Doris, that’s all I’m telling you, because that’s all we know right now,” lied Jimmy Paz. “You have enough for a great story, you’ll win another prize. No, I don’t know whether this is the work of a crazed serial killer. Okay, crazed, I’ll give you crazed, serial we don’t know yet. Right, go ahead and print that: police wait for him to strike again. Helplessly wait, that’s better.”
Paz held the receiver a few inches from his ear and Cesar the prep cook grinned at him around a lot of gold. Paz was in the kitchen of his mother’s restaurant and on the phone, as he had promised, with Doris Taylor the crime reporter. It was six-thirty, a relatively peaceful time in the kitchen, for only the tourists ate that early. Satan might be loose in Dade County, but people still had to eat, and perforce others had to cook for them. Paz, who did not believe in Satan, had left Barlow as soon as he could manage and come here.
“I understand that,” he said calmly, “believe me, but … where did you hear that? Hey, if you hear stuff, you’re supposed to inform the police. No, we have no evidence that it was a cult killing. No, of course it wasn’t a domestic. Why don’t you call it a presumed deranged individual? No, you can’t quote me on that, I’m not supposed to be talking to you at all. I got to go now, Doris. Fine. Right, just keep my name out of the papers. I love you, too, Doris. Bye.”
Paz hung up and turned to face his mother, whose eye he had felt upon him for the last minute or so of this conversation. Margarita Paz had heavy eyes; sometimes Jimmy felt them upon him when he was many miles away, often when he was doing one of the very many things of which she would not approve.
“Who were you talking to, tying up my phone like that?”
“Nobody, Mami, just some business.”
“That phone’s for my business, not your business. You going to work in those fancy clothes?” She looked him up and down. Cesar the prep cook had retreated to the reefer on Mrs. Paz’s entry.
Paz and his mother locked eyes. Hers were on a level with his own because she was wearing four-inch cork platforms on her feet. And a yellow dress, and a yellow diamond on her finger, and a comb in her black hair, elaborately done up. Real lace around the collar of the dress and a plain gold cross against the dark throat. Her uniform of every evening.
Paz had been working in the restaurant in various capacities since the age of seven, and his mother made no distinction between working a meal after school and working a meal after an eight-hour shift with the cops, except that after a shift he was even more available, since there was no homework. Paz had tried to explain the difference between after-school work and after-work work many times, but Mrs. Paz was skilled at the art of not listening.
He smiled to break the stare and said, “Okay, Mami,” which was the right answer, because she gave a la-reine-le-veult nod and turned away. Paz loved his mother and because of this he allowed her to believe that she was still in control of his life, Cuban fashion. But in his mother’s mind, Jimmy Paz was not at all a satisfactorily controlled son. He had, for example, not finished college and gone on to a medical or law degree. He was not even a dentist! Mrs. Paz did not consider law enforcement an acceptable profession for her son. Nor had he married a girl of suitable family and skin tone (pale), thus supplying her with a daughter-in-law to dominate and grandchildren to spoil. Instead, he ran around with a succession of American women, all of whom, despite their fancy educations, were little better than whores.
Paz understood that until he had an acceptable profession and a wife, his mother would continue to treat him like a schoolboy. This did not bother him much, as he had no compunction about cutting out of the restaurant when cop work called, and the restaurant work paid for, in his mind, if not in hers, a rather nice apartment.
He left the kitchen and went into the dining room. As always, this brought him a moment of delight, this contrast between the organized chaos of the kitchen and the calm of the dining room. It was high-ceilinged, decorated in shiny white, yellow, pink, and cream; the tiles underfoot were coffee-colored; the chairs and tables were of heavy rattan, painted white. The rear wall was decorated with gilt mirrors, and the two side walls bore a series of Roman arches in white plaster, through which one looked out at brightly painted representations of Guantanamo Bay. Rattan and brass fans rotated slowly and exiguously overhead, stirring the chilled, conditioned air. The room was as close as the memory and resources of Margarita Paz could come to reproducing the dining room at Tanaimo, the great tobacco finca where her mother had served as a cook.
