Free Byzantium by Ben Stroud Page B

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