“But Senator Zamora, you have heard the news, surely?”

“What news?”

“The accident.”

He had been with Pablo at Cap Spartel. He knew nothing of any accident.

So she told him how the container ship Admiral Grau, loaded to the gunwales with equipment vital for the tunnel as well as a cargo of fuel oil, had collided in the poniente with a fishing boat. The oil was blazing off La Mujer Muerta and the current drifting it towards Abyla.

“It was Don Emilio’s boat!” The boat he had scrimped eight years for, the boat he was sailing from old Mogador, the pride of his life. “And now they can’t find him,” and her mind filled with Emilio, whose beard could not hide his freckles, so many his mother would say the sun must have kissed him through a sieve.

Senator Zamora stared at the dish before him and silently swore. He pushed away his plate. He wondered if he should make a telephone call to his office. There would be no one there. Anyway, since the beginning of dinner an idea had taken root in his mind. He could not bear to abandon it.

“Delicious, Señora Criado. As always. But probably that will do.”

He rose from the table. He opened the door into the hallway, passing from one set of his father’s eyes to another. He climbed the staircase to his study. When he emerged he carried a leather file bulging with papers. On the landing he paused to adjust the portrait of his sovereign which for six years he had hung in the same position, upside down, as a mark of his extreme disrespect. He tiptoed up the stairs, past Pablo’s bedroom to a room on the top floor. The nursery. Tomorrow he would speak in the Chamber and play petanque with Governor Menendez’ head. He sat down before Pablo’s computer. He opened the manual. He switched on the screen, watching a green dot explode into a square of green. Tonight he had work to do.

In the Plaza de los Reyes, Marie Amaral felt the poniente on her cheeks and thought of another wind, the chergui. All weekend she had been gored by memories. Things she didn’t want to remember kept coming back. She knew the Grau was to blame; but there was the vase she had dropped. The dull shards, glazed on one side, remained in a heap in the corner of the Floresteria Amaral. She had tried to throw them away, but couldn’t. She did not see pieces of broken pottery. She saw mirror fragments. She was in Oran again and a turbaned head was bursting through the doorway.

He enters her room in Mers-el-Kebir, kicking open the door. There is a knife in his boots. Nervous hands grip a machine-gun. There have been shots from this building. Some Europeans have fired on the crowd. It is the day after Independence and there are crowds in the streets. Ten people are dead, including a child. Up the stairs comes the oo-oo-oo of women ululating.