Paz reflexively checked the house. Every table was occupied, most of them by pale Americanos, but there were several tables of Germans and two of Japanese. A group of crisply dressed foreign tourists waited with their tour guide on the other side of a huge saltwater fish tank. Margarita Paz was a spectacularly good cook, and her place was listed in any number of restaurant guides as worth a special trip. She trained her waiters well, they all spoke English, and Jimmy had written for the menu concise explanations of the contents and preparation of the various dishes. A tourist-friendly place, by design. Later, when the Cubans showed up, there would be larger crowds waiting for a table. In Cuban Miami they said you went to the Versailles to be seen, but to eat you went down the street. The street was Eighth Street, aka the Tamiami Trail, called Calle Ocho by nearly everyone now. (Barlow still called it the Trail.) Down the street meant this place. Every Cuban man is obliged to defend his mother’s cooking as the best in the world, but in Paz’s case it might have been true.
Then he went home, which was around the corner and four houses down from Calle Ocho, in a yellow stucco two-unit owned by Mrs. Paz. Jimmy Paz had the top unit, and the bottom was rented out. His mother lived next door. It was more space than a single man needed, two large bedrooms, a kitchen, one and a half baths, and a living room facing the street. Paz believed that his mother let him have it so that there would be no excuse for him not putting in the hours in the kitchen and because it allowed her to keep an eye on his doings. The Cruzes, the elderly couple who inhabited the lower floor, were efficient spies, who kept Mrs. Paz well informed. Paz thought it not a bad deal, having had a whole lifetime to get used to his mother’s disapproval. He also was an expert nonlistener.
Paz went to his refrigerator and selected a Corona beer. There was little else in his refrigerator?a couple of bottles of Piper champagne, some limes, some mixed nuts. The freezer was loaded with cylindrical pints of fruit sherbet supporting a bottle of Finlandia vodka. Paz did not dine at home.
Beer in hand, he switched on the television and watched the local news. There had been a shoot-out and car chase down Collins Avenue on Miami Beach that afternoon, with plenty of good aerial footage. The murder of Deandra Wallace, which might otherwise have led, came a poor third (after the usual corrupt-official story) and got extra juice because of the bizarre nature of the crime and the thrill value of a possible cult killing. No interviews, just a mannequin reporter in front of Ms. Wallace’s dreary building, who said “bizarrely mutilated” but did not supply the details, nor did she specify the cult involved. Paz would have liked to know that himself.
He put on a white tunic and check trousers, laced on greasy Doc Marten boots, and went back to the restaurant. There he brought a box of snapper on ice out of the reefer and began to make snapper hash, one of the place’s specialties. Being the boss’s son, he was not subject to the outrageous abuse that is the common lot of sous-chefs the world over, for the chef stayed out of Paz’s way and Paz stayed out of his, and all involved?waiters and kitchen staff?got along unusually well, for Margarita Paz believed that you could taste bad feelings in the food and would not tolerate any prima donnas other than herself. Among restaurant kitchens, this one was unusual in having no actual crazy people in it. The scullion was not even an alcoholic.
Around nine-thirty Paz took his first break. He went out into the alley, sat on an upturned shortening barrel, drank an iced coffee black as tar, and smoked a chico. He felt calm and at peace, with an interesting case just starting up, and the various tensions of the day worked off by the meditation of simple cooking. He finished his cigar and coffee, and thought that a woman would be nice after work, so he went back through the kitchen and used the pay phone outside the rest rooms to call Beth Morgensen and ask if he could come over late. As a readiness to entertain gentlemen arriving at midnight was a universal quality among the girlfriends of Paz, she said he could.
