A Flag for Sunrise

“Sorry,” Mr. Callahan said.

In a few moments Negus had the automatic and the diver’s knife out on deck. Grimly, he turned out Pablo’s trouser pockets one by one.

“What’s all that for?” Mr. Callahan asked mildly.

“Just for protection.”

“Now how in hell,” Mr. Negus wanted to know, “did he get down here trussed up with all that weaponry? Don’t you think it’s a bit odd,” he asked Callahan, “that they didn’t get it off him?”

“Nobody ever searched me,” Pablo told them. “I come down to Vizcaya on the bus.”

“The bus? All the way from the States?”

“Yes, sir. All the way from Matamoros, Mexico.”

Negus sighed in exasperation.

“I mentioned that it would be our rules,” Callahan said to Pablo. “If any of that troubles you”—he motioned back toward the shacks of Palmas—“we’ll pay your way back to Vizc and wish you luck. Otherwise — our rules and no questions. That way you’ll make out very well indeed.”

“O.K.,” Pablo said. “I guess I’m with you.”

“You can’t keep that pistol while you’re aboard,” Callahan told him. “You might have an accident. The knife, O.K.”

Negus gave him his Dacor knife. “Wear it on your belt where a man can see it, sailor.”

“Welcome aboard,” Mr. Callahan said, and took his drink aft.

He walked through the galley and into a dark compartment where the forward ice hold should have been, closing a door behind him. Pablo looked from the well-stocked bar in the galley to the tinted glass fronting the pilothouse. At the forward end of the passageway in which he stood was a Modar UHF transmitter and a CB. There were A and C Lorans and what appeared to be a seventy-eight-mile-range radar scanner. The wheelhouse cockpit had a brand-new recording Fathometer. From the dock the Cloud had appeared to be a moderately clean eighty-five-foot shrimper. Inside she had the appointments and equipment of a cutter.

“I take it,” Mr. Negus said, as he watched Pablo look over the electronic gear, “that you’re familiar with this stuff?”

“More or less,” Pablo said.

“Everything the latest boats carry, we carry,” Negus told him. “Your big Texas boats have all this stuff.”

Pablo did not contradict him. They went out on deck and Mr. Negus led him aft. Between the mainmast and the upright outriggers, some kind of extra compartment had been constructed. Its uppermost section rose above the level of the main deck and was boarded over with three-by-five hatch covers. This, Pablo thought, would be the compartment into which Mr. Callahan had taken his drink.

Pablo decided that he would venture an observation.

“Never seen that space on a Texas boat,” he said to Mr. Negus.

“You’ll see it on plenty of boats down here,” Negus told him casually. “When a man takes his family out, he needs more space. The Cloud’s a home, you understand. It’s a lifestyle.”

“Oh,” Pablo said.

There were two ice holds, empty and with their hatch covers off. Aft of them a hatchway led down to an airless lazaret where there was a single bunk and some bales of chafing gear.

“You can sack out for a while if you like,” Negus told Pablo. “But we’re going out before sunset and I want everybody standing to.”

“Roger,” Pablo said.

“Tino can fix you up with boots and whatnot when he’s finished painting. He’ll show you around. Once we’re under way you come on up to the pilothouse and we’ll tell you what you need to know.”

“Yes sir,” Pablo said out of instinct.

Down in the lazaret, he took off his cowboy boots and lay down on the bunk. The sheet smelled freshly laundered, the pervasive odor of diesel fuel made Pablo feel somewhat at home. A powerboat.

He lay low for a while, listening to the slap of water against the boards, the sounds of the quiet harbor. At some time during his rest, the woman came aboard; he heard them call out to her from the pilothouse and then her voice with theirs in a muffled echo through the holds that lay between his quarters and the dark compartment.

Late in the afternoon he looked up to see the black man who had been painting the bow framed in the hatchway above him. The man dropped a pair of white rubber boots down the hatch: each boot had a rubber glove stuffed inside it.

“Vámonos, muchacho.”

“Sí,” Pablo said. “Momento.”

He rolled out of his rack and put on a pair of clean woolen socks, pulled the boots over them and jammed the gloves in his pockets. The black man stepped back to let Pablo climb topside and extended his hand.

“Soy Tino.”

Tino’s hand was like a shard of coral. Pablo wondered what Tino made of his own soft hand.

“Pablo.”

“Buenas. Usted es norteamericano, no?”

“Texas.”

“Dat’s what I figger,” Tino said.

“Sure is a fine boat.”

“Surely is. Dushi, we say on my island.”

“Which is that?”

“Sint Joost,” Tino told him. “You see it couple days.”

“Be my pleasure to be the fuck off this coast, I’ll tell you.”

Mr. Callahan, looking fresh and sober, was standing on the dockside in conversation with a Compostelan in a smart naval uniform. They were laughing together. Pablo saw them exchange sealed manila envelopes and shake hands heartily. Negus, who had been leaning on the rail beside the pilothouse, sauntered back to Pablo and Tino.

“Reckon we’re just about set,” he told them.

“You don’t want the net rigged?” Tino asked. “Don’t want the outriggers over?”

“Fuck it. We’re not fishing tonight and we don’t have to put on a show. Weather’s nice, so we won’t need the stabilizers. Just get up steam and we’ll ease along out.”

Tino took off for the engine room.

“Like the boat?” Negus asked Pablo.

“Dushi,” Pablo said.

Negus did not smile.

Holliwell traveled down the Río de la Fe from a town called Tapa. The Zeccas together drove him there from San Ysidro. If Captain Zecca had received a line on Holliwell in his workday morning’s mail, he gave no indication of it. At the same time, it seemed to Holliwell that they talked less on the drive than they had before and that their talk was more bland. On the dockside, they shook hands with him gaily and assured him that it had all been fun. Holliwell, quite sober now, felt inexplicably forlorn watching their Honda disappear down Tapa’s single muddy street, headed for the potholed, switchbacking mountain road back to the capital.

In the guidebook Holliwell carried, the local boat was recommended because it afforded a leisurely journey in the course of which one might inspect the magnificent gorges of the river valley, see the Indian towns on the bank and the landings where the hacienderos waited for their mail and their mail-order luxuries from the capital. Unlike Compostela, Tecan had no highway between her coasts; east-west surface transportation was by boat along the river. It was a route much used by Forty-niners during the California gold rush to avoid the journey around Cape Horn; an arduous and malarial journey in those days that killed a quarter of the men who undertook it. Now the traffic moved by diesel-powered launches manufactured in Bremen, and the one moored at Tapa’s dock looked new and fairly well maintained. Holliwell, for the Zeccas’ convenience and his own impulse to flight, had booked passage on the night rápido and engaged a cabin.

An Indian boy carried his bag aboard for a quarter; he found his cabin small but very clean, with a brass-knobbed wooden door opening on an interior passageway and a second, louvered door opening to the deck. The sheets on the bunk were starched and spotless; there was a ceiling fan, mosquito netting, even a glass and a jug of agua purificada. Holliwell took a bottle of the local rum from his suitcase and mixed himself a rum and water. When he finished it, he drew back the mosquito netting, lay down on his bunk and went to sleep.

Rápido or not, the boat stopped many times during the night; so often that Holliwell within the first two hours of darkness was moved to rise and take his bottle out on deck. The night was clear. The mountain ranges rising close over the river on both sides cut off the moon from view but its deflected light lit the rocky peaks and cliffs, the treetops and the slow-seeming tawny river. Night birds and howler monkeys sounded from the banks, their calls echoing in the gorges. Holliwell sat down on a gear locker and looked up at the stars. According to his guidebook, there were jaguar in the valley.

The finca landings were lit by the headlights of parked jeeps. The forks of white light would flash of a sudden from the bank ahead, lighting the dun river in their glow, and the boat would slow and ease toward the bank until the searching spotlight over the wheelhouse picked up the vehicle and the waiting men together with a thousand spinning moths, their bright wings flashing a thousand colors in the glare. Into this well of light, the Indian deckhands would toss the starboard hawsers and the men on the bank secure them to rusty weighted barrels while the vessel’s fantail swung completely around in the invisible current and her engines labored full astern. When the boat was steady against the bank, the engines still rattling astern, the deckhands would push a wooden gangway from cargo deck to bank and, running as though under fire, would commence to carry ashore a few dozen sacks and crates. These the finca’s peons would carefully load in the waiting jeeps. Within a few minutes it would be over, the hawsers cast back aboard and the boat under way again. Astern of them, the landing would quickly dissolve into jungle darkness, like a theatrical tableau suggesting dreams or fairy spectacle.

In the Indian villages along the Río de la Fe there were no jeeps nor were there electric lights of any kind. The people on the bank would signal the boat with torches and the offloading would be lit by the pilothouse searchlight and a fire burning in an open pit beside the bank, with the hawsers secured around stumps. Handshakes and greetings would be exchanged on the run; the language of discourse was not Spanish. Boys would leap aboard from the outer darkness, prowling the decks like scavengers, accosting the few cabin passengers in sight with things to sell — feathered rattles, stuffed lizards, a live snake in a jar. Holliwell, ever conscious of thieves, would watch his unlocked cabin door, although there was little behind it worth stealing. At the last possible moment, the boys would leap ashore in the firelight and the boat continue its slow passage down the river.

Although it was difficult to see in the darkness, the smoke and the confusion of lights, the Indian villages seemed to Holliwell as poor and mean as the slums of the capital. There was a distinct sour smell to them, not quite fecal, but like rust and congealed blood. And in spite of their size and remoteness, they seemed to him like some North American cities he knew in that what they brought to the landscape that surrounded them was not a sense of settlement and advance but of concentrated misery, despair.

Between stops, he walked the upper deck — the few other cabin passengers were not in sight. For a while he leaned with his elbows against the rail and watched the men in the pilothouse. The helmsman was an Indian like the rest of the crew, wearing a wide Panama bent out of shape with the brim turned up and down to resemble an Australian bush hat, staring out into the darkness with a faint smile. Behind him the captain bent over a chart in the light of a desk lamp shielded from reflection by a tar-paper shade. The captain was a heavy red-faced man of some African blood with fair wavy hair, wearing a starched white shirt and narrow black necktie. Neither man appeared to speak to the other.

In time the mosquitoes drove Holliwell back to his cabin, and he lay down on his bunk buried behind the netting, smoking. He was thinking about his wife and his daughters, and how, though he had stayed — would never leave now — he had lost them. He had thought to do everything right — he believed in love. There had been something, perhaps, that it was not possible for someone like himself to know and his not knowing it had lost them. The hard way, little by little, without an outcry of any sort.

Thoughts of loss could be cauterized with drink. The alcohol he had been consuming since the start of his journey was a regular part of his metabolism now; he was half drunk, almost at peace. He nearly slept.

When he went out on deck again it was getting light, the sun rising over flat jungle and grassland where lean cattle grazed. The mountains were behind them to westward, rising abruptly in a massive escarpment that burst into bright green with dawn. Within minutes they were coming into a town of sorts — a city. Unpainted wooden houses with slant roofs stood on stilts above a black beach where gulls picked at piles of refuse and open clay gutters emptied a viscous stream into the brown river. Puerto Alvarado.

As the launch pulled for the right bank, Holliwell could see ahead a line of tin-roofed warehouses where two freighters stood at moor, and beyond that the river widening into a delta bordered with mangrove swamp, and beyond all, almost motionless in the morning light, the expanse of pale green ocean. While they tied up, Holliwell worked on his expense records, then gathered up his luggage.

The hustlers on the deck, offering to carry his bag or shine his shoes, spoke Caribbean English and required eye contact of him.

Holliwell’s shoes were already polished to a high gleam. He attempted to oblige with the eye contact but his eye was uneasy; he was scanning the dock for menace. The most menacing presence he could detect was that of the Guardia Nacional — four troopers and an officer, who exuded a floral aroma and regarded him in an unfriendly fashion. A few yards behind the Guardia pack — at the edge of the dockside street — a tall black man in a white shirt stood beside a Willys jeep of World War II provenance.

“Paradise?” the man asked Holliwell.

“Lovely,” Holliwell told him.

The man took Holliwell’s bag from him with a sure hand and placed it in the back of the jeep.

“Wait,” Holliwell said to him, “there must be some misunderstanding here.”

The black man frowned at him.

“Mon, I just as’ you if you goin’ to Paradise. You tol’ me O.K.”

“No,” Holliwell said. “I’m not going to Paradise.”

The man turned toward the boat in no particular hurry. Holliwell retrieved his bag lest he incur some manner of fee. At the dock, the last Tecanecan passengers were disembarking under the Guardian’s glare. There appeared to be no other gringos aboard.

“Where you want to go then?” the tall man asked Holliwell.

Holliwell looked at him and at his jeep.

“Well — to the Islas Airlines office. And the airport.”

“Jolly good,” the man said, taking the bag back. “I take you to the office.”

He climbed in beside the driver and they started up. The riverfront streets had little Spanish about them. The peeling wooden houses, the tin roofs, might have been in Kingston or Belize.

“How about the airport?” Holliwell asked.

“You not goin’ there today, mistuh. Nor tomorrow neither.”

“How come?” Holliwell asked, feeling a bit alarmed.

“Because Islas got only one plane and she’s over in Respina and she not about to fly. They got to get some parts from up San Ysidro. Carry dem over on de boat when they feel like.”

“Christ,” Holliwell said. The streets and the people in them were more Latin American as they approached the center of the city. Indians with marriage bands around their sombreros carried slaughtered turkeys and heaps of faggots over the cobblestones.

“If it was my airline,” the driver said, “I run it differently. But it’s not.”

“I guess I’ll check in at the office anyway.”

“Humm,” the driver said. “Want me to wait?”

Holliwell thought about it.

“No, don’t wait. I might be a while and maybe I’ll get lucky.”

“Thas a good way to think,” the Paradise driver said. “Thas the way I think.”

In front of the Islas office, he paid the price demanded and took his bag.

The office was in a part of the city off the central plaza, across from the government technical school. It was decidedly Spanish America here. The high curbs were set with ancient paving stones; the cathedral he saw through the jacaranda trees of the plaza was at least as old as the late eighteenth century. There was an old stone building beside it of about the same date, with Guardia sentries at its doorway. The judicia.

Behind a desk in the airline office, an Oriental woman sat listlessly on a high stool, projecting inexpressible melancholy — Masha Kuligina with another life to mourn, upon whom karma had bestowed exotic rebirth and strange displacement. Holliwell realized at once that there would be no good news from her. In the most decorous and formal Spanish at his command, he inquired the state of transportation to the islands. She answered him, as he knew she would, in English.

Things were more or less as the driver from Paradise had described them. The plane was in Respina. Another plane had been dispatched to the capital to obtain needed parts but had not yet returned. There was no question of alternative arrangements because the government regulations about the franchise were very rigorous. The islands and the coast were a military district and could not be overflown by any aircraft other than those authorized. There was indeed a boat that ran to the islands but it ran only on Wednesdays and Saturdays, the same days for which the plane was scheduled. A boat had left that morning. The journey was over ten hours because it stopped at several places along the coast as well as at each of the five offshore islands. One waited on the quay in the morning for a place, it was always very crowded.

“You speak English very well,” Holliwell told the woman. “Do you speak French also?”

The woman looked at him sadly. In his irritation, the observation and question had been a bit patronizing, an impertinence to a Vietnamese woman of culture such as this lady unquestionably was. She allowed him to realize this and smiled without a trace of good humor.

“Of course,” she said.

Of course, Holliwell thought. Bien sûr. Our worlds have touched before and we both know it, don’t we?

In any case the small opportunity he had offered himself for second thoughts on the spot seemed just about removed. Now he would be obliging Ocampo. He was there; he was being seen, as Oscar had put it, to be there. He glanced about the broken streets and wondered by whom.

Taking his bag once around the square, he paused on a guano-spotted bench to have his shoes shined yet again by a gaunt nine-year-old. It was a grim little plaza; the people lounging in it were as poor as any that Holliwell had ever seen. The interior of the cathedral, though it contained some good carved santos, was mainly a Babylonian horror with mindless rococo gilding and a curious encoffined Christ. When he had finished inspecting it, he carried his bag down a street of notaries and public letter writers to the clapboard riverfront.

The jeep was parked in the declining shade of the customs shed, its driver stretched out in the front seat with the brim of a Ralston Purina cap pulled down over his face. The ships at the adjoining wharf were loading sacks of coffee beans and the longshoremen working them wore sweatbands across their foreheads and machetes at their belts which gave them a piratical look.

The sleeping Paradise driver awoke to the whistle of a diesel launch from the interior which was pulling for its berth. He raised his hat and looked at Holliwell sympathetically.

“We goin’ to Paradise, you and me?”

“I guess we are. How much to go there?”

“Ten dollars,” the man said. “And I didn’t say pesos, did I? I said ten dollars U.S.”

Holliwell shrugged.

“The tourists always sayin’ I told ’em ten pesos,” the driver said as they turned to watch the arriving boat. “Never told anyone dat. Ten dollars. One with Mr. Hamilton on it.”

“I got you,” Holliwell said.

There were three gringos on the steamer, all going to the Paradise. A short rounded man with a deep tan, a gray goatee lengthening his thick jowls. His wife or girlfriend, gray-blond with a leathery brown face like a boot about to crack. A thin, florid man wearing a Yucatecan Panama.

The driver took their bags and everyone exchanged small nods. Holliwell sat in the back, beside the slight man with the Panama.

“Ralph Heath,” the man beside Holliwell said, as they drove over a straight dirt road through the mangrove swamp. The man held his Panama in his lap.

“Frank Holliwell.”

“Been here before?” He was an Englishman of about fifty, with a mean-featured hard little face. A drinker — the pouches under his eyes were the only slack part of him and distended veins ran down the sides of his nose.

“Never.”

“Alvarado’s a hole. But it’s a nice coast if that’s what you’re after. Coming place.”

“Are you down here often?” Holliwell asked him.

“Once or twice a year. Sometimes on business, sometimes just for the beer.”

“From England?”

“I live in Miami now,” Heath told him. “I have ever since our fruit company merged with yours. You’re American?”

“Yes,” Holliwell said. And after a moment, he shouted to Heath over the engine noise. “How do you like Miami?”

“Never looked back,” Heath said.

They drove under the mangrove wilderness opened to sandy beaches and palm groves; the road was only a packed sand track near the water’s edge. The cheerlessness of Puerto Alvarado fell away in the sunlight.

The drive took hours. They sped past clapboard fishing villages in the palm groves where nets were drying on poles along the beach and brightly painted boats with cabined wheelhouses were hauled up, buccaneer fashion, on raked plank dry docks beyond the tide line. Almost every house had in front of it a small garden of plantains and an overturned double-ended skiff. Farther from the ocean were the miles of fruit company houses, numbered and painted yellow. A good half of them appeared to be unoccupied.

On the beach road they were constantly passing women carrying baskets or pots on their heads. From time to time, Holliwell would see a basket that looked to have the ghost of an African design or a pot inlaid with a highland Indian pattern. But for the most part they were factory-made, bought in Alvarado or from a passing Syrian. Between the villages or on the edge of them were some compounds of vaguely ecclesiastical design that looked as though they might be missions. Holliwell said something to Heath about its being a fine place to be a missionary in.

“Too damn many of them,” Heath shouted to him. “That was your company’s policy in the old days — the more of the bastards, the merrier. They’re regretting it now.”

“Why’s that?”

“Why? Because they’re a pack of reds. Why shouldn’t they be? They don’t work for a living like you and me. I’m assuming you work for a living.”

“I teach,” Holliwell said.

“Ah,” said Mr. Heath, and he fell silent for a while.

“It isn’t religion they need down here,” Heath declared after five minutes. “They’ve had plenty of that. It’s the Pill. If this coast had half the population it has it would be in damn fine shape.”

