The Harder They Come

1

THERE WAS NO SLANT to the sun — it was just there, overhead, burning, making him sweat, making his underwear bind and the shirt stick to his back as if it had been glued on, and why he’d ever let Carolee talk him into this he’d never know. The bus lurched. There was a stink of diesel. Gears ratcheted beneath the floorboards, metal on metal, as if they were going to fuse or maybe explode into a thousand pieces at any moment. He looked beyond Carolee, out the window, feeling ever so slightly queasy, though everyone assured him the water was good here—potable, that was the word on everybody’s lips, as if they were trying to convince themselves. Plus, the food was held to the highest standards and the glasses out of which they’d sipped their rum punch and rum cokes and rum tonics scrupulously washed in hot sudsing pristine well water, because this wasn’t like Mexico or Guatemala or Belize, this was special, orderly, clean, a kind of tourist paradise. And cheap. Cheap too.

On top of it all, he had a headache. Or the beginnings of one. But that was understandable, because he’d gulped down three rum punches with lunch, so thirsty he could have drained the whole pitcher the waiter had set in the middle of the table, and no, he wasn’t going to drink the water, no matter what anybody said — not unless it came from a bottle with an unbroken seal. He rubbed his eyes. He had aspirin in his kit back on the ship. Cipro too. But that didn’t do him a whole lot of good now, did it? Anonymous streets rolled by, shops, people, dogs, ratty-looking birds infesting the trees and an armed guard out front of every store — or tienda, as his guidebook had it — and what did that tell you about the level of orderliness here? Bienvenidos. Welcome. Mi casa es su casa.

The bus slammed through one of the million and a half potholes cratering the street and Carolee grabbed for his arm. The man in the seat across from him — Bill, or was it Phil? — let out a curse. “I wish he’d slow down,” Carolee said, and he shot a look at the driver, at the back of his head that had been shaved to stubble, the white annealed scar in the shape of a fishhook at the hairline, ears too big, neck too thin, and then he was gazing out the smeared window to where the ship lay fixed in the harbor behind them like a great shining edifice built by a vanished civilization — or a vanishing one, anyway. “I don’t know,” he said, his voice crackling through its filter of phlegm as if he’d been transformed into Louis Armstrong in his old age — everything, even his laugh, coming out in an airless rasp—“I kind of wish he’d speed up so we can get this over with. Nature walk,” he said. “In this heat? Give me a break.”

“Oh, come on, Sten, lighten up.” Carolee was giving him a look he knew from long experience, her eyes wide and her head tilted just a fraction to the right, as if what you’d just said had thrown her off balance. She was enjoying this. If it wasn’t the birds and monkeys, it was the trinket shops and the little out-of-the-way restaurants everyone assured her the tourists hadn’t discovered yet in spite of the fact that they were listed in the back of all the guidebooks and the waiters practically erupted from their shoes when the tour bus pulled up out front. She didn’t speak the language, beyond “¿Cuánto?” and “Demasiado,” but it didn’t stop her. She wanted things. She wanted life, new experience, a change in the routine. What good’s retirement if you’re just going to sit there and rot? That was her line. He’d heard it all day, every day, until finally he’d given in, though privately he figured that since you were going to rot anyway you might as well do it at home, where at least you could drink the water.

“Didn’t you just tell me this morning how you need some real exercise instead of what, shuffleboard and bending your elbow at the bar?” She canted her head a degree more so that her hair, which she still wore long, swept across the right side of her face, and in that moment he felt the thing he’d always felt for her, the thing that had tugged at him now for forty years and more. “Or am I wrong? Did I mishear you? Huh, mister? Was that it?” She poked him for emphasis, but playfully, copacetically, one stiff finger right in the ribs, and he couldn’t help smiling despite himself.

Soon they were winding their way along the seashore, the road getting progressively worse, the houses sparser, everything so green it ached. It was one in the afternoon. The sun baked the roof of the bus. People dozed, their heads thrown back or cradled in their arms. Though the windows were open, the air hardly seemed to move, as if it were another medium altogether, solid, heavy, like sludge. Lunch had been at an authentic café, Ticos (that was what the locals were called) all around them, going through the motions of fork to mouth like anybody you’d see anywhere. That these people, this place, existed independently of him and everything he knew had astonished him all over again, as if he’d gone outside himself, a ghost drifting through another reality. He tried to capture it with his camera, snapping dutifully away, but the photos themselves were ephemeral, images flashing by on a computer screen, attached to nothing, and no one would ever see them, he knew that. The waiter had brought plates of rice and beans. Some sort of fried fish. And rum punch, thank god for that, though if he stopped to think about it he’d have to wonder about the ice cubes clacking away in the depths of the pitcher and where exactly they’d come from, as if he didn’t already know.

The driver jerked at the wheel, shifted down, then up, then down again. He felt his stomach clench. They passed a scatter of houses, a grocery, a school, and suddenly both shoulders of the road were thronged with boys in white shirts and dark trousers and girls in matching blouses and skirts marching through the ochre mud either to or from school, he couldn’t say which, half of them going one way and half the other. Maybe it was double sessions, maybe that was it. Or siesta. Did they have siesta here?

Someone had told him education was compulsory for everybody in the country, grades one through eight, after which it fell off to practically nothing. But that was all right. At least they were literate, at least they could do sums, and what more did you need for a tourist economy? Language skills, maybe. Their waiter at lunch spoke a hopped-up Jamaican dialect, a kind of reggae English, but you could hardly understand what he was saying. Still, just about everybody had at least some English, thanks to Imperial America and the consumer fever that kept spiraling outward till the buy-now/pay-later message was practically a tribal chant from every outpost of the earth. What a gulf there was between needs and wants, he was thinking, all these things, these appliances, these handheld devices. . but what he wanted now — needed, urgently — was a rest stop. And something to wet his throat, bottled water, a soda, gum, did anybody have any gum?

Carolee was dozing, her head pinned beneath his left arm, sweating there, his sweat and hers, conjoined. He tried not to jostle her as he reached for her bag, for the water in the plastic bottle with the screw cap she’d remembered to bring along and he hadn’t. The bag — one of those black over-the-shoulder things she insisted on wearing looped across her chest so the street punks couldn’t make off with it — was on the floor at her feet. He leaned into her, bracing her, and felt the muscles in his lower right side grab as he reached down for it, just a pinch there, a reminder of the intermittent back pain he’d been having and the exercises the therapist had given him to keep limber, exercises he’d been neglecting because he was on vacation, on a cruise ship, and all that seemed to matter on a cruise ship was eating and drinking — you weren’t getting your money’s worth unless you put on twenty pounds and calcified your liver.

He managed to extract the bottle without waking his wife, using her slack form as a counterweight as he leaned forward, and now he was unscrewing the cap and rinsing his mouth before taking a single long swallow. It seemed as if he was always thirsty lately, thirsty back at home, thirsty on the ship, thirsty under this sun, and he wondered vaguely if it was age-related, the first sign of some as yet undiagnosed syndrome — the dreaded acronym — that would bring him down in a dark bloom of imploding cells. The tires screeched. There was a bump. Another bump. Carolee jolted awake on a ragged intake of breath. “What?” she gasped, her eyes straining to focus.

“You were dozing.”

He gave her a minute to come back to the world, the bus, the rank invasive odor of the overheated sea and the sodden jungle. She’d been into the rum at lunch too, rum black as oil, in a smudged glass two-thirds filled with Diet Coke, no ice. Neither of them was used to drinking this early in the day, but then why not, they were on vacation, weren’t they? And he was retired — or pre-dead, as he preferred to call it. Party on. Everybody else was.

“I was dreaming,” she said.

“Me too, but I was awake. You got any gum?”

She shook her head. “Water?” she said, making a question of it, and she bent to reach for her bag before she saw the bottle clamped there in his sweating hand. “Which I see you already found.”

He handed her the bottle and she unscrewed the cap and took a sip herself. “Ugh,” she said, making a face, “it tastes awful.”

“Hot enough to put a tea bag in. And I’ll give you even money they fill it from a tap someplace, like in that movie, what was the name of it, in India?”

“No,” she said, “no. This came from the ship.”

He glanced out the window. More children, more school uniforms, a tienda with a wide-open door and maybe drinks inside, Coca-Cola, Naranja Croosh. He saw tethered goats, palms, bananas, clothes on a line, a squadron of white-haired men playing cards at a table set up in the courtyard between whitewashed houses, the whole business flitting by so fast it was like a movie in the wrong speed. And then, without warning, the bus veered left at a fork in the road and they shot down a narrow tunnel of vegetation, branches snatching at the roof, dogs and chickens scattering before them. Carolee slammed into his shoulder, loose as a puppet, and there went the water, the bottle hitting the floor with a soft liquid thump before vanishing under the seat and then reappearing an instant later as if it were some magic trick. “Jesus,” he said, “what’s this guy trying to do, kill us?”

In the next moment he was on his feet, making his way up the aisle toward the front of the bus, bracing himself against the seatbacks. He was a big man, six-three and two hundred twenty pounds, most of it still in the right places, and he filled the aisle. People turned to look at him — the ones who weren’t lost in a rum haze, that is — but he focused on the back of the driver’s head and tried to keep his balance. There were eighteen or twenty passengers, couples mostly and mostly around his age, and he knew the majority of them by sight, if not by name. The cruise had originated in San Diego and they’d already made stops at Cabo San Lucas, Puerto Vallarta, Puerto Quetzal, Puntarenas, the Panama Canal and Colón, and while there were nearly two thousand passengers aboard, you got to know — or at least recognize — the ones who tended to go on expeditions like this one.

“Excuse me,” he said, leaning over the driver, “but I wonder if you couldn’t slow down a bit?” The windshield held an image and then snatched it away, dodging like a Brahma bull. The engine labored. The driver shifted down, shot an impatient glance over one shoulder and then turned his back on him. “Excuse me?” he repeated. “People are getting upset back there—I’m getting upset.”

The driver didn’t seem to hear him. And why? Sten noticed now that the man was wearing one of those iPod hookups, the buds fixed inside his ears like decorations, like the black wooden plugs his son’s friend Cody wore in his stretched-out earlobes. The bus kept moving, but time slowed. Sten studied the man from above, the shining mahogany crown of his head, the ears like knobs you could take hold of and twist, the sparse bloom of stringy hairs snaking out of his chin. The music was so loud you could hear it even over the noise of the engine. Reggae. The eternal reggae they played everywhere on this side of the country as if it were vital to body function. He hated reggae. Hated this jerk who wouldn’t slow down or think to stop someplace so people could relieve themselves. And he hated to be ignored. So what he did, as tenderly as he could, was jerk the cord so the buds popped out of the man’s ears, and now the bus slowed, and now the driver — what was he, thirty, thirty-five? — was paying attention to him, all right.

“Go sit,” the man said, glaring over his shoulder. He made a motion with one hand, as if shooing a fly, then dug a pair of opaque black sunglasses out of his shirt pocket and clamped them over his eyes.

“I said, could you slow down, is all. You got old people on this bus. What’s the hurry?”

