Free Byzantium by Ben Stroud Page A

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.
    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