After work, he drove his battered orange Z Datsun to her apartment on Ponce de Leon hard by the university, still dressed in his cook’s outfit and carrying a cold bottle of Korbel and a bouquet assembled from the floral displays at the restaurant. Generous, but not wildly so, was Paz, and the women he chose understood this and found it endearing.
Beth Morgensen opened the door and looked at Paz distractedly over wire-rimmed spectacles. She was a hefty one, as tall as Paz, with a braid of cornsilk hair thick as a python running down her back to her waist, and the broad shoulders and narrow hips of a competitive swimmer. Now she was a graduate student in sociology, all-but-dissertation, which study was on homeless people in Dade County.
“Oh, my!” she said. “The old flowers-and-champagne routine. Paz, you’re a living fossil.” She stuck out her face and he planted a nice kiss on her pale lips. Paz liked the way she moved, loose-jointed, swaying the big body as to some inner tune. He watched her roll away into her tiny kitchen. She was wearing frayed jean cutoffs and a black T-shirt that said punish me across the front. He followed her through a living room/studio that was stacked with books and folders and so littered with sheaves of papers that the floor was scarcely visible. A desk sat in the middle of the room, similarly littered, upon which a computer glowed. In the kitchen, he watched her pop the champagne and pour out into two not-squeaky-clean juice glasses. She read the distaste on his face. “Yeah, I know, it’s a pigsty, and you’re such a neat freak, and I beg your pardon, because I’m crashing on this fucking diss, and I swore before Jesus and all the saints that I would finish chapter five tonight.”
“Why did you let me come over, then?”
“Oh, well, a girl needs a little break.” She grinned, stretching the long mouth over her front teeth, the lips like pale rubber bands. They sat in two straight chairs and drank companionably.
“Want to go and hit some clubs?” he asked.
“Oh, no, not that much of a break. I thought we could finish this nice wine and have a delicious little fuck and then I’ll kick your sweet ass out the door. How does that sound?”
“It sounds like you’re only interested in me for my body,” putting an artificial sob into his voice.
“Yes, uh-huh, and …?” She sat on his lap and undid a few of the frogs on the front of his chef’s tunic. “Mm, what is this taste on your neck? It’s terrific.”
“Deep fat, mostly, plus grilled snapper, salsa, garlic, mango, dark rum, some secret stuff.”
He let her take off the rest of his chef’s clothes, including the boots, while he drank champagne. She licked him thoroughly, the entire front of his body, like a child getting all the frosting out of the bowl, and then stripped herself and straddled him, and they had a short, sharp fuck to, as she said, take the edge off. Just after this she picked up the champagne and shook the bottle with her thumb over the opening and let it shoot out, icy, over their joined groins. He chased her into her bedroom, where he gave her a good one on top of piles of books and folders, until she howled like a wolf.
She grunted and withdrew from under her buttocks a thick tome. “Oh-ho,” she laughed, ” Nonparametric Statistics for the Social Sciences, no wonder.” She lowered her voice an octave. “Good study, Morgensen, but your statistics are fucked. Oh, Christ, Jimmy, I don’t want you to go, but you have to.”
“That’s okay, I got two more girls to see tonight.”
She rapped him on the head with the book. “Monster! There’s a full professor who’s been trying to get into my pants for months, and he wanted to come over tonight and I blew him off because I thought you might call.”
“A full professor. I’m honored. Are you going to fuck him to get ahead in your chosen profession?”
“I might. Everyone else seems to be doing it. But I’m glad it was you.” She kissed his neck.
“Serendipity that I called, huh?” he said.
“No, serendipity is when you’re looking for something and you find something else that’s even better. Penicillin. Columbus too, I guess. What you mean is synchronicity, which is when two independent variables happen at the same time, in a pseudo-meaningful way. Serendipity is scientific, synchronicity isn’t.”
“Why not?”
She tossed the stat book onto his belly and slipped out of bed. “Read the book.”
“Why should I when I have you? Where are you going?”
“The shower, where you can join me, if you promise not to get me started again.”
