The limo, exiting the highway, turned left onto Avenue Rio Consulado and then the Paseo de la Reforma. As they entered the city proper, the navel of the Distrito Federal, home to twenty-two million souls, Constanza’s eyes snapped back to focus on Bourne and Rebeka.
“Dios mio,” she said, as they drove through the choked streets of the Historic District, “listen to me rambling on about my life when I so want to know about yours.”
So,” Don Fernando said, “who do you belong to?”
Martha Christiana, plucking off a bit of buttery croissant, concentrated on her breakfast. “Why should I belong to anyone?”
“All women yearn to belong to someone.”
She took a sip of her café au lait, served in a thick white porcelain cup the size of a small bowl. “What about the independent women?”
“Especially the independent women!” he said with enthusiasm.
“Independence needs to be attached to something, otherwise it is meaningless. It has nothing to contrast with. It withers and turns bitter.”
The two of them were sitting at a round table with a glass top and heavily filigreed wrought-iron legs, one of perhaps a dozen scattered across the rooftop restaurant that overlooked the busy harbor at Gibraltar and, further out, the deep-turquoise Mediterranean. The high blue sky was dotted with benign-looking meandering clouds. A freshening breeze stirred her hair. It had been late when they had finished in the room where her mother sat, locked inside her own mind.
Martha had needed to talk, though it shamed her at first. Later on, after he had helped her put her mother to bed, much to her astonishment, the shame had evaporated like mist in sunlight.
She looked up now into his strong, lined, sun-bronzed face. He saw her expression, and his hands opened wide. “What? I’m the man who loves women.”
“At the moment you don’t sound like it.”
“Then you’ve misunderstood me.” He shook his head. “No one chooses to be alone, no one wants it.”
“I do.”
“No,” he said evenly, “you don’t.”
“Please don’t tell me what I want.”
“My apologies,” he said without really meaning it.
The eggs came then, along with papas bravas and salsa verde. They ate silently for a time. A tension was building between them. At the moment Martha Christiana realized that it was deliberate, he said, “So now who do you belong to?”
A tiny smile broke across her lips, which she hid by mopping a runny yolk with several potato bits and popping them into her mouth.
Now she understood what this conversation was about, and why he had taken her back to Gibraltar. She chewed thoughtfully and swallowed.
“Why do you want to know, Don Fernando?”
“Because,” he said calmly and evenly, “you came to me as the angel of death.” He caught the flash of her eyes, their ever so slight widening. “Now I’m wondering whether we have gone beyond that.”
“And if we haven’t?”
He smiled. “Then you must kill me.”
She sat back and wiped her lips. “So you know.”
“It would seem so.”
“When?”
He shrugged. “From the very beginning.”
“And you let me go about it?”
“You intrigue me, Martha.”
Her serious eyes studied him for a moment, then she laughed raucously. “I must be losing my touch.”
“No,” he said. “You no longer wish to be alone. You want to belong.”
“I belong to Maceo Encarnación.”
There, she had said the dreaded name. It was out.
He shook his head. “That, my dear, is an illusion.”
“Now, I suppose, you’ll tell me it’s an illusion created by Maceo Encarnación.”
“In fact, it’s an illusion you yourself created.” Don Fernando, knowing she loved fresh-squeezed blood-orange juice, refilled her tall, narrow glass. “Maceo Encarnación does not possess that power.” He paused for a moment, as if in deep contemplation. “Unless, of course, you have given it to him.”
He shrugged again, his gaze tangling with hers. “You’re stronger than that. This I know without question.”
“How?” she said. “How do you know?”
He answered her with his eyes.
“I have been with Maceo Encarnación for a number of years, after a long line of—” She was about to say after a long line of men who used me and who I used, after I escaped Marrakech, but she bit her tongue instead. She could not recount those months of humiliation, even with this man, whom, she realized now, she had come to trust, an utterly astonishing revelation, considering she had been quite certain she could never trust a man. That included Maceo Encarnación, who paid so generously for her services, just as he had paid for her training. “You’re a natural at killing,” he had told her once. “All your skills need are more options to choose from, a bit of refining.” The concept of trust had never been raised between them. Theirs was a strictly transactional relationship, nothing more, but nothing less, either. The fact remained, however, that she had never once contemplated betraying him. Until now.
Don Fernando Hererra, the man sitting across from her, staring, it seemed, into her very soul, had changed everything, upending her life, causing her to transgress every rule she had imposed on herself.
But, on second thought, maybe not. Perhaps he was an emissary, perhaps he had just handed her the key. The rest had been her choice, as he had intimated. It was she who had opened the door, stepping through into an entirely new world. He hadn’t told her how to act or feel—he had been trying to tell her that she had already made her decisions.
She knew without having to ask that this was how Don Fernando saw it, and she was immensely grateful for that. He was the sort of man she had dreamed of, but had convinced herself she would never meet, that he could not possibly exist.
And yet...
Breaking her gaze away, she stared out over the rocking boats, the furled sails, the drying nets on the decks of the just-returned fishing fleet. The granite boulders rising like a giant’s shoulders from the sea. “When I was a child,” she said, “I used to think I lived at the end of the world.” She waited, afraid, almost, to go on. Then she took the next step into the brightly lit room.
“I was wrong. It was the beginning.”
16
CONSTANZA CAMARGO LIVED at the corner of Alejandro Dumas and Luis G Urbina, in Colonia Polanco.
From her jalousied front windows Bourne looked out at the modernist, angular manmade pond in the center of Lincoln Park, beyond which, to the north, past the thick, geometric stands of trees, was Castelar Street. The interior of the colonial mansion was warm and comfortably furnished, made welcoming and even intimate by the profusion of personal items, photos, memorabilia, and souvenirs from half a lifetime of world travel.
“Someone in this family loves Indonesia,” Bourne said, as he and Rebeka followed Constanza into the dark wood-beamed dining room. It was wallpapered in a dark-green semi-abstract forest pattern and had French doors that led out to an inner courtyard dominated by a lime tree and a concrete fountain sculpted into the shape of twin dolphins, caught in mid-leap. Purple and pink bougainvillea clung to the pale stone walls.
“That would be me,” Constanza said. “In Java, I stood atop the Buddhist sanctuary, Borobudur, at sunrise. In the late afternoon, I heard the Muslim voices of the muezzin calling and echoing all across the dusky, sun-bronzed valley. Astonishing. I fell instantly in love.”
As they sat at the thick trestle table, they were surrounded by servants, each carrying a tureen of stew or a platter of food or bottles of tequila, wine, and spring water.
As lunch was methodically, almost ritualistically, served, Constanza said with that same twinkle in her eyes, “Now I’ve told you my history, you must tell me yours.”