Free Byzantium by Ben Stroud

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