After dinner he smoked a joint on Petley’s veranda, then strolled onto the beach. As soon as he left the lights of the hotel he heard the crunch of coral behind him, slow footsteps, a chewing of soles—he was being followed, but he did not turn. Ahead, past a dinghy that had been drawn up on the sand, he saw that it was tethered to a fallen palm tree. The distant lights on the veranda illuminated the white eye painted on the bow of the dinghy. Sharkey sat on the palm trunk, and with a swish of cloth stirring warm air into his face, a black-gowned and partly veiled figure took a seat beside him.

“I didn’t say a word. I was still smoking. But I knew it was her from the aroma, mingled sweat and perfume.”

That she didn’t move was a sign that she was interested. He reached for her, fumbled with folds of her gown, and found an opening, more warmth, as though inviting his hand.

“She was completely naked underneath. But when I stroked her thighs she pulled away. I said, ‘Sorry.’”

“‘Not here,’ she said. That was encouraging.”

She took his big hand in her small one and, her billowing black gown swishing against his body, led him back across the beach, avoiding the veranda lights, to the rear entrance of Petley’s. The bar inside was so noisy it masked their sounds, their feet on the back stairs, his shutting the door to his room.

When he turned on the lamp beside the bed, the woman protested, a squawk, and reached for the lamp and switched it off. But he had seen two things in the flash of light—her Somali face in her Madonna’s shawl, angular, her pinched nose, her even teeth, her thin dark lips, her small chin; and because in her hurry the hem of her gown had jumped, he’d seen a mottled yellowish scar, wide and matted like a patch of melted wax or hardened rags of flesh, on her thigh. She had once been badly burned, but she was lovely, and even her scar was bizarre and beautiful, like a weird medallion won by suffering.

“When she yanked her gown to cover it I turned on the light again and touched the scar on my face. Her eyes widened and she murmured a word, and a sigh of agreement. And that was not all.”

In the hot room, in the narrow bed (Sharkey now had everyone’s attention, and was speaking slowly), he’d slipped his hand between her legs and—so many secrets hidden by the gown—his fingers stroked an unfamiliar obstacle, more than one, a pattern of thin webbing, not flesh but raised sutures that were stiff to the fingertips, like an old wound or a scar, rough to the touch.

“She’d been sewn up,” Sharkey said. “Somali style.”