Heath was speaking at the top of his voice, conceding their driver only the virtue of some necessity. The couple in the front seat stirred and half turned round in embarrassment.

“Then who would pick the fruit?”

“Hardly any fruit to pick these days. Less than half the crop there was ten years ago. We package coffee and bananas now — we’ve lost most of the bananas to blight. The next thing we need to package is tourism and we don’t need all these imported Jamaicans for that. The other way round — we need less of them.”

The couple in the front seat cringed visibly. The driver, one arm resting on the back of his seat, looked with an amiable countenance at the track before him.

“In the old days,” Heath said, “when the bananas had a few bad years the pickers moved on. No more. The sensible thing for us to do is to airlift the lot to the Pacific coast where we’re bloody crying out for pickers. It’s the sensible thing, so naturally these psalm singers are determined to stop us doing it. They turn the people against us and against the government. They’re masters of propaganda.”

“Really?” Holliwell asked.

“God, yes. Down here they’re meek and mild. Lambs. Then they go abroad and thunder for blood and revolution. They’ve got powerful friends, you know, and they use them to the hilt. Dignity of man,” Heath said sourly. “Where I stand a man’s got dignity or he hasn’t, rich or poor the same. You can’t bestow it on him. You can’t send it to him in a CARE package.”

“I don’t really know the situation,” Holliwell shouted back. “So I can’t say.”

“Fair enough,” Heath told him. “You’re one among many.”

The hotel called Paradise was neither as transcendent nor as banal as its name. It consisted of a number of simple wooden bungalows around a well-tended garden. At some distance from the bungalows was what appeared to be a disused airplane hangar but which revealed itself on closer inspection to be a terraced dining room, open to the beach. Where the tool shops might have been there was a kitchen and a crescent-shaped bar; an old nineteen-forties jukebox stood at the edge of the large cement floor between the bar and the decks of tables, blasting Freddy Fender’s rendition of “El Rancho Grande” into every square foot of covered space. At the water’s edge was a dock with a couple of numbered boats tied up to it and a shack with a diver’s flag painted on the roof.

Not paradise but nice enough. In the office bungalow a hefty Spanish woman registered the guests and dispensed keys to the bungalows.

Holliwell stowed his bag in the plain bungalow and took a cold shower, the only kind available. When he had changed clothes, he poured himself a drink and went outside to sit in the shade of an arbor of bougainvillea.

After he had been sitting for a while, a dark-skinned young man came up from the bar, where he had been drinking a beer with the driver, and asked Holliwell if he wanted to go diving.

Holliwell looked at the young man and then at the placid ocean. The question aroused in him a thrill of fear and also a longing for the depths, for the concealment and oblivion of blue-gray light at sea level minus seventy.

“It’s been a while,” he said.

“If you want,” the young man said, “we run you through a checkout in the morning. Bring it back. You been certified?”

“Yeah,” Holliwell said. A reliable-looking kid, he thought. Undersea images flashed in his mind, fans and parrot fish, silvery barracuda. Things being what they were, why not?

The young man gave him a card with the diving package rates. Holliwell put it in his pocket. As the young man walked back toward the dive shop, Ralph Heath came by carrying a glass of white rum and soda.

“Going diving, are you?”

“I’m thinking of it. I haven’t in a long time.”

“Nor have I. I got thumped on the head in Bogotá eight years ago and I haven’t been able to dive since. Only wish I could.”

“Did you ever dive around here?”

“Oh, yes. Here and in Jamaica. Malta. Yap in Micronesia. I was very fond of it.”

“How did you come to get thumped?” Holliwell asked.

“Accident,” Heath said. “I’ll tell you — Playa Tate’s a good place for a dive. That’s about six miles south of here. There’s a reef close inshore — then she drops off about three quarters of a mile out. It’s a wall — a real chiller-diller, that one. Grand Canyon.”

“Many sharks?” Holliwell asked sheepishly. It was a question one was not supposed to ask.

“Well,” Heath said, “this is the eastern Carib, chum. You’re likely to see the odd shark out there.”

“I suppose,” Holliwell said.

“Another good place is near there. By the American Catholic mission. There’s one reef that starts in about eight feet of water, then slopes down to forty, then flattens out and drops a mile out. Good snorkeling there as well.”

“How’s the shop here?”

“Quite good actually. Sandy’s a good boy. I used to dive with his father ten years or so ago. Nice family they are. Head and shoulders above the rest of them around here.”

“I think I will go out,” Holliwell said. “I’ll go look up Sandy in the morning.”

“You’ll have a jolly good time, Holliwell,” Heath said.

Pablo leaned idly on the rail as they cleared the harbor, the rubber work gloves still in his back pocket. His want of a bath was bothering him acutely now and he wished that he had asked them about it while the boat was still hooked up to a dockside water line. If there was a woman aboard, he reasoned, the Cloud must have a head and shower somewhere.

No harm in asking, he thought after a while; there might be enough water from the evaporators or a fresh-water supply somewhere aboard. They seemed to have everything else. He went forward to the wheelhouse and leaned his head through the hatch. Negus and Callahan were in the cockpit chairs.

“If we got some time now and there’s water enough, could I clean up? I ain’t shaved nor showered for a while.”

Negus looked from Pablo to Callahan.

“There’s enough,” Callahan said. “Right behind the galley. Knock first.”

He went back to the lazaret to get some fresh clothes and his toilet kit and then up to the galley. Behind it was the door to the dim compartment into which Mr. Callahan had earlier disappeared with his drink. He knocked twice on it.

“Hello,” called the voice of Mrs. Callahan.

“Sorry,” he said.

“Come on in.”

He opened the door just as Tino, out on deck, was hauling away the hatch covers that closed off the windows of the compartment from the outside. As the space filled with light he saw that the compartment had the same dark paneling as the forward passageway, that there was a striped chaise longue, some captain’s chairs with brightly colored cushions, even a bookcase. In the center of the stateroom was a round table with metal studs, an electric fan resting on it. Mrs. Callahan was sitting in one of the captain’s chairs under a lighted wall lamp, a book on her lap.

“On your right, Pablo,” she told him. She pulled the terry-cloth robe she was wearing a little farther down over her tanned thighs. It was all she had on, Pablo thought.

“I’ll go easy on the water.”

In the pocket of Mrs. Callahan’s robe, Pablo espied a bottle of pills. There was a small swelling distorting the patrician contour of her high cheekbone and long jaw.

“Yes, do,” she said.

Pablo had him a shit, shower and shave; his thoughts were carnal. Soaping down, he sang to himself.

“I ride an old paint

I ride an old dan

I’m going to Montana for to have a hooly-an.”

The water was warm, hand-pumped out of an overhead pipe through a rubber nozzle. He shaved slowly and deliberately, his shoulder propped against the bulkhead beside the mirror, riding with the slow roll of the boat, still singing.

When he came out, Mrs. Callahan was watching him, leaning her head on an elbow, her hand covering her mouth. When she took her hand away, he saw that she was smiling.

“Do you play the guitar?” she asked him.

“No,” Pablo said, feeling surly and put down.

“What a shame,” Mrs. Callahan said.

He climbed out of the fancy compartment, the kit and soiled clothes under his arm, and went out on deck. Low even seas slid westward under the light wind, over the horizon was a thin line of cloud, nearly pink in the fading light. Big bitch thinks I’m comical, he said to himself. She thinks I’m the fucking entertainment.

Tino was checking out the net’s chain line as Pablo tossed his things down into the lazaret.

“Callahan bring his old lady every trip?”

“Mostly does.”

It was not his custom to speak of white women with dark people but resentment and desire made him uneasy and perverse.

“She spread it around any?”

“Lister engine,” Tino said, nodding toward the casing of the outrigger’s auxiliary motor. Pablo watched him drop the chain line on the deck and walk over to slap the top of the casing. “You can work it from right here or from the cockpit. Can haul it up by hand on the windlass if you needs to.”

Pablo fixed his eyes on the tall St. Joostian and leaned against the upright outrigger. He was being turned around again. He watched the other man’s eyes and thought of the den tided palm.

“We ain’t fishin’ tonight,” Tino said, “but I tell you in case like. Over dere—” He pointed to a rolled-up smaller net against the port rail. “Dat’s de tri-net. We haul her up every half hour maybe on a lay line. You ever been shrimping before?”

Pablo only stared at him.

“Well,” Tino said, meeting his stare, “you best be told so you know what you doin’. Got to know what you doin’ out here.”

“Is that right?” Pablo asked him.

“Believe it,” Tino said, and picked up the chain line again.

“That’s real good of you, Tino.”

“Para servile,” Tino said softly.

During the next two days, the Cloud ran the coast of the Isthmus. Most of the time they were out of sight of land, in the seas between the Swan Islands and Serrana Bank. Pablo watched and listened, made himself useful and kept his nature to himself. It was like a breakdown cruise; they were testing the electronics gear and the auxiliary diesels; making plans to which he was not party. Mainly, he realized, it was he himself that they were observing. Tino, Negus, both of the Callahans would engage him from time to time in strained quiet conversations that varied in nature according to their several styles. He made it his business to be pleasant, incurious and resourceful in small matters. He had a turn at the wheel, he replaced a Raytheon tube and sunned himself on the hatches. Once, when they were anchored off Gracias a Dios, he had a skinny dip and was confirmed in the conviction that Mrs. Callahan had eyes for him. The swim also gave him a chance to study the boat’s dynamics from the business end, and although he was no engineer he could see that even in basic construction the Cloud was not what she appeared. She had what the Coast Guard would call a false hull; a squat duck of a shrimper at first and even second glance above the waterline, her lines were modified to make her capable of formidable speed with the diesels engaged. A contrabands, as he had assumed.

On the morning of the third day out, they dropped the hook off Palmas and every one of them but Tino set about getting drunk. Their intemperance worried Pablo, who thought it unbusinesslike. They smoked a great deal of grass as well and tried to press it on him. Pablo had settled himself into three Benzedrines a day and he did not care for marijuana; it made him feel turned around. An indistinct notion presented itself to him: that the company’s undisciplined self-indulgence might eventually be turned somehow to his advantage. But for the moment he was content.

After siesta, on the same day, the lot of them held a conference in their improbable saloon space. Pablo was not invited. He had found that standing in the forward ice hold he was able to hear quite clearly everything that was said on the far side of the bulkhead, but he knew better than to employ this convenience prematurely.

When the afternoon passed and he was not summoned, he felt confident that they were satisfied with him. In the evening, he and Tino took the anchor in and lowered the stabilizers. Mrs. Callahan cleaned the kitchen. It seemed he was in.

In the years since the city’s history had caused the decline of the lakeside district, the most desirable section of Tecan’s capital was in the hills west of the center, on the only slope not occupied by squatters. Most of the embassies remained on the Malecón beside the lake but a few had moved to the hillside neighborhood; it was in this section of Tecan’s capital that the Zeccas maintained their pleasant house.

The slope section had always been known as Buenos Aires. Its central area of four blocks or so was the remains of a colonial suburb destroyed by a series of earthquakes and contained the remnants of a baroque church and a colonnaded building which had been a theater, a market, or the palace of the Inquisition depending on the books one referred to. A market was what it had become, and it had probably always been one.

The outer streets of Buenos Aires, between the colonial core and the new residential sections, had been set out in the nineties by a class of people who had been to Paris once or twice and remembered it imperfectly but fondly. Any foreigner taking a turn round the Buenos Aires district and attempting to pursue the promise of an isthmian Montparnasse would be disabused as quickly as a stroller among the flats and terraces of a production of La Bohème—but here and there, among the beggars and the Indian vendors, a streetlight, a gray stone high Renaissance structure, a mansard roof might bring a fleeting taste of some dead comprador’s lost city of light. The gentry responsible for this modest hall of mirrors were melancholy internal exiles. But they were also great dreamers, so it was impossible to be certain just how far, during the brief period of agrarian prosperity and large foreign loans, they had intended to pursue this fancy. Their greatest achievements in its realization were marked by the blighted lakeside barrio; Buenos Aires, like the Paris of Thiers, had been early aborted. But for reasons of recent history, that section had held its thin illusion more successfully. Squatters who tried moving into some of the empty buildings were summarily dealt with and sometimes murdered outright by the Guardia, an indication that there must be a continuing affection for the district on the part of a faction in the present regime, men of sensibility less taken with Houston and Atlanta than their colleagues and relations.

There were many religious houses in the area now, minor government offices and the chambers of professional men. The National University used a few buildings there, and there seemed to be a great many private language schools doubling as pensions whose brochures were available through foreign travel magazines. High on the slope, the President’s family were constructing a new, glass hotel.

Early on a winter morning, just after first light in the hour before the day’s heat descended on the inland sea, a young woman in jeans and a neat white blouse was walking downhill past one of the grander of the gray stone buildings, humming to herself and carrying a stack of books and a thin plastic briefcase. Obviously a student, her very presence, her books and high spirits, contributed to the decorous European veneer of the neighborhood.

She was at the point of entering another stone building a little further down the hill when she slipped on a worn marble step at the street entrance. She kept her footing but her books and the briefcase scattered over the pavement. Bending to recover them, she looked up to see a slight elderly man in a lightweight Italian suit advancing to help her. The man had just stepped out of a Fiat in the narrow street; as soon as he was out the door the car sped away.

The man was elegant and professorial, as he briskly gathered up the young student’s fallen books; he smiled in a dignified way and spoke to her softly to ease her embarrassment.

It was a charming incident in its contrast to the petty cruelties and palpable brutality that characterized so much of the street life of San Ysidro. The two, student and professor, looked like the kind of people for whom the Malecón and the Buenos Aires district had been constructed.

“What an opportunity,” the elderly man was saying. “In my youth one could always make the acquaintance of a pretty fellow student in this way.”

“One still may,” the girl said gaily. She was naturally pale, though blushing under the compliment. Her face was angular and handsome; in body she was a bit squat and not altogether suited to jeans. The old man carried her books as the two of them went into the building before which she had had her small accident. A worn brass plaque on the door identified it as a residence of the Christian Brothers.

Once inside they walked up a dusty flight of stairs and to the head of an immaculate corridor which had windows with lace curtains at each end. A European brother met them there, politely asked their names and told them that room five had been engaged for their seminar. The corridor had plastered walls and a wooden floor on which their steps reverberated.

In the room numbered five, five men sat at a polished round table. All five stood at the elderly man’s entrance; they seemed to strain toward him, wanting to touch him. He was the object of their happiness.

“Compañeros,” the elderly man said, “salud.”

The terseness and dignity of his greeting held them in place. They took their seats again.

With a courtly smile, the old man placed the stack of books he had been carrying on the polished table, and extended his hand to the young woman.

“I am Aguirre,” he told her.

The girl took his hand and held it. Her accident had in fact been the signal for his safe entry.

“We met once, Don Sebastián, but you wouldn’t remember me. When you left we were all afraid … never to see you again.”

“But here I am,” Aguirre said. “And I’m not Don Sebastián to you, compañera.”

All in the room were smiling now. Aguirre himself was not well and was extremely tired. Within the past week he had visited foreign friends in several countries, had even made the transatlantic journey from Prague, a process which never failed to exhaust him utterly.

In Prague, in addition to business, there had been late nights with his old friends from the Spanish war — much spinning out of the past and hardly any talk of the future. Their relentless nostalgia discouraged and exasperated him and to his own grief he had found many of his old fellow soldiers — brothers and more than brothers from the terrible days of the defense of the University City — tiresome and redundant. Even more depressing to him than the burned-out nature of so many old comrades had been the occasions of his lack of communication with the young. These, fortunately, had been few — but they frightened him. His courtesy had served to conceal much impatience with empty nostalgia, rhetoric à la disco, self-indulgence and mindless bohemianism. He was relying on the same courtesy now, for few in the room had anything to tell him, in spite of his three years’ absence from Tecan. He was eager for action, for hard information that would complete his strategic assessment, that would move things forward. There was only one person in the room who could provide for his requirements in this regard and he had now to wait, benign and courtly, until the real conversation could take place.

As he pretended to listen to young Comrade Rodo present her report on the student situation in the capital, he used his time as valuably as he could trying to read in the faces of the men around him, in their manner and demeanor, some record of the three years he had lost of Tecan. Of course, they in their turn were seeking out the reverse side of the record in watching him. The concentration that seemed focused on Rodo’s assessment, as she shuffled her coded aides-mémoire, was profound.

Across the table from Aguirre sat an Atapa Indian called a la Torre. Taller and more broad-shouldered than most Atapas, he was otherwise physically typical of them. The Atapas were a Malay-like people, and even their artifacts resembled those of Southeast Asia. During the conquest, the Spaniards had thought of the Atapas as docile, although in the period before independence they had come to learn otherwise.

A la Torre himself was a small landowner and while it would be unfair to speak of him as vicious, he was, drunk or sober, feared by Indians and whites alike. A kulak, the Russians might call him. But their social designations did not apply well in Tecan.

Several attempts had been made on a la Torre’s life by both gentry concerned with mineral rights and ultra-right fanatics. Each had failed and some had occasional mortal consequences. He was the unquestioned leader of the southern group of Atapas, in spite or because of the ways in which his life differed from most of theirs. In his youth, he had been converted to Adventism by North American missionaries, but his enthusiasm for the gospel and its evangelists had evaporated during his two years at the National Technical College, obviated, it seemed, by his discovery of the Republic and the machine.

His experiences had left him with a curious and volatile variant of the Protestant ethic. He was an unstinting and indefatigable worker of strong ambition and great physical strength. His small holding, given over to scarce and hence relatively valuable vegetables and a small dairy herd, had been cleared from scrub jungle by his own muscle and sweat. When he had occasion to hire the labor of his fellow Atapas he paid them as generously as possible and supervised their work through terror. Yet his society had forced him to see his own and his people’s work as a humiliation, surrounded and dominated as he was by those who did none or lived off that of others.

All work to a la Torre was physical work. Doctors and teachers he recognized as necessary, but they were not workers. Making reluctant exceptions for these professions, he was consumed by a serious and quite personal hatred for large groups of people whom he saw as living without working. The rich and the priests did none and he hated these most of all. The bourgeoisie did none. Nor did the gringos, the gachupines, the soldiery. Their existences consisted in living by trickery off the work of others and he was prepared to kill them in good conscience as he would those he caught stealing or cheating him at cards. He was thoroughly honest and a leader, not cruel but unyieldingly just in accordance with his perception of justice, which owed something to that of the Adventist God.

Looking covertly into his black Tonkinese eyes, Aguirre shuddered. The man was so thoroughly the emotional product of social forces as to pose a dilemma, one that Aguirre might find the energy to discuss over good Pilsener with his old comrades in the Charles Square. In terms of socialist humanism, a la Torre was almost too good to be true. That history has provided us in our poor country with such treasures, Aguirre thought gratefully! And que huevon, the old man thought. Invincible!

Seated beside the formidable Atapa — owlish, effervescent with wise humor and contained intelligence — was another personified dilemma, Héctor Morelos de Medina, one of the few surviving members of the old Communist Party of Tecan and one of Aguirre’s oldest friends. Ironical, learned, the best of company and, most rare in San Ysidro, a true wit — Morelos ran a bookshop in the Buenos Aires neighborhood. For many years as a Communist in Tecan he had led a terribly dangerous life, endured exile, acted with the greatest bravery in the face of torture and excruciating sacrifice. Now, like Aguirre’s other old friend in Compostela, Oscar Ocampo, Morelos had become a North American spy. Intelligence abroad had not identified the motive for his defection but it did not seem to be ideological. Presumably it was banal like Ocampo’s. Aguirre had always been close to Morelos; certainly he preferred his company to that of Stakhanovites like a la Torre. On the other hand it could not be said that he was profoundly shaken. He had known many defectors in his lifetime and plenty of them had construed for themselves the best of motives. Sometimes the nature of their treason was objective only. It was disagreeable and regrettable for Sebastián Aguirre to now consider his friend Morelos an enemy in war, but it was certainly not impossible.

