Margery began snoring. Delicate breaths edged with a glutinous phrasing. He rolled onto his back, careful not to wake her. The covers had slipped down about her waist, but she still lay on her side, one arm guarding her breasts, her hair undone, spilling over her cheek. At the point of her shoulder was a mole, perfectly round, like a period completing the milky phrase of her body. The sweet staleness of her breath, lips parted to reveal the bottom of a tooth. She seemed wholly unexpected. As unexpected as her story. It was not the sort of thing, he thought, that she would tell everyone, at least not in the way she had told it to him, and while he was not prepared to give this much weight, to derive from it any promise, it intrigued him nonetheless. Everything she had done until this moment could be explained in terms of a professional pragmatism, but the story was unmistakably an intimacy. His eyes went again to her breasts, and he suddenly longed to pull her against him, to feel her come awake in his arms. Yet longing was notched, not by a fear of rejection or by the awkwardness of the situation, but by his concern that this was only circumstantially different from dozens of evenings he had spent with women who were no more than joyless functionaries, expressions of public debt.
A light knock at the door alerted the colonel. Margery stirred, but continued to breathe deeply. He slipped out of bed and started to put on his trousers, then decided that whoever it was should see the whole show. He cracked the door. A tall young mestizo in a white waiter’s jacket was standing in the hall, holding a tray that bore two wine glasses and a green bottle in an ice bucket and a silver serving dish. “Con permiso…” the waiter began, but the colonel shushed him. The man nodded, pointed to the tray, and adopted an inquiring look. “Bueno… pase,” whispered the colonel, and opened the door to admit him, instructing him to set the tray on the chair by the window, and to do it quietly.
The waiter tiptoed across the carpet, his eyes roaming about the room. Though the colonel detected no bulge in the waiter’s jacket that would indicate a weapon, judging by his bearing, the economy of his movements, he suspected that beneath it the man was wearing a standard-issue army T-shirt. As the waiter turned to make his exit, his eyes dropped to the colonel’s under shorts and amusement grazed his lips. He pressed a small envelope into the colonel’s hand, and with a slight bow, not appearing to expect a tip, he slipped out the door and was gone.
Three words were printed on the card in the envelope:
Enjoy your gringa.
Beneath this salutation, intended—the colonel knew—to make him aware of the all-seeing eye now focused on him, was a scrawled signature, a single name of which only a fancifully scripted capital C was legible. That Carbonell signed himself like an emperor did not surprise him, nor did he find it laughable—though emperors were out of fashion, despots were not, and of such stuff as Carbonell were despots made. The colonel put on his trousers, shifted the tray to the floor, and sat by the window as darkness came to Puerto Morada. Intimations of what might come of the night turned slowly in his head, like millwheels in a lazy stream, affording him a glimpse of every bladed consequence. The woman in his bed moaned weakly, as in a fever; her pale face was blurred and indefinite in the shadow, like a white stone glimpsed through running water. Two roaring lights passed on the street; sprightly music from a nearby cantina braided the hissing of the wind in the palmettos. The colonel’s stomach growled. He ate several of the shrimp contained within the serving dish, but did not open the wine.
Shortly after nine o’clock, the hour when the Drive-In Puerto Rico customarily closed, Margery and the colonel went to talk with Tomas, leaving Gammage hiding in the room. They walked along the verge of the beach, keeping to the shadow of a palm hammock. Drops of orange fire pointed the windows of little wooden houses tucked in among the sinuous trunks, each one also announced by the rattle of a generator, and on occasion a lesser shadow emerged from the dark, tipped its hat and wished them good evening. Off on the horizon a lopsided moon, like an ancient medal of bone, paved the sea with a dwindling silver road, and the swarm of stars in its wild glitter seemed to construct a constant flickering conversation, causing the colonel to think that if he could hear them, their voices would resemble those of crickets. Bats squeaked high in the fronds; invisible chickens clucked; a dog barked distantly, with neurotic regularity. The wind had died, and mosquitoes whined in the colonel’s hair.
“Tomas feels that women have been a misfortune in his life,” he said as they came in sight of the Drive-In Puerto Rico. “He may appear rude.”
Margery slapped at her neck. “Maybe I shouldn’t be with you.”
“No, it’s better he knows a woman is involved.”
“But what if he won’t help?”
“He will. His attitude toward women doesn’t reflect dislike, just a mistrust of their effect on him. As far as I know, he has never been able to refuse them anything.”
The lights on the deck of the restaurant had been switched off, and Tomas was leaning on the railing. On spotting Margery, he let fall the hand he had raised in greeting, and his face grew impassive. As they sat together and the colonel told him what was required and why, he merely grunted in response. Margery continued slapping at mosquitoes, and finally, annoyed by these interruptions, Tomas went into the restaurant and returned with a jar containing a translucent greenish paste, which he handed to Margery. She sniffed at it, wrinkled her nose.
“It is not perfume,” he said brusquely. “However, it will keep away the mosquitoes.”
She thanked him and began dabbing it onto her arms and neck.
With a dolorous sigh, Tomas sat with his back to the railing, his face angled toward the stars. “Benito Casamayor has a suitable boat. And he is in need of money. But he will want a good price to challenge the authority of Felix Carbonell.”
“How much?” Margery asked.
“A thousand might persuade him.”
“Lempira?”
“Dollars,” said Tomas.
“I can have it within an hour.”
Tomas sniffed, a sign—the colonel thought—of his contempt for anyone who could so easily promise a thousand dollars. “I’ll arrange for Benito to be at the end of Punta Manabique at two o’clock in the morning. That will give him time to prepare his boat.”
“How will we get Jerry to the boat?”
Tomas refitted his gaze to the horizon. Their edges gone diaphanous, all smoke and luminous mother-of-pearl, bulky clouds had closed in around the moon, framing it in glowing complexity, like angels heralding a glorious birth in a Rafael or a Titian. A fish splashed in the offing, a sickly generator stuttered to life among the palms.
“How big a man is your friend?” Tomas asked.
“About six feet,” Margery said. “Two hundred pounds, maybe.”
“A little more, I think,” said Colonel Galpa.