He quit fishing the next week. He had stood on the dock with his sea bag and Zoran Bakota calling him from the deck of the Marija, and he had turned around and walked up the hill, and two days later he was tying on an apron at the Anchor Light. Ilda had hired him without asking a single question.
Then in August the divers went back down for the underwriters, and something came up, and the Coast Guard convened a full Marine Board, which meant a public hearing, with lawyers. Speck had called the bakery and left a message with Mrs. KordiΔ downstairs, who told her sister, who told the whole of Ninth Street, so that by suppertime the Croatian half of San Pedro knew that the Coast Guard wanted Thurman Whitfield's boy again.
He knew what they thought. He could feel it every time he walked down to the post office. Whitfield. Here we go again.
The call came on a Thursday, the sixteenth of October, at twenty past two, while Sig Aasen was halfway through a bowl of Ilda's Portuguese bean soup that Duncan had told him was left over from yesterday and going sour. The Anchor Light had one telephone, a black wall phone by the kitchen door, and Ilda's hands were in the dough, so Duncan picked it up.
"Anchor Light."
"Yes, good afternoon." A careful man's voice, flat, Midwestern. "I'm trying to reach a Mr. Duncan Whitfield. I was told he might be found at this number."
Duncan turned toward the wall and lowered his voice, which in a room that size did no good at all. "This is Whitfield."
"Mr. Whitfield, this is Lieutenant Commander Speck at the Marine Safety Office. We spoke in April."
"I remember."
"I'm calling in regard to the Marine Board on the Santa Rosalia. You received our letter."
"I got it."