The only thing that lowered Maxwell’s spirits or caused him doubt was the thought of someone back in London he referred to as ‘Pop’. Anton discovered that this person, whose real name was Dawson, was the managing editor of Maxwell’s paper, for ever demanding that he send over stories that showed they were keeping up with the opposition. ‘“Times reports dynamite accident in Cut,”’ he read out loud to Anton one evening after a visit to the cable office. ‘“Many dead. Require your matcher soonest.” How in God’s name am I supposed to know? I can’t get across to the bloody Cut and anyway the Yanks would just deny it. In any case I happen to know their man’s sitting on his arse in the best bloody hotel in Panama City. Typical.’

Along the lines of Maxwell’s simplifications, Anton could make out where public opinion lay. The president, Theodore Roosevelt, contemptuous of the French, had been determined to get the thing done the American way, and at any cost. The price had turned out to be the lives of thousands of workers from Barbados and Jamaica, dead from plague and mudslide; and the betrayal of Colombia. On the other hand, the United States had purged the isthmus of yellow fever and spanned it with a piece of engineering whose ingenuity was as dazzling in execution as it had been simple in Stevens’s lake-and-lock brainwave. The willpower to build a canal through the most difficult place on earth could perhaps only have come from a young country eager to prove something to the world.

Yet Anton could not quite accept that Europe – and France in particular – was as corrupt or as doomed as the Americans and Maxwell maintained. Something in him rebelled and made him think the truth might be both more complicated and more interesting (and Delphine’s native country was not to be written off so easily). He took the story of American competence triumphing over Old World decadence and set out to undermine it. He had always found this a good principle: to acknowledge the received ideas before destroying them with accumulated facts.

He thought constantly of Delphine, though for reasons of self-protection he sometimes tried to think about her less. Being with her had made him feel a more capacious, multifaceted character; it made him feel interesting, even to himself. It would not be going too far, he thought, to admit that she had changed his understanding of what his life could be. And that was to say nothing of the sybaritic pleasure of her skin, the scent of her and all they did to one another – their own solution to Vienna’s failure to find a proper way for men and women to be close. He sometimes wondered if he should ask her to marry him, but didn’t want to risk upsetting an equilibrium that he didn’t understand.

After two weeks, he was compelled to think of something other than Delphine when he managed to find a place on a train heading down through the isthmus towards the Culebra Cut.