The driver ignored him, fixing his gaze back on the road. The buds dangled at his throat, the music released now to a metallic thump and roll and the thin nasal complaint of a voice lost in the mix. The bus accelerated. “You sit,” he said without turning his head. “No person is permitted up front.” And he pointed to a sign, faded and sun-blasted, that read Stay Behind Line.

Sten didn’t move. He just stood there, looming over the driver like a statue, one hand gripping the overhead rack, the other braced against the seatback. “And how about a pit stop? Any restrooms out here?” Even as he posed the question he realized how foolish he sounded. He could only imagine what the driver must have thought of him, of all of them, privileged white people demanding this and that, here today, gone tomorrow. What did this guy care? There’d be another boat tomorrow and the next day and the day after that.

Finally, the tension tightening like a cord between them, the driver whipped his head round, his eyes visible as two indistinct drifting spheres behind the black plastic lenses. “Five minutes,” he said, the reggae pulsing at his throat, radiating up from the neck of his bright print shirt. Reggae. Thump-thump, boom. Thump-thump, boom. “Five minutes and we are there. You sit. Now.”

Five minutes? It was more like fifteen — and you can bet he was checking his watch all the way, his stomach doing backflips and his bladder sending urgent messages up his nervous system to his brain, which by now had burned itself clear of any lingering aftereffects of the rum so he could focus on what was important. Like escaping this sweatbox. Like pissing. Wetting his throat. Getting all this over with so he could go back to the boat, take a shower and stretch out on the bed, shut his eyes and dream of absolutely nothing.

The driver finally slowed down, but only because the road was barely passable here, so trenched and riddled it looked as if it had been shelled. As it was, they were jolted from side to side as the bus dipped tentatively into one hole after another, the wheels grabbing for purchase, the chassis shuddering and the transmission crying out with a grating whine that had Sten wondering if they were going to wind up walking back. “All we need,” he rasped at Carolee as she rocked into him. “You think triple A makes calls out here?”

The nature walk wasn’t sponsored by the cruise line, but the concierge or fun director or whatever you wanted to call her — a short grinning wide-faced woman in clopping heels and skirts that rode up her thighs — had pushed the brochure on them, along with brochures for a dozen other activities, ranging from kayaking in the harbor to visiting working potters and silversmiths to a self-guided tour of the local rum distilleries, map included. The brochure had featured a sleek two-tone modern van, silver above, blue below, and a light-skinned Tico driver with a conventional haircut, a welcoming smile and a chauffeur’s cap, not that Sten cared whether the man behind the wheel was a Swede or a Mandingo, but the reality was something else. Here you had this surly thug for a driver and a shabby decommissioned school bus that had been painted over so many times it looked as if it had grown a hide. Nobody had been particularly happy about it (“No air-conditioning? You kidding me?”), but they all climbed aboard and squeezed into the seats designed for children in some other place altogether, Lubbock or Yuma or King City, and told themselves At least it’s cheap.

He was staring gloomily out the window, getting more irritated by the minute, when they came to a shallow stream that seemed to be incorporated into the road along with the blistered rocks and scum-filled potholes, except that it was flowing, fanning out in front of them in a broad rippling pan. The tires eased into the water with a soft shush, spray leapt up and fell back again, and all at once he was thinking of the fish that must have lived there in the deep pools, tropical fish, the characins and Jack Dempseys and brick-red platys he’d introduced to his aquarium as a boy. Suddenly he was lost in reverie, picturing the glowing wall of tanks in the pet shop he’d haunted after school each day, remembering the pleasure of selecting the fish and paying for them with his own money, of setting up his first aquarium, arranging the rocks, digging in the gravel to plant the — what was it? — elodea. Yes, elodea. And the Amazon sword plant that looked like a miniature avocado tree. And what else? The little dwarf catfish, the albino ones, and what were they called?

He hadn’t thought about that in years. Or his mother — the way she recoiled in mock horror from the tubifex worms he kept in a Dixie cup in the refrigerator to preserve them. Fish food. The thread-like worms, the smell of them, the smell of the aquarium itself when you lifted the top and the world you’d created breathed back in your face. He began to feel his mood lift. Carolee was right. This was an adventure, something to break the routine, get him outside his comfort zone. The brochure had promised all four types of monkey, as well as agoutis, sloths, peccaries, maybe even an ocelot or jaguar, and here he was getting worked up over taking a leak. He almost felt ashamed of himself, but then he lifted his eyes to where the driver sat block-like at the wheel and felt all the outrage rush back into him. The guy was a clod. An idiot. No more sensible than a stone. He was about to get up again, about to lean over the man and hiss You did say five minutes, right? when the bus emerged on a muddy clearing scored with tire ruts and the driver pulled over to one side and applied the brakes. Everybody looked up.

“Now we have arrived,” the driver said in his textbook English, swiveling in his seat to project his voice down the aisle. “Now you must debark.” The buds were back in his ears. The dark glasses caught the light. Outside was the jungle. “Two hours,” he said, and the door wheezed open.

They were all rising now, fumbling with cameras, purses, daypacks. One of the women — Sheila, sixtyish, traveling alone with what must have been a gallon of perfume and the pink sneakers and turquoise capris she’d worn every day on the cruise, breakfast, lunch, high tea, cocktails and dinner — raised her voice to ask, “Do you meet us back here or what?”

“I am here,” the driver said, bringing two fingers to the wisps of hair at his chin. He stretched, cracked his knuckles. “Two hours,” he repeated.

Sten peered out the window. There was, of course, no restroom, no Porta-Potty, nothing, just half a dozen mud-spattered vehicles nosed in around the trailhead, where a sign read Nature Preserve, in Spanish and English. Across the lot, in the shade of the trees, there was a palapa and in the palapa a single titanic woman in a red head scarf. She would have something to drink — a soda, that was all he needed — and behind the palapa, in the undergrowth, he would find a tree trunk to decorate and all would be well.

They disembarked in a storm of chatter, Phil leading the way — or no, Bill, his name was definitely Bill, because Sten recalled distinctly that there had been two Bills at their table for lunch, and this was the bald-headed one. Not that it mattered. Once the ship docked in Miami he’d never see the guy again — and what he had seen of him so far didn’t go much deeper than How about those Giants? and Pass the salt.

There was a momentary holdup, because Sheila, who was next in line, couldn’t resist leaning in to ask the driver where their best chance to see scarlet macaws was and they all had to wait as the driver removed the buds from his ears and asked her to repeat herself. They watched the man frown over the question, his eyebrows rising like twin smudges above the rim of the sunglasses. “No sé,” he said finally, waving at the lot, the jungle, the trail. “I have never—” and he broke off, searching for the word.

Sheila looked at him in astonishment. “You mean you just drop people off and you’ve never even been up there? In your own country? Aren’t you curious?”

The driver shrugged. He was doing a job, that was all. Why muddy his shoes? Why feed the mosquitoes? He’d leave that to the gringos with their cameras and purses and black cloth bags, their fanny packs and preposterous turquoise pants and the dummy wallets with the expired credit cards to throw off the pickpockets while everybody knew their real wallets were tucked down the front of their pants.

“Come on,” Sten heard himself say. “You’re holding up the line.”

Outside, in the lot, the sun hammered down on him all over again. He waited a moment, gathering himself while Carolee tried simultaneously to tighten the cord of her floppy straw hat and loop the strap of the black bag over her head, and then he was striding across the lot toward the palapa and the woman there. “I’m getting a soda,” he called over his shoulder. “You want anything?”

She didn’t. She had her water. And no matter the taste, it had come from the ship.

When the woman in the palapa saw him coming, she pushed herself laboriously up from the stool she was sitting on and rested her arms on the makeshift counter. She must have weighed two-fifty, maybe more. Her skin shone black with sweat. Like the waiter at the café, she was West Indian, one of the Jamaicans who’d settled in Limón — there was a whole section called Jamaica Town, or so the guidebook had it. Very colorful. Plenty of rum. Plenty of reggae. Trinkets galore. “Good afternoon,” she said, treating him to a broad full-lipped smile. “And how may I be helping you?”

There was a plastic cooler set on the ground behind the counter in a spill of green coconuts. Above it, nailed to the crossbeam, was a board displaying various packages of nuts, potato chips and candy. A paperback book—El Amor Furioso—lay facedown on the counter.

“You got any sodas back there?” Sten asked, and he’d almost asked for a cerveza, but thought better of it — he was already dehydrated. And he had to piss. Badly.

“Cola, Cola Lite, agua mineral, pipas, carambola, naranja, limón,” she recited, holding her smile.

“Cola Lite,” he said, reaching for his wallet, and then he had the can, lukewarm, in his hand, and he was wading through the trash-studded undergrowth in back of the stall, his fly already open.

At first his water wouldn’t come, another trick of old age — your bladder feels like a hot-air balloon and then you stand over the toilet for ten minutes before the first burning dribble releases itself — but he employed the countermeasure of clearing his mind, of thinking of anything but the matter at hand, of the boat and his berth and the way Carolee had looked in the new negligee she’d bought expressly for the trip and what he’d been able to do about it, and then, finally, the relief came. He took his time, christening a tree that was alive with ants, tropical ants, ants of a kind he’d never seen before and would likely never see again. If he was lucky.

A long suspended moment drifted by, the ants piling up and colliding over the cascade of this rank new element in their midst, insects throbbing, birds calling, everything alive all around him. The sun barely penetrated here, and where it did the leaves gave off a dull underwater sheen, the air so dense he half expected to see sharks cruising through the trees. There was a smell of rot, of fragile earth. Something hooted and then another something took it up and hooted back. He might have stood there forever if it weren’t for the mosquitoes — here they came, rising up out of nowhere to remind him of where he was. He shook and zipped up, and only then did he rediscover the can of soda in his left hand, an amazing thing really, an artifact, an object of manufactured beauty transported all the way out here to quench his thirst and pump aspartame into his bloodstream.

He cracked the tab and wet his lips. Cola Lite. It tasted awful, like the amalgam the dentist put in his teeth. No matter. It was wet. He took a swallow and started back around the fat woman’s stall, the shade of the trees giving way to a blast of naked sun so that the headache came up on him all over again and he couldn’t help wishing, for at least the tenth time since they’d left the boat, that he’d remembered his baseball cap.

That was when things changed, changed radically. He was standing there blinking in the light and feeling in his shirt pocket for his sunglasses when a noise — the slamming of a car door — made him look up. There was another car in the lot now, an old American car — what was it, a Chevy? — and it was pulled up right beside the bus. The car was a faded yellow, the finish worn through to rusted metal in so many places it might have been spotted, like one of the big cats that were purportedly roaming the jungle behind them. He saw three men, Ticos, their heads shaved like the driver’s, two with goatees, one without, and they seemed to be dancing, flailing their arms and jumping from one foot to the other as if the ground had caught fire.

“Todo!” one was shouting, the one without the goatee. “Empty sus bolsillos, wallet, cellphone, todo!” There was a flash of light, two flashes: the goatees had knives. And the one without, the one doing all the shouting, he had a handgun.

