by Pam Lewis
Dietz appeared behind Cassian.
“Tessa sends you a letter,” Minke said.
Dietz made a face at its damp, crumpled condition and put on his glasses.
She watched him read, her heart racing, willing herself strong.
“I see.” He folded the letter and put it into his vest pocket.
“Come inside where it’s warm, Minke.” Cassian preceded her into the morphine works, where the boiling opium had made the air warm and humid.
“Tessa believes I’m pregnant.”
It always amazed her how, up close, Cassian’s skin wrinkled delicately when he smiled, how his eyelids were almost translucent, and how he found something amusing in whatever she said. “She does, eh?”
“She says December.”
“She’s the doctor.” He took her heartbeat and asked her to lie back so he could feel her abdomen. “Indeed,” he said. “Tessa is correct.”
“How will the baby come out?” She hadn’t meant to blurt that out, but she’d worked herself into a state over it.
“The same way it got in. Your mother surely told you, eh?”
“Not possible.” Did Cassian have any idea how small that was?
“Trust me.”
“Will it hurt?”
“I’ll give you something.”
When she left, she hoped to find Dietz gone, but he was waiting to escort her to the Explotación. “Did you like my wife’s parrot?” he asked as they walked.
“It’s deaf.”
“So they say, so they say.” As usual, he punctuated what he said with a laugh. They walked a few moments without speaking. “But how does anyone really know?” Dietz laughed loudly, a man bursting with his own amusement. “It’s clear the parrot doesn’t speak, but that only indicates it is mute. I think it understands everything that’s said and simply plays dumb. Smart parrot, don’t you think?”
Minke kept walking. The path was narrowing, and she ducked ahead so she could put distance between herself and him.
“An all-knowing parrot. It hears all and sees all, and then it whispers its secrets into my Tessa’s ear,” Dietz said.
She wished he would just shut up. Or, if he was going to say something to her about the letter, get it over with.
“The parrot must have seen you enter my study,” Dietz said.
She loathed him. She stopped dead in her tracks and turned to face him. “What would possess anyone to own such things?”
“One day they’ll fetch a good price,” he said. “She’s going mad. Do you agree?”
“Anyone would, way out there. She’s alone too much. What do you expect?”
“I can’t be doing for her what she should be doing for herself,” he snapped.
Minke started walking again. “She shouldn’t live so far from other people. She should be here.”
“Look what it’s done to you.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
They were the same height, eye to reptilian eye. He smiled at her. “Fucking that blond boy.” His voice came out a thick whisper.
She raised her hand to slap him, but he caught it midair. “My wife is like her parrot. Nothing escapes her.”
Minke wrenched away from him. “She’s a liar.”
“A shame if Sander were to find out.”
“Sticks and stones, Meneer Dietz.”
“Did you and the boy rob me, too?”
Oh, to hell with him, with his oil wells and foul breath. She ran toward town, toward the hotel, until she stopped cold in her tracks. How could she have forgotten that while she was away, Sander would have moved them to the new house? She backtracked, down toward the Almacén, left on Pellegrini. The house stood solitary, faint light leaching out through the seams. She ran to the back. “Sander!” she called. Her own house!
He held her at arm’s length. Her coat was a dusty streaked mess, her hair disheveled. “What happened to you?”
“Let me see!” She broke away and ran from tiny room to tiny room, touching the bed, the little table, and more things she remembered from the house in Amsterdam that he must have brought for them. It was a palace! She was its mistress. She spun, arms out. “Oh, Sander!”
They sat side by side near the gas lamp in the new parlor, and she excitedly poured out the tale of her visit to Tessa Dietz. How her horse swam across a river, and then the parrot, and the terrible shrunken heads tied up with string. IOUs and money. She opened her hands wide. “This much.” She told him of Dietz’s plan to sell to the Germans. “Tessa was furious when she found us in his study!”
“Us?”
“Goyo found out about the heads from the servant, and Pieps found out from Goyo,” she said without thinking. “But then Goyo refused to enter the house.”
