"Rain Storm aka Choke Point" - читать интересную книгу автора (Eisler Barry)

3

I’D BEEN LIVING in Brazil for almost a year when they finally got to me. It had rained that day, the sky full of oppressive, low-lying clouds that clung to Rio’s dramatic cliffs like smoke from some faraway calamity.

After leaving Tatsu in Tokyo, I had finished preparing Yamada-san, the ice-cold alter ego I had created as an escape hatch for the day my enemies might succeed in tracking me to Japan, as indeed they had, for his departure to São Paulo. São Paulo is home to some six hundred thousand of Brazil’s approximately one million ethnic Japanese, the largest such community outside Japan, and the kind of place in which a recent arrival like Yamada-san might easily lose himself.

Yamada found a suitable apartment in Aclimação, a residential neighborhood near Liberdade, São Paulo’s Japanese district, from which he made the necessary arrangements to establish his new business of shipping high-quality, low-cost Brazilian judo and jujitsu uniforms to Japan-a business which, if conditions were favorable, he might one day expand to include additional exportable items. Many of his neighbors were of Korean and Chinese extraction, which suited Yamada because such Asian faces made it easier for him to blend. A more heavily Japanese setting, such as that of Liberdade itself, would have conferred the same advantages, but could have been problematic, as well, because Japanese neighbors would have been more inclined to probe the specifics of his background, and to discuss it among themselves afterward. To the extent that he did need to share some of his past with his Japanese neighbors, Yamada would explain that he was from Tokyo, a simple sarariiman, or salary man, who had suffered the double indignity of being laid off by one of Japan’s electronics giants and then being abandoned by his wife of twenty years, for whom he could no longer provide as she expected. It was a sad, although not uncommon story in those difficult economic times, and Yamada’s neighbors, with typical Japanese restraint, would nod sympathetically at the telling of his lament and press for no further details.

Yamada obsessed over the study of Portuguese-tapes, tutors, television, music, films, even a series of professional women, because, Yamada knew, there is no more natural or productive route to the acquisition of a language than the sharing of a pillow. Every few weeks, he would leave town to travel, to acquaint himself firsthand with his adopted land: the vast cerrado, the central plains, with its handful of frontier towns and vanishing Indian tribes, and its bizarre, planned city, Brasília, stuck on the land as though by extraterrestrials in imitation of an earthen metropolis; the prehistoric enormity of Amazonas, where the scale of everything-the trees, the water lilies, and, of course, the river itself-first diminishes and then extinguishes the traveler’s sense of his own human significance; the baroque art and architecture of Minas Gerais, left behind like a conflicted apology by the miners who centuries earlier had raped the region’s land for its diamonds and gold.

Yamada avoided Bahia and in particular its capital, Salvador. Rain knew a woman there, a beautiful half-Brazilian, half-Japanese named Naomi, with whom Rain had enjoyed an affair in Tokyo and to whom he had made a promise when she was forced to flee to Brazil. Yamada wanted to go to her there, but at the same time hesitated to do so, finding himself unsure, at some level, of whether he was attempting to forestall the inevitable or simply hoping to relish the anticipation of its arrival. Occasionally Yamada was troubled by such thoughts, but his new surroundings, exotic after so many years in familiar Japan, his travels, and his constant study of the language, were all strongly diverting.

Yamada’s linguistic progress was excellent, as one might expect of a man who already spoke both English and Japanese as a native, and after six months he judged himself ready to relocate to Rio; more specifically, to Barra da Tijuca, known throughout Rio simply as Barra, a middle- and upper-middle-class enclave extending for some nineteen kilometers along Rio’s southern coast. He chose a suitable apartment at the corner of the Avenida Belisário Leite de Andrade Neto and the Avenida General Guedes da Fontoura. It was a good building, with entrances on each of the streets it faced, and nothing but other residences all around, therefore offering, had Yamada been inclined to reflect on such matters, multiple points of egress and no convenient areas from which some third party might set up surveillance or an ambush.

In Barra the Yamada identity finally began to feel truly comfortable. Partly it was that I’d lived as Yamada for so long at that point; partly it was that the São Paulo stopover had been only one step removed from Japan, and therefore from those enemies who were trying to find me there; partly it was the inherent difficulty of feeling uncomfortable for long in Rio, its rhythms, indeed its life, defined as they are by the culture of its beaches.

In my new environs I became a Japanese nisei, one of the tens of thousands of Brazil’s second-generation ethnic Japanese, who had decided to retire to Rio from São Paulo. My Portuguese was good enough to support the story; the accent was off, of course, but this was explainable by virtue of having grown up in a Japanese household and having spent much of my childhood in Japan.

I was intrigued at how distant a notion Japan seemed to present to my nisei cousins. It seemed that, when they looked in the mirror, they saw only a Brazilian. If they thought about it at all, I imagined, Japan must have felt like a coincidence, a faraway culture and place not much more important than the other such places one reads about in books or sees on television, something that meant a great deal to their parents or grandparents but that wasn’t particularly relevant to them. I found myself somewhat envious of the notion of forgetting where you had come from and caring only about who you are, and liked Brazil for offering a culture that would foster such a possibility.

And Barra offered this culture triple-distilled. My nisei story was thin, I knew, but it didn’t really matter. Barra, the fastest growing part of the city, its skyline increasingly crowded with new high-rises, its neighborhoods ceaselessly changing with departures and arrivals, is much more focused on the future than it is with anyone’s particular past. It’s the kind of place where, a month after you’ve been there, you’re considered an old-timer, and I had no trouble fitting in.

Rio, home to a sports- and fitness-mad population, has numerous health food outlets, and it was easy for me to indulge my taste for protein shakes and acai fruit smoothies. These, along with antioxidants, fish oil, and other dietary supplements, enhanced my recovery times and enabled me to adhere to a regimen of five hundred daily Hindu squats, three hundred inclined sit-ups, three hundred Hindu push-ups, and other esoteric body weight calisthenics that maintained my strength and flexibility.

I varied my mornings and evenings training at Gracie Barra, jujitsu’s modern Mecca, where the fecund Gracie family had taken the teachings of a visiting Japanese diplomat and adapted them into a system of ground fighting so sophisticated that the art is now more firmly established in Brazil than it ever was in Japan. I trained frequently and hard, having missed the opportunity to do so during the year I had spent underground in Osaka and in São Paulo thereafter. The academy’s young black belts were impressed with my skills, but in truth their ground game was stronger than mine-although certainly less ruthless, if applied in the real world-and I relished the opportunity to once again polish and expand my personal arsenal.

