By the time we got to Santiago the next day, the dark orchid of her head had been resting on my shoulder almost a hundred miles. We were behaving like any young courting couple when one of them happens to be more than twice as old as the other, who also happens to be a murderer. Perhaps that’s a little unfair. Melba wasn’t the only one of us who’d pulled the trigger on someone. I had some experience of murder myself. Quite a lot of experience, as it happens, only I hardly wanted to tell her about that. I was trying to keep my thoughts on what lay ahead of us. Sometimes the future seems a little dark and frightening, but the past is even worse. My past most of all. But now it was the very present danger of the Santiago police I was worried about. They had a reputation for brutality that was probably well deserved and easily explained by the truth of Doña Marina’s remark that all of Cuba’s revolutions got started in Santiago. It was impossible to imagine much else that got started there. A start implied some activity, movement, or even work, and there wasn’t much sign of any of these tiring nouns on the sleepy streets of Santiago. Ladders stood around idle and alone, wheelbarrows sat unattended, horses kicked their heels, boats bobbed in the harbor, and fishing nets lay drying in the sun. About the only people who appeared to be working were the cops, if you could call it work. Parked up in the shade of the city’s pastel-colored buildings, they sat smoking cigarettes and waiting for things to cool down or warm up, depending on how you looked at it. Probably it was too hot and sunny for trouble. The sky was too blue and the cars were too shiny; the sea was too much like glass and the banana leaves were too glossy; the statues were too white and the shadows too short. Even the coconuts were wearing sunglasses.

After a couple of wrong turns I spotted the coaling station of Cincoreales that was a landmark for finding my way around the shantytown of boatyards, booms, quays, pontoons, dry docks, and slipways that serviced the flotilla of boats in Santiago Bay. I pointed the car down a steep, cobbled hill and along a narrow street. Heavy brackets for trams that were no longer running hung over our heads like the rigging of a schooner that had long ago sailed without it. I steered onto the sidewalk in front of an open set of double doors and peered down into a boatyard.

A bearded, weather-beaten man wearing shorts and sandals was maneuvering a boat that hung from an ancient-looking crane. I didn’t mind when the boat clunked against the harbor wall and then hit the water like a bar of soap. But then, it wasn’t my boat.