The Five

She came in at half past twelve in the red jacket, with a canvas bag over her shoulder full of papers, and stood in the doorway looking at the window from the inside, at the back of the card he had propped against the atlas.

“About four million people,” she read, in English, with some difficulty, because it was back to front. “Nobody knows.” She turned round. “We know. Roughly.”

“Roughly isn’t knowing.”

“No,” said Inés Carrillo. “That’s what I keep telling them.” She came to the counter. “You told me you sold maps. In the bar, in Tijuana. I thought it was a joke.”

“It wasn’t a joke.”

“I see that now.” She looked round the shop, at the plan chests and the globes and the travel guides, and at Mrs Pell at the far end of the counter, who had looked up when she came in and down again. “I walked past twice before I was sure. It has your name on the window.”

“It has Mrs Pell’s name on the window.”

“Your card. I meant your card. It’s your handwriting. I’ve read your handwriting on every note you passed across the table in Tijuana.” She put the canvas bag down on the counter. “Have you eaten? I’ve been in a courtroom since nine and I’m going to fall over.”

Caleb looked at Mrs Pell.

“Go on,” said Mrs Pell, without looking up. “An hour. It’s Friday. Nobody buys maps on a Friday lunchtime, they’re all buying sandwiches.”

---

There was an Italian café across the street with four tables on the pavement under an awning, and they took the one at the end, out of the sun. She ordered in Spanish and the waiter, who was from Puebla, answered in Spanish and brought the coffee very quickly and looked at Caleb with interest. After that they spoke Spanish to each other, because she did and because it was easier, she said, to say what you meant in the language you had thought it in. His was careful and passable and he knew it. She did not correct it. Twice she gave him a word he was looking for, without comment, the way you hand somebody a tool.

“The court,” he said.

“The court.” She put two sugars in her coffee. “We asked them to hear the case before the election. All five of us, through our lawyer, and the Alternative people asked too, through theirs, from the other side. The only time the five of us and the Alternative have ever wanted the same thing. We both wanted to know.” She stirred. “They said no. This morning. Three judges, twenty minutes. The one in the middle read it out. A constitutional question does not become more urgent because a government has fallen on it.”

“That’s a good sentence.”

“It’s a very good sentence. I wrote it down.” She drank half the coffee. “It means we stand on the seventh on the seats we’ve got, and if we win them, we sit, and if the court decides in a year that we should never have sat, then everything we voted for in the meantime is still the law. Because we were counted. That’s the rule. They sit, vote and are counted like any others.” She put the cup down. “Like any others. I have that one written down too.”

“I know. I put it in the committee’s report.”

“I know you did. I read it.” She looked at him. “You were in the gallery. On the night.”

“Yes.”

“Lucía saw you. She looked up before we went out. She told me afterwards she wanted to see whether anybody up there knew what we were doing.” Carrillo turned the cup round in its saucer. “She said there was one person in the whole building who did, and he was sitting next to a very old man with a stick.”

Caleb didn’t say anything.

“Why did you vote against it?” he said, after a while.

“You know why. We told the committee in March.”

“I know what you told the committee.”

“Then you know.” She sat back in the chair. “We didn’t do it because we’re angry. Everybody in your city thinks we did it because we’re angry, because angry is what they expect from people who used to be Mexicans. We aren’t angry. We’re tired. Fourteen months of being told that the thing we are is temporary, by a government that has no plan to make it anything else, written in your own law, in your own words, that it’s not permanent and nobody should rely on it. And then they rely on it. Every day.” She shrugged. “We decided in a kitchen in Tijuana, two days before. All five of us. Lucía’s kitchen. We agreed we’d vote together, and go out last, and not sit down until it was over.”

“Because when you sit down somebody asks you to move.”

She looked at him for a moment, and then smiled, the first time.

“You remember that.”

“You said it in March. In English, for the record, and then again in Spanish to me in the corridor because you thought the English hadn’t come out right.”

“It hadn’t.” She finished the coffee. “It never does.”

---

The waiter brought two plates of something with aubergine in it that neither of them had ordered and said it was what she would want, and she said it was, and they ate.

“Did you meet her?” Caleb said. “Valdez. Before.”

“Four times.”