“So just you and the boy?”
“Yes.”
“I see.”
She flung herself against the back of her chair and kicked at the table leg. “Tessa told me you don’t even own the Frisia,” she said. “And that you had to flee the Netherlands because of your opium imports.”
Sander gave her a quizzical look. “The Elisabeth,” he said. “I own the Elisabeth, not the Frisia. Of course I don’t own the Frisia. I was protecting the Elisabeth.”
“From what?”
“The government.”
“How can you protect a ship from the government?” He was making no sense to her.
“By sailing it far away, where it will not be seized.”
She sighed. “Anyway, I’m pregnant.”
He raised his eyes slowly to hers.
“Well?”
He took in a breath and sighed.
“Are you pleased?”
He nodded. “Of course.”
How was it possible to fit so much happiness and so much dread into one heart? She was ecstatic to be pregnant and terrified that something would happen to undo her joy. She should tell him about Tessa’s accusation and get it out in the open. But what if Sander didn’t believe her? She’d been a fool not to have thrown away the letter when she had the chance.
9
THE SS ELISABETH arrived in Comodoro harbor on June 21 at ten o’clock in the morning. The sun had not yet risen. Sky, sea, and land lay shrouded in darkness, and the ship twinkled with lights like the approach of a small village. People on shore moved about like shadows, waiting. Children darted, their small shapes leaping, running, using the cloak of darkness to throw pebbles at one another.
The ship moored offshore, and soon the tenders began to arrive, four oarsmen each, something Minke wouldn’t have seen but for the lanterns at their bows. It was so cold, with blowing snow and the grunts of the men on the oars over the howling of the wind. She pulled in her coat, tucked in her face. It was darkest winter, and there would be no light for another hour; even then it would be nothing more than an hour’s worth of milky gray, incapable of casting shadows.
The first tenders brought in a few dozen passengers, reminding Minke of the conundrum of Comodoro. The town should have eclipsed itself over and over; new people arrived every month, but they evaporated. They were taken by horse-drawn wagons inland to live in barracks and work in the oil wells. Only a few stayed in the town itself. The area’s population must have doubled, and yet Comodoro itself remained much as it was when she arrived.
From her perch, huddled in her coat on the seawall, she saw how the beach was divided between Sander and Dietz. To the left was Sander, animated as he oversaw the loading of damp bales of raw opium onto waiting carts and sent them up the path and around the Cerro to Cassian’s. Even at the distance at which she stood, she could breathe in its flowery smell. Morphine production ran many hours a day now. Cassian had culled out a larger staff of young men from the town, hardworking and good-natured, who ate and slept at la morfina obras, the morphine factory. They were well paid, better paid than the men who worked in Frederik Dietz’s oil fields, where the work drew desperate men. Knife fights sometimes broke out among them, and everyone in Comodoro had
heard the explosions when one of the wells caught fire. Lives were lost, although the town showed no evidence of it.
Dietz inhabited the other realm of the shore, strutting about, his great bulk supported on little chicken legs, lining up the men who’d come to work for him and assigning them to wagons that took them away.
The last tenders carried merchandise for Sander’s store, where the white sign in front of the house now said EMPORIO DEVRIES. If you asked Minke, the store was more of a museum. Most of the goods were still in their boxes. Women of the village peeked in the door and stepped inside for a look around, smiling shyly at Minke, talking among themselves in rapid Spanish, picking things up, marveling at them, then slipping back out the door without buying a single thing. The bolts of rich textiles and elegant bits of furniture were too expensive, too out of place. It was like buying a chandelier for a barn.
But the obras was doing well, and Minke felt sanguine as she watched Sander raising tarpaulins and laughing with people. Everything was falling into place. The baby had quickened inside her the week before. The house was not only finished but had become a home to her, with its cozy rooms and European furniture.
