“Tourists,” she said. I tried not to take it personally.

“Coffee,” I said.

She poured a cup and put it in front of me. “I don’t know how good it is,” she said. “Let me know. I can put another pot on.” She didn’t wait for an answer and moved back to the end of the bar to the Italians.

I looked at the coffee, a small dark pond in a white cup, and tried to think about Frank the way Frank would think about him, if he were a problem that needed to be solved. Why would he leave? I wasn’t even sure that was the right question. I went over everything, from Frank getting back to the hotel, to the accident, to me handing the statue to Frank. There had to be something in there that made him leave. I remembered him saying the statue wasn’t worth anything. That statement was either true or false. The statue either had value or it didn’t. If it did, was it worth enough for Frank to take off on his own with it? It obviously was worth something, or else we wouldn’t have taken it, but it couldn’t be worth that much, not in actual value. Not to Frank, not to anyone other than the person who wanted Froehmer to get it for them. So, if it wasn’t worth a lot, why did he leave with it? We’d stolen a lot of things that would be worth more money to someone else, that Frank could have taken and sold somewhere, easy and clear. So why this thing? Was that even the right question?

The bartender came back. She poured a little more coffee in my mug. “Everything all right?” she said. I nodded. “You sure you’re in the right place?”

“I’m meeting someone,” I said. She gave me a kind of encouraging shrug with her mouth and glanced at her watch as she left me again. The girls showed her pictures from the guidebook, which was as big as a stack of Bibles, and the bartender nodded and tried to make herself understood.