‘Well, it’s not the Bony One,’ Jesús said at last, with just the slightest uncertainty in his voice.
Pablo snorted. ‘Don’t be a fool, Jesús. It couldn’t possibly be her.’
‘You got any better ideas?’
The way Pablo responded to this challenge, which was not at all, it could have been morning. But the entrance to the bar had filled with black, and bats swooped close to the ceiling, their shadows distorted and grotesque in the light of the kerosene lamp.
Wilson felt the two men’s eyes sliding down the bar to where he stood, searching him for some clue as to the identity of the mysterious woman. He pretended not to have noticed; he did not even appear to be aware of the existence of a mystery. This was easily achieved. He had been drinking for two hours. He was heading for unconsciousness along a straight road, and no amount of talk was going to slow him down or deflect him from his destination. There was no place in this for friends. Friends were about as much use as mosquitoes.
Sometimes a phrase from the letter rose into his head, and he grimaced and scraped his boot against the gutter that ran along the bottom of the bar; he might just have stepped in a cluster of fresh mule-dung. He could only console himself with this one thought: Montoya’s letter had gone on and on, his love endlessly repeating, an echo obsessed with itself. But then he remembered Suzanne’s face, struck with a kind of awe, and glowing, as if the sun had been setting behind his shoulder. To be so close to you and yet so faraway. The hours I spent with you were jewels. The letter was not bad. It was good — too good; he could not have written one like it. All his consolation dissolved. He thought of the plaster cast that he had kept as a memento, the ghost of a red rose showing through the dust. Like the light that hangs outside a brothel on a winter’s night. Wincing at this new bitterness of his, this treachery, he swallowed the contents of the glass that stood in front of him. He was almost sick.
It had been hot in the kitchen hut. The air seemed scented with her, some subtle distillation of her skin. She had taken the letter from him and turned the paper in her hands.
‘It’s a bomb,’ she said in a soft voice.
He stared at the dress that she was wearing. The skirt had been embroidered with lilies of the valley. A flower that stood for the return of happiness, she had told him once. The canaries sang in their gilt cage as if nothing ever changed.
‘Yes,’ she said, her voice still softer. ‘A bomb.’
She slid the letter back into the envelope and pushed the envelope into the centre of the cushion. She fastened the buttons that held the cover in place. Then she held the cushion in both hands, and turned it slowly, one ear bent close, listening.
When she was satisfied that the letter could not be detected, she lifted her eyes to his. He sensed that she wanted some kind of reassurance, but he was not sure that he could give it to her. There was her feeling, which he did not understand, and there was his, which he could not admit. He felt like a man being torn apart by horses. He made one final effort. It seemed to require all his remaining strength.
‘That bomb,’ he said, ‘you must be careful with it.’
‘I will be careful.’ Her eyes had opened wide.
‘It must not go off.’
She shook her head.
‘Take it upstairs. Put it back where it belongs.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘you’re right.’
She left the hut.
It was as if they had not spoken at all. An exchange had taken place in some secret space and would never again be mentioned. So quick, so simple — and yet it had exhausted him.
When she returned, he was waiting by the door.
‘And now,’ he said, ‘I really have to go.’
This time she did not argue.
He slid his glass across the counter. When Pablo came towards him, he took the bottle out of Pablo’s hand.
‘Look.’ Pablo spoke to Jesús. ‘He wants the whole bottle.’
Jesús whistled. ‘Must be some woman.’
Wilson ignored them both.
He drank the bottle dry and ordered another. The bar was filling with miners from the second shift. Voices, elbows, smells. Was there no peace anywhere? He took his empty bottle by the neck and smashed it against the wall. One of the miners put a hand up to his face. Blood gushed between his fingers. A wedge of flying glass had taken half his eyebrow off. Wilson told the man it was his own damn fault. Should’ve moved, shouldn’t he. Should’ve ducked. He tried to hit the man, but the punch looped through the air, a good yard wide. He climbed on to the bar and started dancing. It was a routine that he had seen a troupe of Africans perform in a saloon in Leadville, Colorado once. You had to stamp your feet and shake your fists and shout. His shouting took the form of curses. He cursed the Mexicans, the French, the Indians, the French again and, once again, the French. He undid his pants and pissed on Jesús Pompano’s boots. Then he attempted something else the Africans had not featured in their act, a flying somersault across the bar. He did not remember anything after that.
Chapter 2
Suzanne lay in bed, unable to move, anchored there by sweat. How did people ever sleep in heat like this? She kept seeing the Captain of the SS Korrigan, his skull pressing through his brittle yellow skin, his leering mouth. Wait till July. But it was still only the beginning of June. Her nightgown stuck to her body, and her hair hung in tight, damp curls upon her forehead. Then, as she turned over, seeking some miraculous panel of coolness in the bed, she heard the cries.
At first she thought the cries were taking place inside her head, the product of her fevered sleeplessness, but when she raised herself on one elbow and listened she could tell that they were coming from the open window. Surely it could not be Montoya again? She fought her way clear of the sheets and leaned on the window. The shutters stood open, a vain attempt to stimulate the flow of air. She peered out.
The nights in this place reminded her of no other nights; they had a demonic beauty all their own, in which both industry and nature played a part. There would be moons of strange proportions, sometimes gilt, sometimes scarlet, tilted at drunken angles in the sky. Like cups with no handles, or faces cut off just above the eyebrows. Even the clouds could send a shiver through her. They were thin and silver, rare apparitions. They lay parallel to one another, in horizontal rows, like surgical instruments on a country doctor’s wall. The wind, though soft, almost imperceptible, blew on shore and then off shore with the regularity of a watch for which each beat was six hours. It ebbed and flowed, just as the ocean did; it was like a tide happening in the air. Monsieur de Romblay had told her that they had to run the smelter so it worked in concert with this phenomenon. The smoke that was given off by the plant — the effluence, as he liked to call it — contained a lethal dust that could shower down on the town’s inhabitants, creating illness and disease. ‘And quite frankly, my dear,’ he had spoken behind his hand, though his eyes twinkled with a kind of mischief, ‘we’ve got enough problems with the Indians already, without poisoning them into the bargain.’ And so the smelter ran at certain hours of the night, dictated by the winds, and the smoke was ferried safely out over the gulf. During these hours you could hear the constant grating and clanking of machinery, as if something were being broken rather than made. It no longer disturbed her; it had come to seem familiar, almost reassuring. But some nights they timed it wrong, and the wind changed before they had a chance to shut the smelter off, and a glittering dust, the finest particles of copper that you could imagine, would float down through the atmosphere, settling on rooftops and trees, the ships that lay at anchor in the harbour, drunk miners on streetcorners, sleeping dogs, and the world would take on a supernatural, gilded look, as if some god had been at work with paints.