He didn't have an answer. He sat at his mother's kitchen table and looked at the place where his father's ashtray used to be, a little ring burned into the oilcloth, and he couldn't think of one.
Branko Perovich lived up on the hill above the harbor, on a street of stucco houses built by fishermen in the good years after the war, when the sardines were still running and a man with a boat could put a son through college. The houses had red tile roofs and fig trees in the front yards, and from the top of the street you could see the whole harbor laid out like a chart, the main channel and the long gray line of the breakwater running out two miles to the Angels Gate light, and beyond it the Pacific, flat and pewter-colored, all the way to Catalina.
Duncan went on Saturday morning, because Branko had asked him to, in a note pushed under the door of the bakery in the skipper's square careful handwriting. Please come by Saturday if you can. Coffee. B.P.
Katica opened the door. She was eleven, with her father's black eyebrows and a gap in her front teeth, and she looked at Duncan and then turned and ran down the hall without a word. He heard her say, "Tata, it's him," and a door closed somewhere.
Branko came out of the kitchen wiping his hands on a dish towel. He was fifty-two and looked older. Before March he had been a broad, loud man who sang the Dalmatian songs his grandfather brought from Komiža and could stand on the turntable in a ground swell with a cigar in his teeth. Now he looked as if someone had let the air out of him. His hair had gone gray at the sides in a single summer.
He sat Duncan at the kitchen table, which was covered with a lace cloth under a sheet of clear plastic, and poured him coffee from a copper džezva, thick and sweet, and put a plate of fritule in front of him, little fried dough balls dusted with powdered sugar.
"Vesna made them," he said. "Last night. First time since." He stopped. "She's resting. She said to tell you hello."
On the wall there was a cannery calendar with a tuna clipper on it, still turned to March, and beside it a framed photograph of the Santa Rosalia at some earlier Fishermen's Fiesta, dressed in flags from bow to masthead, a priest on the dock sprinkling holy water. Duncan found Davor in it without wanting to, a small boy on his father's shoulders, maybe seven, waving.
"I'm not going to ask you anything," Branko said. "I want to say that first. So you know."
"Okay."
"I shouldn't have gone to your mother. At her work. That wasn't right." Branko turned his cup a quarter turn on its saucer, and another. "I just wanted somebody to know what it is. Speck has a lawyer from the United States Attorney sitting in on the Board. My lawyer told me. Kostelac. He says there's a law from the old steamboat days. Seaman's manslaughter. If the master is negligent and somebody dies, they can put him in prison. Ten years. Kostelac says it almost never happens to a fishing boat. But if the Board finds misconduct, the U.S. Attorney can take it to a grand jury, and then it's not up to the Coast Guard anymore."