Martin Smith - Stallion Gate

Gold emerged from the ticket office, stood at the corner, looked at his wristwatch and looked at the public clock, a giant pocketwatch on a column outside a jewellery store on the south side of the plaza. He started back across the street to La Fonda, changed his mind and continued to the south side, past the curio shop, the jeweller's, a haberdasher's and into Woolworth's, and sat at the counter.

"But it's good to have someone to talk to," Santa said. "Excuse me." When Joe saw a waitress bring Gold a coffee, he left the obelisk for the ticket office. The clerk was a grandmotherly Spanish woman who told Joe he had just missed the friend he described, but she could sell him a ticket on the same train going to Kansas City and New York on the 17th. Joe said he didn't know if he could go then, but not to tell his friend if he returned to the office because Joe wanted it to be a surprise. As Joe went back to the plaza , he saw Santa vanishing in the opposite direction, moving stiffly like a man in a body cast. In Woolworth's, Gold was still nursing his cup. Although he had a newspaper, the New Mexican judging by the eagle on the masthead, Gold didn't bother reading it. He sat looking at plaster sundaes, his lower lip pendulous with thought. He tapped the crystal of his watch, dropped change on the counter and came out.

The plaza was coming to life, tourists not so much wandering in as suddenly appearing as skirts on the portal , as kids with pistols running around the bandstand. The bank on the east side of the plaza opened its doors. Mail trucks rolled from the post office, a block away and across from the cathedral. There were no traffic lights; cars and trucks ran counter-clockwise round the plaza and sorted themselves out at the corners. Gold stood on the kerb, poised to dash through the traffic directly across the plaza and towards the obelisk and Joe. A milk truck went by. A carload of Navajos. Now Gold was walking up the streets, under the pocketwatch, past the Indian drums in the curio shop windows and, again, to the ticket office on the far corner. Then he appeared to make a decision to take his time. He strolled past the office, past Thunderbird Curios and the bank's Ionic columns to a Territorial style building that housed Guarantee Shoes, crossed Palace Avenue and made a detour down a sidestreet to Maytag's. Joe didn't know why he was following Gold. Curiosity? A sense that everything about Gold was wrong? He seemed carried by the wake of the fat little man. Maytag's sold washing machines on one side of the store and music on the other. Gold scrutinized the Hit Parade list taped to the inside of the window. At last, he came back up the street to the plaza and Santa Fe's central attraction, the Indians on the portal .

The portal was a shaded arcade. Women from the pueblos of the Rio Grande valley sat against the cool adobe wall. In front of each was a blanket or rug displaying red San Juan pots, black pots from Santiago, or Santa Clara's double-necked wedding pots, turquoise jewellery from Santa Domingo, or Navajo beaten-silver concho belts. A few women wore the single-shoulder dress; most wore cotton dresses, aprons and sweaters. They yawned or read movie magazines or gossiped, paying cursory attention to the Anglos who stooped or knelt to fondle or disparage the wares exhibited. This being a holiday event, the would-be buyers dressed like dudes and browsed with intensity. Gold joined a trio of sergeants who were studying a blanket of earrings, bracelets and hairpins. The crown of Gold's fedora came to the shoulders of the soldiers. One sergeant admired a hairpin with a peacock tail of silver and jet. Joe slipped between the cars parked diagonally along the kerb of the portal . The adobe overhang was supported by massive posts of ponderosa pine worn smooth by generations of tourists, and Joe could look at an angle through the colonnade without being seen himself. Some of the women selling pots he recognized. Almost in front of him was a sleek and chubby girl with black bangs, a teenage cousin of his named Polly, for Paulina. She'd put down a copy of Modern Screen to show one of Sophie Reyes' smooth, obsidian-dark pots to a kneeling man in a panama. Gold moved closer, his eyes jumping from blanket to blanket. He stopped to pick up and examine a silver cigar holder. He seemed genuinely to want it, and he replaced it on the blanket with regret. He joined two nuns in the examination of silver crucifixes, falling into the spirit of friendly reverence. Gold seemed to suffer from boosterism, enthusiastically entering into whatever mood he encountered. Good-naturedly he let himself be talked into trying a clip on his tie. The clip looked like a silver bomber. His tie had hand-painted palm trees. He gave the clip back and bent over the next blanket, Polly's.

"For fruit?" Gold lifted a bowl with an embossed serpent around the rim.

Polly shrugged, but the man in the panama said, "Would you put fruit on a Rubens? That's a bowl by Sophie Reyes."

"She's famous?" Gold was impressed.

"To collectors."

"You collect these?" Gold turned the bowl round.

"I collect Dolores. She's dead and her pieces are very hard to find."

"Like art?"

"It is art." The man in the panama looked up as he took the bowl from Gold and Joe saw that the collector was Captain Augustino in civvies. "The pots are an expression of the native concept of the earth, and man's emergence from the earth, each pot both earth and womb. A beautiful, powerful concept."

"The decoration -"

"There is no decoration," Augustino cut Gold off. "There is representation. The snake is the never-ending cycle of the world. It's a representation of lightning. Lightning brings rain. Rain brings corn. You see the contradictions of violence and fruitfulness married in this symbol. The bowl is a vision of primitive harmony. Although not quite as fine as a Dolores."

"That's the one you collect?"

"I can show the collection to you, if you'd like."

"Thanks, but I'm in Santa Fe for only a day…"

Harry Gold worked his way past the last blankets and out of the portal to the corner, where he checked his wristwatch again. An open tour bus was at the corner and the guide was saying something unintelligible through a megaphone. Cameras leaned out of the bus. If Gold took the tour, there was no way Joe could stay near without being seen. At the same time, Joe was wondering about Augustino. The captain was supposed to be 200 miles south at Trinity.

The tour bus pulled away without Gold. Gold was walking fast, trousers flapping around short legs. Joe looked back. Augustino had disappeared from the portal . Joe had to trot across the plaza flagstones to see Gold head toward Woolworth's, where he'd started out, then make a right past Rexall Drugs, left on Don Gaspar Street, which wasn't much larger than an alley, and hurry past the bars and the pawn shops. Joe stayed a block behind, but Gold seemed unconscious of the possibility that he might be followed. Two blocks from the plaza, along the avenue called the Alameda, the Santa Fe river resembled either a dried-up open sewer or a creek. Rocks, brambles and rusted cans filled the bed, although cottonwoods grew luxuriantly on the near bank, tapping the dampness below. A concrete span called the Castillo Bridge led to an opposite bank of poplars and, beyond, the white dome and cupola of the state capitol building in the distance. In the middle of the bridge's walkway, Klaus Fuchs smoked a cigarette and contemplated a scooter abandoned or carried away by some past flood. The tyres were gone, perhaps gathered in one of the war's rubber drives. Fuchs rested his foot on the middle of the three iron pipes that served as guardrails. A folded newspaper was tucked under an arm. Joe stopped in the shadows of the cottonwoods to watch.