In the afternoons I would ride an old ten-speed out to one of the city’s more isolated beaches-sometimes Grumari, sometimes even less accessible slivers of sand, which I reached on foot, where only the most determined surfers, and perhaps some nude sunbathers, might venture. After a month my skin had become dark, like that of a true carioca, or Rio native, and my hair, brown like my mother’s now that I no longer dyed it black to make myself look more Japanese, grew streaked like a surfer’s.

Sometimes I would swim out to one of the nearby islands. I would sit on those deserted outcroppings of gray and green and consider the rhythm of waves against rock, the occasional sighing of the wind, and my mind would wander. I would think of Midori, the jazz pianist I had accidentally met and then deliberately spared after killing her father, a man whose posthumous wishes I had tried to carry out later, an effort that had perhaps earned ambivalence, but that could never lead to forgiveness, from the daughter. I would remember how on that last night she had leaned in from astride me and whispered I hate you even as she came, the newly acquired certainty of what I had done to her father damning the passion she otherwise couldn’t prevent, and I would wonder foolishly if she might ever play in one of Rio’s jazz clubs. And I would look back on my new city and see it as an island, not unlike the one from which I viewed it: a beautiful place, to be sure, but still one of exile, sometimes of regret, ultimately of loneliness.

I kept the apartment in São Paulo. I took care to travel there from time to time to maintain appearances, and managed Yamada’s new export operation remotely, mostly by e-mail. Some simple commercial software turned the lights on and off at random intervals during preset hours so that it looked as though someone was living there, and so that the electric bills would be consistent with full-time residency. A faucet opened to a continual slow drip accomplished the same end with regard to water bills. In addition, I stayed from time to time in various short-term hotel/apartments elsewhere in Rio, adding a certain shell game dynamic to the other challenges a pursuer might face in attempting to locate me.

But all this security cost money, and, although I had saved a good deal over the years, my means were not unlimited, and what I did have was kept in a variety of anonymous offshore accounts that effectively paid no interest. Dividend-paying stocks and IRAs and 401(k)s weren’t part of the plan. I told myself that after a couple of years, or a few, when the trail someone might try to follow had grown cold, and their potential motivations sufficiently remote, I might be able to scale back on some of the precautions that posed such a burden to my finances.

Time passed. And, much as I enjoyed it, Rio came to feel like a way station, not a destination; a breather, not the end of the march. There was an aimlessness to my days there, an aimlessness that my focus on jujitsu alleviated but didn’t dispel. From time to time I would remember Tatsu telling me you can’t retire, spoken with equal parts confidence and sadness, and those words, which I had first taken to be a threat and then understood to be merely a prediction, came in my memory to bear the weight of something else, something more akin to prophecy.

I grew restless, and my restlessness proved fertile ground for memories of Naomi. The way she had whispered come inside in my ear on that first long night together. The way she would slip into Portuguese when we made love. The way she had offered to try to help Harry, who had been not just an asset of mine, but a rare friend, an offer that had been as sincere as it was ultimately useless. And the way I had promised her the last time I saw her that I would find her in Brazil, that I wouldn’t leave her waiting and wondering what had ever happened to me.

The way you did Midori.

I’ve paid for that one, thank you.

It had been good with Naomi, that was the thing. Warm and sweet and emotionally uncomplicated. It wasn’t what I had with Midori, or almost had, but I was never going to have that again and preferred to spend as little time as possible flagellating myself over it. Going to her would be selfish, I knew, because in Tokyo our involvement had almost gotten her killed, and, despite the change of venue and all my new precautions, it was far from impossible that something like that could happen again. But I found myself thinking of her all the time, wondering if somehow it could work. Japan was far away. I was Yamada now, wasn’t I? And Naomi was whoever she was in Brazil. We could start over, start afresh.

I should have known better. But we all have stupid moments, rationalization, even blindness, born of weakness and human need.

Naomi’s Japanese mother had died many years earlier, but she had told me her father’s name, David Leonardo Nascimento, and had let me know that I could find him in Salvador. Nascimento is a common name in Brazil, but there was no Leonardo, David, in the Salvador white pages, to which I had access via a Rio public library. An Internet search proved more productive: David Leonardo Nascimento, it seemed, was the president of a Salvador-based company with real estate, construction, and manufacturing interests.

I could have simply called and asked how I might get in touch with Naomi, but I didn’t want too long a gap between the time when I contacted her and the time when we might actually meet. I told myself that this preference was logical, the outgrowth of my usual security concerns, but I knew at some level that it was driven also by personal factors. I didn’t want to have to catch up over the phone, to answer questions about where I was and what I was doing, to explain my long delay in tracking her down. Better to get it all out of the way in person.

Salvador was a two-hour flight from Rio, and in making my way through this new city I was struck, as always when traversing colossal Brazil, by the contrasts among the land’s regions. Salvador, nearer the equator, was hotter than Rio, the air somehow richer, moister. In Rio, the ubiquitous granite cliffs seem to offer glimpses of the land’s strong skeleton; in Salvador, everywhere there was red earth, more akin to a soft covering of skin. And the people were darker-hued: a reflection of the area’s African heritage, which revealed itself also in the baroque carving of the town’s colonial churches; in the blood-pounding beat of its candomblé music; in the flowing, dancing moves of its capoeiristas, with their hypnotizing mixture of dance, fighting, and gymnastics, all set to the tune of the stringed berimbau and the mesmerizing beat of the conga.

Nascimento was well buffered by secretaries, and there was a fair amount of back and forth before I was able to actually get ahold of him. When I did, he told me that Naomi had left word with him about a friend from Japan, someone named John, but that this had been some time ago. I acknowledged the delay and waited, and after a moment he told me that his daughter was living in Rio, working at a bar called Scenarium, on the Rua do Lavradio. He gave me a phone number. I thanked him and went straight to the airport, smiling at the irony. All these months of avoiding Salvador, only to learn that Naomi and I were living practically as neighbors.

That evening, after taking steps to ensure that I wasn’t being followed, I caught a cab to Lapa, the neighborhood around Scenarium, among the oldest in the city. I got out a few blocks away, per my usual practice, and waited until the cab had departed before moving in the direction of the bar.

I made my way along antique streets composed of rows of cobblestones convulsed over the centuries into valleys and hillocks by the ceaseless stirrings of the earth below. A few widely spaced streetlights offered weak respite against the surrounding gloom, and passing figures appeared indistinct, insubstantial, like phantoms from the area’s colonial past, shifting in confusion among the faded façades and broken balconies, lost souls trying to locate once-thriving addresses that existed now only as monuments to dilapidation and disuse. Here and there were signs of new life-a repaired balustrade, a reglazed set of windows-and somehow these small portents made the shattered relics on which they blossomed a strangely vibrant foreground to the modern high-rises towering beyond: tenacious, more resolute, the ravaged sockets of their empty doors and windows seeming almost to smile at the prospect of the eventual passing of their newer, taller peers, who would age without inspiring any of the devotion that promised to restore these ancients to the vigor of their youth.