Señorita Rodo finished her report and everyone nodded. She was Urban Youth, Studentdom, Woman; an essential. A good-hearted rich kid who might or might not have a mean streak for good or ill when the time came. No question of guts; she was risking interrogation by the Guardia. Aguirre gave her his choicest approving smile.

Beside Rodo — the moderates. Agustín Baz, a manufacturer of soap, a mestizo of poor origin who had worked his way to enlightened wealth and been rewarded with sharp dealing and extortion at the hands of the ruling clique. He was also in competition with foreigners. Most of the local capitalists endured and took what they could for themselves; Baz had the gift of resentment and more balls. He preferred facing revolution to being openly cheated. Baz was as honest as a la Torre and ran the clandestine organization in San Ysidro effectively. He had moments of tactical brilliance. Yet, he would not go the distance, Aguirre thought. The man was no traitor and no weakling but they were simply not fighting for the same things and Baz would finish in Miami, embittered, a gusano, as the Cubans said. He himself had not the remotest idea that this would come to pass, but Aguirre, listening to his report on the state of the nation’s finances, felt fairly certain of it. Naturally, he was always ready to be proven wrong.

Next, inevitably, the priest — at the moment another essential. Monsignor Golz was of partly Swiss origin, another honest man conversant with and not unsympathetic to Marx. Inspired by the example of Calles, a disciple of Gustavo Gutiérrez, he thought of himself as an intellectual. Aguirre, as much a connoisseur of engagé priests as he was anticlerical, thought him fatuous. But there was no question in his mind of the necessity of having Golz, and in his portly, priestly way, Golz was a fanatic. Aguirre was much more certain of Baz’s ultimate desertion than of Golz’s. His fanaticism might take him either way — one could never be sure with priests.

The moderates, Baz and Golz, were ill at ease. They were aware of the patronizing and faint scorn of nearly all the other participants, and the monsignor, as he described conditions on the Caribbean coast, was particularly aware of the distaste and distrust with which the terrible a la Torre watched him. Even young Rodo curled her lip as she listened. And of course Morelos, the CIA stool pigeon, was least able to dissemble his amusement at this ecclesiastical presence.

Listening carefully to Golz’s report, and giving no evidence of any suppressed contumely, was the man whom Aguirre had come to see. He was a man in his middle thirties, dark-skinned and massive, with a face not easily forgotten. His hair was thick and straight, he was bull-necked and broad-faced and down the length of his broken nose from brows to nostrils was a jagged crooked scar, showing the red imperfectly healed flesh of a deep wound. The coarseness of his features and the disfiguring mark of violence seemed to sum up the fortunes of a Tecanecan campesino; in fact the young man’s origins and career were in no sense proletarian. His father had been a botanist at the Institute of Sciences and he himself had degrees in art and in art history from the University of California. For years he had been a moderately successful painter, spending most of his time in New York and in Mexico City; presently he was chairman of the Art Department at the National University. He was on social terms with the families of several presidential henchmen and with quite a few Americans in the diplomatic community.

He was the man, Aguirre thought, reassured, watching him nod encouragement to the rambling monsignor. They thought well of him abroad. The Americans thought they knew him, liked him, had no reason to fear him. He looked as vital, as capable as ever. He was the man who would lead — during the revolution and afterwards. Among those in the room, only Aguirre and the young man himself realized this. The realization had taken Aguirre a long time to arrive at; the young man himself seemed always to have known it.

From his suit pocket, Aguirre drew a forbidden cigarette — Benson & Hedges — and waited, smoking, for the mock council to draw to its conclusion. The scarred young man was his only true collaborator among the lot of them and there were things now that required urgent consultation.

The pro forma strategy session was not ended easily. All participants required a stroke for their self-esteem, the spy required reassurance. Roles had to be assigned and abrazos exchanged with the venerable and distinguished visitor. It seemed a long time before they had all gone and Aguirre was left alone with the scarred man, whose name was Emilio Ortega Curtis.

When they were across the table from each other in the abandoned conference room, Aguirre lit another cigarette and offered Ortega the pack. Ortega smiled and shook his head.

“How was Prague?”

“Beautiful as ever. A bit subdued, as you may imagine.”

“Well,” Emilio Ortega said, “too bad. But that’s their problem, of course. How did you find our friends abroad?”

“How?” Aguirre weighed his words. “Cautious. Patronizing. Faux naïve.”

“Then nothing’s changed.”

“Nothing essential. Tell me about Tecan.”

“As they say in the Koran, Don Sebastián, no one has promised us tomorrow. But I think, my friend, you’ve lived to see the revolution.”

Aguirre’s frail heart began to beat in his throat.

“And have I just seen the provisional government — more or less?”

“Some of it. The same sort of people. Except, of course, for Morelos. Whom we know is a Yanqui spy.”

Aguirre nodded. “Sad, no? I can’t know how you feel, Emil, but — myself — I’ll miss him.”

“I miss him,” Ortega said. “I’ve already mourned for him.”

They sat without speaking, observing something like a moment of silence for the man’s treachery.

“If one must have a moral,” Ortega said, “I propose: Look too long into yourself and you won’t know whom you’re seeing.”

“He was always,” Aguirre said, “an exquisite ironist.”

“Well,” Ortega said. “Small suffering countries don’t require ironists. When we require ironists we’ll produce our own. Without help from the United States.”

“But not too many, one hopes.”

“The representatives of our provisional government — what did you think of them? The ‘usual suspects’?”

“Yes, I suppose. I have hopes for Golz, as priests go.”

“I do too,” Ortega said. “His organization within the church was built very discreetly and subtly. He’s lined up some solid ones for this stage.”

“Godoy, I think, is his man, no?”

“Godoy is among his chiefs. Like him, but not a man to my taste.”

“You’re not Spanish enough to appreciate Godoy.”

Ortega shrugged. He was indifferent to the legend of Spain and the self-obsession of Spaniards. Even Tecanecan criollos like Aguirre, with their peninsular pieties, offended his indigenismo.

“I’m a man of UCLA,” he said. “In spite of what they say, we weren’t all mystics in Los Angeles.”

“Clearly not,” Aguirre agreed, then changed the subject. “You’re aware, I hope, that the gringos have filled up the country with spies. Their activity is more than routine. We have this from primary sources abroad.”

“We’re aware. They’re here for the show, so we’re making it hot for them. In fact, a la Torre shot one in the mountains last week.”

“You’re joking! A U.S. citizen?”

Ortega was unable to repress a smile; in a moment his expression sobered.

“Not merely a U.S. citizen but an imported gringo.”

Dr. Aguirre whistled between his teeth.

“A man named Cole showed himself in Extremadura. He claimed to be a journalist and full of sympathy and he expressed great interest in visiting our military formations. He had just come from Oscar Ocampo. A la Torre took him up to First Brigade. He talked a great deal and he demonstrated familiarity with every sort of weapon. He had been in Vietnam — he told us this himself. We held back awhile — we wanted to be fair and avoid a provocation. The third day there he was court-martialed and executed.”

“I approve,” Aguirre said. “Let them stop taking us for fools. Let them find out that Yanquis die as easily as peasants. And perhaps,” Aguirre said, “the regrettable time has come to do something about Oscar. He seems to enjoy making difficulties.”

“The time has come. But we have to clear it abroad — or so we’re told.”

“I grant you dispensation,” Aguirre said. “Let the Compostelan comrades have him.” He stood up from his hard-backed chair and began pacing the room. Then tiring, he took a different chair. “Thank God for the Atapas,” he said, his eyes closed. “The Fascists truly screwed themselves when they went mad over those mineral rights. They tore the last spines out of the social structure.”

Ortega smiled in agreement.

“For forty years,” Sebastían Aguirre said, “we worked to bring the Atapas to our side and like pious donkeys they ignored us. It would have taken us forty more without the mineral grab.”

“We have them now,” Ortega said. “Moreover, the government has taken to drafting more and more Atapas into the Guardia to find reliable troops — and also of course to demoralize them. When these Indians get out they’re changed men. And right now half of the Guardia is Atapa.”

“My God,” Aguirre said, “it’s going to happen! I don’t know if I ever believed it.”

“There were times, my friend, when you were the only man in the country who did.”

“Morelos and I,” Aguirre said.

There was a tray in the center of the table that held a pitcher of cold coffee and some cups. Ortega poured them both a quarter cup and they drank.

“I want to talk strategy now,” Aguirre said. “Is there a chance that Señor Morelos or these good brothers have placed some electronic instruments here? A bug?”

“We have had help from abroad to determine that. Not here.”

“You must realize,” Aguirre told him, “that I have instructions for you. More help from abroad. Most of it is so much shit. So now I’ll ask you what you propose to do.”

“With pleasure. Sunday — a demonstration here in the capital. A dangerous one, a bad one — but as you’ll see a necessary one for our purposes. They’ll bring in more Guardia from the mountains. A day passes and we hit the Libertad Guardia barracks on the edge of town in small force with automatic weapons. The Guardia troops there are slightly less than half of them Atapas — we don’t expect to take it but anything can happen and we’ll see. Should we take it, we won’t try to hold it but we may gain some arms and recruits. While this is happening the main force will move. The five Atapa brigades will take command of the cordillera and liberate the fincas. In a single offensive they can close the Pan-American Highway north of the capital, close the Pacific highway and the river. The Guardia will never dislodge them, even with aircraft. This is the important thing, and you may depend on its not being in the newspapers. We’ve had tons of automatic weapons and surface-to-air missiles flown in and we haven’t lost a single shipment. Guardia troops going into the mountains will meet Atapas more numerous and better armed than themselves. They will have no support whatever from the population. The Guardia air arm has no experience against surface-to-air missiles and the bastards don’t know how to fly anyway — at least not in a combat situation. The gringos trained them in close air support and if they try doing what they’ve been taught they’ll cease to exist in those mountains within an hour. The ground-to-air missiles are miraculous; they’re easy to hide and two half-trained men can use them. They’ll be the only ordnance from the socialist bloc we’re using and they’re untraceable.”

“Instructions specify Israeli weapons wherever possible.”

“Well,” Ortega said, “in that respect instructions are wise. Everyone knows the Israelis handle supply for the gringos here to see to the Guardia’s needs and Israeli weapons for the most part are what we’ll use. If they’re captured we can say we got them from the Guardia.”

“Bravo,” said Sebastián Aguirre.

“Now prior to the main thrusts we have a diversion on the Caribbean coast.”

“Interesting,” Aguirre said, “but it’s proverbial they don’t care to fight down there.”

“Forget proverbs. It’s going to be a good test. We’ll hit the foreign property there and we’ll kill some notable sons of bitches. The Yanquis are convinced things are safe there, they think it’s a little apolitical paradise and they want to use their property to build resorts now. We shall disillusion them and upset the digestion of their guests. Maybe we can capture a Club Med, eh, Sebastián?”

“Very bad for our fighters’ morale,” Aguirre said drily. “And what would the French say? Did Golz’s man Godoy organize this?”

“To his credit, he did. He arranged for excellent weapons from the old-time smugglers there, so the enemy will be badly outgunned, at least in the beginning. It will frighten the gringos, move troops from the real theater of war and politicize the population. Godoy also cultivated the active support of some progressive missionaries.”

“An effective man, for sure.”

“No doubt of it. Now we can’t depend on success here — the methods are primitive, the Guardia may intercept our weaponry, we may not prevail. But nothing is lost if we fail here and it’s a traditional region of exploitation. We owe our people a front there.”

“One word of advice,” Aguirre said. “Don’t leave Godoy running a diversion. He’s too good, especially with the Indians.”

“I agree. While the southern Atapas are fighting under a la Torre, we’ll have Godoy with the Atapas in the north. A former Guardia officer, an Atapa, will be in military control.”

“It’s going to work,” Aguirre said finally.

“Clearly. The mountains are the key, the Atapas. The roads and the rivers closed, the coast unsafe, insurrection everywhere! Every night rockets in the capital. Within ten days we’ll have Tecan. San Ysidro falls as an epilogue.”

“Abroad,” Aguirre said, “they’re afraid of the North Americans.”

“This is shortsighted of them, with all due respect. They, of all people, should be aware of how it’s going in the world. For one thing we have a most moderate non-Marxist manifesto prepared and the North American embassy will be among the first to get copies. More importantly, a lot of gringo asses got kicked forever in Vietnam and Congress will never authorize any intervention on behalf of this present government.”

“Very good,” Aguirre said. “We can give the Yanquis the stick and the carrot — their own favorite method. We’ll be killing off their lousy spies while we’re reassuring them. They’ve got that coming for their own murders.”

“Precisely,” Ortega said. “And what can they do — destabilize us? Destabilize Tecan?”

The two men laughed together.

“I want a drink,” Aguirre said. “I want to drink to this now in case I die tomorrow.”

“Only one, compadre,” Ortega said. “You’re a living treasure of the nation at the moment and I want to keep you that way.”

“A piss-poor treasure.”

“Nonetheless,” Ortega said, walking toward the door, “you are hereby nationalized. Later I can lay flowers on your monument — now I require you alive.”

During the time that Ortega was out of the room, the beating of Sebastían Aguirre’s heart made him clutch his breast. He felt nearly pulverized with excitement at the prospect of victory yet terrified as he had never before been of loss. Someone had said that the second-saddest thing in the world was not to achieve one’s life’s ambition and that the saddest was to achieve it. Who had said it? A Frenchman? Clemenceau? No, no. Oscar Wilde. He sat looking through the curtained window at the pseudo-Parisian facade on the building across the street.

After a few moments, Ortega returned carrying two glasses and a bottle with a few inches of Spanish brandy. He poured out the liquor and handed a glass to Aguirre.

“Salud,” Aguirre declaimed, and drained his glass. Ortega was amused and touched at the antique chivalry of his style. He returned the toast.

“Where in the world,” Aguirre asked presently, “did you find a la Torre? The man makes me tremble.”

Ortega laughed.

“Yes, a la Torre was a find. A fierce one, no?”

“It isn’t his ferocity,” Aguirre said, “it’s his essence, his life. The man is history. The personification of every Marxian insight. Everything I’ve ever believed about socialist humanism — it’s true in this man.”

“So true,” Ortega said, “as to be a vulgarization.”

Aguirre laughed in spite of himself.

“Compadre, we are all vulgarizations of history. We have to live it out by the day — life, unlike sound philosophy, is vulgar.”

“Indeed. And you approve of Golz? And Godoy?”

“Golz, yes. For this stage certainly. And even more of Godoy, although I know you dislike him personally.”

“You’ve rarely met the man, Don Sebastían.”

Under Ortega’s disapproving eye, Sebastían Aguirre poured himself another small brandy.

“I’ve never met a la Torre until this morning, still I approve of him because of what I know. Now let me tell you something about the Godoys of our world.”

We’ll be off to Spain, damn the place, Ortega thought. Always Spain. Why not Algeria? Why not Angola, Vietnam, China?

“In Irún we faced the Carlists. I can tell you, my friend, they were superb fighters and they had great conviction. In a way, they were the most reactionary of all the Fascist troops. We called them Fascists too but they were not really such. They were fighting a jihad.”

Ortega nodded politely.

“I don’t think you’ve ever heard me speak against the Spanish Republic,” Aguirre went on, “but between ourselves there were some rather sordid bourgeois elements active within it. Some of these thought to act progressively and enrich themselves at the same time through the seizure of church lands in the north. Madre de Dios, what a storm this produced. In the name of Juan Carlos, this fugitive from a Velázquez, led by their priests and by mounted artistocrats — the real thing, Emilio, not like these ratones here but men who spoke their language and their dialect — they turned out to destroy us in the name of Jesus Christ.”

“Like the Cristeros in Mexico,” Ortega suggested.

Aguirre made a sour face. “The Cristeros were the stage of farce. An imitation, a primitive caricature.”

Ortega felt the first surge of sympathy he had ever felt for Cristeros. Farce to the gachupín Aguirre because they were brown Americans and not men of Holy Spain.

“These Carlists were in the grip of a metaphysical politics from which grew baroque mutant fruit. There arose such arabesque absurdities as anarcho-Carlism — all men would be equal and all political organization rooted in the sky. The preposterous Carlos would be king-surrogate for Jesus Christ himself, who would be the true, directly responsible King of Spain. Under His reign there could be only virtue and honesty, liberty, equality, fraternity based on the Sermon on the Mount. Imagine it, Emilio, we found ourselves fighting creatures out of Engels’ history, men who in their hearts believed much of what we believed, who should by rights have been shoulder to shoulder with us, but were fighting us to the death. Well, we could never say so in those days and circumstances but many of us admired them.”

“Courage and conviction are always to some degree admirable,” Ortega said with a shrug.

“And you, Emilio, say ‘so what?’ And I agree. But let me tell you that I think that Godoy is a bit like those men. I think he fights for the peasants and the Indians because whether he knows it or not, he deeply desires the just rule of the Lord. Probably, he will never realize this — certainly we must hope not, for his sake. I’m sure he sees himself as a humanist and a student of Marxism. But I think unconsciously it is the kingdom of God he fights for. Emilio, the best revolutionaries, the first Communists may come from among such men!”

“This must be what I don’t like about him,” Ortega said, smiling. “I admit only that he’s good at his job and for now that’s good enough for me.”

“Ah, yes,” Aguirre said archly. “UCLA. He fights for Christ and you for John Dewey.”

“Tell me, Sebastián,” Ortega said, pouring out a brandy for himself, “what shall we do about our late comrade, Morelos? In fact,” he told the old man, “I’ve already decided. But I should like your opinion all the same.”

Aguirre was taken aback and impressed. He felt justly chastened. Ortega had terminated the anecdotes and the levity with talk of treason and its consequences. It was calculated, brutal and to the point; it reminded Aguirre of the Old Man. The Old Man might have done it the same way. How right he himself had been, Aguirre thought, in deciding that Ortega must lead.

“Do you think me sentimental?” Aguirre asked his young leader. “Do you imagine I would plead for him?” Only once in his career had Aguirre opposed an execution for reasons of friendship and his advocacy had nearly cost him his own life at the hands of André Marty and the NKVD clique. Only Stalin’s intervention had saved him. Never again had he undertaken to defend one condemned and though he had suffered in his conscience as a result, further reflection had always convinced him that the policy of unyielding severity was ultimately correct. In the case of Morelos it was not in question. There could be no mitigating circumstances to regret here.

“Perhaps I’m sentimental,” Ortega said, “because my first instinct was somehow to spare him. For his long service and his gray hairs. I thought we might dispatch him abroad with his ten favorite classics in the presidential airplane. Or wrap him in ribbons for the Yanqui embassy.”

“But now you think otherwise?”

“Tomorrow, when our people here are underground and you and I are in the mountains with First Brigade — Senor Morelos will be arrested by the Guardia as a proven Communist. Then you may be sure he’ll howl for the gringos and he’ll learn whether they retain any interest in him after he’s no use to them.”

Aguirre finished his brandy.

“This,” he said, “is only simple justice.” He would not himself have handled it with such studied harshness. But he was not made to be a leader.

“Now let me tell you something, Don Sebastián — pardon me for addressing you so — we are fighting for a new Tecan with a new leadership. The leader will not be John Dewey and he will certainly not be Jesus Christ. Not Bolívar, or Jefferson or the ghost of Pope John. Not, as we say, the People. Nor even the Party, because all of these entities are either dead or not yet truly formed.”

