A mine shaft? The ceiling was too high for that, at least a dozen feet from the floor, which made no sense for a mine. So why so deep? Mining was a primary activity in the part of the world in which Amy had grown up. She couldn’t remember the first time she had been taken on a tour of one mine or another, or by whom, one of her father’s cousins, who were mining engineers, or by a grammar school teacher on a class outing. The walls were timbered like a mine, but the flooring was textured, heavy metal plate of the kind placed over excavations on highways. The metal was streaked with tire tracks. The tracks of the heavy duty tires that were fitted to earthmoving equipment. Chino opened the gate.

“I’m not exactly wearing the shoes for this.”

“You’ll have no trouble,” he said. He offered his arm. She took it. The easiest way to keep him from realizing how much of this she understood was to play the part he wanted her to play. She let the high heels wobble and leaned against him.

“You know why I’m not wearing any stockings,” she said.

“No. Tell me.”

“They don’t go with this kind of nightie. You don’t wear anything under the thing you sleep in. I don’t anyway.”

“So I noticed.”

“And now that you noticed, could you slow down a little? You know my other secret. The big one.”

“I do? Tell me again. I forgot.” They were coming out of the corridor to a large gallery that opened to the right, sloping down six feet or more, a room almost the size of a basketball court, in the center of which, under harsh, bare incandescent bulbs, was a piece of polished, well-oiled machinery the size and shape of an artillery piece.

At first glance it looked like a cannon, but it was pointed the wrong way, the barrel projected down through a gap in the metal flooring into the earth. She had never seen anything like it. A dozen men around the machine came to attention as they saw Chino. They burst into applause. “Amy? You were saying?”

“What?” The men looked like engineers, not workers, in dress shirts and pressed slacks. But then Amy realized that they couldn’t be anything but ordinary criminals — just like Chino, for all his oily charm.

Chino kissed her neck. “You were saying that I knew your other secret. Your big one.”