Days of the Dead.pdf - Upgrade Systems

thing before I blow out my candle at night.
"And no one came in or went out of the study?"
"No. As you see, there's a torch-bracket immediately opposite the door. Josefa dragged Paloma away
fairly early, rather than have her exposed to such a raffish crew as Natividad, Concha, and Señora
Lorcha; Valentina left as soon as it grew full dark. Doña Filomena dozed off after her fifteenth sherry, and
I can hardly say I blame her."
January glanced over the rail again, observing, indeed, how Doña Imelda and Doña Josefa kept their
distance from-and their backs turned to-Natividad and her mother. "And no one heard anything from the
study?"
Hannibal sighed and shook his head. "The door was shut and bolted-the window shutters, too. The
walls are three feet of solid adobe. From where we sat we could hear Santa Anna thundering on in the
sala about how he was going to wipe the Texian rebels from the face of the earth. I doubt that if
Fernando had cried out at the top of his lungs he'd have been heard."
He winced, sickened with pity for even a man who would almost certainly have had him killed. "But I
doubt he had the breath to cry out, once the poison started to work. His face was so swollen, I'm not
sure I would have recognized him if it hadn't been for his hair and his uni­form. He looked like he'd died
of suffocation, mouth gap­ing, tongue sticking out-his hands were still tangled in his collar, one of those
ghastly military ones designed to pro­tect you from inadvertently breathing in battle. The room was
quite bright. Fernando couldn't abide what he called the `medieval dark' of candle-light and had a patent
Argand lamp on the desk and two more in his room; he'd brought them from Germany."
From somewhere in the courtyard a voice wailed in French, "The President? Here? And no one has
thought to tell me this until now, now, when there is nothing to eat for dinner but that pitiful roasted deer,
those wretched vols-au­vent, and only three jellies to offer! It is enough to slay one­self, to fall upon
one's sword....”
The chef, thought January. Presumably, the one who had counted on the wedding-feast to make his
reputation ...
"How did Franz look when you spoke to him directly after supper?"
"He didn't look well," said Hannibal. "But of course, for twenty-four hours he'd been trying to make
sense out of Don Prospero's financial papers, not a task Id care to un­dertake sober."
"Consuela tells me he threatened you earlier in the day."
"And so he had." Hannibal sighed and took January's flask for another sip of brandy. "You have to
understand that the day had started with Don Prospero standing stark naked in the courtyard, conversing
at the top of his lungs with an invisible Jaguar-God. Don Anastasio tried to quiet him and got a mano
thrown at him-one of those rock pounders that the Indian women grind corn with. By pre­tending to be
Quetzalcoatl, I managed to get Don Prospero back upstairs and into his room, with Father Ramiro telling
me all the way I should be garroted as a heretic, but that was followed almost immediately by Señora
Lorcha’s attempt at a sneaky wedding-there's a door from Natividad's room into Don Prospero's, and
Señora Lorcha had stolen the padlock key. Fernando and his two mad­-doctors arrived in time to put a
stop to that, so I under­stand his being snappish. After supper I went to see him, quite frankly to see if
he'd call off his father's thugs long enough for me to make it back to Mexico City. I mean, he didn't want
me here, I didn't want to be here, so it should have been possible for us to find some kind of common