A Flag for Sunrise

And she understood then that the creature she had seen was the young Mennonite who had passed the mission weeks before. The hillside now was darkening and apparently deserted, the road empty of traffic. Justin shivered, turned her headlights on and started the jeep for home.

Holliwell hobbled along a rutted pathway lined with frangipani toward the dining hall. The stars were out, the wind easy.

The half dozen working tables in the Paradise’s utilitarian refectory were lined up along the seaward edge of the hall. Japanese lanterns hung from the rafters above them and from wire stays in the palm grove between the tables and the beach. On the other side of the huge floor space, some officers of the Guardia were lined up at the bar, drinking rum and listening to old Lucho Gatica records on the jukebox. Looking over the line of tables, Holliwell saw Mr. Heath sitting by himself over a gin and a dish of peanuts. Heath looked up and called him over.

“Hurt your foot, did you?” he asked. His face was florid in the lantern light, his nose and the skin under his eyes marked with swollen veins.

“I kneeled on a sea urchin over by the Catholic mission. There was a nun standing by to pull the spines out for me.”

“Good luck. Was that sister Justin?”

“I never asked her name. I think she’s the only one there.”

“Yes,” Heath said. “What brought you over that way?”

Holliwell shrugged. “Nothing special.”

“What do you make of them over there?”

“I don’t know what to make of them,” Holliwell said. “What do you make of them?”

“They’re quite pleasant, didn’t you think?”

“Yes,” Holliwell said. “Yes, they are.”

Heath and Holliwell dined on fresh dorado. As they took dinner Mr. Heath said that he had been offered a position in the fruit company’s new resort enterprise.

“Old hands like me are redundant since the blight,” he told Holliwell. “The profits are in tourism. So it’s take that up or retire.”

“And which will you do?”

Heath smiled vaguely. At that moment, Holliwell realized how drunk the man was.

“When I first came out here,” Mr. Heath said, “ten bandits and myself were the only force of law in two hundred miles of mountains. Great days they were.”

Holliwell nodded.

“We could put a company blanket on a tree stump — leave it for weeks and no one would dare touch it. We were respected. We respected ourselves as well. Every morning I could get up and say—Yo sé quien soy. Understand?”

“Sure,” Holliwell said.

“My men were able to say that because I made them able. And I didn’t do it by avoiding their eyes and tipping them ten shillings for smiling at me. D’ye see?” He did not wait to be encouraged. “It reflected my training.”

Holliwell was about to ask him where his training had been acquired.

“Nineteen years of age I was in the legion — the Légion Etrangère. Sidi Barras. Christ, great days!”

“And you came here after that?”

For his question, Holliwell received a momentary glance of dark and profound suspicion. It was a look to stay the timid and was obviously meant to be.

“After that I was in the Ceylon police. Had a bit of trouble there … a damn religious procession in Kandi. I was shown the instruments, you might say. Drove off in superintendent’s car after a party and that was that. Then I came out here.”

“Do you ever go back to England?”

“Can’t,” Heath said. “She’s not there, bless her. Not my England. Of course, I was home for the war. I was with the Second Army.”

“Montgomery … wasn’t it?”

Heath laughed. “Yes. Monty. Teetotaler.”

When the server took their plates, he called for more gin. Holliwell, who was fighting a wave of fatigue, would try to counter it with another small rum.

“We’re going to have tourists coming down here at the rate of a few thousand a month. We’re going to have me spying through keyholes so the hotel staff doesn’t pinch their Minoxes. We’re going to teach the people to steal and we’re going to teach them contempt for us.”

Holliwell began to say something about jobs for the populace. About giving them a share.

“These people don’t like being poor, Holliwell. No one does. We’re going to teach them to be ashamed of being poor and that’s something new, you see.”

“That’s the American way,” Holliwell said.

Heath sniffed. “Don’t like to see a man run his country down. Not abroad.”

“I’m not doing that. I think what’s best about my country is not exportable.”

Mr. Heath did not hear him. “We’re all wringing our bloody hands, that’s it. We’ve been doing it since the war. Apologizing and giving in and giving over and not one black, brown or yellow life have we saved doing it. We want to be destroyed, you see. So we will be.”

At the bar, the celebrating Guardia officers had grown progressively more hilarious. But a few of them, drunker than the others, were subsiding into a sinister quietude. They were not coastal people but Indians and mestizos from over the mountains and their style of being drunk was different. They leaned on the bar as though holding themselves up, communicating to each other in single shouted words, in whistles, sudden gestures, bursts of unpleasant laughter. Some telepathy of alcohol.

The Miami dentist came in, accompanied by a tall youthful man in an elegant guayabera. Behind them came Mrs. Paz and her sons, all combed and scented. Their entrance was cordially saluted by everyone present, not least by the officers at the bar. Holliwell gave them good evening and Heath, who apparently knew the tall man, did the same. The tall man, Holliwell assumed, was Mrs. Paz’s brother.

When the Cuban party were seated and served, an American couple came in from the darkness outside, and seated themselves at a table behind Holliwell’s chair. Holliwell had time to observe them as they passed.

The woman was of a certain age — perhaps in her forties, though she might also have been sixty or even older. She wore a muumuu with a coral necklace at her fleshy throat, and her hair, dyed deep black, was pasted against her temples like Pola Negri’s. The man was lean, pale and thick-lipped. He had very close-shaven hair and small dark eyes; his face preserved a kind of desiccated youthfulness. He was in white, even to his loafers.

The couple’s entrance induced an attitude of watchful menace in the drunken Guardia officers at the bar. But it appeared that no one knew them.

Mr. Heath watched them sit down, drawing thoughtfully on the lemon slice that had come with his fish.

“Stew Nabbs was in Key West,” Holliwell heard the man say. He himself was at the point of exhaustion. Of course the rum did not revive him.

“Ugh,” the woman muttered in a deep coarse voice, “the pits. The pits.”

The man giggled. A tiny-eyed giggle.

“Well,” Holliwell told his dining companion, “I’m going to bed. I’m out of it.”

Mr. Heath leaned forward and addressed him softly with a bland half smile.

“You’re not to go. Stay where you are.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” Holliwell said.

Heath glanced over Holliwell’s shoulder at the couple and fixed his eyes on Holliwell’s.

“I want you to listen to these people. They’re extremely interesting.”

“What a guy,” the man behind Holliwell was saying to his friend. “Indictments on him from here to Seattle and he’s living it up in Key West. A house, you know? A bankroll. Fuckin’ guy. But it won’t last.”

Holliwell shrugged and frowned a question at Mr. Heath. But Heath had settled back like a man about to listen to some beloved music.

“Stay,” Heath whispered. “Listen.”

“You lived with him,” the woman said.

“I went by his pad up there. Off Duval. He’s got a kid passed out in the garage — the kid’s fourteen? Fifteen? On a tank of gas. I split. I said, ‘See you, Stewart.’ ”

“You were his pal,” the woman said.

“New York, Clyde Hotel. Aagh. That fuckin’ place. Needle Park over there.”

“Hey,” the woman crooned. “Hey, I remember, Buddy. Do I remember?”

“You remember Phelan, the loan shark?”

“I was into Phelan,” the woman said. Holliwell tried to bring her face to mind again. “You were also, Buddy. And Stew.”

“Everybody was. Me and Stew were supposed to be whattaya-callit. His men.”

“His leg breakers,” the woman said. In a sweet singsong, like one reminding a child of a lesson forgotten. “And legs were broken, in my recollection.”

The man began to curse immoderately.

“How was your dive today?” Heath asked.

“I was just thinking of the dive,” Holliwell said. “It was a lot of things.”

The young man was speaking again.

“That little harelip from Riker’s. The fuck was doing six bits a day and going to Phelan. Simpleminded. Phelan says put the arm on the little stiff. So we go to the big hotel there, the Ansonia. They got offices there, everything. Pay phone and we order shit from Riker’s. An hour later comes the harelip and we jump him. He runs, he screams like a cooze. Runs up a dozen flights of stairs. Finally me and Stew get him on the top floor. We hold him over the stairwell by his feet and it rains coin. His change, his wallet, his works, everything goes — and he’s upside down there making little bird noises. The whole goddamn time he never let go of that burger.”

“Down the purple corridor,” the woman declared, “the scarlet ibis screaming ran.”

“You know what Phelan says? He says how come you didn’t drop him?”

Holliwell’s eyes met those of Mr. Heath.

“Twixt, wasn’t it?” Heath asked. “I remember that wall very well. See anything marvelous?”

“There was something down there. I don’t know what.”

“Stew had holes in his shoes,” Buddy told his dining companion. “He wore rubbers every day. Fucking Clyde Hotel.”

“And Phelan passed away?”

“Did he ever,” Buddy said.

“Did you find it frightening?” Heath asked Holliwell.

“Oh,” Holliwell said, “I suppose. I gather it’s a sinister place.”

“It’s never been my idea of a sinister place,” Heath said.

“Right after Phelan got it,” the man behind Holliwell said, “Stew’s wig snapped. He went funny.”

“Ha,” the woman said, “I heard. I know what it was.”

“No, Olga,” the man said. He lowered his voice. “No, you don’t.”

The officers at the bar were much quieter now, drunk almost to silence. They neglected to play the jukebox. At one end of the dining hall, a waiter was counting out white candles from a stack on a table before him.

“We were still in the Clyde. Stew was chicken-hawking. All these kids, in and out. He dealt. He had a string.”

“Those kids are lousy,” Olga said. “Detestable.”

“He left town. He did one.”

“He did?”

“He did one. He took this chicken out.”

“Curtains?”

“I’m telling you,” Buddy said. “He went to L.A. I saw him there. Hollywood he went to.”

“The Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” Olga said.

“He had chickens on skateboards. Dolls, a couple. Hustling.”

“Tray bizarre,” Olga said.

“Bizarre. He was on Percodans. He was into snuffing. Him and a friend.”

“Some friend.”

“They had clients took pix. They ran the roads, Stew and this friend. Chicken snatching. Kids up the bazoom, they grabbed them. The freeways, like. Off the street.”

“Gollywilkins,” Olga said.

The Japanese lanterns in the palm grove flickered, went out, then came on again. The officers at the bar were leaving. One of them staggered past the tables into the grove, belched loudly and began to piss in the frangipani. Over the palm crowns hung an infinity of stars.

“It’s the simple life down the wall at Twixt,” Mr. Heath told Holliwell. “Clean down there. One sees so far.”

“I was thinking it was the same up here.”

“Humanist fallacy,” Heath said. “Appearances deceive. There’s a philosophical difference.”

Holliwell was unable to answer. Mr. Heath had proved himself a philosopher and once again Holliwell caught the saffron taste of Vietnam. The green places of the world were swarming with strong-arm philosophers and armed prophets. It was nothing new.

Heath was looking over Holliwell’s shoulder, holding his expression of affable uninterest. Buddy had lowered his voice further, it trembled with rodential wariness.

“Chickens were disappearing. Stew had these pix. He sold them. Famous names, he says.”

“Intense.”

“Me, I’m shit scared. I know this is happening. Stew knows I know. His friend is a big pinhead.”

“Poor baby.”

“The cops are finding these children, Olga. Blipped. Bitty kids almost. Sans parts. It’s big in the paper.”

“The parents don’t care,” Olga said. “They sell them.”

“Snuff pix, chickens, that was Stew. He was obnoxious about it. He said it was big.”

“Did he say he liked it?”

“He never said. I figure he liked it, right? I was scared, Olga. I left town.”

“The kids ask for it sometimes,” Olga said. “They’re lousy at that age.”

“That’s what Stew says. I says: See you, Stew. I was scared.”

“This,” Olga said, “is why I won’t live in Los Angeles today.”

When they stood up, Heath gave them a friendly nod. Holliwell forced himself not to turn around.

“Do you know how I came to notice them?” Heath asked. His florid face held the polite amiable smile. “It was a way of laughing that bastard had. When I heard him laugh I knew what I had before me.”

“Not your ordinary run of tourist,” Holliwell offered.

“Yes … well, what’s ordinary today? There’s a very rubbishy sort of American loose on the world these days. If you don’t mind my saying so.”

“All kinds of people have money and leisure in the States. Surely you know that.”

“I thought the American of thirty years ago was a better type,” Mr. Heath said. “Not much savoir-faire but a sounder sort of chap.”

“I know who these people are,” Holliwell said. “I know what they come out of. I know more than I want to about them.”

“So their dinner conversation doesn’t shock you?”

“Does it shock you?”

“Not me, mate. I was there when we went into Belsen and quite honestly that didn’t shock me either.”

“What did it do for you?”

“It aroused my workmanlike instincts,” Mr. Heath said. “I have the same reaction to … them.”

“Olga and Buddy.”

“Yes. Olga. And Buddy. They make me think — ha, boyo. Time to go to work.”

“It is the same,” Holliwell insisted. “Up here and down the wall. It’s the same process.”

“That’s very tender-minded of you. Are you going to tell me all that lives is holy?”

“Not me,” Holliwell said. “But even Olga and Buddy have a kind of innocence, don’t they? And their friend in the story?”

“Holliwell,” Heath said. “Holliwell — God may forgive Olga and Buddy and company — he doesn’t have to share the world with them. You have children, I suppose?”

Holliwell confessed that he did.

“There’s someone murdering children in the villages here, did you know that? He’s killed five kids already.”

“I didn’t know. But that has nothing to do with these people.”

“Don’t you know your own side, man? I can assure you that I do. And when I hear that laugh — when I catch that pong in the air I feel like our good missionary friends, ready to go into my cure of souls. I believe that God gave the likes of Olga and Buddy and the late Rudolf Hoess into my especial keeping. But because this civilization is corrupt and cowardly, because it insists on being tyrannized by weak, bent neurotics who don’t know the fucking meaning of self-respect or mercy — I can’t do my job.”

His knuckles were white on the glass of gin. He blinked and sipped of the drink and smiled again. “So I feel frustrated, you see.”

The officers of the Guardia were leaving the bar. The last to go whistled unpleasantly for the shy black barmaid who had been nervously serving them; when she came up to him, he stuffed a wad of bills under the bodice of her bright tight dress. Then he turned and watched the two men at the table across the hall.

“I’m a copper, really,” Heath said.

“Why did you ask me if I was frightened down the wall?”

“Ah,” Heath said, “rude of me. Sorry.”

“I didn’t think it was rude. Just a little peculiar.”

“My manners are dreadful,” Mr. Heath said. “I expect I’ll have trouble in the resort business.”

At Serrano on the windward shore, the frayed ends of a norther whipped the winch chains against the stabilizers and set the mooring lines to groaning. The dock lights showed soiled whitecaps speckling the milky harbor. Pablo worked the fuel line with one of Naftali’s pier hands. Freddy Negus leaned against the bridge housing, smoking, staring into the darkness beyond the lights. He was waiting for Tino.

Naftali’s men worked quickly. The crates of weapons, greased in creosote, were loaded in the holds on a waterproof tarp; the tarpaulin’s ends were tucked down and the holds half filled with sixteen-pound blocks of ice. Within an hour of tying up, the Cloud was nearly ready to get under way again.

In other circumstances, Negus would have kept a close eye on the loading, but on this night he let the dockers go about their work unsupervised. His attention was fixed on the unlighted road that led to the pier. Across the bay, the lights of an oil refinery glowed like the towers of a phantom city. Slightly above them, on a cactus-covered hillside deep in darkness, were the dim, scattered lights of Serrano Town. A wall of barbed fencing and thorny acacia divided Naftali’s marina from the desert wilderness outside.

The dirt road that led to the pier was blocked by two Dodge trucks parked head to head across it; fifty yards beyond them was a steel hut lit by a single naked bulb over its doorway. A man with a holstered pistol stood under the light watching the loading operation. Negus cursed and went into the cockpit.

“I reckon he’s not coming,” Negus said.

Mrs. Callahan was stocking the galley shelves; Callahan himself was bent over his charts.

“And what does that mean?” Deedee Callahan asked.

“He never done this before,” Negus said.

Callahan said nothing.

“Listen,” Negus said, leaning on Callahan’s chart table. “Put it together, man. We’ve got this punk off the coast on our hands. Then Tino goes over and he doesn’t come back.”

“What are you suggesting?” Callahan asked. “That the kid did away with him?”

“By Christ, I wish I knew. But all of a sudden Tino’s gone and he doesn’t come back. Either he’s in something he can’t get out of — or else he thinks the deal’s queer and he’s pulling out.”

“Wouldn’t he have let you know?” Deedee asked.

“Hell, I’d have thought so. Maybe he wasn’t able.” Negus turned from the chart table and looked out through the windshield at the dark water. “It’s always number one first in this business. That’s the rule.”

Callahan kept his eyes on the chart, not answering.

When the fueling was done, Pablo took a brief turn at loading crates. He, too, was watching the dark road that led to the pier, thinking of the room in the Hollandia Hotel where the wind chime would be sounding faintly on the light breeze. From the pilothouse he heard Negus’ rasping petulant drawl. As he stepped onto the dock, he noticed that the armed man beside the shed had turned to look down the road, and that far in the distance along it was a flickering, wavering light. Pablo glanced over his shoulder at the pilothouse and jogged toward the shed.

“What’s up?” he asked the guard.

The guard looked at him, shrugged and looked down the road again.

As the light drew closer, Pablo saw that it was the night light of a bicycle; a tall islander wearing a mack’s violet platform shoes was pumping it along the sand-and-shell track. He pulled up beside the iron shed and wiped the sweat from his eyes. He and the man who stood by the shed spoke together in Papamiento. The rider held a manila envelope in his hand.

“Boy come up from town,” the guard told Pablo. “Got a letter for Mr. Negus.”

Pablo turned around and saw that the bulk of the iron shed stood between him and the Cloud’s bridge.

“I’ll take it,” he said.

“You Mistuh Negus?”

“That’s right,” Pablo said. “Just give it here.”

The man with the bicycle spoke again. He, too, wore a pistol on a web belt around his waist.

“This man say the boy come from the city. Twenny mile. Got to give him sometink.”

Pablo reached into his pocket for a handful of island bills. Gulden. He put a wad of them into the rider’s hand. He had no idea of how much they might amount to; they turned out to be enough.

While the guard and the armed rider stood by, Pablo walked to the light from the shed’s doorway and stood where he was still out of eye line from the shrimper’s deck. He took a note out of the manila bank envelope and read by the naked bulb.

“Deer Fredd,” said the note, “I muste tell you in haaste. Thees jung pog Pablo ben by Naftalie and that man by him morded. Sure bad you knowe it yeerself. You know brudeer I ben skipping wit you everie ways but thees onie gone be deadt ver us. I doont daar mov vom this place I een. Policia ben versoor. I tinkie say mouten to olde mann. Beterie saaf yoorselv. Die Shell tug standen byheer we get outen byher. Olde mann got to see hees oun way outen. We get to Curacao and thats de ende to it. Thees Pablo a ritt bastad.

“Ritten in Jesus Christ, Valentine.”

Pablo put the note in his pocket. The bicycle rider spoke again.

“Dey tell de boy wait for an answer.”

“No answer,” Pablo said. “It’s all right.” Pablo pursed his lips in outrage. “Damn lucky you got up here,” he told the blank-faced rider. “Really appreciate it.”

In the wheelhouse, Mr. Callahan was setting his Rolex to the time signals from Corn Island. Negus ran his hands through his thinning hair as though the steady double beats from the receiver were flaying his nerves.

