Morgan had traveled widely in the Western Hemisphere. Which country had it been where the American cultural attache had thrown a Halloween party at his house on the bay? When Morgan had arrived by taxi the gates were blocked by mestizo men and women.
They stood in front of the cab with their hands out, they were crying in lispy Spanish trick or treat, trick or treat, and the guard had to come out and shoo them away.
Going up the steps of the diplomatic residence, Morgan looked back and saw the mestizos with their arms waggling through the gate. They called to him with elaborate references to his noble lineage.
They were small in stature and it was impossible to tell their age. They looked as if they were made of leather.
They looked, with their dark skin and slanted cheekbones and black hair, like the sea wrack of ancient Oriental migrations.
Morgan thought of them now as he jogged in the chilly early morning after Halloween and saw relics stuck to the wet street -- a child's mask, a candy wrapper, a hank of sheet imprinted with tire treads.
Coming to a corner, he turned down a winding road that he did not remember having run.
It was a steep curving downhill past stone houses set rather close considering their luxurious size.
Behind them the land angled off sharply through a stand of woods that looked over the parkway leading to the city.
He came abreast of one house of which all but the slate roof was hidden by a stone wall.
Triangles of green bottle glass were embedded in concrete along the top of the wall and looping strands of barbed wire were fastened to steel construction rods protruding from the concrete every few yards.
The wall followed the curve of the road for some distance and at the end of it a man in a black suit was pushing open a cast-iron gate.
The gate swung into Morgan's path and he jogged in place as a black limousine emerged from the driveway, spun sharply right with a squeal of tires, and gunned off down the hill, its brake lights flaring as it disappeared around the bend.
The small man in the dark suit pulled the gate closed with his arms outstretched and his heels digging into the gravel driveway. He did not even look at Morgan. He was short, with skin the color of leather, and he had black hair, a prominent broken beak nose, and a narrow jaw coming to a point like an arrowhead.
The limousine had been packed with men sitting shoulder to shoulder, all of them in black suits, like the gatekeeper, and all with faces of the dark mestizo aspect.
In this way Morgan learned of the district where the houses were maintained by certain foreign governments as residences for their legations.