As Burke examined the photograph, his palms sweated a little. A mulatta in a muslin dress, her hair curled and tied with ribbons, stared out from the photographer’s painted landscape — a wooded hill, a distant temple. Her face was soft-featured, her eyes heavy-lidded, her mouth drawn into a coquette’s half smile. Her skin, from the picture’s tint, indeed seemed a bronze, cinnamon hue. Burke gave the picture back to the don, who returned it to his pocket.
“I’m not the only one with losses. It has been the talk of the Planters’ Club for weeks. Don Sancho is missing four slaves, Don Nicasio is missing five. And these just from the city. It seems to be the season of runaways.” He took a puff of his cigar, let out the smoke. “I have put her description in the papers with the offer of a reward, and I’ve had two of the city’s best slave hunters watching for her. All for nothing. So now I try you.” He put his hand on his desk and leaned forward. “I want you to find Marcita. It is hard, without my cinnamon here to comb my hair and soothe me.” In that moment, the man seemed truly distraught.
In Burke’s mind, a vision of himself stood, bowed stiffly, and pronounced that on his conscience he must refuse. But Don Hernán could ruin him. He hesitated as long as he could, his thoughts a fog. Then Don Hernán coughed impatiently and Burke lowered his eyes and said, “I am at your service.”
AFTER HE AGREED TO TAKE THE CASE, a cold dizziness bloomed beneath Burke’s chest. He fought it as best he could with procedure. In questioning the don and several of the other slaves, Burke learned that Marcita had disappeared in the Calle O’Reilly while marketing in the company of two slave boys, Domingo and Miércoles. They were out on an errand, so Burke arranged to have the boys meet him in the city at five. Then he made an inspection of Marcita’s quarters. She lived in a small room near the kitchens. One wall was decorated with an advertisement for an Italian soprano who had appeared on the stage two years before, and another with a collection of Honradez cigarette labels from a series depicting the progress of a pollo, a fop, from prince of the ball to beggar. Another series of labels, these for a Villargas brand, lay on her bedside table. They showed each of the islands of the Antilles as ladies, Cuba regal and bedecked with pearls and tobacco leaves, sprinkling sugar onto a globe, Santo Domingo a weeping negress with torn skirts. In a plain earthen jar Burke found a bundle of feathers and dried leaves, of the kind you could buy from the guinea women in the night markets for good luck, and beneath a loose tile he discovered a burlap sack filled with coins. He paused over this last item, wondering what might have compelled Marcita to forget the sack when she ran. Perhaps it meant she had fled on impulse. Then he left, sitting once more in the don’s high-wheeled carriage, his observations pressed against the front of his mind to stanch any seepings of guilt.
BURKE DIDN’T RETURN TO THE CALLE DEL SOL, where the old mansion that housed his rooms stood, until past one. The midday heat had already blanketed the city, and after a light lunch he isolated himself in his bedroom and rested. At three he woke to the call of a plantain vendor in the street below. The city was not yet stirring — the plantain vendor’s cry was the only noise that came from outside — and he moved to his study and remained there while the heat lifted. The effort to quash any notion of himself as a slave hunter had failed and he tried to compose a letter to Don Hernán, regretting that he could not finish the case and begging the don that it would not cost him his esteem, but he could not find the right words. No matter the phrasing, the don would be disappointed and insulted. Besides, Burke had already given part of his fee to Fernandita to pay off the butcher. He decided he had no choice now, and when his clock struck four forty-five he rose and left his rooms and went out the courtyard gate to keep his appointment with the don’s two slaveboys.
The sky was high and blue, and, with the worst of the day’s heat finally past, the city had spilled once more into the streets. Gentlemen in broad-brimmed straw hats walked together speaking of business, Capuchins delivered alms, a company of soldiers marched in seersucker uniforms, a lottery ticket seller cried out that his numbers were blessed. Burke had to pass through this throng as he crossed the Plaza de Armas, skirting Ferdinand VII on his pedestal, then going along the university walls and into the Calle O’Reilly. There he found the street, as usual, blocked with volantas. Pale ladies shaded by umbrellas sat in the carriages while shopkeepers came out of their shops to present them with their wares. Burke picked his way around them and after a block found the two boys waiting for him by the sweetshop. They were dressed in the don’s blue livery and engrossed in a game of punching each other in the arm. Burke introduced himself, then took them aside from the bustle and asked them to show him where Marcita had disappeared.
Miércoles, who was the older of the two boys, pointed toward a row of shops past the Calle Habana intersection. “She tole us to get some oysters, so we were loadin up the baskets, and when we done, she was gone.”
Domingo, the smaller and darker skinned of the two, nodded.
“And you saw nothing?”
Miércoles said he’d been watching the road while he held his basket and hadn’t seen her come back past. He thought she’d gone farther up the street.
Burke put his hands on the boys’ shoulders and walked them closer to the shops. The first shop off the Calle Habana intersection was the oyster stall, and next was the narrow stall of the Gallitos brand’s tobacco shop, and after that a bookseller’s. A corpulent, red-bearded fellow was dressing the Gallitos window with rolls of cigarettes. The prices were absurdly high, even for Havana standards, and the shop looked empty; Pedroso y Compañia, manufacturers of the Gallitos brand, had gone bankrupt two months before, and it appeared the new owners would do no better. Next door, however, the bookseller was doing a brisk business selling copies of David Copperfield. He sat beside his crate and handed copies up to the ladies who rode past, catching their coins in his palm. Burke asked what the boys had done after Marcita disappeared, and Miércoles told him that they waited a half hour then returned to the don’s villa on the horse trolley.
“And you didn’t worry?”
“Not on Tuesdays,” Domingo said.
Miércoles glared at Domingo, and Domingo clapped his hand over his lips.
“Ah, so she met someone on Tuesdays,” Burke said. “Who?”
Miércoles looked at his feet. “Her love man,” he said. Then he pinched Domingo until the smaller boy yelped.
Burke had the boys lead him to the lover’s rooms. They took him up the block to the Calle Compostela, turned right and past the Church of Santa Catalina, then walked north two blocks, then turned again, toward the city walls. They stopped finally before a dingy, mud-daubed building in the Calle Villegas. Burke asked which room was the lover’s, and the boys pointed toward a window on the top floor, the one farthest to the right. Leaving the boys in the street, Burke walked into the courtyard, up the stairs, and onto the interior veranda, found the lover’s door, and knocked. There was no answer. Beside the door someone had tacked a piece of paperboard that read Enrique López, Merchant. A grand title, Burke thought, for one who lived in one of the poorest buildings in the city. He waited and knocked again. Still no answer. Burke wasn’t sure what to do. At last he took his card, wrote Marcita’s name on it, and slid it under the door. Then he came out and walked the boys back to the sweetshop, where he bought them sugar sticks and sent them on their way.
THE CASE, it seemed, was shut. Marcita had absconded with her lover. That was an explanation he could give Don Hernán. Tomorrow morning he could send him the man’s name. Surely that would be enough. He’d refuse to track the two further, to clamp Marcita in irons.