“If Tino doesn’t show,” he told Callahan after a moment, “I’m not going.”

“We’ve just concluded that he isn’t going to show,” Callahan said. “Have we not?” Deedee Callahan looked in turns at Negus and at her husband, the shell of a pistachio nut clenched in her white teeth. “Stop it, Freddy,” Callahan said. “Don’t be an old woman.”

“You’re a damn fool,” Negus said. “That’s what you are.”

“Where is our sloe-eyed boy?” Callahan asked his wife. “Where’s he got to?”

Deedee put her head out to see.

“He’s up on the hatches,” she said. “Looks like they’re about done.”

“Go and stroke him,” Callahan said. “Keep him out of harm’s way. Freddy and I have to talk.”

He watched his wife smooth her hair as she went forward.

“If you don’t go, Freddy, I can’t go. And God knows I’ve set my heart on it.”

“You have to know when not to go. Callahan. I do if you don’t.”

“Freddy,” Callahan said, “you owe me one.”

“Not my bloody life, Jack. I don’t owe you that.”

Callahan rolled up the chart he had been studying and put it in a drawer beside the map table.

“I can’t go just me and Deedee and that kid from nowhere. Those bastards on the coast — they’ll take the weapons and then they’ll board and sink us. I need at least one man I can trust.”

“Don’t go.”

“My dear man, I have to go. I must. I bet the ranch on this run.”

Negus looked away from him.

“Remember what happened to Otis in Grenada, Freddy? Him shorthanded and his boat full of M-1’s?”

“He made it to St. Eustatius,” Negus said absently. “They’re good people there.”

“Now here we are,” Callahan said. “We’ve paid and we’ve loaded cargo. We can’t quit now. I can’t.”

“I can,” Negus said. “Tino did.”

Callahan closed his eyes, rested an elbow on the chart table and put his hand over his eyes.

“Listen to me, Freddy. We won’t have money on board until we deliver. Pablo wants to do us, it’s the money he’s after. We can keep him in line until then.”

“Maybe. What about then?”

“Then,” Callahan said, “kill him. In fact he’s yours for the whole run. If you seriously feel he’s more trouble than he’s worth, deep-six him. I’ll leave it to your discretion.”

Negus was silent for a while. Callahan turned in his seat to read the tide tables.

“No chance of paying him off now and turning him loose?”

“No chance,” Callahan said without looking up.

Negus leaned in the hatchway, his teeth set in a rictus of unease.

“Shit, if it’s up to me I’ll put him over as soon as we clear the reef.”

“No, you won’t, chum. You’ll be patient. When the balloon goes up you may learn to love him.”

“When Deedee Callahan came back, Negus turned on her in surprise.

“Where’s the kid?”

“He’s right where he was,” she said. “What’s happening, gentlemen? Are we setting forth or not? Because this vessel’s all loaded and the dock boys are wondering what we think we’re doing.”

“Take her out, Freddy,” Callahan said.

Negus put his fishing cap on, went out on deck and shouted at Pablo to let go the mooring lines.

Callahan took the whiskey down from a pantry shelf and poured himself a shot. “And how’s our young man?” he asked.

“He’s in some kind of sulk. You ever see a speed freak trying really hard not to talk? That’s how he is.”

“In the words of a great Irish wit,” Callahan said, “it’s not enough to opt for silence. You have to consider the kind of silence.”

“Ah,” Deedee said, “that’s very good. But you know something, Jack baby, I don’t like this too well.”

“You could have fooled me.”

“He is bad news. He is, he is.”

“Then we’ll kill him,” Callahan said. “Stay close to him. We’ll want to know what’s on his mind.”

“He’s not dumb. Remember that.”

“Isn’t he?”

“Not at all. He’s pretty fucking clever.”

“Too bad,” Callahan said.

“So this time it’s me who gets to drink if I’m supposed to stay close to him. And it’s you that stays sober. Because he’s not dumb and you better be on top of things.”

“You’re right, of course.”

“Damn straight,” Deedee said. “Some fun, hey, boss?”

“That’s what we’re here for,” Callahan said.

All night they steamed with the stabilizers down, rolling almost dangerously before a dying northeast swell. At dawn a roseate raft of clouds was massed over a solitary mountain to southward. Clouds there seemed to slip away reluctantly on the wind and were replaced by others that, singly or in packs, came over the flat far horizon and made straight for the veined slopes that were brightening to green. It was San Ignacio, once English, then Colombian and Panamanian by turns, now its own, or anyone’s, island.

Pablo had settled in the lee of the after hatch; sleeping in short fits, sliding into undersea dreams, awakening to the stars. Spray had started him once and he had lifted his head to see white water racing under the rails and felt the vessel’s boards tremble from the power of the engines and a steady slap of the bow against the sea ahead. They had been making a speed which he could not calculate but a speed of which no shrimper on earth was capable. When she settled down to her accustomed fifteen knots he had gone to sleep again.

The rumble of the Lister engine raising the stabilizers woke him to morning. He backed off to the rail and turning, saw in the distance a white reef line and green hills fading into cloud. The deep black valleys among the hills were inlaid with rainbows.

“That’s Tecan,” Deedee told him.

And he recalled that she had been around all through the night, smart-talking and boozing, coming on. He had paid her no mind. She was lying across the hatch cover now, in jeans and no shirt at all, leaning her chin on her hands. Pablo felt for the diamond in his shirt pocket and found it over his heart.

He saw Freddy Negus come out of the wheelhouse and engage the windlass engine. They were settling down for the day. Negus never looked in his direction; he felt that the man was trying not to see him.

“So,” Deedee Callahan asked him, “you believe in the invisible world?”

It was just smart talk, but the words troubled him. He turned over the leeward rail to piss.

“I don’t know what you mean,” he said.

“You don’t sleep much, do you?”

“I don’t feel the need of it much.”

“In the Navy they say, ‘All time not spent in sleep is wasted.’ Don’t they say that in the Coast Guard?”

“Yeah,” he said. “They do.”

He saw that in the smooth flesh of her shoulder there was a miniature tattoo, the links of a chain. It was tiny and elegant, a beauty. She saw him looking at it.

“Chain of Cashel,” she told him. “It stands for eternity. On and on and on and on and you don’t know where she starts from and you don’t know whither she goes. So you string along.”

She was smoking a reefer. It seemed to him that she had been smoking through the night; he had been smelling it in his dreams.

She rolled over and he looked quickly at her breasts; they were small and round, young, a paler tan then her shoulders.

“This is Praisegod Reef,” she said.

Looking over the side, he saw no reef; the water under the boards looked as deep and blue as the expanse around them. He turned to look at the coast again, wondering if it could be the same coast they left three days before.

“I spent so many mornings here,” she said, offering him the joint. He shook his head. “So many mornings I wonder how many. Mornings.”

“On this thing?” Pablo asked.

It seemed to take her a moment to realize that he meant the boat.

“Hell, no.” She was looking toward the coast with a melancholy vacant smile. “On the real Cloud. The real article.”

“What was that?”

Deedee raised the joint to her lips and drew from it. “That was,” she said slowly, “that was a schooner, boy. Seventy-footer, two masts. She was built in Halifax, she was a Lipton Cup racer and you could smell her teak before you saw her coming. That was the real Cloud.”

“Where’s she at now?”

Deedee shrugged, pouted her lips and opened them with a little groan.

“She’s in times past. Sailing along in past perfect.”

Pablo snickered at her. He told her she was stoned.

“I been staying awake on this dope,” she said. “It’s good for that.”

“How come you been staying awake?”

“How come you have?” she asked. She got no answer from him.

“The We Never Sleep Shrimp and Shit Corp., right? Eternal vigilance is the price of parsley.”

Pablo was watching the anchor chain grow taut as they drifted to windward. The hook was fast on bottom.

“How come he put the hook over?” Pablo asked.

Deedee flipped the end of the jay overboard and rolled onto her stomach.

“Better ask him that, Pablo.”

In the cockpit, Negus maneuvered the dial on the Cloud’s VHF receiver; the cabin hummed with submarine static and faint Spanish voices. He and Callahan looked at each other and sat back to wait. Callahan glanced at his watch.

Quite shortly, what might well have been an American voice came in loud and clear.

“Waterbrothers, this is Marie Truman, you copy? Over.”

“Well, well,” Callahan said. “There he is now.” He picked up the mike.

“Marie Truman, Waterbrothers. Copy real well. What kind of night you have up there?”

“Waterbrothers, Marie Truman. Slow night. Scraping the rocks. We got us a sawfish bill. Over.”

Callahan grinned at Negus.

“Marie Truman, Waterbrothers. Don’t throw that away, hear? It’s worth forty bucks on the beach. Over.”

“Waterbrothers, Marie Truman. We’ll see you-all up to Gracias a Dios tomorrow. Have a nice day. Over.”

“Marie Truman,” Callahan said, “this is Waterbrothers. You have a good one too. Out.”

“Isn’t he a darling?” he asked Negus. “He’s playing he’s a Texas boat. And he’s got what we want and we have what he wants.”

“We still got all day,” Negus said.

“If we have him on VHF he’s within seventy miles of here.” Callahan went to the chart table and brushed a worn copy of Bow-ditch from on top of his coastal charts. “By his coordinates he’s coming out from a place called French Harbor. Coming out over a reef.” He took a pair of reading glasses from the breast pocket of his tennis shirt and bent to the chart. “There’s supposed to be a church tower there. Anyhow it’s just a hair down from Puerto Alvarado and they have all kinds of lights. So we’ll run past him around dusk. See what we got to work with and take a sight bearing.”

“You get the weather?”

“Beautiful weather, Freddy. Fair. Light northerly. And no moon until after midnight.”

“That guy speaks gringo awful good,” Negus said. “God help us if that’s the Guardia we’re talking to. You know,” he said, “they got a lot of Yankee know-how behind them.”

“Ah, Fred,” Callahan sighed, “if they had him they’d want me. And here I am right on their front porch.”

“Maybe they got you and they want him.”

“Then how would they have his codes? Use your head for Christ’s sake.”

“Negus went on deck and swept the coastward horizon with his binoculars.

“Nothing happening,” he told Callahan when he came in. He set the glasses down in their box beside the windshield.

“The thing is, Fred,” Callahan told him, “you do a thing or you don’t. Now we are doing this thing, so let’s carry on and do it without bitching all the time.”

“I was thinking,” Negus said. “Our people could be just a nice bunch of good patriotic Spanish boys. Probably just pay up and take their hardware. Probably wouldn’t give us trouble at all.”

“Then we could get rid of Pablo right now, couldn’t we?”

“That’s right,” Negus said.

“But it’s more likely they’re a bunch of fucked-up ratones. You don’t get a good class of Spanish boy on this coast anymore. Not since the cocaine boom.”

Negus put his head out of the cabin hatch and looked aft at Pablo, who was propped against the lazaret with his hat over his eyes.

“Goddamn that guy,” he said.

She was driving in from Alvarado with two ten-pound sacks of beans and a few kilos of fruit when she saw Campos in the road before her. His jeep was parked so that it blocked passage to any other vehicle and he stood in front of it, languidly waving her down, his Foster-Grants ablaze in the afternoon sun. Although she had firmly made up her mind not to be afraid of Campos, the positioning of his jeep troubled her. Someone would have to back off — a minor matter on the face of it but a confrontation, charged with suggestions of authority, confidence and guilt. She stopped her own jeep in the middle of the road and stayed behind the wheel.

Lieutenant Campos came forward and looked her body up and down. His attitude was not in the least jocular or flirtatious.

“Sister Justin” was all he said. She tried to find his eyes behind the reflecting glass.

“Good afternoon, Lieutenant.”

He passed by her and examined the provisions in the rear seat.

“We understand you’re leaving our poor country.”

“Yes,” she said. “Before long.”

“You’ve been ordered to go.”

“By our provincial,” she said. “As soon as is convenient.”

The lieutenant leaned against her jeep and looked out to sea.

“Twenty pounds of beans. Going to take them back to Yanquilandia with you?”

“We still have people to feed.”

“Hippies,” Campos said.

Justin was at a loss for words. It was true that some of the long-haired foreign travelers had been turning up around the mission grounds and some of them looked like settling in. She was aware that Egan had taken to spending his evenings out back and that this visitation somehow involved him. As far as she knew — and she kept close accounts — the kids in the ruins never stole. They brought in their own provisions. But the business could not have come at a worse time; somehow she would have to put a stop to it. Since Godoy’s departure she had received no further orders.

“We didn’t ask for these people,” she said, “and we’re not feeding them. The ruins are a natural tourist attraction. We’re not responsible for our location.”

“Hippies aren’t tourists,” Campos told her. “They repel tourists.”

Justin had the sense that a great deal depended on her behavior at that moment. It was necessary for her to seem confident and also necessary for her to determine what Lieutenant Campos had on his mind — never an easy enterprise. Justin had little knowledge of policemen in general but through Campos she had discovered that being crazy did not stand in the way of one’s being a good cop.

“So this doesn’t help the country as a mission should. But the contrary.”

What now, she thought, rational discourse? She had no idea how much he knew or suspected, except that she was somehow subversive. Was he simply upset further about hippies in his jurisdiction? Was this new apostolate of Egan’s a weakness that he was seizing on to hurry them out of Tecan? Or was it much more, a little cat-and-mouse before he brought the whole sorry structure down — the foco that might or might not be, her, Godoy — with his simian Guardia fist?

By God, she thought, if he knows what I’m up to he knows more than I do.

“If you wish,” she said, “we’ll advise them to move along. On your recommendation.”

“They’re murdering children,” he said. “Six children have died.”

Justin let go the wheel, which she had held to like a steersman throughout the encounter, and stared at the lieutenant in horror.

“No!” was all that she could manage. Her combatant’s poise deserted her.

Campos smiled. “Yes. Murdered. Six.”

“These killings,” Justin said, “these killings … they began months ago. If we had the slightest evidence or suspicion … the slightest … we’d report it.”

“How do I know that?” Campos asked.

Justin fought to keep her temper in bounds.

“We have all been horrified by these murders, Lieutenant.” Her fury grew, but as it did she came to realize that something more frightening and more fatal than simple harassment was going on. “We have all been puzzled by the Guardia’s lack of success in solving them. You can be sure we’ll help in any way we can.”

“You’re puzzled by the Guardia’s lack of success?”

“Disappointed.”

“Ah,” said Campos as though soothed. “You know,” he said, “it’s funny. We both have uniforms to wear. I wear mine. But you — never. Are you still a nun?”

“You can consult the church authorities and the Interior Ministry in regard to that. I’m a nun. This is not the capital and we’re permitted to dress for work.”

“Only a confusion of traditions, then?”

“I suppose,” she said.

“Then you may be sure,” Campos said, “that in this jurisdiction you’ll be treated as what you are.”

She made herself smile. Whence came the smile and how she had mustered it she had no idea. It pleased her then to smile at him.

“We thank you, Lieutenant.”

He stood about for a moment whistling tunelessly through his teeth.

“Now, Sister, have the goodness to back up your vehicle and let me pass.”

She put the jeep in reverse and backed into soft sand hard by the water’s edge. For a moment, the wheels spun; she cursed softly. The rear wheels spun free of the slough.

“Excuse me, Sister,” Campos asked, “did you speak?” He had backed his own jeep onto higher ground and was straightening out to pass.

“No, I didn’t,” she said.

He threw his jeep into gear and gunned the engine briefly.

“Nuns don’t curse,” he shouted at her. “Not at me.”

And then he was off at his customary speed.

“Que le vaya bien,” she said to herself as she eased back onto the track. Driving the rest of the way, she kept her attention and her mind on the road. She was very frightened and she wanted nothing more than to go back to her quarters, close the shutters and stretch out in the cool darkness. Things would come clearer to her there.

Back at the mission, she showered and lay down; for a short time, under the weight of her fear and exhaustion, she actually slept. Awaking from a confusion of dreams, she found herself confronted with a simple certainty. The notion that the Devotionist mission at French Harbor could be used as a tactical location in the coming struggle represented a coincidence of fond fantasies. It had been compounded of her own egoism and the Tecanecans’ naïve confidence in the protection afforded by the American flag.

If the Movement was dismissive of Campos as a venal thug, then they had not understood his obsessiveness. To them, presumably, he was simply a sly and brutal timeserver — the ideal enemy. She herself was convinced that there was more to him than that; he had a spider’s-web aura of schizoid insights around him, an odor of unclean appetites that seemed to concentrate on her. He was always asking Charlie Egan about her, asking the merchants, the campesinos. It was beyond suspiciousness. In a peculiar way, he seemed more intelligent than a social agent of the Guardia should be; it was as if he had succeeded in becoming everything that the other swaggering sneering bastards of his organization pretended to be. Then, if he was as unsoundly intelligent as she suspected, he would be as attached to the idea of a foco on the coast as the rebels were. He would have planted the idea on his superiors in the capital and he would, of course, have connected it with the straggling Devotionists. It would be, in a sense, his project too. Captain Campos. General Campos.

The whole thing suggested internal betrayal as well. Tecan was full of police informers; they would have penetrated the Movement, perhaps to its highest level. A fiasco that dissipated the Republic’s revolutionary energy would buy the government ten years. Or longer.

Can it be, she wondered, that I have come to understand this country? Impossible, she decided. It was only one of her brief attacks of common sense. A periodic seizure.

She dressed and had a drink of cold well water. She would get them a message immediately. That the scrutiny was more than routine, that something was up that would mean disaster and there would have to be an alternative plan. She had to presume that the Tecanecan Movement had developed the concept of alternative plans.

Sensible or not, the thought of abandoning her part in Tecan’s liberation was bitter to Justin. They needed so much, she thought, and they had asked her for so little. To keep the dock lights on — there was nothing very suspect in that — many of the fishermen went out at night with torches, sometimes they asked her or Egan to run the generator late and keep the dock lights lit to guide their passage in. To be available for the wounded — she would have done that unrequested. But the obscene attentions of Campos made everything a hazard. The Guardia would be observant of late-burning lights. Wounded men who came to the dispensary would be drawn into a trap. Egan, who was her charge now, would not survive it all.

Decision then — hard but necessary. There were other battles and she had a life before her to fight them. She went into the office beside the kitchen where the small radio set was and sat down in front of it. She would have to call Sister Mary Joseph for help in closing, get a telegraph to the provincial, notify the consulate and the Ministry of the Interior.

She began to draft the appropriate messages in longhand, but after a moment she set her pencil down.

Campos. She had once had an erotic dream about him. His presence now bestrode her thoughts and as she thought of him a notion struck her that stayed and as it stayed, ripened into certainty. It was he who was killing the children! The notion was utterly without foundation but she felt sure of it. How could they have told her not to be afraid of him? If they had planned to kill him — she had surmised so much as long ago as her dinner conversation with Godoy but had put the idea out of her head from weak scruples — why had they not done so before? Now, from a tactical standpoint, it was too late. Or was it? Could there be some element of blackmail in the thing, could the Movement be somehow aware of his killings and consider him thus neutralized? Impossible, she thought, they were not cynical, not that way. But someone would have to do for Campos; if not, he would go on killing. Everyone, every mother and child on the coast was in his hands, living and dying through his sufferances. The torture and murder of children was something more important than even the establishment of revolution, surely. But was it not all of a piece — Campos on the coast, the President in his mortar-proof palace in the capital, the American interests that kept everything in place?

She stared down at the draft paper before her and leaned her forehead on her hands.