Under the lukewarm stream, he soaped her long back, while she held her braid away from the water. He said, “So tell me, why isn’t synchronicity scientific?”
“By definition. And, Jimmy, I want you to know that you are the first and only man I have ever discussed epistemology with under the shower.”
“I appreciate that,” he said. “I know that was hard to admit.”
“It was. In any case, science looks for causality. Event B only occurs after Event A, or is associated with it more than chance alone would allow. Lightning always precedes thunder, and so we assume that lightning causes thunder, and we look for a physical connection between the two events, and in that case, we find it, and science marches on. Synchronicity … thank you, I’ll clean that myself, if you don’t mind … synchronicity proposes a linkage between two events that is meaningful without being causal or related in a reproducible or deterministic way. For instance, I have this terrible plumbing problem and I meet a guy in a bar and we fall in love and it turns out he’s a plumber. Or me wanting to get together with you and you happen to call me from among all your hundreds of women. Pretty, but scientifically meaningless. The Jungians make a big deal of it, which is another reason for not taking it seriously.”
“It’s like luck.”
“In a way. But it’s supposed to be meaningful on the psychic level, too. The cosmos or the collective unconscious is trying to reach us. Horseshit, in other words.”She looked down at him and let out a yelp. “Yikes, get that thing away from me,” she cried, and hung her washcloth on it, then turned the cold tap all the way on.
Later, driving home, Paz experienced the usual letdown, and the fetid backwash of self-contempt. He could sense that his relationship with Morgensen was approaching its conclusion. When they started talking about other, more eligible, men and the passion level went up a notch or two, as was here the case, the final kiss-off loomed not far distant. So Morgensen would get her full professor, or similar, and Paz get another bright, white lady to replace Morgensen, and so on and so on, until he was a fat sixty-year-old cop, turtle-faced with corruption and booze, paying chippies to suck him off in crime-lighted parking lots. Paz had heard about love, and believed it to be real, as he had heard about Mongolia and believed that place to be real as well. Yet while he thus believed, Paz thought that a voyage to the latter was as likely as one to the former: not very, given his record. If milk is free, why buy a cow? Paz had said this to himself and others, even to women. He said it now, waiting for a light, puffing his cigar.
Something was wrong, something was intensely disturbing, but he could not nail it down; it was like forgetting a phone number or leaving tickets home, an absence, felt but not comprehended. He ought to feel good, he told himself: an interesting and exciting day’s work, a terrific piece of ass, what more could a man desire? Now came a new thought, Mr. Youghans and the dead woman, and the girl he was screwing, and Barlow’s contempt for the man. Which Paz shared. He wasn’t like Youghans. He didn’t seduce high-school girls. Only college graduates. That was a significant difference. Or was it? No, it was. A good deal, for both parties, a square deal. Like he had with his mother.
Driving, the windows open to the thick, slowly cooling air of Miami nights, Paz rolled a different sort of life around in his mind, the words settle down scuttling across the surface of his brain. Pick one of them and settle down. Or some other, to come. Fall in love. Move out of the free apartment, quit the restaurant. A three-bedroom ranch in Kendall. Pool and barbecue. Kids. Make friends. Invite the Barlows over.
It had no real taste, it was like water, like meringue without sugar. He would have to be a different man from the one he was now. He supposed he might become that man, but not through any act of personal will. He didn’t know the way there.
