"How come?"
"Saw you watching maybe."
"Me," said Stubbs, "I'm in the Little Hamaca parking lot. In the shade. Tailed him very carefully."
The donut man topped up the detective's coffee, poured himself a cup. "Comes back to what it was he went there for."
"Square one," said Stubbs. He took a bite of donut, washed it down with coffee. "Money? Guy's got much better places for stashing money. A body? Whose? And why not let it rot right where it is?"
"You got a weird job, man. Rotting bodies alla time."
"So what would he be digging up?" said Stubbs.
"You're sure he's not a nut?"
"I'm sure he's acting nervous."
"Lotta guys act nervous," said the donut man. "Too much caffeine. Too much sugar."
"This guy's nervous like the FBI is on the way."
"Is it?" asked the donut man. He smiled with his eyebrows. The FBI went through a lot of donuts.
"'Cause why?" said Stubbs. "'Cause some Russian's wandering around with a wagon and a shovel?"
"He's Russian?" echoed Dave.
"You didn't hear that part," said Stubbs.
"You got a weird job," said the donut man. Then he added, "Little Hamaca, you said it was?"
"Yeah."
"Russian. Be weird it had something to do with those old missiles and shit."
"Missiles?"
"From the sixties. Khrushchev. Cuba. Remember?... Kennedy dead a million years and Castro still hanging on. Amazing, huh? Hey, the FBI comes down, you let me know. I'll bake some extra glazed."
Bert and Sam heated up some soup for lunch, and then they had a nap. But when they woke up Bert was restless.
Once again it came down to routine—the routine that for years had mollified his loneliness and had sufficed, no less well than most people's routines of work or play, as a proxy of actual purpose.
In the late afternoons, as the sun was slouching toward the Gulf, he walked his dog on Smathers Beach. He saw people there—the same locals season after season, arrayed against a background of tourists, who, in their sunburned and slightly desperate variety, also stayed essentially the same. He made chit-chat when the opportunity presented; when it did not, he murmured secretly to his chihuahua, and looked, as at a spouse's face, at the soothing variations in a scene viewed every day: the sun at one corner or another of a certain building as the months advanced; the tide line encroaching or receding according to whether the breeze was north or south.
Freshly awake now in the dead suburban silence of Key Haven, Bert yearned for that routine, and ascribed his yearning to his dog.
"Ah," he said, to the small blind creature that was curled up on the tile floor, "I bet you miss the beach. I know ya do. Tell ya what. I'll shave, I'll dress. We'll get in the car."
He invited Sam, of course. But Sam didn't want to go. He'd already launched into a project of his own.
He was fiddling with his yellow Walkman; transistors and transducers and tiny clips were laid out on a tile table. "Think I'll stay right here."
Bert was not without misgivings about leaving his housemate alone. "Come on," he urged. "A change a scene."
Sam shook his head so that light flashed through his Einstein hair. "My memory," he said, "everything's a change of scene. I'm fine here, Bert. Go have your walk."
Bert could think of nothing more to say that would not be wounding to Sam's dignity. So he found his car keys and he left.
Tarzan Abramowitz, keeping an eye on the intersection where the bridge crossed over the canal, saw him go, saw that there was only one person in the old beige car.
After a while, Sam Katz took a glass of seltzer and his reassembled Walkman and a Benny Goodman tape outside to the patio. The sun was getting low, it threw packets of glare that skipped like stones from crest to crest of the wavelets in the green canal; a rising tide brought the smell of iodine.
Sam watched the gray house across the way and worked to keep his thoughts right there, to concentrate so that he might be of help to Aaron. Aaron and the woman who worked side by side on the ground with him, and whom he seemed to like so much. He tried to keep his thoughts on the two of them, on their safety, but his thoughts kept trying, like eggs on a countertop, to roll away and smash.
He sipped his seltzer, he listened to music, and then he saw his scoop-faced neighbor come through the sliding door that led out from his kitchen.
The Russian, stiff-legged and pale, slowly walked beyond the shade of his awnings and continued down his swath of lawn toward the seawall. Sam watched him coming nearer and could not react; his attention had locked down like a cramping muscle, had grown entirely rigid. He simply stared as his neighbor approached, now squeezing forth a morbid smile that seemed to cause him pain.