The one with the gun saw him then and pointed it at him, though he was a hundred feet away. “You,” the man shouted, his voice so shrill with the rush of adrenaline it was almost a shriek, almost girlish. “You come over here!”

Sten could feel his heart going, accelerating like a flight of ducks beating up off the surface of a pond, flap, flap, flap. It was an old feeling, a feeling that took him back to another time and place, a seething green overgrown rot-stinking place like this one all the way across the ocean on the far side of the world. There were tropical fish there too. Monkeys. Men with guns. He dropped the can and raised his hands in the air. “Don’t shoot.”

The man with the gun was careless—man, he was a boy, all three of them were boys, nineteen, twenty years old, their limbs like broomsticks poking out of their baggy shorts and oversized T-shirts and their faces ablaze with excitement and maybe something else, maybe drugs. The weapon was just an object to him, Sten could see that in an instant, like a plate of food he was carrying from one table to another. A shoe. A book. A used CD he’d found in a bin at the record shop. He didn’t respect it. He didn’t know it. He didn’t even know how to take a stance and aim. “You,” the man repeated. “Right here, ahora!”

Sten shuffled forward, his feet gone heavy suddenly, so heavy he could barely lift them. He saw Carolee there with the others, her face rinsed with fear, the brim of her hat askew. Everybody was tightly bunched, purses, cameras and backpacks dropping at their feet while the goatees prodded them with their knives. There was a blanket there, he saw that now, spread out in the sun-blasted mud to receive the loot. It was one of those Indian blankets they sold in the tourist shops up and down the coast, the colors garish in the harsh hot light.

When he was there, when he’d reached the one with the gun and allowed himself to be shepherded into the group with a quick hot punch of the barrel in his ribs, he was startled by the faces around him. These were the faces of dead people, drained of animation, their eyes fixed on the ground as they gave up what they had, dropping change, wallets, bracelets and wristwatches into the pile as if they were tossing coins in a fountain. Sheila was murmuring “Oh god, oh god,” over and over. Another woman was crying. The man with the gun prodded him again and said, “Empty it, todo lo que tiene — ahora mismo!”

He exchanged a look with Carolee, then pulled his pockets inside out and dropped the contents on the pile, card key, dummy wallet, a pack of matches, his cell. He was thinking there was no sense in getting shot over nothing, no sense in getting excited, but then the one with the gun nudged him again and he went cold all over. They were amateurs, children playing at cops and robbers, infants, punks, too stupid even to be scared. Why would they be? This was easy pickings, old people, seniors so frightened and hopeless they could barely twist the watches off their wrists, let alone defend themselves. “Todo!” the man repeated.

Everything came into focus suddenly, the two goatees with their hands in people’s pockets and down the front of their shorts, Sheila whimpering Please, no, not my passport, the driver shut inside the bus and the fat woman vanished altogether — in on it, both of them, he was sure of it — and the carelessness, the unforgiveable carelessness of the one with the gun who barely came up to his shoulder for Christ’s sake, who’d turned away from him, turned his back on him as if he were nothing, less than nothing, just old and weak and useless. What he’d learned as a nineteen-year-old himself, a recruit, green as an apple, wasn’t about self-defense, it was about killing, and does anybody ever forget that? Mount a bicycle, lace up a pair of skates, shoot the rapids: here it was. In the next instant he hit the man so hard from behind he felt the shock of it surge through his own body even as he locked his right forearm across the man’s throat and brought his left hand up to tighten the vise, simplest maneuver in the book, first thing they teach you, Choke off the air and don’t let up no matter what.

The gun dropped away at the moment of impact and it wasn’t as if he was merely applying pressure to the man flailing in his arms — he wasn’t doing that, no, he was immobilizing him, because that was what he’d been trained to do and he had no choice in the matter. It was beyond reason now, autonomous, dial it up, semper fi. Everyone froze. The two with the knives looked as if they’d been transported to another planet, helpless, stupefied, scared. And then Bill, his bald crown raking at the light, bent to pick up the gun as if it were some pedestrian thing somebody had dropped in the street, an umbrella, a checkbook, a pair of glasses, his face gratified and composed, almost as if he meant to hand it back to the man kicking in Sten’s arms. Somebody screamed. The man kicked. Sten held tight, tighter, even as he watched the other two drop their knives in the mud and scramble for the car.

The engine sucked fuel, the wheels spun in the mud and then the car was fishtailing across the lot, spewing exhaust and fighting for purchase. Sten watched it go — they all watched — as it threw up clods of earth and sheared through the puddles till it plunged into the tunnel of the road where the deep holes gathered and the stream sank into its pools and the brick-red platys darted and hovered. Then it was quiet. The man in his arms had gone limp, like an exhausted dance partner, and the only thing Sten could think to do was move back a step and lower him to the ground.

Sheila started up again, invoking God, and then Carolee was in his arms and they were all gathered round, staring down at the man in the mud. He was on his back, where Sten had dropped him, eyes open and staring at nothing. He looked shrunken, shorter even than the five-eight or — nine he must have been, no girth to him at all, his oversized shorts and new spotless white T-shirt hanging off him like flour sacks. And his ankles — you could have wrapped two fingers around his ankles.

“Is he—?” somebody said, and now somebody else, a boxy officious-looking man with a pencil mustache Sten could have sworn he’d never seen before in his life, was bending over the body checking for vital signs, ear to chest, finger to wrist. This man — certainly he’d been on the bus — looked up and announced, “I’m a paramedic,” and began alternately kneading the supine man’s chest and blowing into his mouth.

This was something new, something the guidebook hadn’t advertised, a curiosity under the sun that beat down steadily on the ochre mud of the lot, and everybody just stood there taking it in, minutes slipping away, the heat exacting its price in sweat, the fat woman emerging from her stall and the bus driver stepping tentatively down from the bus as if the ground were rolling under him like a treadmill. The main attraction, the man on his back on the ground, never stirred. Oh, there was movement, but it was only the resistance of the inanimate to a moving force, the paramedic thanklessly riding the compression of his two stacked palms, then breaking off to pinch the nostrils and force his own breath past the dry lips, the ruptured trachea and down into the deflated lungs. This was a man, this paramedic, who didn’t give up easily. His mustache glistened with saliva and the crown of his head humped up and down as if at the climax of some insistent sexual act. He kept at it, kept at it, kept at it.

Carolee’s voice was very soft and at first he didn’t know if she was speaking to him or the paramedic. What she said was, “Is he going to make it?”

He didn’t know about that — he didn’t even know what he’d done. The only man he’d ever killed in his life, or might have killed, nothing confirmed, was a dink two hundred yards away on a moonless night when the flares strobed out over the world and he was in something very much like a panic, his rifle on full automatic.

“We should get him to a hospital,” Bill said, still holding on to the gun — a revolver, Sten saw that now, 357 Magnum, six shots — as if he didn’t know what to do with it. “I mean, is there a hospital here? In Limón, I mean?”

“There must be,” somebody said.

“But where is it?” Bill wondered. “And if we — I mean, should we move him? Maybe there’s damage there, a neck injury”—and here he raised his eyes to Sten’s—“like in football, you know? Where they bring out the stretcher?”

Up and down the paramedic went, up and down, and now the fat woman was there, peering over Sheila’s shoulder as if to make some sort of positive identification of the body on the ground — and it was a body, a corpse, not a living thing, not anymore, Sten was sure of it — and here was the driver too, his eyes masked behind the sunglasses, the lower portion of his face locked up like a strongbox.

“Driver,” Bill said, and he seemed to be panting, like a dog that had run a long way up a steep hill, “we need to take this man to the hospital. Where—dónde—is the hospital?”

The paramedic, without breaking his rhythm, looked up and said something in Spanish to the driver, something that had the cognate os-pee-tal in it, but the driver just shook his head and turned away to spit in the dirt. “You don’t want,” he said finally, shaking his head very slowly. “You want el córoner.”

“Os-pee-tal,” the paramedic insisted, and Bill joined him, aping his pronunciation: “Os-pee-tal.”

The fat woman emitted a pinched labial noise as if she were unstoppering a bottle, then turned — fat ankles, splayed feet in a pair of huaraches that sank into the ochre mud as if it were dough — and started back across the lot. Sten could still feel the blood thudding in his ears, though he was calming now, what was done was done, already thinking of the repercussions. Certainly he’d acted in self-defense, and here were the witnesses to prove it, but who knew what the laws were like in this country, what kind of flaming hoops they’d make him jump through — and lawyers, would he need a lawyer? He scanned the group — they were still milling there, clueless — but no one would look him in the eye. He wasn’t one of them, not anymore — he was something else now.

Sheila came up to him then, to where he was standing with his arm around Carolee still, and pressed his hand. “Thank you,” she murmured. “You’re a hero, a real hero.” Then she bent to the tangle of things scattered on the blanket to reclaim her purse and passport — her precious passport — and as if a spell had been broken, they all came forward now, one after another, to sift through the pile and take back what belonged to them.

2

THE RED CROSS CLINIC (La Clínica de la Cruz Roja) was where they wound up, the whole tour group, as if this were part of the package. The driver had retraced their route at the same breakneck speed he’d employed on the way out — or no, he’d seen this as an excuse to go even faster, pedal to the metal all the way, as if the bus had been scaled down and transformed into an ambulance, though as far as Sten could see there was no need for hurry, not on the gunman’s account. He hoped he was wrong. Hoped the guy was only unconscious, in a coma maybe, deep sleep, dreaming. They’d give him oxygen at the hospital, defibrillation, adrenaline, something to kick-start his heart and wake him up. . but what if he didn’t wake up? Was that manslaughter? A term came to him then: justifiable homicide. That was what this was. He’d acted instinctively, in self-defense, in defense of his wife and all the others too — he’d neutralized a threat, that was all, and who could blame him? But what if the man was paralyzed, alive still, but dead from the neck down, what then? Who’d pay for the nurse to spoon-feed him and change his diapers? There was no health care down here, no insurance, no nothing. Would there be a lawsuit? They had lawsuits everywhere. And jails. They had jails everywhere too.

He tried not to think about it, tried to wipe his mind clean. The whole way back he’d held tight to Carolee’s hand, his eyes locked straight ahead, the bus rattling till every nut and bolt down the length of it began to sing. Time compressed. The jungle slashed by on either side and the potholes exploded under the wheels. He felt sick. There was a kind of buzzing in his skull, as if a swarm of insects had got trapped inside. His knees were cramped. He felt thirsty all over again. Three rows up, laid out in the middle of the aisle, was the foreshortened form of the gunman, the paramedic hovering over him, but all he could make out were the soles of the man’s feet, jutting up like parentheses enclosing a phrase he didn’t want to decipher.

