He sat in a café and drank a horchata. As he sipped the cool drink and watched the street, he remembered what his mother had told him the last time he saw her. Burke had been brought up in the plantation house by his father, taught to read the books in the library, and allowed to range freely over his father’s land with his own gun to shoot birds in the marshes. There was no white wife — Burke’s father had been a bachelor — and so Burke’s mother was allowed to come spend evenings with him every month or so. “You make me proud,” she’d told him, pulling on the sleeves of his little velvet coat. He was eleven. “And you’re gonna keep making me proud. You’re gonna grow up and do good and be good to people.” She’d died two weeks later, when fever spread up the bayous.
When he’d stumbled on detective work, he’d thought again of his mother’s words. It was all he’d wanted, to do good, and here was his chance. He eased troubled minds, rooted out wrongs.
Later, hours past supper, Burke lay down to sleep and found he couldn’t. A thought had come to him and refused to leave. Sending the lover’s name to the don — would it be any different from putting the irons on Marcita himself?
THE NEXT MORNING, Fernandita brought him coffee and a buttered roll and set them on his desk. As he ate the roll, he watched the tangle of masts outside his window and considered whether he could write the letter. Fernandita was scraping ash out of the grate.
“What sort of man must I be,” he asked her, “to trap this girl for pay?”
He did not typically consult Fernandita on matters beyond the day’s marketing, but he was desperate. He’d barely slept, his mind brimming with the image of himself delivering a chained Marcita to the don’s office.
“A practical man,” Fernandita began, but was interrupted by the cry of one of the city’s rumor sellers in the street below. In the man’s singsong Burke had caught the word murder. He leaned his head out the window, spotted the seller, a beggar in a tattered hat. The man had started up his cry again when Burke whistled and asked, “What murder?”
The beggar looked up. “Toss me a roll and a real and I’ll tell you.”
Burke did so, and the man said some soldiers had been drinking in a field outside town when they found a slave’s body.
“Where?” Burke asked.
“Between the Paseo de Tacón and the railroad.”
“Man or woman?”
The beggar shrugged.
Burke crossed the study to the door, and once in the street he hailed a carriage, a hack with a negro driver. It was a stretch, but it gave him an excuse to delay writing the don. “Take me to the Paseo de Tacón,” Burke said, and the driver began weaving out of the city, moving his carriage skillfully through the crowds.
Twenty minutes later they came to a field scattered with soldiers. An army lieutenant and two government clerks stood at the back of the field, beside a grove of bushes, smoking, and behind them an orderly was brewing coffee. When Burke got out of the hack he made for them. As he approached, one of the clerks, a short man with gray sideburns and the flat, bland face of a sheep, stepped forward.
“You have no business here,” he said.
“I might,” Burke answered, and offered the man his card. “I’m in the employ of Don Hernán Vargas y Lombillo.”
The man broke into a grin and thumped the card with his forefinger. “I know of you,” he said. “You’re called the negrito. My name is Galván. You are most welcome.”
Burke stifled a wince. He was not fond of the appellation the city had given him. “Thank you. I only want to see the body.”
“Ah, that is a problem,” Galván said, looking across the field, where soldiers and policemen in brown holland uniforms were beating the grass with sticks. “We haven’t yet found the body. All we have is the head.”
“Only the head,” Burke said, then asked, “may I look?”
“Of course.” Galván spread his arm. “It’s just over there.” He pointed to the grove. “Forgive me if I don’t join you. I’ve had my fill.”
Burke thanked the man, then went over to the grove, parted the branches, and saw the head. His heart sank. The head belonged to a dark-skinned man with a scar running from his forehead to his cheek. He’d not admitted it to himself, but he’d hoped to find Marcita here and so be free of his burden. He thought to leave, but then decided to take a closer look. As he knelt and examined the head, all the noises behind him — the lieutenant’s guffaw, the policemen’s and soldiers’ complaints, the sush of their sticks against the grass — fell away. The head lay faceup, the skin ragged with gore along the neck where it had been severed. But no blood had drained onto the soil, a fact Burke found curious. The head must have been severed at some other place. He looked at the eyes, felt a chill when their gaze seemed to catch him, and wondered why the body was not here as well. He stood and went over to Galván.
“What’s near here?” he asked.
“Only the railroad tracks, the woods, the field, and those factories.”
Burke looked around the area. The tracks divided the field from the woods, and the factories — three of them, a nail factory, a cigarette factory, a snuff mill — stood on the field’s western end. Any evidence of the killer’s path had been destroyed by the soldiers beating through the field.
He had no business with the murder, but he found himself interested. “Would you mind sending me word once the body is found?”
“It’d be a pleasure,” Galván answered.
WHEN BURKE RETURNED TO HIS ROOMS, he found a note under his door. Fernandita was out, marketing for his supper, and the note was from Marcita’s lover. He’d come by, hoping to speak.
After leaving his card at the lover’s room, Burke had both worried and hoped that the man would flee, if he hadn’t already, that he would take Marcita from her hiding place and disappear. But instead the lover had come seeking him out? Burke stuffed the note in his pocket and turned around, going back out into the courtyard and through the streets toward the man’s dismal building.
When Burke arrived and knocked on the lover’s door, the man answered and beckoned him inside. He was a mulatto, at least two shades lighter than Burke and twenty years his senior. His cheeks and nose were covered with freckles, and he had a high, wide brow. The flesh beneath his eyes was puffed, the eyes themselves red.
“Please, sit,” the lover said, clearing a crate filled with tins from a chair. Burke did so and looked about the cramped room. Its walls were stained a pale yellow, and aside from another chair the only other piece of furniture was a couch whose crimson velvet had been worn to bare pink patches. He was about to ask the lover about Marcita when the man, unable to contain himself, shot out, “Tell me where she is. I beg you. Tell me what you know. Tell me anything.”
Burke, alarmed, straightened in his chair. “I was hoping,” he said, “you’d be able to do that for me.”
“But I thought she’d sent you!” Enrique said, then pleaded, “why torture me with your note?”
“I’m trying to find her,” Burke said.
Enrique was silent a moment. Then something seemed to catch. “Why?” he asked. A nervousness entered his voice. “Who hired you? Was it Don Hernán?”
“I’m under his employ, but he didn’t—”
“He knows?” At that he went to the window. A gauzy sheet hung there, luffing in the wind. “Oh, no no no.”
“I can assure you Don Hernán knows nothing,” Burke said, “and I can further assure you that he will learn nothing. You are safe. I’m charged only to find Marcita. That I will do, and nothing else.”