WHAT SHE REMEMBERED later of Macau was vague. The heat, of course, a good Portuguese restaurant with wooden benches and crumbling plaster walls, hot, crusty bread, carafes of red wine, something called African chicken, and the dan taat, the glossy yellow egg tarts. “You say pataca, I say potato,” he sang to her, changed in this little colony. The cemetery, coming back to the hotel, and Will on edge throughout. The interior of the little shrine had been cool and dark, but with the pungent odor of incense. They had knocked up flurries of dust when they entered.
“This is where Dominick is,” he had said.
“Who is Dominick?”
“A man who was, I think, misunderstood. Not least of all by me. At least, that’s what I think when I am being my most charitable self. But a sad story. In the end, his family didn’t want anything to do with him, and so he is buried here by himself, not with his family in Hong Kong. He wasn’t from Macau but this is where he ended up. An unwilling exile.”
“Did he die during the war?”
“Something like that. Maybe because of the war?” Will raised his voice in a question. “Who knows. It wasn’t that simple.” He ran his fingers along the dusty altar.
“In the end, it doesn’t matter though, does it. Here he lies, and all he’s done and all he did is forgotten by most.”
Then he spat on the coffin.
He had taken something from the little mausoleum, something he put in his pocket so casually she dared not ask what it was. But after that, they did nothing else unusual: they ate good meals, napped after tiffin, had champagne at the hotel bar, walked around and looked at Macau, so she assumed that was what he had come for. He reverted to his old sarcastic self. They came back to Hong Kong and he did not mention what had happened at the cemetery again.