Chapter Four

It was still raining during the night as Collis lay in the Hotel Colón trying to sleep. He tossed around in his narrow iron-framed bed, tousled and sweating, and at last he sat up with the crumbly old mosquito netting draped around his head as if he were a new bride, or a man playing the ghost of himself. The heat seemed to be even worse at night, but he had heard that the night air carried fever, and so he had kept his shutters closed. He lifted the netting, groped to find his matches on the bedside table, and awkwardly lit his oil lamp. The yellowish light swelled to fill the room.

The Hotel Colón, when they had arrived, had turned out to possess a decaying French grandeur, with half-collapsed chandeliers and muddied carpets, although the rooms themselves were bare-boarded and rudimentary. Collis wouldn’t have minded if they had been strewn with rushes. He had been so exhausted by the time a young pockmarked Spanish boy had shown him up to his balconied room on the second floor that he had closed the door and fallen back on his bed with a greater feeling of relief and luxury than he had ever been afforded by the St Nicholas Hotel or the Union Club or even one of the plushest bawdy houses on Mercer Street. After lying motionless for five minutes, he had kicked off his wet boots, stripped off his rain-darkened coat, and then lain back again and closed his eyes.

He had slept, he supposed, for about two hours. He picked up his watch from the table, but it had stopped at ten o’clock. He looked around the room. There was a cream-painted closet, a battered bureau with a china jug and a basin, and a reproduction of the Madonna of the Rocks. His trunk must have been brought up while he slept, because it lay upended next to the bureau. There was a close smell of tropical mould and camphor, and it made him sneeze, twice.

He got out of bed, squatted down by his trunk, and unlocked it. Underneath his linen coat, securely wrapped up in a towel, was a bottle of red burgundy, which he had purchased on the steamer. He took it out, sat on the bed, and dug the cork out of it with his penknife. He swilled out with wine the cloudy tumbler that the management had left by his bed, and then poured himself a large glassful. The water, Andrew Jackson Hunt had warned him, was as dangerous as the night air.

He was sitting there drinking and wiping the sweat from his forehead with the towel when he heard a hoarse whistling sound. He frowned and listened. There was another sound, too. A monotonous pssshh-clank, pssshh-clank, followed by a long sharp exhalation of steam. He got up and went across to the window that gave out on to the balcony. Through the slats of the shutters, he could see orange lights flickering and hear loud voices talking in Spanish, and laughter. Collis unfastened the latch, opened the balcony door, and stepped out into the hot night air.