At first, there’d been some question about where to put the man. No one wanted him inside the bus, but what were they going to do, strap him to the roof? Leave him there in the mud for the police? The buzzards? The dogs? He was a human being, no matter what he’d done, or tried to do, and there wasn’t much debate about it — he was going with them. That was the consensus, at any rate, people wringing their hands, their voices shaky still. Bill’s wife — processed hair, low-cut blouse — held out, her teeth clamped as if she’d bitten into something gone bad. “I don’t want him near me,” she insisted. “I don’t want—” and she’d broken off, fighting back a sob.

It turned out they couldn’t fit the man lengthwise across any of the seats, so Bill and the paramedic, who’d hauled him up the steps by his shoulders and feet, laid him out in the aisle, the back of his head bisected by the scuffed white line on the floor, the one you were advised to stay behind. Most people were already on the bus at that point, their faces blanched and reduced, eyes staring straight ahead, but the final few, Sten and Carolee amongst them, had to step over him to make their way down the aisle. Sten took his wife by the arm and tried not to look down at the glazed eyes and the teeth glinting in the open mouth, and if he missed his step and one foot wound up coming down on the man’s sprawled wrist, so much the worse. The guy was feeling no pain, and besides, he’d asked for it, hadn’t he?

Last to board was the driver, who removed his dark glasses to squint down the length of the bus, counting heads, and then, bending awkwardly to dig under the seat — he had a belly, Sten saw now, the belly of a man who sat for a living — he produced a neon-orange rain slicker, unfurling it with a flourish to make sure everybody was watching. Was he going to drape it over the man’s face? Was that it then, was it all over, forget the charade? But no, he folded the slicker into a makeshift pillow, plumped it two or three times, then bent again, all the way down now, and slipped it under the man’s head. No one said a word. Flies buzzed. Sten’s throat was so dry he couldn’t swallow, and yet he didn’t reach for Carolee’s water bottle because he didn’t want to call attention to himself — or any more attention, that is.

For a moment — too long, because this was an emergency, wasn’t it? — the driver simply stood there looking down on his handiwork, shaking his head slowly. Did he know the man? Had they been in collusion? It was hard to judge from his expression, but when he sank into his seat and pulled the door closed, he shot a withering look down the aisle and repeated his mantra—“You sit”—though everybody was already seated. Incredibly, he was glaring, actually glaring at them, no mistaking the severity of that look, the reprobation, the censure, as if they’d all gone so far beyond the bounds of propriety it wasn’t worth mentioning, as if they were in fact children and had behaved badly, as if they hadn’t been attacked and he hadn’t been in on it or at least complicit. Sten was sure he was. Lure the tourists out here in the middle of nowhere, call the gang, split the proceeds, what could be simpler? The man — the driver, the hypocrite — held that look a beat, then he fished out his sunglasses, and as if performing a delicate operation, fitted them carefully over his ears, adding superfluously, “We go now.”

When they reached the outskirts of the city and the harbor came into view, the bus swung off the main road and hurtled down a series of surface streets, one careening turn after another, until suddenly, without warning, right in the middle of a nondescript block of tiendas, market stalls and apartments, the driver hit the brakes hard, and they lurched to a stop in front of a low concrete-block building that might have been a warehouse or machine shop but for the Red Cross emblem over the door. Caught off guard, Sten was violently pitched forward, and if he hadn’t been holding on to Carolee — protecting her — he might have slammed face-first into the seatback in front of him. As it was, he just managed to tuck his shoulder and soften the blow as the chassis recoiled and a rain of purses, cameras and water bottles spilled from the overhead racks and skittered across the floor, seeking equilibrium. The paramedic wasn’t as fortunate. All this time he’d been on the edge of his seat, leaning over the gunman and bracing him against the bumps and dips and wild looping turns, but he lost his grip at the final moment and the body rucked forward, sliding partially down the stairwell and shedding the rain slicker in the process.

People looked to Sten, as if it was his responsibility, but he was having none of it. It was the paramedic’s problem now — he’d taken it upon himself, hadn’t he? He was the professional. Let him deal with it. For one stunned instant, people just stared, and then, cursing, the paramedic — short, square-shouldered, too heavy in the butt and with a face as round as the moon — sprang up out of his seat to wedge himself in the stairwell and prop up the man’s head, but he was clearly having trouble, the body having come to rest on one shoulder, canting the neck at a spastic angle. “Give me a hand here, will you, somebody?” he gasped, but nobody moved, or at least not expeditiously enough — they were old, all of them, old people — so he slid his hands in under the man’s arms, cradling his head as best he could, and began easing him down the steps.

At this point, Bill — the other Bill, the one with hair — pushed himself up to help, ducking into the stairwell in a shuffling stoop to catch hold of the patient’s feet at the door, but at the last second they slipped from his grasp, flopping down on the hot pavement like fish on a stringer. The sound of it was nothing, barely audible, the small dull thump of dissociated flesh striking an unyielding surface, but it reverberated through the bus like a thunderclap. Sten could feel Carolee tense beside him. Nobody breathed.

The paramedic — he’d seen worse — just seemed to shrug it off, dragging his patient up over the curb even as Bill, fumbling forward, managed to take hold of the abraded heels and lift them from the pavement. “Set him down,” they heard the paramedic say. “No, not in the dirt — right here, right on the walk.” Awkwardly, in a stoop that had him bent over double, Bill swung the man’s legs into alignment as the paramedic eased him down — waist, shoulders, one hand to protect the head, easy does it, and there was their collective burden, harmless enough now, laid out on his back like a sunbather on a glittering gum-spotted beach. Satisfied, the paramedic straightened up and threw a quick glance at the bus before hurrying up the walk and disappearing into the building, leaving Bill there to stand watch.

That was the scene: the man called Bill, skinny, sunburned, his shoulders slumped and his waxen hair flattened to his head as if it had been dripped in place one hot strand at a time, standing there over the man who wasn’t breathing and whose throat was discolored under the point of his up-thrust chin — dark there, too dark, as if he’d decided to grow a goatee after all. Bill shifted in place, put his hands on his hips, dropped them. There was a smell of the sea, tepid and redolent of small deaths. Someone was revving a motorbike in the alley next to the clinic. A car rolled slowly up the street, its windshield molten under the sun.

And then the paramedic (his name was Oscar, Sten would later learn, Oscar Ruiz, of Oakland, California, sixty-two years old and in his first month of retirement) emerged from the building, an attendant in pale green scrubs hustling along beside him, pushing a gurney. Everyone leaned forward to watch as the attendant bent to the motionless form, checking for vital signs — futilely, as far as Sten could see, though one woman kept insisting there was no reason to give up hope because the electroshock machine, the defibrillator, was a real miracle and it had saved her husband, twice. “The guy’s gone, can’t you see that?” the man behind her put in, and a whole sotto voce debate started up. Sten ignored it. He sat there with the rest of them, sweating, thirsty, wanting only to be back on the ship. The police would be coming now, he knew that. At the very least he’d be required to give a statement, they all would. But what then? Would they charge him? Would he and Carolee have to stay here in this reeking excuse for a city for days on end — weeks, even — while all the others climbed back aboard the ship and cruised away into the sunset?

His eyes shot to the driver. The man had swung his legs out into the aisle to get comfortable. He had a cellphone to his ear now, speaking his whipcrack Spanish into the receiver, and who was he contacting if not the authorities? Sten looked to Carolee and she breathed his name, twice, in a kind of moan: “Oh, Sten, Sten.” She fidgeted in the seat, and whether consciously or not, she pulled her hand away from his and rubbed her palm, the moisture there, on her shorts. She spoke in a whisper: “You think they’ll let us go back now?”

He shrugged. He wasn’t exactly in a talkative mood. All he felt was tired. Sleep, that was what he wanted, another realm, a way out of this. He watched dispassionately as the paramedic helped the attendant load the limp body onto the gurney and wheel it up the walk and into the yawning double doors of the clinic. Everybody saw it, the retreating feet, the wheels of the gurney, the doors snapping shut like a set of jaws, and as if at a signal, people began stirring. Here came Bill, the good Samaritan, to lead it off, mounting the steps of the bus and sliding into the front seat beside his wife. A man Sten couldn’t place stood and started sorting through the daypack he’d stowed overhead. There was a rustle of bags and papers, as if a stiff internal wind had started up to whip through the bus. Bottles of water appeared. Power bars. Cellphones. The unpleasantness was over now and it was as if nothing had happened: they were tourists deprived of a nature walk and thinking only to get back to the boat, to their cabins and staterooms, to privacy, air-conditioning, cocktails, dinner at the captain’s table. They’d had an experience, all right, something to text home about, but it was over now.

“Driver?” It was Bill, the first Bill, the bald-headed one, who seemed to have become their spokesman. He was seated two rows up from Sten and Carolee, his shirt soaked through with sweat and a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. His wife was there beside him, her brittle hair set aflame by a shaft of sun slanting through the window.

The driver was in no hurry to respond. He pursed his mouth. Tapped the cellphone at his ear. “Driver?” Bill repeated, and finally the man swiveled round in his seat and lifted his eyebrows as if to say What now?

“We just wanted to know what the holdup is.”

The driver said something into the phone, then pulled it away from his ear and held it up like an exhibit in a courtroom. “I am talking,” he said, “to la Fuerza Pública, the police. You will need to make a testimony for the facts of this”—he couldn’t find the word—“today. A la reserva. The crime. You must make a testimony of the crime.”

“Yes, all right, fine,” Bill said, waving a hand in dismissal. “But can’t we do that back aboard ship? We’ve been through a lot here, I’m talking trauma, real trauma, and it’s not doing anybody any good to sit here sweltering for no reason. .”

“Take us back,” a voice boomed from the rear of the bus.

“Yeah, let’s get this thing moving,” somebody else put in.

As if awaiting her cue, Sheila cried out suddenly, her voice stretched to the breaking point: “We need a restroom. We haven’t — I mean, I haven’t—” She was two seats up, on the left, sitting beside the woman whose husband had been revived twice (but not, apparently, a third time). Sheila’s makeup had gone gummy in the heat and from this angle, Sten’s angle, it looked as if the skin were peeling away from her face. “We’re hot. Thirsty. I don’t know about anybody else, but I for one could use a cold shower.”

The driver slowly shook his head. “This is not possible,” he said, before returning the cell to his ear. “Not at the moment.”

“What is this,” Sten heard himself say, “a debating society?” He’d had enough. Who was this supercilious jerk to hold them here? He had no authority over them, he was nothing, less than nothing. “Hell,” he said, pulling himself up from the seat, “we can walk from here. Or get a taxi. There’s got to be taxis.”

Everyone was in motion now, people clambering to their feet, pulling down bags, looping packs over their shoulders, white hair, trembling hands, a shuffle of sneakered and sandaled feet. In the same moment the driver came up out of his seat, as if to block their way, and what Sten was thinking was Just let him try. It might have been a standoff, might have gotten out of hand — people were scared, angry, impatient — but then the doors to the clinic swung open and the paramedic, one of their own, was hurrying up the walk to them, bringing the news.

Sten watched the man duck into the shadow of the bus, then reappear in the stairwell, his face neutral. He was saying something in Spanish to the driver, something detailed, but nobody could fathom what it was. Sten felt his stomach clench. But then the first Bill, who was standing in the aisle now with the others, called out, “So, Oscar, what’s the deal, is the guy going to be okay or what? And when are we going to get out of here?”

