Byzantium (6 page)

I didn’t mind losing the twenty. Unloading the shingles on the ground was faster than putting them on the roof, especially once you got into a rhythm. It was four thirty now, and since Jimmy’s revelations at the Waffle Shoppe I’d had to do several of the slow-exhale exercises I’d learned in seventh-grade gym.

I hustled to the pallet. Jimmy threw the shingles down and I lined them up as they fell, pulling back as the next bundle soared toward me. Our bodies turned into simple, timed machines, I let my mind float to The Hangout. I wasn’t asking Angela if she wanted a Mountain Dew, I was just buying it for her, showing her nobody knew her like I did. Then I was telling her about living in the world with tornadoes. Her face was pointed toward mine, lips soft and open and sugared from her drink. If the stuff about the tornado didn’t work, I’d tell her I knew where the old man had died and that I could take her there, anything to get me with her. I wondered if she’d be wearing the same bra. The one before had been this thin cotton, with a useless bow between the cups that I wanted to untie and keep in my pants.

“Shit!” Jimmy yelled.

I looked back. A bundle of shingles was mid-air, meteoring toward me. I’d faltered out of rhythm, and the bundle’s corner caught my side, a deep punch beneath my ribs, then spun to the ground. I bent over, held my breath as tears gathered at my eyes and a bruise knuckled to life beneath my skin.

“Fucktard,” Jimmy said. “You awake?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Then go pick those shingles up.”

The bundle had ripped open, silver shingles fanned out. Ignoring the throbs around my kidney, I scooped the shingles together and dumped them on the pallet. Jimmy hurled the rest of the shingles down and I fenced my brain, kept it away from that bow, and didn’t break the rhythm. By the time we were finished and sitting in the truck my side only ached a little and I was feeling pretty good. We’d get back just after five and I could still be showered and at The Hangout by six.

Jimmy drove us down McCann, then 31. No more wandering, we were headed directly home. Honks blared around us from the highway as Jimmy told me about some show he’d watched where wolves captured people’s souls. In the rearview mirror I saw we’d forgotten to tighten one of the straps. It whipped out off the side of the truck like a devil’s tail.

TEN MINUTES AFTER FIVE and the yard was already dormant, that sweet time when the start of the next day was at its farthest. The sun hung high above the far sheds, a lone white dot. The other trucks had been pulled in for the night, angled one next to the other, like children put to bed, and I had to get out and unlock the gate. As I swung it open I thought about Angela and my hand and how the two would soon join.

I had gotten the gate wide enough for the truck when a door slammed, echoing out into the yard and jostling the image of me and Angela in The Hangout’s parking lot. I looked around, caught Mike shooting toward me from the office, and at the sight of him my stomach flipped over on itself like a badly turned pancake. His face was red, and his throat made a grinding noise, like some possessed person in the movies. I clung to the gate and heard Jimmy brake the truck behind me.

Mike’s glare jumped from me to Jimmy and back again before he got his throat to working. “You took the wrong dadgummed shingles to the wrong dadgummed house! I just got a call from Greenhills. The customer came out of her house and looked up and what did she see? Chestnut shingles. What did she order? Silver Lining.”

I stood there, my fogged brain not computing what this meant for me, The Hangout awaiting.

But after another quick bout of throat grinding, Mike said, “You want to keep this job, you better get out there right now and fix it.”

The little hopes I’d been tending popped and crumpled beneath my skin. We’d have to load new shingles for the Longview house, then get the shingles we’d dropped there and take them to Greenhills—we wouldn’t be done until eight, and by then it’d be the Jasper guy with his arm around Angela, getting his hands wherever he could, making dates to see her in Nacogdoches.

“How about early tomorrow—” I began, but Mike turned his red face on me and I swallowed whatever else it was I was going to say. Jimmy started bitching, then gunned the truck and told me to come on. I gave him my chained-dog look, like just step closer and I’ll maul you. All the hours I’d gotten through and we’d fucked up before we even knew it. Good-bye, Angela. Then I dragged myself around the front of the truck and up into the cab. I mean, Jesus, but it would take a dozen tornadoes to get me the life I wanted.

W
hen Burke returned to his rooms from his morning visit to the sea baths, Fernandita, his maid, was shaking the bugs out of his mosquito net. He lived in cramped quarters, on the second floor of an old mansion between the wharves and the post office. The mansion’s ground floor was given over to a molasses warehouse, and its top floors had been cut into apartments. Burke occupied one of these, an old bedchamber in the back of the building that was partitioned into three rooms and looked over the harbor. One room served as his bedroom, its neighbor as his small study and parlor, and the third room, barely a closet, was Fernandita’s.

