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some in my family. I’ve lived with them, slept with them, eaten with them. You’re not one of them; you’re a good person. That’s why we all love you.”
    “You love me because I contribute to the community coffers.”
    Henry inhaled the tarry smoke of the tobacco and suppressed a cough, drawing one foot up to his knee like a wading bird.
    “Bloody hell, that’s strong. Do you know what the Japanese say, Obradin?”
    “Who cares what the Japanese say?”
    “They say that being loved is a curse.”
    “Maybe they do, Henry. But how do they know that?” Obradin spat on his tiled floor. “You don’t just become a writer, Henry. I know that—you’re destined to it. I can’t do it, my Helga can’t do it, and we thank God for it. It must be a real burden.”
    “There’s something in that,” Henry replied and pointed to two silhouettes on the other side of the papered-up windowpane. “I see customers.”
    Obradin glanced up. “Tourists,” he declared disparagingly.
    “Are you sure?”
    “Who looks at my fish pictures? Who does a thing like that?”
    “Only tourists.”
    “There you are then. They’ve come because of you. You just watch.”
    Obradin went and waited behind the fish counter, setting down his cigarette on the bloody chopping board. The bell over the door rang. Two busty women with red cheeks came into the shop. They stood at the counter, contemplating the dead fish without interest. No, it wasn’t the fish they were after. The cigarette smoke bothered them. The older one looked from the fish to Obradin, closed her eyelids, and set them vibrating, as Anglo-Saxon women often do—no one knows why.
    “Do you speak English?”
    Obradin shook his head. Both women were in white trainers and carrying Gore-Tex backpacks. Their hair was closely cropped, their lips were thin, their skin rosy; the older one’s chin wobbled underneath when she whispered to the younger one. Henry cleared his throat.
    “Can I help?”
    The younger one smiled shyly at Henry. Her teeth were white as alabaster and perfectly regular. “Perhaps you know Henry Hayden?”
    Before Henry could reply, Obradin had answered for him.
    “No.”
    The Serb leaned his hairy arms on the fish counter. “No here. Here only fish.”
    The women looked at one another helplessly. The younger one turned around and bent forward slightly, and the older one took a well-thumbed book out of the pack on her back. It was an English edition of Frank Ellis . She held it out to Obradin. With an immaculately clean fingernail she pointed at Henry’s photograph.
    “Henry Hayden. Does he live here?”
    “No.”
    Henry stamped out his cigarette and strode across to the women. “Allow me.” He held out his hand. Taken aback, the woman put the book in his hand.
    “Have you got a pen, Obradin?”
    Obradin handed him a pencil smeared with fish gut.
    “What’s your name, Ma’am?”
    The older woman put her slender hand to her mouth with a start. She had recognized him. “Oh my God . . .”
    “Just Henry, Ma’am.”
    Henry loved moments like this. Doing good and feeling good at the same time. Can there be any act more worthwhile and at the same time more delightful? After all, they’d traveled from God knows where just to see him. Such a lot of trouble for a moment’s beneficence.
    Henry wrote two brief dedications, Obradin took a photo of the two of them with Henry in the middle, and the women floated out of the fishmonger’s on air. Obradin snarled as he watched them go.
    “I’ve been tearing hairs out of my ass so as not to give you away and you come along and say, Here I am .”
    “They’ll come back and buy your fish, now they know you’re not going to kill them.”
    ———
    For dinner Henry grilled Obradin’s monkfish medallions a la plancha . He and Martha ate on the veranda in the cool night air that was fragrant with the scent of cut grass, and drank Pouilly-Fumé.
    “Should I be worried?” Martha asked, in that inimitably