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their cars to be brought around. As Brabanta is bidding farewell to a clutch of politicians, Diego comes down the steps and touches her lightly on the arm. She turns, and he thanks her for the hospitality. Instead of shaking the hand she offers him, he lifts it to his mouth and kisses it.
    “There is no one,” he murmurs.
    “Excuse me?”
    “Otello has no girlfriend, no secret wife, no mistress, no boyfriend.”
    For a moment or two, caught off-guard, she can only stare at him. Then she gathers herself. “Ah. That’s a shame, don’t you think?”
    His smile is no more than a flicker. “Not necessarily,” he says.
    Diego eases his apartment door shut and slips off his shoes before padding along to the bedroom. His consideration is unneeded, as it turns out; Emilia is awake, waiting for him. He is glad. He is a little excited and needs to talk. The curtains are not closed, and beyond the glass the night seems upside down. The sky is a blank, its darkness tinged with dirty orange like a stained concrete floor. Below it, the constellation of city lights glitters and shifts.
    “Yes,” Diego says, gazing out. “I’d say that it went very well, Emilia. Very well indeed.”
    He unknots his bow tie and tosses it on the floor. He undoes the top button of his white shirt and turns to her. He takes his jacket off and holds it in front of him by its shoulders.
    “Otello is the bull, you see? And I play him like a matador.”
    He shakes the jacket, rippling it.
    “The big black bull is very powerful, of course. But very stupid and dreadfully nearsighted. He sees only the cape, and when he charges it, I execute an elegant valenca. ”
    He holds the jacket out from the left side of his body, then sweeps it backward, twirling on tiptoe, his back straight.
    “The bull’s horns pass within inches but do not touch me. The stink of him is strong in my nostrils. He lumbers past, baffled by the disappearance of his enemy. He turns back, grunting and drooling. Now I go down on one knee, as if in submission, holding the cape out with one hand, so. He charges again and . . .”
    Diego, in a slow elegant gesture like a stage courtier’s, wafts the jacket behind him.
    “He misses me again. And so we do this dance of death and he never really sees who his partner is. It would be sad if it weren’t so beautiful. And tonight, Emilia, no less a person than Desmerelda Brabanta handed me the cape.”
    He reads a question in her eyes.
    “No, I’m not drunk, my love. Absolutely not. I sipped one glass of champagne all evening. I was, after all, on duty. Keeping a sharp eye on my client’s interests. Especially his new one.”

M ICHAEL C ASS TRUDGES across the swept white sand of the private beach to where Otello lies on a lounger. Cass is wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat, sunglasses, and a nine-millimeter automatic pistol in a shoulder holster, incongruous under the unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt. Otello looks up when his bodyguard’s big shadow falls across him.
    “Your tan’s coming along nicely,” Cass says, and to please him, Otello chuckles. Cass, whose grandparents were German or maybe Swiss, is blond and liberally coated with sunblock, despite which his fuzzy knees are blushed like peaches.
    “What’s hap’nin’?”
    “Nothing much,” Cass says. He perches on the lounger alongside Otello’s and squints at the horizon. “I was just talking to the old guy does the gardens, you know? He says there’s a storm brewing.”
    The sky is cloudless, a vast blue umbrella with the sun burning a hole in its center.
    “No way,” Otello says.
    “That’s what I said. And he says, ‘See that little old island over there? When the water runs kinda milky behind it, there’s a storm coming. Any boats out when that happens, they come back real quick.’”
    Otello lifts his head. The nameless island is a greenish-gray stain at the foot of the sky. On their first day at the Blue Horizon, he’d asked the hotel manager about it, wondering