Two men: one with memories he can’t escape, the other with memories he can’t recapture — both trusting strangers who lie.

Amnesiac Peter Killian, suspected art thief, can’t understand why LAPD detective Michael Griffin takes his memory loss so personally.

American expatriate Jack Stoyles, exiled in a distant Atlantic outpost, is suddenly in love with a stranger who kisses him — and then dies. With good reason Jack calls his place “Heartache Cafe”.

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You wouldn’t think it even gets hot in a place like this, but let me tell you, brother, it does. Around the middle of July, the fog clears away, and the sun comes out, hot enough (as they say around these parts) to split the rocks. It’s a different sort of place, not like anywhere I’d ever been before, but when you have to leave home as suddenly as I did, you don’t much care. You just pick a direction on the map and head out and hope things turn out okay. Twelve hundred miles as the crow flies to St. John’s, Newfoundland, from my hometown of Philadelphia; I slept nearly the whole way, never mind the roaring of the airplane engines. Some things hit harder than others, and I’d been dealt a knockout punch.

When we landed at the airstrip in this little town called Torbay, I felt like I’d come to the end of the world. Nothing much to see except trees, black spruce and tamarack and scrub pines, and the red gravel airstrip. I got out of my seat and climbed down, stiff and sore, feeling like I’d been run down by a truck. I guess I was still in shock a little bit. The air was colder than I was used to; even Philadelphia winters don’t have this kind of soggy bite. All I wanted was to get inside the little terminal and maybe get a cup of coffee. I had five hundred bucks, American, in my wallet, a passport and a copy of my discharge papers from the army. I guess I should have felt ashamed, because here was Hitler stomping his jackbooted way across Europe, and there was nothing I could do about it. Unfit for active service. Yeah, that’s me — thirty-eight years old and already broken beyond repair.

This — all of this — was a blur to me. I was seeing other streets and hearing a different accent, and I was remembering walking into Moe’s first thing in the morning for a cup of joe, sitting down at the counter to look over the newspaper before I went outside and took a sharp left toward the waterfront. Maybe that’s what drew me to this place: the promise of cold salt air and the tang of the sea in my nostrils, the bustle of the waterfront, and ships coming and going at all hours of the day and night. I loved the idea that I could do the same, just go whenever I wanted to, anywhere I liked in the world, and not have to answer to anybody. If I felt like it, I could hop a freighter to some other place and work my way across the world. It was something Moe and I had talked a lot about whenever I was in there. You thinking of going somewhere? He’d always refill my coffee cup without my having to ask, and I’d always leave a tip. Thinking of leaving old Philly, huh? Right up until the last, I wasn’t sure. Even after it happened, I figured I could just keep on the way I was, doing all the things that I’d been doing. I figured I was strong enough to take it, right up until I stood on the Delaware River Bridge one morning, looking down into the swirling water and wondering if I had the nerve.

You want to know what stopped me? (continue reading…)