The pants were now shorts. Ford put them on and began to run in place, trying to get a sweat going in the cool mountain night. "You have just sold your pantalones for a price twenty times what they are worth. You are not the crazy one."
He left the old man sitting in baggy underwear among the candles and ran out of the park at an easy pace. When the police noticed him, he gave a bland wave and peered at his watch: a runner intent on his training. At every intersection, he checked his watch. He ran right past the Presidential Palace and the elite guard, confirming that, even in Central America, joggers had joined beggars and stray dogs as innocuous creatures of the streets. From a balcony on the third floor of the palace, a woman with waist-length black hair watched him, but turned away when Ford caught her eye. He kept running and did not look back; jogged straight to the American Embassy. Everything he owned was there, in crates, ready to be shipped to the United States. That would be his home, now that he had resigned.
The next morning, Ford paid the old man at Mercado Central, then returned to the embassy to find a box delivered by courier. The box contained twenty thick blocks of U.S. $100 bills and the pants he had left in the palace the night before. There was also a short note. He was not surprised to find the pants; the money and the note were unexpected. The note was signed P.B. for Pilar Santana Fuentes Balserio, the young wife of Don Jorge Balserio, and it said that she would not be joining him, as planned.
Ford rode in the cargo hold of a DC-3 to Miami that afternoon, sitting on the deck, his back braced against crates that held his books and specimens and microscopes; the things he still cared about. By morning he would be in Virgina for a week of debriefing. After that his life as a bureaucrat was done. He could forget about Masagua and try to forget about Pilar. He'd get a place on the water and do the work he'd always wanted to do. A simple life, that's what he wanted. Just a place to do his work and no more women. Not for a while. Not after the president's wife . . .
He brought a Chevrolet pickup truck in D.C.; an old one with a pear-shaped cab, short bed, and new blue-black paint. He left with $1,500 cash in his money belt, receipts for three large separate bank deposits, and everything else he owned in back of the pickup beneath a tarp. He headed for the coast, then drove south, eating when he wanted and stopping at tide pools and estuaries to collect marine specimens. He slept outside when the weather was good; he ran each morning at sunrise. On the Outer Banks of North Carolina and in south Georgia, he found places that would be good to live, but he kept on going, crossing to the Florida Panhandle, stopping at several small towns to inquire about real estate, but ending up in Southwest Florida, as he somehow had known he would. He had grown up on this coast, yet there was no nostalgia involved in his decision—or so he told himself—for he was no less alone upon his return than he was when he had left eighteen years earlier. He wanted to buy a place, but learned of a house built on pilings right in the water— an old fish house inherited by some federal bureaucracy—that might be available on long-term lease to a marine biologist with the proper credentials or the right connections. The fish house was joined to Sanibel Island by a tide-bleached boardwalk, and there was a marina next door that sold fuel, block ice, and beer in quart bottles.
It was not a difficult decision to make.
He took possession of the stilt house in late August, sleeping on the floor while he concentrated on building the lab and office he wanted, stopping only to cook over the propane stove or talk with the marina s fishing guides or to go out collecting. Sometimes, late at night, or out on his new flats boat alone, he would think of Pilar . . . the memory electrodes keyed by an unexpected sound or fragrance, and into his mind would come gauzy images, as if etched by acid: the clean lines of her legs and hips . . . the way her head tilted in thought . . . the way she softened when surprised by his arrival, as if her aloofness was a guard to all but him. These stray remembrances were not unpleasant but he didn't allow them to linger, for they were meaningless now and uninvited. This, Ford realized finally, was the way it must feel to have once been in love.
All marinas are more than a sum total of docks and property, bait wells, ships' stores, and receipts. They are communities; ephemeral colonies with personalities as varied as the individuals who form them. Gradually Ford was accepted into the marina community—Dinkin's Bay Marina, it was called—and, as months passed, he became more than just a member of that small society, he became one of its pillars. If a fisherman had a question about species identification, Ford and his library were available. If a guide had to limp back in after dark with an empty fish box and a broken water pump, there was beer and consoling conversation to be had at Ford's stilt house. In a relatively short time, Ford became the trusted dispenser of first aid, wisdom, reluctant medical diagnoses, and unwilling advice on everything from love to law to broken timing chains—all by saying little but listening much. His rapid climb to position in the community surprised no one more than Ford. He had always been a private person, a man who attracted people and valued his friends yet went his own way. But just as the marina s society had adjusted to him, Ford adjusted to his new role, his new life, doing his work each day and sometimes far into the night, accepting callers with the offer of cold beer and letting down his guard, slowly, slowly, for it was not easy after ten years of being necessarily suspicious and living a life of professional deceit.
And just when it seemed he had finally adapted, Rafe Hollins called.
ONE
SANIBEL ISLAND, FLORIDA
MAY
Ford saw the vultures from a half mile off; noticed them wheeling over the island like leaves in a summer thermal, dozens of black shapes spiraling, and he thought, What in the hell has Rafe gotten himself into?
He stood at the wheel of his skiff, traveling toward an island he hadn't tried to find since high school to meet a friend he'd seen only twice in the last eighteen years. He tapped the throttle and the skiff seemed to gather buoyancy as it gained speed, rising slightly as the bottom came up, a blur of sea grass and bronze sand at forty miles an hour. Ford leaned with the wheel and the skiff banked. There was the tidal rift—a green ribbon of water that crossed the shallows—and he dropped the skiff in, following the deeper water as if on a mountain road. After a quarter mile the rift thinned into a delta of old propeller scars. He touched the power trim and the outboard lifted with the whine of landing gear as he heeled the skiff, running for a time on its starboard chine. Ahead, fish and small stingrays panicked as if trapped beneath a slick of raw Plexiglas. Behind, nubs of turtle grass boiled in a marl cloud.
Then the shoaclass="underline" a sandbank that encircled the island like an atoll. Ford held tight as the skiff jumped the bank then settled itself on the other side. He looked immediately for the opening in the trees, found it, and turned hard into the shadows of the island, backing quickly on the throttle as the bottom fell away in shafts of amber light and mangrove trees interlocked to form a cavern over the tidal creek that was hardly wider than the eighteen-foot Permit flats skiff that now rolled on its own wake beneath him.
Ford nudged the nose of the skiff onto a shell beach and killed the engine, then sat for a moment listening to the wash of waves, pleased that he had remembered the tricky cuts even though he hadn't made the run for all those years, thinking Maybe the intimacies of water and women are the only two things a man never really forgets. . . .