Aaron's mouth was very dry. His hairline itched. He said, "So where does that leave Suki?"
Bert frowned. He petted his chihuahua and watched short and brittle hairs flutter off its back and float in swaths of sunshine. "Aaron," he said, "remember that jerkoff, what's his name, he said something bad about God and the Moslems were gonna kill 'im and then they backed off and made him famous 'stead of dead? Well, if these people are anything like my people, it isn't gonna work like that. They follow through. Have to. Credibility. Ya know. If she's been sentenced, well, it isn't good."
"She's not a threat to them," said Aaron.
"They probably would disagree," said Bert.
"The cops, her own newspaper—no one'll listen to her," Aaron said. "She couldn't hurt them if she tried."
"And who's gonna tell the Russians that?" asked Bert. "Who's gonna convince them?"
Aaron's voice was getting ready to answer but then he began to see the problem.
"The person who tells them," Bert went on, "he knows the same stuff she does. Same knowledge, same sentence. Capeesh?"
There was a silence. People did their laps around the pool. A curse came from the tennis court.
Bert leaned lower across the metal table, his watermelon- colored shirt stretched along his skinny chest. He put his hand on Aaron's wrist, said, "Wit' due respect to your father here, I'm gonna talk like you were my own son. My world, Aaron, any world I guess, we had to learn that nobody could save nobody else. Hard thing, but true. Eh?"
He held Aaron's eyes till Aaron reluctantly nodded. Then he went on.
"Somebody got sentenced—Mafia, cancer, what the hell's the difference how it happens?—we had to learn to say goo'bye. Say it in our heart, wit' no words coming out and nothing showing on our face. Y'unnerstand? Shitty sometimes, but there it is. Ya see?"
He stared at Aaron till the younger man looked off, his smarting eyes stung further by the glare from the pool. "I see."
Driving away, Aaron said, "Pop, you understand what's going on?"
Sam Katz didn't answer right away. There was a certain bleak equity in what was happening to his brain. As he remembered less, he cared less, there was a balance to it. But there were moments when he had to care, and then it took a monumental effort to keep the understanding in proportion. "I think I do," he said at last. "But Aaron, is it me, or is this all a little crazy?"
"It isn't you, Pop," Aaron said.
They cruised up Smathers Beach. Vending trucks were already selling french fries, sno-cones. It was a carefree place. You could take a parachute ride hitched to a motor- boat and float weightlessly above the twinkling ocean.
After a moment Aaron said, "Bert's telling me to walk away. Whadda you think, Pop?"
Sam was slipping but he'd seen a lot of life and raised a son and he still knew things that Aaron didn't know. He said, "He's not telling you to walk away. He's saying it's okay if you walk away. He's giving you permission, freeing you."
Aaron drove and rubbed his cheeks. "And whadda you say?"
Sam looked out the window. The ocean was on his side of the car. "Isn't home the other way?"
"Yeah, it is," said Aaron. They were driving past the airport, the fenced-in stand of mangroves at the east end of the runway.
Sam said, "Wait a second. My hearing aid, it's acting funny. Funny noises, like."
He pulled out the device, squinted at it, turned it over and over in his hand. Aaron said, "If you'd stop experimenting on it—"
"What?" He put the hearing aid back in. "Better now," he said. "About this girl, this Suki, she have anybody else could do a better job of helping her?"
Aaron didn't answer.
Sam looked out the window. The island was curving, the ocean scouring through toward Cow Key Channel. "We going where she is?"
Aaron didn't move his eyes. "I guess that's where I'm heading."
His father watched the water and the wheeling sky. Then he reached across the car and put a hand on Aaron's shoulder. "I'm proud of you," he said. "The whole thing's crazy but I'm proud of you."
Suki was washing her hair in a bucket.
Aaron had walked in from the road and was standing in the shadows of the foliage. He saw her before she noticed him, and the whole scene reminded him of something from another century. A driftwood fire burning. The dented pail lifted up on rocks. Thin suds being wrung out of her hair in sunshine.
He entered the clearing. She looked up and saw him. They both had tired eyes, there was an intimacy in the heavy lids, the shadowed sockets. The bruise on Suki's face had mellowed to a pale chartreuse; you had to look twice to see the marks on her neck. He said good morning.