The Best American Mystery Stories, Volume 17 (59 page)

“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 with their sticks.

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 comes to seek 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 stacks of handbills 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 a handbill. It was for a brand of tinned 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. “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 glazed shop fronts 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 red sausages and rice with a distracted wave of his hand.

“As you wish,” Fernandita said. In a moment, though, 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 tavernkeeper 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 leaped 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's 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 try as he might, 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—and struck a match. As he brought the light to the cigarette tip, he stopped, letting the match burn down and singe his fingers. 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. He recalled now that its owner, Pedroso y Compañia, had gone bankrupt two months before. Theirs was the Gallitos brand, theirs the shop where Marcita must have disappeared.

“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 came past the field where the head had been found, then 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.

He knew he should wait for the captain-general's soldiers, but he couldn't hold himself back. What were these men up to? Might Marcita still be alive, trapped inside? He crept to one of the windows and edged open a shutter and looked. In the factory's single hall, where women once worked rolling cigarettes, a black-skinned body hung from a hook. It was being stripped by one man while two others worked at one of the old rolling tables, turning a grinder. The grinder jammed and one of the men working it kicked at the table while the other shouted. The man stripping the body, cutting meat from the legs, just whistled. Burke recognized him as the corpulent, red-haired tobacconist from the Gallitos shop.

It took Burke a moment to understand, and once he did he felt his reason trickle away. He couldn't turn away—the ghastly sight held him. Instead, without noticing, he leaned forward. His hand was still on the shutter, and it creaked. At that all three men looked up from their work. Burke let go of the shutter and it creaked again, and now they saw him. Burke tried to move—tried to run—but his legs felt suddenly weak. A lightness was washing forward from the back of his skull. The men at the grinder snatched knives from the table, and the one stripping the body picked up an ax. Burke watched, paralyzed. He could hear the cannibals' footsteps—they were out of the factory now, on the grass, closing. At last Burke beat back the lightness, pulled his feet from the morass, and ran. Just as he made it to the
volanta
, he heard the trumpets of the captain-general's troops. The men chasing him turned, but two cavalrymen appeared in the street and ran them down. Burke, wishing to see nothing more, ordered the
volanta
's driver to take him home.

 

“In the sausage!” Don Hernán repeated, his face green. He was sitting in Burke's bedchamber, slumped in a cane chair. “Oh, my poor cinnamon! To think I—” He stopped. It seemed for the moment he could not bring himself to mention the sausage again.

Burke lay on his cot. When he'd returned to his rooms, he'd felt the lightness return, a sickness overtaking him, and he'd not been able to stand or sit. Now, morning having come, he was explaining his findings to the don. Fernandita stood by the door folding and refolding a cleaned sheet as she listened.

“The shop was a ruse. That's why the price on the cigarettes was so high, to keep people away. Marcita must have wandered in, looking for new labels for her collection, and that's when they took her.”

What he'd seen through the window of the cigarette factory flashed again before Burke's eyes.

“All of Havana eating slave flesh!” the don said. “Horrible.” When the don first arrived, his skin was tinged green. But already he seemed to be recovering a little. “What I can't understand is why. I've thought over the numbers. There couldn't have been much money in it, not nearly as much as the slaves were worth in the field.”

“For that,” Burke said, “I'm afraid I'll never have an answer.”

 

Once the don had left, Burke called to Fernandita to help him to the window. She held him by the arm, and he pushed aside the curtain and looked out. The sun shone brightly on the harbor ships, ignorant of all that had just passed.

In the moment of his discovery, along with horror, along with disgust, Burke had felt relief. In the end, he had been working to save slaves, not trap them. But in the light of the morning his relief had begun to crumble.

“I took this case before I knew the slaves were in danger,” he said now. “I didn't like it, I fashioned excuses, but I was willing to hunt Marcita for pay.”

Below him a bell was tinkling—a procession of priests taking the viaticum to a dying man. He turned back from the window. Fernandita, grown uncomfortable, smiled uncertainly up at him.