Mystery

Tom had been half-fearing, half-expecting that another spell of illness would overtake him as they approached Goethe Park; by now, he scarcely knew what he expected from a visit to Hattie Bascombe, but was certain at least that he did not want to get sick in front of Sarah Spence. He still had not told her that all he knew of the old nurse’s whereabouts was that she lived in the old slave quarter, and that was embarrassment enough.

The street numbers marched from the twenties into the thirties as they drove down Calle Burleigh, and he was relieved to feel no symptoms of distress. Neither of them spoke much. When the row of houses and shops before them yielded to the great cream-colored façade of a church, and after that to trees and open ground, he told her to turn left at the next block, and Sarah went around the nose of a dray horse and through a cloud of bicycles into 35th Street.

To their right, children pulled their parents forward toward hot dog vendors and balloon men. Exhausted tigers and panthers lay flattened on the stone floors of their cages; some other animal howled in the maze of trails between cages. Tom closed his eyes.

For two blocks past the south end of Goethe Park, where young men in jeans and T-shirts played cricket before an audience of small children and wandering dogs, the houses continued neat and sober, with their porches and dormer windows and borders of bright flowers. Bicycles leaned against the palm trees on the sidewalks. Then Sarah drove up a tiny hill where a clump of cypress trees twisted toward the sun, and down into a different landscape.

Beside the grimy red brick and broken windows of an abandoned factory came a stretch of taverns and leaning edifices much added to at their back ends and connected by ramshackle passages and catwalks. On both sides of the street, handwritten signs in the windows advertised ROOMS T? LET and ALL SORTS OF JUNK PURCHASED AT GOOD PRICES. OLD CLOATHES CHEAP. HUMIN HAIR BOUGHT AND SOLD. The wooden buildings on both sides of the street blotted out the afternoon sun. At intervals, archways and passages cut into the tenements gave Tom glimpses of sunless courtyards in which lounging men passed bottles back and forth. From the windows a few faces stared out as blankly as the signs: BONES. WARES BOUGHT.

“I feel like a tourist here,” Tom said.

“I do too. It’s because we’re never supposed to see this part of the island. We’re not supposed to know about Elysian Courts, so it’s kind of invisible.”

Sarah drove around a hole in the middle of the narrow street.

“Is that what this is called?”

“Didn’t you know about the Elysian Courts? They were built to get people out of the old slave quarter—because the quarter was built on a marsh, and it turned out to be unhealthy. Cholera, influenza, I don’t know what. These tenements were put up in a hurry, and pretty soon they were even worse than the slave quarter.”

“Where did you hear about them?”

“They were one of Maxwell Redwing’s first projects, around 1920 or so. Not one of his most successful. Except financially, of course. I guess the people who live there call it Maxwell’s Heaven.”

Tom turned around on the seat to look back at the leaning tenements: their outer walls formed a kind of fortress, and through the arches and passages he could see dim figures moving within the mazelike interior.

They were out in the sun again, and the harsh light fell on the poor structures between the walls of Elysian Courts and the old slave quarter—tarpaper shacks and shanties jammed hip to hip on both sides of the narrow descending street. Hopeless-looking men lolled here and there in doorways, and a drunk swung back and forth on a lamppost with a shattered bulb, revolving south-east, east-south, like a broken compass.

The shanties came to an end at the bottom of the hill. Tiny wooden houses, each exactly alike with a minuscule roofed porch and a single window beside the door, stood on lots scarcely bigger than themselves. The whole of the small area, no more than four or five square blocks, seemed oppressively damp. At the far end of the old slave quarter, visible between the neat rows of houses, was an abandoned cane field that had evolved into a vast, crowded dump; beyond the chainlink fence enclosing the dump was the bright sea.

“So that’s the old slave quarter,” Sarah said. “After you’ve seen Maxwell’s Heaven I suppose you’re ready for anything. Where do we go? You have her address, don’t you?”

“Turn right,” Tom said, having seen something between the shacks.

“Aye-aye,” Sarah said, and turned into the road that ran along the northern edge of the quarter. Before them was an isolated shack, two or three times the size of the others and in noticeably better condition, with a large handpainted sign propped on its roof.

“Go behind that store,” Tom said. “Fast. He’s coming out of her door.”