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and worked them through his hair, which he wore long, in the fashion he’d adopted as soon as he’d got out of the service and gone off to college, no hard-liner and no fool either, because what woman in San Francisco in that day and age would look twice at a man in a crewcut? Baby killer, that’s what they’d shouted at him when he boarded the bus at the airport, but the accusation only puzzled him. He didn’t want to hear about babies,alive or dead, or Vietnamese self-determination or the jungle that was a kind of death in itself. He only wanted to get laid. Just that.
    When he came back to the waiting room, Carolee and Oscar were making small talk, just as if they were lounging over drinks at the Martini Bar on the ship. He heard her say, “And your youngest son, what’s he do?” and then she glanced up with a smile and patted the seat beside her.
    “He’s in computers,” Oscar said. “Actually paying his own rent, which is kind of a miracle these days, if you know what I mean—”
    “Oh, yeah, we know,” she said, and he thought she was going to say something about Adam, but she didn’t, and that was all right, that was a blessing, because for the first time in years, it seemed, Adam had gone right out of Sten’s head—he wasn’t worrying about where he was, what he was thinking, what kind of trouble he was going to get into next, because they were in enough trouble themselves. “Don’t we, Sten?” she said, and gave him an odd look, as if she wasn’t attached to the moment, and he supposed she wasn’t and no sense in pretending otherwise. This was hard. As hard as anything that had ever happened to them, and she’d had to stand there and watch it unfold.
    “Maybe you want to go freshen up?” he said, sinking into the seat. “They’ve got a real bathroom here, with hot and cold running water. Paper towels. The works. Knock yourself out.”
    “Yes,” she said, rising from the chair with her black cloth bag still looped across her chest, “I think I will,” and then she was sidestepping a child in a wheelchair and making her way across the room.
    They both watched her go. There was a crackle of Spanish over the address system. A baby, exasperated beyond endurance, threw back its head and began to howl. He turned to the man beside him, to Oscar, and shook his hand. “I want to thank you for doing this,” he said.
    A shrug. “Least I can do.”
    “What about your wife, she okay with it?” The wife, short, plain, with an expressionless face, a straw hat and an oversized turquoise necklace one of the goatees had jerked from her throat and dropped casually on the pile in the middle of the blanket, had gone back to the ship with the rest of them.
    Another shrug, more elaborate this time. A smile. “Once a paramedic, always a paramedic.”
    “The guy’s dead, isn’t he?”
    “Yeah, he’s dead. You could see that when you let go of him. But we have to try—and I tell you, I’ve seen people come back to life so many times I wouldn’t want to be taking odds. You do what you can and the rest is out of our hands, you know what I mean?” The loudspeaker crackled again, more Spanish. Oscar looked up, concentrating, then shook his head. “No, it’s nothing, it’s not for us.”
    “But again, thanks for this. I owe you. When we get back to the ship, the drinks are on me.”
    “No apologies. What you did out there was amazing, it really was. Word is”—he lowered his voice—“there’s been problems lately, the kind of thing the Costa Rican government, not to mention the cruise line, doesn’t want to get out. It’s not just robbery. Sometimes—again, I’ve heard rumors—they want more than that.” He shot a glance round the room, then leaned in confidentially. “They can get brutal. With the women especially. In one case I know of they raped them all, young, old, they don’t care, right in front of the men. Daughters even. Kids.”
    “Jesus.”
    “So what I’m saying is you