“Who then?”

“With permission,” Ortega said, “and with your invaluable assistance — me!”

“Am I to take this for cynicism, Emilio?”

Ortega looked away from him and out through the curtained window.

“Cynicism? That I — a plain man, a mediocre artist, perhaps even a mediocre fighter — take it upon myself to bring justice to our accursed suffering country? To bring health to her children, dignity to her desperate poor? To replace her absurdity in the eyes of the world with pride — to make housing, hospitals, schools for her masses of ignorant? To leave sound philosophy and engage life which we both know to be so vulgar? To dispense life to some and death to others in the name of a form of humanity which for all we know may never exist?”

The old man listening to Ortega rose from his chair. Ortega turned his back on him.

“Hombre,” Ortega said, “there is no Jesus Christ. There is no philosophy in a shack or in the gutter. There is not yet even such a thing as the People. There are only poor creatures like you and me, my comrade — and we propose to bring these things about. We propose unto death.”

Ortega turned toward Aguirre again. “Cynicism? I would have to be mad, would I not, to cherish all this cynically — in the name of my own glory? Perhaps I am mad to propose these things at all. Yet, as an act of faith, I do propose them.”

Aguirre fixed his eyes on Ortega and took a step toward him. The old man spoke truly of himself when he said that he was not sentimental. He had heard such words from the cynical and the mad. He had seen much of war and executions, death and cruelty. He raised his palsied hand in a fist.

“I don’t know,” he said to Ortega, “whether one may thank History. She’s a cold bitch. But I thank her now. I thank her with love that I’ve lived to see you and this day. I beg her to allow me to see the days that are coming. You are my son, Ortega …” The old man laughed with pleasure and to cover his emotion. He could say no more and advanced no further. It was a time to refrain from embracing. Perhaps, later.

Ortega returned his salute with a smile. He was embarrassed at having run on. He supposed that the suggestion of his cynicism had provoked him; moreover he was an artist, a man of temperament.

“And you, my father,” he told Aguirre. “Without you — nothing. I thank you.”

If the gringos could see us here, he thought, it would amuse them. “So,” old Aguirre said. “Death in one eye and dishonor in the other, eh. We shall have a drama.”

They raised nearly empty glasses to each other.

“Victory,” Ortega said. “Patria o muerte.”

The dark came down quickly after sunset. The lights of the coastal fishing boats grew dimmer and more distant abaft; eastward the evening star was rising, the wind steady. The Cloud plowed into its faint resistance making seven or eight knots. From the galley came the smell of frying steak.

Pablo sat beside the after hatch, watching the wake in starlight. Freddy Negus came out on deck and called him forward for chow.

Mrs. Callahan was leaning over the galley stove, a rum and tonic secured on a rack beside her. Strips of sirloin were warming on the pan, there was a huge pot of boiled greens.

“She’s a good feeder,” Pablo said. He was cheerful.

“Oh, you bet,” Mrs. Callahan said. “Get yourself a drink and go sit down.”

Pablo helped himself to a moderate measure of light rum and took it down to the fancy paneled compartment. The crew’s lounge. Tino came down behind him, smelling of diesel fuel, and ducked into the head to wash.

At opposite quarters of the mahogany table, drinks set before them, were Negus and Mr. Callahan. Pablo picked himself a chair and sat down. After a moment Tino came out of the head, ducked up to the galley to draw a Coke from the freezer and joined them.

Pablo looked around at the men in the compartment; all of them were watching him. Callahan looked boozy and affable. Freddy Negus, scratching his ear, looked unhappy; Tino, sleepy-eyed now, expressionless.

“What do you think, Pablo?” Mr. Callahan asked.

Pablo smiled. “What do I think about what, Mr. Callahan? You got a nice boat here. She’s a good feeder. I ain’t even done any work yet.”

Mrs. Callahan, in the galley, was humming “Amazing Grace.”

“You will, though” Callahan said. “For example, can you handle an M-16?”

“I don’t see ’em every day. But I’m familiar with the weapon.”

“We may be dealing with unpleasant people and we may have to defend ourselves. How’s that grab you?”

“That’s how it always is,” Pablo said. After a moment, he said: “I hope you’re not talking about the U.S. Coast Guard.”

“Christ,” Negus said to him, “you think we plan to shoot it out with the goddamn U.S. Coast Guard? I was hoping you had more sense than that.”

“We won’t be dealing with any U.S. authorities. We’re not working in their jurisdiction and it’s unlikely we’ll even see them. So don’t worry about that.”

“Local-type cops, maybe?”

“Not too likely either. If we have that kind of problem we tend to run. We’re a lot faster than we look. Thanks to our engineer.”

Pablo surmised that Mr. Callahan was referring, to Tino. He nodded.

“It’s thieves I’m thinking about. We have a few exchanges to make with various parties that we’d like to see secure. Just so everybody keeps their side of the bargain.”

Pablo sipped his rum with satisfaction. It was everything he might have hoped.

“You got the right man, no shit, Mr. Callahan. I never backed out of a hassle in my life and I never let my people down neither.”

“We your people?” Negus asked him.

“You treat me right, you’re my people. Anybody that knows me knows that.”

“We don’t let our people down either, Pablo,” Callahan told him solemnly, “and we’ve been in business a long time.”

Pablo raised his hands, palms up.

“Good enough!”

Mr. Callahan rose to his feet. “Let’s have another drink, compañeros.… Deedee,” he called to the galley, “come and have one with us.” He started toward the single step that led up to the galley space and in climbing, tripped and staggered. Negus and Tino exchanged looks as he did so. For a moment, the Callahans whispered together in the galley, then returned; Deedee Callahan carried a tray with the bottles of rum and of tonic and some iced glasses. When she had settled herself in a captain’s chair everyone except Tino poured himself another drink. Then it seemed Mrs. Callahan was lighting a joint. She passed it to her husband, who passed it to Tino. Tino took two deep tokes and passed it on to Pablo. On this occasion he smoked some and passed the joint to Negus. Negus passed it back to Deedee Callahan without taking any. It went around again in the same fashion and then Mr. Callahan declined a third toke.

“Das all for me,” Tino said.

“Me, too,” said Pablo.

“Well,” said Mrs. Callahan, “the more for me.”

Pablo felt her eyes on him. He looked through the smoke into their blue watchfulness.

Tino stood up suddenly.

“Goin’ forward,” he announced. “Got to watch de bottom out here.”

“What about your chow?” Negus called after him, but he was gone.

Mrs. Callahan leaned back in her chair and finished the joint. Callahan was pouring himself another drink, Negus moodily finishing the one in his hand. The woman worked her joint down to a ring of resin, balancing it on her lip with a hemostat. When it was finished, she put the hemostat away.

“Want to help me out, Pablo?”

“Sure,” Pablo said.

From the galley, they could see Tino sitting in one of the cockpit chairs, his head and shoulders faintly green in the unnatural light of the Fathometer. A soft merengue was coming in over the UHF; Pablo watched Mrs. Callahan’s lower body, encased in the tightest of faded denim jeans, sway mellifluously to its beat. She was gathering metal plates from an overhead dish rack. For the first time he noticed a printed sign posted over the stove that read you BETTER BELIZE IT. When she turned to him he was laughing at the sign.

“What’s funny, pardner?” She smiled and brushed the damp hair from around her eyes. He could not tell how old she was — forty, more or less. Her face was lean, creased around the eyes, sun-cured. When she set the dishes down on the counter beside the stove, he felt her breast brush his bare arm, the nipple distinct and distended under the soft cotton of her sweat shirt.

“Just feelin’ good,” Pablo said.

“Feelin’ good is easy,” Mrs. Callahan said. She said it with such gravity that he felt compelled to reflection.

“No,” he said after a moment. “Not so easy.”

They watched each other, locked in the drug; she was looking at him with wary amusement, still easing to the merengue.

“Funny kind of boat this is,” Pablo said.

“Yes,” Deedee Callahan assured him. “This is your basic funny boat. Now do something for me, Pablo. Give the boys their vittles.”

She took the steak from the pan and placed a strip on each of the five dishes. On each dish she spooned out some of the greens from the stewpot, then handed two of the plates to Tabor. She winked at him and motioned with her head toward the dining compartment.

Pablo did not chafe under his servitude. He served Negus and Mr. Callahan graciously, setting the steaming plates before them.

I goddamn well got her, he was thinking. Any old damn time.

When he went back into the galley she gave him a plate for Tino in the cockpit. He brought it forward and placed it on the chart table; Tino gave him a brief bad eye in return. Pablo smiled. The man must know, he thought, what was passing between himself and Mrs. Callahan.

There was a plate for him steaming in the galley; he brought it down to the table and seated himself across from Negus and Callahan. Mrs. Callahan joined them presently, carrying her own plate and some salsa, salt and pepper on a tray. The Cloud took the gentle seas with a slow fore-and-aft pitch.

“Beats shrimping,” Pablo said, breaking the silence that had settled over the dinner table. He assaulted his tenderized steak with concentration.

“We’ll do some shrimping by and by,” Mr. Callahan told him. “But as you have undoubtedly surmised — shrimping is not how we make our way through life.”

“Yeah,” Pablo said. “I surmised that.”

“What else you surmised?” Negus asked him.

“You told me not to ask questions, cap,” Pablo said, “so I didn’t ask you any.” He looked around the table. “I’m easy to get along with.”

“Fred,” Mr. Callahan said to Negus, “you’re the best seaman in the world but you’re a balls of a politician.” He turned his soft look on Pablo. “What we’re wondering, fella — you being lately in the Coast Guard and all that — is what you make of us. We’re interested in your educated guess.”

“O.K.,” Pablo said. “You’re running something. I would have said dope but I don’t think so now. If you were going up to the States from a Dutch place like St. Joost I’d say diamonds. But you say you’re not messing with the States.” He cut himself another piece of steak. “Computer parts maybe. Calculators, like that. Only this boat’s not big enough for a high-scoring run with that kind of weight. And the whole deal feels sort of heavy-duty. Between one thing and another — guns. That’s a good old-time trade.”

“Yes, it is,” Callahan said.

“If we’re going to Cuba,” Pablo said, “we got our work cut out for us.”

“We’re not going to Cuba.”

“Well, good. If it’s not there it could be any one of ten or a dozen places. There’s lots of petty-ass politics down here, right? I don’t even follow it.”

“All right,” Callahan said. “Let me give you the word on a need-to-know basis as it were. You don’t need to know where we’re going. In a day or two we’ll be in Nieuw Utrecht on St. Joost taking on ice and groceries. After dark we’re loading cargo on the other side of the island. What we want from you is a little help with the groceries and what we especially want is you standing by while we take on the cargo. Also when we deliver it, because that’s the moment of truth, hombre. You’ll get to do some shrimping tomorrow night too, in case you’re interested.”

“I wish someone would tell me what I stood to get paid,” Pablo said.

“When we figure our costs,” Negus said, “we’ll tell you.”

“It’s a reasonable question,” Callahan said equitably. “You can figure on at least five hundred a day for the next few days. It’ll beat your Coast Guard pay.”

“I guess so,” Pablo said.

“Think that’ll keep you happy?” Negus said. “Because we have to keep you happy. We insist on it.”

“I think everybody’s gonna do all right,” Pablo said.

Everyone in the cabin laughed; Pablo found it disconcerting.

When dinner was over, Negus and Mr. Callahan took their coffee to a small compartment aft of the central cabin and closed the teak door behind them. Pablo found himself on mess duty with the lady once again. The radio in the cockpit was tuned to one of the missionary stations that broadcast Jesus messages — the Baptist missionaries had the most powerful transmitters in the islands.

“Whereunto shall I liken the Kingdom of God?” a youthful Nebraskan voice inquired over the UHF, “it is like leaven …” Tino was making notations on his Loran chart.

She had gone back to smoking grass. It was the strongest grass Pablo had ever drawn of and she seemed to take joint after joint of it. After two or three tokes, the enveloping papers grew moist and tarry with deep green resin. Pablo declined. When the washing up was finished they went back to the cleared table.

“What brought you down here, Pablo?”

“Just wandering around,” Pablo said. He was thinking that they were all the same.

“You’re kind of a throwback, aren’t you? In the jet age?”

“I been on plenty of jets,” Pablo told her.

“Didn’t you like the Coast Guard?”

“I liked it all right until they started turning me around.”

“I thought that was what they were all about.”

“Some guys will sit still for anything,” Pablo explained. “They got no self-respect. Any kind of militaristic trash, they don’t object to it.”

Pablo had picked up the anti-militaristic angle working at the Coast Guard district headquarters in Boston and incorporated it into his line. It had worked fairly well with the girls around there, and Mrs. Callahan, although not so young and tenderhearted, seemed to be a little like them.

“So you got radicalized, is that it?”

Pablo felt as though he had been softly counterpunched. He rolled with it.

“I had this CPO on my case who was like a Fascist-type guy. He kept at it, so I cold-cocked him. Broke his jaw. I was looking at time, see what I mean? So I skipped.”

“Is that a literal story, Pablo,” Mrs. Callahan asked sympathetically, “or is it kind of symbolic?”

“What?” Pablo asked. He did not necessarily insist that women believe everything that they were told, but he was not used to their calling him a liar.

She put her joint down and looked sincerely thoughtful.

“The thing is,” she said, “when you hear the same kind of story from a lot of different people you wonder about the little details. Because no two things ever happen the same way, do they, Pablo?”

“I guess not,” he said.

“Of course, they don’t. So you tell me that story and right away I want to know — because I’m a curious sort — what’s special about Pablo Tabor. As opposed to all the other guys who broke the CPO’s jaw and so forth.”

Smart, he thought. But smart or not they were all the same.

“A jaw got broke,” Pablo told her, “and it wasn’t mine. Somebody tried to fuck with me. So I’m over the hill and on this boat and that’s my story.”

“And they call you Pablo. Is that a nickname or what?”

“It’s my name,” he told her.

“But it’s Spanish.”

“My mother was Indian,” Pablo said. It was true to an extent, but to what extent was a question lost in centuries.

“I knew it,” Mrs. Callahan said quietly.

That’s what she goes for, Pablo thought. He had run across it before. He was aware that she had eased her chair against his and he felt her body again, her long leg in smooth clean denim.

“This funny boat where you live?” he asked her.

“So it would seem,” she said. “It just goes on and on.”

“Maybe you don’t like it too much.”

“It has its moments.”

When he put his hand against her soft sheathed thigh, she was suddenly somber.

“Goodness,” she said.

He slid his hand down to her knee and back up, fingering an inner seam and the flesh it lined. Then he closed his fist and rested the back of his hand on the film of denim. It was a physical stalemate. With Tino in the cockpit, Callahan and Negus on the other side of a door, there was nothing more he dared do.

“You take your pleasures where you find them, do you, Pablo?”

“My kind of life you do.”

“Mine too,” she said.

She turned her head to look at him and he saw that under the weathered skin, the various set wrinkles and the small boozy sacs below her eyes — there was something like a kid about her.

“Hey,” he said after a moment, “we’re gonna get in trouble.” He was embarrassed at the standoff and his palms were beginning to sweat.

The woman laughed silently. “Trouble?”

“Ain’t we?”

“What’s a little more trouble,” she asked, “on this funny boat?”

The small teak door to the inner compartment opened and Freddy Negus put his head out. In the moment, Pablo decided, Negus had seen all there was to see.

“Jack would like you with us for a while, Deedee. If you don’t mind.”

She rose slowly from under Pablo’s hand, her own hand touched his shoulder. “Right you are.”

Negus was watching Pablo as he held the compartment door for Mrs. Callahan.

“Why don’t you get some sleep, son?”

“Thought you might want me to take the wheel from Tino.”

“Tino’s all right. If he wants a few zees we can go on automatic for three or four hours.”

“Well, O.K, then.” He stood up and stretched. “Guess I’ll go back aft then.”

Negus nodded and they exchanged good-nights.

Ambling back to the lazaret, Orion ablaze over the starboard quarter and the sea rolling easy under the boards, Pablo paused to lean over the rail. He was flushed and horny with his conquest of the soft rich lady. As he lounged, scheming in the starry darkness, he became aware of voices sounding from somewhere in the innards of the boat. He was standing over the forward ice hold. The voices were those of Negus and Mr. Callahan.

Pablo took a look around and lowered himself into the halfcovered hold; its interior still smelled of shrimp and of another substance, vaguely familiar but beyond his recall. There was a half inch of water on the flooring.

Moving to the bulkhead closest to the compartment in which he had taken dinner, he pressed his ear against the damp boards. It was almost completely dark where he stood, except for the scattering of stars visible beyond the edge of the hatch cover overhead.

“The old Jew’s losing his grip,” Callahan was saying in his whiskey-confident voice. “He’s hitting the sauce. There’s a certain vacancy there.”

“I wouldn’t attempt to exploit that,” Negus replied. “I think it would be unwise.”

“It would be plumb fatal,” Callahan said. “Even half out of it old Naftali’s worth ten of the punks you see around now.”

“Speaking of punks …” Negus began — but Callahan cut him off.

“Speaking of punks — stay off the kid’s back. I don’t want him getting all disgruntled and paranoid. We don’t have to live with him long and he’s going to come in handy.”

“Handy for what?” Negus asked. “For playing kneesies with Dee is all.”

“You playing kneesies with him, Dee?”

“I confess,” Pablo heard her say; he was startled. “I was playing hot kneesies with him. I dig him.”

“If you fuck him,” Callahan said, “that rather makes him one of the family. I think that’s going too far.”

Negus uttered a series of low cautioning obscenities. “I wish the governance around here would pull its socks up. We’re doing serious business and the whole vessel’s stoned, drunk or sopored.”

There was a brief silence and then laughter.

“Pablo’s all right,” Callahan said. “For our purposes.”

“I gotta admit he ain’t as bad as some of ’em,” Negus said. “He’s a hard-ass and that’s good if he knows his place in things.”

“I think he does,” said Mrs. Callahan. “Pablo Tabor is one of life’s little yo-yos. He wants to please and he’ll do just fine.”

His ear pressed against the cold sweating woodwork, Pablo’s mind beheld the picture of a red yo-yo on a red, white and blue string with a store sticker on it that said “Made in Japan.” He had forgotten that he was high; he was more puzzled than angry. I’m gonna fuck her brains out, he thought.

Negus was swearing again. “You see the fucking weaponry he had on him? He was armed to the goddamn teeth. Shit!”

Another silence and Negus said: “Tino don’t like him.”

“Tino’s not too big on the whole number,” Callahan said.

“Well,” Deedee Callahan said, “Tino’s a fucking mystic. How can you go by Tino?”

“I’m inclined to go by him,” Negus said. “I been with him fifteen years in all weather.”

Crouched in the hold, Pablo heard a step on the deck above him. He heaved himself against the boards and saw a shadow pass between his hiding place and the night sky. It would be Tino, he thought. Coming up from the lazaret. From going through his gear. He bent lower and listened.

“Naftali still take his money up front?” It was Negus.

“First thing that happens is Naftali gets his dough. He’ll be on the pier with his hand out.”

“Chrissakes,” Negus said, “that old boy rakes it in. I seen him peel off hundred-dollar bills like they was lempiras. I think he keeps it all in his hotel room, I swear.”

Pablo was thinking of an old boy in a hotel room full of hundred-dollar bills when he was startled once more by a sound on deck. He looked up and saw the outline of a man directly above him. It could only be Tino again. After a few moments, the man moved off aft. Pablo waited, too anxious to eavesdrop further, and then climbed silently out of the ice hold. He saw no one. For a while he leaned on the rail expecting to be challenged — but there was no further sign of Tino and he was reassured. He went down into the lazaret, found his gear in good order and climbed into his rack.

