"Right now all he'll talk is platitudes. But you might get him to talk off the record. He's gotten around to telling me things. And stop looking at your watch. I'll lock up and we can start back to town at once. You'll be back in plenty of time to sleep with her tonight."
"With whom?"
"Whoever you have that date with. I know I should be nasty about it. But I never demanded fidelity and I always hated men who demanded it of me. That's the way we both are, darling, and as long as it goes off as good as it did upstairs today we can expect to do it often." She left the settee, walked over to Hall's chair, and kissed his ear. He slapped her trim buttocks, shouted, "Cut it out!"
"Let's get going," she said. "Time's a-wasting."
Hall thought, as Margaret drove him back to San Hermano, that Pepe Delgado would have approved of her skill as a driver just as much as he would disapprove of her politics. The ledger on her lap, she pushed the roadster through hairpin curves and back-country roads with a confidence as cold as her reasoning about her manganese properties.
"I'll walk to my hotel from the Embassy," he said, when they reached the suburbs of San Hermano. "I could stand a little walk."
"So you're meeting her in the lobby," Margaret laughed. She kissed him fondly when she stopped the car near the Embassy. "Darling," she said, "don't ask me to the Bolivar. But I have to go back to the farm in a few days. I'll let you know ahead of time, and we can have a night together."
"Call me," Hall said. "Or I'll be calling you."
An hour later he met Duarte in the home of one of the secretaries of the Cuban Embassy. The Mexican had borrowed the home for the evening. "We have at least two hours to talk here," Duarte told Hall. "My friend is at the cinema."
Duarte opened two bottles of cold beer, set one before Hall. He took a long look at Hall and burst into laughter. "Did she give you any information, Mateo?"