In the morning, first thing, Paz called Dr. Maria Salazar at home and got an answering machine that informed him, first in English, and then in a particularly limpid and refined Spanish, that Dr. Salazar would be out of the country until a date three weeks in the future. Paz cursed in muddy and impure Spanish and then punched in Dr. Lydia Herrera’s number. Dr. Herrera was busy, the secretary said, she had no room on her schedule that morning. Paz bullied, abandoning Barlow’s rule. He threatened that if Dr. Herrera did not see him, he would have her dragged down to police headquarters and charged with obstructing a homicide investigation, and wouldn’t that screw up her busy schedule? The line went briefly dead, and then the secretary came back again and, in a stiff voice, gave Paz his appointment. Paz put on a fawn-colored Palm Beach suit and walked over to the hole-in-the-wall on Calle Ocho where he took breakfast, cafe con leche and a couple of Cuban fruit pastries. While he ate he read Doris Taylor’s story in the Herald, which had made page 1 below the fold. Doris didn’t spare the gory details, and he guessed that she had gotten to the medical examiner’s staff. The police, he learned, had refused to rule out the possibility of a cult killing. It could have been worse, although he now expected that the brass would be more interested in the case than was optimal. He ripped the story out, pocketed the clip, and drove directly to the university.
Dr. Herrera was dressed in mango color this morning and she frowned in a way that brought her plucked brows together like a child’s drawing of a gull. The patronizing smile was missing. She stood in the doorway of her little office and radiated honest outrage.
“This is really inconvenient, Detective,” she said. “And I resent being threatened.”
“Murder is often inconvenient, Doctor,” said Paz blandly. “And citizens have a positive duty to help the police in an investigation.” He gestured past her. “The sooner we start …”
She stalked back into her office and sat behind her desk. Paz placed before her a copy of the toxicology analysis on Wallace.
“This is a list of the chemicals we found in the victim’s body. If you could, we’d like to know what plants they came from.”
She snatched up the paper, frowning. As Paz watched, her expression changed; irritation gave way to confused fascination. She spun her chair, pulled a reference volume from the shelf, paged through it, pulled down a batch of reprints, shuffled through them, read a page of one, shook her head, muttering.
“Stumped, huh?”
She stared at him, but not with hostility. “This is remarkable. Amazing.”
“Do you know what plant that stuff comes from?” asked Paz.
“Plant? My God, there’s a whole pharmacopoeia in this. The harmalines here are botanical psychedelics, monoamine oxidase inhibitors, incredibly powerful, used by shamans in both the New World and Old World tropics. In the New World they come from the Banisteriopsis vine, they call it yage or ayahuasca; in Africa they’re derived from Leptactinia densiflora. As to which we’ve got here, I’d have to look it up, but this set of indoles they have listed looks like typical contaminants from Leptactinia preparations. Yohimbine is from Alchornea floribunda, African again. Ibogaine is a powerful stimulant and psychedelic, also African, from Tabernanthe iboga. It’s called the cocaine of Africa. It may not be purposeful here because it’s a common contaminant of yohimbine preparations. It’s an intoxicant and supposed aphrodisiac. Ouabain is an African arrow poison, from Strophantus species. It’s a cardiac glycoside.”
“A poison?”
“Yes. Extremely potent. I don’t know what it’s doing here. Was the woman poisoned, too? I read the story in the paper this morning. I thought it was an evisceration.”
Paz decided to yield a scrap of information. “Apparently she died before she had time to bleed to death. Her heart stopped. Could this ouabain do that?”
“No question. In Central Africa they use it to kill elephants.” She gestured at the tox report. “As I said, this is remarkable. The cocktail of substances?I have no idea what the result of this combination would be.”
“We figure he wanted to knock her out, so he could, um, do his operation.”
“I don’t know.” She put her finger on one of the polysyllabic names. “This one here is a phenanthrene.”
“What’s a phenanthrene?” Paz had his notebook out and was scribbling in it.
“A narcotic. Morphine and codeine are phenanthrenes. I’d have to check, but I think it’s the one derived from Fagara zanthoxyloides, which is widely used as a narcotic in West Africa.”
“So that would have knocked her out.”
“In the right dose, yes. But then why this other stuff? Some of them typically make the user run around hallucinating like crazy. But who knows what they would do in combination? And we don’t know what the original dose was. What about the stomach contents?”
“Zip. She took it in through the nose or skin.”
