What he wanted was a black woman.

No. He wanted Josephine.

Wesley Lewis Jr’s first sight of her: it was just after luncheon, his head pounding, soused and heavy in the gut, swaying beneath the hot, searing sky. Numb inside the cushioning sweet wet green of the surrounding sugarcane.

He saw her disembark from a barge on the river, a stunningly beautiful dark mulatto, barefoot in a pale blue European dress, a frilled rose-red umbrella in her hand, her arm hooked in Mr Hendrik’s. As they walked, Wesley Lewis Jr watched the Negro pack, damp down, light and then hand her a long wooden pipe, which she began to smoke, smiling, giggling, pressing her head to his shoulder, affectionate and loving. They’d been in town, a rare privilege, and she was his half-sister, barely fourteen years, and Captain van der Velde’s mistress. Wesley Lewis Jr had heard of her, and now understood the talk. Every desire he’d ever felt in his life that moment poured into the image of her. The beautiful slave Josephine.

Josephine of Surinam.

He’d bedded an abundance of black flesh in his time, from South Carolina to Cuba, from the Caribbean islands to the plateaus of Brazil, and in every shade of light and every shade of night, but none were like this vision here before him. The sun!

But she was half the world away. So, right now, Wesley Lewis Jr, no question, would pay double (triple!) for a black woman. And he’d pay for heat and sweat and sugarcane liquor, too.

Not a chance.

Christ Almighty, but Berlin was a dog!

Only one more night, he told himself. We’re leaving in the morning.

He poured more schnapps into his coffee cup, splashing some onto the table. Through narrowed, drunken eyes he watched the girls serving.

Nothing like the girls he knew. Those Surinam girls, van der Velde’s girls, deep into the night, deep into the dark, the table heaving, the candlelight, a ship’s hold of gorging and laughing and shouting and singing and fucking. Those girls.

Van der Velde’s girls. Beautiful Negresses, brown angel mulattoes, feasts, dark nipples and gleaming dark flesh, gleaming, molasses under the moon.

Kill-devil liquor, and heat, blue, green: impenetrable green. Remember the slave hanging from the tree?

Wesley Lewis Jr had just arrived at the plantation, first day, off the barge from Paramaribo and still wobbly after the sea voyage from South Carolina and there he was, the Negro, swinging gently in the breeze, an iron hook pushed into his ribs, hands tied behind his back, his face anguish carved out of stone.

‘Still not dead,’ somebody said. Still not dead, two days later. ‘Maybe tomorrow,’ they said. ‘You never can guess it.’

The serving girl at Otto’s came by. ‘More coffee?’