that Buenaventura bestows on all its widows Everyone around the table nodded along, the way they did to a pretty song sung in Cargo English.
Only Martisela lowered her eyes in disappointment. “Esteban Contreras filled your house with friends,” she said.
“Esteban always trusted people to do the right thing. He made allowances. Look at where he left me.” The emotion she had been holding off welled up. She blinked hard at sudden tears. Her chin wrinkled and her face reddened. Jorge saw his chance to move in with sympathy, but Cynthia was angry and pushed him off. She took Martisela’s arm. “I’m going to be like you.”
Martisela looked down at her habit. But it wasn’t the cloistered life that Cynthia envied. Martisela looked back up at her and she realized what Cynthia was talking about; her eyes widened and she gawped for something to say.
“I’m going to be ruthless and clever,” Cynthia said. “I’m going to play the market like an ocarina. I will always finish at the money. And if I go down I’ll take a billion people with me. So that even if the Shoes put me in the Convent Santa Ynez, and make me ride Bright Matter ships for my penance, nobody will trade another share without looking across the bay to see if I’m still safely away.”
I remember someone cooking carne borracha on the river watch that ran behind the house; the splash and sizzle of tequila was the only sound in the room, I remember Martisela trying to say something, only it wouldn’t come out. She sat next to me, and she was beyond my reach.
It was Jorge who stood up first. “My, doesn’t that smell good?” He grinned and nodded around the table and everyone gratefully agreed. Why, yes. The carne smells delicious. Let’s all go have a look.
This wave moved toward the door. Only Cynthia Contreras paused, and then only for a moment. “People pushed me around all my life,” she said to me. “A person like you, you can’t know what that’s like.” She looked to me to tell her she was making sense.
“Dryden murdered two faithful and trusting employees,” I said. “Just to do business with you. Don’t you wonder when your time will come?”
She gave me a bashful smile. “Honestly? No.” Behind her, Jorge had Dryden’s arm in this squeeze that gangsters in the Paraffin District give each other. He was detailing what he would do to Dryden’s enemies, extending his hand here and there as if setting out tools. Dryden glanced up at me as he passed. His face was fixed in horror.
“Jorge likes me,” Cynthia said simply. “He’s always liked me.” The screen slapped behind her.
Martisela sat back beside me. She folded her hands between her knees. She looked dazed.
Somebody walked past with a bag of wine. She snagged it without looking. She leaned back and drained it. All around us, the conversation sort of died out; people do seem to tip-toe around a half-potted nun. The man with the wine bladder shook it for signs of life. He looked appalled. Martisela seemed oblivious, but I got uncomfortable. I nudged her and motioned toward the front door. Maybe we need some air? She agreed, maybe we did.
I didn’t expect we’d be out long. The wind was turning. The fog was coming up from the wet docks, glowing faintly in every hollow along the canal. But Martisela was one of those people who wondered why red wine had to be sour. I thought to stick with her a bit, she’d get sentimental and ill and I’d take her home.
Cynthia Contreras called out something as we stepped outside. I thought she was asking us to stay, but I realized she was talking to Dryden.
“Look at this contract. Nine hundred pennyweight and you’re getting it for nothing-1.5 teratramos, and two lives.”
I looked at Martisela. Maybe she sighed.
“Amateurs.” I tried to laugh.
“She didn’t make this city.” Her eyes came around to me from someplace very far away. “Have you ever counted up the people you and I have betrayed?” She waited, but I had no answer. After awhile, I realized she had no answer either.
“The debt market is not your fault. Let it go.” I nuzzled her ear, just like old times. “Come home with me,” I said. I knew an old high-boy tugboat drydocked on Canal Sanchez. It was warm and private and I pictured us making love in the pilot house, under a parchment-colored sky.
Martisela was tracing the grids on her left hand with her fingers. “What if we got jobs?”
I thought she was joking. Martisela had this clownish streak to her, but she was drunk right now, and she was never funny when she was drunk. “We’ve got jobs,” I said. “We’re the best team of traders this city’s ever seen. Tonight, we reminded this whole city why they’ve had spending money the last couple of years.”
“What if we got a cart and sold shaved ice on Galle de Campana? You could talk to the customers. You’re good at talking to people. And I could put away the money?”
Shaved ice. I liked that. Shaved ice. This, from the girl who had rigged an entire monetary system in the space of a conversation.
“You know when you’re making too much money? When poverty starts looking picaresque.”
She bent away from me. Her hands twined into a figure I recognized: Swallowtail Catastrophe. She was plotting a discontinuous change in her own future.
“You’re going back to your sponsorship,” I realized.
“I’m so washed up in this town.” She made a broken little laugh. “I can’t even sell an investment to a poor widow woman.” She rolled her lip under her teeth. She looked away. “You should have seen me. I was doing so well when you showed up. You know how long it had been since I’d told a lie?” She took my currency marker out of my pocket to order up a water-taxi back to Santa Ynez.
She didn’t even see what was staring at her from the splash screen-something was wrong with the market. It should have been going wild, it was utterly flat. I tried to show her, but Martisela was drunk and heartsick and not listening to what the market was saying. I had to take her hands to make her look at me. “The reason Cynthia Contteras passed on your ancillary market is because there is no ancillary market. Whatever this Dryden person is doing with our pterachnium, it’s not bankable.”
Not bankable. There was an antiseptic phrase. I remembered the market report of the Hierophant’s port vane. Acres of cesium and cobalt showered by neutrons and swept off in rivers of molten metal. You want to say such visions are “unimaginable.” But they’re not. Sometimes they’re impossible to look away from. “Wait a week,” I said. “Let this pterachnium decay before you go out.”
“And in that week, what happens? Maybe Dryden hotloads some other ship? With some other sister in my place?”
“Maybe-” I could hardly get the words out of my throat. “Maybe I make you stay with me.”
She looped her arms around my neck. Her lips and nose were soft. Her breath, luscious and stale with wine. “Maybe you rescue me.”
“I’m in no position to rescue anyone. Already, everybody at the Botanica asks what happened to me. They soothe me with cheap flattery like a cerrazadito.”
“Maybe we rescue each other.” I could see it in her eyes: Me and her and this pushcart.
“Is that what we’re talking about here? Are we saving my soul?” She gave me a sleepy grin. “If your life depends on my redemption, you are one dead Hermana, Camala.”
We always talked so tough with each other.
“Don’t go,” I whispered. “Please.” Perhaps you don’t know Orlando Coria, and this pleading sounds genuine, yes? And that wetness to the eyes, a nice touch.
Martisela’s taxi slipped out from the shadow of Puente de Hierro.
“I’ll call you when I’m away,” she said. I couldn’t believe she would really leave. We’d brought this city to its knees, helped a helpless widow, and faced down the big guero. How she could do this?
“Leave a message if I’m out.” If she hoped to gain some advantage on me, well, she hoped in vain, didn’t she? If she put her palm to her mouth or offered a little wave, I barely noticed. I had lots to think about. I had my commission, 10 percent of 1.5 teratramos. I was a man of substance now.
I remember checking my currency marker to show her what she walked away from. I don’t remember the amount, but it was an awful lot of money. Enough so that my life would never be the same. It was enough to make me feel vindicated. Funny the way some moments stay with you.
As for the jingle of the buckles on her sandal straps as Martisela turned away? Five years later, I barely remember the sound. I have my pride.
