‘I still don’t understand you. You’re a funny man. A little crazy, as I said.’

‘I’m only crazy because I’m not supposed to be here on the deck of this godforsaken ship at all. I should be waking up in my own bed on Twenty-first Street, in New York City, and I should be wealthy and organised and perfectly content. I should have gone out gambling last night, and had my supper at the Union Club, and maybe gone to a whorehouse to top off the evening properly. Instead of which I tried to seduce a married woman in a ship’s cabin, and got myself thrown out by some hair-curlered Tartar I’d never seen before in my life, and then I spent the rest of the night arguing with a Mexican-Polish lady about whether I was morally responsible for her pregnancy or not.’

Maria-Mamuska grinned. ‘You sure are crazy. But I’ll come to that place. If you say Montgomery Street, 18 September, three years from now, then that’s where I’ll be.’

Collis clasped her hand, and then kissed her, very quickly, on the forehead. For some reason he couldn’t begin to understand, he felt pleased, as if something quite happy had just taken place.

Right then, without any warning, Andrew Jackson Hunt appeared around the port side of the steamer, dressed in a tan suit, and tan-coloured cowhide shoes as wide and flat as cigar cases. He stared at the spectacle of Collis consoling Maria-Mamuska, with Collis in his nightshirt and nothing else, and Maria-Mamuska in her Pueblo blanket and a blouse that was obviously hanging loose, with undisguised pleasure. Collis couldn’t do anything but look back at him, and give him the sort of turned-down smile which means ‘Okay, you caught me, I give in’; but Andrew Hunt stepped forward and walked around them with both his hands clasped behind his back, as if he were admiring a new piece of statuary.

‘Good morning, sir and madam,’ he said with benevolence. ‘And how are we enjoying our voyage?’

Only a few miles out of Limón Bay, on the isthmus of Panama, with the dark coastline already in sight, the Virginia’s steam engines blew a valve, and the ship wallowed offshore for most of the day, while the weather worsened, and the passengers were fed with stone-cold mutton and carrots. It was early evening before they eventually paddled into Aspinwall harbour, and it was raining out of a low sky the colour of dirty white bath towels. Aspinwall itself was built on a flat coral island in the middle of the bay, and as the Virginia approached it through the rain, it appeared to the passengers to be floating on the steamy water as if by enchantment, a clutter of wet red rooftops and peeling white stucco, like a town mysteriously set adrift from land. The passengers stood on deck with umbrellas, or sheltered underneath the sagging awnings, as they were slowly borne towards the United States Mail Steamship Company’s jetty. There, silent and disinterested, a huddle of longshoremen waited in wet shirts and sodden straw hats, and a company official with whiskers and rows of gilt buttons held a dripping umbrella in one hand and a fizzled-out cigar in the other.