He turned the roll of microfilm back to the beginning and switched off the light in the projector.
The girl in the horn-rimmed spectacles came hurrying over, looking alarmed as if she expected him to wreck the machine or at least run off with the film. “Let me handle that,” she said. “These things are quite valuable, you know. History being made right before our eyes, you might say. Did you find what you wanted?”
Pinata glanced at Daisy. “Did you?”
“Yes,” Daisy said. “Yes, thank you very much.”
Pinata opened the door for her, and she began walking slowly and silently down the corridor, her head bent as if she were studying the tiles on the floor.
“No two are alike,” he said.
“Pardon?”
“The tiles. There are no two alike in the whole building.”
“Oh.”
“Someday when this current project of yours is finished and you need something new to amuse yourself with, you could come down here and check.”
He said it to get a rise out of her, preferring her hostility to her sudden, unexpected withdrawal, but she gave no indication that she’d heard him or even that he was there at all. Whatever corridor she was walking along, it wasn’t this one and it wasn’t with him. As far as she was concerned, he had already gone back to his office or was still up in the library looking at microfilm. He felt canceled, erased.
When they reached the front of the building, the carillon in the courthouse tower across the street was chiming four o’clock. The sound brought her to attention.
“I must hurry,” she said.
“Why?”
“The cemetery closes in an hour.”
He looked at her irritably. “Are you going to take some flowers to yourself?”
“All week,” she said, ignoring his question, “ever since Monday, I’ve been trying to gather up enough courage to go there. Then last night I had the same dream again, of the sea and the cliff and Prince and the tombstone with my name on it. I can’t endure it any longer. I must satisfy myself that it’s not there, it doesn’t exist.”
“How will you go about it, just wander around reading off names?”
“That won’t be necessary. I’m quite familiar with the place. I’ve visited it often with Jim and my mother — Jim’s parents are buried there, and one of my mother’s cousins. I know exactly what to look for, and where, because in all my dreams the tombstone is the same, a rough-hewn unpolished gray cross, about five feet high, and it’s always in the same place, by the edge of the cliff, underneath the Moreton Bay fig tree. There’s only one tree of that kind in the area. It’s a famous sailor’s landmark.”
Pinata didn’t know what a Moreton Bay fig tree looked like, and he had never been a sailor or visited the cemetery, but he was willing to take her word. She seemed sure of her facts. He thought, So she’s familiar with the place, she’s been there often. The dream didn’t just come out of nowhere. The locale is real, perhaps even the tombstone is real.
“You’d better let me come along,” he said.
“Why? I’m not afraid anymore.”
“Oh, let’s just say I’m curious.” He touched her sleeve very delicately, as if he were directing a highly trained but nervous mare who would go to pieces under too much pressure. “My car’s over on Piedra Street.”
8
Right from the beginning, she has been ashamed, not only of me but of herself, too...
The iron gates looked as though they had been made for giants to swing on. Bougainvillea concealed the twelve-foot steel fence, its fluttery crimson flowers looking innocent of the curved spikes lurking beneath the leaves, sharper than any barbed wire. Between the street and the fence, rows of silver dollar trees shook their money like demented gamblers.
The gray stone gatehouse resembled a miniature prison, with its barred windows and padlocked iron door. Both the door and the lock were rusted, as if the gatekeeper had long since vanished into another part of the cemetery. Century plants, huge enough to be approaching the end of their designated time, lined both sides of the road to the chapel, alternating with orange and blue birds of paradise that looked ready to sing or to fly away.
In contrast to the gatehouse, the chapel was decorated with vividly colored Mexican tiles, and organ music was pouring out of its open doors, loud and lively. Only one person was visible, the organist. He seemed to be playing to and for himself; perhaps a funeral had just taken place, and he had stayed on to practice or to drown out a persistent choir of ghosts.
There was a threat of darkness in the air, and a threat of fog. Daisy buttoned her jacket to the throat and put on her white gloves. They were pretty gloves, of nylon net and linen, but they looked to her now like the kind that were passed out to pallbearers. She would have taken them off immediately and stuffed them back in her purse if she hadn’t been afraid Pinata would observe the gesture and put his own interpretation on it. His interpretations were too quick and sure and, at least in one case, wrong. She thought, I know no person called Juanita, only an old song we sang at home when I was a child. Nita, Juanita, ask thy soul if we should part...
She began to hum it unconsciously, and Pinata, listening, recognized the tune and wondered why it disturbed him. There was something about the words. Nita, Juanita, ask thy soul if we should part... Nita, that was it. Nita was the name of the waitress in the Velada Café, the one Fielding had “rescued” from her husband. It could be, and probably was, a coincidence. And even if it wasn’t a coincidence, and Nita Donelli and Juanita Garcia were the same woman, it meant nothing more than that she had divorced Garcia and married Donelli. She was the kind of woman who would ordinarily seek employment in places like the Velada, and Fielding was the kind of man who frequented them. It seemed perfectly natural that their paths should cross. As for the fight with the woman’s husband, that certainly hadn’t been planned by Fielding. He’d told the police when he was arrested that she was a stranger to him, a lady in distress, and he’d gone to her assistance out of his respect for womanhood. It was the type of thing Fielding, at the euphoric level of the bottle, would say and do.
They had come to a fork in the road at the top of the mesa which formed the main part of the cemetery. Pinata stopped the car and looked over at Daisy. “Have you heard from your father?”
“No. We turn right here. We’re going to the west end.”
“The waitress your father got into a fight over was named Nita. Possibly Juanita.”
“I know that. My father told me when he phoned about the bail money. He also told me she was a stranger to him, a good-looking young woman who’d led a hard life — those were his words. Don’t you believe him?”
“Yes. Yes, I do.”
“Well, then?”
Pinata shrugged. “Nothing. I just thought I’d mention it.”
“What a fool he is.” The contempt in her voice was softened by pity and sorrow. “What a fool. Will he never learn that you can’t walk into a squalid little café and pick up waitresses without inviting disaster? He could have been seriously injured, even killed.”
“He’s pretty tough.”
“Tough? My father?” She shook her head. “No, I wish he were. He’s like a marshmallow.”
“Speaking from my own experience, some marshmallows can be very tough. Depends on their age.”