The story was his apology. She knew he didn’t owe her one. This was how she knew his affection.

At Macau Station there was a portrait of the governor, Commodore Esparteiro, with mustache and white hat, waiting to greet the visitors.

“He looks very distinguished,” Claire said.

They stepped outside passport control to instant chaos. Clamoring men pressed up against the steel fences, waving their hands, shouting.

“Taxi, taxi.” “Car, car, drive you.”

Will went off to the side and negotiated with one quickly in Cantonese. When he spoke the language of the locals, the unfamiliar sounds coming from his familiar mouth, she felt her insides tighten, something more than desire. The driver looked at her, understood instantly. He leered, showing brown, chipped teeth. She looked away and let Will put his arm over her, he instinctively knowing what had just transpired.

“Let’s go now,” she said, grateful for his protection.

“Almost done,” he said, and finished up the bargaining.

In the taxi, the air was thick and it was unbearably hot. Will rolled down the windows. As the car picked up speed, the wind was filled with particles that hit her face, but it seemed churlish to complain at this, the beginning of their romantic escapade.

Here I am, she thought, a woman on an illicit holiday in the Far East with her lover. She looked out at the people on the street. They didn’t know. Her secret was safe with them, their blank Oriental faces, their busy lives unencumbered with her transgressions.

They got out of the taxi at the Hotel Lusitania, off the Largo do Senado.

“This is the center of town,” Will said. “And that over there is Sao Paolo, the white stone façade of an old Jesuit church. It’s just the front that’s left.”

“Was it the war?”

“No, a fire in the 1800s. We’ll go there later. You can still see all the reliefs and carvings. Quite beautiful.”

The lobby was shabby but grand. Will seemed to know his way around.

“Have you been here often?”

“I used to come a fair amount,” he said. “But not in the recent past.” They were shown up to their room by a Chinese bellboy, and when the door closed behind him, they looked at each other, shy once again.

“You look different here,” she said.

“Yes,” he said.

In the waning light of the day, sun streaking through the dusty window, they reacquainted themselves with each other, their displaced bodies somehow new, somehow more thrilling.

Afterward he said, “It’s almost like we’re an old married couple, coming away to a new place together.”

“It’s nice,” she said. His tenderness was new and it unnerved her.

“It is.”

“What is it you have to do here?” she asked.

“I have to pay my respects to someone,” he said.

“Am I to come?”

“If you wish.” He twirled her hair around his fingers. “It doesn’t matter.”

They took a taxi to a cemetery. Will paid the driver and got out. Paint peeled off a dilapidated, vacant guardhouse. A large tin sign with garish red Chinese characters teetered precariously above it.

“A cemetery!” she said. “You know how to treat a girl on holiday.”

“Do you know anything about how the Chinese bury their dead? ” he said, ignoring her.

“No,” she said. “Is it very different from our way?”

“Yes.” He consulted a map on the wall and traced his finger along a route. “Here we go.”

The air seemed thicker here. Claire didn’t want to breathe in, for fear that the essences of the dead would enter into her. She had grown more superstitious despite herself during her time in Hong Kong. In the cemetery, there were tombstones-smallish gray stones with English and Chinese characters interspersed-and paths intricately intercut among the graves, with rough stone steps leading up a hill.

She read the tombstones as they passed.

“ ‘Here lies William Walpole, brother of Henry.’ No other family, I suppose. He died in 1936 at the age of forty-three. And this one, ‘Margaret Potter, beloved.’ I like that one. I think I would want something simple on my tombstone, don’t you?”

Will spoke as if she had not said anything.

“It was very difficult after the war, you know, to catalog the dead. For the most part, they did mass graves. But it was very hard on the families. Not having the body of their loved ones to bury.”

“The ceremony is what comforts, a little, at least, I would think.”

“Yes, these rituals came about for a reason. People need something to focus on, to focus their grief on, and to keep busy. All over the world, rituals are part of death. It makes you hopeful for humans, that they have something in common.”

“In civilized times,” Claire said. “People are different when lives are at stake, not death.”

Will looked up, surprised.

“Yes,” he said. “In civilized times. At other times, all bets are off.”

He grinned.

“My savage mistress,” he said. “You are magnificent today.”

“Can I ask what we’re looking for?”

“An old friend,” he said.

They stopped at the top.

“Chinese like their graveyards to be built on hills. They think it’s more auspicious, and being the class-conscious society they are, they are consistent even in death: the top of the heap is still the top of the heap, as it were.”

The gravestones had given way to small structures, some quite elaborate, with turrets and gates and carved doors, resembling small residences or temples. Some had porcelain urns underneath.

“Do those contain ashes or bones?” she asked.

“Bones,” Will said. “The skull is laid on top.”

He was looking carefully at each little house as he passed. Suddenly he stopped.

“Here we go,” he said.

It was whitewashed stucco, with a wooden door that had an iron knocker in the shape of a dragon. Above the door was a sign with gold Chinese characters.

“We didn’t bring anything,” Claire said.

“We’re not here to give,” Will said. “We’re here to take.”

He pushed the door open and stood outside. He seemed to be waiting for something.

“Will!” Claire said, scandalized. “You’re disturbing the dead!”

“I’m quieting them,” he said, and went inside.

May 12, 1953

WHAT SHE REMEMBERED later of Macau was vague. The heat, of course, a good Portuguese restaurant with wooden benches and crumbling plaster walls, hot, crusty bread, carafes of red wine, something called African chicken, and the dan taat, the glossy yellow egg tarts. “You say pataca, I say potato,” he sang to her, changed in this little colony. The cemetery, coming back to the hotel, and Will on edge throughout. The interior of the little shrine had been cool and dark, but with the pungent odor of incense. They had knocked up flurries of dust when they entered.

“This is where Dominick is,” he had said.

“Who is Dominick?”

“A man who was, I think, misunderstood. Not least of all by me. At least, that’s what I think when I am being my most charitable self. But a sad story. In the end, his family didn’t want anything to do with him, and so he is buried here by himself, not with his family in Hong Kong. He wasn’t from Macau but this is where he ended up. An unwilling exile.”

“Did he die during the war?”

“Something like that. Maybe because of the war?” Will raised his voice in a question. “Who knows. It wasn’t that simple.” He ran his fingers along the dusty altar.

“In the end, it doesn’t matter though, does it. Here he lies, and all he’s done and all he did is forgotten by most.”

Then he spat on the coffin.

He had taken something from the little mausoleum, something he put in his pocket so casually she dared not ask what it was. But after that, they did nothing else unusual: they ate good meals, napped after tiffin, had champagne at the hotel bar, walked around and looked at Macau, so she assumed that was what he had come for. He reverted to his old sarcastic self. They came back to Hong Kong and he did not mention what had happened at the cemetery again.