Negus and the Callahans sat late in their paneled cabin while the Cloud ran on automatic. Tino was brewing coffee in the galley.

“We getting ice and fuel from the Perreiras this time?” Negus asked. He was hunched in a captain’s chair, his bony arms folded on the table. Callahan sat across from him nursing a glass of soda water. His lady reclined on a short sofa, her feet up, reading High Times.

“I don’t think so,” Callahan said. “I think we’ll get grub and parts from the Perreiras, then after dark we’ll go over to Naftali’s outfit in Serrano. We can get fuel from him along with the goods.”

“What’ll we tell Perreira?”

“We’ll tell him Naftali made us a better offer. He won’t press it. He’s not aggressive.”

“Always wondered how Naftali got away with running that operation,” Negus said. “You’d think the Dutch would know it. Or the Americans.”

“Maybe they do. Anyway it’s Naftali’s property, he owns it and he’s pretty fucking careful. Or else Mossad owns it and they’re super-careful.”

Tino came down from the galley carrying a cup of coffee and took a chair. He spoke briefly to Negus in Papamiento.

“You’re unhappy,” Callahan said to him.

“I don’ like dat mon,” Tino said. “Pablo.”

“Hell, I don’t like him neither,” Negus said. “But he ain’t supposed to be a nice fella. He’s our sonuvabitch.”

“You approved him, Tino. You said you’d ship with him.”

“So I gon to,” Tino said.

Callahan kept his eyes on the engineer.

“You’re sort of off the whole enterprise, in my opinion.”

Tino smiled sadly.

“De ting can be done, capt’n. De money’s good.”

“I think,” Negus said slowly, “that Tino’s concerned about the way things are being done lately.”

“Meaning what?” Callahan asked.

“I ain’ sayin’ dat, Fred. You sayin’ dat, not me.”

“Look, Jack,” Negus said, “you have to admit that we been getting lax. You been drinking a lot, there’s that. You been drinking on the job, so to speak. The both of you been acting like there’s no tomorrow. I mean, the days are past when you can operate down here in a spirit of fun like.”

“You can ask anybody around, Freddy, and they’ll tell you we’re the most professional, the most reliable vessel in the commerce. That’s always been true.”

“It’s been true in the past, Jack.”

“If we weren’t good, Naftali wouldn’t work with us.”

Negus looked down at the tabletop.

“I’ll tell you — sometimes I’m surprised he still does.”

“Well,” Callahan said, “you give me pause, Freddy.”

“I’m sorry, skipper, but there it is. Sometimes it feels like we’re just floating a party.”

“We do like we’ve always done, Fred. The only difference is we seem to be losing our confidence.”

Negus was silent.

Callahan reached across the table for the bottle and poured some rum into his soda.

“Maybe you’re right about getting old for it. Could be it’s the beach for you, old stick. Maybe you should get back to that saloon in Hope Town.”

“I just hope to see it again,” Negus said.

“Nowadays,” Tino told them, “so many droguistas. A mon get killed quick.”

“Young Pablo reminds me of a droguista,” Negus said after a while. “That’s what bothers me about him.”

“He’s a Coast Guard deserter,” Callahan said. “Hasn’t been around long enough.”

“Know who he reminds me of,” Negus said. “That dude we had the trouble with … you know. Can’t even remember his damn name.”

Deedee put her magazine aside.

“Oh, dear,” she said. “What an unpleasant thought.”

“Dat was bad,” Tino said.

Negus nodded in somber agreement.

“Well,” Callahan said, “we dealt with it. I trust we won’t have to do that to anybody again. However,” he said, “should the occasion arise … we won’t be found lacking in resolve.”

Freddy Negus stood up and walked to the hatch that led up to the galley.

“It ain’t a matter of Pablo, Jack. It’s the whole thing. I mean, Tecan’s no milk run. Those Tecs lay hands on us, we’ve had the fucking drill.” He leaned in the hatchway for a moment and went back to his chair. “El Jefe’s got a lot of new technology. He’s got more boats and they’re faster. He’s got helicopters. The Yanks give him whatever he wants. They tell him what he wants.”

“We’ve always run the same risks, Fred.”

“Damnit,” Negus said, “we were younger. We were tougher and more squared away. And you were … more responsible.”

“Obviously,” Callahan said, “if you don’t have faith in me we can’t operate.”

“Fred’s been brooding,” Deedee said. “He’s been thinking about that albino dwarf El Jefe keeps.”

Callahan sipped his drink.

“Oh,” he said with a smile, “the one who chews people’s privates off.”

Negus flushed.

“There is such a creature, Jack, I hate to tell you.”

“Snowflake,” Tino told them. “Copo. Das his name.”

“Tecan is a mixture of the old and the new,” Deedee said.

“Look,” Negus said, “there are times when the two of you act stark crazy. Now we gonna keep this damn boat right end up and do our business or what?”

“I’ll come through for you, Fred. You do the same for me. Are you guys with us or not?”

Tino nodded silently.

“Of course I’m with you,” Negus said. “Always have been. Just I get the feeling sometimes you’re flirting with disaster.”

Callahan grinned with adolescent mischief and winked at his wife.

“If it be now, ’tis not to come,” he declared. “If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all.”

“Ripeness,” Deedee Callahan said.

“It’s readiness, Dee.”

“I mean taking a risk is one thing,” Negus told them. “Fucking around for kicks is another.”

“I like ripeness better,” Deedee said.

“You like it,” Callahan said, “because it’s sexier.”

With the air tank tucked into the gunwales under the bench on which he sat, Holliwell smoked and watched the green coastline — palm groves, banana plants strayed from the plantations, beach heliotrope of outsized luxuriance. Sandy, the dive master, ran his thirty-six-footer at full throttle, slapping the hull over the placid water; the bow took spray over the windward side that soaked the STP jacket Holliwell had worn against the sun.

Sandy was a long, spare man with a freckled English countryman’s face darkened by the suns of Tecan and West Africa. He lounged in the stern, one loose hand over the stick, one elbow on the rail, leaning out to see the water ahead. His long black hair was bleached at the crown, parted at the middle of his skull like a nineteenth-century Russian peasant’s, and this with his sharp black eyes deep-set under thick low brows brought a kind of dervish flair, a Rasputin intensity, to his appearance.

In the boat with Holliwell was a family of five Cuban-Americans from Miami. The father was stocky and muscular, his hair worn in a brush cut, his jaw jowled and pitted from relentless shaving. His wife was buxom and fleshy-faced yet with a long-legged trim frame, a Floridian body honed by dieting and Gloria Stevens. There were three boys between twelve and seventeen — the oldest vulpine with a nearly complete moustache and muscular like his father, the two younger quite like their mother; over the waist of each of their bathing suits sagged a tube of buttery fat. The parents spoke to each other in Spanish, the boys in American Adolescent. All of them ignored Holliwell.

“Could be seein’ turtle over this reef,” Sandy told the boys. “Good place to see dem.”

“Aw-right,” said the middle boy with enthusiasm.

“Would they bite you?” asked the smallest boy.

Sandy laughed. “Turtle bite you? Turtle don’t bite you. Maybe take you for a ride.”

“Hey,” the seventeen-year-old said, “I could go for that.”

When the children’s parents spoke to Sandy it was in a formal and imperious way, as though they were used to service. Sandy answered them with deference.

Three hundred yards offshore, Sandy killed his engine and hopped forward to put the anchor line down. Everyone looked over the side. The sky’s light sparkled back at them, reflected and refracted from the reef tops below — a long line of peaks curving out toward open ocean.

Sandy gave them the dive plan. The current was southerly. They would dive straight out from the stern, up-current. Then they could follow a semicircle of reef tops, cross a sandy bottom and follow the edge of a drop back to the boat with the current behind them. There was black coral there, Sandy told them. The site was called Twixt by the people of the coast.

Holliwell stared down at the liquid light of the white reefs. They were, after all, what he had come to see. He took a deep breath and put on his buoyancy compensator, his backpack tank, and bent to wrestle on his weight belt. Sandy put his own tank on with the ease of a man donning a sweater. The Cuban-American bustled about, trying stays and buckles — the head of the house overseeing procedure. The woman and the youngest boy were not going down. While Holliwell put his boots and fins on, Sandy checked out the gear of the younger of the two boys who were diving.

“Ever see any sharks around here?” the younger boy asked, as casually as he could. Holliwell admired his sangfroid. Testing his own regulator, he turned to watch Sandy answer.

“No sharks here,” Sandy said simply.

It turned out that the younger boy was diving with Sandy, the oldest with his father. It had been so ordered.

“Want to come with us?” the dive master asked Holliwell.

“I’ll just follow along,” Holliwell said. “I’ll be all right.” He was not in fact a very experienced diver but the dive seemed easy enough.

Holliwell went over last, carrying two five-pound weights, wearing trunks and a tee shirt to ease the shoulder straps on his sunburned back. On the jump-off, his mask filled almost to eye level; he let the water rise in it, pinching his nostrils to equalize pressure. When he saw the reef tips rising around him, he cleared his mask and checked the depth gauge on his wrist. He was forty-five feet below the surface. He settled over a punch-bowl depression on the bottom; his fin tips stirred the milk-white sand there. The visibility at this depth was marvelous — over a hundred feet, perhaps two hundred. Black and golden angelfish swarmed around him as though they expected to be fed. There were parrot fish and convict tangs in uncountable numbers. The reef descended in terraces from its highest peaks, from each terrace elkhorn coral stretched in tortured fantastical shapes between the domes of brain coral. Below him wrasse and groupers glided by, a boxfish watched him shyly from behind two prongs of elkhorn. When he paddled out from the plateau on which he had rested, two trumpet fish came along with him like scouts. He swam clear of the next terrace and let the weights take him deeper; on the edge of vision he saw a barracuda — fairly small, certainly under three feet — prowling the edge of the swarm to pick off stragglers. When he leveled off, he was at sixty feet and the ocean floor still sloped downward under his fins. Far off and about forty feet above him he saw Sandy and the Cuban boy outlined against the shimmering curtain of the surface, swimming away from him.

On the next terrace he saw the black coral. There seemed to be acres of it, dappled with encrusting yellow infant sponges, and circling down he felt as though he were flying over a lava field grown with daisies. When he was closer, he could see the coral’s root and branch patterns. It was sublime, he thought. He could feel his heart beating faster; his blood coursed through him like a drug. The icy, fragile beauty was beyond the competency of any man’s hand, even beyond man’s imagining. Yet it seemed to him its perfection provoked a recognition. The recognition of what? he wondered. A thing lost or forgotten. He followed the slope of the coral field. Down.

It had been years since he had taken so much pleasure in the living world.

At about ninety feet, he confronted the drop. The last coral terrace fell away and beyond it there was nothing, an immensity of shadowy blue, an abyss. He was losing color now. The coral on the canyon wall read blue-gray as he descended; the wrasse, the butterflies, the parrot fish looked as dun as mackerel. A gray lobster scurried along the cliff. Enormous gray groupers approached to have a look at him. In a coral crevice, a spotted moray drew back at his approach, then put its head out to watch his bubble trail with flat venomous eyes. The surface became a mirage, a distant notion.

He was at a hundred and ten and his pressure gauge, which had pointed twenty-five hundred p.s.i. at the jump-off, now read slightly under eight hundred. It was all right, he thought, the tank had no reserve and no J valve; he would have enough to climb back as the pressure evened out. At a hundred and twenty, his exhilaration was still with him and he was unable to suppress the impulse to turn a somersault. He was at the borders of narcosis. It was time to start up. As soon as he began to climb, he saw shimmers of reflected light flashing below his feet. In a moment, the flashes were everywhere — above and below. Blue glitters, lightning quick. The bodies of fish in flight. He began pumping a bit, climbing faster, but by the book, not outstripping his own bubble trail.

Some fifty feet away, he caught clear sight of a school of bonito racing toward the shallows over the reef. Wherever he looked, he saw what appeared to be a shower of blue-gray arrows. And then it was as if the ocean itself had begun to tremble. The angels and wrasse, the parrots and tangs which had been passing lazily around him suddenly hung in place, without forward motion, quivering like mobile sculpture. Turning full circle, he saw the same shudder pass over all the living things around him — a terror had struck the sea, an invisible shadow, a silence within a silence. On the edge of vision, he saw a school of redfish whirl left, then right, sound, then reverse, a red and white catherine wheel against the deep blue. It was a sight as mesmerizing as the wheeling of starlings over a spring pasture. Around him the fish held their places, fluttering, coiled for flight.

Then Holliwell thought: It’s out there. Fear overcame him; a chemical taste, a cold stone on the heart.

He started up too fast, struggling to check his own panic. Follow the bubbles. Follow the bouncing ball.

As he pedaled up the wall, he was acutely aware of being the only creature on the reef that moved with purpose. The thing out there must be feeling him, he thought, sensing the lateral vibrations of his climb, its dim primal brain registering disorder in his motion and making the calculation. Fear. Prey.

He was running out of air — overbreathing and overtaxing the expanding contents of his tank. The sound of his own desperate respirations furthered panic.

When he had worked out a breathing pattern and reached the first terrace, he found that he had enough to curve his ascent with the slope of the coral. At forty feet, he saw a sandy punch bowl like the one in which he had stopped but the forests of elkhorn were everywhere the same and the anchor line was nowhere in sight. Looking up, he saw Sandy outlined against the surface, coming down at him.

Sandy grabbed Holliwell’s pressure gauge, read it and shook his head in reproach. He pointed to the right and upward along the slope. Holliwell followed the coral ridges as long as he could. The fish in the shallows swam placidly, unperturbed. When he found himself sucking hard on the regulator mouthpiece, he eased up the next thirty feet, taking three breaths on the way. And there, in another dimension altogether, the boat rocked gently, the youngest of the Cuban boys leaned over the side to watch the shifting surface, lost in reverie; his mother thumbed through Cosmopolitan. The shoreline glowed green beyond the hot blur of the beach, the line of banana jungle broken only by a white wooden building on a solitary hill, surmounted with a cross. Holliwell turned over on his back and swam to the boat’s ladder.

The boy and his mother watched as he took off his gear. Before disconnecting the regulator from the tank he checked the gauge once more; it read just a hair over empty at sea level.

“That’s as empty as it gets,” he told the people in the boat. The charge of primary process he had experienced at a hundred and ten feet put him in danger of becoming garrulous.

The boy looked at the gauge. “None left at all?”

“Empty,” Holliwell said. “Just like it says.” He was ill at ease with the boy and he sensed a certain artificiality in his own manner. His own children had not been this age for five years or more; he had forgotten what it was like. Out of touch again, he thought.

“How come is that?” the woman asked.

“Just ran it out,” Holliwell told her cheerfully.

“What did you see?” the boy asked him.

“Lots of great fish,” he said. “And beautiful black coral.”

“And we can’t take any,” the woman said. “Such a shame because it’s so beautiful.”

“I’m sure it looks prettier where it is,” Holliwell heard himself say pompously.

The woman inflated her cheeks and shrugged. She was not a bad sort, Holliwell decided. They chatted for a few minutes. The family’s name was Paz; they lived in Miami, had lived there since 1961. All of their sons were born there. The man was a dentist, she herself was in real estate. They were visiting her brother, who had five hardware stores in Tecan. Holliwell told her that he was a professor; she had lived in the States long enough to remain unimpressed.

Sandy and the middle son were next up; the boy climbed aboard and fixed a smirk on Holliwell. The dive master got out of harness in a single easy motion.

“Now what you want down theah, mistuh?” he asked Holliwell. He was smiling. “I nevah tol’ you go down theah.”

“Just wanted a look, I guess.”

“Sandy made him get out of the water,” the middle son announced. Señora Paz and the youngest boy gave Holliwell dutifully accusatory looks. Then Señora Paz asked sharply after her husband and eldest son. They were under the boat, Sandy assured her, playing among the elkhorn coral.

After a few minutes, the dentist surfaced and climbed aboard. He was elated after his dive and his amiability extended even to Holliwell.

“Where the hell were you?” Dr. Paz asked Holliwell. “I never even saw you.” His English was almost completely unaccented.

“Sandy made him get out of the water,” the middle son said.

“Just down too deep,” Sandy said soothingly. “A bit too deep and de air run out faster.”

“What’s the attraction down there?” the dentist asked.

“Just the drop,” Holliwell said.

“How far you think she drop off dere?” Sandy asked him, laughing.

“A long way,” Holliwell said.

“Nine hundred meters,” Sandy said.

“Is that possible?” Holliwell said.

Sandy let his smile fade. His nod was solemn, his eyes humorous with certainty.

“I’m tellin’ you, mon. Nine hundred meters.”

When the youngest boy wanted to know how far that was in feet, Sandy was uncertain.

“It’s about two thirds of a mile,” the dentist said. “I thought they taught you that in school.”

“Yeah, dummy,” the middle son said to his brother.

“How about that,” Holliwell said.

Then the oldest boy surfaced with an empty tank.

“Orca, orca,” the two younger boys shouted. “Orca surfaces at last.”

The youth’s eyes were shining as he climbed up the ladder. It was hard to dislike anyone, Holliwell thought, when you watched them come up from a dive.

“Gosh,” the boy said to Holliwell, “we didn’t see you anywhere.”

“Sandy made him get …”

Señora Paz hushed her middle son with a frown and a raising of her chin.

They motored back to the hotel dock making small talk. At the dive shack, Sandy, who knew a big tipper when he saw one, helped the Pazes wash and stow their gear and was jolly with the boys. Holliwell put his own gear away and sat down on the dock. After a while Sandy wandered down and joined him.

“How long you been divin’?” Sandy asked him.

“I’ve been certified for two years. I don’t do it much anymore.”

Sandy looked out to sea. “Lost a mon on dat drop other year. I follow him dorn near two hundred meters but when I turn off de mon still goin’ down.”

“Suicide,” Holliwell said.

“Das right. Mon take de sleepin’ pills and go down.”

“It must have happened more than once.”

Sandy nodded. “I don’ lose nobody,” he said. “Got to be dere own chosen will.”

Holliwell felt himself shudder. “Did you think that’s what I was doing?”

“Oh, no,” the dive master said quickly. He touched Holliwell on the shoulder in the Caribbean way but avoided his eye.

“I won’t make the dive this afternoon,” Holliwell told him. “Maybe you could leave me off around French Harbor. I’d like to snorkel down there.”

Sandy guessed that it would be all right. French Harbor was on the way. He told Holliwell that if he requested it, the Paradise kitchen might pack a lunch for him. They walked together toward the hotel buildings.

“There was something down that drop this morning,” Holliwell said. “A big shark, maybe.”

Sandy stopped walking and looked at Holliwell, holding his hand on his brow to shield his eyes from the sun.

“You see any shark?”

“No.”

“Then don’ be sayin’ shark if you don’ see one.”

“Something was happening down there.”

“I tell you don’ go down that far, Mistuh Holliwell. I give you de dive plan. When you down so far, das not a good place.”

“Why’s that?”

Sandy walked on; Holliwell followed him.

“Dat drop, people see tings, den dey don’ know what dey seen. Dey be frightened after.”

“Was it always like that?”

“Jus’ dangerous divin’, das all. Surface current and de drop is cunnin’. You get deeper den you know.”

“So pretty, though.”

“Jus’ as pretty on de top,” Sandy said. “Always prettier in de light.”

“Yes,” Holliwell said. “Yes, of course.”

Justin was trying to reread To the Finland Station in the afternoon shadows of the veranda. She had almost dozed off when she saw the man snorkeling along the southern end of Playa Tate. For days now, her dispensary had been ready to receive wounded insurrectionists; each night she had spent awake and prowling in the light of her hurricane lamp among the stacks of stretchers, the basins and the small array of surgical instruments — listening to the government radio until it went off the air and then to U.S. Armed Forces radio or the BBC foreign service. Sometimes she would turn the volume down and tune in Radio Havana. Nights were long.