From outside, from the small plantain grove through which the creekside trail led inland, she heard voices. She went to the window, opened the shutter and saw the first groups of young foreigners heading for the stelae. They were mainly in couples, mainly fair, sunburned and bleached, in cutaways or sailcloth pants, in halters or bare-chested. They seemed to her incredibly innocent, vacant. But the oldest of them could not be many years younger than she herself. They passed like ghosts. None of them saw her.

Out on the veranda, Father Egan was still asleep on the hammock. His gut was swollen with sickness but his face was thinning, hollows beginning to show under his eyes and cheekbones. He had been hale and portly when Justin arrived in Tecan; now she saw for the first time his long chin and fine features. His face was a gray replica of what it might have been in his youth, the death mask of a handsome delicate young priest who could quicken a pious lady’s pulse with the resonance of First Corinthians.

She did not want to bury him here, she thought, under a twisted-wire cross. There was a stone vault for him under the lime trees in California, where he could sleep with all those other shadows who had worn down their steps on carpeted altars by candlelight. Broken their hearts, minds, sex and entrails in the imperfect service of their Holy One, their Hanged Man.

He woke and saw her looking down at him.

“What’s wrong, dear?” He sat up on the hammock and his belly hung down over his belt, almost to the hammock’s edge.

“You’ve got more of them coming,” she said.

He looked at her blankly.

“Your parish,” she said, “is assembling.”

Egan yawned. “You’re disapproving of me again.”

“Well, they have to go, that’s all. One of us has to tell them to move on. I’m trying to get the two of us out of here with a minimum of trouble and Campos is making a stink over them.”

“He was here today,” Egan said. “He never mentioned them. He asked about you.”

Justin shivered. “Asked what?”

“Vague questions — you know how he is. He asked me man to man if I thought you were a virgin. Man to man, he said. Then he asked me if you had ever been in California or in Paris.” He stood up and brushed the hair from his forehead. “It made me think.”

“And what,” she asked, “did it make you think?”

The priest went past her into his own quarters and began to pump up water for his shower. He spoke to her through the open door.

“About humanness. He asked me these strange questions and I began to wonder if he was human. Then I began to wonder if I was. And you, dear, whether you were. Then I thought: What do we mean by it? Humanness. Does it mean being real and in the world and not an animal? Is it running thin, so to speak? Whatever it is — is there less of it? And is that good or bad?”

The pumping stopped and she heard him move the bottle from the shower stall and turn the water on.

“Then I ran out of categories, so to speak. Meanings just faded. I thought — a word might as well be a little plant. I thought, well, silence will do. Not thinking will do. But I’m incapable of silence or not thinking.”

“You’re still capable of taking a shower, Charlie,” she said. “There’s merit in that.” He would not have heard her for the running water.

She stood for a moment looking at the blank message sheet by the transmitter and wandered into the kitchen. Immediately she saw that the stores had been broken into. The last sack of beans, which had been half full, was missing. The larder’s only padlock had been broken and half of the frozen fish was gone. And the biscuit tin.

“The useless sons of bitches,” she said aloud. On the next thought, she hurried to the dispensary; sure enough — a jar of codeine tablets gone, half of the Percodan. Her store of morphine was still intact, they had failed to find it.

In a rage she ran out to the edge of the veranda to confront Egan’s troops, shouting as she went.

“We have real pain here, you people! People suffer here, they get hurt!”

Three young men in turned-down white hats looked up at her as though she were mad, startled from their serenity. A couple behind them actually smiled at her.

“This is a medical dispensary!” she was shouting. “Our medication is not for you fucking rich kids to get high on!” At the height of her outrage, she found herself eye to eye with the peculiar young Mennonite she had been seeing around the place.

The strange young man only stared at her with his doll’s face. His eyes were blue and very bright. She could have sworn in that moment that he had painted cheeks. Justin’s angry words stuck in her throat. She held to the railing of the porch, turned her head away and then backed off. Out of his sight.

As she went back inside, his image stayed clear in her mind’s eye. And with it came a verse which she had always loved but which now filled her with revulsion.

“Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,

Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not …”

She felt overthrown. Why was there so much suffering? How was it she could never do anything? Tecan. It was an evil place. Accursed.

In his quarters Egan had finished with his wash and was dressing. Justin walked in on him, took a swig of Flor de Cana and sat down in his desk chair.

“I’m going crazy, Charlie. Like you. I think we’ll have to send up a rocket.”

Egan tucked the tails of a clean white shirt under his belt.

“You’re just afraid, dear. I know all about that, I can assure you. Remember how afraid I was?”

“I don’t scare easy, do I, Charles?”

“You certainly don’t.”

“What am I scared of?”

The priest went to the mirror and began combing his hair.

“There’s a great deal to be scared of here. I suppose mainly you’re scared of Campos. He’s after you, you know.”

Justin looked at him in the mirror. “Charles,” she said, “is he killing those children?”

Egan did not answer her. He finished combing and took a net shopping bag from beneath his bed in which there was a Bible. Then he took the rum from where Justin had laid it and put it in the bag.

She followed him out into the office.

“Is Campos killing those children, Charles?”

“I thought,” Egan said, “you suspected me of it.”

“No,” she said. “Campos.”

“Well, it isn’t me,” he said. “You’re right about that. I don’t kill. I can’t imagine any circumstances in which I’d kill anyone ever.”

She watched him look off toward the hillside until she thought he had forgotten where he was.

“I thought it was Campos,” he said after a while. “I was fairly sure it was. But it’s not.”

She felt weak, almost unable to breathe.

“Then I know who it is,” she said. “It’s that …”

“It’s the Mennonite kid,” Egan said. “He came in over the border from Nicaragua. The police are looking for him there. Grew up on one of their farmsteads down there and lost his mind. Religious. Hears voices.”

“You’re hiding him.”

“That’s about it.”

She walked up to him and seized him by the arm, trying to keep calm.

“You can’t do that, you fool! He’s killing little children.” She was crying unawares, tears spilled down her cheeks, gathering at her chin.

“Not since he came to me. I’m talking him down. When I give him the pills Mary Joe gave me he doesn’t hear the voices. And I’m going to replace his voices with mine.”

Justin wiped her face with a handkerchief. “I was sure it was Campos.”

“I was too,” Egan said. “But no.”

“What fools we are,” Justin said. “This place just beat the shit out of us.”

“They all will,” Egan said. “All of ’em. Every time.”

“The thing about that boy,” she said, “he doesn’t look real to me. He doesn’t look human.”

“You’re getting the idea now, aren’t you? Well, he’s as real as it gets, Justin. Here or anywhere else.”

“All right,” she said. “All right.” She began to pace up and down. Egan sat down at the desk beside the transmitter and looked at the matted floor.

“We’re getting out in a hurry,” Justin said. “While we do, we’ll get that kid locked up and sent back to Nicaragua. I mean it’s tough, but it’s got to be done. Maybe the Mennonites can get him proper care.”

One was not a child, she thought. One was not a hysteric, one was trained to deal with the world as it came. There were three things — to see that the Movement did not ruin itself trying to use the mission, to get the insane young person out of circulation, to get herself and Egan back to the States.

I’m not going to be afraid, she told herself. I’m going to do what I have to and if I louse it up I’ll carry the weight. She was, she thought, not just anybody.

“There’s a message for you,” Egan told her. “Your friend Laura brought it. It seems she’s a Latinist.”

“I see,” Justin said evenly. “And where is it, please?”

She watched Egan go into his trouser pocket and bring forth a crumpled piece of paper which he carefully straightened out against his thigh. Steady, she told herself. She felt, for the moment, strangely calm.

The message was indeed in Latin, hand-printed on bonded stationery.

NOLI RESPONDERE NI NECESSE SIT. APPARA, ET LUMINES CUSTODI. NOLI TIME.

“No response unless necessary. Prepare and remember the lights. Don’t be afraid.”

Justin read it over several times, using every fraction of her strength to keep hold of the suspect calm she had achieved. The lights, of course, meant an incoming boat or plane. No problem there unless they were disposed to set down right at French Harbor. If that was their plan then everyone involved in the business would be killed outright, the President could proclaim a national holiday and Campos would get a medal. That was what was bound to happen, she thought, unless she reached them in time. They had to stay away — there could be no question of them using the dispensary. At the same time it seemed as though events had overtaken her and, unfortunately, Egan with her. Campos, as the priest had observed, was after her and she saw no point in letting him get her without a fight. With things so far along and gone, being of some use to the Movement was the only way she could accomplish anything more life-affirming in Tecan than to successfully run away from it. And she wanted to fight, wanted to desperately — in spite of her terror, perhaps because of it. It was just possible that she might have it both ways — fight and run. More folly perhaps, but her chances were not the best now either way and that was not entirely her doing. If she could get a message through that would both warn them away and arrange a quick meeting, they might have other work for her, worthwhile work. With things as they were, she would probably be told to drop out of it — then she could get Egan away and be free herself with a good conscience. And even warning them off would be a valuable service.

Hope, sweet and green, came to her in the midst of their ruin.

She shooed him away from the chair and with one of his dictionaries sat down to compose her own Latin message.

UTI HOC LOCO NON POSSE EST IN CONSILIO. CONGREDI DEBEMUS. GRAVIS EST.

“This place should not be used in the plan. Necessary to meet. Urgent.”

She wrote it out on the sheet on which she had been composing the radio message to Sister Mary Joe. She would hold the radio messages a day, until after the meeting. If there could be one. The light in which she wrote had the red cast of sunset. She would have to keep the dock lights on, all the same.

“I wish I could pray,” she said to Egan. “How I wish I could.”

“There’s really no need,” he told her. “Everything’s all right. In spite of what seems.”

“Hell,” she said. “No wonder you’ve got yourself a following.”

The angle of the sun came aslant the peak of his baseball cap and lit him from another shallow sleep. Since Serrano he had been drifting into this dozing, a reptile suspension of awareness that was impervious to speed. He rose, sunburned and sweating, and went down to his quarters in the lazaret to draw a change of clothes.

From his pockets, he was able to salvage three whole Benzedrine tablets and one that was nearly crushed to powder. Immediately, he swallowed two of them. Perhaps the Callahans would have more. Yes, certainly they would. Pablo believed there was always more. He left the diamond where it was, in his soiled work shirt.

When he climbed on deck, the engines were turning over and the anchor chain winding itself around the windlass. He stood by the hatchway and watched the forepeak swing round until the mountainous coast and the declining sun lay westward. Then he went to the rail and leaned on it, looking at the weakening sunlight on the blue water, letting the bennie spin. There was a diamond in his pocket.

He blew a spot of crushed cigarette ash from the white tee shirt that he held rolled and folded in his handful of clean clothes. Things turned up if you kept your eyes on the moment. For a few minutes, with his Benzedrine and his clean clothes, Pablo was a happy man. But he was certainly in danger now; no question. It would be utter dumbness to dismiss this fact and of utter dumbness he felt himself incapable. He was all right. He was better than all right. The Coast Guard turkeys at Berry’s Point were so many peons, so many stooges compared to him. His was the life of adventure. As he walked into the wheelhouse he was thinking that what he would buy next was a tuxedo. A white one that you wore a black tie with. For hot countries.

Negus was at the helm in the cockpit, Mr. Callahan leaned on his chart table and looked toward the coast.

“Mind if I take a shower?” Pablo asked them.

Neither man glanced at him.

“We may be fishing tonight,” Callahan said. “You’d just get yourself all gamey again.”

“Fishin?” Pablo asked.

“Anyhow,” Negus said, “the lady’s using the shower. She might be a while.”

Pablo took himself out on deck again, the anticipated clean clothes he carried were just a useless embarrassment now. He was nearly enraged. It was a hell of a thing not to get a shower when you wanted one. It was a bring-down. It made you negative.

He threw the clothes in a heap on his bunk in the lazaret. If they were fishing tonight, he thought, it would be for show, to have shrimp to put on the ice in the holds where the guns were stored. He climbed the ladder and stood scratching at his scroungy frame, looking over the stern as the Cloud picked up power and headed along the coast. His elation fled.

There would be no tying up on this coast, he should have known that. In Serrano, they might have a setup, but here the guns were for people to use against their own government. The coast here would be Reef City all the way; any passage broad enough to be worth dock space would have a town and any town must have some type of cops. The draft of the Cloud, even with her modified hull, could not possibly be less than eight feet loaded — so they would have to lie offshore, beyond the reef, and wait for a small boat to come out to them. Then there would be no way for him to get ashore and when the job was done it would be only the four of them on a big ocean. And whoever was in the small boat would be no friend of Pablo’s.

Showerless and negative, his rush fading, he thought things over several times to make them come out his way. In this, he was not successful.

Not a word had they said about Tino. Not Word One. Back in St. Joost, Naftali’s body would have been discovered. He found it very difficult to believe that the Callahans would ever be prepared to pay him off and let him go. Yet, he thought, if they had wanted to do him they could have done so by now. They were waiting for the deal to go down. For the money.

Pablo began to discern the diagram of events toward which the life of adventure was propelling him. Either the Callahans and Negus would get their money and he, Pablo, die — or he must make it be the other way round. But he was not a killer; he could not conceive of killing them. Even if they forced him — out of their greediness, their paranoia, their natural two-timing way of doing — to defend himself, he was outnumbered and lost and alone. On the other hand, he found his own death even more difficult to conceive.

“Holy shit,” he said.

He tried again to make it come out all right in his mind — another coast somewhere, the diamond in place, cash in hand, a grudging admiration all around. Then a few months on the beach. Daiquiris, elegant flunkies, his tuxedo.

No help. He was boxed. In over his head — and the image of that dreadful game came to him on Naftali’s dying whispers, the game with his skull. He looked at the deep green coast and was frightened.

“I can’t cut it,” he told Naftali. “I’m up the well-known creek.”

Thinking about Naftali made him feel a little bit better because that had been a time when things had looked bad and he had made out. He had put his mind to it and scored.

So, he thought, there was something more than just human to it. There was the Power. He might be Aided — his mother had said that to him. Aided.

He prayed to Jesus and to his mother and to Naftali. They gave him to understand that in the coming days he would know.

Late in the day, Holliwell took the boat ride to Playa Tate and limped along the beach to a small dock that ran thirty feet or so from the sand to the first ridge of coral. He wore long cotton trousers, a windbreaker and a shapeless straw hat to defend himself from the force of the sun. Down a curve of the coast, he could see the beach where he had been spined and the mission building with its pier, its high veranda and wooden cross. In a way, he was spying.

At the other extremity of the Playa, the Cuban hardware dealer, brother to Mrs. Paz, lounged under a desiccated palm cabana with some men who had driven out from town. The men appeared to be local merchants like himself; the dusty late-model Ford in which they all had come was parked at the edge of the dirt road. The Cuban and his friends were drinking piña coladas, mixed in a blender that plugged into the car’s dashboard.

For over an hour, he sat and watched the sun play on the coral shallows, the darting silver shapes of shore-feeding barracuda. Again and again he turned in the direction of the mission beach. It was where he wanted to be. Even with the use of his injured leg, there was no way for him to simply present himself there with discretion. But he wanted to see her.

It was hard, in the sunshine of Playa Tate, to consider repression and retribution, sacrifice and justice. It was hard anywhere for Holliwell to consider such things except as abstract functions of behavior. They were things other people believed themselves to be motivated by, his objects of study, the people who also believed themselves to be at home in the world. Wars he understood, what people did in them and believed they did and how they explained it to themselves and to others. All at once he found himself wondering again about what he would say back home when they came around to ask him. He realized now that they would surely come around to ask him — he had been seen to go. He might tell them nothing, he thought. Or something that explained things or obscured explanation. Of one thing he was certain — he would find out what it was she believed herself to be about over there under the wooden cross. He would find out what it was like for her; that was all he cared about.

It was a little dangerous. The thought made him smile and quickened in him a subtle fine excitement. Like the feeling that had come to him over the black coral — but not so coarse as that. It had to do with the girl. There was something of seduction in it.

He lay back on the splintering boards, his hat beside him, arms across his face, until something, a bird’s shadow, the passing of a cloud, roused him. He sat up then and put on his hat and saw a solitary figure coming toward him along the water’s edge. When he saw that it was she, a rush struck him like cocaine in the blood and he was surprised. He had been hoping against hope that she would come that way.

Upright, his hands clutching the edges of the dock, he watched her draw closer. She was in white and he thought, at her expense, it was appropriate. Loose-fitting white work pants and a short-sleeved shirt. There was a red scarf over her hair.

When she was near the dock, he could see that her face was drawn and paie, her eyes harried and haunted and clouded with fatigue. She walked looking down at the sand.

As soon as he called to her, something like a voice inside him said: You are foolish. A middle-aged drunk, meddling. Foolish. By then he had already spoken. When she turned toward him her look was blank. He took his hat off.

“Oh, it’s you,” she said, and he nodded, lamely agreeing that it was.

“You shouldn’t be out in the sun. How’s your leg?”

“It’s healing,” he said. “I don’t much like sitting around the Paradise.”

“Don’t you like it there?”

“Not much. Do you know it?”

“Not up close,” she said.

“One thing I can’t do is get a fin on. I’m thrown on the cultural resources of the area.”

“That’s a shame,” she said, “because there aren’t any.”

He asked her if she could stop to talk; he was afraid of sounding breathless. He wanted her to sit beside him on the dock but she stood off, tensed for flight.

“How are things going?”

“Oh,” she said, “not too bad.”

“Packing?”

“Yes,” she said. “Right.”

“How long have you been here now?”

“About six years.” She seemed to have to think about it. “Six it would be.”

“You’ll be sorry to leave then. Or will you?”

She pursed her lips as if she were trying unsuccessfully to smile.

“Yes, I’ll be sorry. I’ll be sorry to leave this way. To leave things as they are, when I might have helped more.”

“When you talk about things and how they are do you mean the country? The conditions?” He watched her then for a hint of suspiciousness; he was reminding himself of the secret policemen who started conversations with suspicious foreigners about the state of their countries. One found them all over.

“It’s a poor country.”

“With tourism coming down,” Holliwell said, “things might improve.”

“For some people they’ll improve.”

“Not for the campesinos?”

“For a few of them. If they mind their manners and smile a lot.”

“You don’t read much in the papers about the politics here,” Holliwell said. “Not in the States.”

“I’m sure you don’t,” she said.

“You do read a few things though. Guerrilla stuff in the mountains. Makes you wonder who you ought to be for.”

“Good,” she said.

He laughed. “People like to tell you it’s the politics of bananas.”

“Sure,” she said, and her smile changed until it had a bitter turn to it. “It’s a banana republic. I’m sure that’s in the papers.”

“Strategic considerations aside,” Holliwell said, “bananas are worth fighting for. Any nutritionist can tell you that.”

“Really?”

Holliwell stood up, his eyes on hers. There was clear light there, when the film dissolved. The film of weariness or fear.

“If you don’t eat your bananas, you don’t get enough potassium. If you don’t get your potassium, you experience a sense of existential dread.”

“Now I’m a nurse,” she said, “and I never heard that.”

“You can look it up. One of the symptoms of potassium insufficiency is a sense of existential dread.”

“You’re the scientist. I’m supposed to believe what you tell me.”

“Certainly. And now you know why Tecan is vital to the United States.”

“The United States,” she told him, “may be in for a spell of existential dread.”

“What do you think will happen after you go?”

“There’ll be changes. I’m absolutely sure there will.”

“They say the more it changes here, the more it stays …”

She was shaking her head. “Changes,” she said.

