“Books could amount to that much?”

“No, but they set my table. She taught me to learn. Sounds like a load of crap, I know.”

I shrugged.

“She was a pimp, you know. Her prostitution business quickly grew from the low-rent variety of Beale Street to expensive call girls in Saint Louis, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and especially Washington.”

“I didn’t know there could be that much money in sex.”

“Not the sex per se,” he said. “The clientele. The call girls found out from their johns about public projects and programs and my dear mother would then buy the properties and sell them to the cities. Information, Wala, information is everything. And then there was the extortion.”

“Your mother sounds like quite a gal.”

“She had that American spirit. And she hated America. America killed her one true love. My father. I don’t know squat about him, but I know, she knew, everybody knew that America killed him.” Sill beamed with an incongruous smile.

“You’re a terrorist.”

“Of a sort.”

“You also hate America?”

“Killed my father. I’m a dismantler. America killed my father and my mother. And nothing is going to change that.”

“You mean nothing.”

“Precisely.”

We set down with remarkably little bounce at just about sunup at the Miami-Opa Locka Executive Airport. I knew this because of the sign. I never saw the pilot. We disembarked and were spirited, a word I employ with some irony, away in a nondescript car that might have been a rental, a midsized Japanese sedan. I sat in the back seat with Trigo. Sill drove while Eigen sat beside him, her window open, the wind filling her hair. She looked so, so well defined, if a little trashy. The well-dressed pair were so different from me. I realized that my belt was a striped necktie that I had fed through the loops of my trousers and that I was not wearing socks. I imagined the color of my missing socks to be black, a primitive notion in the technical sense, but like all foundational, unprovable assumptions it must have meant something about me, but I didn’t know what. I was left in the back seat, stroking the fur of my only friend. I admitted to myself, once again, that I was, if not stupid, at least profoundly astray, adrift.

The freeway was packed, barely moving, but moving. Finally there was water. We crossed Biscayne Bay and drove down the middle of Miami Beach, then from MacArthur Causeway turned onto a small road.

“This is Star Island,” Sill said. “One way on by car, but there are ways on and off by other means.” He drove us onto a property that featured a prominent helipad on the expanse of a meadow. A shiny red-and-white helicopter sat on the pad.

Sill looked at me in the center mirror. “Over there is my Airbus H155. But I’m sure that means nothing to you. Fastest civilian helicopter in the world. You can see I’m fond of things that fly.”