, walking dreamily across the kitchen toward Father Egan’s door, and you think you’re there — then sooner or later you realize you’ve got to make the jump. And this one — toward man or history, the future — call it whatever — was harder for her. She accepted the revolution, she had for years — but she was critical, arrogant, better at the forms of humility than the substance, not so good a lover of her neighbor as herself. So there it was at her feet, another death-defying leap.

For a moment, at Egan’s door, she thought about death and the defying of it. What was death, she wondered, and what did it mean to her? A proper essay for the novitiate, a nunnish reflection.

She rapped lightly on Father Egan’s door several times, then slowly pushed it open. Egan was sprawled across his cot, still dressed in his khaki work shirt and tan trousers, his Detroit Tigers cap on his head, the laced work boots on his feet.

Justin went toward his unconscious figure, slowed by dread. He’s dead, she thought. He’s really died. “Father?”

She stood over him looking for signs of life and after a moment she understood that he was breathing; she could see the slow heaving of his shoulders and hear the irregular wheeze of his exhalations against the mattress. His hands as well as his boots were soiled with black earth.

“Father Egan? Charles?”

She put her hand against his damp shoulder and shook him. Very slowly he raised his head from the mattress, even more slowly turned and looked at her with utter incomprehension.

“Are you all right?” she asked him.

“Might I,” he asked, “have a paper?”

“A paper?” Justin asked in astonishment.

Egan had begun a cetaceous wallowing to right himself. Justin noticed that his pills were at his bedside and that the Flor de Cana bottle stood on his desk.

“You can’t mix those,” Justin pointed out to him. “You’ll kill yourself.”

Father Egan managed to place his feet on the floor and sat with his arms folded, head down.

“I can’t do anything about a paper,” Justin told him. “But I can point out that we have a shower. And that there’s a change of clothes available.”

“Shut up,” Egan said sourly. “Just … shut up, Justin. There’s a good girl.”

She walked to the far end of the room and considered him.

“Did you mix those pills and rum?”

“No,” Egan said. “Don’t worry about it.”

“You were out last night. Where on earth were you?”

The puzzled look on his face frightened her.

“Oh, yes,” he said presently. “Yes.”

“Well,” Justin said, “may one ask where?”

“You wouldn’t understand,” Egan said.

Grim suspicions assailed her. Just how crazy is he? she wondered to herself.

“I might,” she said. “Try me.”

“I was out at the ruins.”

Justin watched him, holding her position at the farthest extremity of his cluttered room. “But why?”

“I can’t tell you that. Under the seal.”

Justin went out and put some coffee on for him. He preferred the Irish tea that sometimes came from home but that morning there was none available. When the coffee was ready she carried the pot and one cup on a tray to his quarters. Egan was still sitting on the cot, staring at the scrubbed wooden floor. She poured him out a cup of the thick native coffee.

“There’s fruit in the kitchen,” she said. “And there’s mail.” In her fright at his condition she had set the letters down on his desk. She handed them over. “We’ve got Fellowship if you want to look at it. There’s a letter for you. And we’ve got a flash from the provincial.”

Egan took his mother’s letter and set it beside him.

“It’s all been opened,” Justin told him. “Whether by Campos or by someone higher I’ve no idea.”

The priest shrugged and began to remove his stained shirt.

“What does the letter from the provincial say?”

As she was opening it, he stood up and began undoing his belt buckle. “Oh, hell, tell me later. I’ve got to clean up and get to work. Answer it in whatever manner you feel’s appropriate and I’ll sign it.”

While Father Egan carried on with his undressing, Justin went outside and read their letter from the Very Reverend Matthew J. Greene, to whose directives she and Charlie Egan were bound by sacred vow.

Monsignor Greene’s letter finally and unequivocally closed the mission. It contained airline ticket vouchers and orders for them to report, prior to the twentieth of February, to the Devotionist House of St. Peter Martyr in Metairie, Louisiana. They would have been informed by the mission country’s ecclesiastical authorities, the letter went on to say, that an intervenor had been appointed by the bishop of the diocese to take charge of the mission house grounds and supplies, and to supervise the property’s transfer to the Millimar Corporation of Boston, the parent company of International Fruit and Vegetable, to whose control it now reverted. They were reminded that funds to cover the last quarter of the mission’s expenses had been disbursed and that no further funds would be forthcoming.

“There is no reply to this one, Charles,” Justin said in the empty slatted hallway. Egan was in the shower. “This is the one.”

In fact, no one among the church authorities in Tecan had informed them of anything, nor had International Fruit, which had a large district office in Puerto Alvarado. It meant, Justin thought, either that the local diocese was simply proceeding in the Tecanecan style or that someone in the hierarchy was delaying the operation for unfathomable reasons.

As for IF&V, they must be simply waiting; in spite of rumors that Millimar was planning Tecan’s first Florida-style resort at French Harbor, they seemed content to let the church sort out its minor schisms before taking over. Eventually, of course, they could go to the government — the President was by way of being a junior partner in the firm — if they saw the need for any dispatch. Things worked better in Tecan if you were IF&V.

When she went back into Egan’s quarters the priest had changed and, red-eyed, was gathering up his books.

“You can read it, Charles. It’s a final notice. We’re not replying.”

“Fine,” Egan said. He picked up the provincial’s letter, wadded it and threw it in his wastepaper basket.

“Our ticket vouchers have arrived.”

“Really?” Father Egan asked. “They’ve sent us tickets before. They must have forgotten. That’s the profligacy that goes with being tax-free. So now we’ve each got two tickets. If we hold out down here long enough maybe they’ll send more and we’ll take our entire flock to New Orleans with us.”

“We don’t have a flock anymore, Charles. Haven’t you noticed?”

“I have a flock,” Father Egan said.

“And the order’s dissolving. Tax-free or not, they’re really broke.”

Egan looked at her blankly. “I can hit Hughie up for a thousand dollars U.S. God knows whether it’ll get here and how long it will take.” Hughie was his younger brother, a former Devotionist seminarian, now a liquor wholesaler in Seattle. “But it’ll be the last grand I get from him.”

“Do it then,” Justin said.

“Personally I’m prepared to move to a hotel in town. Or I might try to trade those vouchers in and buy myself a little house inland. Don’t stay on my account, dear.”

“It’s not on your account, Father Egan.”

So it could go on awhile she thought. And they might yet be needed.

“What’s your citizenship?” she asked Egan, possessed of a sudden thought. “It’s U.S., isn’t it?”

“It’s U.S. For over thirty years. Since just before Pearl Harbor.”

“Right,” Justin said.

Just at the door, she stopped.

“You know what’s funny?” she said. “The rest of the team — I hardly remember any of them. I mean Mary Margaret Donahue was here for five years and I can’t remember what she looked like. Don’t you think that’s strange?”

“Yes,” Egan said. “But it’s like you. Myself — I remember them all. I don’t forget people.”

He began to type as she went out; she walked to the veranda and commenced pacing its length. The idleness was destroying her, she thought. Egan at least had his imaginary endless book; she had nothing. As she paced, she kept watch for the fish seller and for Epifanía to come with her basket to do the laundry. The laundry, especially Egan’s, was a rotten job, yet she half hoped that Epifanía would stay away like the rest, so that she herself would have labor for the afternoon. But if Epifanía too failed to come, their situation would be even more grotesque. Pathetic as it was to have in the visits of a washing woman a last hold on duty and reason, if Epifanía and the fisherman stopped coming the place would be utterly shut off from the community of French Harbor, completely without intercourse, pastoral, social and even commercial. As though, she thought bitterly, they were there to buy fish and have their laundry done.

Then she thought she saw Epifanía walking along the beach road and even while she wondered why Epifanía was without her basket, she saw that it was not Epifanía at all, not a black offshore-island woman at all — but Father Schleicher’s friend, the community-planning trainee from Loyola, barefoot, her hair in braids and wearing a bright print dress. Almost, Justin thought, in disguise. She went down the steps and stood in the road until the woman came up to her.

“You look lovely,” Justin said. She did not try to smile. “Out for a walk?”

“To see you,” the girl said. She looked at Justin gravely, though she seemed to be mastering excitement. “I bring you a message from Xavier Godoy.”

Justin’s heart turned over.

“He says you must be ready for an action.”

And will I see him? she wanted to ask. But she asked simply: “What do we have to do?”

“You must have a place ready for men to go if they are hurt. Where they can hide until we get them out.”

“We have,” Justin said. “But there’ll be a risk if the place is really searched thoroughly.”

“We think it won’t be. Not everywhere.”

“Then,” Justin told her, “we have such a place.”

“We have to know if you have antibiotics and dressings. Also whether you yourself can treat the wounds of bullets.”

Justin pursed her lips to keep from trembling.

“We have all the medical equipment we need. I can treat a bullet wound — I can extract a bullet if the wound’s fairly superficial. I’ve done it. But I’m not a surgeon. With really deep bad wounds all I can do is try and stop the bleeding and the pain.”

The Tecanecan girl listened with her eyes closed. They were both visibly trembling now.

“At what time can I expect business?” Justin asked.

The girl shook her head quickly. “We here don’t know. We’ll be told.”

“O.K.,” Justin said.

“What about the old Father Egan? Will there be trouble because of him?”

“He’s ill,” Justin said. “And he’s not a bad man. He won’t be trouble, you can depend on that.”

“Well,” the girl said, “that’s it then.”

That’s it then, Justin thought. At last.

“Will I see Xavier?”

The young Tecanecan drew herself up at Justin’s naked breathless question. But suddenly she was smiling, a soft and kind smile.

“Maybe you will see him. I don’t know. Who can know in these things?”

“Of course,” Justin said, smiling back. And they were holding each other’s hands.

“But you mustn’t say anything to anyone. I know you understand that.”

“Good glory, yes.”

“Then good luck.”

“Good luck to you. And to those who fight.”

“To all of us,” the girl said. “To our Tecan.”

They embraced quickly, and the girl with a little curtsy that might have been nervousness or upbringing or a show for onlookers hurried along the sandy road toward town.

Justin ran up the steps and leaned panting in the doorway. She looked at her watch — it was nearly eleven. There was plenty of time — there was too much. If the fisherman failed to come she could drive into Puerto Alvarado and buy groceries from the Syrian, enough for extra mouths if necessary but not so much as to arouse suspicion.

When the prospect of the long afternoon’s waiting began to oppress her she remembered the laundry. Thank God for it! If Epifanía came she would give her some money and send her away.

Without a word, she gathered up the scattered dirty clothes from Egan’s rooom, then fetched her own laundry bag and set the load down by the kitchen sink. There was no need to tell Egan now; it was best that, if there were people to treat, he should know at the last minute. There was always the chance, she reminded herself, that Godoy would not come, that she would not see him, that she would have to handle it all herself. It would be all right.