The paramedic turned and blinked up at the faces ranged above him as if he couldn’t quite place them.

“Well?” Bill demanded.

“They’re going to need a statement.”

Sheila let out a groan. “What sort of statement, what do they want? We didn’t do anything.”

The paramedic — Oscar — held up a hand for silence. “But they say they can do that on the ship.” On the ship: those were the incantatory words, the words they’d all been waiting to hear, the spell broken, relief at hand. Everyone exhaled simultaneously. “For the witnesses, that is, and I guess that includes all of us.” His eyes settled on Sten. “Except you — they’re saying you’re going to have to wait here till the police arrive.”

He didn’t know whether to grin or grimace. His face felt hot. His back ached, low down, where he must have tweaked something out there in the mud lot, one of the tight lateral muscles that didn’t get enough use, one of his killing muscles.

“But don’t worry,” Oscar went on, “I’ll stay with you, in case you need an interpreter.”

“Yes, okay,” Sten said, barely conscious of what he was assenting to, and then he was moving forward — dehydrated, lightheaded, unsteady on his feet — and Carolee, the bag looped over her chest and clutching her hat as if it were a lifeline thrown over the side of a sinking ship, was following along behind.

There was a waiting room in the clinic and it wasn’t much different from what you’d find in the States: fluorescent lights, gleaming linoleum, a smell of bleach and floor wax to drive down the faint lingering odor of body fluids. Nurses glided through one door and out another, a trio of hard-faced women sat staring into computer screens at the front desk and a forlorn cadre of the sick, hopeless and unlucky slouched on folding chairs in an array of bloody bandages and mewling infants. There was air-conditioning, and that was a blessing. And a restroom. The first thing he did, as soon as Oscar directed them to seats in the far corner of the room, was lock himself in the men’s, turn the tap on full and let the cold water (tepid, actually) run over his face. He wet his hands and worked them through his hair, which he wore long, in the fashion he’d adopted as soon as he’d got out of the service and gone off to college, no hard-liner and no fool either, because what woman in San Francisco in that day and age would look twice at a man in a crewcut? Baby killer, that’s what they’d shouted at him when he boarded the bus at the airport, but the accusation only puzzled him. He didn’t want to hear about babies, alive or dead, or Vietnamese self-determination or the jungle that was a kind of death in itself. He only wanted to get laid. Just that.

When he came back to the waiting room, Carolee and Oscar were making small talk, just as if they were lounging over drinks at the Martini Bar on the ship. He heard her say, “And your youngest son, what’s he do?” and then she glanced up with a smile and patted the seat beside her.

“He’s in computers,” Oscar said. “Actually paying his own rent, which is kind of a miracle these days, if you know what I mean—”

“Oh, yeah, we know,” she said, and he thought she was going to say something about Adam, but she didn’t, and that was all right, that was a blessing, because for the first time in years, it seemed, Adam had gone right out of Sten’s head — he wasn’t worrying about where he was, what he was thinking, what kind of trouble he was going to get into next, because they were in enough trouble themselves. “Don’t we, Sten?” she said, and gave him an odd look, as if she wasn’t attached to the moment, and he supposed she wasn’t and no sense in pretending otherwise. This was hard. As hard as anything that had ever happened to them, and she’d had to stand there and watch it unfold.

“Maybe you want to go freshen up?” he said, sinking into the seat. “They’ve got a real bathroom here, with hot and cold running water. Paper towels. The works. Knock yourself out.”

“Yes,” she said, rising from the chair with her black cloth bag still looped across her chest, “I think I will,” and then she was sidestepping a child in a wheelchair and making her way across the room.

They both watched her go. There was a crackle of Spanish over the address system. A baby, exasperated beyond endurance, threw back its head and began to howl. He turned to the man beside him, to Oscar, and shook his hand. “I want to thank you for doing this,” he said.

A shrug. “Least I can do.”

“What about your wife, she okay with it?” The wife, short, plain, with an expressionless face, a straw hat and an oversized turquoise necklace one of the goatees had jerked from her throat and dropped casually on the pile in the middle of the blanket, had gone back to the ship with the rest of them.

Another shrug, more elaborate this time. A smile. “Once a paramedic, always a paramedic.”

“The guy’s dead, isn’t he?”

“Yeah, he’s dead. You could see that when you let go of him. But we have to try — and I tell you, I’ve seen people come back to life so many times I wouldn’t want to be taking odds. You do what you can and the rest is out of our hands, you know what I mean?” The loudspeaker crackled again, more Spanish. Oscar looked up, concentrating, then shook his head. “No, it’s nothing, it’s not for us.”

“But again, thanks for this. I owe you. When we get back to the ship, the drinks are on me.”

“No apologies. What you did out there was amazing, it really was. Word is”—he lowered his voice—“there’s been problems lately, the kind of thing the Costa Rican government, not to mention the cruise line, doesn’t want to get out. It’s not just robbery. Sometimes — again, I’ve heard rumors — they want more than that.” He shot a glance round the room, then leaned in confidentially. “They can get brutal. With the women especially. In one case I know of they raped them all, young, old, they don’t care, right in front of the men. Daughters even. Kids.”

“Jesus.”

“So what I’m saying is you don’t have to thank me, I should be thanking you.”

There was movement at the door. Sten glanced up, expecting the police, but it was only another patient, a boy of ten or so, his head wrapped in gauze and the right side of his face looking as if somebody had taken a cheese grater to it. The woman with him — his mother, his aunt, maybe a big sister — looked like a saleslady from one of the high-end stores, pink dress, heels, eye shadow, but the face she wore was the face of despair.

Distracted, he watched the woman guide the boy across the floor to the admittance desk and begin making her case to the secretary there, who barely glanced up from her computer screen. The boy was unsteady on his legs, leaning into the woman for support, and Sten could see where her dress had begun to go dark under the arm and across her breast with what might have been perspiration but wasn’t. He couldn’t understand what she was saying, but her voice rose up suddenly to jackhammer the secretary, who kept pointing to the seats in the waiting room with an increasingly emphatic jab. The woman in pink was having none of it. Her voice raged on until there was no other sound in the room. The lights flickered. The air conditioner blew. And then, as if it had all been decided beforehand, a nurse emerged to escort her and the boy into the inner sanctum and the little sounds came creeping back, people coughing, sneezing, conversing in low voices against the pain that had summoned them there. Sten could feel his blood racing. “High drama, huh?” he said.

Oscar, who’d been watching the boy too, turned back to him. “Bicycle,” he said. “Or motorbike. Bet anything.” His eyes flicked to the doorway behind the desk and back again. “And a concussion on top of it.”

Sten shifted in the chair, which had begun to dig into his backside. He wanted to stand and stretch, but instead he just sat there, bearing it. People crowded the room, faces everywhere. Somewhere a machine was whirring. Babies cried. Somebody’s phone rang. “So what now?” he said, shifting again. “I mean, what are the police going to do — I’m not in trouble, am I?”

“You? They ought to give you a medal.”

“Right, sure. But do you know anything about the laws down here?”

The thin stripe of mustache quivered and it took him a moment to realize Oscar was working up a grin, as if all this was funny, as if now, sitting here exiled in this little chamber of horrors, the real fun was about to begin. “They ought to give you a medal,” he repeated.

An hour crept by. Nothing happened. More people came dragging through the double doors and they brought more squalling babies with them, more bandages, more broken bones and abrasions, more grief, but the police never showed. Oscar, depleted of small talk, leaned back in his chair and shut his eyes. Carolee kept saying, “This is ridiculous,” and Sten kept agreeing with her. Beyond the windows, the sun stood high still, though it was past five now, cocktail hour, and he couldn’t help thinking about what they were missing aboard ship, the outward-spooling loop of activities that lassoed every moment, as if to sit on deck and look out to sea would crush you with boredom. He didn’t need activities. He needed rest. He needed a drink to wash the bad taste out of his mouth. The Martini Bar was all ice, the bartop itself, frozen and planed smooth, and the air-conditioning was like the breath of a deep cave in the hills back home in Mendocino.

At some point, he must have closed his eyes too. He’d been thinking about the first time he and Carolee had come south of the border, a summer vacation when they were in their twenties, backpacking through Mexico, Belize and Guatemala. Carolee had stepped on a sea urchin in one of the tidal pools and the spine had broken off in her heel, which became instantly infected, and so they’d had to go to a clinic like this one, or was it a hospital? That was in Mexico, in the Yucatán. They’d waited then too, waited eternally, until finally a doctor no older than they took them into a back room strewn with medical debris, gave her a local, extracted the spine and shot her up with penicillin. Sten had had to carry her out of there. And then, two days later, he was the one who collapsed, sick with a gastrointestinal bug because he’d ordered oysters—ostiones—and didn’t know the term the waiter threw back at him: ceviche. He’d expected them fried or maybe baked in an Oysters Rockefeller kind of thing, but here they were, served up cold on a plate of ice, and Carolee sitting across the table grinning at him. “They look good,” she said, folding a chicken taco into her mouth. And he, whether out of some macho impulse or maybe just the stupidity of youth, sucked them out of their shells, all twelve of them, and then ordered a dozen more.

It got worse. They were snorkeling someplace — Belize, he thought it was, or maybe Isla Mujeres — and stayed out too long because it was magical, beyond compare, the reef there alive with every kind of fish you could imagine, and it wasn’t just sunburn they suffered all the way down the blistered crab-red lengths of their bodies, from the backs of their necks to the calluses at their heels, but sun poisoning. Within hours their legs swelled up with fluid, as if they’d somehow shot over to Africa and contracted elephantiasis. They could barely walk, and she with her sore foot to begin with. Clutching at each other for support, sweltering, sick, staggering like drunks, they made their way up the street to their hotel, local rum — fifteen cents a shot at the lobby bar — their only consolation. And then, a few days later, they began to peel, and as he crouched there over the unmade bed, absently stripping the dead skin from his legs while Carolee snored beside him, he noticed the ants coming in beneath the door in a wavering dark line that snaked under the bed to climb the wall and exit through a crack below the windowpane. They seemed to be carrying something, these ants, like the leaf-cutters you saw in nature films. But they weren’t carrying leaves — they were hoisting pale shriveled translucent flakes of skin, human skin.

“Give me the Nordic climes,” he’d told Carolee when she sputtered awake, and told her again and again, through all these years, making a routine of it, a joke, but a joke that wasn’t funny, not in the least. “Oslo,” he’d say, “Helsinki, Malmö, Reykjavik, what’s wrong with Reykjavik?”

