Skeleton Key

he was out. The Game Boy with its hidden Geiger counter was central to their mission. They had taken it back.
    Alex undressed quickly and got into bed, but suddenly he wasn‟t tired. He lay in the darkness, listening to the waves breaking against the sand. He could see thousands of stars through the open window. He had never realized there were so many of them, nor that they could shine so bright. Turner and Troy returned to their room about half an hour later. He heard them talking in low voices but couldn‟t make out what they said. He pulled the sheet over his head and forced himself to sleep.
    The first thing he saw when he woke up the next morning was a note pushed under his door. He got out of bed and picked it up. It was written in block capitals.
    GONE FOR A WALK. THOUGHT YOU NEEDED A REST. WE‟LL CATCH UP WITH YOU
    LATER. MOM XXX.
    Alex tore the note in half—and then in half again. He scattered the pieces in the wastepaper basket and went out to breakfast. It occurred to him that it was a strange set of parents who would walk off, leaving their son behind, but he supposed there were probably plenty of families, with nannies and au pairs, who often did the same. He spent the morning on the beach, reading.
    There were some other boys of about his own age playing in the sea and he thought of joining them. But they didn‟t speak English and seemed too self-contained. At eleven o‟clock, his
    “parents” still hadn‟t returned. Suddenly Alex was fed up, sitting there on his own in the grounds of the hotel. He was on an island on the other side of the world. He might as well see some of it!
    He got dressed and set off into town.
    The heat struck him the moment he stepped outside the grounds of the hotel. The road curved inland, away from the sea, following a line of scrubland on one side and what looked like a tobacco plantation—a mass of fat, green leaves rising to chest height—on the other. The landscape was flat but there was no breeze coming in from the sea. The air was heavy and still.
    Alex was soon sweating and had to swat at the flies that seemed determined to follow him every step of the way. A few buildings, sun-bleached wood and corrugated iron, sprang up around him.
    A fly buzzed in his ear. He beat it away.
    It took him twenty minutes to reach Puerto Madre, a fishing village that had grown into a dense and cluttered town. The buildings were an amazing jumble of different styles; rickety wooden shops, marble and brick houses, huge stone churches. Everything had been beaten down and baked by the sun—and sunlight was everywhere; in the dust, in the vivid colours, in the smells of spice and overripe fruit.
    The noise was deafening. Radio music—jazz and salsa—blasted out of open windows.
    Extraordinary American cars, vintage Chevrolets and Studebakers like brilliantly coloured toys, jammed the streets, their horns blaring as they tried to make their way past horses and carts, motorized rickshaws, cigarette sellers and shoe-shine boys. Old men in vests sat outside the cafes blinking in the sunlight. Women in tight-fitting dresses stood languidly in the doorways. Alex had never been anywhere louder or dirtier or more alive.
    Somehow he found himself in the main square with a great statue at the centre; a revolutionary soldier with a rifle at his side and a grenade hanging from his belt. There must have been at least a hundred market stalls jammed into the square, selling fruit and vegetables, coffee beans, souvenirs, old books and T-shirts. And everywhere there were crowds, strolling in and out of the dollar shops and the ice-cream parlours, sitting at tables beneath sweeping colonnades, queuing up in the fast food restaurants and the paladares—tiny restaurants located inside private houses.
    There was a street sign bolted to a wall. It read: PLAZA DE FRATERNIDAD. Alex had enough Spanish to translate that. Brotherhood Square. He somehow doubted that he would find much brotherhood here. A fat man in an old and dirty linen suit suddenly lurched up to him.
    “You want cigars? The best Havana cigars. But at cheap, cheap price.”
    “Hey, amigo. I sell you a T-shirt…”
    “Muchacho! You bring your parents to my bar…”
    Before he knew it, he was surrounded. Alex realized how much he must stand out in this crowd of dark, tropical people milling about in their brightly coloured shirts and straw hats. He was hot and thirsty. He looked around him for somewhere to get a drink.
    And that