As she watched her scrub bucket fill with well water from the tap old prayers came to her mind. Justin drove them out, sorting the wash, lighting the stove.

You don’t pray to that God, she thought, that God of meaningless battles, of unconsoled poverty and petty injunctions. Perhaps Egan was right when he said that they had it wrong — wrongly written down. It was superior and uncharitable of her to be such bad company, to ignore him so. Perhaps his thinking was closer to hers than she imagined.

When the bucket was full, she went off to look for soap.

So, she thought, let God be in those children on their carousel, in Godoy, in these people proud and starving. Because if not there, then where would He be and to what purpose and what would it matter?

She put the steel bucket on the stove and opened a fresh white bar of soap.

A violent red sunrise assaulted Holliwell’s eyes as he awakened. He had not drawn the curtains and his room was bathed in its light — the tiles of the floor, the dressing-table mirror, the sheets of his bed stained a color like blood and water. Outside, the sun was rising into smoky rain cloud over Misericordia, the eastward peak. He eased his feet onto the tiles. It was the dry season, he thought. The rain clouds had no business in that sky.

During the night, there had been three calls, each promising him a painful death forthwith. Each time it had been a different voice, once it had been a woman’s. He had not neglected to call the switchboard before collapsing into bed; he had asked them not to put calls through. But the calls had come.

He stood up and in the next moment he was sick, on his knees over the toilet fixture, gripping the sleek rounded edges of it — his body running sweat, his hair plastered to his skull in the faint breeze of the bathroom ventilator. For a few moments he thought he would die there.

Presently, however, he was upright; he showered and brushed his teeth. As he cleaned up, the events of the previous night came back to him in small paroxysms, each jab of memory occasioning him a minor convulsion.

The red glow had not softened when, wrapped in a towel, he went back into his bedroom. He walked to the window and saw the sun higher but still fixed in its prism of rain cloud and smoke from Santiago. Its broken light dyed the still surface of the pool below, was reflected on the waxy surface of the leaves of the trees along the hotel’s wall and on the whitewashed walls of the city beyond them. Blood red were the tin roofs of the shacks on the lower slopes, the chrome and windshields of the cars on the highway that led to the airport. He drew the curtains, dressed, and pouring himself a drink, drank the straight scotch in cautious sips until it was down and easing him.

His watch read seven-thirty, local time; the daily plane for Miami left at eleven. He spent the next hour and a half in chill combat with the switchboard until he had determined that there was no one at Aerochac to take a reservation. Between calls he drank and paced the floor, smoking his duty-free Kents one after another. The flights were almost always filled the day before departure, and as for standbys — there were always enough people crowding the Aerochac desk at the earliest possible hour, ready to slip some clerk a five for such cancellations as might occur. If he had troubled to make the reservation the day before there would have been no difficulty, he could even have done it through the hotel. But he had not planned to leave so soon.

More and more frequently as he paced his curtained room, the thought of calling Tom Zecca came to him. With the thought came the recollection of a poem he had once heard read, about a mouse so frightened it went to the cat for love. But he was not a mouse — he had always been good at taking care of himself. He was neither a coward nor a small animal. The fact was that in spite of what he might tell himself or others, he simply did not have enough direct knowledge of present conditions in Compostela to be able to interpret the degree of danger his threatening calls represented. There had been killings, there was no question of that. And he no longer trusted Oscar Ocampo enough to accept his reassurances.

His confidence rose and fell irrationally. He became drunker. Shortly before ten he made contact with Aerochac — there was nothing. Standbys? Standbys were being turned away.

If at sunrise, he thought, he had summoned the presence of mind to go straight to the airport he could probably have bought someone’s seat from under them. It was too late for that now. Grimly, he made a reservation for the following day.

It was not going to be a pleasant twenty-four hours. There would be more calls. He would be confined to the hotel, messengers of death would pursue him through its grounds. Oscar would importune him.

Soothed by the whiskey, he thought further of the ride to Tecan. He put the card with Tom Zecca’s number on it beside the phone. It was almost ten-thirty; if he did anything, it must be soon.

He knew shortly that he would go to Tecan. There was every reason for it now. He could not face flying home as he was, to the safety of white winter, terrorized, more crippled than when he had come. He had business down there. On the coast near Puerto Alvarado were things to be seen that it was his business to see, his secret business, the business of his dry spirit. He refused to be frightened away.

Of course, there were the islands just offshore, and the ocean. And he had never driven the stretch of Pan-American Highway between Santiago de Compostela and San Ysidro.

Holliwell finished the drink in his glass and went to the telephone. It’s what you want, he told himself. Don’t obsess over it. Do it.

Marie answered. She sounded pleased enough. It would be fine. Finer still since he had only one bag. Plenty of room.

Holliwell hung up, a little stunned at what he had set about. They would call for him at the hotel at twelve-thirty. There was only time to pack, check out — and go.

When the Zeccas’ car pulled up, he was on the street side of the hotel wall having his shoes shined by a feral twelve-year-old. He leaned against the oily stone, regardless of his best dark shirt, his suitcase behind the heel of his disengaged foot, a Saigon reflex, a half measure against snatchers. The boy was whispering to himself, working over Holliwell’s second shoe with elaborate snaps and flourishes of his cloth.

The Zeccas waved and smiled and left their engine running. There was a balding young man in the back seat. His expression was amiable.

After an unconscionable amount of time the boy proffered up to Holliwell his shined shoes with a deferential smile.

There were sores on the boy’s gums.

Holliwell felt around in his pocket and came up with what proved to his embarrassment to be a U.S. dollar. He handed it over. The shoeshine boy took the dollar and looked quickly up and down the street. His sunken little chest expanded in triumph; he gave Holliwell a smirk of contempt, picked up his box and fled. Two older city Indian boys were advancing on him along the tree-lined avenue, racing barefoot under the palms of the traffic island to cut off his retreat. One of them held a screw-driver handle up in his fist. The blade would be sharpened to a cutting point.

“What did you give him?” the amiable-looking young man in the back seat asked Holliwell, as he climbed in the car with his suitcase. “What’d you give him — a buck?”

“It was all I had,” Holliwell said. “Forgot to get change.”

“Good for him,” Marie Zecca said. “He had a good spot there.”

Tom was watching the pursuit in his rearview mirror. Clutching his box, the smaller boy had turned the corner but the other two were gaining fast.

“Good for him if he gets to keep it.”

They drove toward the Old City, where the Avenida Central broke up its act, rounding the seventeenth-century cathedral and dissipating, delta-like, into the back streets of the market. Indians in straw sombreros with marital knots in the band carried loads of cured hide, squat women in white carried fresh-killed turkeys or stacks of cheap hammocks to sell in front of hotels like the Panamerican. With the hand of experience, Tom Zecca guided his gold-colored Honda through the crowds, past the Salvadorean chorizo stands and the shops selling tail pipes and stolen hubcaps and dried beans.

“Kind of reminds you of market day in Danang,” he said.

The blond young man in the back seat beside Holliwell was named Bob Cole; he sat rigid, staring out at the market streets. He was pale and overweight in an unwholesome way; his teeth were crooked and yellow from smoking. Holliwell sensed a peculiar tension in his frame; Cole held his hands clutched against his knees and the khaki cloth around his grip was moist. He seemed somehow atremble. At first, Holliwell thought he had been drinking.

“It’s all the way,” Cole said.

“What do you mean?” Tom Zecca asked him. “You mean it’s all like Danang? You mean after you’ve seen one marketplace you’ve seen them all?”

Cole never looked at him.

“He means the Third World,” Marie said. “The pre-industrial world, right, Bob?”

“Yes,” Cole said.

“When you get too far from Madison, Wisconsin, it gets unsanitary,” Tom Zecca said. “The people get funny-looking and it’s hot.”

“Tom,” Marie said, “stop teasing.”

They passed the reeking meat markets, the third-class bus station with its cluster of dormitory hotels, and followed the rutted streets to an intersection where the road to the banana lands commenced — the back way out of town, through the side which Santiago de Compostela presented to most of its countrymen and subjects. Within a mile or so of the last cluster of hovels the plantations began.

“My grandfather,” Tom Zecca told them, “always said to me — kid, you don’t know how lucky you are you live in America. Back there it’s all shit. You take your hat off and you eat dirt. Here you got it made.”

“He must have been successful,” Cole said.

“He burned his bridges and he was tough. He lived to see his son be Man of the Year. That was in Toledo, see. They have a Man of the Year every year and my old man was Man of the Year twice. He had a real camel’s-hair coat and my grandfather would come up to him when he put it on and rub his fingers on the cuff and shake his head.’ ”

“America,” Marie said, “success — the whole bit. My family was a little like that. Only we didn’t have any Men of the Year in mine.”

“Have you ever gone to Italy?” Holliwell asked.

“Oh sure,” Tom said. “The Bridge of Sighs. Florence. Verona. Marie and I once spent two weeks in Taormina. Well, the old man flipped. Sicily? What the hell you want to go to Sicily for? It’s all strunz there.”

“That means it’s all shit,” Marie explained.

“I suppose I understand how he felt,” Bob Cole said.

“Eh,” Zecca said, in a tone of mock menace. “Watch it.”

After about an hour of the banana trees, they came to a town called La Entrada. There were railroad yards there and the stacks of an industrial complex. The town had a great many shops and a bank with bright wide windows through which one could see decorative plants and fluorescent lights. There were neat stucco houses with chain link fences in front of them; the square had a new church of triangular concrete slats in the North American suburban style and a playing field with basketball courts.

“They got themselves a steel-rolling mill in this town,” Zecca said. “Old Compostela — little by little — it’s coming up in the world.”

“And Tecan,” Marie said, “little by little it’s going down. Or under. This year there’s a banana disease and a coffee disease. They get the worst of the quakes.”

“When new diseases are invented, Tecan gets them first,” Tom said. “And of course they hold fast to the old ones.”

“And of course,” Bob Cole said, “they have our continual attention and assistance.”

No one answered him.

“Are you from Madison?” Holliwell asked Cole after a while.

“No,” the young man said. “Never been there.”

After a few more miles of bananas, Holliwell helped himself to the water jug in the car and went to sleep again.

When he drifted out of his whiskey doze, they were driving a curving road in uplands that might have been Colorado. The hillsides were pine-clad. There were meadows of rich green grass and wild-flowers intersected by fast-rushing streams that ran clear over smooth rock, trout streams they might have been, looking pure enough to drink. The roadside window carried a fragrance of sun-warmed evergreen.

“They must have looked for gold here,” he said dreamily.

The Zeccas turned and looked back at him.

“Welcome back,” Marie said.

Bob Cole was leaning forward in the seat, his face nearly pressed against the window.

