Double

He worked for a big agency in an unnamed city. He came into the office in the morning, to the accompaniment of some voice-over narration, and had a consultation with his boss on his current assignment: something to do with industrial espionage. The exchange of dialogue bulged with electronics jargon and buzzwords that I didn’t understand. Then he went to his desk, which happened to have a computer terminal on it. But the first thing he did was make a couple of telephone calls, some of each conversation we got to listen in on while the rest was obscured by more voice-over narration. Then he plugged in his computer, or whatever it is you do with the things, and the camera moved in for some nifty close-ups of the screen — orange letters on a black background — and there was a lot more stuff printed there that made no sense to me. Then he got up and left the office—

— and I got up and left the theater. Popeye said it best: I can stands so much, I can’t stands no more.

I went downstairs and through the lobby and outside. It was another hot day, cloudless, windless. The ocean was glass-smooth except where powerboats made clean white slashes across its surface; farther out you could see the shapes of some barren, rocky islets and a naval vessel, probably a destroyer, drifting past. The beach was already crowded, mostly with kids and young adults. I went along a path under some palm trees, to the seawall that adjoined the terrace bar, and ogled some bikini-clad women for a while. Which was a hell of a lot better than ogling a black-and-orange computer screen; even Kerry would have agreed with that.

All that calm blue water looked inviting, too, and I thought that pretty soon I would go upstairs and haul out my trunks with the hibiscus flowers on them and have myself a swim. Back before I took off weight, I might have been leery about exposing my flab to the public eye; but I didn’t look too bad in swim trunks these days. “A fifty-four-year-old Italian god,” Kerry had said to me a while back, kidding the way she does. But what the hell, there were a lot of guys my age who looked worse than I did with their clothes on.

I wandered off through the gardens that paralleled the beach. The bungalows were down that way, half a dozen of them built to resemble thatched-roof English cottages, with little enclosed gardens at the rear and easy beach access. Fronting them were several interconnecting paths that wound among palms, banana trees, stands of bamboo, jacaranda and oleander shrubs, and other kinds of tropical flora that I didn’t recognize; the paths also passed over a couple of little wooden bridges spanning a tiny creek. There were sections of formal gardens, too, that you might not think would blend in with the tropical stuff but did. Plus wooden benches where you could sit and read or contemplate your sins or whatever. Plus a little glade with some picnic tables in it.

There were three or four acres of grounds, and it was cool and kind of soothing among all that greenery. At least it was when one of the Navy patrol planes wasn’t zooming by overhead. I saw some people at one of the bungalows, and a young couple holding hands, but nobody else for a ten-minute stretch. Then I came around a turning in the path, not far from the last and most secluded of the bungalows, Number 6, and there was a kid about seven years old sitting by himself on another of the benches.

He was a big kid, blond and fair-skinned, wearing a pair of Levi’s and a blue cotton pullover. He hadn’t had a haircut in a while; the shaggy look of him made me think of a bear cub. A lost bear cub, at that: he looked kind of lonely and forlorn sitting there, staring at nothing much and picking the bark off a twig.

I went his way. He jumped a little when he saw me, as if he might be afraid of strangers. Or afraid that I was somebody he knew. But then he saw me smiling, and he relaxed and stayed where he was.

“Hi, guy,” I said.

“Hi. Who are you?”

Because kids like nicknames, I said, “You can call me Wolf, if you want.”

“Wolf. That’s a funny name.”

“I think so too. But a lady I know likes to call me that, and you can’t argue with a lady.”

“No,” he said solemnly. “I guess not.”

“What’s your name?”

“Timmy.”

“Are you staying at the hotel, Timmy?”

He looked down at the twig in his hand. Then he pointed toward Bungalow 6 and said, “Over there. But pretty soon I’m going to see my dad.”

“Your dad’s not here with you, huh?”

“No.”

“Just your mom?”

Timmy was silent for a few seconds. “I don’t like my mother,” he said finally.

“No? Why not?”

“She makes me afraid. I don’t want to talk about her.”

“Okay.”

He brightened. “My dad lives in Mexico. Have you ever been there?”

“A few times. How about you?”

“One time. But I don’t remember it.”

“How come?”

“I was a baby, I guess.”

“Where in Mexico does your dad live?”

“In a town on the water with monkeys in it. I’m going to—”

“Timmy! Timmy!”