As the last wagon was loaded with the goods for the Emporio DeVries, the first wagon returned full of crates rattling with brown bottles of finished morphine, destined for shipment to buyers north up the coast to a dozen ports, including Bahia Bustamente, Puerto Madryn, and Buenos Aires. After the Antilles, the SS Elisabeth would turn around and head south, arriving again in Comodoro on her way around the Horn and back to the East Indies for more raw materials.
All around, men shouted in Spanish. Minke knew what they were saying from her time spent with Cassian’s primer. She liked to translate into Spanish what she saw. “El amanacer,” she whispered to herself, and in English, “the rising sun.” She practiced often with Cassian. “Estoy feliz.” She loved the rhythm of her new languages and, most of all, the absence of that sound so common in Dutch, like a man preparing to spit. “Tu madre es una puta,” one of the men shouted, and even that sounded lovely in spite of its meaning: Your mother is a whore. She had discovered that to hear such things aloud in a language not her own was very much more benign.
The sun had set by the time the work was done, and it was only four in the afternoon. Sander swung a torch up the ramp to her. He was wonderfully full of himself these days. He stood straighter, laughed easily. “Come on,” he said, taking her hand. “We’re going to the hotel. All of us. My treat.” He fumbled in his coat pocket. “But first I have something for you.”
She felt him clasp a necklace about her neck. Her fingers found its large links, the largest in the center, with a stone embedded. “Let me see!”
“In the mirror at the hotel,” he said, and gave her a light tap on her bottom.
She twirled around, walked backward, facing him, and laughed. She was so happy. “Who will be there tonight?”
“Cassian, of course. Dietz, our Bertinat.”
“The important men of Comodoro,” she said.
“Indeed.”
“Bertinat is very nice, but I think I scare him to death. He’s so shy.”
“A man afraid of his own shadow is always terrified by a beautiful woman. Did you hear what Bertinat calls you?”
She shook her head.
“La princesa de Comodoro.”
Once when she was at the Almacén, Bertinat had invited her to climb the ladder that was attached to the shelves and could slide down the length of the store. He’d given her a ride on it, sending it down a row of shelves while she hung on for dear life, skirts flying. “Are you jealous?” she asked.
“Stark raving mad with it,” he said, and they both laughed.
THE BAR AT the Explotación was crammed full, densely smoky, and loud tonight. Before going in, Minke removed her coat and ran to the mirror to see what Sander had put around her neck. A cameo, an ivory profile of a woman, but the greater surprise was her own reflection, something she hadn’t seen in months. Her face was fuller than she remembered, from the pregnancy, no doubt. Her color was high from the cold. She smiled, turned this way and that, and strode into the bar with new confidence.
A large table, covered in a perfectly ironed white cloth, had been set for them in the center of the room. It seemed elevated somehow, but that was an illusion, a function of her excellent mood. The chair between Dietz and the amiable Bertinat had been saved for her. The men rose partly to their feet as she sat down. She’d learned her lesson well on the Frisia, turned to Bertinat to her left, and flashed princess eyes at him. She spoke in a voice for the whole table to hear and let her hand rest on his for a moment. She was heady with the arrival of Sander’s ship. Everyone was. “A pleasure to sit beside you.” Un placer sentarme a tu lado.
He was such a sweet man, so kind, and always willing to help with her Spanish when she bought at the store. He blushed and said no, it was his pleasure.
“A toast!” Sander raised his glass. “To Comodoro Rivadavia!”
Dietz refilled all the glasses. Minke took a small sip of cognac and said to Bertinat, “Tell me what has arrived on the Elisabeth today that I will find in your store tomorrow.”
Bertinat straightened in his chair. Cassian translated, but Bertinat knew well enough what she’d asked. “I am honored to show you mañana.”
“For los niños, eh?” Dietz tipped back in his chair and blew out a long trumpet of cigar smoke. “Eh, Sander?” He smacked his stomach with both hands and laughed his hoarse laugh. “Nice going, there.”
Now it was Minke’s turn to blush. Bertinat sighed beside her. “Azúcar,” he said. “Leche enlatada.”
“Sugar.” She clapped her hands. She was ravenous for sweets. “And some sort of milk. What’s enlatada?”
