And Nate saw then, in his mind's eye, the form of his father's corpse laid out on the floor in front of him, his garroted head resting to one side, his neck bruised from ear to ear, the poor, dear man. And lying there beside him, Ms. Graves, in her flannel skirt and cardigan, her gray hair brushed down over her ears and her eyes closed, the two of them hovering in the netherworld between the living and the forgotten dead.
"Can I ask you a question?"
"Sure," Alex said.
"Is it okay if we kiss?"
Alex nodded, and Nate stood, stepping through the shadows at his feet to cross the space between them.
Chapter 21
At night, from his hotel balcony, Doug watched the Jaguars and Porsches cruise up and down Arabian Gulf Road blaring pop music as they glided by the armored cars that had appeared recently at intersections all over Kuwait City. According to the concierge, the American schools had announced an unscheduled six-week vacation and the ex-pats not here for the war were leaving with their children by the hundreds. But in the evenings along the promenade the Kuwaiti families still picnicked on the grass, enjoying the mild winter air and the views of the glittering towers up and down the waterfront, leaving their trash on the ground behind them for the municipal workers to collect - the Filipinos and Pakistanis, who came by in their minivans and green jumpsuits to spear the crumpled plastic bags and date wrappers and empty soda cans tipping and rolling in the breeze.
When he couldn't sleep Doug walked the city, whose citizens seemed to stay up all night shopping in the twenty-four-hour supermarkets. There were American sailors about as well, up from the naval base for their sober nights out on the town. He did his best to avoid them, though he knew his chances of being detected here were small. He'd been careful, at first, sounding out other guests at the hotel about which contractors might be hiring, thinking he needed to avoid the firms working directly with the State Department. But soon he'd realized how far the demand for people outstripped the supply and just how many of the men here were themselves not so interested in anyone knowing much about their past. If you were an American and a firm wanted you, the background check was often skipped lest it prove inconvenient.
Passing through the streets of low-rise apartments he'd reach Al Taawun Street from where he could see over the resorts and the private compounds to the coast, the lights of skiffs and police boats mingling with the more distant signals of tankers headed south with their American escorts for the Strait of Hormuz.
In all his life he'd never had this much time on his hands; such idleness was a menace to him. In the hotel room, he felt caged but out walking there was nothing to do but think. Seeing the young sailors in their dress whites moving in packs along the sidewalks put him in mind of when he'd left for the navy and what he'd imagined lay ahead of him back then.
He'd ridden the commuter train into Boston with his suitcase and knapsack and crossing the dingy concourse of South Station boarded a Greyhound that had taken the better part of two days to carry him up to the Naval Station Great Lakes, there along the western shore of Lake Michigan.
Through the dead of night on that trip, as the other passengers dozed, Doug had put on his Walkman and watched the fencing alongside the highway tick by in the headlights, the flat expanses of Ohio and then Indiana stretching out in every direction, the farmland parceled into one forty-acre field after another, as dark and empty a landscape as his Eastern eyes had ever seen. With the signs for Gary and Chicago, lights appeared and soon the streets were bright with lamps above the barren parking lots and block-long warehouses. As the bus bounded over paved gorges of underpasses and empty surface roads, a panorama that made the Alden strip seem like little more than a candle's light came into view: acre after acre of oil tanks and cylinders connected by masses of strut work and pipes running this way and that, white smoke jetting from valves up and down the tangle of steel, lit by thousands of naked yellow bulbs lining ladders and catwalks and above this vast tract of works, a giant orange flame billowing from