The effort of trying to work out what might have come about made me groan. Who had cut the dead man’s throat?? Who was now claiming to represent the merchant? And where was Hare?
I finished my tortilla and looked around, trying to find something on which to wipe away the grease, other than my cloak. I was still looking for a suitable piece of cloth or a large, j flat leaf when I noticed someone looking at me.
He was not the sort of man who would normally have merited a second glance. He wore a plain maguey fibre cloak and wore his hair loose like any commoner. His face was equally undistinguished, his weak nose, shallow cheekbones and fleshy mouth somehow seeming to melt into the flesh around them so as to be immediately forgettable. His eyes alone commanded attention, and when I first looked around they were fixed on me as intently as a toad’s upon the fly it is about to eat.
As I turned fully towards this man, he dropped his gaze, abandoned whatever business he had been pretending to contract, and stepped swiftly away. A moment later he was lost in the crowd.
I took a couple of steps after him but stopped myself. If he had been watching me, I thought, then there was no need for me to pursue him. He would come and find me. .
I wiped my hands on my cloak and sauntered away deliberately, at a pace that anybody following me would find easy to match.
I wandered vaguely around the marketplace for a while, casting occasional nonchalant glances over my shoulder. It was difficult to tell whether my tail was still with me or not. The moment he had vanished the first time, I realized that I could not remember quite what he looked like, and although from time to time I caught sight of someone I thought might be him, I was never sure. It was an unnerving sensation, believing I was being followed by someone who was effectively invisible.
I walked over to where the sellers of cocoa beans had their pitches. It occurred to me that anybody planning to covert his assets into money might well have started here, since cocoa beans were an easy form of currency to use: not too valuable to be exchanged for small, essential items such as food and touch less trouble to carry around than large pieces of cloth. As with the fish sellers, I made my discreetly casual enquiries while pretending to admire the wares.
Chocolate was the drink of lords, a luxury I had rarely had the opportunity to indulge in. Hence I knew little about it, and was immediately struck by the sheer variety of forms it came in. A bean is a bean, is what I had always imagined, a small, oval, white thing. Here, I was presented with beans of every size and colour: tiny ones like chilli seeds, green ones, brown ones, even some that were variegated, and separate piles of beans from different sources — Tochtepec, Coatolco, Xolteca, Zacatollan, even as far south as Guatemala. There were piles of cracked and broken beans, and heaps of others ground into various grades of powder. Every stall sold a selection of flavourings as well — vanilla or honey or pimentos — and bowls, jugs and wooden whisks for mixing the drink and beating it into the perfect frothy consistency.
‘This is as good a selection as you’ll find anywhere in the valley,’ I was told. ‘Whatever your master wants, I can supply it. If you don’t see what you want here, I can probably get it for you.’
‘Thanks,’ I said dubiously. I looked quickly up and down the row of pitches, most of which had at least as great a variety of beans on display as this one.
The vendor intercepted my glance. ‘Well, please yourself,’ he said huffily, ‘but just do me one favour: don’t buy anything from him over there. He’s a shyster. Toasts his beans in hot ashes to make them swell up and turn white.’
I turned to look at the stall he indicated. As I did so, my eyes passed over a nondescript man in a plain cloak slipping quietly across the aisle. I decided to ignore him. There was little I could do about him for the moment in any case.
I began asking about Hare again. It was not long before I found what I was looking for: a bundle of smoking tubes, I bought very cheaply that morning, from a large man who said their owner was in a hurry to raise cash.
I left the same message here as I had with the seafood seller, to ask whoever was trying to get rid of the merchant’s property to meet me, and then started walking back to the guesthouse.
I felt pleased with myself. The plan I had come up with was still not much of a plan, but so far it was working.
I wondered whether I ought to make an effort to get rid of my tail. I stepped up my pace, heading briskly and purposefully towards the wide entrance to the marketplace and the palace precinct. The stalls and crowded aisles around me resembled a maze, but it was easy enough to get my bearings simply by glancing up at the great bulk of Tezcatlipoca’s pyramid, which towered over the walls and the sacred precinct beyond them. As I got closer to its base, the top of the pyramid vanished from sight, hidden by the lower slope of its great stairway, and all I could see up there was a thin wisp of smoke from the temple fire, a faint dark smudge against the clear sky.
At moments such as this I remembered that the Lord of the