“Hmph! That’s unusual, but not unknown?snuffs and salves applied to the mucosa. Usually they ingest an infusion or eat the raw plant matter. Fascinating. And then there’s this. tetrahydra-?-carboline. What’s that doing there?”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s not a botanical. It’s an alkaloid found naturally in the brain and especially in the pineal body. In her lungs? It’s interesting because it’s chemically related to ibogaine and the various Banisteriopsis and Tabernanthe alkaloids.”
“Why is that interesting?”
Dr. Herrera allowed herself a sigh. “It’s fairly complicated and I don’t see what forensic value it has. And, as I thought I had made clear, I’m extremely busy …”
“Why don’t you let me be the judge of forensic value. Just give me the dummy version.”
“Fine.” She spouted rapidly and in monotone. “Question: why should chemicals produced by plants have profound psychotropic activity in human brains? Answer: because plants have evolved to produce analogues and antagonists of alkaloids and neuroactive substances present in the brains of animals so that if animals eat them they will get sick and learn not to eat them. Opiates, for example, imitate brain endorphins and bind to the same sites, hyoscine competes with the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, the harmines and other indole derivatives are chemically similar to serotonin, which is an important neurotransmitter in brain regions associated with emotionality and perception. It’s probably why they can act as hallucinogens. The fact that tetrahydra-?-carboline is related to ibogaine, et cetera, is interesting for the same reason. What it means, we don’t know. The pineal gland’s function is obscure?it seems to be some kind of endocrine gland in antagonistic relationship to the pituitary, and hence intimately connected with a whole range of physiological and psychological control functions. In fact, now that I think about it, there’s another pineal hormone, adrenoglomerulotropine, that’s identical to a psychotropic botanical, 6-methoxytetrahydroharman.”
Paz had more or less stopped listening. Her spiel was completely beyond him, not that he would ever admit this. The last named gobbledygook, however, was familiar. “That was in the corpse, too, wasn’t it?” he asked.
“Yes. But don’t ask me what it all means, because I don’t know. Nobody does. You’re at the frontiers of psychopharmacology here.”
“Would Dr. Salazar?”
Herrera frowned. “Maria? Of course not. Less than I do, certainly. She’s an anthropologist.”
“I don’t mean the hard science. I meant the particular mix of drugs. Maybe she’s seen it before.”
She shrugged. “It’s unlikely. Santeros don’t typically use powerful psychotropics. They’re more into elacampane and sarsaparilla, and botanical symbolism. Now … will that be all?”
Paz stashed his notebook and stood. “Yes. You’ve been very helpful, Doctor, and I want to apologize for any misunderstanding with your secretary.”
A slight smile. “You mean you wouldn’t have had me locked up?”
“Only in an extremely comfortable cell. And, if the Miami PD can ever do you a favor …”
“Thank you. If you catch this guy, I’d love to talk with him. About plants.”
“Let’s catch him first. By the way, do you happen to know when Dr. Salazar will be back? I called her house and got a message …”
Dr. Herrera looked down at her desk. “Yes, but I can’t help you there. Maria keeps her movements somewhat confidential.”
“And why is that?”
“You’d have to ask her,” said Dr. Herrera, not smiling at all anymore.
Paz left, feeling he had missed something important. He didn’t like being on the frontiers of science, and he did not see how the dense slug of information he had extracted from the ethnobotanist brought him any closer to the murderer, who now seemed to be not only a skilled surgeon, but a master of psychopharmacology. Ordinarily, putting an unknown suspect in a new class was a good thing. If you knew your guy was a plumber and you found he liked bass fishing, that was good. If you found out he bred beagles, even better. It was possible to interview all the bass-fishing, beagle-breeding plumbers in Dade County and ask them where they were on the night of, and there you had it. Skillful eviscerators who knew a lot about tropical pharmacology should have generated a similarly small class, but … where to begin looking? Hunters? Actual surgeons? Butchers? Veterinarians? With a sideline in tropical plants?
