“Su amigo,” Luis repeated, and jerked his chin at Will, whose eyes were slitted open and still. His chest had ceased to rise and fall, his head had rolled to one side and the tip of his tongue stuck out of a corner of his mouth. Nathaniel put an ear to Will’s heart and, hearing the worst, the loudest silence in the world, shook him by the collar and said, “Aw, come on, Will, come on,” as if his friend were running a race and needed to show only a little extra effort to win.

Luis closed the eyes with a brush of his hand and pulled the sailcloth over the corpse’s face, and then he and Elvira and the three boys confronted the great conundrum of death in their own ways: Luis crossed himself, the Braithwaites looked at their covered shipmate in silence and disbelief, and Elvira let out a shriek that flew a little distance over the dark waters of the Gulf Stream, rolling on into oblivion.

26

“VERY WELL, thank you, gentlemen. Quite a story.” Mr. Carrington, the American consul, a tall and ponderous man wearing a cream-colored linen suit, looked at his notes. “We’ll have to go through it again, with my secretary present to record it. Hope you don’t mind.”

“All of it, sir? From the start?” asked Nathaniel, seated with his brothers in front of Carrington’s desk, an impressive expanse of dark wood bearing a brass lamp, pens in holders, and papers tidily filed in labeled trays.

“No. We’d be here until tomorrow,” he said, running a finger under his starched collar, yellowed at the edges with dried sweat. An American flag, uncased behind him, and photographs of President McKinley and Vice President Roosevelt lent a patriotic flair to his otherwise stark office. “Only the incident involving your friend. Mr. Terhune, is it? That’s our concern here. A U.S. citizen murdered—I should say, who appears to have been murdered—by a citizen of Cuba.”

Rising, the consul opened a set of double doors and called quietly into an adjoining room, “Joseph, would you come in, please?”

Joseph appeared, garbed in a striped shirt with sleeve garters, and asked his boss if it was all right to leave his jacket off, for it sure was a scorcher today.

With a wave of his pen, Mr. Carrington gave his approval, observing that just about every day in Havana was a scorcher. The secretary sat down alongside the desk, under high casement windows facing the street, the windows open to admit the breezes, the louvered shutters closed to break the direct afternoon sunlight. Joseph opened a stenographer’s pad on his crossed legs, adjusted his steel-rimed eyeglasses, and waited, pencil poised.

“This will be to the Department of State,” Mr. Carrington began. “Dated today, August fourteenth. Subject—Alleged homicide of a United States citizen in Cárdenas, Cuba, by a citizen of Cuba.…”