“You mean … something like a socialist government?” It was a crude question and he was ashamed of it.

“The country is going to be overrun by its inhabitants. We may have to pay a little more for our potassium and our sense of cosmic certainty.”

“So,” Holliwell said, “we’re the bad guys again.”

“Look,” she told him, “they’re good people here. They suffer. Their kids die and they get pushed around and murdered. That’s all there is to the politics here — no more than that. Just people who need a break.”

“Will they get it?”

“If there’s any justice they will.”

“Is there any?”

“Yes,” she said. “Even here. Even Tecan isn’t beyond justice.”

“But it’s only a word. It’s just something in people’s heads.”

“That’s good enough,” she told him.

He had not been paying close attention to the things she said. There was no need for him to draw her out and sound her politics. Instead, he had been concentrating on the way she was, and in the time it took him to spin out his net of marginal civilities he had seen, or was persuaded he had seen, what fires were banked in her. Fires of the heart, of sensibility. There were plenty of engagés, he thought, plenty of them were honest and virtuous. She was different; she was heart, she was there, in there every minute feeling it. This kind of thing was not for him but he knew it when he saw it; he was not an anthropologist for nothing.

It’ll kill her, he thought, drive her crazy. Her eyes were already clouding with sorrow and loss. It was herself she was grieving and hoping for; for that reason she was the real thing. So he began to fall in love with her.

“Maybe it is good enough,” he said.

“Even here we have history. Things change. People want their rights.”

“Does history take care of people?”

“I wish I knew,” she said. “Maybe in the end. In the meantime people take care of themselves.”

“Yes,” Holliwell said.

Lady of sorrows, he thought, creature of marvel. It was enough for her that people took care of themselves. In the meantime.

I will show you, he thought, the war for us to die in, lady. Sully your kind suffering child’s eyes with it. Live burials beside slow rivers. A pile of ears for a pile of arms. The crisps of North Vietnamese drivers chained to their burned trucks.

He thought she was a unicorn to be speared, penned and adored. He was a drunk, middle-aged, sentimental. Foolish.

He wanted her white goodness, wanted a skin of it. He wanted to wash in it, to drink and drink and drink of it, salving the hangover thirst of his life, his war.

Why, he wondered, is she smiling at me? Then in a moment he thought he knew why, although he was sure that she did not. You did not have to be an anthropologist to know.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said.

He would never bring it to that. He was more honorable than that, an honest man. But he was sure now and he did not feel ashamed for thinking it. Exalted rather and moved at her innocence in that regard, who was so wise.

The smile had left her face; she looked at him in slight confusion, raising a weary hand to her face.

“I’m supposed to have dinner,” Holliwell said, smiling. “I’m supposed to see the ruins.”

“Oh, my gosh,” she said. “I forgot.”

“Is it all right?”

She stammered, the hand touching her scarf.

“Not, not … for me. I mean I don’t think I can. But Father Egan will take you.”

“Good,” Holliwell said. “Well, I’ll see you anyway.”

“Yes,” she said. She had turned back in the direction from which she had come, she did not look at him again. “Take care. Take care of your leg.”

When she walked off he felt like crying. He stood up and walked the beach, hardly thinking of his leg. When he had been wandering around for a half hour, he found himself even with the ragged cabana where the Cuban and his friends were resting. It was their blender that attracted his eye. It was amazing how many people owned blenders in places like Tecan. Where there was electricity, even people with barely enough to eat seemed to have them. The Cuban was waving to him, motioning him over.

The man’s name, it turned out, was Miguel Soyer. He was tall and youthful with a square good-natured face, warm eyes under thick Celtic eyebrows. He did not much resemble his sister.

“You were diving with my brother-in-law, no?” Soyer asked as the three men with him watched politely from behind their dark glasses.

“Yes, indeed,” Holliwell said. He had been introduced to the others but had immediately lost their names. All of them had the sinister air that respectable businessmen so often projected in the South. Holliwell was not disturbed by it; it was an incongruity of appearance only, the result of a difference between Anglo and Latin expectations and masculine style.

“Twixt,” Soyer said. “Beautiful.”

“It was a fine day’s diving.”

Soyer turned and looked in the direction of the mission.

“You’re a friend of Sister Justin?”

“Not really. I had a minor accident in front of the mission the other day and she took a sea urchin spine out of my knee. So we’re acquainted.”

“She’s a nurse,” Soyer said vaguely. “Now you’re her patient, eh?”

“Yes.”

Holliwell accepted a piña colada.

“A very dedicated woman,” Soyer said. “We admire her here.”

“She’s very nice, isn’t she?”

“Yes, very nice. Very American. Una tipica.”

“I suppose,” Holliwell said.

“I know North America well. Once I spoke English but I’m out of practice.”

Holliwell was reassuring. It was not his impression that Mr. Soyer had difficulty with the language. The three men with him held their silence.

“I was in school at Washington,” Soyer said. “At Georgetown University. I was preparing for the foreign service of Cuba when the Communists took power.”

“Ah,” Holliwell said.

“America is so free,” Mr. Soyer said. “That’s what I liked. So many opportunities.”

“But you chose to settle here.”

“The style is better for me. I like the quiet life, I think.”

“How’s business?” Holliwell asked.

“It’s not bad,” Soyer said. He was still looking toward the mission. “We hear that Sister Justin is leaving.”

“That’s what she says.”

“Then it must be true, eh?”

“Gosh,” Holliwell said. “I guess so.”

“Do you think she is a true idealist?”

“I assume so,” Holliwell said. There was a silence. “Do you mean,” he asked, “as opposed to a false idealist?”

Soyer slapped his knee and laughed loudly and vacantly.

“I’m misusing the language,” he said. “Forgive me.”

“I’m intrigued,” Holliwell said. “I wonder about the relations between the missionaries and the community here. Are they good? Are they cordial?”

“Why not?” Soyer asked. Then he said: “Why ask me?”

“I wondered,” Holliwell said, “what you thought about it.”

“I think they’re more than agreeable,” Mr. Soyer said. “But I’m a sucker for Americans.”

Holliwell supposed his smile appropriate and kept it in place.

“This mission,” Soyer said, “Sister Justin’s — I don’t know what they do now there.”

“She was telling me they feel kind of redundant. That’s why they’re going, I guess.”

“Ourselves and you,” Mr. Soyer said, “I speak as though I’m of Tecan because it’s my home now — ourselves and you, we have a great deal in common. We have common enemies.”

“Very true,” Holliwell said.

“The greatest enemy,” Soyer said, “is the enemy inside America. Do you think so?”

“We’re all our own worst enemies, aren’t we?”

“I don’t mean that,” Soyer said. “Not exactly.”

“American politics is rather frenetic.” Holliwell hesitated. “Fucked up.”

“From maybe too much comfort. Everyone is comfortable.”

“Not everyone.”

“I see,” Mr. Soyer told him. “I understand your point of view.”

“I’m not very political.”

“Sister Justin?” Soyer asked. “Do you think she is political?”

“No, I don’t,” Holliwell said. “Not at all.”

He watched Soyer frown. The Cuban grunted and shook his head as though he had been given information of significance. Holliwell turned toward the ocean and saw with some relief that Sandy was bringing the Paradise boat around the outer reef.

“I don’t see Mr. and Mrs. Paz,” Holliwell said.

“Gone home,” Soyer told him. “Only this morning.”

“Thank you for the cold drink, Mr. Soyer.” He got to his feet and nodded to Soyer’s three friends. They nodded back.

“Staying long?” Soyer asked him.

“No, I don’t think so. I only wanted a little rest after my labors.”

“Listen, Holliwell — don’t take the boat back. Come have a drink with us and we’ll take you.”

Holliwell explained that his foot was hurting and that he had writing to do.

“Ah,” said one of Mr. Soyer’s hitherto silent friends. “Writing.”

In fact, Holliwell was in some pain. He felt dizzy and he was thinking for the first time in a while about the telephone calls in Santiago de Compostela.

On the run back, Sandy spoke to him above the engine.

“How you leg now, mon?”

“Better,” he shouted. “I still can’t put a fin on.”

Sandy grinned. “Keep you outena trouble.”

“I think it’s too late for that,” Holliwell said.

With the sun below the green saw-toothed ridges of the coast, darkness gathered quickly. Venus was the evening star. She hung low over the eastern horizon and the unbroken sea beneath her transit was dulled to the color of lead. The wind rose in that quarter, setting a roll beneath the Cloud’s counterfeit boards but nowhere breaking the skin of the sea’s expanse. Across the sky, Deneb and Vega twinkled beyond a calligrapher’s stroke of purple nimbus.

Freddy Negus, holding to the wheel, had pulled the night shade down behind the cockpit. Callahan, a drink in one hand, stood beside the wheelhouse hatch running his infrared binoculars along the coastline.

“How’s traffic?” Negus asked him. “I’m getting blips on my scope here.”

“Let’s light it up,” Callahan said.

Negus threw a switch that lit the running lights in the stabilizer mast and the work areas around the hatches. Callahan went forward to light a spot on the forepeak.

“We’re gonna be out in front of Port Alvarado presently, boss,” Negus said.

Callahan refilled his glass and bent to inspect the digits on the Raytheon and leaned over his chart table. He turned the Loran signal up so that it was audible and timed the tones on his watch.

“We’re getting there, Freddy. What’s your bottom like?”

“Bottom is marbles,” Negus said. “A couple of yards to starboard and we’d be sitting on them.”

Callahan hung in the hatchway, looking coastward.

“I got Puerto Alvarado light,” he told Negus. “I see the bastard. If you could get me a mite more speed, Freddy, I would love it. So we have a tiny bit of daylight when we drop the buoy.”

“I can get you twelve knots on just the main engine. That’s what you got.”

“Puerto Alvarado,” Callahan said, pronouncing the city’s name in careful Spanish. “I see the banana piers and I believe I see the national streetlight.”

“Some hole that place is,” Negus said. “Had to get some of my boys out of jail there once. No trouble either. Being a British subject meant something in those days.”

Callahan studied the harbor.

“They planted a few light buoys in these roads since I was here last,” he said. He glanced at the Raytheon scope. “Lot of boats around without lights.”

“That’s how it is out here,” Negus said. “Nothing faster than ten knots. Nothing coming our way.”

Callahan checked the Loran digits and his charts.

“Very shortly we’ll get on the CB. Right around the point.”

Callahan had taken the rum bottle from the galley shelf and was pouring himself another drink, easing the neck of the bottle against the glass so that Negus would not hear him, when Negus stood up in his chair and turned around.

“Look at this, Jack. I got a fucker on here bearing three-forty. He’s coming at us and he’s coming fast.”

Callahan put his drink in the galley rack, ran into the lounge to slam his wife’s door twice and ran out on deck with the glasses.

“I don’t see him,” Callahan said. “He’s not lit.”

“Bugger fucking all,” Negus said.

Deedee Callahan was standing beside her husband in the next moment, straining to see into the near darkness.

“Engage the diesels, lover,” he told her. “Do it faster than anything.”

She ran around to the engine space and had opened the metal hatch when she heard her husband laugh.

“He just lit up,” Callahan called to them. “He’s a dragger.”

Negus looked out the windshield at the fresh lights.

“He must have been making thirty. You sure he’s a dragger?”

“He’s the Rastafarian Navy,” Callahan said, watching through the glasses. “He’s going right into Alvarado.”

Deedee came forward wiping sweat from her forehead.

“Is there an explanation for him?” she asked. “Or is he just stoned like us?”

“Probably be his lights don’t work very well,” Negus said. “He wants to get in before United Fruit runs him over. And he’s souped up for running ganja.”

“Don’t want no more,” Deedee Callahan sang, “midnight rambles no more. Que vida.”

“Where’s that fucking Pablo?” Negus asked.

“Sacked out. Leave him.” He bent over the Raytheon and marked his Loran chart. “O.K.,” he told them, “Freddy’s going to find me a hole in the wall.”

As they looked on, Negus turned the Cloud’s head toward the reef and cut speed. Everyone watched the Fathometer.

“Gotta be it,” Negus said after a minute. “Ninety and ninety and sloping up.”

“Engine stop,” Callahan said. “And drop the hook so we don’t drift on the marbles.”

Deedee was on deck peering into the darkness.

“You don’t get more than a flash glow from Alvarado light,” she said. “It’s around that point.”

Callahan was at his chart table with a piece of chart paper before him.

“Let me get a quick line of sight here,” he said.

“There’s an aviation beacon on that mountain,” she said, shielding her eyes from the glow of the deck lights. “It’s on your Loran chart.”

“I got it,” he said. He marked the coordinates from the Raytheon on his line-of-sight chart and x’d in the aviation beacon. They were waiting for the boat to swing full around on its chain.

“Two dock lights at sixty degrees off the beacon. Over them there’s a building with a cross on it.”

“That’s fine if those dock lights are on all night,” Negus said. “But whoever they are must be using a generator because there’s no electricity out here.”

“They’ll be on,” Callahan said. “We were told they’d be on.”

He marked the dock lights on his handmade chart and put it under the Bowditch.

“Now,” he said, “Deedee, go turn that bozo to and get the marker buoy over. It’s time to talk to the customer.”

The CB was silent as Negus dialed in.

“José,” Negus said into the night, “you get those pumps for me?”

“Absolutely, Mr. Fry.” It was a different voice, but relaxed, easy with English.

“That’s just fine,” Negus said, and hung up the receiver. “Think he sees us?” he asked Callahan.

“No question about it,” Callahan said.

Deedee and Pablo came in slightly breathless. At Deedee Callahan’s call, Pablo had been huddled in the lazaret hatch close to Naftali’s pistol, looking at the Puerto Alvarado lights with longing and dread.

“Hi, kids,” Callahan said to his wife and to Pablo. “Now we’re going to open up the arms locker.”

Pablo watched Callahan unlock the gear locker in which his automatic was stowed. There were half a dozen other pistols beside it. Seeing his weapon, Pablo took a step toward it.

“Leave it where it is,” Negus snapped at him.

“No, Pablo,” Callahan said patiently. “We’re unlocking them, we’re not going to wave them at passing shipping.” He stepped through the galley and down into the paneled compartment and there, with another key from his key ring, opened what looked like a teak book chest between two lounge chairs. The chest had a small automatic rifle of foreign make and a number of shotguns. When he had unlocked the chest, he closed it again.

“It’s very frustrating,” Mr. Callahan explained, “to look for keys when you’re in a hurry. In the meantime, let’s everyone remember that we’re a few miles offshore with all our lights blazing like Christmas. So let’s preserve our workaday respectability and demeanor and leave this stuff where it is. Until we need it. Which of course we all hope we will not.”

“You’re so right,” Deedee said.

Callahan picked up the glass of rum he had been drinking. “Now,” Callahan said to Pablo, “you and Deedee are going shrimping.”

“I don’t follow you there,” Pablo said.

“Mrs. Callahan will explain.” He put his hand beside his wife’s ear; it was a caress of sorts. “And while you’re out on deck, Dee, put a watch cap over your hair, O.K.? So you’ll look like a gringo shrimper and not a Rhine maiden?”

She went into her quarters and came out with a black watch cap and a green down vest. She tucked her hair under the cap and winked at Pablo.

“Let’s go, Tex,” she said to Pablo. “Let’s go get the hatches clear.”

When they were on deck, Callahan sat down in the cockpit chair and drained his drink. He picked up the rough line-of-sight chart he had make and smiled at Negus.

“We’ll take her out on the Bonaire radio beacon. Right out on one-eighty. At eleven hundred we’ll have her back here along zero-zero-zero.”

“Aye, aye,” Negus said, and swung the bow toward the open sea.

“We’ll have the net over,” Callahan went on, looking at the Raytheon scope, “so you better keep the speed way down. Eight or nine knots, no more.”

“Hey, Jack, lay off the sauce, will you? We got a lot of time to kill and you’re like to get me started.”

Callahan made a placatory gesture with his slim small hand. They heard the stabilizer engine cough up and chain line being dragged across the deck.

“Damn Tino,” Negus said.

Deedee Callahan appeared in the galley in work gloves and white shrimper’s boots, the watch cap tucked down to her eyebrows. She took the rum bottle and a handful of joints down from the shelf.

“Hey, man,” she said, eyeing the level of the bottle, “I thought it was you staying sober tonight. I thought it was me could get snackered.”

“You may get as snackered as you see the need of,” Callahan told her.

Negus looked over his shouder.

“What are you gonna do, missus, have a party back there?”

“Why not?” she said. “We gotta head all those little nasty things. You know,” she told them, “I was once quite fond of shrimp.”

“Don’t bother heading them,” her husband said. “Just get it in there and make sure it’s all shrimp.”

Negus reached out from his chair and took the bottle from her.

“That’s my limit,” he announced when he had drunk. “First we work, then we can get fucked up. That’s the way you’re supposed to do it.”

“Are we using the tri-net?” Deedee asked.

“The hell with it.” Callahan stood up and went to the hatchway and looked out at the black ocean. With the net and stabilizer down, the Cloud had begun to roll at an angle not at all commensurate with the mild weather.

“What’s the Pablo situation?”

“He’s quiet,” she said. “He wants to know what he’s gonna do when we get back to the marker.”

“Well,” Callahan said thoughtfully, “tell him a little about it and make him feel important. But don’t let him get drunk and lose his splendid air of authority. Keep him otherwise occupied.”

“I’ll massage his cock while he heads shrimp, how’s that?”

They passed the bottle around again.

“Hey,” Deedee asked, “you sure you want me to tell him about the operation?”

Callahan looked aft to the stern, where Pablo was straightening out the folds in the dragnet.

“Hell, why not? I want him to feel he has a future with us.”

Negus laughed hoarsely.

“But watch him, Deedee. Watch him good. If he starts acting agitated like there’s too much on his mind, we want to know about it.”

“He always acts that way,” Deedee said. “So how will I know?”

“Intuit,” Callahan told her. “Intuit darkly, and get back with him. He shouldn’t be alone at all from this point.”

When she went out, Negus set the wheel to one-eight-zero and they settled back in their cockpit chairs. Negus lit his pipe.

“Jack, damnit,” he said after several minutes, “this here op … I wouldn’t give … well, I wouldn’t give you a Panamanian peso …”

“Do you have to?” Callahan asked, interrupting him. “Must you fucking say it again?”

Negus fell silent again. But only for a short time.

“That’s a damn fine woman, Jack. I hope you’re taking good care of her.”

“She takes care of me,” Callahan said. “She takes care of us all.”

In a clearing, three stelae stood in file, an even distance apart. Their bases were sunk in morning glory vines but some of the vines had been cut back to reveal the inscriptions and hieroglyphs.

The clearing had been part of a village plantation at different times; wax beans and wildly mutant gourds grew around the slight rise where the three standing stones were. It was bordered on three sides by tall ramon trees. A small stream, originating in the mountains, ran beside it toward the sea.

The place was an obsure joint property of the fruit company and the President’s family, adjoining the land donated to the mission. On certain maps it was marked as an archaeological site but — with the exception of the three stelae — it had been haphazardly denuded of its antiquities long before. A few adventurers hunted there still, at moderate risk. It was a forgotten place.

On the fourth side of the glade was what appeared to be a hill but was in fact a pyramid covered in jungle. It had been excavated forty years earlier, the apartment floors strained and sifted, the chacs removed and crated and sent to Philadelphia.