I turned onto the Rua do Lavradio and saw Scenarium. The bar occupied all three floors of two adjacent buildings, the façades of each suffering, like so many of their brethren in the area, from considerable age and neglect. The light and music emanating from the interior were startlingly vibrant and alive by contrast. A long queue of cars waited in the street in front, as though in awe or homage. I stood before the large, open entranceway for a moment, surprised to note that my heart was beating rapidly, remembering the concentrated time I had spent with Naomi in Tokyo, and how long it had been since I had promised I would be in touch.

I walked in and glanced around. Hot spots first, by instinct and long habit: seats facing the entrance, partially concealed corners, ambush positions. I detected no problems.

I moved inside. The interior was vast, and decorated like a Hollywood prop warehouse. Everywhere there were antiques and curios: iron cash registers, a red British telephone booth, a cluster of parasols, busts and statues, shelves of colored bottles and jugs. Even the tables and chairs looked vintage. Had it been less capacious, it would have felt cluttered.

The ceilings were high and of bare wood, the walls stone and alabaster. In the center of the room, about ten meters in, the ceiling disappeared and the room was open to the second and third floors above. Below this space, a three-man band was performing “De Mais Ninguém,” “No One’s But Mine,” Marisa Monte’s modern classic of choro, a style that might loosely be thought of as Brazilian jazz, given that both choro and jazz are based on improvisation and the mixture of African and European musical elements. But choro, though less widely known, is in fact older than jazz, and has a distinct and sometimes melancholy sound of its own. The crowd, clustered around warrens of wooden tables and five across at couches along the walls, was singing along passionately.

I made my way to a staircase in back, which I took to the second floor. This, too, was crowded with diners, and no less replete with ancient odds and ends, but was somewhat less boisterous than the area below.

The third floor was quieter still. For a few moments, I leaned against the railing surrounding the open center of the floor, gazing down at the band, at the patrons at the tables before the stage, and at the waiters crossing between, and felt an odd sadness descend, both remote and heavy, as though I was watching this lively scene not so much from on high but rather from an impossibly detached and alienated distance.

A waiter came by and asked in Portuguese if he could bring me anything.

“I’m looking for Naomi,” I told him.

“She’s downstairs, in the office,” he said. “Who shall I tell her is looking for her?”

I paused, then said, “Her friend from Japan.”

He nodded and moved off.

I walked over to the end of the room and out onto one of the balconies overlooking the Rua do Lavradio. I leaned against the railing, pitted and worn as driftwood, and felt the old surreal calm steal over me, the kind I always feel just before the final moments of a job, like a sniper relaxing into his shot. There was nothing I could do now. It would turn out the way it would turn out.

A few minutes passed. I heard the floorboards behind me creaking with someone’s rapid approach. I turned and saw Naomi, her hair longer than it had been in Tokyo, her caramel skin darker, and when she saw that it was me her face lit up in an enormous smile and she made a sound of almost childlike delight, and then she was in my arms, pulling me close and squeezing hard.

She smelled the way I remembered, sweet, and somehow also wild, her own scent, which I will always associate with heat and wet and tropical ardor. Her body felt good, too, petite but ripe in all the right places, and her shape, suddenly in my arms, along with her scent, flooded my mind with a jumble of conflicted memories.

She pulled back after a long moment and glanced down at what she had already felt was there, then punched me in the shoulder, hard. Her face was mock-angry, but I saw some real distress in her eyes, as well.

“Do you know how many times I promised myself I wouldn’t do that?” she asked in her Portuguese-accented English.

“How many?”

“A lot. Most recently as I was coming up the stairs over there.”

“I’m glad you didn’t listen.”

“Why didn’t you call me? Why did you wait so long? I thought that maybe you weren’t interested. Or that, after everything that had happened, something bad had happened to you.”

“You were wrong about the first one, but were almost on the mark with the second.”

“What happened?”

Her green eyes were so earnest. It made me smile. “I had to settle some things in Tokyo,” I said. “It took a while.”

“You came all the way from Tokyo?”

“I’ve been moving around a lot.”

“Are we going to keep secrets after everything that happened between us?”

“Especially after that,” I said, telling her the truth. But she looked hurt, so I added, “Let’s just spend a little time together first, okay? It’s been a while.”

There was a pause. She nodded and said, “You want a drink?”

I nodded back. “Love one.”

“A single malt?” she asked, remembering.

I smiled. “How about a caipirinha, instead?” The caipirinha is Brazil’s national cocktail. It’s made with cachaça-a Brazilian liquor made from distilled sugar-cane juice-along with lime, sugar, and ice, and I’d grown fond of the drink during my time in the country.

“You know a lot about Brazil,” she said, looking at me.

I realized it might have been safer to go with the single malt, which she had been expecting. “Go ni itte wa, go ni shitagae,” I said with a shrug, switching to Japanese. When in Rome, do as the Romans do.

She smiled. “It’s a good choice,” she said. “We make a great caipirinha.”

I raised my eyebrows. “ ‘We’?”

Her smile widened. “I’m one of the owners.”

“I’m impressed,” I said, looking around and then back to her. “How did that happen?”

She smiled and said, “First, the caipirinha.”

We sat near the windows, open to the air outside, in the semidark of the third floor. A waiter brought us a pitcher of caipirinha and two glasses, and, as Naomi had promised, the drink was expertly made: astringent but sweet, cold and strong, redolent of the tropics. Unlike whiskey, with its decades of associations, the taste of caipirinha holds no memories for me.

I asked her how she wound up coming to own a place like Scenarium, and she explained that it was part serendipity, part her father’s connections. The government was investing in restoring the Lapa district-which explained some of the renovations I had noticed-and was offering tax breaks to new businesses in the area. She had some money saved, and some entertainment business expertise, from her time in Tokyo, so her father had put her in touch with a group that was hoping to open a bar/restaurant.

“What about you?” she asked me. “What have you been doing?”

I took a sip of caipirinha. “Figuring some things out. Trying to get a new business going.”

“Something safer than the last one?”

She didn’t know the specifics. Just that whatever I did had a tendency to put me in touch with some shady characters and that it had nearly gotten both of us killed in Tokyo. “If I’m lucky,” I told her.

“It looks like you’re staying in shape,” she observed.

I smiled. “Pilates.”