And then he wasn’t thinking anymore, he was dreaming. He was alone, hiking up a trail deep in the redwood forest, everything cool and dim in the shadow of the trees, his legs working and his heart beating strong and steady so that he could see it there out front of him, at arm’s length, beating, beating. He kept going, up and up, till he wasn’t walking anymore but gliding above the ground, sailing on stiffened wings, and that seemed perfectly natural, as if all his life this was what he’d been meant to do. He might have been a bird. He was a bird. But the strangest thing was there were no other birds out there with him, no creatures of any kind, no people even, nothing but the trees and the sky and the earth unscrolling beneath him in silence absolute, dream silence, a silence so profound it could be broken only by the mechanical squawk of a loudspeaker—Doctor Hernández, venga al teléfono, por favor—that sheared off his wings and dropped him down here in the hard wooden seat of the Red Cross Clinic, awaiting judgment.

“You were asleep,” Carolee was saying. “I didn’t want to wake you.”

It took him a minute, so much harder at his age to come back to the world, and then he sat up and gazed blearily round the room, his eyes shifting from Oscar’s face to Carolee’s before dropping to the watch on his wrist: 6:15. Was that right? He blinked at Carolee. Blinked at Oscar. “Jesus,” he rasped, “they going to make us wait here all day?”

Oscar — he’d been asleep too — rose from his chair, stretching. He was wearing shorts, plaid shorts, and below the hem of them his kneecaps were discolored, smudged still from where he’d knelt over the dead man in the mud. “I’ll go check at the desk.”

“No, don’t bother.” He was on his feet now too, a sudden jolt of anger searing through him as if he’d touched two ends of a hot wire together. “Come on, Carolee,” he said, reaching a hand down for her, “we’re out of here.”

“But Sten, they haven’t come yet. The police. They’ll think — I don’t know what they’ll think.”

He just shook his head, took her hand and pulled her up. “Sorry, friend,” he said, nodding at Oscar, and then he was guiding Carolee back across the waiting room, out the double doors and into the scorching stink of the evening, charcoal and dogshit and the fumes of the cars, fish, dead fish, and if he brushed by the pair of policemen in their pleated blue uniforms with the Fuerza Pública patches on their sleeves and their faces of stone, he really didn’t give a good goddamn whether they’d come to pin a medal on him or haul him off to Golgotha. He was out in the street, that was where he was, striding through traffic, calling — no, yelling, bellowing—“Taxi! Taxi!”

3

AND THAT WAS ALL kinds of fun too, trying to communicate to the cabbie just where he wanted to go, and how did you say “boat”? Barco, wasn’t that it? He all but shoved Carolee into the backseat, then slammed in himself, twisting his neck toward the cabbie and in the process catching a glimpse of himself in the rearview. His eyes, furious still — burning, consumed — were sunk in a nest of concentric lines like pits on a topographic map, the eyes of a seventy-year-old retiree pushed to the limit. There were red blotches on his cheeks. His nose looked as if it had been skinned. And his hair, not yet gone the absolute dead marmoreal white of the rest of the duffers on the ship, but getting there, hung limp over his ears. But his eyebrows — his eyebrows were exclusively and undeniably white, and how had he never noticed that? White and pinched together with the glare of the sun that picked out the two vertical trenches at the bridge of his nose and ran them all the way up into the riot of horizontal gouges that desecrated his forehead. He was old. He looked old. Looked like somebody he didn’t even recognize. “Barco,” he announced to the driver. And then, to clarify, added the definite article: “El barco.”

The driver was dressed in shorts and sandals and the ubiquitous flowered shirt open at the collar and he wore some sort of medallion dangling at his throat. He didn’t have an iPod, but he sported the same wispy goatee as the bus driver and the two thieves in the lot — in fact, and this came to him in a flash of ascending neural fireworks, the guy could have been the bus driver’s twin brother, and if that wasn’t an irritating thought he couldn’t imagine what was. All right. They were in the cab, that was all that mattered — but the cab wasn’t moving. The driver — the cabbie — was just staring at him.

“El barco,” he repeated. “I want to go to el barco.”

“The boat,” Carolee put in. “The cruise ship in the harbor. The Centennial?”

“Oh, the boat, sure, no problem,” the cabbie said, grinning, then he put the car in gear and started up the street. A joker. Another joker. He’d probably learned his English at Cal State.

“Ask him how much,” Carolee said. No matter the exchange rate or the deals she finagled in the shops, she was sure they were getting ripped off, especially by cabbies. Before they’d left, she’d gone online to browse the travel sites and make detailed lists of dos and don’ts: photocopy your ID, leave your jewelry aboard ship, avoid fanny packs (“one-stop shopping” in the thieves’ jargon), dress down, talk softly so as not to broadcast your nationality, stay sober, carry a disposable camera ashore, and always get the price up front before you get into a cab.

“How much?” he said, or croaked, actually, deep from the well of his ruined voice.

“Oh, it’s not much,” the driver said, accelerating, “nothing really. Only a mile or so. I’ll give you a break, don’t worry.” And he mentioned a figure — in colones—that seemed excessive, even as Sten tried to do the math.

“Demasiado,” Carolee said automatically.

The driver, and he was a cowboy too, swinging into the next block with a screech of the tires, glanced over his shoulder and said, “Maybe you want to go back to the clinic? Maybe you want to wait for some other cab?” The car slowed, made a feint for the curb as if he were going to pull over and let them out.

“Demasiado,” Carolee repeated.

Raising his voice to be sure he was understood, not simply by the driver but by his wife too, Sten said, “Just drive.”

The first thing he did when he got back aboard and passed through the gauntlet of rhapsodically smiling greeters, puffers, porters, towel boys and all the rest of the lackeys who were paid to make you feel like Caesar returning from the Gallic wars every time you set foot on deck, was step into the shower. He should have deferred to Carolee, should have let her have first shot at it — and he would have under normal circumstances, but he was too wrought up even to think at that juncture. He’d thrown some money at the cabbie while she stood there on the pavement fooling with her hat and bag, then he took her by the arm and marched her up the gangplank and into the elevator and on down the hall to their cabin, impatient with everything, with her, with the lackeys, with the card key that didn’t seem to want to release the lock — and was this the right cabin? He drew back to glare at the number over the door: 7007. It was. And the card did work. Finally. After he’d tried it backwards, forwards and upside down and angrily swatted Carolee’s hand away when she’d tried to help — and why, amidst all this luxury and pampering, couldn’t they manage to code a fucking key so you could get into your own fucking cabin you were paying through the teeth for? That was what he was thinking, cursing under his breath, but then the light flashed green, the door pushed open and before Carolee could pull it shut he was already in the bathroom, stripping off his putrid shirt and sweaty shorts to thrust himself under the showerhead and twist both handles up full.

He must have stayed under that shower for twenty minutes or more, he who was always so conscious of wastage at home, who would bang impatiently on the bathroom door when Adam was a teenager and showering six times a day, who recycled and bought local and composted every scrap left on every plate in the house. But not now, not today. Now he needed to wash himself clean of the dirt of this godforsaken shithole he should never have come to in the first place. He lifted his face to the spray. Soaped up. Let the shower massage him, soothe him, coax him down off the ledge he’d been perched on ever since the bus had pulled into that mud lot. He was showering, all right? Was that a crime? When finally he did emerge, Carolee brushed by him without a word and locked the door behind her. An instant later she was in the shower too, the muted hiss of the water intimate and complicit.

He went straight to the phone to order a drink — a martini, two martinis, his and hers — and something to put on his stomach, something that didn’t involve tortillas, rice, beans or fish. Pasta, he was thinking. Pasta and a salad. And steak for her, filet mignon, rare. He dialed room service, ordered the drinks and food and went out in his robe to sit on the veranda and brood over the views of the city and the bright rippling dance of the sea beneath him, wide awake suddenly when all he’d wanted all day was a nap. He poured himself a glass of water and took a long drink, his throat parched, still parched, always and eternally, and when he set the glass back down he saw that his hand was trembling.

Carolee was still in the bathroom when the knock came at the door. Barefoot, cinching the robe around his midsection and smoothing back his hair — still wet because nothing ever dried in this humidity — he came in off the veranda and crossed the cabin to the door, expecting the room-service waiter. It wasn’t the room-service waiter, but a group of four, fronted by the fun director in her solid black heels. Beside her stood one of the ship’s officers — a man of forty, forty-five, wearing a deep tan to contrast with his whites — and behind him were two members of the Fuerza Pública, as rigid as wooden soldiers in their sharply pressed uniforms. “Sorry to disturb you, Mr. Stensen,” the fun director said, “but I wonder if I might introduce you to Senior Second Officer Potamiamos and Officers Salas and Araya of the local police force.”

“We just wanted a word with you,” the ship’s officer interjected, his English smooth and bland and with the faintest trace of an accent Sten couldn’t place, though he assumed it must have been Greek. “About today’s. . incident, I suppose you’d call it. We’ve interviewed some of the others and we’d like to have your version of events, if you don’t mind.”

Sten took a step back and held open the door. He wanted to bark at them, wanted to tell them to go fuck themselves and slam the door in their faces, but all he did was shrug. “No, I don’t mind,” he said.

The ship’s officer produced a smile, but he made no move to enter the cabin. “Fine,” he said, rocking back on his heels. “Very good. Excellent. But wouldn’t you be more comfortable in one of our conference rooms? Where we can sit at a table, have a bit more room? Get coffee. Would you like a coffee?”

“I’m not going to need a lawyer, am I?”

The fun director — her nametag read Kristi Breerling in gold letters against a glossy black background — looked as if she were about to burst into laughter over the absurdity of the proposition, but the cops never broke protocol and Potamiamos’ smile froze in place. “We just want your version of events, that’s all,” he said. “We’re cooperating fully with the local authorities, who, I’m told, are even now tracking down the other two criminals involved in this unfortunate assault on our passengers — on you. And your wife.” A pause. He glanced across the cabin to the bathroom door. “Is she present, by the way? We’d like to have her—”

“Version of events,” Sten put in, cutting him off. He didn’t like where this was going, didn’t like it at all. He was an American citizen. He’d been attacked. On foreign soil. And the Senior Second Officer was either going to throw him to the wolves or cover the whole thing up. Or both.

“Yes, that’s right,” Potamiamos said. “For the record. But wouldn’t you — wouldn’t we all — be more comfortable in a larger space?”

“I’m comfortable here.”

That was when the door to the bathroom clicked open and the cops snapped to attention. Carolee, barefoot and wrapped in one of the ship’s plush deep-pile towels, stood there gaping at them a moment before she recovered herself and ducked back into the bathroom, the door pulling shut behind her with an abrupt expulsion of air.

“Well, in that case, can we come in?” Potamiamos asked, and then he paused, as if thinking better of it. “Or should we wait a few minutes to give you and your wife a chance to dress? Five or ten minutes, let’s say? Would that be sufficient? We don’t want to be intrusive, but, you understand, these officers do need to make their report and the ship will have to stay in port until such time as this business is concluded.” The smile, which had gone up a notch when Carolee appeared, had vanished. The passenger was always right, that was the credo of the ship, of the whole cruise industry, but sometimes a passenger stepped over the line and the Senior Second Officer had to come down from the bridge or the casino or wherever he spent his time and address the situation in a way the usual ass-kissing shipboard smile simply wouldn’t accommodate. The cops just stared. The fun director looked embarrassed.

