It was before sunrise. Hendrik Gonzalez was scrubbing down the little white deck of the boat and she watched him at work. He kept his face averted, shy and young. In his movements was a curious absorption, a completeness as if each action had its precise rhythm, a harmonic of his fundamental living tone. She knew he was instinctively musical and it seemed natural to see his unusual balance in those terms. He had on a blue short-sleeved vest and tight faded denims rolled up to the knee. His thick black hair was too long, untidy, and he shook it from his face with a slight, easy movement. Gonzalez—of Portuguese origin, or the name could as well have come to him like other accidents in the mystery of his past. He would be inconspicuous in any of the hot fishing harbors of the Mediterranean, brown, small-boned but with an ancient physical delicacy, a power beyond himself. And yet he was far removed from the Old World, a colored boy who had drifted from the country of the Western Gape to become a fisherman at Saldanha Bay.

They heard two rapid shots, a left-right of a sporting gun, and he half turned, looking not at her but to one side over the stem of the boat.