In the days before the arrival of antiquarians and smugglers, the people of the coast had buried their dead in the patch of salty, infertile soil that was closest to the plinths themselves. Some nameless ones were still interred there — the unknown and the Disappeared. Egan himself had come upon the corpse of an Indian child, somehow strayed from the Montana, and buried it beside the stream. A passer-by, following the path that led from the ocean to the falls at the head of the valley, might miss the stones and the buried pyramid entirely, in the filtered light and the many shapes and shades of green.

Now, Egan came up the path as the sunlight faded like mist from the forest, carrying a plastic briefcase and taking softly to himself. People were waiting for him at the stones. They were foreigners from the North, from South America and Europe. There were more than a dozen of them; their tents and hammocks were spread throughout the clearing. Young people of their sort, rarely seen before on that coast, had been turning up in increasing numbers, as though there were something for them there. Father Egan would come out and speak to them.

The easternmost stela, discolored from years of rubbings and centuries of weather, faintly showed the outline of a human figure, a man in a feathered headdress. The makings of a fire had been laid before it. As Egan took his place beside the stone marker, a slim young woman with a bandaged arm poured kerosene on the pile of sticks. The foreigners watched, reclining against their packs and ground cloths. Sitting apart from the rest was a hulking blond man with thick-browed elfin features and bright blue eyes.

When the fire was lit, Egan turned away from the group and leaned against the stone, eyes closed. It seemed to him he had a text. There was a cane fire in his brain. Wet-eyed, he rounded on them.

“Why seek ye,” he demanded, “the living among the dead?”

Someone giggled discreetly. Marijuana smoke floated on the still air.

“What are you doing here, children, a place like this?” He steadied himself, leaning on the stone. “You know when the Easter angel asked the woman at the tomb why she was crying she said: ‘Because they have taken away my Lord and I know not where they have laid him.’ ”

In the highest boughs, spider monkeys were singing out last reports, their sentries calling in from evening stand- to as the bands settled down for the night.

“Taken away,” Egan said. “Mislaid. No wonder she’s crying. Wouldn’t you? Don’t you?”

A few of the young people affirmed that they did.

“Of course you do. We all do. No matter how smart you are, some things are very hard to lose.”

A girl with a fever began to sing. She lay resting her head on her companion’s lap.

“This is a dead place,” Egan said. “It’s a boneyard, that’s why we’re here. It’s history,” he told them. “It’s the world.”

“Not my world,” said a man who was older than the others and drunk. “Not by a long shot.”

Egan ignored him.

“It’s another city on a hill, you see. An earthly historical city — very grand. Here we celebrate what dies. What fails. What is mislaid.”

“What about the bright side?” the man said. “Is there one?”

“Certainly,” Egan said. “But it has nothing to do with you. You’re not on it.”

Pablo and Deedee sat under the work lights aft of the ice hatches, mounted on upturned shrimp baskets, their backs against the lazaret. Over the open hatches the coiled net swung like a dun banner, anchored between the paired stabilizers and the chain drag line. The drag lay covered in a confetti of brightly colored chafing gear that was heaped over it; the pile looked like the wreckage of a carnival float. Before them, under the bright lights, was a living creeping jambalaya, a rapine of darkness and depth. In thousands, creatures of hallucination — shelled, hooded, fifty-legged and six-eyed — clawed, writhed, flapped or devoured their way through the mass of their fellow captives, the predators and the prey together, overthrown and blinded, scuttling after their lost accustomed world.

“Dig in, Pablo buddy,” Deedee said. “I guess you know a shrimp when you see one, right?”

Pablo stared silently into the mass of struggling life at his feet. Deedee stood up, walked carefully to the edge of the swarm and plucked from it in her gloved hand a two-foot barracuda. Grasping the struggling fish behind its row of teeth, she tossed it over the side.

“Poor baby,” she said. She worked with a joint between her lips. “Might be another one in there,” she told Pablo, sitting back down on the basket. “You want to watch where you stick your hands.”

Pablo leaned forward, picked up a shrimp and looked at it in his palm.

“There you go,” Deedee said, “that’s one right there. When you have a basket full of those little fellas you stick it down in the hold. If we were the honest folk we pretend to be we’d take their heads and legs off. But we’re not, so we won’t.”

He did not care for the way she watched him. She was smiling and high, but there was a guilty wariness beneath her chatter and high spirits. Pablo knew little about shrimping but he believed he knew rather a lot about female anxiety. How they looked when they were turning you around. How they smiled when they were scared.

He crushed the shrimp he was holding in his right fist and with the fingers of his left hand, pulled its head off. The gesture of petty violence seemed in no way to alarm her. She went on looking him happily in the eye but he knew she had seen and interpreted his vague threat. She was very tough, he thought, she was different from other women. And they were playing a game. The thought of games was hateful to him now, it savored of Naftali’s whisper.

“The rest of these beasties — the non-shrimp — just let them lie. We’ll hose them off the deck later.”

He kept his gaze fastened on her and she looked back at him until he felt foolish. She was better at games than he was. He was beginning to hate her. He was beginning to be afraid of her, of her more than the others.

“The first time I ever did this,” she told him as they filled their baskets, “a man threw a barracuda at me.” She took the joint from between her lips and let it die on the wet deck.

“Huh,” Pablo said, keeping his eyes on his work

“I was going to throw that one at you. But then I thought better of it — indeed I did.”

“It might have bit me,” he said.

“It might have. And then where would I be?”

What he wanted, he realized, was to fuck and to kill her. The realization made him even gloomier because he believed that such impulses were particular to him alone. It touched his self-respect. Moreover, he could not be sure whether she was only teasing him or really coming on now. It was like it kept changing. Confused and increasingly angry, he could think of only one strategy and that was to listen and wait and sound her.

“You gotta be crazy,” he said. “I mean you gotta be crazy, a good-looking woman like you out here on this turkey.”

“That makes two of us,” she said. “At least.”

“Yeah,” Pablo said. “But I’m just passing through.” So saying, he shuddered. He felt a nearly prayerful hope it might be true.

“Cast a cold eye,” Deedee said, “on life, on death. Horseman, pass by.” She was weirdness itself.

Within forty-five minutes they had enough filled baskets to cover the ice completely in one hold and to cover half of it in the second. Pablo stood on the ice bars receiving the baskets from Deedee as she passed them down. When the shrimp were stowed, she got the stabilizer engines going and he helped her spread the drag line again. They sat down on their baskets and drank some rum. It was good light Puerto Rican rum, better than the stuff they usually brought out.

“A very fine place for shrimping,” Deedee Callahan said. “If we’re ever in that line again well have to remember it.”

Pablo looked out at the surrounding ocean. There were other boats in sight now, four or five of them, lit and working.

“Could be the fisheries patrol come down on us any minute,” Pablo said. He said it to have something to say, bitching to bring her down and to make himself feel better.

“I wouldn’t worry about that, Pab, we’ve never been boarded, ever. They check out the numeral and the colors. When they’re close enough to see you’re gringo they leave you alone. Unless of course they’re looking for you.”

“But that won’t happen, will it?”

She took a drink of rum and passed him the bottle.

“Well, I haven’t said anything. And the boss hasn’t and Freddy hasn’t. Have you?”

“That’s a joke, ain’t it?”

“Yes,” she said, “ain’t it?”

“They don’t trust me,” he said sullenly, nodding toward the wheelhouse, “I know that.”

“If they don’t trust you they must have a reason. What would the reason be?”

“You playin’ cop or somethin’, Missus Callahan?”

“We’re playing Pirate,” she said. “I have to trust you. So do they. Otherwise you’d be walking the plank. That’s how it is in Pirate.”

“What about that nigger stayed back in St. Joost?”

“You mean Tino?” He was trying to stare her down again; she was looking back at him, easy-natured. “We don’t usually refer to Tino as a nigger,” she told him pleasantly. “He’s an old friend of ours. We’re a little concerned that he’s not with us but we’re quite sure he won’t talk to anyone.”

“Everybody’s a snitch sometime.”

“That’s a word I don’t like,” she said. “I dislike it and I dislike the way you say it. It makes you sound like a punk.”

Pablo was genuinely surprised.

“Nobody never called me punk,” he said savagely when he had mustered the force.

She smiled and sighed. “Nobody never? In your whole life?” In the next moment she was coming on. “You’re a fine figure of a man,” she told him. “Cultivate your higher qualities.”

While he was thinking of an answer, by the time he had decided to say he guessed he was quality enough for her, Mr. Callahan came aft and looked at the catch in the holds.

“Real good, shrimp people,” Mr. Callahan said. “Now let’s bring the nets up again. We’re running out of time.”

There were not so many shrimp in the second catch and they had to pad the baskets with chipped ice and junk fish to get the second hold covered. Negus came out and worked with them until the nets were secured and the hatches tight over the holds. Pablo observed that Callahan was drunk again. Even Negus in his silent dispatch did not seem altogether sober.

“We’re gonna lose these other boats,” Callahan told them. “Then we’re going in without lights and fast.”

“And he’ll be there,” Deedee said.

“I like it,” Callahan declared, “it’s going well.” He smiled at Tabor. “Is it going well for you, Pablo?”

“Sure,” Pablo said.

Deedee leaned on his shoulder.

“We’re happy back here. We’re a team.”

When Callahan and Negus went back to the cockpit, Deedee stayed where she was, cuddled against Tabor. They both watched as Callahan made his way forward, a little more unsteadily than the roll of the Cloud demanded. Pablo reached in his pocket and swallowed the last of his Benzedrine.

The drug’s action when it came was disappointing and curious. For a fraction of a second he could not remember where he was and he was overcome with fear. But the rush passed and then he was better. He asked her for more rum and while he drank it she held to his arm. For a while he was calm and sad and grateful to have her beside him.

“You’re a good man,” she told him soothingly. “You’re O.K. and you’re going to be even better.”

“I like the sound of that,” Pablo told her, and then he laughed. Almost giggled. She seemed sympathetic; she laughed with him.

“How long you been with that man?” he asked her.

“Forever,” she said, and they both laughed again.

She rolled a joint and they drank a little more.

“If you been with him forever,” Pablo asked, “how come you’re coming on to me?”

“Heavens to Betsy,” she said, “I thought you’d never ask. I didn’t think you noticed.”

They laughed at that too. They were smoking her heavy Jamaican weed. But then he decided there was something wrong with what she had said or the way she had said it. Things got tricky for him again.

In the cockpit, Negus put the wheel on manual and they steered north, the compass needle over the Raytheon fluttered. The other boats fell away southward.

“God grant it goes easy,” Negus said. “It’s been such a damn …”

“Gonna stay ashore now, Freddy?”

“Oh, crikey,” Negus said heartily, “you’d best believe it. I’m too old and brittle for this sort of thing anymore. You said a true thing when you said that.”

“I will grant you,” Callahan said, “that this one was difficult. Without Tino and with Tabor. I will grant you that. But I told Deedee … I told her I need a bad guy I can keep in line.”

“I been telling you for years, Jack, you can’t just pick up any dingbat these days for something like this. You’re bound to get wrong ones. Must say I think you drink too damn much for a man of business.”

Callahan did not dispute him.

“What you got Deedee to aft yonder?”

“Taking care of him. She’s a smart girl.”

“With all due respect and up to a point that’s a true thing about her,” Negus said. Then he looked over his shoulder from the chair and lowered his voice. “He goes, don’t he? Afterwards?”

“I’m not without principles,” Callahan said. “I propose to do my duty by the world and the international shipping lanes. He goes.”

“And Deedee knows that?”

“She knows.”

“Just so we’re clear on that,” Negus said. “Because she’s soft on him in a way. Taking care of him, you know, that could mean anything to her.”

“I know what it means to her, Freddy, and so do you. Soft on him isn’t quite the word, is it? Dee isn’t sentimental in the least.”

“No, hell no. She ain’t sentimental. She’s … like we know she is.”

“Perverse.”

“However you want to say it.”

“She likes edges. She thinks he’s a stud. He’s got shit between his toes and he’s going to be dead tomorrow. That’s what she likes.”

“Yep,” Negus said. “That’s the way I see it. That would be her way of looking at it.”

“Me, I think she’s splendid. One-of-a-kind kid. She suits me.”

“Yep,” Freddy Negus said, “she does. You and her — you’re adapted to each other naturally.”

“Not exactly made in heaven,” Callahan said. “But we like it. Edge players as we are. You suppose he could possibly figure out why she’s breathing on him?”

Negus laughed. “Well, I couldn’t if I was him. And I think I seen about everything.”

“But what’s right and what’s wrong, eh, Fred? You can’t have sex without mortality. That’s a biological fact.”

He began to pour himself another drink. Negus lifted the glass from his hand.

“No more, boss. Not until afterwards.”

Callahan watched Negus throw the full glass over the side.

“Right,” he said “It’s getting time to darken ship and get on triple zero. Another couple of minutes.”

“I’ll be on the forepeak when we go in. We ought to check on Dee from time to time.”

“She’ll handle it,” Callahan said. “She has a gun. Let me do the checking, Freddy. It’ll work out better.”

“Sure,” Negus said. “That’d be more your job than mine.”

“You know,” Father Egan said, “I’m reminded here of another city.” He uttered a reflective clerical chuckle. “When I was preparing to be whatever it is I’ve become I was sent to work in a hospital. Comfort the dying. I remember the mortuary there — it was very Victorian. Neo-Renaissance. In the foyer there was an inscription in Latin. ‘Let smiles cease,’ it said, ‘let laughter flee. This is the place where the dead help the living.’ ”

The older man in the group got to his feet muttering.

“Bummer!” he shouted at Egan. His heavy face grew red with anger; he raised cupped hands to amplify his voice, and screamed. “Bummer!”

“I’ll describe a picture to you,” Egan told his congregation. “I’m sure you’re familiar with it. A group of men are standing over a pile of corpses. They’re smiling and they have guns. Some of them have tied handkerchiefs across their faces but not to give themselves the raffish air of banditti — because of the smell.” His eyes went vacant. “What are they looking for in that pile? Has one of them dropped his watch? Never mind.”

The priest wiped his mouth with his sleeve and took a cautious step forward. “That’s the big picture, children. That’s how it is now. That’s why you see that picture every week in all the magazines. You know — there are variations, the people and the uniforms come in different colors, but it’s always the same picture.”

Around them the silences and the darkness deepened. Ramon nuts pattered to the ground through a web of leafy branches, making a sound like soft rain.

“Now why,” Egan asked, “are we made to see this picture week after week until it’s imprinted on the backs of our eyes and we have it before us dreaming and waking? Is it that we’re meant to see it? Is it the cunning of dice play, children? Is there, in short, a message for us?”

No one answered him.

“Will those dead help the living?” he asked. “Are we to seek the living among the dead? What does it mean?”

A youth with a full dark beard who was sitting cross-legged on a waterproof poncho roused himself.

“The Holy One is among the dead,” the young man declared.

The girl who had started the fire turned and stared at him.

“Oh, no,” she said softly.

Egan stood with his hands clasped under his chin, his face uplifted, his eyes closed.

“And yet,” he said, “and yet — where, eh?” he opened his eyes and peered at them across the firelight. “Because you can stare into faces of the dead — I’ve been doing it for years, I ought to know — and you won’t see anything. Anything more than plain death, I mean. You can look as sharp as you like, you can pray for a sign, for something, for the slightest hint of something … more. Not forthcoming.”

He sighed and shook his head.

“You can look into the dead face of the world, try to catch it unawares — no good. You keep looking, you tell yourself you’ve seen something, some little intimation, you know, of something … living. The Living. Or the Holy One, whatever. But it’s no good. You won’t. It won’t reveal itself that way.”

He had been standing, swaying, dangerously close to the fire. The heat warned him away.

“I mean — you look outward. To the stars, to the farthest nebulae. Not a sign. Or you look in. Do it!” he told them. “Look in! Close your eyes and look down from the outside in and what have you got? Blisters. Skin, eh? Flesh, parasites, sour guts and a little concupiscence. Then we’re down among our several intoxications and delusions and we find our minds, the little devils, the devious protean things. Anything more? A glimmer?”

Some of them sat with their eyes closed looking in. Others stared at Egan or into the fire.

“Maybe yes,” Egan said. “Maybe, eh? Who knows down in that mess? But maybe there is something. A little shard of light. What is it?”

“An anchovy,” the drunk said. “An undigested bit of beef.” He turned and walked off toward the dark tree line, carrying a box of Kleenex.

“Marley’s ghost,” he said as he went. “The ghost of Christmas future.” Egan never seemed to hear.

“It’s the why and wherefore,” the priest said, “that little radiant thing. I’ve never seen it, you know, but it has to be there. It’s the life. The Life. There’s all this death and this dying and it’s the only difference. It’s the only difference things make,” he told them.

“There aren’t angels,” Egan said. “There’s none of that. Thrones. Dominions. All that business — it’s rubbish. But there’s life. There’s the Living among the dead. I mean, you can’t ever quite see it, can you? You’d hardly know it was there but it has to be, doesn’t it? It’s only mislaid.”

He was dizzy, his chest felt hollow. He steadied himself against the stone again.

“Because it’s there — everything’s all right.”

He tried to see each of them among the shadows and flickering light.

“That’s the Holy One among the dead, son,” he told the dark-bearded youth. His eye fell on the strange blond man, something made him look away.

“You have to try and find it, see?” Egan said. “If you can’t find it you have to believe in it. If you can’t believe in it you have to hope you will. If you can’t hope then all you can do is love the idea of it. Love it at a distance if that’s the best you can do, children. Love it like a secret lover.”

He seemed perplexed by their silence. He walked around the fire into the semicircle they had formed.

“It’s the only meaning in all of things,” he said. “There aren’t any others.”

Pablo had lost sight of her face in the glare of the overhead work lights; she was standing by the rail stretching. He moved to the rail opposite and looked for the lights of the other boats he had seen working nearby. No other lights were in sight now.

They seemed to have shifted course. The angle of the wind was different and the low troughs came at them from a different quarter, making the sea seem rougher. He moved out of the glare of the lights, picked out the pointers at the top of the Dipper and lined up Polaris a little off the bow. The new course was northerly. A freshening wind made him feel cold.

“I’m tired,” he said. “I expect I’ll be earning my pay soon.”

She was smoking marijuana again. He smelled it as she went across the stern to sit down on her overturned basket. She never stopped. From her knit basket she took a straight cigarette and a bottle of Puerto Rican rum; she uncapped the rum and took a deep swallow.

“Won’t I be earning my pay soon?”

He could see her face well enough now. She was smiling at him in a way that made him feel as though she had never seen him before. He shivered and that seemed to make her smile the more. She stood up and brought the joint and the bottle across the deck to him.

“Soon, baby. That you will. Now have yourself a drink of this here.”

The rum was good, clear and light, much better than the thick stuff they drank in the cockpit. She pressed the joint on him and absentmindedly he smoked more of it than was good for him.

“Thing is,” Pablo said, “I don’t understand. Things been happening and I don’t understand. Like something was going on.”

“Something’s always going on,” she said. And while he was trying to read her look, all the lights went out together. Only the instrument lights in the cockpit showed, reflected in the windshield and the faint glow of the interior lights from between the louvered shutters over the saloon housing. The Cloud shifted course again and someone — Negus — came out on deck and opened the engine panel. When he slammed it shut again, the boat began to pick up speed. The whole frame of the vessel shuddered, a wind picked up where there had been little more than a steady breeze — the Cloud was running like a crash boat.

Negus had gone below again; he came out now wearing a slicker. The bars of light from the saloon compartment had disappeared. Negus was crouching in the forepeak, a pair of binoculars around his neck.