It came to him suddenly that he was in control here, that they were afraid of him, afraid of the stink he could raise—Tourists Mugged on Cruise—afraid of lawsuits, bad press, all the retirees of the world canceling their reservations en masse and nobody collecting the precious Yankee dollars that kept the whole enterprise afloat, the true trickle-down economy, from the old folks’ pensions and 401(k)s to the captain and his crew and the restaurateurs and shop owners and even the pickpockets and whores. “All right,” he said, “give us ten minutes.” He leveled a look on Potamiamos. “How about the Martini Bar? That work for you?”

That was the moment the room-service waiter chose to appear in the doorway, pushing a cart with the covered dishes and drinks set atop it. He was a Middle Easterner of some sort, judging from his nameplate, part of the international cast that ran the ship, from the Greek officers to the Eastern European housekeepers, one-point-three crewmembers to every two passengers, no amenity left unturned. When he saw the cops and Senior Second Officer there, his face fell, but Sten waved him in. “Put it there on the table, will you?” And then, turning back to his visitors, who couldn’t have all fit in the cabin at once even if they’d wanted to, he said, “Make that half an hour, will you?”

He wound up tasting nothing — not that it wasn’t good, all the food was terrific, first class all the way, but he was still sick in his stomach from the ice cubes or the dirty glasses or whatever it was, and worked up too over what was coming. He chased the pasta around his plate, the same lobster tortellini in cream sauce he’d practically inhaled the day before, and sat there sipping meditatively at his martini while Carolee dispatched her steak. She was a good eater, always had been since the day he’d met her, no nonsense, no lingering, address your food and put it away, and how many times had he glanced up from his plate in one restaurant or another to see that she was already finished before he’d had a chance to shake out his napkin? It was a sensual thing, he supposed, and that was all right because he was included in her range of appetites too, and who would have thought it would last this long? A lifetime. A whole lifetime.

“They’re going to want to question me too, aren’t they?” she said, tucking away the last pink morsel on the tines of an inverted fork, a faint sheen of grease on her lips. She’d changed into a pair of jeans and a silk blouse — blue, with a scoop neck that showed off the topaz necklace she wouldn’t dare wear ashore. Matching earrings. A touch of makeup. She’d combed out her hair, which was darker when it was wet, but blond still and mostly natural, though the woman at the beauty parlor back at home touched it up every month or so.

“Yeah,” he said.

“What do I tell them?”

The question irritated him. “What do you mean what do you tell them? Tell them what happened. Three shitheads attacked us and we defended ourselves.”

She was chewing, the napkin suspended in one hand. A shadow flickered across the veranda, and it might have been a gull. Or no: more likely a vulture. Vultures were everywhere here, settling like collapsed umbrellas on top of every roof and telephone pole in town. “You think I’m dressed okay?”

He shrugged. He was in a pair of shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, exactly what he would have worn if he were going to the bar for a cocktail and a little recreation, as he’d done every night since the boat left San Diego. “You’re fine,” he said. “You’re not on trial. And I’m not either. Everything’s fine, believe me.”

Her voice went soft. “I’m glad you were there.”

“Me too.” He stared down at the floor, his feelings too complicated to put into words. They’d been lucky, he knew that. And she must have known it too. “But I’m not going to be around forever,” he said, lifting his eyes to hers. “You’ve got to learn to watch out for yourself.”

“No more nature walks, is that what you’re saying?”

“It’s no joke, because it’s not just money they’re after, you know that, don’t you? Anything can happen. Bad stuff, real bad stuff.”

She didn’t answer. She looked beyond him, out the open door to the bay and the sepia blur of the city that was like some fungus sprung up around a band of pale eroded beach and hacked green palm. He pushed his plate away. What he wanted was a cigarette, and he’d actually reached for his shirt pocket before he caught himself — he hadn’t smoked in ten years now. It was times like this he missed it most. Smoking had given him something to do with his hands, the whole ritual of it, from sliding the cigarette from the pack to tamping it on the nearest hard surface, to cupping the match and drawing in the first sweet sustaining puff. The thing was, his hands had become too busy, manipulating up to two packs a day, his fingertips stained yellow with nicotine and his lungs as black as the bricks of the fireplace back at home. That was all behind him now. Now he was healthy. Now he rode a stationary bike and got out in the woods two or three days a week, keeping his hand in with part-time work for the lumber company, looking out for trespassers, squatters, marijuana growers — patrolling, if that was what you wanted to call it. The way he saw it, he was getting paid to go hiking, simple as that, best deal in the world.

Carolee set down her fork and laid her napkin across the plate, where it instantly began to color with the juices gathered there — blood, that is, and why should that bother him? A basket of bread stood beside her plate, untouched. A carafe of water. The grated Parmesan the waiter had left for him, yellowing in its stainless-steel bowl. Flies were at it now, Costa Rican flies, wafted in through the open door to the veranda. She reached for her martini glass, which bore a smear of lipstick on the rim, a transparency of red wax and the faintly striated impress of her lips, and it touched him somehow, this trace of her there, DNA, a code to outlive us all. There was a dead man in the morgue, but she was alive and he was alive too, alive together, come what may. He watched her lift the glass and finish what was left of her drink. “I needed that,” she said, her voice flat and deliberate. She looked tired. “It’s been a day, hasn’t it?”

“It’s not over yet.” He wanted to add, “Some vacation, huh?” but restrained himself. Rising from the chair, he felt something click in his right hip, a tendon there, one more thing he’d managed to aggravate. He threw back his head to drain his own glass, best painkiller in the world, then patted down his pockets to be sure he had everything he was going to need, or potentially need: cellphone, wallet, passport, card key. At some point in the progression, he realized he was still holding the glass and that the glass was empty, useless, one more irritation, and without giving it even the flicker of a thought, he swiveled round and flung it high out over their private veranda and into the bright glittering sky beyond. Carolee just looked at him as if he’d gone mad till he snatched her glass up off the table and tossed it out the window too, and then he turned his back on her, rotating his wrist to consult his watch. And yes, he was angry, furious all of a sudden, as if he were back out there grabbing hold of that jerk with the gun, the dead man, the man he’d killed with his bare hands, and why couldn’t the fool have picked some other group, another bus, another day?

He was squinting at his watch — half an hour, was half an hour up? — but he couldn’t seem to make out the position of the hands, his eyes going on him now too, along with everything else. Jesus. Jesus Fucking Christ. If they offered him a drink he was going to refuse it, no matter how badly he wanted it — and he wasn’t going to volunteer anything, just the facts. He smoothed down his shirt, took hold of the doorknob and shot a look over his shoulder to where Carolee still sat lingering at the table as if they had all night, as if they could have another round and order up dessert and coffee like normal people on vacation. “Come on,” he said, flinging open the door on the corridor, “let’s get this over with.”

4

IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN his imagination, but as they walked down the corridor to the elevator he couldn’t help feeling people were making way for him, eyes meeting his and dropping to the floor, conversations suddenly hushed, men unconsciously hugging their wives closer as if he were some sort of feral beast, and what was that all about? Had the captain made an announcement? If not, he was going to have to at some point, the cruise delayed here in port for another day, at least a day, and of course everybody had cellphones, BlackBerries, iPads, all rumor consolidated into news and all news instantaneous. They knew. The whole ship knew.

Potamiamos and the two cops were waiting for them in the scoop-backed lounge chairs in a corner of the Martini Bar, the fun director off somewhere else now, her duties in the present circumstance having extended no further than applying her knuckles to the door of cabin 7007 and making the introductions. All three were sitting stiff-backed in the chairs, glasses of iced tea sweating on the table before them. They rose when he and Carolee crossed the room, even as a pair of waiters materialized from the shadows to pull out chairs for them. “And what will you have, ma’am?” one of them asked, bending over Carolee. Sten tried to warn her off with his eyes, but she was looking to the waiter. She emitted a little laugh, self-conscious all at once and maybe a little tipsy too, and said, “When in Rome. .” And then, catching herself: “Just water, thanks.”

“Sir?”

“Water. Out of a bottle. No ice.”

The waiters withdrew and a moment of silence descended on the table before the Senior Second Officer turned to the cop on his left, who for some reason was now wearing a pair of sunglasses, though they were indoors and the lighting was in no way intrusive. “Lieutenant Salas, perhaps you’d like to begin?”

“Yes, certainly,” Salas said, his voice a creeping baritone, heavily accented. He shifted his gaze to Sten, or seemed to — you couldn’t really tell what he was looking at, which, of course, would have been the point of the dark glasses. “Why don’t you, sir, begin by giving us an account of events, what did you see, what did you do, et cetera.”

Sten told him. He had nothing to hide. He’d done what anybody would have done, anybody who wasn’t a natural-born victim, anyway. There was no need to go into detail about the trip itself, the state of the roads or the recklessness of the driver — not yet — so he began with the bus pulling into the lot and how everybody had descended into the sun, guidebooks, binoculars and birding lists in tow, and how he’d gone across the lot to the fat woman’s palapa.

“And why was that?” Salas had produced a pack of Marlboros, shaking one out for himself and offering the pack to Sten, as if this were the interrogation scene in a police procedural, and that struck him as funny, so he laughed. “This is amusing?” Salas said. “The recollection? There is something amusing about the death of a man in my jurisdiction?”

“No,” Sten said, waving away the pack as Carolee sat there tight-lipped beside him and Salas struck a match and touched it to the tip of his own cigarette. “No, not at all. I was thinking of something else, that’s all.”

The moment hung there. Potamiamos, handsome as a cutout from the cruise line brochure, tried to look stern — or worried, maybe he was worried. The thought caught Sten up and he felt the smallest tick of apprehension.

“You went to the palapa. And why was that?” the lieutenant repeated on a long exhalation of smoke.

“I was thirsty. It was a long ride. I dry out easily.” He smiled, but it was a smile that gave no ground, lips only. Lips and teeth. “I’m old. Or didn’t you notice?”

Salas nodded. “And then you went behind the stall, did you not? Into the jungle there?”

“Right. I had to piss. You know, pressure on the bladder?”

There was a moment of silence. Salas, his face unreadable, turned to the cop beside him. “¿Qué dijo?”

The second cop flicked his eyes at Carolee, then leaned forward, cupping one hand to his mouth. “Para orinar,” he said.

“Ah, I see,” Salas said. “It all comes clear now — you were urinating.”

The Senior Second Officer rediscovered his smile and now they were all smiling, smiles all around, urinating, the most human thing in the world, and what had they thought — that he was an accomplice? That he’d been hiding? That he’d worked all his life and paid his taxes and retired to come down here to this tropical paradise and mug tourists? “Yeah,” he said, smiling still, but there was an edge to his voice, “I pissed on a tree back there. Any law against that?”

