In the morning Thales searches for his brothers over the groomed sand of the hotel’s crowded beach. They hadn’t come back to the suite the night before but for them this is hardly unusual behavior and even behind his sunglasses the day is too bright, though the sunbathers are like shadows and the container ship on the horizon is a patch of darkness on a blaze of clouds. He almost trips on a girl lying prone on a towel, awkwardly untying her bikini top, and once he’d have found some reason to linger, he thinks, but now he looks down at her and just sees the curvature of skin stretched over layers of fat and muscle and the striations and eczema on the backs of her thighs.
He spots Helio, not twenty yards away, heading for the waves, longboard under his arm. Whatever his brothers’ faults, their family loyalty is unwavering and they’re sure to take his part. He labors over the sand and seizes Helio’s shoulder and then recoils, because it’s a stranger who turns to him, his face a mask of blank inquiry. “Sorry!” blurts Thales, so taken aback he speaks in Portuguese, and as the stranger turns back to the surf he tells himself that out here under the sun behind his polarized glasses it’s only natural to mistake one body for another.
He stands there sweating through his shirt and scanning the beach though he now feels certain that his brothers aren’t there and in lieu of whatever sense of abandonment or desolation he just wants to know what’s happening. If pure thought led anywhere but in circles he’d have solved the problem long since so it’s therefore time to act, but what is there to do, and who is there to ask, and then he remembers the ragged woman who’d accosted him on the hotel patio, how she’d said she found him by staking out the clinic, and the force of her conviction that both she and he were somehow victims, so he heads up the beach toward the hotel’s garage.
* * *
It’s already evening and he’s been dozing in the town car for hours, dimly aware of the rush of traffic, the gathering darkness, the few lights visible over the clinic’s wall across the street. He programmed the car to alert him if another Mitsui Talos comes within fifty meters but even so he startles when it announces, “Target in proximity.” Through the darkened window he sees the same filthy town car that had followed him to the St. Mark, and he holds his breath as it crawls by the clinic like it’s looking for something and then as it speeds away he tells his car to follow.