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mma stepped from the sweltering heat of the ancient turbo prop airplane into the balmy sunshine of San Marcos City and descended the metal steps to the pitted concrete runway.
Her first impulse was to fall on her knees and kiss the ground. She managed to resist, however. Somehow she got the feeling that the two soldiers who stood at either side of the steps, with the black barrels of their submachine guns pointed at the deplaning passengers, might not understand.
Emma had been in the air for eight out of the last thirteen hours, flying from San Francisco to Saint Louis, Saint Louis to Miami, Miami to Puerto Rico, and finally, Puerto Rico to San Marcos.
The last leg of the flight had been the killer. Emma had flown in old planes before, had survived turbulence, screeching children and poor ventilation. Maybe it was the combination of all the conditions which can make a flight unbearable that had gotten to her nowâor perhaps just the uncertainty she was flying into.
In any event, Emma was now ready to concede that it had been
a mistake not to fly to New York and spend the night, then take the only jet service to San Marcos, as the travel agent had recommended. Emma smelled of secondhand cigarette smoke and firsthand perspiration from the toes of her loafers to the end of her braid. And it would probably be days before her knuckles returned to their original color from their present shade of ghastly white.
But at least she was here. In the Caribbean. On San Marcos island.
Emma's stay at the Alhambra had settled nothing, simply raised more questions. Why had Henri-Pierre extended his stay in San Francisco? Had he been killed by someone he knew and talked to his murderer moments before it happened? What had he been so unhappy about?
No matter what Charlemagne Moussy and Detective Poteet believed, Emma knew she was not crazy. Somebody had really taken the model boat from Pepe's bedroom. Was the
Kaito Spirit
the connection between Jacques Passant and Henri-Pierre? Was it the reason they had both been killed?
Whatever the answers, San Marcos was the best place to look for them. Let Benno Poteet worry about what Henri-Pierre had been doing in San Franciscoâthe police had better resources than she to look into his affairs. Emma was going to find the
Kaito Spirit.
The real one. Pépé had said in his will that it was her legacy. Maybe she could even find someone who had known her grandfather when he was here.
At least that had been her plan yesterday, and yesterday it had seemed entirely reasonable. Now Emma was not so sure. “An island in the Caribbean” was something quaint and manageable when you were sitting in the cocktail lounge of a hotel in San Francisco.
Looking out her window on the plane, however, Emma had realized that there was nothing quaint or manageable about San Marcos. It was an entire country. It was mountains and farmlands
and endless miles of coastline. It was sprawling cities and tiny nameless towns. Finding one small boat here would be like looking for a needle in the proverbial haystackâa haystack that was more than thirty years gone. What was she going to do? Stop people on the streets and ask if they remembered a little Frenchman with apple-dumpling cheeks?
Emma looked around the airport runway for some kind of sign directing passengers where to go, but there was none. The sky was an unfamiliar blue and the soldiers cast no shadows in the stark tropical sunshine.
Everyone seemed to be heading for a temporary-looking white structure attached to the brick terminal building. Emma followed, passing through an aluminum screen door into a large space with a concrete floor. The walls there were of corrugated metal painted a dirty yellow. Half a dozen soldiers with submachine guns slung over their shoulders stood at strategic locations around the room, their eyes dark with suspicion, their lips curled tight with power.
Emma's fellow passengers seemed to be waiting for something. She tried asking in English what was going on, but the people who didn't stare blankly at her just rattled long Spanish explanations that she couldn't understand. More soldiers arrived, all dressed in the same olive combat fatigues, and all armed to the teeth.
Ten minutes passed, then twenty. Emma chewed a fingernail, cleaned her glasses, and tried again to find someone who spoke English. Finally a middle-aged man in a powder-blue suit answered in a familiar accent.
“American?” he said.
“Yes,” said Emma, relieved despite the man's annoyed voice and sour expression. “Do you know what's going on here?”
“Don't worry. We're just waiting for the luggage. This is customs.”
“That's what I was hoping, but I was beginning to think it was the firing squad.”
“No, they don't do that much anymore. Not since Peguero died.”
“Peguero?”
“Rafael Peguero, the dictator. They shot him a few years back. Things have gone pretty much downhill ever since. Peguero knew how to keep the riffraff in line. Now's just catch-as-catch-can.”
“I'm Emma Passant,” said Emma, sensing the man was losing interest.
“Pleasure,” he replied, craning his neck to see what, if any, progress was being made at what Emma now recognized as customs stations.
Men in black pants, white shirts, and ties had taken position behind caged-in tables. Passengers were forming disorderly lines. Just as on the plane, half the people in the room seemed to be chain-smoking cigarettes. Hadn't they heard down here that smoking was bad for one's health? Especially where there was jet fuel around? Maintenance people were even smoking out on the runways. The man in the powder-blue suit started to move away.
“Are you staying at the Casimente, by any chance?” said Emma, not wanting to lose her surly friend so quickly. Like all travelers in strange places, she was dependent upon the kindness of strangers. Maybe the man wasn't the most pleasant person she had ever met, but at least he seemed to know the territory.
“My company's got its own place,” he said, taking a pack of Marlboros out of his shirt pocket and lighting up without offering her one. “That where you are? The Casimente?”
“Yes. The travel agent said it was the only good hotel in the city.”
“Casimente's niceâif you like a place without a casino. Has its own purification system, which you need down here unless you plan to boil the water before you brush your teeth. You'll be fine.”