“They did,” he told Holliwell. “It was a man called Martínez Trujillo, one of Alvarado’s captains. He used Alvarado’s techniques. He would gather the Indian leaders and give them until dawn on a certain day to produce the weight of his horse and armor in gold. If they didn’t he burned them alive. He never got any, of course, because there isn’t any up here. Never got a nugget but he kept on burning Indians. He burned thousands of them in these mountains.”

“The gold was all down in the swamps where it didn’t belong,” Zecca said. “Under the mud. No one’s ever found gold up here.”

“What became of Martínez Trujillo?” Holliwell asked.

“He burned a few too many Indians,” Cole said, “and he never had them baptized. The friars complained. Martínez Trujillo was a New Christian and the Inquisition got him in the end.”

“And burned him, we hope,” Marie said.

“The histories are vague. He appears and disappears. He was a minor unsuccessful conquistador. Impatient and cruel. Probably just stupid.”

“History is tough on guys like that,” Tom said.

Cole told them that was as it should be.

Cole, Holliwell thought, was a man who respected history. History was always affecting to be moral and to be just.

“Another loser, another prick,” Tom Zecca said. “You ever see the murals at Bonampak? These characters all deserved each other.”

“Well, you can’t really say that,” Cole said.

“What can you really say?” Zecca asked.

“It’s still going on,” Cole said. “The same thing. It’s unresolved.”

“Do you think,” Marie asked, “that the Indians knew where the gold was all the time?”

“Who knows?” Zecca said. “Who knows what they knew?”

A few kilometers further along the highway, they pulled off onto a freshly paved track that curved through the pine forests. A short distance in, a sign beside the track read: “Lago Azul Lodge, Global Fishfinders, Houston, Texas.”

“The bass lake,” Holliwell said. “I’ve heard about it but I’ve never been up here.”

“Well, I’ve done got some beauties out of here,” Tom Zecca said. “Biggest was over twenty pounds. God only knows what the record is.”

“Twice that,” Bob Cole said. “Maybe bigger.”

The paved road began a descent and, rounding a turn, they saw the lake itself, immense and truly blue, girded on the near shore by flame trees and then by sharply rising palisades. There were no boats in sight. Its uncanny blue surface shivered under the faintest of breezes; a flight of black ducks was crossing it at midpoint, flying in a V wedge inches above the shimmering water.

“Good God,” Holliwell said.

After twenty minutes’ descent they pulled into the grounds of the lodge itself; a cluster of neat huts with bamboo lattice windows. Near the lakeside, above a series of piers where aluminum boats were moored with their outboards up, was a large building, open on all sides, with wicker shades curled under its wide winged roof. Its decorative style was tropical-Bavarian and fixed to its walls were the mounted carcasses of outsized largemouths, some of them bigger than sand sharks. On the muddy strand beside the piers a few reed pole boats had been drawn up.

They parked beside the building and climbed out stiffly. The lakeside air was warm, the vegetation about them more tropical. There were palms near the shore and parakeets in the flame trees.

The open-sided building was a restaurant; it had a fireplace with German beer mugs on the mantelpiece above it and more, dozens, of the outlandish stuffed bass.

“Where are the global fishfinders?” Holliwell asked.

“Just be grateful they’re not here,” Tom told him.

They took a table near the lakeside and after a few minutes a black waiter came out to serve them. His English and his air of deference and bonhommie under pressure might have come from Houston with the fishermen.

Bob Cole and the Zeccas had bass. Holliwell called for beer and then for an omelette, which was huge and fishy.

“Everybody know the story of Lago Azul Lodge?” Cole asked them.

Holliwell had not heard it.

“Let’s hear your version,” Zecca said.

“This lake,” Cole said, “used to be called the Lago de los Camaidos. But back in the thirties an American airline bought it and the land around it with the lodge in mind. The airline figured that los Camaidos had too much bad history in it and they wanted their customers to feel more at home. So they named it Lago Azul and they stocked it with largemouths from breeding tanks in Louisiana. As you can see, the largemouths thrived, they grew to enormous proportions. Also they killed every native species in the lake. The Indians who lived by netting the native fish starved, their nets couldn’t hold big bass. A lot of the lake birds — some of them didn’t exist any other place on earth — died out completely because the monster bass ate their young.

“The only problem was that these big bass wouldn’t take a hook. They simply could not be caught on a line. So the tourism angle went by the board. After a while, the airline sold out to Global Fishfinders, who were a bunch of rich Texas doctors, and the Fishfinders developed some kind of Arkansas shiner that the bass would take on a hook. Now they’ll take plugs if they look enough like shiners. Eventually, the Indians learned to spear the bass. Some of the birds survived.”

Cole fell silent. Tom Zecca took up the tale. “So now — every few weeks, a planeload of gringos turns up in Santiago and they bus them out here. They make a few jokes about the country and the people, they go around yelling ‘Sí, señor,’ and ‘Hey, Pedro,’ and they fish. Every night they sit in here and get drunk and talk about the niggers back in Texas compared to the niggers down in here in Compostela. I tell you, this is the Forest Lawn of fishing, a bigger bunch of drunken bigoted assholes than these Fishfinders you couldn’t come across.”

“When we come,” Marie said, “we try very hard to avoid the times they’re around. It’s not much fun then.”

Zecca was watching the birds on the lake. Cole smoked one local cigarette after another.

“Marie had her fanny pinched by a Sun Belt executive type once when we were down here.”

“You should have let it pass,” she said.

“I sent him home in a neck brace to straighten his head out,” Tom told them. “That’s what diplomatic immunity is for.”

After lunch, they trudged back to the Honda and took up positions.

“There are jaguar in these mountains,” Tom said as they drove back to the highway. “Wouldn’t you like to see one of those babies?”

Westward, the land sloped downward, the pine forests thinned and they drove over high desert cut by steep barrancas. Within an hour, the Sierra was behind them, the land sandy and cactus-ridden, picked over by lean cattle and skeletal burros. They passed an occasional burro cart laden with cords of pine wood but there were very few people to be seen. It was an empty desert of a place. In the western distance the slopes of another range rose; these were the mountains along the Pacific coast, fleecy marine cloud hung over them.

They turned south well short of the coastal mountains and came in sight of a town centered on the copper dome of a basilica and surrounded by green irrigated fields.

“That’s Zalteca,” Bob Cole said to Holliwell. “Where you and I get our visas for Tecan.”

“Zalteca de las Palomas,” Tom Zecca said.

Before long they were passing the gates to fincas and little wood and adobe villages.

“This is another place known to sportsmen the world over,” Zecca said. “Here it’s the annual dove shoot.”

“Yes, it’s very big,” Cole said.

“Every year,” Zecca explained, “the doves migrating south pass through this valley. The Global Fishfinder types and similar sportsmen come down to shoot them. And all the villagers outside of town bum down their houses.”

“Why’s that?” Holliwell asked.

“Well,” Zecca said, “it goes like this. We’re out in the brush with our fowling pieces popping away at doves when suddenly this distraught granny appears. We don’t understand a word she says but she’s really upset. She shows us this column of smoke and leads us to a heap of burnt-up shit that she claims was the home of her ancestors. If we try and ignore her she gets whinier and nastier and louder and presently a crowd of locals appears. They’re wearing machetes, they smell of cane juice and they’re looking at us in a most unfriendly manner. So we say — what the hell? We’re all mogul Fishfinders out for a good time, we all own condominiums somewhere, we kick in twenty or thirty bills apiece to buy granny a new spread. Let’s say there’s six or seven of us. The old woman gets a hundred fifty, maybe two hundred. If she’s lucky she can find another bunch of blasting-away gringos and do the same number on them. When the season’s over everybody throws together a new bunch of sticks to live in and has a party.”

“They’ve been doing it so long,” Marie said, “that it’s taken on a religious significance.”

Zecca laughed. “As an anthropologist you should be interested in the cultural layers. A little crude insurance arson. Gringo baiting. Renewal.”

“And the auto-da-fé,” Holliwell said. “Perhaps a subconscious reference to Martínez Trujillo.”

“You could do a paper,” Bob Cole said.

“I could indeed,” Holliwell said. “I’m working on a multi-volume study of mankind called The Aesthetics of Horseshit. I want to beat the sociologists at their own game. I’d happily include a chapter on Zalteca.”

Tom Zecca had begun to sing “Cu cu ru cu cu, paloma.” His wife joined in briefly.

“You don’t sound as though you take much satisfaction in your work,” Bob Cole said.

Ah, Holliwell thought. The representative of history.

“That’s not true at all,” he told Cole. “I’ve been temporarily sidetracked. But I go to bed every night with a profound sense of satisfaction.”

“Really?” Cole asked.

“Oh, yes,” Holliwell said. “I live for my work. Every day is different.”

Cole nodded thoughtfully.

“How about your work,” Holliwell asked. “Are you getting off on it, as we say?”

“Well,” Cole said, “I suppose I’ve been sidetracked too.”

“It’s very hard to fix one’s eye on the Big Picture,” Holliwell said. “Don’t you find that?”

“Yes,” Cole said.

They were driving through the cobbled streets of town. Small boys ran beside their car offering threats and guidance.

The central square was nearly empty under the afternoon sun. A man lay asleep at the foot of a eucalyptus tree with a tray of chewing gum beside him. There were a few wrought-iron park benches that looked as though they might have been imported from Paris a hundred years before by some local philanthropist of means; they were covered with parakeet shit, and mongrel dogs lay asleep beneath them.

Zecca parked his car in a space beside the basilica; the church’s dome was held together with wooden scaffolding. The boys who had been following the car approached across the deserted square in an attitude of movie-hoodlum confidence. Zalteca was used to gringo tourists. Tom Zecca engaged the largest boy to watch over the car.

Walking wearily, they made their way down the street of public notaries and public letter writers to the Tecanecan consulate. After several rings of the outsized doorbell, a teen-aged girl admitted them to a parlor filled with tropical plants and girded by whirring electric fans. In the adjoining room, prosperous-looking children were watching dubbed Yogi Bear cartoons on a color television set.

The consul’s wife appeared after a while; in her tight sheath skirt she had the appearance of an attractive woman turning gradually into a caricature from a Rivera painting. The consul’s wife led them into an office where there were still more fans and a monumental ebony desk with an Olympia typewriter in the middle of it. On the wall behind the desk were a crucifix, a portrait of Tecan’s celebrated President and a tintype of William Walker’s last defeat.

