Byzantium (7 page)

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.”

Enrique pulled back the curtain and looked out. Then he stepped back toward Burke. “I love her,” he said. “When she is free, we’re going to move to Santo Domingo, away from the don, away from this island. I’ve been saving money to help her. See?” He offered Burke one of the tins in the crate. A crowned cow stared out from its label, which touted the contents as superior butter. “I sell this, for my living, for her. I was waiting for her last Tuesday. We were going to have an hour. But then she didn’t show. I worried. I thought the don had found out. Then I saw the notices the don put in the paper, and I thought maybe she had run.”

Burke’s mind began to leap with what Enrique had told him. “You were waiting for her on Tuesday?” he asked.

“Yes, yes,” Enrique said.

“Where, exactly?”

“At the corner of O’Reilly and Compostela.”

“And you kept a hard watch for her?”

“I always do.”

Burke rose, relief breaking through him like morning sun. She wasn’t a runaway—she had truly disappeared. “Thank you,” he said. Then, without another word, he went to the door.

“Is that all?” Enrique asked, still standing by the window and staring after Burke.

“It is enough.”

BURKE WALKED DIRECTLY to the Calle O’Reilly. There, halfway between the Habana and Compostela intersections, he planted himself in the center of the street. He looked eastward, toward the intersection where Miércoles and Domingo had waited, O’Reilly and Habana. Then he pivoted and looked westward, toward the intersection where Enrique had kept a sharp lookout, O’Reilly and Compostela. Between these two lookouts, one at either entrance to the block, Marcita had vanished.

On the left side of the street were the oyster shop, the bookseller’s, and the tobacco shop he’d seen before, and farther on a linen shop and a silversmith’s. On the right stood a tea shop, a music shop, a large shop selling glassware, and a perfumery. There was nothing strange about the block. The shops were all elegant, glass-fronted establishments that catered to the city’s gentry. They had preposterous names like The Empress Eugénie (the perfumery) and The Bower of Arachne (the linen shop) written in gold letters above their doors. Burke walked up and down before them, observing everything around him, looking again and again into the same shopwindows and at the crowds moving past, the gentlemen, the vendors, the slaves. He even knelt and examined the street itself, paved in smoothed cobblestones. But after two hours’ investigation, Burke had found nothing. Returned to the Calle del Sol, he sat at his desk to think, and when Fernandita brought in his supper he refused the plate of French sausages and rice with a distracted wave of his hand.

“You must ease yourself about hunting that girl,” Fernandita said. “Somebody’s going to catch her and it might as well be you. We have debts to pay.”

“It’s not that,” Burke said, looking up at her. “I’m quite over that.”

The usual stoniness returned to Fernandita’s face and she left the room, but in a moment she had returned. “I almost forgot,” she said. “A boy brought this.” She handed Burke a message. It was from Galván, and he’d written only three words: Body not found.

LATER THAT NIGHT, once full darkness had fallen, Burke dressed in trousers and a shirt made of old sailcloth and left his rooms to walk through the city. It was all he could think to do. He hoped that, passing among slaves, visiting their night haunts, he might hear rumors—of Marcita, of the murdered slave, of the others the don mentioned had gone missing. He went to the abandoned lots and shadowy groves where slaves were known to gather for their dances and their guinea magic, but each one he found deserted. The only slave he saw that night he stumbled on by chance—a fresh
bozal
standing outside a tavern, far from any of the slaves’ usual places. He seemed agitated; he was staring in through the tavern’s window at white men eating and drinking, gnashing his lips.

Burke approached him. “What’s the matter?” he asked.

The slave turned to him. Tribal scars ridged his forehead and shoulders. His front teeth were filed into points, and his breath stank of aguardiente. “I lost my little Anto,” he said.

Just then the tavern-keeper came out and waved a stained rag at the two of them. “Bah!” he said. “Go on! Get moving!” He snapped the rag at the slave and then at Burke, who, as he leapt back, bumped into a creole passing by. Without breaking stride, the man struck him with his gold-tipped cane, then continued on down the street, paying him no more attention. Burke recognized the fellow—Maroto? Sánchez?—had even shaken his hand at a salon where he’d been invited to play cards and share stories about his cases. He wanted to shout, but by the time he’d overcome his shock at being struck the creole was gone, disappeared into the night. He turned to find the slave with the pointed teeth, but he was gone, too.

After an hour of more wandering, Burke returned to his rooms, lit a lamp, and sat at his desk. The slaves were frightened of something—he could see that in their emptied gathering places and in the eyes of the
bozal.
But what was the connection to Marcita’s disappearance? He thought of the head found outside the city, and of the street where Marcita disappeared. He could sense a tie between them, but his brain failed to take hold of it. Outside, the
sereno
called the second hour of morning. Burke took a cigarette from the canister on his desk. Fernandita had just restocked them with the don’s money. He struck a match, brought the light to the cigarette tip, then stopped. The labels in Marcita’s room—the shop in the Calle O’Reilly with the too-high prices—the cigarette factory next to the field where the slave was found. As each piece clicked into the next the match burned down and singed his fingers.

“Fernandita!” he shouted. “Fernandita!”

After the fourth shout she emerged from her closet, cursing and blinking.

“Go to the captain-general’s palace. He’ll be up, playing cards. Give him this message.” As Burke spoke, he quickly scrawled a letter telling the captain-general he was acting in the affairs of Don Hernán and asking him to send troops to the Pedroso y Compañia factory without delay.

“Why? What’s happening?” Fernandita looked about the room, as if someone else might be there.

“I’m not sure yet,” Burke said, the unlit cigarette still in his mouth. He shoved the letter in Fernandita’s hands. “But I’m going to find out.”

At that he left his rooms and ran through the dark streets until he found an idle
volanta
waiting near the cathedral. Dropping a handful of reales into the postilion’s palm, Burke yelled for him to drive to the Calle de la Soledad, outside the city. “Race the devil!” he shouted. Then he threw himself into the
volanta
’s seat and the man took off.

THEY WENT PAST THE FIELD where the head had been found, then came to an empty lane just off the paseo—the Calle de la Soledad. The
volanta
pulled to a stop, and Burke got out, telling the driver to wait. The white macadam glowed in the light of the moon, and the air carried the scent of meat cooked over a fire. A night bird called from a far line of trees, but otherwise everything was still. Just up the lane stood the three factories Burke had seen earlier that day when he’d come to inquire about the murder. The snuff mill lay dormant and Burke stepped quickly, carefully past its low, silent hulk. Just beyond it was the yard of the cigarette factory. He halted. The factory’s yard was untended, overgrown with weeds and littered here and there with bottles. But light shone through the cracks in its shuttered windows, and, once he stilled his own breathing, Burke could hear the murmur of men talking.