WINDING UP M INERVA ’S affairs in New Spain took several months. Jack, Jimmy, Danny, and Tomba moved north to a frontier town in Zacatecas where no one cared if Jack failed to wear his sanbenito —or if they did, they were too scared to say anything, because this was a town of desperadoes, and every man went armed all the time. When Jack had lived in Europe, he had enjoyed and even profited from being a picaroon in a world of Lords, Ladies, and Chamber of Commerce members. But he found living in a whole society of picaroons to be tiresome if not downright dangerous. So he did not linger in that border-town long, but went west over the Sierra Madre Occidental with a mule-train to recover the last of the goods they’d cached around Cabo Corrientes: a ton of quicksilver, and all of van Hoek’s books—which he had left in the mountains so that they would not be seized and burnt by the Inquisition when Minerva called at Acapulco or Lima.