“Just cool, Ian,” Fire said. He was thinking of the sketch pad now.

“You think ah fraid for him?” Donovan said to Fire. “Let him try nuh. I have my connections.”

“Donovan, shut you ass before de man mash you down.”

Donovan began to mutter to himself while shuffling some papers to show that he wasn’t concerned with whatever was on their minds. “Dis likkle coolie bwai feel say … cho—”

“Weh you say?” Ian asked. “Is me you calling coolie?”

Donovan sucked his teeth.

And Ian sprang on top of the desk and kicked Donovan in the face.

“Gimme de fucking money, Donovan,” Ian whispered as cocked his boot again.

“I don’t have it,” Donovan said, clutching his broken nose.

“So who have the fucking washer and dryer?” Ian asked, pulling the smoke in deeply.

“Dr. Lewis at the children’s hospital,” Donovan replied. Blood was splattered on his light blue shirt.

“Good. Make him fix you up.”

Fuck, Fire was thinking now. How did it get to this?

At the same time that Ian and Fire were hustling out of Donovan’s office, Humphrey Heath was finishing his figure drawing class at the Edna Manley School of Visual Arts. Puffing on his Hoyo de Monterrey Double Corona, he spared some time for the students’ questions, then went to have his lunch.

Although he was approaching his seventy-fifth birthday, Mr. Heath was still a handsome man—tall and willowy. His salt-and-pepper hair was swept away from his face in an exuberance of curls, and his white beard clung to his face like ivy on a parish church.

He walked slowly—but lazily rather than feebly—with rounded shoulders and the slight limp that he’d been carrying since the Libyan campaign of 1942. He liked to tell students that he’d been hit by a Mauser slug at El Alamein, but in truth his patella was damaged during a pickup game of cricket in a rearguard supply station.

He sat in the outdoor amphitheater at the drama school and broke off bits of bread with his gnarled hands. A class was rehearsing a play onstage, and when they had a break, the students came to sit with him on the limestone tier. He had been teaching at the school for some twenty-five years and was immensely popular. Budget cuts and arthritis had forced him to reduce his hours, but he could always be found at the school, usually in the center of a group of young artists.

Mr. Heath left the amphitheater after about a half hour, and walked across the campus to the gate, stopping every few yards to talk with the groups of students who called out to him.

He crossed the street and walked on the shady side of Arthur Wint Drive down to Tom Redcam Avenue and sat on a bench in front of the library and smoked another cigar, relaxing in the shade of a poinciana tree as traffic crawled by. He resumed his walk over to the military headquarters at Up Park Camp where he was due for his afternoon scotch with Major Daley. The corporals on duty gave him a mock salute and admitted him without question. He returned their salute jokingly and hitched a ride in a jeep to the major’s house, a cream-colored clapboard bungalow with sky blue trim that had been built by the British army in the 1940s.