“And you’re tan. You get that dark in Tokyo?”

She was zeroing in. I should have expected that.

Maybe you did. Maybe you wanted that.

But I wasn’t ready to tell her. “You know how it is, with all that fluorescent lighting,” I said.

She didn’t laugh. “I’m getting the feeling that you’ve been in Rio for a while.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Why did you wait so long?” she went on after a moment. “To look me up. I’m not mad. And only a little hurt. I just want to know why.”

I drank some more and considered. “I can be a danger to the people I get close to,” I said after a moment. “Maybe you noticed that, in Tokyo.”

“That was a long time ago. In another place.”

I nodded, thinking of Holtzer, the late CIA Chief of Tokyo Station, and how he’d reappeared in my life in Tokyo like a resurgent disease, very nearly managing to have me killed in the process. Of how the Agency had patiently watched Midori, hoping she would lead them to me. “It’s never that long ago,” I said.

We were quiet for a while. Finally she asked, “How long will you be in Rio?”

I looked around. “I don’t want to complicate your life,” I said.

“You came all the way out here to tell me that? You should have just sent me a damn postcard.”

I had tried to resist her charms in Tokyo because I knew it would all end badly. None of that had changed.

Yet here I was.

“I’d like to stick around for a while,” I told her. “If that’s okay with you.”

She offered me a small smile. “We’ll see,” she said.

We made love that night, and again and again on the nights that came after. She had a small high-rise apartment near the Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas, just slightly removed from the crowded beaches and trendy boutiques of Ipanema. From one of her windows there was a view of nearby Corcovado, or Hunchback Mountain, topped by the massive, illuminated statue of Christo Redentor, Christ the Redeemer, his head bowed, his arms outstretched in benediction to the city below him, and on some nights I would gaze out upon this edifice while Naomi slept. I would stare at the statue’s distant shape, perhaps daring it to do something-strike me down if it wanted, or show some other sign of sentience-and, after an uneventful interregnum, I would turn away, never with satisfaction. The statue seemed to mock me with its muteness and its immobility, as though offering the promise, if of anything, not of redemption, but rather of a reckoning, and at a time of its choosing, not of mine.

One rainy morning, about a month after I’d gone to see Naomi at Scenarium and started spending time with her, I left her apartment for a workout at Gracie Barra. It was a Friday, and training would be in shorts and tee-shirts, without the heavy cotton judogi. I took the stairs to the third floor, kicked off my sandals, and stepped onto the mat.

On the far side of the room a heavily muscled Caucasian man was hanging from the bar in front of the cartoon Tasmanian Devil that serves as the academy’s logo and mascot. He was barefoot and bare-chested, wearing only a pair of navy shorts, and his torso gleamed under a coating of oily sweat. He saw me come in and dropped to the floor, the move smooth and silent despite his bulk.

The sandy-colored hair was longer now, longer even than the ponytail he had once sported, and he wore a goatee that had originally been a full beard, but I recognized him immediately. I knew him only as Dox, his nom de guerre. He was an ex-marine, one of their elite snipers, and, like me, had been recruited by the Reagan-era CIA to equip and train the Afghan Mujahideen, who were then battling the invading Soviet army. We had each spent two years with what Uncle Sam at the time affectionately referred to as the Muj, more recently regarded with less warmth as the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and I hadn’t seen him, or missed him, since then.

He walked over, a grin spreading as he approached. “Wanna roll around a little?” he asked in the hayseed twang I remembered.

I noted that he had no place to conceal a weapon or transmitter. I wondered whether the attire had been chosen deliberately, to reassure me. Dox liked to play the hick, and a lot of people bought the act, but I knew he could be subtle when he wanted to be.

This was obviously not a social call, but I wasn’t concerned for my immediate safety. If Dox had any ill intent, the third floor of Gracie Barra would be a poor place to carry it out. He was an obvious foreigner, would have checked in at the front desk, and would be dealing with dozens of witnesses.

“Let me warm up first,” I said, without returning his grin.

“Shit, man, I’m already warmed up. Pretty soon I’m going to be warming down. Been here almost an hour, waiting for someone new to train with.” He jumped up and down a few times on his toes and flexed his considerable arms back and forth.

I looked around. Although morning classes at Barra tend to be more sparsely attended than the evening equivalent, there were about twenty people practicing on the mat, some within earshot. I decided to hold off on the questions I wanted to put to him.

“Why don’t you go with one of these guys?” I asked, looking over at some of the other men who were training.

He shook his head. “I already went with a few of them.” He smiled, then added, “Don’t think they liked me. Think they find me… unorthodox.”

“Unorthodox” was in fact the origin of the nom de guerre. He had been one of the younger guys in our happy few, having left his beloved Corps under cloudy circumstances not long before. There was a rumor that he had roughed up a superior officer, although Dox himself never spoke of it. Whatever it had been, it did seem to impel the young man-who, unlike most of his peers in Afghanistan, had been just a little too young for service in Vietnam-to try to prove himself. He liked to accompany the Muj on ambushes despite his “train only” mandate, and was well respected because of it. He made his own way, developing a reputation for unusual, even bizarre tactics, usually involving improvised explosive devices that left the Soviets firing at an enemy that had long since faded back into unreachable mountain caves. Nor did he confine himself to training new snipers-he went out and did some hunting himself.

His physical conditioning methods, I remembered, were also unconventional: he lifted weights with fuel drums, and would sometimes stand on his head, his hands laced behind his neck, for a half hour or more. A lot of people had underestimated him because of his unusual habits, his good ol’ boy routine. I wasn’t going to make that mistake.

“I’ll let you know when I’m ready,” I told him, rotating my head, loosening my neck.

He gave me the grin again. “I’ll be right here.”

He walked over to the wall and popped up into a headstand. Christ, he was still doing that shit.

I stretched and worked through a series of Hindu squats, neck bridges, and other calisthenics until I felt sufficiently limbered. Then I stood and signaled to Dox, who had been watching from his headstand. He dropped his legs to the floor, came to his feet, and strolled over.

“You’re good, man, I can see it. Rolling through on those neck bridges smooth. You’re staying in shape.”

Although he’d been damn effective in the field, in other contexts Dox had always talked too much for my taste. He still had the habit, it seemed. “You want to start standing, or on the ground?” I asked.

“Whatever you want, man,” he said. “It’s your place.”

If he’d intended the comment to rattle me, he’d failed. But I did feel some irritation, mild for the moment. I thought I might not be able to respond as quickly as decorum ordinarily demanded when he tapped out from a submission hold.

I nodded and started circling. He got the idea and followed suit.