There was some difficulty about the visas for Holliwell and Cole; between the lady’s drawling Tecanecan and the whirring of the fans its nature was obscured to Holliwell’s ear. The difficulty had to do with its being Sunday, with its being siesta, the consul’s absence, the proximity of Lent, the configuration of the planets and the phase of the moon — whatever it was, it got away from him. He stood obstinate and uncomprehending while Cole nodded sympathetically. When the woman, with a melancholy smile, had finished her elimination of possibilities, Holliwell simply began over again — citing the necessity of his immediate departure for Tecan, the misfortunes that would befall both him and the country if he failed to arrive in time, hinting at the displeasure in high places that would be the result of his delay in Zalteca. Zecca, responding, came to his aid, producing a U.S. passport with a red cover. A diplomatic passport, Holliwell supposed.

It turned out to be a matter of money. Travelers who insisted on crossing the border in the face of the many difficulties at hand paid twice the rate for their visas. Twelve dollars instead of six.

He and Cole set their twenty-four U.S. dollars on the consulate desk. The lady, without glancing at the money, seated herself, typed out the visas and stamped them in the two passports. The children in the meantime had torn themselves away from Yogi Bear and were gathered in the office doorway, watching their mother work. As the Americans left, the consul’s wife shooed them away and back to the screen. The twenty-four dollars stayed where it was, on the desk.

When they returned to the central square and their car, Holliwell and his company found the boys gone but their hubcaps in place. Zecca opened the hood to see that the battery had not been stolen. All was well.

On their way back to the Pan-American Highway, a little boy of hardly more than six ran toward the car, demanding to guide them. Zecca avoided running over him with some difficulty.

“Well, that’s Zalteca, folks,” Zecca said.

“Not such a bad town really,” Marie said.

“No,” Holliwell said. “Not really.”

“When you’re in Tecan,” Zecca said, “you’ll think about it fondly.”

They stopped at a filling station on the edge of town, filled the tank with the highest-grade gasoline and drank Coca-Colas.

South of Zalteca the land flattened out altogether; the line of the coast range disappeared and only fulsome clouds marked the proximity of the ocean. It was desert, the barest of cattle land, brown grass, dust. East of them the Sierra petered out into a low regular slope that seemed to be covered with a jungle of thorns.

Within half an hour they were in sight of what appeared to be the border, a cluster of kiosks of different colors, a line of trucks, and most incongruously in this empty landscape, lines of people blocking the road.

The border between Compostela and Tecan proved to be an affair of some social complexity. The Compostelan dimension consisted of three adjoining green buildings atop one of which the national banner hung lifeless from a peeling flagpole. The highway was blocked by a series of speed-trap bumps, the bumps were green-striped on the Compostelan side; on the Tecan side the stripes were yellow. Four Compostelan border policemen in green tropicals and Wehrmachtstyle caps lounged together in the shade of the customs shed, a fifth was making what appeared to be a halfhearted inspection of a truck loaded with kerosene stoves. From the perfunctory nature of his poking and prodding about the truck, he appeared not to have had his turn at AID customs school.

The real action was all on the Tecanecan side. There, six or so trucks were lined up at the side of the road while Tecanecan customs men in coveralls went over them with screw drivers and flashlights. The difference in ambiance on the far side of the border was reinforced by the presence there of the Tecanecan Guardia Nacional, whose uniforms, resembling those of American paratroopers complete with the laced boots and colored scarves, were freshly pressed and spotless and quite different from those of the ordinary customs inspectors. The Guardia were occupying themselves with a long line of young foreigners who had been lined up in the middle of the road beside their shoulder bags and bagpacks and who stood, facing Compostela, squinting into the sun and looking frightened and unhappy.

Zecca had parked his car so that its front tires surmounted the first Tecanecan speed bump; those foremost in the line of colorful young travelers could exchange glances with the passengers in the Honda at a distance of a few feet.

“It’s hard to get into Tecan if they think you look funny,” Zecca said. “It’s even harder to get out.”

There was a sergeant in charge of the line of funny-looking foreigners. The sergeant was black, although it was not a part of Tecan where many black people lived — the Guardia Nacional pursued the tradition of stationing the members of the gendarmerie as far as possible from their native region. This made assignments fairly predictable in Tecan; it was not a large country and its only regions were the mountains and the land on either side of them.

The sergeant was repeatedly inspecting and commenting upon the hippie gringos. From time to time, he would seize hold of a boy’s long hair and pull him out of line, caress the hair while making kissing noises with his mouth, shout something at the youth and shove him back in line. He had a repertory of spits and sneers and snarls and his smiles were not good-humored. When he came to a girl who struck his fancy, he would pause contemplatively and feel her up. No one seemed to be protesting his behavior.

“Shit,” Zecca said, “they must have caught someone with grass.”

“I think someone should have a word with that guy,” Marie said.

On the opposite side of the road, another event was in progress. A cow had fallen into the ditch that marked the frontier and entangled itself in the wire the Tecanecans strung on their side of the line. A crowd of local boys, whose proper business was assisting tourists through customs, selling cold drinks or begging, were amusing themselves by stoning it to death. The cow had so totally engaged their attention that they ignored the Zeccas’ car.

The animal had lost its footing and was lying with its back legs tucked under it, its hooves tearing ineffectually at the dirt and wire while the rocks crashed down on it from every side. The boys would exhaust their handful and then run off into the sandy fields to gather more. Each stone was received by the cow with a soft bellow. Its eyes and nostrils were beginning to show blood.

“Look at that, for Christ’s sake,” Marie said. “Are we going to do something about this bullshit?” she asked her husband.

“Hang on,” he told her. “Everybody give me their passport.” The Honda’s passengers gave him their passports; he climbed out from behind the wheel and held a brief dialogue with the officials on the Compostelan side.

Holliwell and Bob Cole sat watching the boys stone the cow. As they watched, one of the smaller boys looked over at the car, wiped his hands and approached them with a glass jar. He thrust the jar through the open window into Holliwell’s face — inside was the largest scorpion Holliwell had ever seen.

“Two dollar,” the boy said.

“No,” Holliwell said. “No, gracias.” For a moment he thought he might be being threatened. If he failed to produce two dollars the boy would drop it on his chest.

“One dollar,” the boy said.

Marie Zecca let out a fetching little scream.

“No,” Holliwell said. “Otra vez.”

But the boy only made a farting noise at them and ran back to throw more rocks at the cow.

“That thing must have been nine inches long,” Marie Zecca said.

“Smaller than that, surely,” Bob Cole told her.

Tom Zecca came back clutching the brace of passports.

“What happened?”

“A kid just tried to sell me a scorpion,” Holliwell said.

“Hell, you can’t give them away around here. This is alacrán city.”

“I suppose,” Bob Cole said, “it’s considered a souvenir.”

Marie Zecca grasped the back seat and turned to Tom.

“Look, man — those nasty little kids are murdering a defenseless animal and over there that goddamn Guardia is abusing women and children. Can we do something about this action?”

“Sure,” Zecca said. He handed the passports back round and started up the car, easing it over the Tecanecan speed trap. This forcing of his nation’s border attracted the Guardia sergeant’s attention; he came toward them with languid belligerence, walking with his hands on his hips.

“Buenos tardes, sargente,” Tom Zecca hastened to say, when the Guardia stood beside his window. He thrust the red passport into the sergeant’s hand. The Guardia looked at it through the reflecting sunglasses that were as much a part of the Guardia uniform as the paratroop boots. Within a moment of inspecting the passport, the sergeant drew himself to attention and saluted energetically.

“Señor Capitano, bienvenidos a su casa.”

Zecca thanked him for his kind greeting and returned his snappy salute.

“What about the cow?” Marie whispered.

From where they were now parked, Holliwell was looking out nearly eye level with the young Europeans and North Americans who were trying to cross the border. A number of them, boys and girls both, had begun to cry.

“Sergeant,” Tom Zecca said, “I’m sure you know how women are. My wife here is disturbed by the misfortune of that cow. Can something be done?” His Spanish was effortless, unashamedly American in accent.

“Capitano,” said the Guardia, smiling with Zecca, “claro que sí.”

He walked over toward the ditch, drawing the automatic pistol from the web belt at his waist as he went. Bracing his legs, he fired the weapon three times, a few inches above the hairline of the tallest boy. The gringo youths in line recoiled at the firing. The boys dropped their stones and scattered crouching, diving for cover. Some cringed along the shoulder of the highway, sad-eyed waifs awaiting the sensitive photographer, their hands clasped over their heads.

The cow was so startled at the burst of fire that it freed itself from the wire in an awkward lunge, gained its feet and succeeded in hauling itself out of the ditch. Liberated, it trotted up to the Pan-American Highway, eluded a charge by the cursing Compostelan customs cops with a bovine end run and took off down the center line, headed for the capital.

Zecca waved his thanks.

“Que le vaya bien, capitano,” the sergeant called, and returned to the line of quaking travelers. The Honda and its passengers drove past their wistful glances.

“It’s lousy about these kids,” Zecca said. “But I can’t interfere in that.”

“They can’t all be carrying dope,” Holliwell said.

“No, he just got one or two. He’ll let the rest out when he’s had his fun.”

“They really are pigs, the Guardia,” Marie said. “Actual pigs.”

“What happens to the ones with the dope?” Bob Cole asked.

“Best not to think about it,” Zecca said. “It was very dumb of them to buy it here. They were probably turned by the guy who sold it.”

“I didn’t know you were a captain,” Holliwell said after a while.

“That’s because I didn’t tell you. But I am. U.S. Army. I’m with the military mission in San Ysidro.”

Bob Cole stared at him.

“Don’t you feel a little …” Cole let the question die.

“A little what, Mr. Cole? I feel just fine.”

“O.K.,” Cole said. He turned to Holliwell. “Can you imagine what that feels like — especially for a college kid? Standing there, taking that abuse, waiting for those bastards to go through your stuff?”

“I know what it feels like,” Holliwell said. “I dream about it.”

“That was no dream back there.”

“No,” Zecca said, “that was an average day at the gates of Tecan.”

As they drove south, the wind carried dust clouds that sometimes forced them to close the car windows. With every kilometer the land seemed more brown and infertile, the cattle fewer, the corn scantier and more stunted. A squat brown volcano came into view in the southwest; the wind whipped its faint smoke trails into the lowering sky.

“I’ll tell you a Guardia story,” Tom Zecca said. “Our Caudillo in the capital lives in a house with a hundred and fifty rooms. The grounds take up about twenty-five city blocks square and there’s a wall of cactus against the fence. The whole complex is patrolled by German shepherds, real ones — from Germany. When the old man bought them he was told that they had to have steak every night to be happy and alert — so the palace is serving up steak dinners for over a hundred of these huge mutts. The dogs probably eat more meat than the population of Tecan.

