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

4

AFTER LEAVING BELGHAZI’S suite, I took a long, solitary walk along the waterfront. I wanted to think about what had just happened, about what I wanted to happen next.

Delilah. Who was she? How would her presence affect my operation? The same questions, of course, that she would be asking about me.

I knew from her deportment that she was trained. Therefore likely to be working with an organization, rather than on some sort of private mission. And that, despite public appearances, she was no friend of Belghazi’s. She was with him because she wanted something from him, something he kept, or that she thought he kept, on his laptop, but that she hadn’t yet managed to get.

I considered. By conspiring to get me out of the suite, she had sided, at least temporarily, with me. We shared a secret. That secret might become the basis for cooperation, if our interests were sufficiently aligned.

But she also had reason to view me as a threat. There was some hard evidence of her operation against Belghazi, in the form of her dual-purpose cell phone and the boot log on Belghazi’s computer, which the wrong people could find if they knew where to look. If someone like me were to steer them to it, for example.

I realized that my knowledge of that potentially damning evidence gave Delilah a reason to want me out of the way. “Out of the way” might take a variety of different forms, of course, but none of them would be particularly attractive from my standpoint.

Still, it wouldn’t make sense for her to do anything too aggressive without first trying to learn more. If she had struck me as stupid or inexperienced, I might have concluded otherwise. But she’d obviously been around for a while, and she was smart. I thought I could reasonably expect her to play things accordingly.

I smiled. You mean, to play it the way you would. Yes, that was probably true.

Again, she would be coming to similar conclusions, mutatis mutandis, as the lawyers like to say, about me.

So the risk of a meeting seemed manageable. Moreover, avoiding her, and losing an opportunity to acquire additional information, would make proceeding against Belghazi more difficult, possibly more dangerous. Not an easy call, but in the end I decided to go see her at the Mandarin casino.

I used the cell phone to call Kanezaki. It was late, but he answered after only one ring.

“It’s me,” I said.

“Is it a coincidence, or do you just enjoy calling me in the middle of the night?”

“This time it’s both.”

“What do you need?”

“Information,” I said. “Anything you have on a woman I ran into, although I don’t have much for you to go on. She uses the name Delilah, probably among others. I think she’s European, but I’m not sure what nationality. She’s tall, blond, striking looks.”

“You need this information operationally, or are you trying to get a date?”

Maybe he thought that busting my chops would foster “camaraderie.” Or that it would otherwise put us on a more equal footing. Either way I didn’t care for it.

“Also, she’s shacking up with our friend,” I said.

“That’s not much to go on.”

“Is there an echo on this line?” I asked, my voice an octave lower. It seemed he’d recently learned the value of playing up the difficulty of accomplishing whatever he was tasked with, the better to play the hero when he subsequently pulled it off. He was overusing the technique the way a child overuses a new word.

There was a pause that I found satisfying, then he said, “I’m just saying that it might be hard to find anything useful with the particulars you’ve given me.”

“I’m not interested in your assessment of how difficult it might be. What I need is the information. Can you get it or not?”

There was another pause, and I imagined him reddening on the other end of the line. Good. Kanezaki seemed to be getting the idea that I worked for him. Although I supposed this sort of misapprehension was probably common enough among the world’s newly minted Secret Agents, I didn’t like being the subject of it. It might be beneficial for him occasionally to be reminded that I work for myself. That he was a stagehand, not one of the actors.

I heard a voice in the background, muffled but audible. “That’s John, isn’t it,” the voice said. “Let me talk to him!”

Christ, I knew that twang. It was Dox.

There was an exchange that I couldn’t make out, followed by a hiss of static and a clatter. Then Dox was on the phone, his voice booming and full of amusement.

“Hey, buddy, sounds like you’re having yourself a good time there! Are we talking blonde, or brunette? Or Asian? I love those Asian ladies.”

He must have snatched the phone over Kanezaki’s protests. Secret Agents get no respect.

“What are you doing out there?” I asked, smiling despite myself.

“Oh you know, just a meeting with my handler. Going over this and that. What about you? Guess you decided to take advantage of Uncle Sam’s magnanimity. Good for you, and tough luck for the bad guys.”

“You mind putting him back on the phone?”

“All right, all right, no need to act short with me. Just wanted to say hello, and welcome aboard.”

“That was good of you.”

There was a pause, then Kanezaki’s voice came back on. “Hey.”

“Sounds like you’ve got a little date of your own out there,” I said, unable to resist.

“I wouldn’t call it that.” He sounded glum.

I chuckled. “Not unless you’ve done hard time with a cellmate named Bubba.”

He laughed at that, which was good. I needed him to understand who was in charge, but didn’t want to beat him down too hard. His goodwill, his naïve sense of fairness, was a potential asset, and not something to toss away needlessly.

“I’ll check the bulletin board,” I told him. “If you find anything about the woman, just put it up there.”

“Okay.”

I paused, then added, “Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it,” he said, and I thought he might be smiling.

AT ABOUT six o’clock the following evening, I dropped by the Mandarin casino. Delilah had said eight, but I like to show up for meetings early. It helps prevent surprises.

I used the street entrance, preferring to avoid the hotel for the moment. Keiko was out, but I wanted to minimize the chances of my running into her while she was coming or going. I walked up the escalator, nodded agreeably to the guards, and went inside.

The room was large, and largely empty. The pace would pick up later in the evening. For now, the action comprised just a few lonely souls. They seemed lost in the expanse of the room, their play joyless, desultory, as though they’d been looking for a livelier party and found themselves stuck with this one instead.