We closed and I took the back of his neck in my right hand, my elbow down, pressed in against his clavicle and chest, controlling his forward movement. He grabbed a similar hold with his right and yanked my head toward his, the movement fast enough to almost be a head butt. I looked down in time to take the impact on the top of my skull, where it didn’t do anything more than hurt. My irritation edged up a notch. But before I had a chance to react further, he started muscling me with the neck hold, jerking me left, right, forward and back. He was using his hand and elbow confidently, which showed some training, and he was strong as hell.

Time to change tactics. I snapped his neck toward me, and then, as he pulled back, used the hold to launch myself into the air under him. I wrapped my legs around his waist and dragged him down to the mat. I had expected him to try to retreat from my “guard,” as the position is known in jujitsu, but instead he went the opposite way, grabbing and twisting my head in both pawlike hands and attacking the underside of my jaw with the top of his head. It felt like someone was trying to run a pile driver up through my skull. To relieve the pressure, I unlocked my ankles from around his back, brought my knees to his chest, and started pushing him away.

Once again, his reaction showed training: he wrapped his right arm around my left ankle from the inside out and dropped back to the mat, trying for what I recognized as a sambo foot lock. Sambo is a variety of Russian wrestling. It’s distinguished by, among other things, its emphasis on foot, knee, and ankle locks, some of which can be applied so swiftly and can cause such extensive damage that they’ve been outlawed from various grappling competitions.

I shot my right foot into his neck and jerked the other leg back, just barely getting it clear from between his biceps and ribs. He tried to scramble away, and as we scuffled I managed to throw my right leg over his left and across his body and to catch his left toes under my right armpit. Before he could kick free, I over-hooked his heel with the inside of my right wrist; clasped my hands together and clamped my elbows to my sides; and arched back and twisted to my left in my own little demonstration of sambo prowess, a classic heel hook.

Despite the technique’s name, the attack is to the knee joint, not the heel. The heel serves only as the lever, and I had a nice grip on Dox’s. He tried to kick with his right leg, but from this position the kicks were feeble. I twisted a fraction more and he gave up that strategy.

“Tap, tap,” he said. “You got me.”

“Who sent you here?”

“Hey, I said ‘tap!’ Come on, now!”

I twisted another fraction and he yelped. “Who sent you?” I asked again.

“You know who sent me,” he said, grimacing. “Same outfit as last time.”

“Yeah? How did they know where to look?”

“I don’t know!”

He tried to push my leg off. I squeezed my knees tighter and twisted his heel another millimeter.

“Fuck!” he said, loud enough for other people to hear. “C’mon, man, I seriously don’t know!”

His breathing was getting more labored, as much from pain as from exertion. I looked in his eyes.

“Hey, Dox,” I said, my voice calm, almost a whisper. “I’m going to count to three. If you haven’t told me what I want to know by then, I’m going to twist as hard as I can. Ready? One. Two. Thr-”

“The girl! The girl! They paid her, or something. I don’t know the details.”

I almost twisted anyway.

“What girl?”

“You know. The Brazilian chick. Naomi something.”

I was less surprised than I would have imagined. I’d have to think about that, later.

“Who’s your handler?”

“Jesus Christ, man, I’ll tell you what you want to know. You don’t have to… fuck! Kanezaki! Ethnic Japanese guy, about thirty, wire-rimmed glasses, says he knows you.”

Kanezaki. I should have known. I’d let him live when I’d first found him trying to tail me. I wondered briefly whether that had been a mistake.

I noticed that several people were watching us, including Carlinhos, the founder of the academy and its chief instructor. No one was moving to interfere, recognizing, as Brazilians do, that this problem was homem homem-man to man-and not yet their concern. Still, I didn’t want to draw any more attention to myself. I released his leg and disengaged.

The tension ran out of his body and he slumped onto his back, cradling his injured knee. “Oh, man, I can’t believe you did that,” he said. “That was totally unnecessary, man.”

I didn’t respond.

“What if I really hadn’t known, huh? What then?”

I shrugged. “Surgery to reconstruct the anterior and posterior cruciate ligaments and menisci, then maybe a six- to twelve-month rehabilitation. Lots of painkillers that wouldn’t work nearly as well as you’d want.”

“Shit,” he grunted. A minute or so passed. Then he sat up and looked at me. He flexed his leg and flashed his indefatigable grin.

“I almost had you, man. And you know it.”

“Sure,” I said, looking at him. “Almost.” I stood. “Where did you learn the sambo?”

The grin widened. “Since the dreaded Iron Curtain got lifted, I’ve been working some with the Ruskies.”

“They let you in, after some of the shit you pulled on them in ’Stan?”

He shrugged. “It’s a whole new world, partner, with whole new enemies. I’m helping them with their Chechen problem now, so we’re like old buddies.”

I nodded. “Let’s go somewhere where we can talk.”

We grabbed our bags and left without changing. I still had the bug and transmitter detector Harry had once made for me. It lay quietly in my bag, powered up from its daily charging, and I knew neither Dox nor his belongings was wired. But that didn’t mean he was alone.

I took him along a circuitous series of quiet neighborhood streets. Twice we got in and out of taxis. I stayed with generic countersurveillance techniques, not wanting to take specific advantage of the area’s features lest he conclude by my intimate knowledge of the local terrain that I must be a resident. He knew what I was doing and didn’t protest.

By the time we had reached the beach at São Conrado, I knew we were clean. The rain had stopped and we strolled down to the edge of the water. The tide was receding, giving up wet sand like a defeated army abandoning terrain it could no longer control.

A minute passed. Neither of us spoke.

A ball from a nearby game of beach soccer rolled our way. Dox picked it up and threw it back at the brown-skinned kid who was chasing after it. The kid waved his thanks and went back to the game. I watched him for a moment, wondering what it would be like to grow up like that, in a city by the sea with nothing worse to do than play soccer on the sand.

“We done with the spy stuff?” Dox asked me.

I nodded, and after a moment he went on.

“Nice setup you got going here,” he said. “Good weather, the ocean… And man, the women! I’ve been falling in love maybe three times a day. First morning, I got to my hotel, girl at the reception desk, man, they practically had to resuscitate me she was so fine.”

“You could be a travel writer,” I told him.

“Hey, I’d take it. It’s tough for guys like us, you know? You get a certain résumé, you only get hired for certain jobs.”

“You seem to be doing all right,” I observed.

He kicked some sand and looked out at the ocean. “Sure is nice here, though. You been here long?”

The hayseed accent was getting thicker. I wasn’t going to fall for it, but no sense calling him on it, either. Better to have him assume that I was underestimating him the way he was used to being underestimated.

“Couple months,” I told him. “I move around a lot. So people like you can’t find me.”

