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Fates—Ellis, Riedesel, and Englander—started a new fad raging. Eschewing clothes, they had gold circuits printed directly onto their skin. A small battery pack in one earring caused the circuits to emit mournful drones, facetious beeps, or catchy jingles out of the button-speaker that was the matching earpiece. Soon, the whole island was a carnival of naked noisy flesh laced with gold diagrams. The poor fellow who had been drafted into layering the circuits—a retired billionaire from Silicon Valley—saw so much female skin during the fad that he was later forced to spend a month at the monastery in Carmel.
    Among the daytrippers, I noticed the proliferation of T-shirts that read:
     
    NO MORE SINGAPORE?
    ACCIDENT, HELL—IT WAS WAR!
    The televised images of the millions of corpses in the sterilized country did much to offset our island’s natural gaiety. In Las Vegas, bookmakers were offering three-to-two odds that the Philippines were the source of the CBW agent that had eliminated their rivals in the cheap-labor market. (Insiders picked Malaysia.) Already the media were calling it “The South Pacific Commerce Wars.”
    I didn’t envy “Young Joe” his task of mediating the dispute. But no one had ever promised him the president’s job would be easy.
    At the end of those particularly frantic two weeks, my own private world felt a tremor high on the emotional Richter scale.
    Charlie and Christina disappeared a second time, for five days.
    They returned for a night. I never even got a chance to see him. Then they vanished for a week.
    When they returned again, Koos van Staaden had somehow learned of his daughter’s affair.
     
    Deatherage stood massively between van Staaden and me. The old man wasn’t shouting—that would have been less upsetting. Instead, his voice was dead and controlled, as if artificially generated.
    When Blauvelt had phoned me that van Staaden was on his way to the club to confront either Charlie or me, I had summoned Deatherage as mediator.
    “I insist that he be fired, Holloway,” van Staaden persisted in his monotone. “He’s seduced my daughter and is obviously no more than a wild rutting bull. No White woman on the island is safe while he’s around.”
    I opened my mouth to voice something appropriately caustic, but Deatherage, sensing my anger, intervened.
    “The man’s done nothing to warrant his dismissal, Mr. van Staaden. From all accounts, the affair between your daughter and the Kid was mutual. And she is an adult. I’m afraid that your only recourse is to try to change your daughter’s mind, if you continue to disagree with her.”
    “She’s locked herself in her wing of the house. Won’t come out, either.” Van Staaden paused. “In the old days, where I come from, Chief Deatherage, a man in your capacity would clap this Kid person in jail for such an offense, and then supervise his hanging.”
    It was out in the open now, and although Deatherage and I had both known van Staaden’s true feelings, to hear them voiced shocked us silent.
    Deatherage spoke first. “We don’t have your goddamn exalted but defunct system in this country, mister.”
    Van Staaden held Deatherage’s gaze, a defiant specter. “Then someone should kill the beast personally.”
    Deatherage went to grab van Staaden’s lapels, found none, and settled for his shirt front. “That’s an actionable threat, van Staaden, and could get you locked up. If I hear any more such shit, it will.”
    Van Staaden twisted free and banged out the door.
    I phoned everywhere, seeking news of Charlie, but couldn’t find him. I wondered if he was closeted with Christina in her half of van Staaden’s house high atop Bosky Knob. I remembered him as he had been that night when I held him while he cried.
    The next morning Deatherage came by to take me to see the Kid’s broken body on the rocks below Bosky Knob.
     
    It was literally the first time I had left La Pomme d’Or in three years. The sunlight felt