That was a random guess, but Andrés looked nervously over his shoulder. The man he’d been handling pipe with was watching him with a worried expression.

“I will not be tricked into disclosing confidences. What do you know about Fly the Flag?”

“Frank Zamar had just signed a big contract to deliver sheets and towels to By-Smart, not long before his plant burned down. That sounds like good news, not the desperation that would make a man blow up his own plant with himself inside it. So someone was annoyed with him.”

I slapped my head, the caricature of someone struck by a hot idea. “Come to think of it, you yourself were at Fly the Flag a couple of days before the fire. You had some kind of issue with Frank Zamar. You’re an electrician. You’d know just how to set up something that could start a fire while you were long gone. Maybe you put it in place that Tuesday when I saw you at the factory.”

“You should be careful about making such accusations.” He tried to speak angrily but his lips were stiff; I had the feeling that if he relaxed they might start trembling. “I would do nothing to risk the life of a man, especially not Frank Zamar, who was not wicked, just troubled.”

“But, Roberto,” his coworker said, “we all know—”

Andrés interrupted him to tell him in Spanish to be careful with what he said—I was not a friend.

“I’m not your enemy,” I said in English. “What do we all know?”

With another reproving look at his coworker, Andrés said stiffly, “As you said, Zamar signed a new deal, to make sheets for the Bysens, sheets and towels with the American flag. Only—he signs in a panic, because he has lost so much business, and the bills for the new machines don’t stop just because the machines have stopped. And Zamar says he will make these sheets, but for so little money he cannot pay his workers in Chicago. So he has to do it in Nicaragua, or China, or someplace where people will work for a dollar a day, not thirteen dollars an hour. And I went to warn him, he could lose everything if he takes his jobs out of the neighborhood, and not only takes them out but pays people so bad they are no better than slaves.”

“And he wouldn’t listen?” I said. “So you put rats in his heating ducts, and he still didn’t agree so you torched the factory?”