“Away we go,” Mrs. Callahan said.

The sensation of moving at such speed in what seemed an ordinary shrimp boat was dreamlike, almost comical. Pablo stared down at the white water that rushed under their bow.

Deedee sat on a basket near the lazaret hatch, hugging herself, the knit bag on her lap.

“Sit down before you fall over, Pablo,” she said. “We’re going faster than you think.” She lit a straight cigarette in the lee of the lazaret housing. “Let’s get out of this wind and Mama will tell you how it is.”

Following her down into the darkness of the lazaret, his first thought was that it was not right because their clothes were foul. They had been working shrimp. And because she was smoking and there were oil cans and engine rags.

When she sat herself down on the chafing gear he sat beside her. It was the first close touch he had of her since the night in the galley that seemed so long before. He was fighting to hold Pablo now, to hold within himself the thinking, calculating Pablo — because even as he sat with her, that self was being crowded out by lust and a shadow. The lust had a rubbery bubbly taste; the shadow, he knew well. It had few emotions but it was an angry frightened shadow.

She pushed his cap off and brought his head against her shoulder and put her chin on the top of his head.

“This is how it is, Pablo,” she began. Pablo closed his eyes to listen. Somehow he had the notion that his mother would tell him something.

“We have some boys to deal with on the coast here and we don’t know who they are. It could occur to them to take our goods, our boat, everything — and pitch us over the side. It’s happened. So we need a little display of sincerity. We need a crazy old boy like you who’s so mean and nasty looking they think he might feed them a few just to hear the funny noises they’d make. Then look at it from their side. Everything’s COD. Maybe it’s a little old-fashioned but that’s us, see, that’s the way we do it. They’ve got money for us. Now we might just take their money and do them in — that’s happened too.”

She ran her fingers along the back of his neck.

“So. So, honey …” Cuddling him. “So they come out in their boat and we load the stuff. You go along so everybody feels all right. They usually have to make more than one trip and going in they’ll feel better because even if they don’t have all of their delivery they have you. And you’ll be riding along looking so bad and crazy that whatever they’d like to do — they’ll decide it makes more sense to stick to the deal. So they bring you back with the last load. We take our money. Buena suerte and viva la causa, that’s it. It’s not a desperate situation even today. It’s got rules. You’re riding shotgun.”

He began to laugh or by now it was the shadow. He listened to her laugh as well.

Then he went after that wet fouled denim for the sweet flesh inside, peeled the sweat shirt off her and licked her breasts, the nipples, above them below and around, the nipples themselves again.

“Crazy stuff,” she said. “Crazy stuff.”

Her watch cap had fallen off and her hair spread out among the strands of chafing gear. She was thrusting her ass against him — soft, round, damp under the wet film of denim — unzipping his fly. She forced him back against the bale; she, him!

“No need you holdin’ me down,” he said. It was the shadow talking.

But by answer she bent and put her teeth against his penis. Then she raised herself on her hands and feet like a cat stretching and kicked off her shrimping boots, then peeled down the jeans that encased her. Naked, she lay facing him against the bale. Pablo took off his shirt and undid his belt until his dungarees were down about his ankles.

She was laughing still.

“Don’t you take off your boots when you have a lady, Tex?”

“Never you fuckin’ mind.”

She answered him by taking his right hand and putting it between her thighs and the skin there was as smooth as the surface of a glass of buttermilk on a summer’s day. She closed his hand over her, his thumb in the cleft of her buttocks, his fingers playing over the down and labia. He put his face into her neck, then sought out her shoulder where the arrogant tattoo was and then, wanting it without delays, put his face between the thighs and with his mouth and tongue took all such pleasures there as he could see or imagine. She had wriggled partway up the heaped bale until her body was above his, and with her posture strangely erect, her head thrown back, slipped down on him time after time, impaling herself, until they both had come.

Deedee was still moaning softly when he saw that the hatch at the top of the ladder was pried open. He could make out the stars.

“The hatch,” he said.

She reached out for her bag and the bottle.

“Scared of trouble?”

From the way she said it, he could not tell if it was challenge or consolation, so he did not answer.

“We’re not having trouble on this boat,” she told him, “not about you and me. And the reasons for that I cannot tell but in another day.”

So, warily, he settled down, and though he did not like the way she had spoken to him, presently he was hard again. Or it might have been the shadow’s lust. He took her once more, trying now to hurt her — but she could not be hurt in that way; every thrust he made she somehow met, met yielding, as though she were ready for every moment. So he could not hurt her, could not gentle or humiliate her. And when he started to come and to pull out, she held him, letting go little by little as it pleased her until he was seeing lights on the overhead and he thought he would pass out cold.

He was very high, higher than he had ever been. His thoughts twisted off into spools, arabesques, snatches of music.

Deedee was putting her clothes on. Automatically, he buckled his trousers.

“Don’t you have any gentleness in you, boy?” she asked.

He looked toward her unseen face. Fear sat on his chest, its talons in the muscles of his breast. He had seen a shadow pass the hatch. He was certain.

“You mustn’t be afraid,” she told him softly.

Hearing her say it was a terrible thing for him.

“Someone’s up there,” he said.

“That could be, Pablo. It’s all right.”

All right. And he was in a rank-smelling trap at a loss to understand how he had got there. Beside him in the darkness his soft-bodied enemy soothed him in a voice like gold wire.

“Hey, hey,” she said, nudging him slightly, “it’s all right, my man.”

All right. But they were going to kill him. He had been through the question before and that was the way it had come out.

“You set me up,” he told her.

“Don’t be silly,” she said firmly.

As she said it, he stopped trembling. She had set him up and there was no more to it. He was among crazy people, in an empty landscape tasting of salt rubber, smelling of scale and death. They were about killing him. He sat very still waiting for her to move, listening for sounds on the deck above.

“Settle down now,” she said, as though she were talking to a horse.

He was quite settled down now. There was no more reality to him than to the blossoming bougainvillea he thought to see in the darkness or to the music that he heard. Things were inside out but he was strong.

He made a loop of the chafing line and by a blind stroke caught her around the throat. One of her hands came up to struggle with the noose but the other was reaching into darkness. Pablo, twisting the line with all his strength, his mind serene, took a moment to react. Deedee brought up the butt of the pistol she had taken from her bag and cracked him hard across the upper lip, nearly getting the underside of his nose. He let go the line and went after the pistol; he could not see what had hit him but he knew it must be one.

She was shouting now, shouting for her husband in a choked nightmare voice. When he had forced the pistol from her right hand, he pressed his head down against her chest to keep it low and took Naftali’s Nambu from beneath his seabag.

There was true light in the space now. On the ladder someone with a flashlight was searching out the darkness. Pablo rolled her across his body — it was as though they were making love again — her teeth were sunk in his arm. As she passed over him, he jammed the barrel of the Nambu under her down vest and fired two of its eight shots upward. He felt her teeth release him, she was flung onto her knees beside the bale. Two shots came from the ladder, at least one of them striking the woman. She rolled over on her side, her knees still together. The compartment was spinning with illuminations; Pablo thought of fireflies, wet spark plugs. His ears were hammered shut. Against the flat lower section of the bulkhead he was unhurt. When he fired at the man who was on the ladder, he did so with confidence, as though he had nothing but time. And in a second, he knew he had been on target. He heard the shuffle, the groan, the gun strike the ladder’s bottom step and slide across the deck. The man fell behind the beam of his own flashlight, invisible and motionless. Pablo sat panting in the darkness, waiting for the figure behind the light to move. The moment he started to his feet, there was another flash; Tabor’s leg went out from under him and his head struck the slanting overhead. He knelt and fired two shots into the space behind the light’s beam. There was a groan and a man spoke — it was Callahan — but Pablo could not make out what he said. Then Pablo discovered himself to be shot; there was a bleeding wound in the thick part of his calf, in the back. He ran his finger along the shin bone and found it unbroken. The bullet might only have cut him and passed through but it hurt. He would be all right, he thought. He had power enough to fox them all and live. There was another one.

From the open deck above, he heard Negus’ voice calling the Callahans by name. He began to go up the ladder backwards, sitting for a while on each step. Negus’ voice sounded far away, carried off by the wind. At last, he was sitting framed in the hatchway. There was no sign of a light. His head bent low, he glanced around his shoulder and saw Negus, holding a shotgun and crouching anxiously beside the after hatch.

“Jack?” Negus asked, and reached for a light he had set down on the hatch cover.

As Negus reached for it, Pablo turned full around, got off a shot, then flung himself out of the hatchway and scuttled across the slimy deck like one of the creatures that had swarmed there during the evening. His shot, he knew, had missed. His leg throbbing, he crawled for darkness, his steel-hearted killer’s trance deserting him. Negus was after him, rounding the hatch for a shot. Pablo, terrified now, cowered in the scuppers, he had two shots in the little Nambu and the light was bad. Then he saw Negus stumble backward, make two little capering backward steps and fall back against the hatch cover. The shotgun discharged heavenward.

Pablo, uncertain of what he was seeing, came to realize that Negus had slipped on the deck. It was a miracle of God. He hesitated for a moment, saw Negus try to bring the gun to bear and shot him. It seemed to him that he had missed again. Negus dropped the shotgun on the deck and was looking down at it, cursing softly. He turned toward Pablo.

“You stop, you hear! Just stop it!” There was a catch in his voice. He was hurt.

Pablo lowered his gun.

“Don’t yell at me no more, Mr. Negus. Get back there against the rail.”

When Negus stood clear, Pablo lowered himself on his good leg, and picked up the shotgun.

“Oh, you dirty monkey,” Negus said. “You little son of a bitch. What’d you do?”

He seemed furious. Pablo felt as though he had done something wrong.

“They’re down there,” Pablo said, pointing to the lazaret hatchway. “You look down there, you’ll see them.”

Negus walked stiffly to the flashlight on the hatch cover, took it and went to the top of the lazaret ladder. Tabor stood behind him, keeping him on the top step as he played the beam over the silent space.

“You dirty fucking monkey,” Freddy Negus said.

“They were turning me around,” Pablo explained. “You was too.”

“Well, they ain’t turnin’ you around no more, bucky,” Negus said. “They’re dead. You killed them.”

“Well, they were,” Pablo said. He felt remorse and disgust.

Negus sat down on the hatch, his arms folded over his stomach.

“I don’t know how the hell he took it in his head to hire you. You were just a wrong number.”

From the cockpit, they could hear the RDF’s steady null signal, sounding over and over, a noise from space.

“Goddamn foibles and human error,” Negus said, “you got such a little margin anyways and them two always overplayed it.” He coughed and spat thickly on the deck. “Figured you were fun or something.”

“Well, I can’t live for fun,” Pablo said. “Some people can afford to but I can’t. A lot of times people try and turn me around and they always find that out about me.”

Negus stood up and started forward, paused and went on, holding to the rail.

“I’m not walking well,” Negus told Pablo.

“Me neither. But you’re gut-shot.”

When they reached the wheelhouse hatch, Pablo started in; Negus stayed him with a hand.

“I don’t want no blood in there.”

Pablo understood. Negus sat on a gear locker and looked out to sea; Tabor leaned on the rail. There were no lights in sight, or ridges to block the great field of stars. The pointers and Polaris were over the starboard quarter.

“You got no sense, son,” Negus said. “Why’d you ever come aboard?”

“I needed to. Thought you needed me.”

Negus spat again. “But we didn’t, did we? No need on anybody’s part.”

“Guess not,” Pablo said. “But that’s the breaks.” He was beginning to think there might be a way in which he was going to make out after all. Most of all, he was wondering if there was any more speed on board.

“Now what we got, kid, is a Mexican standoff. You know what I mean?”

“No,” Pablo said. But he was intrigued and encouraged to hear things put that way.

“I’m hurting. I got a slug in my gut. I don’t know but that …” He let it go. “But you’re hurting too, kid. You can’t get nowhere from here. Nothing on that coast for you now. You’ll pile her up or the Guardia’ll get you or the pirates will. You’re bleeding, boy, you’re drawing sharks, you see what I mean now?”

Pablo listened in silence to the beat of the null tone.

Negus stood up and leaned on the rail a few feet away from him.

“I can take this vessel anywhere. I can get us anywhere. Clear.”

“How?” Pablo asked.

Negus grew enthusiastic.

“Oh, by Jesus Christ, boy, why, plenty of places. San Ignacio. Colombia. One of the islands there. I got friends in all them places. I can get us a doctor. We can sell our goods, man. Emeralds. We can get them.” He was trying to see Pablo’s face in the faint light that came from the cockpit. He was smiling.

“What would you tell them there? If we got to Colombia — one of them places?”

“Well, a thousand things. A thousand things, hell …” He was talking faster and he began to laugh. “They don’t give a goddamn what you done or where you been if you got cash or goods. We’d have it made.”

Pablo was straining toward hope. That it might all be true. There were moments when they both believed it all.

Negus drew his breath painfully, and encouraged, went on.

“Listen, Pablo. You’re using twenty gallons an hour out here. More than that. More. You goin’ to be sailing in circles.”

When Pablo did not reply, he grew more heated.

“You be out here, boy, you’ll see things day and night. Stuff that ain’t there. I know what I’m talking about. You don’t ever want to be alone out here because the stuff you’ll see sometimes it ain’t there and sometimes it is. When it is it’s worser. I know. I’m the one that knows. And me takin’ us in, old shoe, we’ll be home free. Home. Free. They know me, man. They don’t care.” He laughed and ran out of breath, and Tabor saw that the man was lying to him, talking for his life as though to a child. Turning him around.

Years before in a town Pablo knew, the bootleggers had chained an old boy to an anchored oil barrel at low tide, chained him up for the high water to come in on him. There happened along this young child out where he had no business and the man talked to the child and begged and hollered at him to go for help. But the child forgot or his parents told him better not to say and the tide came in over the man four feet and they only found out about the child afterwards.

Pablo looked at his weary enemy and was sorry.

“Well, O.K.,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

Negus’ delight was so great that, sorry as he was, Tabor couldn’t keep from laughing. The old dude was whooping and shouting like the drunkard he was, going on about emeralds and cocaine and private villas and his face was happy as Christmas morning when Pablo blew him away. It was necessary to hold the dead old man up against the rail so that he would not become a burden. Holding him up hurt Pablo’s injured leg, so the two of them leaned over the rail side by side for a while. Fellow travelers. Then Tabor bent down, took hold of Negus under the knees and pitched him over. The null tone went right on sounding.

He remained at the rail, his elbows resting there, his hands clasped, and looked up the Dipper. He had been watching it edge around Polaris through the night. Perhaps because of the wound, he felt cold. Now he and the creatures in the ice hold were the only living things aboard.

His work done, Pablo became afraid. An unfamiliar emotion oppressed him which he came to recognize as loneliness; a loneliness deeper than he had ever experienced.

“Jesus help me,” Pablo said aloud.

He missed them, that was it. A crazy way to feel, because they were low-down people, they were just shit as people and they had certainly been turning him around. Not the way he missed Naftali — Naftali was all right. But them being dead now, all of them, it was hard to take. It put a strain on him. Cecil, he thought, that black bastard was the root of it.

Then he thought of speed and how that would be the ticket. On his way to the sleeping quarters he stopped in the cockpit and looked over the navigational gear. The compass bearing was set for zero-zero-zero and the constant null tone signified that this was where it should be. They had gone out on one-eighty from the marker and were headed straight back in — no problem there. On the chart table he found Callahan’s rough line-of-sight chart; in one corner Callahan had written the Loran digits he had noted at the spot. For the moment things were all right but later, up near the reef, he would have to do his own steering and find the market in darkness. And there would be the men on the coast, those money-crazy bird-talking people. Perhaps his mother’s people.

He took a light and went into the head where the shower was and found an unlocked cabinet under the small sink. Up front there were first-aid kits and soap and every kind of downer, all of them prescribed for a Dolores Callahan. In his impatience he swept them aside; he found aspirin, aloe powder, ginseng, exotic shampoos. Not until he was on the edge of despair did he find, on the bottom shelf under the pipe, a small bottle containing six Desoxyn. He clutched the Desoxyn bottle and bent his head against the shelf in gratitude. Less impatient now, he looked through the rest of the scattered bottles and found a jar of pain-killing tablets. He recognized the gray half-moon pills and their brand name because they were the things that Kathy took for menstrual cramps and he had used them as speed back home.

Pablo sat on the deck of the head, swallowed two Desoxyn and one of the pain-killers and made a bandage for his wounded leg. There were no exit or entry holes, only a scythe-cut wound along the side. It did not seem serious; there was not much blood. He would do.

With the light at his feet he sat in one of the lounge chairs of the saloon to let the speed and the pain-killer do their work. A ridiculous place it was, the saloon, with its teak and rattan and Spanish table. He recognized it now as a third hold, the sort they had on the big Texas boats. The Callahans had made it into a floating parlor. And it suited them, he thought, it was their idea of fun and high living. The wooden louvered shutters at deck level could keep it cool at sea but it was really just a hidey-hole, set everywhere with fans and as cramped in its fancy way as the lazaret.

When he felt better he went to Deedee’s compartment and opened the teak door. There was a wide bunk bed against the bulkhead and a steel bookcase with a great many books. On top of it was a picture of both Callahans on a lawn with a lot of tables and lawn umbrellas behind them. Callahan, looking young and thinner, was standing behind a bench upon which sat his wife, who looked very much the same. Her blond hair was tied back severely and her smile was sweetness itself; her legs, in tight breeches and gleaming boots, were crossed in comfortable self-assurance. Callahan’s hand was on her jacketed shoulder. Her own hand, in a string glove, rested on his.

Pablo turned the picture face down. The room smelled of saffron.

The Callahans would have to go with Negus now.

Tabor hobbled up on deck, bringing two stationary flashlights with him. Scanning the night horizon, he saw no lights in view; he would have to risk some light of his own to get the thing done. But to bring the bodies up from the lazaret by main force was more than he could manage. He switched the flashlights on — one beside the hatchway to light the compartment, the other beside an after hatch to light his work space. Then he engaged the tri-net motor and swung the bar amidships; the chain line, coils and chafing gear spread out around him like a collapsed circus tent. From among the heap, he seized an end of chain line and, grasping it under his arm, eased himself painfully down the ladder, pulling a web of coils behind him.

He came to Callahan first and linked two sections of chain line under the dead man’s fleshy shoulders. When he thought the links were secured, he went topside and set the tri-net bar to hauling upright. The coils and chain with their burden rattled up the hatchway like a receding tide; Pablo stationed himself at the top of the ladder to ease the corpse through. With Callahan netted and swinging above the deck, Pablo loosened the chain from under his shoulders, swung the bar outboard and lowered away.

It went easily. Pablo had been standing by with a gaff in case the netting or the body fouled the overworked engines. But the chain settled, the net spread out without bird’s-nesting and Mr. Callahan rolled off into the quiet ocean and disappeared.

Pablo rested then, nursing his throbbing leg, looking around for lights, for aircraft, for a wall of mountains against the sky northward. When he felt up to it, he went up to the cockpit to check the speed, the bearings and Fathometer. The speed was steady, the Fathometer read over eight fathoms and unchanging, the compass needle was fast on triple zero and the null as constant as Polaris.

Topside, he started up the Lister again to bring back the net to center line. A second time, like a diver, Pablo descended into the lazaret compartment, dragging chain line behind him. He found her easily enough and pulled her into the coils. Her death’s darkness smelled of suntan oil. The net hauling, he guided her up the ladder and out of the hatchway.