It was high tide and the swimming man crossed over the inner reef and headed for the roadside beach in front of the mission steps. Only a few hundred yards past the steps, a sizable stream ran down from the foothills of the Sierra, carrying with it all the refuse and infections of the hillside barrios. Its small estuary was a dirty place to swim. The shrimp that lived there grew to great size and Justin had often seen boats from the hotels up and down the coast come at night to gather them. Moreover, she knew that in the water offshore there was a deep channel where hammerhead sharks came in to feed upon the shrimp.

The man would be a tourist from one of the hotels. There would be many more before long as the fruit companies liquidated their unprofitable plantations and converted to the resort business.

The swimmer’s absurd sportive presence irritated Justin considerably. If he persisted in staying near the channel, she would have to go down and wave him out of danger and she was not in the mood for personal engagement. To her further annoyance, the man came out of the water by the mission pier, took his fins off and sat down on it. Two women carrying laundry on their heads passed the pier and Justin felt as though she could see the false smile he gave them, hear his fatuous “Buenos días.”

While Justin was watching the tourist on the dock, Father Egan came out on the veranda.

“There’s someone on the dock,” he said to her.

“A tourist. Snorkeling through.”

“What do you think he wants?”

“He wants to sun himself on the glistening sands of Tecan. That’s what he paid for.”

“But why on our dock?”

“Because he owns the place. Chrissakes, Charlie, go ask him.”

She watched Egan make his way down the steps, slack-jawed, shuffle-gaited. His deterioration was proceeding at an alarming rate; he had aged dreadfully in the past months, sometimes he seemed to her almost senile.

Egan was talking to the tourist now; the tourist had accepted a cigarette and a light from him. An odd pair they made — the tourist tanned and muscular, towering over the priest’s gray, lumpish figure. The two of them turned toward the mission building; Egan was pointing into the forest behind it. She stood up impatiently and went inside to make herself some coffee.

It had all been smoke before, Godoy had said. Perhaps it was still.

One time, she thought, they will require something from me other than my well-exercised reverent attention and prayerful expectation. People — men, when you came down to it — were always dreaming up glorious phantasmas for her to wait joyously upon. Justice. The life to come. The Revolution. There are limits, she thought. Justin Martyr.

When she went out with the coffee, Egan and the snorkeler were sitting on the pier in conversation.

Well, she thought, why not, we’re all tourists now. For weeks no one had come. Campos had some method of keeping them away.

After a few minutes, Father Egan came huffing up the steps.

“Know who he is, that fellow? He’s an anthropologist. He had business in the city and now he’s come to see our ruins.”

“Yours and mine?”

“Haw,” Egan said. “Clever kid.”

But Justin was growing anxious about the swimmer.

“And did you volunteer to take him back and show him?”

“Yes, I did. And I asked him to dinner on Friday.”

Justin looked at him in dismay.

“Go down and un-ask him,” she said in a steely voice. “We can’t have him here.”

“We certainly can.”

“We can not!” Justin almost shouted.

“May one ask why?”

She looked away, out to sea.

“Good heavens, I suppose we can go to town and have dinner. I don’t understand what the objection is. Do you think I’m so unpresentable?”

“It’s not that,” Justin said. Better to let it go, she thought. The chances were that the man would not come back. Or that Egan would forget. She watched the strange swimmer now, saw him sit waist deep in the water putting on his fins. He began to crawl toward deeper water. He was not far from the river channel now. If he continued as he went, the bottom would slope sharply and without warning he would be over it. It was no place for a tourist to be — the sharks, and the bottom covered with sea urchins. A few feet short of the surge channel, she saw him crumple up and stop swimming. He was splashing, clutching his knee. Justin stood up. The tourist had crawled into the shallows and was lying in the slight surf, both hands folded over his wound.

Damn you, she thought, you asshole tourist.

“He’s hurt himself,” Father Egan said helplessly.

“He stepped on a goddamn sea urchin is what he did. Either that or something took a piece of him.” She went into the dispensary wing, snatching up a bucket on her way through the kitchen. In the bucket she poured a pint of ammonia and then diluted it with well water from the tap. She hauled the solution down the veranda steps and across the road to the water’s edge. The swimmer was sitting upright now, with his back to the ocean. When he saw her, he was squinting in pain, his teeth clenched, pale under his tan.

“Watch where you’re sitting, sir. There are sea urchins all around you.”

The man turned on his side and eased toward her, feeling the way before him with his swim fin. She put out a hand and he took it in his, leaning his weight on her, dragging the injured leg. His mask was up on his forehead.

Justin guided him out of the water and had a look at his leg. Sure enough, his left knee was swollen and purple with small spine ends visible through the skin. Justin poured some of the ammonia solution over his knee and rubbed it in with a cotton swab.

“You can also piss on it,” Justin explained.

“It’s not so easy to piss on your knee sitting down,” the man said.

He was looking grateful and embarrassed. He was a tall well-built man; his face, in Justin’s eyes, bespoke softness and self-indulgence. But perhaps it was only the pain and his being a tourist.

“I’m really sorry to be trouble. Are you from the mission here?”

“Yep.” She took a hemostat from a kit and lifted a spine end off the mottled flesh of his knee. “Hey,” she said, “I got the end out.”

“I’m sure you have more important things to do.”

“Oh, stop it,” Justin said. She went after the second spine and pulled it out. “That’s gonna be sore for a while but the real bad pain will stop very soon. It’s nothing serious.”

“I guess I was lucky.”

“I guess you were. When you doubled up I thought a shark had hit you.”

“A shark? Right here?”

“There are sharks in the channel here. And a carpet of sea urchins. And the water’s polluted. It’s like a harbor.”

“I’d better restrict my snorkeling to Playa Tate then.”

“You should,” she said. “This is a lousy place for it.”

And what now? He should be given an aspirin, put in the shade. He did not appear to be in shock. Nursey business for the tourists.

She helped him across the dirt road, sat him under a ceiba tree and went back up to her dispensary for aspirin.

“Poor fellow,” Egan said as she passed through the kitchen to replace her bucket. “A nice chap.”

“Yep,” she said.

As she went down to him, two young loafers from town walked by along the road and paused briefly to mock him. He was indeed mockable, she thought, with his swim fins in his lap and the mask and snorkel still fitting on the front of his skull and his Day-Glo kneecaps. An absurd and unnecessary person.

“Have an aspirin,” she said. “Have two. Forgot the water.”

He took the pills and swallowed them. Some color was coming back to his face. In the scattered afternoon sunlight that shone through the great ceiba’s branches, she noticed that there were two identical and very nearly invisible scars on his right earlobe and that a small piece of the lobe itself was missing.

“My name is Frank Holliwell,” the man said. “I was just talking with your Father Egan.”

“Is that right?” When the man’s ear was out of the sunlight the small scar disappeared. “How will you get back now?”

“The boat will pick me up.” He looked at the angle of the sun through the ceiba leaves. “They should be by anytime.”

“You O.K. now?”

“I feel a lot better.”

“Good. Take care now.”

“I understand I’m coming to dinner on Friday.”

“No, I don’t think so,” Justin said, blushing. “I think Father Egan means to go into town with you. If he’s well enough.”

“I see.”

“We’re in a state of disarray. We’re closing down soon.” There was something in the man’s affectless stare that made her uneasy. She glanced quickly at the scar, visible again in the sunlight. “They’ll have to get along without us.”

“You’re a nun?”

“That’s right,” she said.

He asked her what order she was and she told him. He went on nodding as though the Devotionists were familiar to him. Catholic.

“They used to rap you on the knuckles, right?” she asked lightly.

“Not on my knuckles. I had Jesuits for that.”

“Oh, I see. Well, that’s … classy.”

“Are you coming to dinner with us too?” he asked. She was startled by the manner in which he put it. It was as though he was flirting with her. What’s the world coming to? she thought. And how would I know?

It sometimes happened to Justin that she would relax a bit and speak earnestly and directly to a man and the man would think she was becoming flirtatious. It was annoying. It had something to do with the way she looked.

“No, I can’t,” she said. “I’ve got a whole dispensary to pack.”

“What’s it like being a nun these days?”

“Oh,” she said, “well, there are all kinds of nuns.”

He is, she thought, he’s coming on. He probably can’t help himself. That’s what that softness in his face is all about.

“What’s it like for you?”

“It’s medieval,” she said. “And otherworldly.”

She was pleased when he laughed, in spite of herself. “What’s that business on your ear, Mr. Holliwell?” Put him on the defensive.

The question seemed to surprise and embarrass him.

“It’s a tribal scar. I got it in Southeast Asia.”

“Really? Where?”

“Indonesia,” he said quickly. “Celebes. I’m an anthropologist.”

“And you were being one of the gang.”

“Yes,” he said, “one of the bunch. I asked for their smallest size.”

The buzz-saw whine of a large outboard sounded on the ocean; they both turned to see the Paradise dive boat on its way to Playa Tate.

“Well,” she said, “take care of your foot. Be thankful you knelt down on a baby one or we might have had to open up your leg to get the spines.”

“Thanks,” he said.

“And try to keep it clean.”

“What?”

She laughed at him. “Your knee.”

“Oh … yes. Look, maybe I’ll see you again. At the ruins or somewhere. I’d like very much to talk.”

“I’ll be pretty busy.”

“Packing and telling your beads.”

She smiled at him and turned away. He was impertinent and patronizing and for all she knew, depraved. He was the kind of man she thought of as “cheesy.” But he was sort of nice. And not just a tourist, she thought; Justin was innocently snobbish in the extreme.

Back on the veranda, she felt a little high. The very recognition of her exhilaration was enough to depress her; she was shortly guilty and ashamed. Air-headedness. Petty foolishness. The thought of waiting through another night was dreadful. But she would have to. She would have to go on believing in them.

She leaned on the rail, gripping it until her knuckles were white.

“Christ, it’s impossible,” she said.

Egan was in the kitchen. Drunk.

“Now, now,” he said. “There’s a good girl.”

Pablo opened the hatch to dazzling sunlight and stepped out on the hot boards of the afterdeck, barefoot and shirtless. The Cloud was tied up by a cement pier in a town of red-tiled roofs. The streets, unlike those of Palmas, were paved, the walls of the harborside buildings were whitewashed. Over the port captain’s shed was a double-masted flagstaff displaying a banner with a white cross on a star-dappled blue field and the horizontal tricolor of Holland. Beyond the town was desert, grown with cactus and thorny acacia. Across a sparkling bay lined with limestone palisades, a low white peak rose like a cone of salt.

The water lines were over; Pablo picked up a hose and laved his head and face with a jet of fresh water. The water was good and cold. Spring water. Wiping it from his eyes, he saw Tino approaching.

“Like to start d’ day wid some beer?” Tino asked pleasantly.

“You kidding me?”

Tino motioned him toward the rail. Stacked up on the dock were a dozen cases of Amstel beer. A yellow-haired Creole driving a forklift was lowering more beside it.

“You go get ’em, sailor,” Tino said, slapping him on the shoulder.

Pablo took his morning Benzedrine; a barbed wave of resentment ran through him. Fucking pull and tote. He climbed over the rail and took a closer look at the town.

At the end of the pier was a market square dominated by a gabled stone building with “Perreira Brothers” lettered over its central doorway. To the right of it, behind a garden wall enclosing royal palms and banana trees, was a government building marked by the same two flags.

Two seagoing tugs were berthed at the adjoining pier, one flying U.S. colors, the other Dutch. Beside the tugs were two small Venezuelan freighters. As far as Pablo could see, there were no other craft in port.

He lifted a crate of Amstel, carried it aboard and set it down beside the forward hold. After a while, he fell into the rhythm of hauling; the speed, the sweating, the sun on his body made him feel powerful. When the beer was aboard, there were cartons of frozen meat for the reefer, then greens and fruit.

Each time Pablo shouldered a box past the shuttered main cabin, he heard the voices of the people conferring inside and although he could not make out what was being said there was something about the very tone in which they spoke that made him think of high fortune and the big-time score. He began to take less pleasure in his donkey work and to feel turned around.

After a little more than a half hour, he decided that he would take a break, let the cartons pile up on the pier for a while and get out of the sun. Tino was down in the engine space, working on the diesel.

In the shade of a hatch cover, Pablo contemplated the scheme of things. He kept thinking of the old man called Naftali who was with them in the cabin now, and who lived in a hotel room amid piles of hundred-dollar bills.

He had made his move, he thought. He had put a thousand miles between himself and the life of petty day-by-day. McPhail and his like, the crummy trailer, the chickenshit, that bitch and her rat-burgers. He was out where it mattered; out here, he thought, you made it big or you went under. He would go under or go back and let them put the irons on him and do the time. But if he made it big, he might go back and no one could touch him. Or he might settle down, on some island, a better island than this one — and be like the men you read about in Soldier of Fortune, men who had lived the life of adventure in hot countries and by their strength and cunning made it big, gotten rich, and who lived exquisitely in plantation houses high above the harbor with beautiful native wives.

People liked to get you thinking you were small-time. That way, they made out and you got fucked. It was that way now, he thought, they were in the cabin talking big-time scores and he was hauling groceries for them. They might pay him or they might not; he was a yo-yo to them. One of life’s little yo-yos.

But the fact was, they were old and soft. They were making it big, they had made their move, but they were soft. Callahan was a rummy. What were Negus and Callahan together compared to him? Surely, he thought, their day was over. It was someone else’s turn now, someone smarter and tougher. And it was all in your mind; if you let weak people buffalo you, they would keep you down. He had been letting them do it all his life and it was time to call them on it. He was young, he was strong, a soldier of fortune. He had seen them up close, they were nothing much.

Naftali with the room full of money, he had not seen. But Naftali was an old man, was losing his grip. Was he as bad as all that? He, Pablo, might see about that; you had to take risks, there was nothing for free. It was a new ball game on this ocean. He began to suspect that things were going his way.

Then Tino came up and yelled at him — the black son of a bitch actually cursed him out in front of the other niggers on the dock; he was put back to his loading. As he labored under the bales of netting and the boxes full of spare parts, a chain of recall ground against his memory and every insult and humiliation he had ever been forced to bear flashed before him, as bright and hurtful as though he were enduring each again.

When the last of the stores were aboard, he took another Benzedrine and shortly thereafter made up his mind. They would never pay him, he realized. They took him for a fool. It was time for another move. A man doesn’t live forever, he thought. You don’t make out playing it safe. He had tried being Joe Citizen and he had ended up sharing a trailer with an ignorant whore and a kid he couldn’t support. No more. If you let yourself be anybody’s man you ended up like everybody.

In the afternoon, Tino sent him to the port captain’s office to get the Cloud’s papers stamped and the fishing permit renewed. By the time he got back aboard, the conference was over. The cabin shutters were lifted and Naftali had departed unseen. The Callahans were in bathing suits.

Pablo asked if he could take a shower.

“Go ahead,” Callahan told him. “We’re finished here.”

Callahan looked pretty good, Pablo thought, harder and trimmer than he ought considering his age and the amount he seemed to drink. The sight of Mrs. Callahan in her bikini stirred Pablo’s resentment and strengthened his resolve. He noticed that Negus had started in drinking beer.

“We’re going to the beach,” Deedee said. “Up at the new hotel. Anybody else want to come?”

Pablo shook his head.

“Tino,” she said, “you come. I want to see if you’ll show your legs.”

“Oh no,” Tino said. “Not me.”

“I don’t think he can swim,” she said to her husband.

“I de bes’ swimmer,” Tino told her with a sad smile.

“You’ll find Naftali at the Hollandia if you need him,” Callahan told Negus. “He’ll probably sack out, I don’t think he’s feeling well.” He looked over his men with an air of good-natured proprietorship. “Think you boys can stay out of trouble until we get back?” As he asked the question, Pablo noticed that a gear locker beside the galley was swinging open. Its upper drawer was piled with tubes and radio parts — various things that might be worth keeping under lock and key in port. His automatic pistol was in the lower drawer still in its leather holster. On the locker handle hung an open padlock.

“Guess I’ll wash up now,” Pablo said. He went back to the lazaret to get his towel and clogs and some clean underwear. The space was close and airless without a seaborne wind to cool it; the boards enclosed each hour of the day’s heat.

When he had finished showering, the locker still hung open. He changed clothes on deck, leaving his boots beside the hatch with his wallet and passport under his socks, and put on his sunglasses and his Macklin Chain Saw hat. With the cap down over his eyes, he sat down in one of the cockpit chairs, turning it round on its swivel so that he could face the main cabin and see the open locker.

In the cabin, Negus reclined on a wooden bench, his feet up on the table and his back against the bulkhead. He had been up all night and had started drinking in the morning. There was a glass of neat rum on the table, a few inches from where his legs rested.

Tino was in the engine space with another St. Joostian, working on the Lister. Through the planking, Pablo could hear the rattle of their tools and their soft curses.

In his swivel chair, Pablo felt clean, cool and ready. He was waiting for Negus to fall asleep. As he willed Freddy Negus into slumber, he had a look at the publications stacked beside the Modar. He found two U.S. Coast Guard code books, laminated and stamped “Secret,” and the Coast Guard frequency chart, all current. Along with these were code books of the Tecanecan and Compostelan navies, so similar in typeface and binding to the U.S. books that it was apparent they had been printed by the same outfit. The Spanish in these was obscure to Pablo, but the military frequencies and codes were listed.

When he heard Negus begin to snore, he put the books down quietly and stood up and walked barefoot into the galley. Negus was asleep down in the main cabin, not ten feet away from him, his head resting on a lintel in the paneling, his mouth open. Pablo waited a moment with his eyes on Negus’ drawn face and listened to Tino and his mate work in the engine space. The quiet rhythm of their labor went on unbroken. Still watching Negus, he reached into the lower drawer of the open locker and drew out his holstered pistol. Pistol and holster in hand, he backed off silently to the cockpit and furiously set about getting himself in harness. Negus was still snoring when he finished, Tino still tapping away on the Lister with his assistant. With shirttails over his trouser tops, Pablo walked out on deck, picked up his boots and sat down on the edge of the after hatch. He put his passport and wallet in his pocket and casually put on his socks and cowboy boots. He made himself wait for a moment, then climbed over the rail and walked slowly along the cement dock toward town. There was still no one in sight aboard the Cloud. On his way to the market square, he could not resist touching the pistol under his arm.

When the slant of the sun lit the cockpit windows to a green-tinted blaze and the sunlight crept across the galley and the cabin below it, Negus woke up and held his head in his hands. After a while he stood up, shuddered and went out on deck shielding his eyes. He found the water hose beside the after hatch, turned the pressure on and held it over his head and drank from it. Tino, in a grease-spattered purple tank-top shirt, came up and took the hose from him.

“Where’s the kid?” Negus asked him as he drank.

Tino rolled the water in his mouth and spat it out on the deck.

“He not with you?”

They looked at each other and stalked around the boat in search of Pablo. Negus called his name. They checked the lazaret and looked through his gear.

“The fucker flew,” Negus said.

“Lef’ his gear.”

“I didn’t see his passport there.”

They went into the galley and leaned against the stove. Negus rubbed his eyes.

“Maybe he won’ come back,” Tino said.

“Took his piece out of here,” Negus said, slamming the gear locker shut. He did not bother to lock it.

“I fin’ him,” Tino said. “No place he can go I won’ fin’ him. Not on dis eye-land.”

“O.K.,” Freddy Negus said.

“Wan’ me to bring him back?”

“Find out what the hell he’s up to and let me know. We’ll figure it from there.”

“Ya,” Tino said.

