few photographs of Maria D’Arcy were difficult to read. It was as if each had caught a separate aspect of her personality, although she was identifiably the same person. Like a signature, he thought; always the same and invariably different — too much the same, and it was fake. She was certainly not fake, he thought. Intriguing, yes, and from her pictures somehow inscrutable. He found himself liking her, she was familiar and exotic at the same time. Her pictures invoked the scent of wildflowers and sun-drenched pebbles — the lingering smell of her perfume that was caught in the air around her corpse although he had not focused on it at the time.
* * *
In the dark and brutal instant it took for Miranda to assimilate the unknowns, her mind swarmed with facts, as it often did when she needed to dissociate from raw feeling. President Salvador Allende was an elected Marxist. Augusto Pinochet was the general who overthrew him. Pinochet brought relative prosperity, he established a totalitarian reign of terror, it lasted two decades, the disparu numbered over four thousand. The coup took place on September 11; another September 11. Allende shot himself in his office, within walking distance of this room. It was an act either of desperation or martyrdom. The fascist Pinochet was now out of power, but he was alive. He presently lived within walking distance of this room.
The two figures looming at the foot of her bed smoked in silence, cigarettes illuminating their distorted features with each inhalation in a macabre gleam. They did not know she was awake. Or perhaps they did. She kept her breathing even. They said nothing.
Miranda mentally reached for her Glock semi-automatic, which was secure in her gun locker at Police Headquarters in Toronto.
She wanted to laugh at the absurdity, she wanted to scream, she wanted to absorb every detail: muted light pushing against her curtains from the quiet street outside, the smells of a tropical city at dawn, of American tobacco, and the sound of her own breathing. She wanted to be calm, fully present at her own execution. She tried to suppress fear; fear breeds futility. She suppressed rage; rage would make her more vulnerable. She wanted to cry. She could do nothing, feel everything. She waited.
A cigarette arced onto the carpet, was ground into the fibres in a small conflagration of sparks. A hand touched her foot through the sheet. Gently, like a lover, trying not to startle. She flinched involuntarily and drew herself up against the headboard, with the sheet wrapped around her. Contact had been established. In a moment, pressing their advantage, they would turn on a bedside light so that they could see her better than she could see them.
“Hola,” said a man’s voice, surprisingly high-pitched and cheerful.
Miranda said nothing.
The bedside light flicked on.
“You are Mrs. Miranda Quin?” He spoke English.
She said nothing.
“We regret this intrusion, Miranda Quin, we must do what is necessary.” In spite of his soothing voice, this sounded ominous.
“You are naked beneath your cover, is it true?”
Miranda’s sense of her own vulnerability ratcheted up by several degrees.
“We must ask you to get dressed. We will watch.”
She pulled the sheet closer, then realized this might seem enticing and fluffed it away so the contours of her body disappeared in oblique planes of shadow and light.
“We must watch, Mrs. Quin. You are a policeman, yes? You might have the gun. You might be well trained in the martial arts, you might be hazardous. Possibly you would run away.”
“Naked?”
“Please. You get dressed in your clothes.”
“Where are you taking me?”
“Nowhere, Mrs. Quin. We wish to talk.”
“Can’t you talk to me like this?”
“No, Mrs. Quin. You are naked.”
His courtesy puzzled her, given that they had broken into her room in the dead of night. The man who spoke English handed her the clothes she had left in a neat pile on a chair for dressing in the early morning. He waited until she had squirmed into her panties and then he withdrew the sheet. Awkwardly, she continued to dress, wavering for balance on the soft bed as her weight shifted, feeling unutterably vulnerable.
Their thinking: it would be easier to explain away a fully clothed corpse than a naked one. They must be police of some sort. Gangsters or revolutionaries would simply kill her, dressed or not. There seemed no threat of rape, which upset her because it implied something more complex, even more sinister.
* * *
Morgan had finished out his day watching bad television. Usually he read, but he was feeling uneasy. His eyes were sore from researching Harrington D’Arcy. He wondered how Miranda was doing in Santiago. She was staying at the same Best Western where he had spent the night a year ago. The beds were excessively soft, but it was a clean, well-lit place. When he turned in, he thought of her asleep, and when he awoke in the morning, it felt as if they had spent the night together, but she had left early.
2
Easter Island Cryptic
To Miranda’s surprise, she was still alive. The city stirred outside her window and she was not a corpse, she had not been molested, she had not been tortured. So far, she had been treated with a kind of deferential civility calculated to invoke terror. The acrid smell of burned synthetic fabric made her nauseous. The smoking man who did the talking frightened her more than the man who was silent, even though his voice was amiable. He had absolute power in a room swarming with ghosts of the disparu, because in the dead hours of early morning he was responsible to no one. He smiled politely as she arranged herself against the headboard, drawing her knees up to her body.
“You are ready now to talk?” he said.
“About what?”
“This is not a social visit, Mrs. Quin. You know why we are here.”
“It’s Ms. Quin.”
“Yes. That is good. You will tell us, please, where is that man?”
His high-pitched voice was smooth and she thought of drowning in oil, suffocating.
“No,” she said. She had no idea who they were talking about, but it seemed a good idea to answer in the negative.
He moved close to the side of the bed. The other man moved close on the other side. She felt squeezed, twisted inside, like meat in a grinder.
“Mr. Harrington D’Arcy. You know Mr. D’Arcy?”
“I’ve never heard of him.” The name sounded vaguely familiar. “Are you with the police? I assume you are armed.”
“It is not necessary, Miss Quin.”
The implication was that the two men could kill her with their bare hands, although his tone was conciliatory. The feeling of drowning in warm oil.
“Strange,” she said. “In Canada, we need warrants.”
“There