“One morning, El Caudillo arrives at his desk to find eight guys from the palace Guardia detachment on their knees in front of it. The palace commandant is his little brother Arturo and Arturo is wailing on these guys, yelling and carrying on and beating on them with the butt of his sidearm. It turns out they’ve been stealing the dogs’ steak, sneaking it home to their families. Arturo’s beside himself, making points with big brother. A breach of the President’s trust. Treason to the nation. A disgrace to the most honored branch of the service. And so on. One of the Guardia is already half dead from Arturo’s beating on him.

“Now this is a thorny problem. These characters know all the security arrangements for the presidential palace. They know where all the bodies are buried — we’re in Tecan now, so I’m speaking literally. You can’t fire these men, you’ve got to shoot them or forget about it.

“Amid the weeping and the dull thuds, El Hombre considers the scene and ponders deeply. Finally he tells Arturo to knock off and let them go. From now on he says, all the Guardia and their families get steak every night just like the dogs. AID will pay for it somehow. The Guardia crawl over to El Hombre, they cry on his cuffs, they lick his boots. He’s got their loyalty for life. They’ll all walk over their grandmothers for him.

“All except the dude little brother’s been beating on too much. He’s too punchy to be properly grateful, so they shoot him.”

Marie uttered a soft vibrating wail, indicating fear and loathing.

“Life in Tecan,” she said.

“But observe the craft,” Tom said. “Observe the crude but sound statesmanship. The bastard hasn’t been in power all this time for nothing.”

“Have you been inside that palace?” Holliwell asked Tom.

“Claro. Many times. Even partied there.”

“The parties,” Marie said, “are ghastly. It’s like a Dracula movie but without the class.”

“The last party I went to,” Tom said, “was after I’d been out to the islands, so I’d been peeling. I mean my skin was peeling from sunburn. Up to me comes Arturo — drunk out of his gourd, as is customary. He grabs a fistful of skin off my nose and calls me a gringo.”

“You didn’t tell me about that,” Marie said. “What did you do?”

“What did I do? I smiled and saluted. Is Arturo a sadistic little creep? Should I have cold-cocked him and rubbed him into the carpet? Claro. But I represent the flag, comprende? In my small way, I represent Policy. I had my dress whites on and two years in grade.”

“He’ll get his,” Marie said.

“Not if we can help it, my dear. If we can help it, he’ll be the next President.”

“There must be someone better than that,” Holliwell said. “Someone acceptable.”

“Well, Arturo’s a stopgap. While Policy decides what to do next. Mind you, Fat Frank really likes the guy. He likes the whole family. He thinks they’re American-type people.”

“That’s a quote,” Marie said. “ ‘American-type people.’ Because they speak English to him.”

“Fat Frank?” Holliwell asked.

“Ambassador Bridges. Some people call him that.”

“But not us,” Tom said.

Bob Cole was staring out at the hills to their left. The desert ended where they rose toward the Sierra and the further hills showed dark green.

“That’s coffee up there,” he said after a while. Holliwell thought that Zecca was glad to hear him speak. Cole’s silence had been making him uneasy.

“That’s right,” Tom told him. “Good grade and low price, they tell me. But what do I know?”

“Then there’s probably an insurgency in progress up there,” Cole said. “Given the situation.”

“Yeah?” Tom Zecca asked him coolly. “Why do you say that?”

“The way I understand it,” Cole said, “wherever you’ve got coffee in this country, you’ve got an insurgency. They go together.”

“There’s a degree of truth in that,” Tom said.

“Is there one going on up there?”

“What do you hear?” Zecca asked him.

“I hear there is. That it’s centered around Extremadura. Among the Indians there.”

“Who says that?”

Cole looked on Captain Zecca with a sagging smile, his mossy yellow teeth briefly displayed.

“There was a piece in the international edition of the Miami Herald last week. It was off the AP wire — I think the dateline was San José. You must have seen it.”

“I saw it,” Zecca said. “Might be something to it.”

“Well,” Cole said, turning his gaze back toward the hills, “I’m thinking of going up there.”

“I wouldn’t,” Zecca said.

“You oughtn’t to,” Marie told Cole. “I’ve been around there. If I were you I wouldn’t go up there right now.”

“I’m just doing my job. Like you folks are. Like Mr. Holliwell.”

What job? Holliwell thought. What does he mean?

“If I know you’re up there,” Zecca said, “I’m going to worry about you. The Atapas don’t like strangers around in the best of times and they’re not nearly as tranquil as they look. Especially these days.”

“Do you suggest I register my presence with the embassy in San Ysidro?”

“Honest to God, Mr. Cole,” Zecca said, “I don’t know what to suggest. Except that you not go.”

“I understand,” Cole said.

They drove on in silence over the dusty plateau. The coastward volcano was abreast of them, a second, larger rose ahead. To Holliwell, they seemed freakish mountains; only malignant gods could inhabit or inform them. They rose solitary out of featureless tableland, bare, without harmony, unbeautiful enough to appear exactly what they were — burst excrescences on Tecan’s pocked dusty hide. A geology lesson, he thought. They communicated a troubling sense of the earth as nothing more than itself, of blind force and mortality. As mindlessly refuting of hope as a skull and bones. The landscape was a memento mori, the view ahead like a dead ocean floor.

“Scary,” Holliwell said.

Tom and Marie laughed.

“We thought it was only us,” Marie said.

“The Tecanecans are very big on their volcanoes,” Tom told Holliwell. “They’re on the flag and the national seal. They run up and down the country along a fault. First thing a local will ask you when you come in-country is whether you’ve seen the volcanoes or not.”

“Key-to-the-country kind of thing?”

“I never had it put that elaborately,” Tom said. “I don’t think anyone here thinks they’re the key to the country. They’re just big things for turistas to gawp at. I mean they’re there and they’re huge and uniquely Tecanecan, so the Tecs are proud of them. It’s their duty to be.”

“What does the national poet say? Is he on about them?”

“They don’t have a national poet to speak of. They never had a Rubén Darío in Tecan. Never saw the need of one.”

“There’s a verse about the volcanoes in the national anthem though,” Marie said. “I can’t remember how it goes. It’s pretty trite.”

“The first movement of Brahms’ First,” Tom told them. “That’s the national anthem. Moving as hell. In the old days before the Marines came the Tecanecan Army could goose-step to it. The Marines made them knock it off.”

They began to pass more buses on the road. The number of dirt roads with signs indicating villages off the road increased.

Tom slowed down, wary of children and cattle on the highway, sounding his horn at turns to warn the burro carts that appeared more and more often now as they approached the capital. From time to time, they passed a lone Indian bent under a load of firewood. People looked down at the dirt as the car sped by them.

“What I wonder,” Bob Cole said in his strange tremulous voice, “is whether the people down here have to live this way so that we can live the way we do.”

“I’m just a soldier,” Zecca said. “But I think the answer to that is no. It sounds too simple to me.”

“But it’s not a simple question,” Marie said brightly. “It’s a really complicated one.”

Cole turned to Holliwell.

“How about you, sir? You’re something of an expert. What do you think the answer is?”

“I have to confess,” Holliwell said, “that I haven’t figured that out. There are lots of gaps in my expertise. I don’t know what the answer is.”

“We have to believe it’s no, don’t we?” Cole asked. “We couldn’t face up to it otherwise. Because if most of the world lives in this kind of poverty so that we can have our goodies and our extra protein ration — what does that make us?”

“It makes us vampires,” Holliwell said. “It makes us all the cartoon figures in the Communist press.”

“What if you found out it were true?”

“Me? What I do doesn’t matter. I’d go on doing what I’m doing.”

“How about you, Captain?”

Zecca took one hand from the wheel and turned partway around toward Cole. Marie kept her eyes on the road.

“What are you, Mr. Cole?” Captain Zecca asked. “Some kind of an agitator?” He asked the question humorously, with more of Toledo in his voice than he usually permitted.

“Not at all,” Cole said.

At the approaches to the Tecanecan capital of San Ysidro, the Pan-American Highway wound down in switchbacks from the high desert into a lush tropical plain beside a great lake. As they started the descent, the sun hung over the low hills of the coffee country and the contours of the two visible volcanoes softened to show Holliwell a more insidious menace. They were running late. After sundown, the inter-capital truck traffic would be on the road — a mortal risk.

“When you were in Vietnam,” Holliwell asked Cole, “what did you do there?”

In the expectant silence that filled the car, Cole seemed to force an answer.

“I was in the Army,” he told them. “In the Army there for three years because I extended.”

“Is that right?” Zecca said.

“I started with an infantry platoon, a second lieutenant. Then I was on staff, with intelligence. Then later … I went back. With AID. And then I went back again as press, free-lancing.”

“You must have liked it there,” Zecca said.

“In a way,” Cole said, “I liked it very much.”

The captain smiled thinly.

“It held a fascination for you. A kind of moral fascination, am I right?”

“Well …” Cole began. “Yes,” he said.

“I can understand that very well. Right, Marie?”

“Sure,” Marie said. “A lot of our friends were like that. We were a little like that too, weren’t we?”

“We sure were,” Tom said. “And we were courting, so that lent color to our moral fascination.”

“I never found time to go courting,” Cole told him.

“Too bad,” Zecca said. “You find time to get laid? Or weren’t you interested?”

“Sexist talk,” Marie hissed softly. “Jeez.”

Holliwell asked Cole if he had been much in the delta. He had been. He had been out to the island and met the coconut monk.

“He’s in jail now, that guy,” Tom said. “They locked him up.”

“That’s a mistake if it’s true,” Cole said.

“It’s true,” Holliwell found himself saying. “And they didn’t lock him up by mistake. They know what they’re doing.”

“Fucking-A,” Zecca said.

Holliwell asked Cole if he had been much in the delta. He had been. He had been out to the island and met the coconut monk.

“He’s in jail now, that guy,” Tom said. “They locked him up.”

“That’s a mistake if it’s true,” Cole said.

“It’s true,” Holliwell found himself saying. “And they didn’t lock him up by mistake. They know what they’re doing.”

“Fucking-A,” Zecca said.

Cole only shrugged and looked more unhappy.

Fields of bananas grew on the slopes above San Ysidro, introduced there from the east coast. The town below was a white seaport city with the lake doing duty as ocean. It was a lake twice the size of the Lago Azul but lifeless from four hundred years of ill use. Its surface was still and dark. The declining sun had passed over it.

They drove past a summerhouse among the young banana trees, a pocket villa hung with Japanese lanterns. Below them, a mile or so from the foamy edge of the lake, was a reservoir, surrounded by a cement wall.

“The Marines put that in during the nineteen thirties,” Zecca told them. “You can drink the water here. Only drinkable water between El Paso and God knows where.”

“That at least,” Marie said. “So our presence here hasn’t been all bad news.”

Cole stirred in his seat, his thoughts apparently fixed on the coffee country. Holliwell lit a cigarette.