He frowned. “C’mon, what else was I going to do? The lucky ones find a gig bodyguarding rich assholes, doing threat assessments, living the good life in the guest quarters of a house in Brentwood, hardening the soft targets who should have gotten culled early on to improve the gene pool like nature intended. The really lucky ones teach Hollywood types how to act like soldiers, or they get to blow shit up for the cameras. The unlucky ones? Mall security guards and rent-a-cops. I didn’t get a shot at the first, and fuck the second. So here I am.”

“Why not go with Blackwater, one of those outfits?”

He shrugged. “I tried it. But I discovered that the corporate world just didn’t offer me appropriate financial opportunities. And you know what they say about opportunity, buddy. It only knocks once.”

We were silent again for a moment. I asked, “Why’d they send you?”

He reached down and rubbed his knee. “You know why. We know each other, they figure you trust me.” He smiled. “Don’t you?”

“Sure,” I told him. “Completely.”

“Well, that’s it,” he went on, pretending he was too slow to understand sarcasm. “Plus, I figure they want you to hear from me that what they’ve got in mind is real, get you interested that way. I’m like a customer reference, you know what I mean?”

“Sure,” I said again.

“Okay, so here’s the score. I’ve been doing some work for Uncle Sam, deniable shit, off the books. High risk, high ‘they’ll fuck you in the end’ potential, but lucrative.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. They thought you might be interested. But contacting you wasn’t my idea, by the way. I didn’t even know you were still around, man. A lot of people we knew in ’Stan, they’re not breathing so much these days.”

“Whose idea, then?”

“Look, there’s a program. Something new, something big. They’re hiring people like me and you, paying good money, is what I’m saying.”

“Dox, do you know what a ‘pronoun’ is?”

He frowned. Then his face brightened. “Ah, I know what you mean. I keep saying ‘they’ and shit like that. Not telling you who really.”

I looked at him and waited.

He smiled and shook his head. “C’mon, man, you know who ‘they’ is. Christians In Action.” He shivered in mock excitement. “The Company.”

“Right.”

“They’ve got some sort of new mandate. You should hear it from them.”

“I’d like to hear it from you first.”

“Hey, I don’t have all the details. And I can’t give you the specifics about what I’ve been up to. I’ll just tell you that they’re paying me a lot of money to make certain people who are causing problems stop causing problems. They want to make the same offer to you.”

“Through your handler?”

He nodded. “I’ve got a number for you to call.”

I wrote the number down in code, then left him there and made my way back to Naomi’s apartment. The move was predictable, and I took extensive precautions. The caution was mostly reflex, though. If they’d wanted to kill me, they wouldn’t have sent someone I knew to contact me first. They would have known that doing so would only tune up my alertness, possibly even convince me to run.

No, I had a feeling Dox’s story was straight. But no sense being sloppy, regardless.

I thought on the way to Naomi’s about what Dox had told me. The Agency must have connected the bodies outside Naomi’s Tokyo apartment with the contemporaneous death of Yukiko, the ice bitch who had set up and then disposed of Harry after the yakuza had used him to find me. They knew, despite the absence of real proof, that I’d been involved in all those killings. They knew that Naomi and Yukiko had both been dancers at the same Nogizaka club. It wouldn’t be too great a leap to deduce, from the pieces they had, a connection between Naomi and me.

I used the intercom at the front entrance. Naomi was surprised that I was back, but she buzzed me in. I took the stairs. She was waiting, holding the door open for me.

I went in. The room smelled of brewing coffee. Her hair hung wet against the shoulders of a white terry-cloth robe-she had just gotten up and out of the shower, it seemed.

“Someone was following me this morning,” I told her.

“Following you?” she asked.

“Yeah. Not in a good way.”

“A mugger?”

“Not a mugger. A pro. Someone who knew just where to go.”

She looked at me, her expression more frightened than confused.

“Tell me what’s going on, Naomi.”

There was a long pause, then she said, “I didn’t tell them anything.”

“Tell who?”

“I don’t know exactly. They call every month or so. It started when I came back to Brazil from Tokyo. Someone came to Scenarium and started asking me about you.”

“Describe him.”

“He called himself Kanematsu. American, but ethnic Japanese. He had slicked hair and wire-rimmed glasses. Thirtyish, I think, but younger-looking. He told me he was with the U.S. government and that he was a friend of yours but wouldn’t say more than that.”

Kanezaki again, operating under a pseudonym. “What did you tell him?” I asked.

She looked at me, her expression an odd mixture of vulnerability and defiance. “I told him I knew you, yes, but that I didn’t know where you were or how to find you.”

If that was true, it was also smart. If she’d denied even knowing me they would have known she was lying. They would have assumed the rest was a lie, too, and might have started to pressure her.

“And after that?”

She shrugged. “I get a call once a month or so. Always from the same guy. And I always tell him the same thing.”

I nodded, considering. “What did they offer you?” I asked.

She looked down, then back at me. “Twenty-five thousand U.S.”

“Just for putting them in touch with me?”

She nodded.

“Well, it’s good to be appreciated,” I said. “Did the guy you met leave you any way of contacting him?”

She got up and walked into her bedroom. I heard a drawer open, then close. She came back and wordlessly handed me a card. It included an e-mail address and a phone number. The latter had a Tokyo prefix. It was the same number I had just gotten from Dox.

“Twenty-five thousand is a lot of money,” I said, flipping the card around in my fingers.

She stared at me.

“You were never tempted to take it?” I asked.

Her eyes narrowed. “No.”

“Not even with everything you’ve invested in the restaurant? That kind of cash would be a big help.”

“You think I’m going to give you up?” she asked, her voice rising. “For money?”

I shrugged. “You never told me about any of this. Until I pressed you.”

“I was afraid to tell you.”

“And you kept the card. A keepsake? Souvenir?”

There was a pause. She said, “Fuck you, then.”

I told myself I should have seen this coming.

I told myself it was all right, that I wasn’t disappointed, that it was better this way.

I wondered in a detached way whether it was all part of some cosmic punishment for Crazy Jake, the blood brother I had killed in Vietnam. Or perhaps for the other things I’ve done. To be periodically tantalized by the hope of something real, something good, always knowing at the same time that it was all going to turn to dust.

Maybe she didn’t tell them anything. Maybe they nailed you some other way.

Then why didn’t she say anything to you? And why did she keep that card?

I had convinced myself that, in Rio, I had become safe enough to see her. I realized now that I’d been wrong. The disease I carried was still communicable.

And still potentially fatal. Because, even if I could trust her to stay quiet, the Agency was watching her. She had become a focal point, a nexus, just like Harry had been. And Harry had wound up dead. I didn’t want that to happen to her.

