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times,” Miles said.
    “First I will put beautiful flowers in the patio,” Alberto said.
    “No. First you will remove the tiles.”
    “What will I do with them, Señor Droomond?”
    “I don’t know. Throw them in the barranca.”
    “How will I carry them to the barranca?”
    “On the wheelbarrow.”
    “It is now broken.”
    Miles stared at him in helpless exasperation. “Now carry all these things to the room where I will live.”
    Alberto went to the car, picked up one small suitcase and shuffled sadly off with it. When he was fifteen feet away Miles called to him. “Where is Rosalinda?”
    “She has gone someplace to purchase a hen.”
    “And the maids?”
    “The rooms were clean so they both went home.”
    “And Pepe?”
    “He has gone to the city.”
    “Mind if I look around?” Billy said.
    “Not at all. Not at all.”
    Billy wandered off. Miles picked his largest suitcase out of the car and struggled into the hotel with it. The central patio, through the doors that opened off the shadowy lobby, looked scurfy and beaten. It contained a flagstone walk in the shape of an X, three cement benches, one sundial with the end broken off the blade, one cement birdbath and one small defunct fountain. And fifty kinds of weeds.
    After he was unpacked and settled in, and after Billy had left, without comment, Miles went into the patio and began pulling weeds.
    Gloria Garvey picked Miles up at the Hutchinson at two-thirty on Sunday afternoon in her powder-blue Jaguar sedan. Cars were Gloria’s single expensive vice. She kept her car garaged near Las Rosas, but gave it no other care. When it ceased running properly, she would order another one.
    Gloria wore her Mexico City costume, a black suit, white blouse, white gloves. But the skirt of the black suit was shiny in the seat, and the lapels of the jacket were tinged gray with cigarette ash, and the finger seams of the white gloves were split. Her careless hair had the look and texture of lion mane in thorn country.
    As Miles got in beside her, she said, “For Chrissake, Drummy, stop jittering. Gam Torrigan is absolutely nobody. What happened to your hand?”
    Miles looked down at the bandage. “I cut my fingers on some broken tile I was throwing into the barranca.”
    “You know darn well that if you potter around doing manual labor, they’ll let you do it all.”
    She yanked the Jaguar around and plunged through the gate, making it skitter sideways on the road before it leveled away and roared by the military barracks where a lone Sunday soldier, lounging on guard, caught a glimpse of long fair hair and responded with the expected whistle, a mechanical and customary courtesy.
    She pulled the Jaguar to a shivering halt at the toll gate of the
autopisto
, took the five-peso note from Miles and gave it to the man. She accelerated smoothly, keeping the tach just under the red until the car was climbing toward Tres Cumbres at a hundred and thirty kilometers an hour and the wind roar made conversation impossible. She saw that Miles was firmly holding his own frail knees and staring dead ahead in hypnoid alarm, and it amused her. She took pleasure in driving. She had always had a knack for it, an instinctive ability to judge distances, a sense of timing. But the finishing touches had been added one summer in Italy. It took a few seconds to reach deep into memory and pull the name out. Rufino Cellero. A very, wiry, arrogant little guy. And that great beast of a competition Mercedes that made a noise like a runaway sawmill, and when you had it up there, really up there, you lived on the dirty edge of disaster, and it was very fine. She remembered the misty morning, fighting the gear box, sliding into curves, booming down across the mountain bridges, while Rufi, beside her, yelled with joy and banged the side of the door with his brown fist. Rufi had told his manager how good she was and the manager had taken a trial ride with her and then had gotten all heated up about