Entering the capital, the Pan-American Highway made a brief promenade into town, running along the lakefront past several blocks of crumbling, incongruously Victorian mansions and lit by cast-iron streetlamps of antique Parisian design. After less than half a mile of this, it broke up into unpaved narrow streets.

San Ysidro, in its tuck of the lake valley, was losing the light. The cramped streets near the lake were suddenly dark, scantily lighted, but alive with the din of a half-seen crowd. Driving slowly, Zecca put his head out of the car window to see past the screen of dust and crushed insects that fouled his windshield.

On corners, vendors sold roasted maize from pushcarts, barefoot families made their way along the damp walls, ready to press back against them as cars passed. At the intersection where there was a little light, groups of young men in bright plastic shirts stood together drinking rum, listening or singing to someone’s guitar. There was much music to be heard — but these streets were not festive or lyrical. The mood was restless — febrile, Holliwell thought — furtive. The songs were short on melody, driven and mocking, calling forth from those who listened a hard humorless laughter. Holliwell could not understand a word of the shouted, perversely inflected Tecanecan Spanish that went back and forth in the darkening streets as they passed. He and Cole were tense and silent.

“Late at night,” Marie said, “these are bad streets.”

Holliwell caught a whiff of marijuana on the air, something he had never experienced before in a public place in a Spanish-American city. From a nearby street, he heard what seemed to be screaming.

“Pretty lively for this time of evening,” he said.

Zecca pulled his head back in and steered carefully round a turn.

“It’s always lively on this side of town. It’s one big bad party.”

Someone fired a water gun at Cole’s closed window. Cole looked at the dirty water streaking down the glass beside him.

“Hey, Cole,” Zecca said, “a lot of the people here are from Extremadura. You could find out a lot by checking it out over here, discreetly. In the daytime.”

“I think I’d do better out there, don’t you? I mean, I’d feel kind of heavy-footed around here. I’d be drawing crowds.”

“You’re gonna draw crowds anywhere,” Zecca said. It was uncertain whether he was speaking generally in reference to the country or of Cole.

Holliwell began to notice that there were a surprising number of cars in the narrow streets, most of them American cars only a few years old. They drove along a block of open arcaded shops and came on a cathedral square centered on a monumental obelisk. The rotary around it ran its course like a mechanized feeding frenzy, a riot of oversized cars in every condition, bad driving and ostrich optimism.

“Well, shit,” Zecca said, and drove the Honda into it. Marie clung to the back of her seat, her face on her arm. Cole and Holliwell held to the top of the car interior.

They went halfway around the rotary and up a wide, park-sided avenue that ran between the cathedral square and another plaza, visible in the distance, where there were neon signs and taller buildings — office buildings lit on every story.

To one side of the avenue along which they drove was a forest of low trees, divided from the broad clean sidewalk by a high barred fence. On the other side there was more greenery. There, only the tops of trees were visible because the thick wire fence along the street was backed with a wall of cactus.

“On your right here,” Tom Zecca said, “behind the wire and the cactus and the German shepherds is the palace of the President. Over there is the Central Park and the Zoo, famous for its three-legged cow.

“There are about ten thousand people bedding down in that park now. They’re a lot worse off than the people back there in Mamalago. But the nearest shack is more than a mortar’s distance away from the Palace. That’s a trick we taught the President. Anything closer is patrolled by the Guardia. The cracks in that obelisk back there came from the earthquake ten years ago. The people in Mamalago moved into the park and some of them never moved back. Then more folks came down from the hills and took over the houses in Mamalago. If you’re in Mamalago it’s rough, but it’s better than the park. Mamalago and the park are better than the shanty towns on the west slope. If it were still light, you’d have got a good look at the cathedral and you’d have seen the Palace of Culture beside it.”

“Where they have the midget wrestling,” Marie said.

“What’s the obelisk for?” Cole asked.

“Usual shit,” Zecca said. “Victory and independence and successful struggle. Tecan always wins. It won the Second World War.”

It was a dead-hot city, sea level and without hope or promise of an ocean breeze. As they drove along the ceremonial avenue, the day’s heat welled up from the earth; the mixed smell of the jungle plants and of cheap gasoline threatened to close off breath.

As they passed the palace gatehouse the smells, the sight of the sentry box in its well of light under the jacaranda, the brown sawed-off soldiers in MP’s helmets brought Holliwell such a Vietnam flash that he was certain that they must all be feeling it together. It awakened in him so potent a mixture of nostalgia and dread that in spite of the morning booze-up which was still fouling his blood, he began to feel like a drink.

No one said a thing.

When they made the turn into traffic at the end of the drive he half expected to see noodle restaurants beside the cinema with its cheap imported karate thriller — but there were record shops and farmacias instead and the street vendors sold roasted nuts and empanadas and the city smell was of cigars and pomade and dust instead of fish sauce and incense and bougainvillea.

Some things were the same though. The empty stares, the demented traffic — even the newly built bus station had about it something of the curving hand-me-down art deco of downtown Saigon. There were beggars clustered about its doors with little paper cartons full of cigarettes or chewing gum and fruit or sometimes only brown outstretched open palms. And the markets would be behind the bus station, where they always were, in Tecan as in Danang or Hue.

“As close to the bus station as you can get,” Bob Cole said, “will suit me fine.”

“You’re not trying for Extremadura tonight?” Marie protested. “You’ll get there in the wee hours. You’ll have no place to sleep.”

“My little red book says there’s a through bus in two hours,” Cole told her. “I’ll wander around town a little and get it.”

When they pulled up at the bus station both Tom and Marie turned around to check that their car was out of traffic.

“Stay the night with us,” Marie said. Tom, beside her, was nodding.

“No, thanks,” Cole told them. “Look,” he said to Tom Zecca, “maybe someone from the consular office should know I’m up there. If that’s the case, you tell them. O.K.?”

“You’re making a mistake,” Zecca said. “That’s the advice of the consular office. As conveyed by me.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter,” Cole said. He climbed out of the car and started into the crowds in front of the bus station. The beggars were on him at once.

“How do you like that?” Marie said. “He’s out of his mind.”

Carefully Zecca pulled the car into traffic again, and rounded the bus station block.

“He broke up with his wife,” Tom said. “I think I remember him telling me that.”

In the market behind the station the stalls were beginning to close. The streets at this end of the city were very like the streets at the lakeside with their mud roadways and high broken curbs. The same morose groups were gathered at corners.

“Shit, the guy’s crazy,” Zecca said. “He’ll get macheted up there. And he better not wander off from the bus station or he won’t even get that far. This is no town for midnight strolls.”

The Zeccas lived in a house high on the slope above the town, a street of middle-class houses with little stucco walls in front of them. At the end of their comfortable street, the shacks began, cut off from the bourgeois fortress by a barricade of barbed wire, rusted road signs and sheet metal: as they drove the Honda into their garage and began unloading their gear, a chorus of unseen dogs set up a cry from one end of the street to the other.

A smiling young maidservant met them at the door. She took as many of their cases as she could manage and led them into the living room.

The house was new but tasteful and pleasant in a severe colonial style. The tiles looked as though they might have come from Spain, the oak beams were weathered and supported at their moldings by metal studs. Oak beams were not just for fun in Tecan — the number and mortality of her earthquakes was appalling.

It was a small house, by no means sumptuous, with a homely American smell.

Marie argued the maid out of making them dinner and sent her back to her quarters to watch television. The television was in the maid’s room and her opportunity to watch the dubbed soap operas had made her the foremost storyteller in her barrio.

“Well, we can go out or I can make us up something simple. Like ham and eggs.”

“There’s a big production of a place, La Finca, a few blocks from here,” Tom Zecca said. “Steak in the local style. Muy Auténtico. Lots of music and red bandanas flapping.”

“Speaking just for me,” Holliwell said, “I’m not very hungry. But I’ll go along with anything.”

“Well, I’m not too hungry myself,” Zecca said. “Don’t know why.”

“Maybe no one’s hungry,” Marie said.

“Looks like no one is,” Tom said. “But I think everyone would like a drink.” Holliwell nodded gratefully.

They took margaritas in a small garden, closely bound by vine-covered walls and banana trees. There was barely room in it for the green metal table and the chairs that had been set around it. Marie put out glasses and two large blenders full of margaritas.

“Someday,” she told Holliwell, pouring the drinks into the frosted glasses, “I’ll tell you about the day I was sitting out here and an iguana fell in my lap.”

Tom took his drink. “And me — goddamn it — I missed it. I was at the office. I have to reconstruct the whole scene in my imagination.”

“As I remember it,” Marie said, “the cops came. People poured into the street, crossing themselves.”

They drank and after a moment Tom said: “What about that Cole guy? Now there’s a questionable character.” It struck Holliwell as odd that Captain Zecca would raise the matter of Cole’s question-ability with him. He looked across the table and saw that Marie was shaking her head sadly. Perhaps they were just relaxing.

“I suppose the question about Cole,” Holliwell said, “is who he thinks he is and what he thinks he’s doing.”

“Do you mean does he think he’s Régis Debray?”

“No,” Holliwell said, “I mean beyond that.”

“Beyond that?” Zecca asked. “Beyond that isn’t necessarily my business. Beyond that he’s a Vietnam burn-out. A pilgrim.”

“There’s a lot of us,” Holliwell said.

“You see yourself as a burn-out?” Marie asked. She turned to her husband. “I wouldn’t have described him that way.”

“Maybe just badly seared,” Holliwell said.

“Everyone that ever saw that place is a little fucked up,” Tom said, leaning his stocking feet on the delicate table. It was easy to picture him at the Diplomat Hotel or some BOQ bar, a younger man, harder case, second-generation tough, hungry. “It was the dumbest damn thing we ever did as a country, no question about it.”

“Well, we told them so at the time,” Marie said. “Nobody listened until it was too late.”

“No,” Holliwell said, “we told them and they didn’t listen.”

“AID?” Zecca asked. “That was your cover?”

Holliwell became afraid. It was a misunderstanding.

“It wasn’t a cover,” he insisted. “I wasn’t an intelligence specialist or even a contract employee. I mean, you know how it is.” He was staring at his drink. The Zeccas watched him. “They come to you. Someone has a girlfriend in Saigon, he wants to stay there, so he has to make work for himself, he has to make up a report to file. So what an anthropologist knows — family relationships, the relationship of an uncle to a nephew, a younger cousin to an older cousin — it all goes into the hopper. Nobody gives a shit about it — maybe nobody ever looks at it. But it ends up — pardon the expression — intelligence.”

“We know exactly what you mean,” Marie Zecca said.

“Did you learn the language?” Tom asked him.

“I picked up a certain residue. No,” he said. “I never really did. I depended on a few local people and we spoke mainly in French.”