Well, now for the hard part. You don’t have to like it, a boot camp instructor had once told me. You just have to do it.

I looked at her for a long moment. Her eyes were angry, but I saw hope in them, too. Hope that I would put my arms around her and pull her close, apologize, say I’d just been startled, that I’d been out of line.

I got up and looked into those beautiful green eyes, now widening with surprise, with hurt. I wondered if she could see the sadness in mine.

“Goodbye, Naomi,” I said.

I left. I told myself again that I wasn’t disappointed, that I wasn’t even terribly surprised. I learned a long time ago not to trust, that faith is to life what sticking your chin out is to boxing. I told myself it was good to get some further confirmation of the essential accuracy of my worldview.

I took extra precautions to ensure I wasn’t being followed. Then I went to a quiet beach near Grumari and sat alone and looked out at the water.

Don’t blame Naomi, I thought. Anyone would have given you up.

Not Midori, was the reply. And then I thought, No, you’re just trying to turn her into something too good to be true, something impossible.

But maybe she really was that good, and now I was just trying to dampen it, debase it, cheapen the consequence of what I’d lost.

I guess you can never really know, I thought. But then how do you decide?

Doesn’t matter how it gets decided. Just that you do the deciding.

I shook my head in wonder. Midori was still throwing me off, all these months later and half a world away. Making me doubt myself, my judgments.

What does that tell you?

That one I didn’t answer. I already knew.

I sat and thought for a long time. About my life in Rio. About how Naomi had come into it, and how she was then suddenly gone. About what I ought to do now.

A breeze kicked up along the sand. I felt empty. The breeze might have been blowing straight through me.

I supposed I could just leave it all behind me. Bolt for the exit again, go somewhere new, invent another Yamada.

I shook my head, knowing I wasn’t ready for that, not so soon after the last time. The thought of doing it all again felt like nothing but dread.

Which made the conclusion that followed suspect, a possible rationalization. The conclusion went like this: It would be better to know what they want, anyway. To take the initiative, rather than passively waiting for whatever they have in mind.

All right then. I left the beach, and called Kanezaki from a pay phone. There was a decent chance they would track the call to Rio, but they obviously already knew I was here.

The phone rang twice. “Yeah,” I heard him say. He sounded groggy.

It was early afternoon in Rio, and Tokyo was twelve hours ahead. “Hope I didn’t wake you,” I said.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said, recognizing my voice. “I had to get up to answer the phone, anyway.”

I was surprised to hear myself chuckle. “Tell me what you want.”

“Can we meet?”

“I’m in Rio for a few more days,” I told him. “After that I won’t be reachable.”

“All right, I’ll meet you in Rio.”

“Glad I was able to provide you with the excuse.”

There was a pause. “Where and when?”

“Have you got a GSM phone, something you use when you travel?” Unlike Japanese cell phones, a GSM unit would work in Brazil and most of the rest of the world.

“I do.”

“All right. Give me the number.”

He did. I wrote it down, then said, “I’ll call you on this number the day after tomorrow, when you’re in town.”

“All right.”

I hung up.

Two days later, I called him. He was staying at the Arpoador Inn on the Rua Francisco Otaviano in Ipanema, an inexpensive hotel located right on Ipanema’s famous beach.

“How are we going to do this?” he asked.

“Have a cab take you to Cristo Redentor, Christ the Redeemer,” I told him. “From there, head southwest on foot along the road through the Parque Nacional da Tijuca, the national park. I’ll find you in there. Start out from the statue in one hour.”

“All right.”

An hour later I had made myself comfortable on a trail overlooking the road through the national park, about a kilometer from the statue. Kanezaki appeared on time. I watched him pass my position, waited to ensure that he was alone, then cut down to the road and caught up with him from behind.

“Kanezaki,” I said.

He spun, startled to hear my voice so close. “Shit,” he said, perhaps a little embarrassed.

I smiled. He looked a little older than he had the last time I had seen him, leaner, more seasoned. The wire-rimmed glasses no longer made him look bookish. Instead, they gave his face… focus, somehow. Precision.

The bug detector was silent. I patted him down, took his cell phone for safekeeping, and nodded my head toward the trail from which I had just descended. “This way,” I said.

I led him back to a secondary road in the park, where we walked until we found a cab. A few deft countersurveillance maneuvers later, we were comfortably ensconced in the Confeitaria Colombo, a coffee shop founded in 1894 that, but for the tropical atmosphere and the surrounding sounds of animated Portuguese, can convey the illusion of an afternoon in Vienna. I used English to order a basic espresso, not wanting Kanezaki to see any more of my familiarity with the local terrain, and he followed suit.

“We want your help again,” he told me, as soon as the espressos had arrived and the waitress had moved off. Right to the point. Like Tatsu. I knew there was a relationship there, each believing the other to be a source, with Tatsu’s view being the more accurate. I wondered if Kanezaki was emulating the older, more experienced man.

“Like you wanted it last time?” I asked, my eyebrows arched slightly in mild disdain.

He shrugged. “You know I was in the dark about all that as much as you were. This time it’s straightforward. And sanctioned.”

“Sanctioned by whom?”

He looked at me. “By the proper authorities.”

“All right,” I said, taking a sip from the porcelain demitasse. “Tell me.”

He leaned forward and put his elbows on the table. “After Nine-Eleven, Congress took the shackles off the Agency. There’s a new spirit in the place. We’re pushing the envelope again, going after the bad guys-”

“The few, the proud…” I interjected.

He frowned. “Look, we’re really making a difference now-”

“Be All You Can Be…” I started to sing.

His jaw clenched. “Do you just enjoy pissing me off?” he asked.

“A little bit, yes.”

“It’s petty.”

I took another sip of espresso. “What’s your point?”

“I wish you’d just listen.”

“So far I’ve listened to five clichés, including something about shackled envelopes. I’m waiting for you to actually say something.”

He flushed, but then nodded and even managed a chuckle. I smiled at his composure. He had matured since I had last seen him.

“Okay,” he said. “Remember that Predator drone that took out Abu Ali and five other Qaeda members with a Hellfire missile in Yemen in November 2002? That was one of ours.”

“That’s what was in the papers,” I said.

“Well, what’s not in the papers is the full extent of this kind of clandestine activity. The Agency has won a tug-of-war with the Pentagon over who’s responsible for these things. The Pentagon tried, but they can’t move fast enough to act on the intelligence we produce. So we’ve been tasked with the action ourselves. And we’re doing it.”

I waited for him to go on.

