A faded, light-green Mercedes with a broken rear spring came bouncing too fast across the beach and skidded, sliding sideways as it stopped near the carousel. An elderly European man wearing a white coat over a dirty tropical suit stepped out of the car and stretched. He had a head of unkempt, wiry white hair in the style of Albert Einstein. He brushed it back with his hand and opened the back door of the car. A magnificent boxer dog hopped out and followed the old man over to Ad Magic and the boy.

“Are you a doctor?”

“I am a doctor, yes. You were in a car accident, jah?”

“I was, but it’s nothing. I called about the horse. I wondered if you could do something about the horse. What is wrong with that animal?”

The doctor looked out at the sea, lifting his hands to shield his eyes from the afternoon sun. “Probably he has been drinking saltwater in desperation. He will die, very soon.”

Ad Magic said, “I will give you five hundred American dollars if you can save the horse.”

The doctor said, “I can send him to seventh heaven with one shot. Haff him dragged away. Fifty dollars for the whole shebang.”

“Look, I don’t want to wrangle. If you can save the horse, I will pay you a thousand dollars.”

The doctor opened the trunk of the Mercedes and removed a piece of rope. He sent the boy down to the edge of the water and had him lead the horse up onto the dry sand while he backed the car another fifty feet down the beach, where the sand became too loose and he had to stop. Then he got out of the car and removed his medical bag from the back, setting it on the hood. He quickly looked the horse over. “Malnutrition, dehydration, fever.” He opened the horse’s lips. “Ah! He has infected tooth. This is very bad.…”

“What about all the sores? Why does he have so many sores?”

“Quick,” the doctor said. “In my trunk I have glucose und water. We haff to getting in fluids.”

Ad Magic carried two pint-size bottles of glucose and sterile-water solution over to the horse and then stood holding them as the doctor ran drip lines into large veins in the horse’s neck. Ad Magic watched the bottles slowly begin to drain as the doctor put on a pair of rubber gloves and began to scrub the sores on the horse’s body with a stiff brush and a kind of iodine solution, making a rough, sandpaper sound.

“Doesn’t that hurt?”

“Animals don’t experience pain in the same fashion humans,” the doctor said, with some irritation. “Pain for humans is memories, anticipation, imagination—”

“I don’t care about that. What you’re doing has got to hurt.”