‘It’s really Richard. When he was a kid we called him Ricky, which somehow turned into Rocky. Some people call him Rocco. He gets called a lot of things.’

‘Do you have much contact with him?’

‘There’s a gift shop. Maybe I should get a shark key chain or something for Molly.’

‘We can do that.’

He changed his mind. ‘Maybe I’ll just bring her some bagels.’

I did not want to push him about his son, but the topic was within reach, and I believed their estrangement from each other was the root of many of Marino’s problems.

‘Where is Rocky?’ I cautiously asked.

‘An armpit of a town called Darien.’

‘Connecticut? And it’s not an armpit of a town.’

‘This Darien’s in Georgia.’

‘It surprises me I haven’t known that before now.’

‘He don’t do anything you’d have any reason to know about.’ Marino bent over, his face against glass as he stared at two small nurse sharks swimming along the bottom of a tank outside the exhibit.

‘They look like big catfish,’ he said as the sharks stared with dead eyes, tails silently fanning water.

We wandered into the exhibit and did not have to wait in line, for few visitors were here in the middle of this workday. We drifted past Kiribati warriors in suits of woven coconut husks, and Winslow Homer’s painting of the Gulf Stream. Shark images had been painted on airplanes, and it was explained that sharks can detect odors from the length of a football field and electric charges as weak as one-millionth of a volt. They have as many as fifteen rows of backup teeth, are shaped the way they are to more efficiently torpedo through water.

During a short film we were shown a great white battering a cage and lunging for a tuna on a rope. The narrator explained that sharks are legendary hunters of the deep, the perfect killing machine, the jaws of death, the master of the sea. They can smell one drop of blood in twenty-five gallons of water and feel the pressure waves of other animals passing by. They can outswim their prey, and no one is quite certain why some sharks attack humans.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ I said to Marino as the movie ended.

I buttoned my coat and put on my gloves, imagining Gault watching monsters ripping flesh as blood spread darkly through water. I saw his cold stare and the twisted spirit behind his thin smile. In the most frightening reaches of my mind, I knew he smiled as he killed. He bared his cruelty in that strange smile I had seen on the several occasions I had been near him.