“So now we have a new mandate: no more Nine-Elevens. No more sneak attacks. We’ve been charged with doing whatever it takes-and I mean whatever-to disrupt the international terrorist infrastructure: the financiers, the arms brokers, the go-betweens.”

I nodded. “You want me for the ‘whatever’ part.”

“Of course,” he said, almost impatiently, and this time I was sure he’d gotten the habit from Tatsu, who had a way of uttering those two syllables as though barely managing to avoid instead saying, Are you always this obtuse?

He took a sip from his cup. “Look, some of the individuals in question enjoy a lot of political protection. Some of them, in fact, are technically U.S. citizens.”

“ ‘Technically’?”

He shrugged. “They could be classified as enemy combatants.”

I closed my eyes and shook my head.

“What?” he asked.

I smiled. “Just thinking about the way the end justifies the means.”

“Sometimes it does.”

“Their end, or only yours?”

“Let’s save the philosophical discussion,” he said. “The point is, even post-Nine-Eleven, even in the current, security-minded climate, it wouldn’t do to just take some of these people out. Certainly not with a Hellfire missile. Better if their demise were to look… you know, natural.”

“Assuming that I were interested, and I’m not, what would be in it for me?”

“You’re not interested? You’re going to a lot of trouble to meet me, for someone who’s not interested.”

A year ago my protestation would have flustered him. Now he was counterpunching. Good for him.

“It’s no trouble. I was here because of a woman. When I found out she was working for you, I had to break things off. So here I am, killing a few days before heading home.”

If he was surprised to learn that I knew about his connection with Naomi, he didn’t show it. He looked at me and said, “Some people think Rio is your home.”

I returned his stare, and something in my eyes made him drop his gaze. “If you want to play fishing games with me, Kanezaki,” I said, “you’re just wasting time. But if I think your I-took-a-course-at-Langley-on-verbal-manipulation-techniques bullshit contains an element of threat, I’ll take you out before you even have a chance to beg me not to.”

I felt fear flow off him in a cold ripple. I knew what he had just seen in his mind’s eye: the way I had broken his bodyguard’s neck, an act that would have looked as casual to Kanezaki as unzipping to take a leak. Which is exactly the way I had wanted him to see it. And remember it.

“The money could set you up well,” he said, after a moment.

“I’m already set,” I answered, which was a lie, unfortunately.

We were both quiet for a moment. Then he said, “Look, I’m not doing any verbal manipulation here. Or at least no more than you’d expect. And I’m definitely not threatening you. I’m just telling you that we could really use your help to accomplish something important, and that you could make a lot of money in the process.”

I suppressed a grin. It was nicely done.

“Tell me who and how much,” I said. “And we’ll see if there’s anything worth discussing after that.”

The target was Belghazi, of course. The first of many, Kanezaki told me, if I was interested. Two hundred thousand U.S. a pop, delivered any way I wanted, fifty thousand upfront, the rest upon successful completion. On expenses I’d be out of pocket, which minimized paperwork-and paper trails-for the bean-counting set, a rule we wound up having to change somewhat given the sums I needed to operate in the VIP rooms of the Lisboa. The only catch was that it absolutely had to look natural.

It was about what I would have guessed. Enough to create the incentive, but not so much that I wouldn’t be tempted to do it again later. Not a bad deal for them, really-about the cost of a Hellfire or two, and a lot less than a cruise missile. And more deniable than either.

“I’ll think about it,” I told him. “And while I’m thinking, pay Naomi what you owe her.”

“She didn’t hold up her end,” he said, shaking his head, not bothering to deny the connection. “So she’s out of luck.”

“What was ‘her end’?”

“She was supposed to contact us if you contacted her.”

I looked at him. “If she didn’t contact you, how…”

“Voice analysis. Like a lie detector. We used it every time I called her. Every time I asked whether you’d shown up, she said no. On the last time, the machine detected significant stress patterns.”

“So you knew she was lying.”

“Yeah. We sent people to watch her. You know the rest.”

I looked away and considered. So she had been telling me the truth-she really hadn’t given me up. Damn.

Or maybe she had, and Kanezaki was just protecting her. There was no way to know, and I supposed there never would be.

“Pay her anyway,” I said.

He started to protest, but I cut him off. “She still led you to me, even if it was inadvertent. Pay her the fucking finder’s fee.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” he said, after a moment.

I wondered briefly whether this was bullshit, too, designed to make me feel that I’d won something. Again, no way to know.

“I’ll contact you,” I said. “If you’ve paid her, we’ll talk more. If you haven’t, we won’t.”

He nodded.

I thought about adding something about leaving her alone, some threat. But all an admonition would accomplish would be to reveal, more than I already had, that I cared, thereby making Naomi more interesting to them. Better to say nothing, and simply steer clear of her thereafter.

Maybe you could have trusted her after all. The thought was tantalizing.

And sad.

It didn’t matter. Even if there had been some possibility of trust, my reflexive assumptions, my accusations, had extinguished it.

I thought of an apology. But there are things that just aren’t subject to an “I’m sorry” or a “please forgive me” or a “really, I should have known better.”

Let it go, I thought. The twenty-five grand would have to do.

“Now tell me about Dox,” I said.

He shrugged. “I needed someone you knew, so you could see that the program, and the benefits of the program, were real. If it weren’t for that, then, other than your history, you would never have known about him.”

“Are there others?”

He looked at me over the top of his glasses. The look said, You know better than to ask something like that.

I looked back.

After a moment, he shrugged again and said, “I’ll just say that men like you and Dox are rare. And even he can’t operate in some of the places you can. Asia, for example. Also he tends to be a little less subtle in his methods, meaning not well suited for certain jobs. Okay?”

We left it at that. He gave me the URL for a secure bulletin board. I called him a few days later on his Japanese cell phone. He was back in Tokyo. He told me Naomi had gotten the money.

I used a pay phone to call her at Scenarium. The club was noisy in the background. She said, “I didn’t want the fucking money. I could have had it, but I didn’t want it.”

“Naomi…” I started to say. I didn’t know what I was going to add. But it didn’t really matter. She had already hung up.

I looked at the phone for a long time, as though the device had somehow betrayed me. Then I put it back in its cradle. Wiped it down automatically. Walked away.

I went to an Internet café and composed a message. The message was brief. The salient part was the number of an offshore account, to which they could transfer the fifty thousand down payment.

I heard laughter and looked up. Some kids at the terminal next to me, playing an online game.

I wondered for a moment how I had gotten here.

And I wondered if maybe this is what Tatsu had meant when he said I could never retire. That I would inevitably ruin every other possibility.

We shall not cease from exploration, some poet wrote. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time.

How incredibly fucking depressing.