“He’s tired,” Olive said, provoked by the man’s mockery. She had kept a little behind Sharkey, listening to them, surprised by the sudden names and the reminiscence of school in the squalor of the camp, the flapping tents, the litter, the tossed-aside Wahoo can sunk in the sand.

Not tired but anxious, needing relief. The names had fluttered through Sharkey’s memory as distant and dark. He was looking at the sea, gazing beyond the men and the scattered camp and twists of paper and broken plastic as of shattered toys, easing his mind with the afternoon light on the water, the far-off waves, silvery corrugations at this distance. The sun was so low a fishing boat crossed in front of it and blocked it, winked it away for seconds. The incoming swell was a consolation, the ocean seeking him. He had known struggles in the water, but in the end the sea had always befriended him.

Clearing his throat, Fonoti struggled to his feet, staggering a little, then kicked past the two other men and approached Sharkey and straightened. In a strangely formal ritual, he opened his arms and hugged him, jarring Sharkey hard with the itch of his sweat-stink. He released him and beheld him, his dark eyes deep in their sockets.

Local Motion clapped his hands to his knees, a decisive gesture. “Me—I’m Frawley. What you want to know?”

He folded his thick arms across his shirt and turned his sunglasses on Olive, and she saw on his roasted face the pitted scars from chicken pox or acne.

“Max Mulgrave,” Olive said. “What can you tell us about him?”

“Max!” the man said. “Bradda Max,” and reached to bump fists with Olive. “He down on his luck now, but he one great guy.”

“When did you first meet him?”

“Early days—eighties—when he came here after the big buyout deal with his company.”

“That he sold?”

“Not to Symantec, though they made a big offer. He sell it to his employees,” Frawley said. And now, losing his aggression, he lost the lilt of pidgin and the gabble of synthetic English, becoming more grammatical as he gained in pride. “He did the right thing for his workers.”

“I take it his company made software,” Olive said.

“You don’t know?” The man laughed in a surprised, superior way, blowing out his cheeks. “Max came up with one of the first and best software programs for finding glitches in operating systems. Debugging was his thing. Bug fixes. Software patches.” He reached to scratch his blunted and damaged-­looking big toe, then heaved himself back in his chair and went on. “He devised the Max Patch—you don’t know that, and he famous for it. Max had the formula. But he wasn’t satisfied, so he made the smart move. He sold everything and came to Hawaii.”

“For any specific purpose?”