When the tri-net boom was lowered and the web offered her out she did not go readily as her husband had. The colorless hair, almost phosphorescent over the water, spread itself among the coils, her down vest was caught on a cross wire, her legs, akimbo, were wrapped in the chains. In the end, he had to bring his light to the rail and cut her free from the webbing. The chains snapped loose, and then upright, her hair held on its ends by the coils that enshrouded her like a veil, she fell. Wide-eyed, as though eight fathoms held some new curiosity — like a figurehead, dolorous, an image of destiny — feet first into the water.

So Pablo had done with his dead and he switched off the lights. The null tone and the engines went on throbbing and the pointers held their places. He smoked and took another pill. He felt that his unseen presence on the ocean was ceremony enough for them.

“The answer”—Father Egan was saying—“I think they have it on the prayer wheels. Do you know what it says on the prayer wheels?”

Most of them had gone to sleep. From among the group only the girl with the bandaged arm, the feverish girl and her boyfriend, the dark-bearded young man and the blond giant remained to listen. A few others had gathered around a fire at the base of the overgrown pyramid and were smoking marijuana and passing a bottle of colorless rum. Their laughter sounded a muffled echo off the ancient stone.

“On the prayer wheels it says, ‘The jewel is in the lotus.’ They turn the wheels round hundreds of times a day. The little flags flutter so the wind says it. The Jewel is in the Lotus.”

The feverish girl moaned and stirred in her lover’s arms. Egan stopped speaking and looked at her and saw that she had the dengue. He had had it himself several times. He would have to get her some medicine, he thought, and for a moment he forgot what it was he had been preaching to them. Then it came back to him. The girl, he thought, was like a lotus and the pain in her overbright eyes a jewel.

“The lotus,” he told her, “is sweet and fragrant, beautiful in life. But it’s fallible and it’s born for death. It’s sown in corruption. But the jewel—” He felt his arm go numb and when he tried to raise it he could not. “The jewel is undying and beyond time. Beyond measure. The jewel is the meaning, you see.”

A high-pitched cry sounded from somewhere in the deeper jungle, a cry that might have been human. Something surprised in the dark.

“You’re the lotus. Your dear bodies that you’re so fond of. You’re the lotus. The jewel is in you.” Egan laughed and brushed his sleeve across his mouth again. “The jewel’s in hock to you. And the whole world of mortality is the lotus. And the Living is the jewel in it. That’s the bright side.”

He looked for the drunken man who had heckled him, but the man had gone away.

“It is sown in corruption,” Egan declaimed, “it is raised in incorruption. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power! On the bright side — everything’s fine. You’d think they’d have no business here whose place is on the bright side. Here — it’s whirl.” He put out his hand and described a spiral with three fingers. “Whirl is King and it’s lonely and in shadow, but over there — well, that’s life over there, that’s where the Living belongs. But,” he said, and tapped his palm with his forefinger as though citing some father of doctrine, “the Jewel is in the Lotus! Why?”

He looked at them each in turn.

“Why, children?”

They were all still, watching.

“Because,” Egan thundered, “they’re as lonely as we are! The Living is lonely for itself. For the shard of itself that’s lost in us, the jewel in the lotus.” He paused to draw breath.

“Isn’t it wonderful after all? That we’re secret lovers? Because why else would the Living be concealed within this meat, in all these fears and sweats, the Holy One among the dead? Why would he hide himself in Whirl to give meaning to a pile of corpses? Why isn’t a campesino just an animal with a name? Why not? Why is there any meaning in a heap of dead? Or a lost kiddie. A sick little girl, a drowned …” A shudder ran through him and he paused again. “Because the Jewel is in the Lotus out of loneliness and secret love. He doesn’t have any choice.”

Exhausted, he leaned on the stone. Then he thought of something that he had once read. Or perhaps he had written it himself.

“It’s hard to see,” he told the young people. “You never know when you see the Living. The eye you see him with is the same eye with which he sees you.”

The girl with dengue put her hands on her companion’s shoulders and pulled herself upright.

“The bands broke,” she said, half singing. “The bands broke on Faithful John’s heart.” The boy who was with her tried to ease her back down; she fought him. “The bands broke on the heart of Faithful John,” she screamed.

Egan had sunk to the ground and lay resting against the stela. It seemed to him that he had made it come out all right. His hand was on his briefcase, over the bulge of his bottle of Flor de Cana.

“No, no,” he told the girl kindly. “That’s not the same at all. That’s a fairy tale.”

Justin had spent the morning making inventory and talking to a man from the shipper’s office in town. They had told her that it would be easier and more economical to load the mission’s promptuary equipment on shipboard at Puerto Alvarado than to ship it by way of the capital. He would have a ship with available holding space quite soon.

A short time after noon she was standing in the kitchen when she turned and saw the young Tecanecan woman to whom she had spoken on the beach the week before. The young woman had come up the front steps without a sound. Justin had never learned her name.

“I don’t think I can come here again,” the young woman said. “Only in emergencies.”

Justin led her into the kitchen.

“You’re right. You shouldn’t risk coming here. I sent you a note through the sexton.”

“I have an answer for you from those in charge,” the young woman said. “They agree that you can’t be involved further. They say only continue to leave the dock lights on, this is all they ask.”

“That’s not much to ask.”

“They say it’s well you’re preparing to leave. We’re all in great danger now. If things don’t happen soon we’ll have to go for the mountains.”

“Will it be soon?”

“I think so but I know very little. Only those in charge know.”

“Well,” Justin said, “I suppose I’m out of it now.”

“You’re out of it. But listen — when it starts, nobody is going to be safe. There are medical supplies here and they’ll be wanted.”

“When we go I’ll lock up as much as I can in the building. They’re at your disposal.”

“If it should be that you’re still here when it comes, you might be safer with us. You can make your own decision. I’ll try to get word to you beforehand but there may not be time.”

“Thank you,” Justin said. “I’ll be all right.”

“They also say thanks. Those in charge.”

“Yes,” Justin said.

As the girl was leaving, Justin went a step after her.

“How’s Father Godoy?”

“Gone,” the girl said. “Gone to the Montana.”

When the girl was gone, Justin felt desperate. Desperate to leave, to be gone — because their idleness and uselessness seemed more shameful than ever now that they could not actively help. Her work now would consist in persuading Charlie Egan to leave with her.

Thinking of Egan put her in mind of the man she had seen at Playa Tate and who was supposed to be taking the priest to dinner. He was a very self-confident man, very assured, rather arrogant. It seemed to her that she came very close to disliking him. For some reason, she did not altogether. It might be that he reminded her of someone, she thought.

Then the weight of things came down on her. The six years, everything that had happened since the day of the fiesta, Godoy, the child killings. A storm broke inside her, leaving her feeling for all the world as she had felt sometimes as a child — ashamed of her own triviality and insignificance, ashamed above all of her own body and its gross necessities, its rankness, its sinfulness, its carnality. She had stopped eating then, hoping to die. She found now that she couldn’t stay still, couldn’t put one thought in front of another, couldn’t cry. She stood in the kitchen staring through the open door at the rectangle of raw mindless sky and waiting, more alone — and more lonely — than she had ever been.

Holliwell had had a hard day and he spent a large part of it trying not to get drunk. Finless, he had been going back and forth between the hotel beach and his bungalow. The hotel was suddenly full of people who described themselves to each other as contractors, and although they reminded him in some ways of the contractors he had known in Vietnam, they seemed to him at once more sinister and less colorful. Pale and foul-mouthed, they were everywhere — drinking beer at the water’s edge, crowding the bar; they talked about Bogotà, Managua, Zihuatanejo and what they called Cancún City. Many of them seemed to be old acquaintances of Heath and Señor Soyer, the Cuban hardware man. Others were friends of Olga and Buddy. When they were quiet it meant they were on about coke or emeralds. It was as though there was some convocation of evil elements, a jar culture oozing out and discovering itself.

He parked his rented jeep beside the road, mounted the mission steps and walked straight into her in the kitchen. She looked ominously solemn.

“You know I don’t know your name?” Holliwell said.

“Justin Feeney,” she said. Perplexed, he thought, and weary.

“Is Father Egan around?”

She shook her head.

“He’s back in the ruins. I’m sure he forgot about dinner with you. I should have told you he would.”

“Maybe I should go back and talk to him.”

“It’s too far,” she said. “It’ll get dark and you’ll lose your way. And he won’t go with you. He’s out of it.”

Holliwell turned to look at the sky’s light.

“He’s in a bad way,” Justin Feeney told him.

“So be it,” Holliwell said. “I sure would like a look at those ruins once.”

“How’s your leg?”

“Fine,” he said. He looked at her; it seemed she had not moved at all since his coming in.

“You must have rented that jeep and everything,” she said. “I’m really sorry.”

“Nothing to be done, I guess.”

“Do you like brandy?” she asked.

“Sure.”

She went into the dispensary wing and came out with a small bottle of medicinal brandy and a bottle of agua mineral.

“You have some,” Holliwell said, when she had opened them. She seemed not to hear.

“I’d take you back to the ruins myself if there was time,” she said. “But there isn’t. It’ll be too dark to see anything.”

“Another time.” He felt her eyes on his face as he drank.

“Listen,” he said when he had finished the brandy, “how about you coming in to town with me? I’d just as soon not go back to the Paradise.”

“No,” she said, and laughed nervously. “No, it’s not possible.”

“Sure?”

“No,” she said firmly. “Not possible.”

“O.K.,” Holliwell said. He wanted not to leave. “Do you suppose I could have another brandy?”

“You shouldn’t,” she told him. “Your system’s been poisoned.”

“My leg’s fine. The rest of me could use a little bracing.”

“You shouldn’t,” she told him.

“Well, hell,” Holliwell said. “Checked at every turn.”

“All right,” Justin said. She went back into the dispensary and when she came out she had two bottles of brandy, together with the bottled water. When she poured his, she poured one for herself.

“Is something wrong?” Holliwell asked, seeing her.

“I’d like to go into town for dinner,” Justin told him. “I will.”

“You will?”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, please.”

Holliwell was smiling uncertainly.

“Fine,” he said after a moment.

“We could go,” the nun said, “to the Chinese restaurant in town. It’s not too bad.”

“That’s fine,” he said.

There was something wrong, he decided. It was not the bad atmosphere he had brought from the hotel, or his disorientation or the pain in his knee, which burned now with the liquor. The woman was on wires, her eyes were wide open and staring, her mouth slightly open as though she had received a blow. She had the most beautiful eyes, he thought.

“Why don’t I drive in,” Justin said. “You can leave your jeep here if you like.”

“You’re afraid I’ll pass out at the wheel?”

“You might well,” she said. “But I just thought you’d be more comfortable.”

“That’s kind of you,” he said. “I would be.”

She was trying very hard to be cool, he thought, enjoying herself a little; she seemed to really want to come along with him. But she could not quite get it together. She was up to something. Drinking his drink, watching her, he felt a certain regret at having come. He was thinking that there was going to be trouble and that she knew it and was afraid. And although he was certainly neither a spy nor an informer, although his visit was an innocent one — he was not the company she should be keeping.

They drove in silence through the brief dusk and into the night. The ghostly sparkle of the sea was on their right; on their left the darkness compounded itself into the mass of the Sierra. It was a ride on the edge, among half-seen and unseen things, an increasingly tense and uneasy-making ride for Holliwell. He caught glimpses of wood fires through slat doorways, of fires in the cane fields. Beside him at the wheel, a frozen-faced female stranger possessed of some taut strength he felt himself to be somehow taxing. But it was beautiful there; the wind was what God had meant the wind to be, fresh from the ocean, unsullied by time. Smaller breezes stirred against the sea wind’s breast, carrying an iodine smell, a smell of jacaranda, of flowers he knew by half-forgotten, six-toned names from across the world—me-iang, ving, ba—the smell of villes in Ban Me Thuot, cooking oil, excrement, incense, death. The smell of the world turning. War.

It was wrong for him to be there. He had chosen to live where the world turned wrapped in illusions of peace, where all odors startled, the soul slept and dreams were only dreams. This fate-scented night brought up his wariness, his body tensed, he watched from behind the lights with the rapid eye movement of nightmare. It was war here; his nerve ends shivered like the polyps of the reef, vibrating to guns which he could almost hear.

“It’s beautiful here,” he said to her, as they turned inland and the jeep labored up a grade to the low cliffs over the delta.

“I guess it is,” the strange young woman said. The nun.

Over the dim lamps and the encircled glare of Alvarado’s naked lights, he could make out, far out to sea, a tiny beacon. It would be Camarillo, the nearest of the Corazón Islands. It was a sweet island. He had friends there once. He knew that he would not be seeing it this time around.

Descending toward the streets of town, he looked at her from time to time, trying not to let her catch him at it. She seemed, superficially, to have thrown every grain of her energy into the driving; she sat erect and rigid and the expression of mild shock in which her face was set never changed. She was stone beautiful, he thought; to his eye outrageously and provocatively beautiful, an impossible nun. And stone fierce now, her beauty suggested steel to him, steel that drew blood, the Queen of Swords.

“Not a bad town as they go,” he called to her above the engine’s whine. She nodded without looking at him, and showed her white upper teeth between the soft parted lips. He could not make himself look away from her then. She was the only person in the world. He needed to find her out and love her. Bad luck, he thought. Bad luck for both of them.

She guided him along mud streets, past square cement houses to the Gran Mura de China. It was a lime-green wooden building beside the river, the interior done up with a little halfhearted chinoiserie. There were plastic tables and fringed lanterns and a three-dollar dragon tapestry over a counter where a pale middle-aged Chinese woman leaned beside her abacus. A party of four Greek ship’s officers were eating steak and eggs at one end of a long table in the back of the room.

Justin exchanged a few pleasantries with the Chinese woman and then took Holliwell up a flight of stairs to a balcony where there was a table with a window overlooking the slightly fetid harbor. The breeze was fresh enough to make it the most pleasant table in the place. Dragons notwithstanding, there was nothing to be had that night except tough steak and eggs and jalapeños. They started out with Germania beer, served them by a Chinese girl of twelve or so.

“You must have been very young when you came,” Holliwell said.

“I was twenty-two,” she said. “I did my last year of nursing with them — the Devotionists.”

He wanted to ask if she had desired to go where springs failed not.

“Why them?”

“It must have been a newspaper ad,” she said. “Isn’t that silly?”

He thought it was very peculiar. He was silent.

“I was in Los Angeles at Cedars Hospital. I came from the country, you see, from Fairfield, Idaho. I didn’t like Los Angeles. I was after God, all that. They wanted me.”

God. All that. Yes, indeed, he thought. Life more abundant. More.

“I always thought of them as being in another century. I mean more than the others.”

“No,” she said, “no more than the others. They have lots of good women doctors.”

He nodded enthusiastic agreement.

“A lot of religious used to think of them as low Irish. Still do, I guess.”

“I know that to be true,” Holliwell said. “Part Jesuit as I am. There is a grain of truth in it, is there not?”

“I’m a grain of truth in it,” Justin said.

Her voice made him think of clear water, running over smooth stones. Gold-flecked pebble bars in the south fork of the Salmon. The fool’s gold and the real stuff.

“Why a nurse and not a doctor? I mean … not that there’s anything wrong with nursing.”

“The status side of it doesn’t really worry me. I don’t guess it occurred to me then that I could be a doctor. I was a girl, right? You think they had women doctors up there in Zion?”

“I suppose not when I was younger,” Holliwell said. One of us, he thought, has got to calm down. “I thought maybe by your time they had.”

“No,” she said. She sipped her beer and touched the paper napkin to her lips, staring all the while. “You know,” she said, “you look a bit spaced. Are you all right?”

“I’m perfectly well,” he said very slowly. “If you don’t mind my saying so, you look a little spaced yourself.”

“Oh,” she asked, “do I?” She tried to laugh. “Well, I am.” She tried again. “Because we’re moving out. And we’re so busy.”

“We should take things easy now. We’re not working at the moment.”

Holliwell called to the child for more beer.

“It’s terrible beer,” Justin said.

“Yes, it certainly is.”

Somehow, he thought, he was going to have to tell her about the whole business — Marty Nolan, Ocampo, all of it. He would have to explain himself and that would be the hard part. His presence did not explain well. He had followed disordered circumstance, coincidence, impulse and urging so heedlessly that the logic of his to-ings and froings had evaporated. He made no sense. Except as an agent of Nolan’s.

If he did not tell her, it might be more dangerous for her. She was in some danger already. If he did tell her, it would quite likely be dangerous for him.

“I’ve heard talk of you around,” he said to her. “You’ve apparently made an impression here.”

“What have you heard?”

“There are people who think you’re a radical of some kind.”

“Who?”

“Local people. I met a man at Playa Tate the other day after I spoke with you. He didn’t seem to like you.”

She seemed neither surprised nor alarmed.

“There are people here who hate my guts. They’re all I have to show for being here. The local Guardia, for instance.”

“That’s interesting,” Holliwell said. “Why’s that?”

“Oh,” she said, “because when the mission was open I was running some projects they didn’t like. I was training women in some basic nursing and it got sort of political. There were other things too. Anything like that gets them uptight. And I was friendly with some church people who were suspected of being anti-government. I still am.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad.”

“Maybe not to you. But it’s enough for the Guardia.”

“I thought it was dangerous to have misunderstandings with the Guardia.”

“I’m leaving, see, so my war’s over. They win. I quit.”

“The man at Playa Tate was pretty nasty.”

“Do you know his name?”

Holliwell thought about the question for a moment and decided to stall. It was bad business.

“Didn’t catch it.”

“Cuban?”

“I think so.”

“I know who it was. He’s a big-time hardware person. He’s nice enough when I see him but I understand he has Fidel on the brain.”

“I think it’s all a bit frightening,” Holliwell said.

“They spy on me — the Guardia do. I don’t think they can do much more than that.”

Suddenly, he realized that she was frightened. Fear was one of the elements composing her state that evening. What she needed was a friend. And what she has, he thought, is me.

“I hope you’re being careful.”

“You better be careful too, you know.” He watched her glance about the room. “You don’t want to be here when it goes.”

“Is it imminent?”

“I only know what I hear. I hear … a lot.”

The beer came and Justin hastened to change the subject. She was a bit frantic, manic.

“You can’t drink both of those beers,” she told him. “You’ll be ill. I’ll have to drink one.”

“Sorry about that,” he said. “It is sporting of you.”

“You’re damn right it is, this horse piss.”

“You certainly don’t have the manner of a nun, do you?”

“Horse piss is in Shakespeare,” she said. “In The Tempest.” And then she suddenly looked sad.

Holliwell felt she would be easier to deal with that way, although she had broken his heart with horse piss in The Tempest. He was more in love than he could ever remember. And the beer was truly dreadful.

“Do you feel good about your six years here? I mean have you …”

“Have we brought spiritual guidance to the soul and temporal health to the body of our flock?”

He checked his impulse to apologize for the question, for bringing forth her impatient scorn.

“Have you?”

“I think it was all for us,” she said. “What we did we did for ourselves.”

“Everyone does for themselves finally.”

“Easy answer,” she said.

“You expected more from being here?”

“What I expected I don’t know.”

I know, Holliwell thought. But he realized he could know only in part. He avoided looking her in the eyes; it was harrowing because she could conceal nothing. Along with the fear, mastering it, was a mighty pride. More was what drove her. Whatever the world afforded in the name of virtue, sacrifice, good works — she wanted more, wanted it all, as though she deserved it. She could be clever, she could play a little homely poker but she had never learned to trim the lights of her pride.