“What did she say?”

Carrillo put her fork down.

“I can’t tell you that,” she said. “Nobody’s going to tell anybody that. Not us, not her. It’s the one thing the five and the Prime Minister agreed on, in the last meeting, eleven days before.” She picked the fork up again. “I’ll tell you one thing, because it isn’t about what she said. She was the only one of them who ever asked us what we thought it should be. The Territory. Not what we wanted. What we thought it should be. She asked it as if she wanted to know.”

“Did you tell her?”

“Yes.”

“What did she think?”

“I can’t tell you that either.” She ate. “She lost, anyway. It doesn’t matter now what she thought.”

“And whoever wins?”

“Whoever wins.” Carrillo considered it, chewing. “The Conservatives will win most seats and say they’ll settle it and not say how. Labour will lose and say it was the sierra. The Bloc will win a great many seats saying count them, which is a very good slogan, by the way.” She looked at him over her fork. “I wonder where she got it.”

“It’s an obvious thing to say.”

“Is it.” It wasn’t a question. “And then they’ll form something, or not form something, and in a year the court will decide about our seats, and in two years somebody will count us, maybe. And nothing will change in Tijuana for a long time.” She shrugged again. “We expect nothing. That’s not bitterness. That’s planning.”

---

He paid, because it was his city, he said, and she let him, because it was. The waiter from Puebla brought the bill on a saucer with two sweets on it, and said something to her in Spanish too fast for Caleb to follow, and she laughed and answered, and the waiter looked at Caleb again and went away grinning.

“What did he say?”

“He asked if you were my husband.” She picked up her bag. “I said you were a lord who sells maps. He thinks I’m making fun of him.”

“Are you?”

“A little.” She stood up. The sun had moved and the edge of the awning’s shadow was on the table between them. “I fly back tonight. I have a seat to keep, if the court lets me keep it, and thirteen days to keep it in.” She held out her hand, and he stood and took it. “Can I ask you something?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve read everything. Every page of evidence. You’ve been to Tijuana twice, and La Paz, and stayed on a week at your own expense, and learned Spanish to talk to us, which nobody else on that committee did.” She did not let go of his hand. “What do you think it should be? The Territory. Not what you think will happen. What it should be.”

He looked at her.

Behind her, across the street, Mrs Pell’s window. The atlas on its easel, open at the page at the back with the old lines in dotted grey. His card propped against it. Nobody knows.

“I think that’s a question for Parliament,” he said.

“You are Parliament.”

“Not until it meets again. Parliament’s dissolved.”

“That’s a lawyer’s answer.”

“It’s a bookseller’s answer. Lawyers charge for theirs.”

She let go of his hand. She was still looking at him, steadily, the way she had looked at the committee across the table in Tijuana while it asked her questions it could have asked by post.

“You do know,” she said. “You just won’t say.”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do. You’ve decided, and you won’t say, because if you say it you’ll have to defend it, and you’d rather be the one person in the building who’s read everything and hasn’t said anything.” She shouldered the bag. “That’s all right. It’s a very useful thing to be. I just wanted to know whether you knew you were being it.” She smiled again. “Adiós, señor. Your Spanish is very good. Don’t let anybody tell you it isn’t.”

“Do you still think Giffords?” he said, as she turned. “For governor.”

She stopped.

“Yes. Do you?”

“Yes.”

“Then that’s one thing you’ve said.” She raised a hand, and went off down the street towards the Axis, in the red jacket, with the canvas bag of court papers over her shoulder, and did not look back.

---

Mrs Pell had sold a globe while he was out, the second largest, to a dentist from Baltimore, and was writing it up in the book.

“Your friend from work,” she said.

“Not that one. A different one.”

“I gathered.” She wrote the price in. “She speaks very good English.”

“She speaks very good everything.”

“Hm,” said Mrs Pell. She closed the book. “The window wants dusting. The card’s curling at the corner. You’ll want a new one.”

He took the card out of the window. It had curled in the sun, and the pencil had faded a little at the top. He looked at it for a while: THE TERRITORY OF LORETO. About four million people. Nobody knows.

He wrote a new one, in ink this time, and put it back exactly where the old one had been. It said the same thing.