Negus watched him walk briskly down the cement pier. As he went, two young islanders who had been sitting on a piling stood up and fell into step with him.

Holliwell finished his rum, thought about having another and decided on it. He poured it quickly and guiltily; he was drinking as he had not done for years and still smoking. Propped in a wicker chair on the porch of his Paradise bungalow, his feet on the pastel rail, he looked out over the layered ocean.

Raw rum drained the disease of his mind. His thoughts were focused by an act of will on the pale-eyed woman at the mission beach. He remembered quite clearly the cool sure-handed motion with which she had guided him from the surf. The lightest of touches, a gesture almost, but she had put all her strength behind it. For a few seconds she had supported him. Curious. Indicative of what? Trust. Confidence. An insolent assurance, an unthinking self-superiority that was wonderful to see. A nun.

Thinking of her made him laugh. In his solitary laughter there was admiration, contempt and jealousy.

It was very beguiling, that female arrogance. There were women who could not refrain in their dealings with men from intimating that it was they who were more at home in the world. Who could not forbear, all unprovoked, to run up their mythic pennants. Instrument of Birth. Shroud Weaver. Bent never Broken. It became very primitive very quickly. Talking some commonplace like genocide or the weather they performed a hula, a series of mudras. Your eyes are hot and deluded, they signaled, ours are clear. We have suffered your rantings, your violence, your febrile illusions and endured. We can look on all things the same, we can imagine serenity. Grow up, they said.

The responses were various and complex but all involved equally primitive rage. Snatch! Stuff, cooze, undoing, unclean. Go bathe yourselves and be suitable for our fantasies. And you can’t hear the sound of our Bull Roarer!

He took more rum and filled his glass with warm Popi-Limón. The ice in the bar bucket had melted.

He liked her, it was that simple. He could say anything he liked or nothing at all and the spooks and hirelings could report anything that he said and it would make no difference. He felt sure enough of that.

Was she then at home in the world — the modern world, like the Jew in Nolan’s strange arrested hypothesis? She seemed to think she was. The question would not have occurred to her. He would put it to her; that was in his line, after all. Who do you think you are and what do you think you’re doing?

One way or another it must seem possible to her that the world could be ordered to suit her scruples and inhabited with satisfaction. In the name of God or Humanity or some Larger Notion — a new order of ages with a top and a bottom and sides. Right consequences following right actions. A marvelous view of the world, he thought. If it prevailed it would produce its own art forms, its own architecture, its own diet.

In Saigon, he had once smoked opium with a young officer of airborne troops who had described himself as a winner. “If you oppose me,” the young officer had explained, “I will win. You will lose.”

“Always?” Holliwell had asked.

Every time, the officer had explained. Because the compulsion to lose was universal and only a handful of people could overcome it.

Holliwell had ventured the opinion that it must be very strange to approach every contest with the certainty of success.

The officer was an unimposing man. He wore eyeglasses so thick that one wondered how he had come to be in the Army at all.

“What I think is strange,” he had said, “is approaching them knowing you’re going to lose.”

Saying it, he had fixed Holliwell with a look of unsound satisfaction. The eyes behind the lenses were knowing and tolerant and demented, but the point was well taken and he had scored a success ad hominem in that very moment.

Positive thinkers.

How could they? he wondered. How could they convince themselves that in this whirling tidal pool of existence, providence was sending them a message? Seeing visions, hearing voices, their eyes awash in their own juice — living on their own and borrowed hallucinations, banners, songs, kiddie art posters, phantom worship. The lines of bayonets, the marching rhythms, incense or torches, chanting, flights of doves — it was hypnosis. And they were the vampires. The world paid in blood for their articulate delusions, but it was all right because for a while they felt better. And presently they could put their consciences on automatic. They were beyond good and evil in five easy steps — it had to be O.K. because it was them after all. It was good old us, Those Who Are, Those Who See, the gang. Inevitably they grew bored with being contradicted. Inevitably they discovered the fundamental act of communication, they discovered murder. Murder was salutary, it provided reinforcement when they felt impotent or unworthy. It was something real, it made them folks and the reference to death reminded everyone that time was short and there could be no crapping around. For the less forceful, the acceptance of murder was enough. Unhappy professors, hyperthyroid clerics, and flower children could learn the Gauleiter’s smirk. The acceptance showed that they were realists which showed that they were real.

Rum was making his poisoned leg throb.

There was no reason to get angry. At his age one took things as they were. Despair was also a foolish indulgence, less lethal than vain faith but demeaning. One could not oppose the armies of delusion with petulance.

It was necessary to believe in oneself. Very, very difficult. One was a series of spasms, flashes. Without consistency, protean, infantile — but one would have to do. The loneliness was hard.

In the greening twilight, he thought of the great silence that had settled on the reef. The fear and the muted coral colors hung in his recollection like fragments of collective memory, a primordial dream. Closing his eyes, he could hear again the rhythm of his breathing and feel the panic drugs surging in his blood.

He had no business down there.

Three men carrying firewood came down the road, their bent figures outlined against the aqua and scarlet horizon. Approaching the Paradise grounds they turned off to follow the shore where their passage and their burdens would not worry the nerves of sensitive guests. It was a diorama of toil and poverty, and Holliwell, in his easy chair, felt suitably guilty. B. Traven — but they were all south of cliché, so it was simple reality. Familiar moral frissons qualified as insights. Carrying wood always felt different depending on your health, your state of mind and the time of day; sitting in a resort watching the peons was always the same for people whose education prepared them to do it properly; the final emotion was self-pity.

He had no business under the reef. Nor had he any business where he was, under that perfumed sky.

He reminded himself that he had his business like everyone else. It was as real as anyone else’s and so was he. His business was done in University Park, a perfectly real place though recently constructed. It was to husband and father, to teach, even to inspire, and to endure. These things were not trivial. A monstrous pride might despise them, but honor could not. Because who does one think one is?

At times one has only a slender notion. One is only out here in this, whatever it is.

Whirl. People disappeared and were said to have died, as in war. Or their contexts changed like stage flats leaving them inappropriately costumed, speaking the wrong lines. Some disappeared in place, their skulls hollowed out by corrosive spirits or devoured by parasites.

The world and the stations of men changed ruthlessly; the funhouse barrel turned without slowing. The fall of last week’s airplane sends amazed salesmen down the ledge. The coral polyps and sawfish receive a dry rain. In suburban shopping centers the first chordates walk the pavement, marvels of mimesis. Their exoskeletons exactly duplicate the dominant species. Behind their soft octopus eyes — rudimentary swim bladders and stiletto teeth.

Just out here. Each one alone. The rest is fantasy.

It had been to consider too curiously to consider so. As the stars came out, fear broke over his heart like a dawn of unwholesome colors. Rags in the wind, the taste of a tannery. It was a childhood image.

He drank more but the rum didn’t do it. That’s what you get, he thought.

In the last hours of afternoon, Pablo sat pacing himself in the E Wowo Bar, drinking light rum and doing speed. Well after dark, he hit the street; he felt himself an instrument of stealth and strength. He followed the palm-topped wall of the Governor’s Palace, grim, almost angry.

Naftali’s Hollandia Hotel was two blocks beyond the palace on the far side of the street. Pablo sauntered across, strung tight and trying to loosen it down. Trying to ease it, cool it.

The Hollandia was no more than a two-story stone house with a little garden behind its pastel gate. Four tiled steps led up to its veranda. Pablo mounted them quickly and went inside. The foyer was deserted, the cubicle-sized desk unattended. In a curtained room behind it, someone was watching television, a comedy with music, in Spanish from the Caracas station. No one came out when Pablo went upstairs.

The second-floor corridor smelled of varnish and insecticide. At the far end of it a loosely fitted shutter creaked in the gentle wind and lightly battered the window casing. The sound covered Pablo’s soft steps as he went along the hall.

There was only one transom showing light and it was at the windowed end of the passage, above the room numbered eight. Across the hall was a water cooler with a plastic glass resting on it. As he passed the cooler, Pablo glanced back over his shoulder toward the stairs, then placed himself beside the door to room eight. He was disturbed to hear voices sounding from inside, speaking some foreign language he had never heard before. Dutch maybe. But after he had listened for a while, he determined that there was only one voice, a single speaker. The voice sounded vacant and slurred, like that of a drunk man talking to himself.

Well, well, thought Pablo. You put yourself away a little early, my friend.

He went to the cooler and silently filled the plastic glass. Then he crouched down outside the door and began to pour the contents of the glass underneath it. The door opened at the first spout.

Standing above Pablo was a hawk-faced man in a blue bathrobe and carpet slippers who was pointing what appeared to be an automatic pistol down Pablo’s throat. The hand holding the gun was unsteady but purposeful. Pablo set his plastic glass down and rested on one knee, a genuflection.

“What’s this, sailor,” the hawk-faced man inquired, “the wine of astonishment?”

When the old man leaned down to take Pablo’s weapon from beneath his open shirt, Pablo realized how unsteady the man’s hand actually was. Had he not been thrown so off balance himself, he might have tried a move. But he had lost for the moment. The sclerotic nature of the old man’s movements both frightened and encouraged him.

“Come visit,” the man said to Pablo. “I been expecting you all night.”

“Not me,” Pablo said, blinking under the shaded light of the room. “We both got the wrong people. See, I was playing a joke on a friend of mine.”

“Aha,” the man with the gun said. “Funny.”

“Honest to Christ,” Pablo pleaded. “Now just take it easy!”

“Tell me something. How easy you want me to take it?” He motioned Pablo deeper into the room. It was a room that was clean and without character, unclaimed by its occupant, everything the management’s. “In my former organization when funny people poured water under our doors we would blow the door apart.”

“Hey, man … honest to Christ!”

“If I would have done that it would have been your blood I’d see coming under my door. But I’d wait before I put my head out, believe me.”

“It’s a mistake is all, see.”

The man carefully seated himself on the side of his bed; he was half turned away from Pablo.

“I saw you on the boat today. You stank all over the dock of petty thief.” Naftali was inspecting the serial number on the stock of Pablo’s service forty-five. “But a petty thief with problems. Right away I knew we’d meet again.”

He had put his own gun down on the bed to look at Pablo’s.

“This is U.S. government property, no?” Naftali asked. He removed the clip from Pablo’s gun, set it down and picked up his own automatic. Leaning back on the bolsters, he held the gun on his lap.

“That’s right,” Pablo said.

“And you … whose property are you?”

Pablo made him no answer.

“Well, you’re too late, thief.” Naftali took a piece of paper from his bathrobe pocket, wadded and threw it toward Pablo. What Pablo picked up and read was a bank receipt for the transfer of gulden three hundred eighty thousand to the Amsterdam branch of the Nederlandse Algemeen Bank. The account to which the money was consigned was held in the name of a M. Blanc, a resident of Brussels, Belgium.

“Know what it means, boychick?”

“I believe I know what it means,” Pablo said.

“It means you would die for nothing, thief. It means the money’s gone.”

“What are you gonna do?”

“You know what’s customary?” Naftali asked.

Pablo took a deep breath and glanced at the door. It looked very far away. When he turned back to face Naftali he noticed for the first time the night table beside the old man’s bed. The table was covered with bottles — one of Mexican brandy, another of liquid Nembutal, clearly labeled in English, yet another small one of insulin with a syringe beside it.

“I won’t ask you for a break,” Pablo said.

“It never hurts to ask.”

Pablo turned away from the sight of the barrel.

“Fuck you,” he said.

“Nothing to say for yourself? A name?”

“Pablo,” Pablo said.

“Whose life is worth more, Pablo? Yours or mine?”

Tabor looked with hatred into the man’s cold gray eyes. He could not stand to be the object of games.

“I’m gonna walk outa here,” he told the man on the bed. “You can do what you like.”

“That’s right,” Naftali told him. “I’m entitled.”

Pablo stayed where he was.

“Tonight I indulge my every whim, why not?”

Confused and frightened, Pablo bared his teeth and tried to shrug. The man seemed extremely drunk. Or drugged. Yet his movements were deliberate. He was crazy, Pablo decided, and sick. His eyes were red-rimmed, he was pale and sweating. Sick to death, Pablo thought.

“Please,” Tabor said. He knew it was a terrible thing to say.

“I think I waited for you,” Naftali said. “The thief always comes.”

Pablo panicked, coiled himself to spring and almost lost his balance. He was too frightened.

“You embarrass me,” the old man said. Yet he was not so old, Pablo saw. Sickness and fatigue had drained him. “I’m dying.”

Tabor could only stand and stare, taking each breath as it came.

“Do you understand, Pablo?”

Pablo slowly shook his head.

Naftali smiled coldly.

“You are interrupting my suicide.”

Tabor’s mouth fell open.

“It’s terrible,” Naftali said. “A coarse intrusion at a solemn moment. What a rude fellow you are.”

“I … I … don’t know what to tell you,” Pablo stammered. “I made a mistake.”

“Definitely.”

“I made a big mistake,” Pablo Tabor admitted. “But I ain’t gonna crawl, mister. Whatever happens gonna happen.”

Naftali laughed and his eyes closed for a moment and Pablo considered a bolt for the door. The predatory eyes were on him before he could compose a move.

“You’re young, Pablo.”

Tabor swallowed.

“Have a drink,” Naftali said. He reached over, took the brandy bottle from his night table and tossed it to Pablo. Catching it, Pablo held it by his chest for a moment, then took it in his right hand. He licked his lips. He was preparing to throw it in the man’s face.

“Don’t even think about it,” Naftali warned him. “I want to see you drink.”

Pablo stared at the bottle.

“No,” he told Naftali. “No way.”

“Think it’s poisoned?” Naftali laughed again. “That would be funny, eh? I could go to eternity with a little thief at my feet. A Viking funeral. Don’t worry,” the old man said. “It’s not the best brandy but it won’t kill you.”

Pablo took a sip and gently put the bottle on the foot of the bed.

“Sit,” Naftali ordered him. He went across the room to a straight-backed chair and sat down with his head in his hands.

“We’ll tell the story of our lives,” Naftali said.

“I’m sorry,” Pablo said. “I’m awful sorry. Lemme go, will ya?”

Naftali shook his head solemnly.

“An extrovert to the last, that’s me, Pablo. But I’m a good listener too. Since you’re here, we’ll chat. But it must be about important things. Time is short.”

Pablo started to speak, to plead. The barrel of the pistol was still trained on him. He put his hand over his eyes.

“I’m a thief like you,” Naftali said. “An older and much better thief. Smarter. If I were not a thief — who knows what I’d be. A geologist. An opera singer maybe. A baritone. Scarpia.” Still pointing the gun at Pablo, he leaned forward and took the brandy from beside his slippered feet. “Truthfully,” he told Tabor, “I think I would be a pianist, strange as it seems. Now tell me — given your intelligence — if you were not a thief what would you be?”

“The thing is,” Pablo said, “I’m not a thief at all.”

“Answer seriously.”

“Shit, man, I don’t know. Look, if you’re gonna be easy about this, would you mind if I just left?”

“I would mind,” Naftali said. “Now answer.”

“I got no idea in hell.”

“Try harder.”

“I suppose I’d be a lifer in the Coast Guard.”

“Harder.”

“I’d do things different.” Then to his own surprise he said: “Maybe I’d be a better father.”

“Ah,” Naftali said. “Now you’re talking. Father to whom?”

“You want to know my story do you, mister?”

“I do. In your own words.”

“I got a little boy. Nine. I was just wishin’ he had a better father. It just come to me here.”

“Then why do you have to be a thief?”

“Because I got turned around. Just turned around and around.”

“Yes. Me also. What turned you around?”

“What did? Things did, is what. Things.”

Naftali took the bottle of liquid Nembutal in his hand and drank from it. He followed the drink with brandy, which he swallowed without blinking, his eyes still on Pablo’s.

“Things,” he said. “Life? History?”

“Sure,” Pablo said. “If you like.”

A small wind chime tinkled against the closed shutter on the window. Naftali turned toward it. Pablo saw that his hand was still around the pistol.

“The last time I saw my father,” the old man said, “he was standing on a piano stool. He was showing our visitors that there was no jewelry concealed in the light fixture. It was in a faraway country of which you know nothing. My father was wearing only pajamas and I had never — although I was already a graduate — I had never seen him in pajamas before. And my mother stood beside the stool and her hand was raised because she was afraid he would fall. I was there. I was also afraid. I wasn’t Naftali then.”

Pablo frowned. He could make no sense of it.

“Did they find any jewelry?” he asked after a moment.

“No jewelry. But in the stool there were some nocturnes of Chopin. Manuscripts in his hand. Right in the stool. So typical of my father.”

“Huh,” Pablo said. “Did they find them?”

“Oh yes, they found them. They came back for them. And for my parents and my sisters also. But I was gone.” He picked up the brandy bottle and tossed it to Pablo. Pablo took a long drink. Naftali was listening to the wind chime.

“Hey, that’s tough,” Pablo said.

“Tough,” Naftali repeated. “Happened a million times. Always has. Continues. History. History will turn you around every time, sailor.”

“Well,” Pablo said. “I hope you got your own back off the bastards.”

Propped on one elbow against the bolster, Naftali shrugged.

“I had revenge. It wasn’t enough.” He turned toward the shuttered window again and the breeze drifting through stirred his sparse hair. “You can’t get your own back.”

Naftali’s eyes were dulled. Pablo began to think he might come out all right.

“I keep remembering trains, Pablo. The last trains. Little gymnasia sweethearts waiting on platforms. Their parents waiting for them. And I alone am escaped to tell thee.”

“What I don’t understand,” Pablo said, “is how come when you got all that money you’re gonna throw it away.”

“If you lived long enough, you might understand,” Naftali said. “But you won’t.” He settled back beside the bolster; his hand, holding the pistol, rested at his side. “Know what Nietzsche tells us? He tells us that the thought of suicide helps bring a man through many a long hard night. Well, I’m grateful to Nietzsche for that observation — but, danke schön, no more nights.”

Another breeze licked at the wind chime.

“All that bread, man — that could buy you a couple of good ones.”

“You can buy lots of fancy nights. But you can’t buy morning. Try sometime and buy yourself a short night for money, you’ll see what I mean.”

Talking was the thing, Pablo thought. “I couldn’t be that negative,” he said. “The way I see it, if money don’t mean nothing then nothing does.”

“I know the value of everything,” Naftali said. “I’ve stolen it all and I’ve sold it all.”

“Life is life. You just don’t blow it off. Not me.”

“A little cinder in the wind, Pablo — that’s what you are. You’re telling me — who set such store on my survival — that life is life?”

“It’s me gonna be alive in the morning,” Pablo said. He hoped it had not been rash of him.

“What for?”

“What for? Well … to keep it rolling, I guess.”

“To keep it rolling,” Naftali repeated. “To make the world go round. Maybe it goes better without you — what about that?”

Pablo watched him warily. The man seemed balanced on the edge of consciousness but his falcon’s gaze was still sharp enough.

“I never thought of it that way,” Pablo said.

“Try it.”

“Are you gonna let me go?” Pablo asked.

“I had three wives,” Naftali said. “Each one was an idealist. All went to prison. And I, a thief, a murderer, have never seen the inside of a prison.”

“You been lucky.”

“Why should I let you go?” Naftali demanded. He pulled himself upright in a sudden spasm of passion. “What are you worth? Explain yourself.”

“Everybody’s worth something,” Pablo said. “I mean — everybody’s life got some meaning to it. You know — there’s a reason for people.”

“No kidding? A reason for you? What is it?”

“I don’t know,” Pablo confessed. “I ain’t found out yet. But I know there is one.”

“But you’re vicious and stupid, are you not?”

“No!” Pablo said hotly. He was shocked and enraged. “Of course not!”

