"No, I say we pretty sure. What's the same as pretty sure? Quite sure? Very sure? Let's say I'm as sure as I have to be."
Boudreaux said, "Well, if you're that sure…" and smiled slightly.
Tavalera started to turn, but stopped as Amelia said, "Wait a minute," amazed that Rollie was letting it go. "Victor's just as sure they're not insurgents. There must be a way to resolve this kind of situation. Isn't there?"
"Yes, of course," Tavalera said. "What we say is, why take a chance of making a mistake?" He turned from the window, motioned his men out of the way as he approached the two prisoners, removed the ropes from around their necks and placed the men one in front of the other, as though to march them off the platform. Now he drew his revolver and shot each one, barn barn, like that, in the right temple.
Tavalera did not look at the train window again. His men did when he said something to them in Spanish, but Tavalera walked away without looking back.
Fuentes watched him, then turned to the window as Boudreaux said, "Well." And said, "I guess that's that."
Fuentes looked at Amelia. In the moment she was looking back at him with no expression, nothing, her face drained of color, and yet each knew what the other was thinking.
Before they came to the road where the horses were waiting, Amelia used another compartment to change into boots and a riding skirt. It was the middle of the afternoon. Fuentes knocked on the door for her luggage, which would follow the horses in a wagon.
She said to him, "Tell me something about Mr. Boudreaux. What side is he on?"
Fuentes said, "Excuse me?"
"You know what I mean."
Fuentes looked at her directly and said, "The government or the insurrectos, the insurgents?" Amelia nodded. "Which?" "The wrong side," Fuentes said. "What kind of man is he?"
"Like the rest of them. He knows only his own kind."
The tea this time was served in the inner courtyard of Lorraine's home in Vedado, jade plants in pots, decorative blue tile on the walls, pillars that gave the courtyard the look of a cloister.
"For supper," Amelia said, "we might have soup, rice, eggs, plantain, a crab salad, roast peacock, guava, cheese and some kind of pudding."
"Peacock?" Lorraine said. "Peacock. Like the Romans." "What does it taste like, chicken?"
"Turkey. Then for breakfast we might have soup, rice, eggs, plantain, fried crabs, guava, cheese and coffee. Breakfast is really dinner, the midday meal. The cook's name is Cimbana, she's from the Congo and keeps cigar butts in her turban, among other things."
"It's different here, isn't it?"
"Very different."
"What about the house?"
"There's the sugarhouse," Amelia said, "full of machinery they shove the cane into to make sugar… " She paused. "If the mill doesn't have a centrifuge it can only make brown sugar. Did you know that? And there's the vivien da the residence, built in 1848. It has a red tile roof, verandas on three sides of both floors-kind of like old plantation homes but not as Greek Revival-looking. More austere, and without trees close around it. The living quarters are upstairsmdining room, sitting room, everything-offices and the servants' quarters downstairs, and a hall full of saddles, bridles and guns locked in cabinets. The kitchen's in back."
Amelia looked up at the courtyard's high ceiling and the second-floor balcony.
"I like your house better. It's warmer."
Lorraine said, "Can I ask you something?"
Amelia was still looking around. "Rollie's house has glass panes in the windows and doors, but they're always open; flies come in and out as they please. There're a few shrubs, tropical plants, a lot of banana trees, a few mango, vegetable plots and twenty thousand acres of sugarcane, three estates Rollie bought and combined into one. They call them estates, but what they are really are little towns with the main house in the center, the sugarhouse with its big ugly smokestacks, and streets of stone houses for the workers, a Negro quarter, a Creole quarter, a street that's all Chinese and a nicer area where the higher-ups, the people in charge, have their homes: the estate manager, another man who's a chemist and runs the sugarhouse-I think he's the one they call the sugar master-and a few others who work directly under him, engineers, machinists… Rollie has over a million and a half in just the land, and spent another hundred thousand to modernize the sugarhouse, put in all the newest machinery. If it's a good year, you know how much sugar he'll produce and ship?" "Amelia?"
"I've forgotten now how much, but it's an awful lot." She paused and said, "What?"
"Have you slept with him?"
"I have, yes," Amelia said, and had to smile at the way Lorraine was staring at her so intently. "So you're staying?" "For a while anyway." "Where're you going to live?"
"I guess wherever he wants me to."
Lorrainecontinued to stare.
"There's something you're not telling me." "What do you want, intimate details?" "You sound different."
"Well," Amelia said, "nothing happened until we got to the summerhouse. It's smaller than the one on the estate but more comfortable, with a veranda and a view of the Gulf rather than cane fields. The first night we were there, finally, after not saying a word to each other for hours, he took me into the bedroom. Mine; he has his own. And kissed me for the first time. I'm quite sure he thinks he seduced me. He was serious to the point of being grim, sort of ritualistic about it, first you do this and then you do that. It's funny, when we're alone-and this was true of other times, too, on the train or riding horses together-he doesn't seem as confident as he does when he's with people, an audience agreeing with him. It might be me," Amelia said, "or he's just not that comfortable with women. Anyway, Rollie finished, he got off and said, as he stepped into his underwear, "That wasn't entirely unpleasant, was it?"
"He said that?"
"He wasn't kidding, either."
"When I said there's something you're not telling me. Remember, before? I wasn't referring to what you did in bed. It was a feeling I had."
"About what?"
"That something happened you're not telling me about."
They came through rolling hills aboard the sugar train to Matanzas, Boudreaux telling Amelia there were more sugar estates here than in any province in Cuba. "How many, Victor? Four hundred and seventy-eight, if I'm not mistaken?"
"Not anymore," Fuentes said. "Maybe three hundred something. Many of them in the past year burn down, or the owner has enough-wake up in the morning and see black smoke in the sky, over his fields."
"I ask you a question," Boudreaux said, "I like a simple answer, whatever is the fact, not your opinion."
"You want to know exactly how many burn down?" "That's enough, Victor."
The train was creeping through the outskirts of the city, pale stone and steeples and red tile roofs, and now Boudreaux was pointing out to Amelia the villas of the wealthy, the old cathedral, the domed railway station, the ornate bridge that linked the city to the fortress of San Severino on the bay. "The second largest city in Cuba," Boudreaux said, "and some say the most beautiful."
"It's true," Fuentes said, "even though the word rnatanzas means slaughtering place."
"That's enough," Boudreaux said. He turned, shaking his head, to give Amelia a weary look.
"For the slaughter of livestock," Fuentes said, "cows to make biftec for here and for Havana. I don't mean the slaughter of the Indians who lived here-"
"Victor?"
"Or the twenty-three thousand last year, the reconcentrados who were made to starve to death, kept in filthy sheds along the Punta Gorda."
"I said that's enough," Boudreaux said. "Are you becoming restless, Victor, you want to move on?" He said to Amelia, "Victor, at one time, was a reader in a cigar factory. Which one was it, Victor?"
"La Corona."
"Victor ad to the employees while they rolled cigars. He'd read every word of the newspaper including the advertisements while they sat there rolling away. He even read a book once. Wasn't it Marti, Victor, the poet who's become you-all's hero?"