“What will you do when you get back to the States?” he asked her.

“First laicize. I don’t belong in the church. I don’t believe in it. I’m a fake nun.”

“You’re not a fake, ma’am, whatever you believe.”

“We made a botch of it here,” she said. “You wouldn’t believe what a mess we made of it.”

In her eyes, the hunger for absolutes. A woman incapable of compromise who had taken on compromise like a hair shirt and never forgiven herself or anyone else, and then rebelled. She could, he thought, have no idea what that look would evoke in the hearts of smaller weaker people, clinging to places of power. She was Enemy, Nemesis, Cassandra. She was in real trouble.

When he looked out of the window and saw the fishing smack steaming for its berth, two deckhands with red and green flashlights playing at being running lights, he followed the rivers of his own past. There, in an instant was Dalat, the Perfume River, its banks disgorging Marty Nolan to a second, lesser life. Holliwell had the strange notion that Nolan had found this woman out by some magic of Lazarus, had found himself a new war and an enemy. Then watching Justin eat her charro steak, demurely, but one would have to say hungrily, he wondered if something like the same thing was not true of him, if he had not sought out war and nemesis. But he was in love past regret. Regret, his second nature, the very fluid of his veins, and it was not there.

“You probably asked too much of yourself. I think it must be hard to make a dent down here.”

“We tried. We were doing it the wrong way.”

“I wonder if there’s a right way,” Holliwell said.

She was puzzled. “There must be,” she said. Then she said: “I’m glad you stopped asking me questions. I felt on the spot.”

“I’m sorry,” Holliwell said. “Why do you think I was asking questions?”

She smiled a thin tense smile.

“You’re seeing our part of the world, aren’t you? You’re an intelligent tourist and you want your money’s worth. We’re local color.”

“You state my good intentions very coldly,” Holliwell said.

“Good intentions get a going over here. Am I right more or less?”

“No, you’re wrong. I’m asking you questions because I like you. And I’m an anthropologist. It’s my way of communicating. It’s all I know.”

“You’re supposed to gain people’s confidence first. Even dumb missionaries know that.”

“I would like very much to gain your confidence,” he said.

“And why? When you’re just passing through. What’s my confidence worth? I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m being difficult. I’m not very good company.”

“Madam,” Holliwell said, “you’re all the company I want, believe me.

“Who, me?” she asked. She seemed genuinely incredulous.

“I like you, I told you that. I wouldn’t say it if it wasn’t so.”

“Are you lonely?” she asked. Strange question.

He smiled. “Always. So I’m the deserving object of your attention.”

She was staring at him again but her look was no longer so wild.

“It never occurred to me that someone like you could be lonely. I was thinking how interesting and full your life must always be.”

“You’re putting me on,” he said. He was fairly certain she was not but he had to ask. There was not another soul he knew who would make such a statement without irony.

“I’m not,” she said. “I most certainly am not. Do you know what fun this would be for me if it wasn’t for … things?”

“Let’s …” He sought words, the right words, he was desperately afraid of losing her. “Let’s put things aside.”

Her look was so sorrowful and so transparent that he could not bear to face it. She was shaking her head.

“They don’t put aside too well,” she said.

“Let’s go outside,” he said, “or I’ll make you drink more of the beer. Is it cool to walk by the river?”

To her eyes came a smile that made them dazzle, a very small mischievous smile that she slowly gave way to. He stopped breathing.

“You mean is it safe for tourists? Yes, it’s safe enough.”

When they were downstairs, and Holliwell peeling out soiled Tecanecan bills to pay for dinner, it seemed to him that he saw her place her paper napkin, correctly folded, on the edge of the counter. He was too addled to take note of it at the time, but the image would come back to him later.

Beside the Gran Mura de China was a sorry little park with the warped ruin of a railing between the uncut saw grass and the riverbank. A stand selling ices was drawn up beside it. A few children played on the overgrown lawns, dodging between the sprawled bodies of three unconscious cane-juice junkies. An old black man in a Panama who looked as though he had been there all day occupied the only bench.

Holliwell and Justin walked a small paseo along the fence.

“The coconuts are all that’s dangerous,” she told him. “They never pick them off the trees.”

“We’ll sue.”

“Good luck,” Justin said.

Ahead of them, the river spread out to merge with the sea, a conjoining of darkness. The channel lights weaved restlessly between the slow current and the force of the tide.

“You’re limping,” she told Holliwell. “A shame about your leg.”

“It was just a ploy,” he said. “To get you down to the beach.”

“You didn’t know I was there,” she said.

“No.”

“I’m being simple,” she said, “I’m so turned around.” Then she laughed a little and he was glad she did because he felt as though he had lied and it pained him. Of course he had not lied; he had not known. “It’d be like shooting off your toe.”

He knew that he was going to have to tell her. But not just now, he thought, when the weight was off her and she was trying to have fun. Wartime romance, nothing like it.

“When do you think you’ll be back in the States?” he asked.

“Hard to tell. As soon as we can get it done.”

“And when you laicize — what will you do then?”

“Get a job, I guess. I’ve got an RN. I might apply to medical school after all, if I can borrow the money.” She looked at him in mild reproach. “You’re asking me questions again.”

“I have to,” he said, “because you never ask me any. Otherwise how will we find out who we are?”

“We’ll never find out,” she said. They had come to the end of the railing. Beyond there was only mud and mangrove stumps and darkness.

“I hate to,” she said, “but I have to go back. Can we? My God,” she said, “I’ve forgotten your name.”

“Frank. Yes, of course. We’ll go back.”

The road and night took them up again; they sat alone with their Furies as the jeep splashed along. Justin sat ramrod straight behind the wheel as she had on the drive in — Holliwell was halfway back to Route Three, with a sense of being caught on the road in the villes after dark, expecting a mine or an ambush and ready to dive for a ditch if there had been one.

When the jeep pulled up before the mission, they stayed in their places listening to the night sounds. Somewhere in the distance, an English-speaking voice was raised in some frenzied incantation. Neither of them remarked on it.

“God,” she said, “how I hate this place and what it means.”

Holliwell climbed out of the jeep. Justin stayed where she was.

“Look,” he said, “let it go. It’ll be your past and you’ll have learned something from it. There isn’t a lot you could have done differently.”

“Six goddamn years,” she said. She took the keys out of the ignition, climbed out of the jeep and started to walk around it. “We could have done a lot differently. We could have helped people defend themselves … from these American flunky thugs that run things here. Instead of dispensing APC’s and holy water. Now it’s too late.”

He came around the jeep to her.

“Sorry,” she said. “I’m blathering.”

When she looked at him, he saw that she was exhausted. Her face was drawn; she was near breaking.

“Nothing is too late for you, Justin. You’re young.”

She bit her lip and looked at the ground, her eyes wild again, like an animal looking for a way to run. His hand went out toward her as though he could not have held it back and he took her hand. It was trembling but dry, a small fastidious hand in his large sweating palm.

“My name is May,” she said suddenly. “I was born in May.”

“May,” he said, “I have to hold you a minute. You’re shaking.”

She looked up then and stared — past him, through him.

“No,” she said. “You can’t do that here. You don’t know what you’re doing to me. You can’t know.”

“You’re in trouble,” he said. “I think you’re in trouble. I’m coming back tomorrow.”

“You mustn’t do that …”

“I’ll come tomorrow. And if you think you have to — you’ll send me away.”

She only shook her head.

He forced himself away from her, walked to his rented jeep and started it up.

She was standing at the foot of the steps as he drove out. He could take his eyes from the roadway only for a moment to look at her; he tried to smile.

“Be careful,” he heard her call to him. May.

When the mountains and the aircraft beacon were in sight above the horizon, Pablo cut his speed back to nine knots and watched the Loran digits roll toward what he hoped would be the figures on Mr. Callahan’s line-of-sight chart. The dock lights on the chart were dimly visible now, a single glow below and to the right of the beacon. From time to time, he glanced at the Fathometer. The bottom was still in its place.

Two local shrimpers showed their working lights far off southward; the Cloud itself was showing no lights at all. As Pablo watched, the mountain beacon loomed ever high above him and through his glasses he could make out the little dock on which the dock lights shone. He could even see lights in the windows of the building behind the pier.

He cut his speed further; the rattle of his engines in the quiet night was making him nervous. He was swallowing another pain pill when the Fathometer suddenly plunged to ten feet and sloping up — he took manual control and came about; the DF signal after so many constant hours began to waver and wander in its tone. He turned it down. The zero-zero-zero course meant nothing now, he was up against a wall of coral, blundering for the Loran fix, trying for all he was worth to line up the beacon with dock lights at the proper bearing. The night seemed full of treachery.

He began to panic. Everywhere he turned the wheel, the marbles were waiting for him. Instincts of mindless flight possessed him. To turn seaward. To put out and follow the coast to the appearance of safety. Or to Negus’ promised islands of bliss, or San Ignacio or Colombia. But he could no longer believe in refuges, he dreaded the morning light and its exposure and dreaded more the open sea from which he had escaped and which was now beyond his managing. Whatever was done would have to be done here.

Half praying, drenched in sweat, he spun the wheel. Trying to put the light bearings where they should be, watching the Loran digits.

Suddenly there was a voice on the open CB. The voice sounded so close and clear that Pablo turned from his desperate work in guilty terror. It was as though someone were there.

“Mr. Fry? Do you copy? Mr. Fry?”

In the situation he was almost tempted to call for help. At the moment, nothing seemed worse than being where he was.

“Do you copy, Mr. Fry?”

He fought the impulse to answer and the voice desisted.

Once, when the bearings seemed right and the digital reading was square with Callahan’s, the Fathometer reading was less than fifteen feet. It was all wrong. Just before he spun her around, he saw his bottom reading fall off all the way to seventy, then eighty, then ninety feet. He laughed and swore and was cutting his engines when the terrible sound of something striking the hull shook him to his soles. He swung hard to port, knowing it would be too late — and ran to look over the side. There, in a light which was purely the illumination of God’s grace, was the marker, bouncing along his starboard side like a tin can along a windy street, until its anchor held it fast and it cleaved to his hull like a puppy.

“Ave Maria purissima,” Pablo said aloud.

The inshore current was already easing him toward the reef edge. Moving quickly, he released the windlass and let the chain play out. There was no extra line across the anchor crown — if it stuck fast, then he was stuck fast — he could not concern himself with that now. The current spun the vessel round so that her forepeak faced the open sea. Pablo looked at the ocean and trembled. He was sick and hurting, he wanted no more of it out there. More than anything he wanted to land.

But turning shoreward was no comfort. Behind the lights that had shone to save him was Tecan. It was all the game and there was no end to it.

He hastened to arm himself — reloaded the Remington and put another clip in his own automatic. He retrieved his shoulder holster from the lazaret and slipped it on under his dirty work shirt. There were no more slugs for the Nambu, so he pitched it overboard. Then he seated himself outside the cockpit and waited.

It was not long before he heard engines approaching in the darkness. They were strong outboards, the kind that pushed the heaviest Boston whalers, and there was more than one.

“Mr. Fry!”

It might have been the voice he had heard over the CB. The other boats had cut their engines; only one advanced toward the Cloud on low throttle. He raised his head over the rail. What he saw in the darkness might have been a boat with men in it. Or might not.

“Mr. Fry?” asked the voice from the ocean.

Pablo thought about it for a minute.

“That’s right,” Pablo called back. “That’s me. Who are you, cuz?”

He was answered with silence. Then all the outboards started up together; there were three or four. There were no more hails from the water, they were waiting for codes.

“No sé las codas,” Pablo shouted. He did not know the Spanish word for codes, whether it was codas or not. “I’m just a peon on this boat.”

“Show yourself,” a frightened voice called. When he came to the rail, he was holding the shotgun. He could see their boat now; it was in fact a whaler and there were four men in it, all of them pointing what looked like M-16’s at him. The other boats hung on their throttles in the darkness some distance off. There would be other guns covering him there.

“The gun!” a second and even more frightened voice called.

Pablo realized that he was holding the Remington and threw it over the side. If they’d landed as many pieces as had gone over the side this trip, he thought, they could have themselves a couple of revolutions. And it was a damn fine shotgun.

Lights went on in his face and from the startled reaction he heard from the men in the boat, he imagined he must be a strange sight.

The friend of Mr. Fry had regained his composure.

“Everyone aboard together,” he demanded. “Everyone to show themselves.”

Pablo felt very tired in spite of the speed.

“The hell of it is,” Pablo shouted back, “there ain’t no one but me.”

Silence again, while the unseen boats circled off somewhere and the four men in the nearest boat watched him. Finally they pulled alongside. As the others tried simultaneously to hold their rifles on Pablo and steady themselves in the swell, the main man began to clamber aboard. The artificial hull deceived him; stepping from his own boat, he found himself short of the rail and was forced to come in hand over hand.

The men in the boat flashed their light on Pablo and on their leader and then turned it off again. They were plainly as chary of lights as he was.

Pablo shrugged to show his good will. His diver’s knife and the automatic were still concealed on his person.

The man from the whaler was trying to watch Pablo and look around at the same time. In a moment, he called his friends aboard, and Pablo heard the other whalers draw closer.

The four men who had come aboard tied their whaler’s painter around a bit. The leader, the one who spoke, had Pablo spread-eagled on the deck beside the wheelhouse. The two others made their way cautiously through the compartments. They carried lights but showed them only in closed spaces.

“Sangre,” Pablo heard one of the men say. Perhaps for that reason the leader ripped open Pablo’s shirt and found the automatic there. When there was a second man to back him, he took the whole harness, holster and all, and put it over his own shoulder.

The leader spoke to one of his men in words that Pablo could not make out and the man spoken to made a noise over the side like a soft cattle call. The other boats came in now and people began climbing over the rail. Pablo had the feeling there was another boat off somewhere, perhaps keeping watch.

They could kill him now, Pablo thought. A number of them crouched around him, keeping below the rail, shining their lights on him as though he were some strange sea creature they had brought up.

Men were shoveling aside the ice covering in the hatches. When they found the weapons crates, he could tell from their cries that not all of them in fact were men. They were hauling the crates out of the hatches now; their boots crunched against the overturned plastic baskets and the shrimps’ useless shells.

He turned his head to one side and between the legs of the men who guarded him saw the boat people working on the crates with their crowbars, checking their contents. A woman in a bandana knelt with them, holding a checklist, reading off contents.

“Galil. Seventy-five. Fifty-round clips. Three boxes.” She read on, hesitating, as though the words must be unfamiliar to her. “TRW. Seventy-five. Five point fifty-six. Thirty-round clips. Three boxes.”

They had the crates out on deck and were working on the second hold.

“You’re shot,” the man who was the leader said to Pablo.

“Did you figure I didn’t know that?”

“I have to know what happened.”

Pablo laughed. “I wish I knew,” he said.

“Tell it as best you can,” the man said. “We are at war here. Were you attacked?”

“Naw,” Pablo said. “It was just paranoia.”

The man who was questioning him laughed. None of the others did.

“In other words, you fought. And the others?”

“You figure it out.”

“They were killed by you. That’s how I figure it out. And their bodies thrown to the sharks. How’s that, Yanqui?” the man asked him. “How’s that for figuring it out?”

“I don’t care what you do to me,” Pablo said. “None of this was my idea.”

From the forward hatchway came indiscreet cries of joy. It seemed, to Pablo’s understanding, that they had discovered rockets there. The leader, the man who had been questioning Pablo, got to his feet and quieted his troops. They formed passing lines and commenced to offload the cases onto their whalers.

When he returned to question Pablo, the leader directed all but one of his men to a loading station.

“Can you walk?” the head man asked Pablo.

As they were helping him to his feet they discovered the diver’s knife against his calf. Shaking their heads, they helped him into the cockpit. The boat leader and Pablo sat down in Negus and Callahan’s cockpit chairs. The leader’s number two stood in the hatchway, his weapon leveled at Pablo’s chest.

“If our business is betrayed,” the head man said, “if anyone ratted here … you die first.”

“If I didn’t think the meet was O.K., I wouldn’t be here,” Pablo said. Although he had no idea where it was that he might be, regardless of what he thought.

“The fight was about the money, no? Or about the guns? Maybe someone tried to stop our operation?”

Pablo was at a loss to make them understand.

“It was part personal. It was part about the money.” He looked at the leader and at the man with the rifle. “Things happen that way.”

“Yes, truly,” the leader said. “Often in this world. And you are the winner. You must be very strong.”

“What’s that get me, chief? You’re the boss now.”

The leader wore a yellow oilskin and underneath it he carried a hand briefcase of cheap plastic. So full was it that the cloth beside its zipper bulged. Holding it under his arm, the leader went toward the Cloud’s CB receiver.

“I don’t think I like to be your boss,” he said.

He lifted the receiver off its cradle for a moment, then set it back down again.

“This isn’t good,” he told Pablo. “We thought we dealt with responsible people, you understand. This is trouble for us and we don’t need it.”

Pablo looked at the folder and said nothing. One by one he had heard the small boats taking off; the last boat was alongside now and the people in it were calling for their chief in low hisses. The armed man in the hatchway looked from Pablo to the last boat.

“Hay que matarlo,” he said to his chief. “We have to kill him.”

“Y la barca?” the chief asked, watching Pablo. “What about the boat.”

“Sink it.”

The leader looked as though he were about to smile. From the envelope in his hand he took a roll of bills and threw it on the chart table. Pablo saw that there were hundreds. On the top at least.

“It’s enough for one man. Two men in this country make less in a year. Now get yourself and your boat away from us.”

Pablo’s outrage made him speak without thinking.

“You see what he’s doin’?” he demanded of the second-in-command. “He’s grabbing money that’s mine. He aims to keep it himself.”

“Hay que matarlo,” the man with the rifle said.

“No,” the leader said. “Now,” he told Pablo, “go while you can.”

The two men went out of the cockpit and began climbing into the last waiting whaler. Pablo hobbled out after them. The whaleboat was floating free now. Pablo leaned down over the rail.

“I can’t make it,” he called to them. “I’m hurting and I don’t know my way out there.”

Someone started up the outboard.

“Look,” Pablo shouted, “that bread’s no good to me now. I got no place to go. Let me join up with you guys. I’m trained, you understand. I swear to Christ, compadre, I’m your man!”

“Some other time, eh,” the leader in the boat said. “You’re tough.” And the outboard disappeared into the darkness, its throttle held low.

“You stole my money, you fuck!” Pablo screamed. Probably no one heard him. There was no point trying to shoot at them; they were out of sight and shots would bring the law.

Thinking of the law, Pablo looked around quickly. The pier lights had gone out and the only light in view was the aircraft beacon on the mountaintop over the little harbor. Seaward, the breeze was as gentle as ever but a quarter moon was rising now, to show the lines of the Cloud against it. He looked at the ocean, lightly moonlit, and a wave of pain and exhaustion passed over him. The sight of it filled him with dread. He was afraid. He could not go back to it now.

Then the thought came to him that the town they had passed during the afternoon could not be far. A seaport — with great freighters loading up at cement piers. City lights had been going on there. He might find a billet on one of the ships. There might be buses, even an airport.

He wiped his brow, counted the money on the chart table and discovered that he had something less than fifteen hundred dollars in American bills. Fifteen hundred and a diamond — he would take his chances at sea no longer, in a boat full of blood, among reefs. He decided to set out for shore.