The door to the runway opened and several rickety carts full of luggage were wheeled in. There was a mad dash of passengers in
which Emma lost sight of her new friend but managed to retrieve her two suitcases. She was trying to figure out which line she was supposed to stand in when the American man returned, carrying one small bag.
“Hey, look, I don't want you to get the wrong idea,” he said in a vaguely conciliatory tone, taking a deep drag of his cigarette and tapping a bit of ash onto the floor. “San Marcos actually isn't all that bad. The people are friendly and don't hate Americans as much as they do most places. The women are great. And things are cheap. You know about the money?”
“What about it?”
“The official exchange rate's bullshit, so there's a big black market in dollars. There'll be a bunch of locals when you get out, trying to buy your U.S. money. Don't change more than enough to get to your hotel. You'll get a better rate in the city. I have to go through the other line. Good luck.”
“Thanks,” said Emma weakly and watched her anonymous friend rush across the room to a station at the side that seemed to be reserved for business people. Disoriented, she tried to follow after a moment, but a thin man in khaki directed her back to the more crowded area.
The noisy room was beginning to feel unreal, dreamlike. Emma's nervousness gave way to a strange detachment. After another fifteen minutes she had reached the head of the customs line. In front of her one of the customs officers was inspecting the luggage of the passenger ahead of her, though “inspecting” was probably too kind a word for what the process looked like.
The passenger was a forty-something fellow with a bad complexion and an odd-looking white-on-white shirt that ended in a straight edge outside his pants. As he looked on with a worried expression, the inspector rummaged thoroughly through the contents of his badly packed suitcase, removing several toilet articles and some magazines. Then they ordered him to empty his pockets and began leafing through his wallet. When the passenger
started to complain, a young soldier standing on the sideâhe couldn't have been more than twentyâsnarled something in Spanish and threw the man's suitcase on the floor. Then he pocketed the wallet, shouting all the while at the man as he picked up his belongings. So much for the friendly people of San Marcos.
The passenger skulked away in silence under the angry eyes of the young soldier, who then turned to Emma and waved her to the table impatiently.
Emma's hand involuntary patted the pocket of her jeans where Pépé's little gold coin was cached along with two pieces of Kleenex and her car keys. She had brought the coin with her for luck, but for all she knew it might get her arrested now for smuggling.
Feeling like a sleepwalker, Emma stepped forward. She handed the inspector the declaration she had filled out on the plane and her passport. Then she opened her bags on the table as she had seen the others do and watched helplessly while the man pawed through her things like someone searching a kitchen drawer for a can opener. It all felt as if it were happening to someone else.
Finally it was over. No one had asked her to empty her pockets, though the inspector had removed the neat little soaps and bottles of lotions wrapped in green paper which she had taken from the Alhambra, plus all her paperback books. Perhaps historical novels and biographies of Irving Berlin were considered subversive in these parts.
One of the soldiers pushed the suitcases back at her and waved his hands impatiently. Emma closed her bags with as much dignity as she could manage as the inspector stamped her passport. Then she followed the other passengers through a door at the end of the long room.
Suddenly the picture changed. Instead of the claustrophobic, hostile space of the customs area, Emma now found herself in a spacious terminal teeming with people. The building reminded her of train stations from 1940s movies: old brick walls, yellowgreen floors, departure and arrival boards with flights listed in
plastic letters. Old-fashioned and vaguely threadbare, everything seemed clean, though the noise reflecting off the hard surfaces was deafening.
Instantly a dozen men descended upon her, jabbering in Spanish, grabbing at her suitcases. Luckily Emma was too surprised to scream. She quickly realized that her assailants were self-appointed porters, hoping to carry her bag for a tip. Breathing a sigh of relief, and carrying her own bags, she let herself be swept along by the flow of traffic, past several more armed soldiers and out the front doors of the terminal.
Suddenly the scene changed again. If there was any doubt she was in a foreign land, it vanished the moment Emma got through the door. She found herself facing a stand of palm trees on an impossibly crowded sidewalk surrounded by a crowd of men shouting at the top of their lungs. They seemed to have swooped down from nowhere, all of them waving thick wads of money and pocket calculators.
“Dos diez!”
“Due quince! Dos quince!”
“Dos
dieciocho! Dieciocho!”
It took Emma a few moments to understand that the numbers were exchange ratesâthe number of pesos the men would give for a U.S. dollar.
The money changers were young for the most part and darkcomplected. Many were dressed in white shirts like the one the passenger who had suffered ahead of her in customs had wornâwith double-pointed collars and straight bottoms worn outside their pants. They shouted and waved their hands frenetically, but somehow didn't seem nearly as threatening as the soldiers inside had been.
“Dos dieciocho!
Two eighteen!”
“Two two!”
“Best price! Best price for dollars!”
Most of the passengers were ignoring the money changers and
trying to press their way to the curb, but a few had stopped to make deals, bargaining in Spanish. Emma was suddenly grateful to the surly American. If he hadn't warned her, she wouldn't have known what to make of this. The last thing on her mind when she had decided to come to San Marcos was the subject of foreign exchange.
Emma let herself be cornered by two money changers and put down one suitcase long enough to dig into the pocket of her blazer for her wallet. She had worn the jacket for its pockets and expected to have to buy some lighter clothes while she was here âher wardrobe was geared for the temperate climate of San Francisco. Now she wondered if it would be necessary. It was nearly noon, but the temperature was only in the mid-seventies, with little humidity. Plenty of people in the airport were dressed in slacks and cotton shirts, though almost all the women wore actual dresses, making Emma feel out of place in her blue jeans. Already she had gotten more than one disapproving stare.