The thought came to Holliwell that he had spent much of his life depending on a few local people, speaking some lingua franca, hovering insect-like about the edge of some complex ancient society which he could never hope to really penetrate. That was his relationship with the world. And he himself — more and more losing touch with the family he had made, a bastard of no family origin, no blood or folk. A man from another planet forever inquiring of helpful strangers the nature of their bonds with one another.

“I don’t know how I got into family structures,” he heard himself tell the Zeccas. Tequila. Insidious. “It was archaeology I liked. The ruins, the traces, you know. I would have liked, I think, to dive. To dive for galleons.”

“Maybe you will yet,” Marie said.

“The family,” Holliwell said. “It’s so strange, you know. I never had a family of my own to speak of. And the one I’ve raised I don’t believe I understand at all. As far as other people’s families go — I’m absolutely ignorant.”

“Christ,” Tom Zecca said. He was relaxed now, merry with the end of the drive. “With guys like you in the shop no wonder we lost the goddamn war in Nam.”

They all laughed.

“No,” Zecca said, touching his arm to reassure him. “I’m kidding you, bro. You’re O.K. You’re a straight shooter.”

“I hope our friend Cole comes down O.K. He worries me a little.”

“How about it, Holliwell?” Captain Zecca asked. “You think he’s a spook?”

“You’d probably know more about that than I would,” Holliwell said warily.

“I’ll tell you something, Doc Holliwell … I don’t know much until I read my mail — that’s the situation we’ve got working here. Maybe there’s a line on him in the pouch tomorrow.”

And maybe, Holliwell thought, a line on me.

“Well,” Marie said, “he’ll be up there tomorrow wandering about among all those disgruntled macheteros. Feel for him, guys.”

“We do,” Holliwell said.

“Poor useless bastard,” Zecca said, pouring out his creamy margarita. “He doesn’t know who he works for and he doesn’t know what side he’s on. Even if he’s ours, he’s not a hundred percent sure. You take a dude like that and the next thing you know you’ve got a double agent, the most dangerous goddamn creature walking.”

“They have short life spans,” Marie said, “that’s one thing about them.”

“That’s the only good thing,” Zecca said.

Marie moved the second blender into position.

“But damnit, those people up there are screwed. They’re getting dumped on in the most incredible fashion.”

“You better believe it,” the captain said. “For untold fucking generations they’ve been living on beans and lizards to grow coffee for the bastards that run this country. Now we’ve found copper up there and the idiot greedhead generals who own it are throwing them off the land — sending them down here to beg or starve. Nah,” Zecca said, “who am I to knock Cole? It’s no wonder they’re righting back.”

“Are they?” Holliwell asked him.

“Are they seriously fighting back? I wish I knew. I’m supposed to. I can’t depend on dip-shits like Cole. One of these days I’m going to have to exercise my ass and go find out. I go up there in a chopper and they’ve got the weaponry, I’ll know in a big hurry.”

“It’s not worth worrying about,” Marie said. “If this place goes, they know where to find us. We’re fatalists. That’s what you’ve got to be, see. You’ve got to be a fatalist.”

They drank from the second blender.

“How much do you know for sure?” Holliwell asked. “If you don’t mind telling me.”

“O.K.,” Zecca said. “There’s a basic, quite justified piss-off all over the country. It’s particularly strong up in the Sierra where the Atapas live and the Atapas have a history of banditry and trouble-making. They can handle modern weapons but we don’t really know if they have any or if they have, what sort. If they’ve got, say, ground-to-air missiles — El General is in big trouble. Likewise if they’ve got a big cache of AKA’s. Here in town, anyone with a brain or an honest buck to turn hates the government but probably won’t move. Here the trouble is students, rich kids most of them — they’re divided into factions, Fidelistas, Trots, Maoists — the usual spectrum. Over on the east coast people tell you time stands still, nobody expects trouble over there. In my opinion that’s complacent because if anybody lands armament it’ll be over there, not on the Pacific coast. And it’s hard to fly stuff in here because we gave them an outrageous air force and we trained them in radar detection.”

“Sounds sort of standard,” Holliwell said.

“It’s not, though. Because now the morons who run this joint have given every anti-government faction a common cause with that copper grab. The unemployment rate is like sixty percent here. The streets are full of teen-age kids with nothing to do but rip off what-ever’s handy and go to the karate movies. You could make a tough little army out of those kids. Inept, disorganized, sure. But you’d have to kill whole bunches of them — they’d be the cannon fodder. El General would stink worse than usual in the nostrils of the world. Bad scene,” Zecca said. “The question is — does the Guardia stay loyal? Answer — probably.”

“And when the Guardia goes in — we advise them?”

“Mr. Holliwell,” Zecca said. “Doctor! We put this government in for our own interests. We trained the Guardia. Our ambassador thinks the Pres and his family are American-type people.”

“There’s a grain of truth in that,” Marie Zecca said.

“You’re a Communist,” Captain Zecca told his wife. “She sings ‘Guantanamera’ at embassy lawn parties.”

“Under my breath,” Marie said. “Fat Frank wouldn’t recognize it if he heard it anyway.”

“O.K.,” Zecca said, “the Guardia will have American weapons and support. The support will be mealy-mouthed and covert but it will be there.”

“And what do honest folk like ourselves do then, Captain Zecca?” Holliwell inquired.

Zecca put away another margarita.

“It’s too late. It’s too late, understand. The usual shit will go down. You and I, Doc, maybe we know something about the country. But it’s too late. If we don’t back them now, we’ll have a Russian submarine base in Puerto Alvarado — maybe a missile base this time. See how that goes over in Dubuque, in Congress, in the White House, for Christ’s sake.”

“Fucked again,” Holliwell said.

“I’ll be gone,” Zecca said. “My tour is almost up. Then they can send in the types who like the Guardia’s style. The headhunters, the Cubans, the counterinsurgency LURPS’s. And the guys who enjoy saluting animals in tailor-made pink uniforms.”

“And where will you be then?”

“I don’t know,” Zecca said. “Not some place like this. They owe me.”

“It’s not all one thing or another, you know,” Marie said. “It’s not us being bad guys all the time. Only assholes think that. Pious assholes.”

“Don’t call him a pious asshole,” Captain Zecca commanded his wife.

“I don’t mean him,” Marie said, and Holliwell thought she was beginning to cry. “I don’t mean you,” she assured him. “I agree with you. I don’t even mean Cole and Cole really is a pious asshole.”

“You have to go on hoping for the best,” Zecca said.

Marie nodded. “You have to have faith.”

“Only pious assholes have faith, Marie,” the captain said.

“Up yours,” Marie told him. Holliwell drank another margarita. It was all in fun.

“Let me tell you something,” the captain said suddenly to Holliwell. “In Nam I spent two years in combat intelligence. In that time I interrogated maybe hundreds of prisoners and chieu hois and I never once let the Arvins get away with torturing any. I’m speaking of torture in the strict sense. I never did, in any of the time I was in that place, anything I thought was cruel or dishonorable. You believe me?”

“Of course,” Holliwell said.

“I never sat still for shooting up civilians, not even up north. I never clipped an ear or set fire to a hootch and I never countenanced it. I conducted that fucking war honorably and so did my people. I did that to the greatest possible extent, sir, and it wasn’t easy in my position. Moreover, I thought it was a crock, a stupid hopeless crock. It was dumb and it was inhuman by its nature. But me,” Zecca said, turning his fingertips inward and tapping his heart, “I’m not. I make that claim.”

“It’s true,” Marie said.

“I don’t claim virtue,” Zecca declared. “I don’t claim to be a kindly man. I claim to be capable of honor.”

“I also claim that,” Holliwell said.

“I took an oath,” Zecca said. “I fulfilled it and I fucking fulfilled it without compromising myself. Takes a little working at.”

“Surely,” Holliwell said.

“The Army didn’t send me down here to be a chaplain to the peasantry or to feed the birds or conduct an agrarian reform. It sent me down because I’m supposed to know about the lay of the country from a military point of view. In terms of intercontinental defense.”

“Of course,” Holliwell said, “intercontinental defense. And you’re beginning to feel compromised?”

“No,” Zecca said quickly. “Not at this point.”

“Excuse me,” Holliwell said. “Do you expect to conduct your career in one American-sponsored shithole after another, partying with their ruling class, advising their conscripts in counterinsurgency and overseeing their armaments, and not compromise your oath or your honor? Because that sounds very tricky to me.”

“You don’t know the facts, mister,” Marie said.

“I know a few,” Holliwell said. “Beyond that I know what you tell me.”

“I know what you know,” Zecca said. Holliwell folded his hands on the metal table. In the circumstances, he had gone too far. “And this is what I tell you — that when they evict those people over the mineral rights, I hope to Christ we’ll be on our way to another posting. O.K. — that’s a cop-out, it’s a quease. But you’ve got to think in terms of the larger scale, the …”

“The Big Picture.”

“The Big Picture,” Zecca said with a grim smile. “Thank you, sir. But you don’t know what’s really going on here. Neither does Cole. He thinks he does but he doesn’t. He knows more than me but I know more than him, do you follow me?”

“I think we went to the same sort of schools,” Holliwell said.

“Tom and I both went to St. Bonaventura,” Marie told him. “In Olean, New York.”

Captain Zecca was drunk. So was Marie. So, to his own reckless satisfaction, was Holliwell.

“I’m sorry,” Holliwell declared. “I don’t approve of the American presence here.”

“Someday,” Captain Zecca said, “I’m going to work with the Chinese. Someday somewhere the conditions are gonna be right and me and the Chinese will get something going — I don’t care if it’s Africa — maybe even China.”

“Wouldn’t that be great,” Marie said.

“I’m a fucking master of destiny,” Zecca said. “My family is related to Napoleon’s. I’m gonna get down with those Chinese.”

“Listen to him,” Marie said. “I hope you realize we’re all drunk here.”

“I realize it,” Holliwell said. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

“But, Jesus,” Marie went on a little sadly, “I wish we could trust you. I mean, we don’t even know who you are and here we’re talking about the Chinese.”

“You know who I am and you can trust me,” Holliwell said. “Personally, I enjoy talking about the Chinese.”

“Well, one day,” Zecca said, “this army will get me and the Chinese together and together we are gonna be the fucking Yellow Peril.”

“Include me in,” Holliwell told him. “As far as possible.”

“There have been Chinese for five million years, man,” the captain said. “I don’t know how long there’s been Zeccas but I know there’s one thing that Zeccas and Chinese have in common. We know how the world goes.” He took a little salt from the edge of his margarita glass and rubbed the grains between his fingers. “We know the price of salt. The Americans forget, if they ever knew. But Zeccas and Chinese will always know.”

Holliwell toasted the ancient wisdom of the Zeccas and the Chinese.

