“I see. Well, maybe I have a hangover from my own background. You probably know there’s not much of a color problem in my country, either — Australia — but it’s nonetheless color-prejudiced as hell, with its keep-Australia-white immigration policy and the rest of it. I don’t care any longer; I’ve worked around the world, and I don’t find brown people harder to get on with than white people. But maybe some of that prejudice has stuck with me. Maybe I see problems where they don’t exist.”

I offered her a cigarette. As usual, she shook her head.

“I am afraid I do not care for that pale tobacco, señor. Please, though, make trial of one of mine. I think these of mine are of more character than ordinary cigarettes — they have a certain superior aroma.”

She flicked open the little gold case and slid a cigarette out for me with her thumb. I took it.

“I think,” she said, waiting for me to offer her a light, “it is better to see problems than to overlook them. Had we been more aware of such prejudice in some — not all, but certainly some — of our foreign-born citizens, we might be less troubled today. Naturally the newcomers brought their opinions with them. Possibly some of those opinions were infectious.”

She bent to take a light from me, and then glanced at her watch.

“Another day ended,” she said with a sigh. “Indeed, it is very late now. I must be leaving, señor. Should the gentleman with whom I was playing chess return, please make my apologies.”

“With pleasure, señora. Buenos noches.”

“Buenos noches,señor.”

I sent for a nightcap and lit the black cigarette — finding it aromatic, but too bland for my taste. There was no sign of the man she had been playing chess with.

I waited only a few minutes, in the end. I grew very sleeply all of a sudden, tossed off my drink and went up in the elevator to my room. I must have sunk into a deep stupor as soon as I had undressed and got into bed.

I awoke with cramp and discomfort in every limb. The surface on which I was lying was hard and cold, and I knew that if I breathed deeply, I would cough. I had to breathe deeply. I did cough — rackingly, with a violence that made my throat sore.

Then sudden shock brought me to my feet. I was in total darkness. I had been lying on a cold concrete floor — merely putting out my hands to stand up had told me that. But — what in hell was I doing on a concrete floor? I had nothing on but pajamas, and my feet and hands were frigidly cold from the still, slightly dank air in this place. Where in God’s name… ?

I hadn’t a lighter or a match; I had nothing at all except my sense of touch. Alert, tensing myself against anyone who might be in the room — if it was a room — and straining not to cough again, I felt in front of me like a blind man, taking a half-pace at a time. In a moment I struck something hard: a bench, about waist-high, littered with small objects I could not identify.

Fumbling over the bench, I touched a wall, and started to grope along it. My head felt as though it were stuffed with horsehair; my throat was rasped from my violent coughing. I wondered wildly whether I was engulfed in a nightmare or whether this was real.

My shaking fingers touched a switch. I threw it, not caring what the consequences might be. Nothing happened, and I started to creep farther forward.

Suddenly a startling pattern of lights leaped into being just in front of my face, and I staggered back, almost losing my balance. Things dropped into perspective with astonishing precision.

It was a cathode ray tube I had turned on. And by its fitful, irregular glare I could see that this was the concrete shed — the blockhouse — where Maria Posador had brought me to show me her recording of my appearance on television.

I looked around wonderingly. What the hell was I doing here?

Before I had had time to digest my situation, there was a clinking sound. I spun to face its direction; it came from the heavy padlocked door. Someone was putting a key in. I could hear tense breathing.

I snatched a length of metal bar from the nearest bench and snapped off the switch controlling the cathode ray tube. In the renewed darkness I saw irregular glimmers from a hand-held flashlight, seeping through the crack at the edge of the door. Cautiously, I moved toward the glimmers. Whoever had put me in here was going to get as good as he gave.

The door swung back — thrown back violently. I leaped forward, seeing in the dim light of dawn that the newcomer held not only a flashlight, but a gun.

Then my bare foot landed, with my entire weight behind it, on a thick electric cable crossing the floor.

The pain was shocking. I lost my footing, lost my grip on the metal bar — and the gun cracked.

Something hit the fleshy upper part of my left arm; it felt as though a pair of gigantic red-hot pincers had closed on the skin. The impact spun me around and sent me sprawling across the floor. Rough concrete burned skin from my cheek and the palm of the hand with which I tried to break my fall. My head rang with dizzying pain.

Light bloomed from the ceiling; I tried to turn my head, but all I could see was a pair of soft moccasin slippers and the lower part of a pair of biscuit-colored linen slacks. A voice said softly, “Madre de Dios! Why should he be here?”

Maria Posador herself.

I heard a clinking sound as she hurriedly pushed the gun and the flashlight onto a bench; then she was kneeling beside me, probing my blood-smeared arm with precise, gentle fingers. I dug my voice harshly out of my raw throat.

“I’m not unconscious, you know,” I said stupidly. “I—”

Another fit of coughing seized me. Maria Posador rocked back on her heels, staring down at me in astonishment. “But you!” she said, shaking her head. “But — you! I — I — oh, we must get you to the house. And quickly!”

I wasn’t thinking clearly for the next few minutes. I got to my feet somehow and stumbled out into the dawn with my left arm hanging limp, my right around her shoulders. The grass was cool and soft under my bare feet; the fresh, clean air steadied me and blew the clouds from my brain.

When we came in sight of the house itself, Maria Posador cried out for aid; a man who might have been Filipino threw open a window and stared out, his face blank with sleep. In a moment, though, he had comprehended the situation and was hurrying down to us.

I simply took the line of least resistance; I allowed myself to be guided into a room and laid on a divan. I set my teeth while she cut away the arm of my pajama jacket and wiped the wound with a cloth wrung out in hot water brought by the Filipino houseman. A fat, motherly woman who reminded me by her cast of face of Fats Brown’s wife came with brandy, and when my arm was bandaged I was made to sip a glass of it.

In a little while I was able to sit up. The bullet had gone clear through, making a shallow groove in the flesh rather than a hole, and the substance of the muscle was hardly touched. I could even move the arm — stiffly, but without great pain — when it was dressed.

Maria Posador watched me with her face quite expressionless.

“I will not ask your forgiveness,” she said at length. “Once before — soon after I came back to Aguazul five years ago — there was an ambush laid for me. I was beaten about the head and left to die.”

She reached up and drew back her sleek black hair from her left temple. With a quick twitch she removed one of the tresses — a postiche. Where it had been, a patch of red, granular scar tissue showed on her scalp.

She left it visible just long enough for me to take in its meaning. Then, deftly, she restored her hair to its original immaculate state.

“So,” she said levelly. “It was because of that, you understand. I have not been out very often to that place since the television center was burned down. But last night I heard a strange noise, and it occurred to me to — well, to see if there had been trouble. It was perhaps foolhardy to go out alone, but what could I do?