“Your food is on the desk,” Fernandita said, giving the net one more vigorous shake before sweeping the loosed mosquitoes and other insects onto a scrap of newspaper. A skinny, toothless, yellow-skinned woman past middle age, Fernandita was Burke’s only companion in the city.

Inspecting his breakfast, Burke picked a green beetle from his eggs and tossed it into the grate, where Fernandita had lit a small flame, then he sat and ate as he read again the letter he’d received from Don Hernán Vargas y Lombilla. My business is most delicate, Don Hernán had written, giving no further clue to the nature of his problem. Burke hoped for a challenge, and let his mind wander once more, imagining all the possible conundrums the don might present him.

He was at the start of his life, twenty-two, a free gentleman of color who had left his home in the lower Brazos not a year before. His mother had been a slave, his father a Texas sugar planter. Burke had come to Havana after his father died, freeing him, as he thought that here he might make use of his Spanish and his knowledge of the sugar business. But his various inquiries at those trading houses open to negroes met only with vague promises of later openings, and within four months he was down to his last pennies. It was then he’d read an account of a mystery baffling the city: a nun in the Convent of Santa Clarita had been poisoned, yet she seemed to have no enemies and the walls of the convent were most secure. Puzzling over the story and the details of the nun’s life, Burke had soon figured out how it must have been done. The dentist who visited the convent had mixed her toothpowder with arsenic. Burke wrote the captain-general with the solution, and the dentist, taken by the police, confessed to the crime. Unbeknownst to the nun, she had been named in the will of a wealthy coffee grower, an uncle, and were she to die the legacy was to pass to a distant cousin—the man who’d bribed the dentist.

At a loss for income and facing mounting debts, Burke had seen then how he might support himself. After the Case of the Poisoned Toothpowder he was approached with another, and soon Habaneros burdened with seemingly insoluble problems were calling on him in his rooms at least once a week. He took each case offered him, stringing together enough money to pay his creditors as he swiftly established a reputation for uncommon subtlety and skill.

AFTER HE FINISHED HIS BREAKFAST, Burke was fetched by one of the don’s
volantas.
It was driven by a negro postilion and fitted out with soft leather seats, a Turkish rug, and, lodged in a teak case, a brass lorgnette for observing passengers in other carriages. As he rode, Burke tried the lorgnette but, feeling foolish, soon put it away and sat for the rest of the trip with his hands in his lap. Within twenty-five minutes he was delivered to a sprawling estate near the top of the Jesús del Monte. The postilion stopped at the front door, and Burke alighted and was immediately led by another negro down a marble-floored hallway, into a courtyard with a tinkling fountain encircled by orange trees, and then into the don’s office, where gilt-framed ancestors stared down from the walls and old account ledgers filled the bookshelves. For fifteen minutes Burke sat alone. Then, at ten precisely, the don strode into the room. Burke had worn his dark coat, white waistcoat, and white drill trousers, the uniform Havana fashion demanded of its gentlemen, but Don Hernán, a stout man with gray, slicked hair and a waxed imperial, was in his silk dressing gown. He snapped at the liveried slave, who then stepped forward and presented two plates piled with eggs and the plump red sausages they’d lately begun selling in the markets. “French sausages” they were called—a bid, Burke suspected, to justify their expense.

“No, thank you, I’m quite full,” Burke said, refusing his plate with an apologetic smile. The don snapped again at the slave, and the slave transferred Burke’s servings to the don’s plate.

Don Hernán did not speak as he ate, and Burke remained silent. He watched as the don cut each sausage into three pieces and shoved the pieces into his mouth, grease dribbling into his imperial. Now that he was here, Burke was nervous about the meeting. One of the island’s wealthiest sugar planters, Don Hernán held more sway in Havana than any other creole and could, with a single whisper, ruin Burke’s career before it had even begun. A man in his sixties who looked younger than his years—he was childless and a carouser—he was known to be fickle and demanding. Whatever the don’s request, Burke couldn’t afford to fail him.

When the don finished eating, he shoved the plate away, dabbed at his lips, then lit a cigar. Once he had the cigar going, he eased back in his chair. “A month ago,” he said, “the manager of my Santo Cristo estate sent up a load of fruit along with two slaves to work in the house. The next day the mules, still bearing the fruit, were found grazing in a field off the Infanta highway, three miles outside the city. The two slaves were gone without a trace.”

The don paused. Burke held himself erect in his seat, but unease rippled through him. So far he’d avoided any cases that touched on slaves.

“That was a month ago. A week ago I lost my treasure, my Marcita.” The don fumbled in the pocket of his gown and pulled out a gilt-framed daguerreotype and passed it to Burke. “My cinnamon,” the don said. “She is most precious to me.”

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.

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.