with the copper-red hair. He was fine now. Miranda was still in the world. People got on planes, went away, and you didn’t know if they were real anymore. But hearing her voice, she was still real.
But what the hell had they been talking about? It was like they had caught brief glimpses of each other across an abyss between parallel worlds. He felt himself slipping into a funk. He envied her having an adventure. A fake Harrington D’Arcy bleeding in your bed at the Hotel Victoria. She had slipped into a story by Somerset Maugham. A spy? Not likely, if he was using the name of an establishment lawyer. He was attractive, though. He could tell by her voice. And dangerous.
* * *
Miranda sat on the only chair in the room, gazing at her unconscious companion with something approaching affection. He had roused while she was talking to Morgan, then slipped off into a deep sleep, which projected, as it does among even the most dangerous, an innocent vulnerability that she found disconcerting. They had been through a lot together. So it seemed. Really, he had been through a lot, and so had she, but separately. She would let him sleep and heal. Then she would try to sort things out. It was good talking to Morgan. She had not crossed over into another dimension after all.
She had gone out and gotten medical supplies from a pharmaceutical and curio shop on the main street and picked up a few ready-to-eat groceries from a small grocery and curio store next to it. She had noticed very few tourists in Hanga Roa, but every retail outlet in town seemed to have rows of table-top moai replicas, gaping maki-maki ashtrays fashioned after an open-mouthed god of the island, and a stack of T-shirts emblazoned with moai or birdmen or heroic images of Hoto Matua, the island’s first leader when the people of Rapa Nui arrived from the sea, about the time ancient Rome fell to the invading Vandals.
Cruise ships, she reasoned. At random intervals, a sudden influx of exotic visitors would no doubt arrive, take photographs of themselves standing in front of a scowling moai to prove they had been there, pick up a few souvenirs on the run, and sail away. There can’t be too many, she thought. The nearest port for their next stop would be more than two thousand kilometres away. Curiously, she did not feel isolated, or that the rest of the world was remote. She knew her loneliness was something carried within, not imposed from outside. This would be a good place to write mysteries, if she could just step away from the one she was in.
When she returned to her room, she dressed the man’s wound. He shuddered from pain, without fully awakening, and when she was finished he mumbled something and fell back into sleep. After the interlude with Morgan on the phone, she squirmed down in the room’s only chair and watched as the hours went by, until the room grew suddenly dark when the subtropical sun plunged into the western ocean. She got up and went to the bathroom, leaving the door open in case the Englishman stirred. When she came back, he was awake. He had turned on the bedside light. Even in pain, he was insufferably handsome.
“Hey, how are you doing?” she said.
“Good, a lot better.”
“You just lie easy.”
He boosted himself up against the headboard.
“I’m all right,” he said. “I’m a fast healer.
“You lost blood.”
“I’ve got a lot. Was it blue?”
“Was it, oh yes, very blue. Sloane Square and Oxford, right? And before that, Eton or Harrow, no doubt.”
“Eton.”
“And what name are you going by today?”
“Tonight? Shaw, Thomas Edward Shaw.”
“You’re lying.”
“Am I? Yes, I suppose I am.” He hunched a bit to the side, to relieve pressure on his wound. “What about Ross,” he said, “could my name be Ross?”
“I suspect your name is Lawrence — T.E. Lawrence of Arabia, he used both Ross and Shaw as pseudonyms.”
“Quite so. You must be very good at crossword puzzles.”
“Yes I am.”
“Did you read his very pretentious book, Seven Pillars of Wisdom? Are you a Middle-Eastern history buff? Or was it the film with Peter O’Toole? An excellent film.”
“Where on earth did you get the energy? You were dying a few hours ago. I read the abridged version; Revolt in the Desert. Didn’t finish it. And what’s your connection with Harrington D’Arcy?”
“I am of stern stuff, my mother habitually proclaimed. Heal or die, my father would say. I had a Victorian childhood, generations too late. My parents were really quite evil, in their own charming way. I have never met Harrington D’Arcy. It’s just a name with a history, powerful, but obscure. Makes it easier to take on another identity if there’s an identity to take on, so to speak. For now, I need to be Ross. I believe I am carrying papers that will establish I am Thomas Edward Ross.”
“And are you?”
“Yes, certainly. Did you know when Lawrence was Ross he was John Hume Ross. He was only T.E. as himself and as Shaw. If there was an himself. I prefer my own version. Do you know Mr. D’Arcy?”
“Intimately. From a distance. His wife was just murdered — died.”
“Which is it, Miss Quin?” He was trying for a quip, but he seemed, for a moment, confused. “How could you know that?” he said. He glanced around, then looked at the telephone.
“And how would you know she was not?” said Miranda.
The Englishman who had decided to call himself Ross shifted his weight against the headboard.
“I think perhaps we should clean up the blood,” he said.
“I’ll do it later. I bought cleanser and some wiper-uppers.”
“Were you out?”
“I don’t carry dressings for a knife wound when I travel,” she said, gesturing toward his bandaged abdomen.
“Yes, of course. Thank you. Why are you being so helpful? Thank you for not calling the police.”
“I reserve the option. At this point, though, I’d rather keep the so-called authorities as far away as possible. I had some midnight callers in Santiago. They claimed to be police. Carabineros. They were looking for you. They did not inspire confidence.”
“And do I?”
“Inspire confidence? Anything but. You seem like a dangerous man to know.” She paused, then smiled. “I doubt you’re a cop, but I do think you’re one of the good guys. That could just be part of your disguise, of course.”
“Disguise?”
Come on, Thomas Edward Ross, she thought. No one wears good looks so casually without something to hide.
“Yeah,” she said.
He smiled with roguish insouciance. “I have no idea what you are talking about, Miss Quin. I will confess, I am not actually a member of the constabulary, although I might have been, had life gone in a somewhat different direction. I am a wounded man and