“Tinned,” Cassian said.
She patted Bertinat’s hand. “Puedo comprar,” she said. “I can buy!”
“And what arrived for your store today, Meneer Dietz?” Bertinat asked, with Cassian again translating.
Dietz laced his thick fingers across his stomach. “What store might that be, señor?”
Bertinat said something quickly, and Cassian translated. “He says you’re playing with him, Dietz. You know what he’s talking about.”
Dietz signaled to Meduño for another round.
“What’s this about a store, Dietz?” Sander ran a white napkin over his lips. “All joking aside.”
Dietz shrugged, a man wrongly accused. “For the men. Nothing more. For the things they need.”
“No profit, then, eh?”
Dietz wove his clubbed fingers. “I’m a businessman like you, Sander. Of course I profit. I’m not stupid.”
“May I shop in your store, Meneer?” Minke asked with a wink at Sander. She was enjoying their little game of cat and mouse. They were all friends, but competitors, too, Sander had explained.
“My dear, there’s nothing there for you unless you would like to bathe with lye soap or shave that pretty face of yours with a straight blade. That sort of thing,” Dietz said.
“Your men have no opportunity to buy their soap from Bertinat, or so I understand,” Minke said. “I heard they aren’t allowed to come into town, that they must buy from you at very high prices.”
“Who told you that?” Dietz asked.
It had been Pieps, of course. “People talk,” she said.
“Watch out for her, Sander. People are filling her head with nonsense.”
“So it’s not true? Your men can buy from anyone?” she asked.
“Well, my dear, your husband and the good doctor understand all about monopolies. I suggest you ask them,” Dietz said testily.
“Oh, settle down, Frederik,” Sander said. “We’re only having some fun with you.”
Dietz took a spoonful of stew. “We came to celebrate the arrival of the Elisabeth,” he said. He held out his glass. “To the Elisabeth.”
“Hear, hear,” Cassian said.
The talk shifted to the Elisabeth’s sche
dule. Dietz pressed for information about who was buying what up and down the coast, what other merchants were involved. Thousands of those little brown bottles of processed medicine were reaching people in ports big and small all over South America. Minke was half listening, though, because her attention was drawn to something blue at the door. It took a few moments to recognize Tessa’s parrot. The bird took a look about, then bobbed along toward their table. A brief hush fell over the room as the men in the bar watched Tessa, a grand vision of opulence, thread her way among the tables. Her hair was parted down the center and swept up at the crown into a pouf of orange curls. She wore a dress of orange and yellow brocade laced with gold.
A chair was quickly pulled up between Minke and Bertinat and another place laid at the table. Tessa crowded in and whispered, “I as well. Can you believe it? A miracle.” She smelled of a delicious flowery cologne.
“As well what?” Minke was still flustered at seeing Tessa for the first time since that awful moment at the estancia, confused by the woman’s warmth.
“Expecting, you goose! I’m almost certain of it.”
Dietz nudged her, and when she turned, he cocked his head. “See? You’re not the only one.”
She returned to Tessa. It was like a game of tennis. “You came to see Dr. Tredegar?”
“Why would I see him?” Tessa sniffed. The parrot spread its wings, wobbled from foot to foot, and opened its mouth as if it wanted to speak.
“To help with the baby.”
“That so-called doctor let my Astrid die.” Across the table, Cassian watched Tessa without expression. He must have heard. “Frederik has arranged for a real doctor.” Tessa paused, looked from face to face. “What is everyone staring at?”
“We’re delighted for you,” Cassian said. “This is very happy news.”
What a gentleman he was.
“Sander!” Tessa laid a bejeweled hand on Sander’s. “I must say it’s a pleasure to see the Elisabeth in harbor.” She addressed the table at large. “The ship was named for our dear departed Elisabeth when she was only a child, you know.” And then to Bertinat only, she said, “Sander’s late wife, a lovely woman. Minke cared for her when she was ill. Isn’t that right, Minke?”