Apparently not. No one said a word, but the smiles slowly died all the way around. He wanted to go on, wanted to get things out in the open, wanted to throw it in their faces: All right then, charge me, you sons of bitches, go ahead, but I’ll make you regret it, all of you! The words were on his lips when Carolee raised her water glass, ice cubes clicking, and took a quick birdlike sip. They seemed to have arrived at some sort of impasse. The room expanded, then shrank down again till it fit just exactly right. Finally, the lieutenant ducked his head to remove the dark glasses, revealing eyes that were darker still, eyes that were almost black, heavy-lidded and set too close together. “We are not here to accuse you,” he said. “We are here to assist. And to clear up any difficult feelings or dissatisfactions you or your wife may have. We are gravely sorry for what has transpired and we extend our sincerest apologies.”

Someone at the bar behind them let out a laugh and the lines hardened in Salas’ face, lines that traced his jaw muscles and pulled tight round his mouth. He wasn’t much older than his own son, Sten realized, thirty maybe, thirty tops, but his job — poking at the underbelly of things, interviewing gringos, sweeping the dirt under the carpet — bore down on him, you could see that at a glance. Sten had an impulse to reach out to him, to thank him, but he couldn’t relax, not yet, not till the boat weighed anchor and they saw the last of this place.

“The man you”—a pause—“encountered, was a criminal, well known to us. Let me tell you, his death is no loss to the world.” His lips parted and here came the smile again. “In fact, from a certain perspective, you could almost say that you’ve done us a favor.”

The other cop nodded in assent. “One less problem. Or headache, is that how you say it? One less headache?”

“Yes,” Salas agreed, “that’s exactly it. Now,” swinging round to face Carolee, “we will require a statement from you, señora — and my colleague here, Sergeant Araya, will assist you in that.” He squared his shoulders, as if coming to attention, though he was still seated and his iced tea stood untouched before him and the cigarette burned unnoticed in his hand. “And you, sir, Mr. Stensen, I would ask you please to accompany me and the Senior Second Officer”—a nod for Potamiamos—“to another portion of this ship, a cabin we have secured for this purpose, in order for you to make identification of a man we have reason to believe was an accomplice in this business.” He made a motion toward the door, sweeping an arm in invitation.

Sten remained seated. He looked to Carolee, who’d sat there wordlessly to this point. “It’s okay,” he said, “no worries. I’ll be right back.”

Potamiamos rose. He and the lieutenant exchanged a glance. The party seemed to be breaking up.

“All right,” Sten said, “I’ll take a look at him. But I’m not leaving this ship.”

“Oh, no, no.” Potamiamos very nearly clucked his tongue. “No, there’s no question of that.”

They walked down the corridor to the elevator, Potamiamos to his left, Salas to his right, and everybody, every reveler aboard, stared at him as if he were being led off to a detention cell somewhere, and he supposed there must have been a secure room down there in the depths of the ship to accommodate the occasional passenger or crewmember who drank too much or went floridly berserk. They had a sick bay, didn’t they? And a pharmacy. And just about anything else you could imagine. They were a small city afloat and all contingencies had to be anticipated and prepared for.

He was a head taller than either of his — what would you call them? — escorts, but still he couldn’t help feeling a sense of unease, no matter how many times he told himself he was in control, because he wasn’t, he wasn’t at all, and he half expected some sort of trick, a roomful of cops, handcuffs, the cloth bag jerked over his head and a quick hustle down the gangplank and into some festering hole like the one in Midnight Express. The tendon clicked in his knee again, once, twice, and then they were standing before the elevator and the doors were opening on a scrum of passengers in tennis togs, terrycloth robes, shorts and T-shirts, dinner jackets and cocktail dresses. The Senior Second Officer greeted them with a blooming smile and a cheery “Good evening, folks, enjoying yourselves?” while Salas held the door and shepherded Sten in amongst them. Most of the others were going up and Sten and his escorts made way for them as the elevator stopped at various decks, even as a fresh crew of tennis players, high rollers and shuffleboarders crowded in, and then they were going down, stopping at each floor, until they were belowdecks, in the crew’s quarters, where passengers were not allowed.

Sten had been arrested only once in his life, for a DUI after a wedding for which he’d stood as best man. John Jarvis’ wedding. J.J. They’d been in the Corps together, had seen some hairy and not-so-hairy shit, buddies over there and back here, and when they got home — the very week — J.J. had married his high school heartthrob in some wedding palace down in Carmel. Drinking preceded the ceremony, floated through it on fumes and quick nips from one flask or another, rose in a delirious clamor while the cake was cut and distributed and went on unabated long after the newlyweds had ducked away to do what they were going to do as man and wife in their room at the big hotel in the middle of town. He’d felt a bit hazy as he’d climbed into his VW Bug and started back up the coast, alone and missing Carolee, who was away in London for her semester abroad, but he had the radio—“Radar Love,” cranked high, he remembered that, and “Magic Carpet Ride” too — and he had the window rolled down though he was freezing, making it all the way up 101 and Nineteenth Avenue through the city and Golden Gate Park and back onto the freeway and across the bridge, feeling clearer and soberer by the mile.

That was when the flashing lights appeared in his rearview, a cop rushing up on him so fast he thought at first the problem must have been up ahead of him somewhere, the cop after somebody else in that streaming river of taillights that made the night so cozy and inviting. He was wrong. The cruiser rode up on his tail, but he told himself that didn’t mean anything, not necessarily, because maybe the cop was going to get off at the exit coming up on the right, an emergency there somewhere, an accident, a dog loose on the highway, a motorcyclist down, debris in the passing lane. . but then the cruiser swung out alongside him and it began to dawn on him that he was in trouble.

What he remembered of that night, aside from the wheezing and muttering of his fellow drunks and the reek of vomit that was so pervasive it seemed to arise from the walls themselves, was the helplessness he’d felt behind bars, locked up, incarcerated, in the can, no place to turn or even sit, except the floor — not in control, definitely not in control. He’d told the arresting officer he’d been to a wedding, the wedding of one of his service buddies—“You know,” he said, “the Marine Corps? Like I served my country. Like I saw some bad shit and I know I had a couple drinks, just this once, because it was a wedding, okay?”—but it didn’t do any good. He had a flashlight, the cop, and it was right there like a supernova bursting in Sten’s face, in his eyes, hot and probing. Cars hissed by. It was the strangest thing, but for a moment, just that moment, he didn’t seem to know where he was or where the light had come from or why it was punishing him like this. “You know you’re in no condition to drive, don’t you?” the cop said.

Sten just blinked at him. And then, very slowly, he began to nod his head in agreement.

But now he was in a corridor, deep in the underbelly of the ship, one man on his left, the other on his right. They walked along amiably enough, down to the end of the corridor, and then they swung into another corridor and another after that till he had no idea where he was or how to find his way back. He followed their lead, moving along blindly till Salas put a hand on his arm to guide him and they entered a room that smelled of food — of hamburgers, a mountain of hamburgers, fries, onion rings, beer — and he saw the light there, bright as the cop’s flashlight, and the man it illuminated till it seemed as if he were the only three-dimensional thing in the room. Everything else was flattened as if on a screen, tables, chairs, the counter where they must have served up meals to the crew. But the man — a Tico in an oversized T-shirt sitting at one of the Formica tables, his hands cuffed behind his back and his eyes cast down — seemed to leap out at him. He wore a goatee. He was skinny, puny, barely there. He might once have held a knife in his hand.

“Is this the man that attacked you?” Salas indicated the prisoner with a jerk of his head, his voice in official mode now, ripe with accusation and contempt. “Or one of the men?”

Sten saw now that there was another policeman in the room, a guard with a holstered gun leaning against the back wall in the shadow — or relative shadow — of the lamp. He saw too that the lamp, one of those shop lights with a clamp at the base of it, was fixed to the table directly across from the prisoner and arranged so that there was no way for him to escape the glare of it, and if he went outside of himself again to think of the movies, this scene he’d witnessed a hundred times on screens big and small, it was because the movies were his only reference point for what was happening to him. It was as if he’d entered some dream, some fantasyland where there was no sun, no sky, no mud lot or bus or ship, only this. Finally — and he was on his guard now, on his guard all over again — he noticed the square of white cloth smoothed out at the far end of the table. It was a linen napkin, one of the service items on pristine display at each of the ship’s restaurants and lounges, one of countless thousands that must have been washed, dried, folded and set out afresh each day. But this one was different. This one held — presented — three exhibits: a.357 Magnum revolver and two knives, switchblades with mother-of-pearl handles.

“Well?” Salas said. “What do you say?”

Sten looked to Potamiamos but Potamiamos averted his eyes, as uneasy with the proceedings as he was himself. He could feel Salas pushing his will on him, eager to get this over with, wrap it up, take the prisoner back where he belonged, to the cell in some crumbling compound with the rusting steel bars and wet concrete floor — and what else? Roaches, there’d have to be roaches. Scorpions, maybe. Who knew? Biting flies. Leeches. Toss him in the pit and leave him there. Sten wanted out too. He thought of Carolee and the other cop and how she was bearing up, and then he was focusing on the prisoner as if seeing him for the first time. The man’s left eye was partially closed and a raised red welt traced the cheekbone beneath it. His scalp was close-shaved, each follicle of hair bristling like a clump of rice set down in a smooth paddy of skull-tight flesh. There was a problem with his ear, the lobe torn, dried blood coiled in the hollow there, grainy and dark, and his posture was all wrong, his body language. He looked ashamed of himself, looked guilty. Was this the man? Sten couldn’t say. It could be. Certainly it could be.

“Well?”

Sten shrugged.

Salas exchanged a glance with the Senior Second Officer. “We will need a positive identification, because unfortunately”—he gestured to the weapons on the white cloth—“whatever person extracted these knives from the mud compromised any fingerprints we might have found there. Do these look like the knives the perpetrators used — in your recollection?”

Another shrug. “I don’t know,” he said. “But that’s the gun.”

“Yes, we have corroborated that.”

It was then that the prisoner entered the equation, suddenly jerking to life as if he’d been hot-wired. His head snapped forward and he rucked something up — a rapid ratcheting of his throat, the pursing of his lips — and there it was on the front of Sten’s shirt, dangling in a long glistening thread. “Voy a matarle,” he snarled, even as Salas stepped forward and cuffed the side of his face. “¡Silencio!” Salas roared, and then he turned to Sten and said, “Do you see? Do you see what happens when you try to treat these animals like human beings?” He drew himself up. The prisoner shrank back into the nest of his bones. The light flickered and the bloated hull of the ship seemed to rise and dip on a nonexistent tide.

“What did he say?” Sten wanted to know.

“Nothing,” Salas said. He seemed abrupt, almost offended by the question. In the same moment, he removed a handkerchief from his breast pocket, and very carefully, tenderly even, he wiped the spittle from the front of Sten’s shirt. “Now, I ask you again: is this the man?”

If his heart was pounding, it wasn’t out of fear or excitement or remorse, but out of rage, only that. He’d never seen this man before in his life — in that instant, he was sure of it. Another Tico. Another shaved head. Another goatee. He looked first to Potamiamos, then to Salas, and finally, to the prisoner. “Yeah,” he said, and he was already shifting his hips to work the long muscles of his legs and climb on up out of this hole, “that’s him. That’s the one.”