Paz stepped from the shade cast by the science building and the morning sun socked him in the face. He put on his Vuarnets and crossed Memorial Drive almost unseeing, deep in his own head. The vision: a black man slipping around a corner, climbing the stairs to Deandra Wallace’s apartment. A black man because the vic was black, and that was the way it almost always went: people kill their own, plus there was Deandra’s boyfriend’s testimony about the African witch doctor, they had to take account of that, too. And a white fellow at night in Overtown would have registered like a comet in the minds of neighbors and passersby. An intelligent black man. He’d left no obvious clues, besides that damned nut, and they knew that Youghans’s violent outburst had been responsible for it ending up under the bed. The killer had lifted the rest of the opele, obviously, but missed the one nut. So, not so perfect. But the attempted frame was clever, and if not for Barlow’s religio-cracker intuition, Youghans would have gone down for it. So, an intelligent, educated black man. Not a homeboy. But a race man. Interested in Africa, in African ritual and culture. That’s how he had hooked Deandra, who had also been an aficionado of sorts. Rebelling from the striving, conventional parents. And the African angle was looking more interesting. The plants that had produced the drugs in the victim’s body were African plants. Could the guy be an actual African? He used an African-sounding name. That would be something else to check.
He was in shade again; the tower of the Richter Library loomed over him, and obeying an impulse, he entered the building. Like any autodidact, Paz knew how to use a library. He spent an hour or two in the pharmacology section, copying down chemical structures to go with the substances found in the victim and those Herrera had mentioned. He couldn’t follow the neurophysiological material very well?there seemed to be an inordinate number of substances involved in producing thought, rather more than seemed necessary to Paz, given the extremely simple nature of most people’s thoughts. But he read enough to recognize that Herrera had been right when she said that not much was known about the connection between the soup of chemicals and the production of mental states. Abandoning these researches, he went to seek more wisdom on the use of psychotropic botanicals by traditional shamans. His beeper went off?Barlow calling?but he ignored it and continued his pacing through the stacks. The University of Miami does not have a graduate program in anthropology, but it does have a department of Caribbean and African Studies, and a special collection in Richter to go with it. This has its own room, a typical special-collection establishment: counter with a clerk, several long blond wood tables, ceiling-high shelves all around, a few display cabinets exhibiting books and photographs.
Two dark women were working quietly at one of the long tables. They glanced up when Paz came into the quiet room and went back to what they were doing. At another table, surrounded by books and papers, sat an elderly woman writing in a notebook. The hair stood up on the back of Paz’s neck as he recognized her.
He noted that her hands were ink-stained, that she used an old-fashioned fountain pen, that her white hair was thick and wiry, springing out from the sides of her head in two wedges, like pieces of angel cake. She was wearing a fawn-colored linen dress with a pointed collar and a row of closely spaced jet buttons down the front, and she had thrown a dark mohair cardigan over her shoulders against the air-conditioned chill. He stared at her; she looked up briefly and went back to her writing. He sat down opposite her and said, in Spanish, “Dr. Salazar, if you could spare me a minute or two, I very much wish to speak with you.”
Her head popped up. A peculiar series of expressions passed across her face: first surprise, then an instant of fear, then a resettling of the features into the social persona, reserved and a little wary. She said, “Why is that, senor? And how did you know I was here?”
Her face was covered with tiny wrinkles, but the peach-colored skin still clung closely to the fine bones. A curved, bold nose, a determined chin, the eyes still bright, though sunken into their sockets and brown-shadowed beneath. She looks older than she did on the book jacket, Paz thought, and also that she must have stopped traffic in 1940s Havana. He displayed his badge and photo identification.
“I’m a homicide detective. I want to discuss certain aspects of a recent murder with you. As for how I knew you were here, I didn’t. I thought you were out of the country. I came here to do some research and here you were. Synchronicity.”
“You mean serendipity, Detective,” said Dr. Salazar after a considering moment. “It would be synchronicity only if I sought you out before you knew you wanted to see me.”