Naftali’s eyes went out of focus for a moment. His gaze wandered. Pablo tensed.

“I could have put an end to everything with this,” the old man said, lifting his pistol. “But I thought — no. I want to go slow. I want to remember. Can you believe it? I wanted to remember everything.”

“I believe it,” Pablo said. He felt himself under Naftali’s cold scrutiny again.

“You’re a very stupid young man,” Naftali told him. “I tell you this for your own good because you need to know it.”

“Can I have a drink?” Pablo asked. Naftali let him come forward and take the bottle off the bed.

“When you’re dead in some gutter for a dime, what happens to your son? It was you with the son, yes?”

“Yeah,” Pablo said. “It was me.”

“What happens to him? He becomes a thief like his father? Or what?”

Pablo put the brandy back on Naftali’s bed.

“You really give a shit?”

“Tell me.”

“He won’t be nothing like me,” Pablo said. “He’ll be the total opposite of me.”

Naftali turned toward the breeze again. The wind chime sounded.

“You won’t get to sniff that wind where you’re going,” Pablo told him.

“I leave you the wind,” Naftali said.

“Aren’t you scared?”

“Of what should I be scared? Of devils?”

Pablo was impressed.

“You got a real heavy rep around this ocean, Naftali. I guess you know that.”

“I got a heavy rep all over,” Naftali agreed. “For my avarice and my readiness to kill.”

“Listen,” Pablo hastened to say, “I appreciate your bein’ easy about this. I wouldn’t blame you if …” Naftali’s smile stopped him. A hard, bad smile, he thought. A dead smile. He froze in his chair.

“Revenge is not enough,” Naftali said. “I know.” The smile faded and the hardness left his eyes. “Not revenge. Not money. Liquor. Opium. Women. All the things we like, Pablo, you and me. They’re not enough.”

“Easy for you to say, pal. You’ve had all those things.”

“Not enough.”

“Well, hell. What’s enough then?”

“I am not the man to ask, young sir. I can only tell you what is not.”

Pablo began to rise from the chair but Naftali raised the gun and waved him back down. He took more Nembutal, then brandy, and rolled the bottle to Pablo.

“Drink.”

Pablo had another pull and eased back in the chair.

“Trains,” Naftali and softly. Pablo saw with embarrassment that he was crying.

“I sure did come to rip you off, Naftali. Sorry I picked tonight.”

“Thank your lucky stars you picked tonight,” Naftali said. He kept the gun pointed at Pablo; his left hand was groping under the bolster. It came up a clenched fist.

“If you’re asked — tell them I’m dead. Tell them you saw me. That there’s no mistake.”

Pablo nodded. Naftali extended his closed left hand and opened it under Pablo’s eyes. In the colorless palm was a small bright stone; it took Pablo a few seconds to realize that the stone was a diamond.

“Take it,” Naftali said. His voice was empty of intonation, running down. Pablo looked at the stone, then at Naftali.

“You’re giving me this?”

“I’m giving. Take it.”

It was the biggest diamond Pablo had ever seen, although he had not seen many. It appeared to be five times the size of the one in his wife’s wedding ring and he had still been paying for that one when he went over the hill.

“Goddamn,” he said.

“I don’t want them to get it here,” Naftali said.

“Goddamn,” Pablo said. “You’re all right, boss, no shit.”

“And,” Naftali said softly, “I don’t want you searching my room afterwards. It has … bad associations for me.”

Smiling like a child, Pablo feasted his eyes on the diamond.

“Since I was young,” Naftali told him, “I haven’t given anything to anyone. Now there’s no one but you and it costs me nothing. So take it, thief. Give it to the son you talk about and tell him …” He broke off in a massive yawn that seemed to exhaust him. “Or keep it and lie. Do what your nature compels.”

“What do you want me to tell him, boss?”

“There is a creature in another dimension whose jewelry is dead worlds. When this creature requires more of them it plants the seed of life on a tiny planet. After a while there are people and then nothing — a patina.”

“You want me to tell him that?”

The pistol fell from Naftali’s hand. At the sound Pablo jumped up in alarm.

“The thief always comes,” Naftali said. “Weren’t you told by your mother?”

“Not by my mother, no.”

“Yes,” Naftali said. “Always.”

The old man’s eyes began to roll backward in their sockets. He said something too faintly for Pablo to hear.

“Es ist eine schöne …” Naftali whispered. “Ach. Trains.”

Pablo leaned against the brass frame of the bed and bent down to hear.

“Brain coral,” Naftali whispered to him. “It’s only the outer coral of the brain …”

Tabor took the brandy bottle and sat down on the edge of the bed. He dropped Naftali’s diamond into the breast pocket of his shirt.

“Pablo!”

“Yo,” Pablo answered.

“There are reefs outside, Pablo. And reefs inside — within the brain of the diver.”

“I don’t understand you, boss,” Pablo said. He realized then that he feared to lose the old man’s presence.

But he had scored in spite of everything. Had made an idiotic overplay and scored all the same. He felt forgiven, favored by God.

“In the brain coral you see the skull of the earth, the heaping of the dead. You pass it going out … you see it in your mind … it’s your own brain. Sometimes among the brain coral … the casing of a skull. It rolls under the reefs.”

Pablo stood up, lifted the shutter slats and looked out into the quiet street. He saw no one save an elderly Chinese in a Hawaiian shirt, walking his bicycle along the sidewalk. He turned and put the brandy bottle on the dresser, catching sight of his own lean brown face in the mirror as he did so.

“Pablo!”

“Still with you, boss.”

“Your name rolls, Pablo. It’s your skull down there — white and round. It shines in the clear light … eight fathoms under the fan coral. Your skull is the counter … it’s the only ball in this game, Pablo.”

He cursed me, Pablo thought, he turned around and cursed me. The chill of eight fathoms touched his heart. A dying man’s curse.

Might it be, he wondered, that a man saw the future as he went out?

“Hey, man!” He shook Naftali’s shoulder, lightly at first, then harder, trying to bring him back in over the reef. But Naftali’s breathing was like the slow droning of some remote insensible machine, beyond call.

He stepped back and looked around the room, fingering the bottom of his shirt pocket where the diamond was. It was still possible, he thought, that there was more jewelry somewhere in the room. If there were even one more stone like the one in his pocket, he might buy time and freedom. If there were two or three more … the excitement made him clench his teeth and roll his upper lip in a hungry grin.

As he reached down to take his clip and gun from beside Naftali’s unconscious body another thought came to him: that it might still be possible to bring the old man back, to get help, a doctor, an ambulance. But it was too late for that. There was too much to explain, too many forces at work. It would be a foolish gesture.

Naftali’s pistol was a good one — Japanese, a new Nambu, eight shots, seven sixty-five.

Pablo set about searching the drawers and paper wardrobes. In one drawer, he found a wall crucifix. The other drawers held invoices, onionskin copies of contracts, letters typed in several languages, some in a strange alphabet he had never seen before. Only one was locked and when Pablo pried it open he found a stack of nearly a dozen passports from as many countries. The wardrobes held a few pairs of slacks and a great many short-sleeved white shirts.

He searched no further; he felt very tired now and it was dangerous to stay. He sat back down in the chair for a few minutes and drank the rest of the brandy, listening to the wind chime and Naftali’s last labored breathing. What, Pablo wondered, might he be seeing now?

The speculation threw him into a sudden panic.

He’s too strong, Pablo thought desperately, he’ll take me with him.

Tabor got to his feet, hesitated for a moment and then went quickly to the bed and slid the bolster from under Naftali’s head. Staring hard at the colorless stucco wall before him, he pressed the bolster with all his strength into Naftali’s face. There was a brief spasm of faint struggle, so faint that he might almost have imagined it. When he had finished, he dropped the bolster and wiped the sweat from his eyes. He could not bring himself to feel for the old man’s heart.

Before turning out the light, he glanced quickly at the figure on the bed. Naftali’s gray eyes were dull, there was spittle at his lips. No question now on which side of the reefs he lay.

Alone in the darkened room, he felt bereaved. He would interpret Naftali’s words not as a curse, nor as a prophecy, but as a warning from the dead worlds. He besought Naftali’s forgiveness. When he passed the open drawer where the crucifix lay, he crossed himself as he had seen Mexicans do.

What now, old man? he thought, touching the diamond.

There was nothing to do but go back to the Cloud.

The lower floor of the Hollandia was silent and dark now; its street door had been bolted. Pablo laid back the latch carefully. Outside, the island town seemed to have withdrawn into itself. He could hear only a distant car engine, a few dogs, the calls of the night birds that had tormented him in Compostela. He went down the front steps and out through the little garden fence and it was not until he had crossed the street and started down the neat little alley leading to the marketplace that he noticed the old Peugeot with an unlit taxi sign that was parked some distance down the road from the Hollandia, and that there was a man seated behind the wheel. The Hollandia’s night light reflected on what might be the man’s sunglasses or the visor of a driver’s cap.

Aboard the Cloud, the Callahans were making merry in their saloon deck; Negus was on the bridge moodily tapering off on beer.

“Where the hell you been?” he demanded of Pablo. “Who in fuck said you could just take off?”

“I got finished loading,” Pablo told him. “You were crapped out, so I thought I’d go over and lift a few.”

Negus staggered out of the pilothouse. He looked slack with his day’s drinking, his anger weak and without menace.

“Nobody told you you could have that pistol. Give it here.”

“I need protection,” Pablo said, “if I’m gonna walk around these foreign places.” He handed Negus his forty-five. The Nambu was tucked in his belt, concealed by shirt-front.

“This ain’t the goddamn Waterman Line,” Negus said, as though he had thought of saying something else instead.

“Hell, I was over with Tino before. I thought it must be all right.”

“Where is Tino?” Negus asked. “Was he with you?”

“Haven’t seen him since this afternoon,” Pablo said. He walked back to the lazaret with Negus’ frail curses behind him.

Down in the compartment, he propped the hatch cover open with a marlinspike and lay down on his rack. When he closed his eyes, luminescent ranges of coral began to form behind them.

Godoy’s church was in the hills above Puerto Alvarado, a square structure of whitewashed clay with the shapeless parody of a Norman steeple over its doorway. As soon as Justin opened the unpainted wooden door she heard the babies crying. Some Indian couples had come down from the Montana to have their infant children christened. The Indians knelt gravely in the candlelight around the font, the women in their dreary cotton shawls that were never sold in shops or exported, the men in khaki shirts and trousers, clutching straw sombreros with red and black marriage bands like coral snakes around the crown. The older children knelt behind the adults, equally grave and silent.

In turns the women rose to offer up their weeks-old infants and as Godoy, unassisted, poured the sacramental drops, the church would fill with the babies’ thin cries and the liturgical hum of the godparents reciting their oaths. Justin sat waiting in a rear pew, out of the light. When she had been seated a minute or two, she looked across the church and saw two men, one white and the other Negro, sitting in a pew opposite. The two men had turned to watch her; they did so unselfconsciously. One of them had thrown a lazy arm around the back of the bench on which he sat. The men were wearing cheap silky sport shirts of a bright print.

Justin ignored them and sat facing the baptismal font. When the christenings were duly solemnized and Godoy, wielding his censer, blessed the Indians and his church, the two men crossed themselves. Justin, out of reflex, did the same.

Father Godoy, with a smile, walked the Indians to the door. Each of them turned their eyes toward Justin as they passed her; not one, not even the children, glanced at the men in the print sport shirts. Godoy opened the church door and stood in the doorway, a rhombus of fiery light, shaking hands and bestowing felicitations. The Indians gone, he remained there, shielding his eyes from the glare. The surplice over his black cassock was real lace, Justin saw; it was a strangely rich thing in so poor a place. A gift from his mother, she thought. Vestments were what their mothers gave them.

The two men in the church stood up, and passing Justin, affected to examine her with an insolence enriched by four hard centuries of tradition. At the doorway, they did as well for Godoy. When the two were outside, Godoy closed the door against the fiery light and locked it.

“Thank you for coming up,” the priest said to Justin. He approached her and offered his hand with the same manner and with the same smile that he had employed for the Indian parents. The recognition of this troubled Justin slightly: she decided that it was his sincerity she saw.

“I’ve been waiting to hear from you,” Justin told him, as indeed she had been.

Together they walked toward the front of the church and Godoy went to the baptistry to blow out the candles around the font. Justin sat in a forward pew to the left of the altar. With the candles out, the church was almost in darkness, lit only by two small windows of imitation stained glass over the ceiling beams and the red sanctuary lamp.

He sat down beside her and she could barely see his face. They were close together, nowhere touching; two creatures of sacerdotal dark.

“I sent for you to tell you I was leaving,” the priest said.

She was surprised at the pain his words caused her. In the silence of the church, she thought he must have heard her shocked intake of breath. She fixed her eyes on the lamp beside the tabernacle.

“The work is in the mountains. It’s very important for us to be there now.”

“Of course,” Justin said. “Whatever the necessity … wherever it’s going on … you should be.” She could not get it to come out right but her voice never broke.

“In the mountains we have started collectives—ejidos. There are nuns working there and the Indians are organized. They’ve done wonderful things there, these nuns. Our compadresitas.”

Unlike the nuns here, Justin thought, who tend to be twittish, sentimental and useless. And who are not above a rush of raw hatred for the wonderful compadresitas in the mountains.

“We have the land there,” Godoy told her. “We have it by right of occupation and by right of law. Very soon the landowners and the copper companies will send in the Guardia to take it back if we let them. But we’re not going to let them. This time we resist, you see. And all over the country we will resist.”

“What about the foco here?” Justin asked. “Is it going to happen?”

“Absolutely it will happen. When the signal is given. Arms are on the way. And it will be soon. Absolutely.”

“And how will I know what to do?”

“You’ll be directed by people who know you. You must prepare.”

“We might have done things here as they did in the mountains,” Justin said sadly. “We might have organized collectives on the land.”

“The situation is different here. Here the foreign companies have what they want and the structure is not so visible. Also one is cut off on this coast. It can be liberated only together with the rest of the country.”

“I thought the nursing was enough,” Justin said, bowing her head. “I wasn’t looking around me. I wasn’t seeing. In all this time …” She could hear Godoy tapping his fingertips on the pew bench, impatiently.

“Don’t reproach yourself. You have your job and I have mine.”

After a moment she said: “I’m sorry you’re leaving.”

Godoy himself was silent for a while. She waited in the darkness for his answer.

“Interrupted friendships are disappointing” was what he said.

“Yes,” Justin said calmly, “but I suppose they’re very much part of the work.”

“Sadly so.”

Sadly so. He had done her the courtesy of informing her personally of his leaving and he wanted her to be off.

“How much notice do you think I’ll have,” she asked him, “before the dispensary is needed?”

“You were told to be ready at the shortest possible notice. At most you will have only a day or so. It depends on circumstances.”

“O.K.,” Justin said.

“I must go very soon. I have many things to do before I leave for the mountains.”

“Yes,” Justin said. “I have to go myself.” In fact she had nowhere to go. Nothing of any value to attend to except the nursing of a dying drunk.

They sat beside each other, neither moving.

Will you just touch me, Justin thought, will you do only that much? I will do whatever you ask, I will face the Guardia, I will die, I will try to kill for you, will you just touch me? Will you do something for me, to me? Will you give me your hand? Will you give me anything?

Godoy stood up and waited in the aisle for her to do the same. She rose and walked the length of the aisle with him. A key was in his hand.

“Father Godoy,” she said to him. He had not looked at her, had marched her straight back to the door which he was now unlocking. “Father Godoy!” She nearly shouted it at him. “What I care about … maybe all I care about … is me! Not about this country. Only about the way I myself feel.”

He looked at her in silence for a moment and then he smiled. He had a sad smile for all the wind and weather, she thought.

“I think we are all that way deep inside. But there can be a coincidence of interest, can there not? Between justice and one’s feelings.”

In despair, she played the schoolgirl and then the penitent.

“Of course. But before I go there is something I want to say. I want to say it because we may never meet again. My feeling for you is particular. I have come to feel about you in a particular way.”

Godoy had opened the door a crack. She stepped back from the light so that he might not see the shame in her face. It would have been so easy not to say anything. And then to say it in the absurd language of the cloister. Now it was too late.

In time suspended, she watched him search for an answer, saw his brows knit, his eyes shift. Then, without looking at her, he said: “I feel the same about you.” Immediately she knew that he was lying. Whatever his feelings might be, his declaration to her was a simple lie, a pacifier.

She watched the Adam’s apple bob in his white throat above the top button of his cassock and the thought came to her that he must be quite good at lying. But for her he was not trying very hard.

“There you see the extent of my selfishness,” she said. Driven by the lie, she could not stop. “And my smallness and foolishness.”

Godoy was genuinely embarrassed and perhaps concerned for his foco.

“Please,” he said. He opened the door and they were standing together in the white hot light. “I am your friend, you can believe that. I need you to help me. These poor also need you.”

“There was never any question of that,” she said. “I’ll be there when you need me.”

Another melancholy smile. “Until later then, dear friend.”

“Yes, until later,” Justin said, and went down the three whitewashed steps. The two men in print shirts were on the corner and she needed all her strength to walk past them, calm and heedless with a friendly, superior nod.

On the drive back she let herself cry. She cried from shame and from revulsion at his deceit and unctuousness. But he was right, she thought. Her feelings were a child’s feelings, and they were a matter of no importance. It was she, by all the rules of all the games, who was wrong.

By the time she was most of the way along the beach road, the sun was out of sight behind the mountains. Justin parked her jeep beside the ocean, climbed out and walked to the water’s edge. For a long time she looked out over the ocean before her, still in sunlight and deep blue.

In all the working systems, she thought, the weakness was always yourself — that spot of gristle in the gears. It applied on every level — even the act of getting through a day could be performed with gusto and dispatch if you kept out of your own way. Justin believed that she knew as much as anyone about self-struggle. But if I win, if I crush myself, she wondered, what will be left of me? She was not so much afraid as curious. Would what was left be useful? And if so, in what way? Would what was left be happy? And there I am again, she thought. Me.

The self was only a girl, a young thing, brought in arsy-varsy. A One True Church was a One True Church, a scientific system was a scientific system, a Revolution, no less, was a Revolution, but a broad was only a broad. It was all so obvious.

I am unworthy, she thought. You are. We are. They are. We are all fucked flat unworthy, unworthy beyond belief, unworthy as a pile of shit. Help us there, you — help us crush ourselves out of recognition, help us to be without eyes without pudenda without any of those things. Most of all make us without childish feelings. Because it’s that kid inside that makes us so damnably unworthy. We’ll scourge ourselves, we’ll walk in the fiery furnace, we’ll turn ourselves around.

To do penance and to amend my life, amen. To struggle unceasingly in the name of history. Gimme a flag, gimme a drum roll, I’m gonna be there on that morning, yes I am. And it won’t be the me you think you see. It’ll be the worthy revolutionary twice-born me. The objective historical unceasingly struggling me. The good me.

And if I’m not there on that morning, she thought, I won’t be anywhere at all.

She walked a few steps into the mild surf, wetting her chino trousers to the knee, and cupped two handfuls of salt water to pour over her face. When she started back to her jeep it was a few minutes before twilight and the hillside across the road had started to settle into evening. The first howler monkeys were awake and signaling their alarms, the diurnal birds settling down to cover among the thickest boughs, trilling the last calls of the day.

Something was in the road ahead; Justin stopped in her tracks. It was an animal running along the inshore shoulder, but it did not run so much as prance. And it was not an animal, it was a kind of man. The light was still strong enough for her to make out some of its colors — a topping of flaxen hair, white garments that were stained.

Back behind the wheel, she could not be certain that the stains were red. They were bright, of that she was sure. No fruit she knew would stain that brightly. She could not make the stains be anything but blood.