“Cole doesn’t know shit. Fat Frank doesn’t know shit. El General — well, he’s an ape. You, sir,” he said, addressing Holliwell, “I don’t know what you know. I won’t presume to speculate. But things don’t work the way people think.”

Holliwell shrugged. “I know that my redeemer liveth,” he said. The Zeccas stared at him. It was too Protestant a text.

After a moment, Tom laughed.

“We have a proverb, sir, in my grandfather’s country. In his island. I’m positive they have the same proverb in China. It goes ‘To trust is good. Not to trust is better.’ ”

“A salute,” Marie said, and they drank the last of the margaritas.

“To Sicily,” Holliwell said.

Captain Zecca’s face seemed suddenly drained of good feeling. In the light from the living room, the shadow of his thick brows masked his eyes, high cheekbones and the arch of his nose covered the play of his thin lips.

“To the price of salt,” he said, “and the ten pains of death. Which is all we really know.”

Marie sighed. Holliwell held his seat until Captain Zecca rose from the table. He had seen such drinking parties in Vietnam and sometimes they ended badly. Zecca had begun to “sir” him rather a lot, a bad signal.

“Next month,” Captain Zecca said, as they all staggered off to show Holliwell to his quarters, “we have to have twenty barrels of green beer. The way things get done in this country we better get on it now.”

The room to which Holliwell was shown was small and comfortable, typical of the house; a touch of suburbia, a touch of Spanish formality. It had its own bath.

“Green beer!” Marie said. They shook hands all round.

“Good night, Doc,” the captain said. “Great ride.”

“Really,” Marie said.

Holliwell thanked them profusely, excessively.

Washing up in the small neat bathroom, he could hear them plainly when he turned off the tap. They were in the kitchen.

“St. Patrick’s Day,” Captain Zecca was telling his wife. “It’s in March.”

“Oh, you’re kidding,” Marie said.

“Like hell I’m kidding. I’ve got to locate this individual who can dye beer green without poisoning the whole station.”

“That’s too goddamn ridiculous,” she said.

Sitting on his bed, Holliwell could still hear them.

“Some Kraut, maybe. They’ve gotta have some Kraut over at the Germania brewery. Maybe he can do it.”

“He’ll think you’re crazy.”

“Fuck him.”

“Tom — in this town — they’ll dye it with old socks and deadly nightshade.”

“We’ll find a Kraut,” Captain Zecca said. “We’ll make him drink the first barrel.”

Marie was giggling as they went to bed.

“Green Tecanecan beer for St. Patrick’s Day. That’s the living end. Will anybody mind if I stick with agua mineral?”

Holliwell heard them laughing together until he went to sleep.

Pablo woke to the goony birds. He had propped a chair against the doorknob; he was lying in a soiled mesh hammock in a bare evil-smelling room. Roaches in the size and quantity of delirium were scurrying across the slat floor, stripes of hard sunlight came in through the closed battered shutters. He struggled out of the hammock and took a Benzedrine at once. On the floor, he found an empty pack of the local cigarettes; he poured his remaining tablets into the packet and folded it away in his shirt pocket.

His clothes and his body were sweaty and rank and it had been days since he had been able to brush his teeth properly. This was a particular discomfort to a young man of Pablo’s fastidiousness.

Downstairs, Cecil was cooking refritos in a kitchen off the bar.

“Don’t you never sleep, Cecil?”

Without a word, Cecil came out of the kitchen and threw a plastic bag on the bar that contained Pablo’s passport and his turista card. Beside it he placed the blue duffel bag that Pablo had come south with.

“Twenty,” Cecil said. “Damn cheap at de price.”

Pablo paid him.

“De bus station — you know where it is. Take de bus to Palmas — make sure. In Palmas go on down to de quays and you see de Cloud. Das de name of her — de Cloud. Goin’ to be your new home.”

“See you, Cecil.”

“Hope so, mon. Hope you be doin’ all right. Find out de use of you, all like dat.”

“Shit,” Pablo said.

Cecil watched him walk out with his gear and went back to the beans.

The bus to Palmas ran past mile upon mile of banana plantation. One of them was enclosed by a chain link fence surmounted with barbed wire; at its gate was a Coca-Cola sign with its center board replaceable for the inclusion of the name of the establishment on whose behalf Coca-Cola was prepared to extend its welcoming logo. The sign read: “Coca-Cola — Bienvenidos a — LA COLONIA PENAL.”

The bus stopped often and it was crowded. There were a few women with children but most of the passengers were young plantation workers wearing machetes hung in leather sheaths from their belts. Listening to them speak together in a soft-edged Spanish of which he could pick up scarcely a word, Pablo fell victim to his wonted suspicions. That they were mocking him, taking counsel in avian trills and hisses to plot his undoing, seemed as obvious to him as the cloudless sky and the green mountains. Pablo was scornful of their ill intentions; he was armed, as was his custom, with a Dacor diver’s knife strapped to his calf and the automatic pistol bolstered against his armpit.

But the passengers in the bus aroused within Pablo another sensation and it was one on which he scarcely dared reflect. As his guarded glance swept the people pressed close around him, he felt that he could anticipate every smile and gesture that he saw. There was a secret self inside him that knew their rhythms and their stirrings, even knew their thoughts. In the hot cramped space he realized suddenly that he had some kinship of the blood with these dark stunted people whom he so despised — that they were, however distantly, his mother’s people and in that way, his own. It did not make him feel in the least warm toward them.

Palmas was a gas station at the end of a dirt street that led past mean wooden shacks to the ocean. Pablo climbed off the bus with his gear and walked the length of it. He paused at the dockside — there were a few shops and bodegas and the office of the captain of the port. Tied up at the two piers were two dozen local shrimp boats of seventy or eighty feet, their wheelhouses painted in bright tropical colors like the local buses. There was no craft in sight that looked as though it would be the Callahans’ powerboat. He put on his Macklin Chain Saw hat, took his sunglasses from the pocket of his shirt and looked from one quarter of the harbor to the other. Nothing but shrimpers. He walked out on the pier, set his bag down and leaned against a piling, cursing under his breath.

From behind the tinted-glass windscreen of the Cloud, Mr. Callahan and Freddy Negus watched Pablo on the pier.

“That’s our boy,” Callahan said.

“Gawd,” Freddy Negus said.

“What’s wrong with him?” Callahan demanded. Callahan was drinking a rum and soda and the sight of it in his hand at so early an hour made Negus uneasy. “He showed up, didn’t he? He’s just a deserter, that’s all.” He saw Negus glancing at the drink in his hand and put it down beside the Fathometer. “I mean, what do you want, for Christ’s sake? Billy Budd?”

“You hire these monkeys and then I got to keep them in line. I’ll tell you, Jack, I’m getting plumb wore out with it. We could have taken on a local crew for this.”

Callahan picked up his drink angrily.

“I told you, Freddy, didn’t I, Freddy, that I did not want a native crew for this? I need people I can control and who need me. I need a guy with a little technical savvy who’s a long way from home and who can’t take to the hills if the deal goes queer. A deserter is perfect. That boy you’re looking at is gonna work out fine.”

“Gimme a dope run any old time,” Negus said. “At least you know what you’re up against.”

“Hell, Freddy,” Callahan said, “you been out in all the weather. An old pirate like you.” He stepped unsteadily over the hatchway and into the galley for another drink.

“Maybe that’s the problem,” Negus said. “We’re all getting a little old for piracy.” He kept on watching Pablo, fretting down on the pier. “And when’s Deedee coming back? We want to clear tonight.”

“She drove over to Pico to find a dentist,” Callahan said, measuring out his rum. “She’ll be back in plenty of time.”

“Fuckin’ ’ell,” Freddy Negus said. He put his baseball cap on and went out on the little bridge beside the wheelhouse, squinting into the sun.

“Hey, you!” he called down to Pablo. “Pablo! Come on up here.”

Hearing himself hailed from one of the ratty shrimpers, Pablo picked up his bag and started along the pier. There was a white man in a baseball cap on the bridge of the largest of the boats; the man was waving Pablo aboard. It occurred to him that the Callahans’ yacht must be lying to offshore somewhere. He had suspected contrabanding but nothing so complex.

“Tabor?” the man asked him when he stood abeam of the shrimper. A black man who had been painting bright yellow numerals on the vessel’s prow turned to look at him. Pablo nodded.

“Come aboard, Tabor.”

Pablo stepped over the rail. The man who had called him was tall and lean, tanned, with lazy faded blue eyes. He indicated a hatchway behind the wheelhouse and followed Pablo through it.

“I’m looking for the Cloud,” Pablo explained.

“You’re standing in her,” the tall man said.

Mr. Callahan came forward from the galley, a glass in his hand.

“Well done,” Mr. Callahan said. “Right on time.”

Pablo turned from the tall man’s steady gaze.

“Christ, Mr. Callahan. You told me you had a powerboat. You didn’t say nothing about shrimping.” He felt disappointed and betrayed. It was not at all what he had looked forward to.

“You don’t see any sails, do you?” the tall man asked him. “This is a powerboat.”

Pablo turned to face him. “No question about that.”

“What’s happening right now,” Mr. Callahan said, “is that you’re being engaged as a crewman on the shrimp boat Cloud. We’re registered out of Marathon, Florida. We’re licensed to fish in the territorial waters of the United States, of Mexico, Belize, Compostela and Tecan. Any other questions will have to wait. O.K.?”

“What am I working for?” Pablo asked bitterly. “A percentage of the catch?”

“That sounds like a question to me,” the tall man said.

Pablo looked at the man again. From his accent, Pablo made him out to be a white Bahamian. Hope Town, Spanish Wells, some sorry-ass town like that. A mean redneck.

“Let me introduce Mr. Negus,” Callahan said. “My number one.”

Pablo nodded. Mr. Negus shifted the plug of tobacco in his cheek.

“And let me hasten to assure you that you’re not being taken advantage of. If we were looking for cheap labor there’s plenty to come by down here. You’ll do fine but you’ve got to go by our rules.”

Negus was looking out at the pier through the hatchway.

“Where you from, son?” he asked Pablo.

“Texas.”

“Lay out your gear for us.” He indicated Pablo’s bag and the deck of the passageway in which they stood. For the first time, Pablo noticed that the interior bulkheads were paneled in dark wood, the rubber-matted deck was spotless. He opened his bag and spread his store of worn work clothes, toiletry bags and slickers across it. Negus crouched to rifle through it and immediately picked up the plastic bag that held Pablo’s passport and tourist card. He handed it over to Callahan.

“We ask everyone to do that for us,” Mr. Callahan explained. “These days you can’t be too careful.” He looked the passport and tourist card over and returned them. Negus took Pablo’s wallet from him. There was nothing in the wallet except what was left of his money. Negus gave him back his wallet and motioned him up against the bulkhead. Pablo leaned forward on his palms.