On that third day at the beach he began to see a way he might do it.

With his tourist wandering about taking pictures, Isidro had time to look at the girls and study them. They seemed to him girls who were lazy and yet restless, moving idly even as they moved to the music of their radios. They seemed to be looking not for something to do but for something to happen, to entertain them.

One in particular he believed he recognized and searched his mind for a name. A girl who had come out of the Caribe Hilton late one night, tired, going home to Calle del Parque. She had given him her name and telephone number saying, “But only men who stay at the Hilton, the Condado Beach, the DuPont Plaza and the Holiday Inn.”

Light brown hair with that dark gold skin, and what a body. It was her hair that helped him recognize her, the way it hung down and nearly covered one of her eyes. She held the hair back with the tips of her fingers, like peeking out of a curtain, when she looked at somebody closely. As she did talking to the man with the cane.

Iris Ruiz.

That was her name. He had phoned several times with customers but never reached her. Iris Ruiz.

Talking to the man with the cane.

He remembered now she had been with him yesterday and the day before. The man in the same aluminum chair, reading a book, the cane hooked to the back of the chair. The girl, Iris, kneeling in the sand to talk to him, earnest in what she was saying. The man looking up from his book to nod, to say something, a few words, though most of the time he seemed to read his book as he listened.

His skin was dark from the sun. His hair and his beard, not cared for though not unattractive, were dark enough for him to be Puerto Rican. An artist perhaps, an actor, someone from the Institute of Culture, a member of the party for independence. But this was only his look, his type. Isidro knew, without having to hear him speak, the man was from the States.