still functioning, it still serves its original purpose.”
Leading her around to the west side of the lighthouse, he walked with her several hundred yards to the grave site. She stopped, reading the headstone. It was her father’s grave.
“Why have you done this, Don Fernando?”
“You are angry. Perhaps I was wrong.” He took her elbow gently. “Come. We’ll leave immediately.”
But she did not move, stood her ground and shook off his hand as gently as he had gripped her. She walked several paces away until she was directly in front of the grave. Someone had left flowers in a zinc container, but that was some time ago. The flowers were dried, many of the petals missing.
Martha Christiana stared down at the stone below which her father lay buried. Then, surprising even herself, she knelt down to touch the earth. Above her, clouds raced across the azure sky. Sea birds swooped, calling to one another. Lifting her head, she saw a sea eagle’s nest and thought of family and home.
Unaccountably, her fingers went to the pin she wore at her throat. She unfastened it, dug a shallow depression in the earth over her father, and placed the pin in it. Then slowly, almost reverently, she covered it over, placed her palm onto the earth, as if she could still feel it, like a beating heart.
When she rose, Don Fernando said, “Do you want to go inside?”
She shook her head. “I belong out here.”
He nodded, as if he understood her completely. Instead of annoying her, that gesture of their unspoken, innate connection comforted her. She linked her arm in his, walked him away to the edge of the rocky promontory. Below them, the sea rose, foaming against the granite teeth far below.
“When I was a little girl,” she said, “I used to stand here. The sea looked like brittle glass as it broke apart on the rocks. It made me think of my family. It made me sad.”
“This is why you left.”
She nodded. Back in the car, as they drove slowly away from the shore and the glowering lighthouse, she said, “How did you find out?” “Everything is knowable,” he said with a smile, “these days.”
She said nothing more. It did not matter how he had found her history, only that he knew. One more astonishment: She was not unhappy that he knew. Somehow, even without asking, she understood that it would remain their secret.
She stared at the countryside, and like a sleeper waking from a pleasant dream into harsh reality she remembered that she had been sent here to kill this man. The idea seemed absurd to her now, and yet she knew that she had no choice. She never did once she took a commission from Maceo Encarnación.
Emerging from her difficult thoughts, she saw that they were turning off Castle Road into an area of Gibraltar unfamiliar to her. After several small streets, they came to a triangle of parkland, dotted with pencil cypress and palm trees. Martha rolled down the tinted window, heard the clatter of swaying fronds. A bright spray of gulls flickered by. Sunlight glimmered off a bisque-tile roof, which came nearer as the car rolled up a driveway and came to rest before a pillared portico.
“Where are we?” Martha said.
Without a word, Don Fernando accompanied her up the stone steps, across the portico, and into a large, airy entryway, dominated by a cut-crystal chandelier and a high mahogany banc behind which sat a young woman, efficiently fielding calls while entering data on a computer console.
A business of some sort, Martha thought. Possibly one of his.
Leaning forward, Don Fernando handed over a folded sheet of paper, which the young woman unfolded as if it were an official document. Her clear eyes scanned it, then they flicked up to take in Don Fernando and, briefly, Martha Christiana herself. She picked up a phone, spoke only a few words into it. Then she nodded at them, and, smiling, pointed in the direction of double swinging doors.
Inside the doors, a uniformed woman, somewhat older, with a kind face and demeanor, waited for them, her hands clasped in front of her like a nun. When she saw them, she turned, leading them down a wide, thickly carpeted hallway, interspersed with closed doors between which hung various photos of Gibraltar down through the years. The only thing that hadn’t changed was the great shrugged shoulder of rock, uncounted ages old.
At length, the woman stopped in front of a door and gestured. “Take as