The marked had a different status in the Order: greater access to knowledge, rituals, decisions of the inner circle. They had been touched by the gods. The young woman who had been marked the night before would now be invited to more important rituals, her whims would be granted, and, if Juan wanted, she could have a personal relationship with him. Stephen had so much freedom and access to Juan not only because he was Florence’s son, but also because he was one of the marked. Over the years their bond had become intimate, both fraternal and sexual. If that bothered Florence, she had never said so out loud. Everyone knew, though, that she would have preferred that privilege for her other son. But no one talked about Eddie anymore, not since he had disappeared almost ten years before.
Gaspar shook the branch so hard that some leaves drifted down to Juan and Stephen.
“Get down right now! I’m not going to climb up there and get you.”
There was silence, then a slow and doubtful sliding of hands and legs. The tree wasn’t tall, and Juan knew his son could manage on his own. In under five minutes he was back on the beach and running toward Juan.
“It’s harder to get down than climb up.”
“And that’s strange?”
“Yeah, cos it’s the opposite on stairs.”
One of his hands was full of leaves, and he added them to the collection in the bucket. Hi, he said to Stephen, and sat down beside him. When Gaspar started to organize and classify his flowers and weeds and leaves on the dark sand of the beach, Juan asked:
“How did it go with your grandmother yesterday? You told me a lot about the zoo but nothing about what you did with her.”
“It was boring. She said we were gonna play, but we played weird games that weren’t fun. I don’t like being with Grandma. I like Grandpa okay.”
“What were the games?”
Gaspar described the tests in his own way, confused and chaotic, but to Juan and Stephen, who knew them, it was easy to understand. They had covered his eyes and asked him who was in the room. Gaspar had named the people present. He didn’t sense anyone else. Still with the blindfold on, they’d asked him to imagine symbols. Like what? Gaspar had asked. Like numbers. Or other things. He had talked to them about the flowers he saw before a headache.
“That doesn’t count for anything?” Juan asked Stephen.
“Doesn’t seem to have caught their attention. It’s a halo from a migraine. They’re not idiots.”
Gaspar talked as though in a dream while he piled up purple flowers, red flowers, light green leaves, dark green leaves, and bark, as though they were ingredients for the cauldron.
“Then they made me walk around a weird part of the zoo and they ran around me, I think. I don’t know what game that was. Like hide and seek, but I got scared by the noises and plus some of them weren’t wearing clothes and I didn’t like that. Grandpa came to get me, but after a really long time. Like nighttime.”
“Okay. What else?”
“Then that boring part, when they made me sit on some circles in the grass. Are they chalk, Dad?”
“Yes, they’re made of chalk.”
Juan thought: They used to be made of blood, son, but your mother forbade it as you got older. I’m surprised they’re respecting that wish.
“And another boring thing—they wanted me to lie in a bed with my legs all twisted up, and think about things they told me, like imagining things, but I didn’t really understand them. Plus, they have a hand like the one Mom had in her purse, maybe it’s the same one.”
Juan frowned. He didn’t like to mention that hand in front of Stephen, but he also knew the hand was hidden. If they had found it, that was a serious problem. Stephen reassured him:
“It’s not the same one. Rosario’s is still safe. Argentina has more than enough anonymous dead, and this house has been a clandestine prison for years.”
Juan rubbed his eyes. His neck felt stiff from his headache, and from his frustration.
“Grandma got mad because when they gave it to me, I almost dropped it, it’s really heavy. Mom never let me touch it and I don’t know how to hold it.”
“What do you mean she got mad?”
“She took it away from me and hit me and told me I was stupid, something like that. I don’t know if she said stupid. Something mean. Anyway, I almost dropped it. It’s heavy.”
“She hit you.”
Gaspar made a gesture like a slap, hitting the back of his hand on his cheek.
“It didn’t hurt, though. It didn’t really hurt.”
Juan looked at Stephen.
“One of these days I’m going to kill her,” he said. And he added: “Gaspar, do me a favor. Make a racetrack for your cars, in a figure of eight.”
Gaspar obeyed, as if he were grateful the interrogation was finally ending. He started to work in the sand, smoothing and packing it with his shoes.
The meeting took place in the main hall of Puerto Reyes. What had been a hint of a migraine at the Paraná beach was now hammering in Juan’s head, and his nausea grew with each violent, uneven pound of his heart. He sat down in the leather armchair—completely unsuitable for the heat and humidity of that room, which was too large for air conditioning and had only a ceiling fan; the chair was immediately damp with sweat. He had left Gaspar asleep in Marcelina’s arms. The pain forced his eyes closed. It was too late to take a pill, and in any case, he knew he would need something very strong, but a powerful painkiller would lower his blood pressure too much, even more than the medicines Bradford had already injected him with, the tracks running up the inside of his elbow in tiny puncture wounds. From his chair he could see the painting by Cándido López. Assault of the 3rd Argentine Column at Curupayti. A rectangle a meter and a half long, with its little men carrying ladders, the wounded soldier on a stretcher, the man riding a white horse with his sword raised, seemingly removed from it all, the ground a swamp, the explosions in the background like low clouds, the darkened sky of war. It was beautiful. It was death at a distance, observed, childish.
Stephen was preparing cold drinks as if the conversation to follow would be a friendly and extortion-free chat, a kind of social tea. He himself, however, was drinking whiskey from Adolfo’s bottomless cellar. He offered some to Juan with a lot of ice, but Juan refused it: alcohol made the pain worse. Stephen came over and ran an ice cube over the back of his neck.
“Does this help?”
Juan didn’t answer. It didn’t help, but he needed Stephen nearby. He had proved his loyalty a long time ago, and proved it so definitively it was impossible to doubt.
Only Mercedes, Florence, and Anne Clarke were in the hall. The women, the leaders. Florence was wearing a floral silk dress that seemed to float around her. She was tall, and that day she was wearing almost no makeup or jewelry: her au naturel skin was overly white and had a grayish tinge, and her teeth, somewhat yellowed, appeared only when she smiled. She had pulled her long and indomitable red hair back into a bun. She was talking about how this time the Darkness’s projection had been extraordinary. Twelve people it had touched, more than ever before. Juan wanted to know how many people had been consumed, and with unchecked pride she told him there’d been eight, and then she repeated it, eight, in English. She often did that, mixed English and Spanish, when she talked to Juan, who understood both languages.