I spotted Delilah instantly. She was one of a handful of people quietly attending the room’s lone baccarat table, and the only non-Asian in sight. She was dressed plainly, in black pants and a black, shoulderless top. Her hair was pulled back and I saw no signs of makeup or jewelry. If she’d been trying to downplay her looks, though, she hadn’t been notably successful.

I checked the usual hot spots and saw nothing that set off any alarms. So far, my assessment that she wouldn’t yet do anything precipitous seemed correct. But it was too soon to really know. After all, the casino, with its cameras, guards, and other forms of security, would have made a poor place for an ambush. An attack, if one were to come, would happen later.

I bought a handful of chips, then took a seat next to her.

“Early for baccarat,” I said, meaning it’s early for our appointment, but trying to be oblique in case anyone nearby spoke English.

“For both of us, it seems,” she replied, putting her chips down on player and looking up at me sidelong.

I smiled, then placed a bet on the bank. “I hate to get a late start. You get there, the place is already filled up, the odds aren’t as good.”

She returned the smile, and I got my first good look at her eyes. They were deep blue, almost cobalt, and they seemed not only to regard, but somehow to assess, with intelligence and even some humor.

“Yes, early is better,” she said. “It’s a good thing not everyone realizes it. Otherwise you could never beat the crowds.”

I noted that her English, though accented, was idiomatic. She would have learned it young enough to pick up the idiom, but not quite young enough to eradicate the accent.

The banker dealt the cards. I said, “Looks like we’re the only ones who recognize the advantages of a timely arrival.”

She followed my gaze, then looked back at me. “Let’s hope so.”

The dealer turned over the cards. Delilah won, I lost. She collected her chips without looking at me, but made no attempt to hide her smile.

I wanted to get her someplace where we could talk. The casino was a good starting point because it offered us a relatively safe, neutral venue. Also, it provided automatic cover for action: if anyone, Belghazi, for example, saw us here, our presence together would look like a coincidence, each of us presumably having arrived separately for a few rounds of cards or the dice. A corner table in a bar, or a park bench in the shadows, or a walk along the harbor, would offer none of these advantages. But we weren’t going to get anywhere at the baccarat table. Besides, I was losing money.

“I was thinking about going somewhere for a drink,” I said. “Care to join me?”

She looked at me for a moment, then said, “Sure.”

We left through the street exit. As soon as we were out of earshot of the casino’s few patrons, she said, “Not the hotel bar. I’m too well known here. We’ll get a taxi in front of the hotel and go somewhere else. There’s not much chance that any of my acquaintances will show up right now, but just in case, we ran into each other in the Mandarin casino. It was dead. I mentioned that I was going to try the Lisboa. You asked if I wouldn’t mind you catching a cab over with me. Okay?”

I was impressed, although unsurprised. She was obviously in the habit of thinking operationally, and was as matter-of-fact about it as she was effective. I’d already concluded that she was trained. To that assessment I now added a probable minimum of several years of field experience.

“Okay,” I said.

I took us to the Oparium Café, a place I’d found near the new Macau Cultural Center along the Avenida Baia Nova while waiting for Belghazi and getting to know the city. The ground floor featured an oppressively loud band playing some sort of acid-funk and a bunch of deafened teenagers gyrating to the beat. Not the kind of place you’d find someone unfamiliar with the area, especially someone whose tastes ran to things like the Macau Suite at the Mandarin Oriental.

We went upstairs, where it was darker and quieter, and sat at a corner table in a pair of oversized beanbag chairs. The other seating consisted mostly of couches, some of them occupied by couples, a few of them locked in intimate embraces that the shadows only partially obscured. A pretty Portuguese waitress brought us menus. They were written in Chinese and Portuguese. Delilah smiled and said, “I’ll have what you’re having.”

In the dim light her eyes looked more gray than blue. I liked the way the lighting softened her features, the way it rendered her eyes, even her smile, alluringly ambiguous.

I glanced at the menu and saw that they didn’t serve any single malts worth drinking. Instead I ordered us a couple of caipirinhas, which I knew from recent experience would be delicious in the tropical heat.

The waitress departed. We were quiet for a moment. Then Delilah leaned toward me and, looking into my eyes, asked, “Well? You have something you want to give me?”

I looked at her. Why was it that her question seemed suffused with double entendre? She was attractive, of course, more than attractive, but that wasn’t all of it. She had a way of looking at me with a sort of confident sexual appreciation, that was it. As though she was seeing me just the way I might hope a desirable woman would see me.

And she made it seem so natural, so real. I would have to be careful.

“Like what?” I asked, curious to see her reaction if I hit a few back at her.

“Do I need to be more explicit?” she asked, maybe suggestive again.

I wondered what response she was expecting. I knew that my information about her cell phone and the computer boot log would make her view me as a potential threat. And she would probably expect me to try to exploit the video, to hang its existence over her head as a way of protecting myself. I decided to surprise her.

“The thing about the video was a bluff,” I told her. “I think you know that. I was afraid that, without it, you might take a chance on waking Belghazi.”

She paused, then said, “You’re not concerned that, without it, I might take other chances now?”

I shrugged. “Sure I am.”

“Then why are you telling me?”

I looked at her. “I’m not a threat to you.”

She raised an eyebrow. “This is like, what, a dog showing its belly?”

I smiled. “Well, I’ve already seen yours.”

She smiled back. “Yes, you have.”

The smile lingered, along with her eyes, and I felt something stirring down south. But I thought, Don’t be stupid. This is how she plays it, how she gets people to drop their guard.

“Well, you don’t have a video for me,” she said, after a moment. She was still looking into my eyes. “So what do we do next?”

The stirring worsened. I decided I’d have been better off if I could have just removed the damned thing and left it in a drawer for the evening.

But I saw a less extreme means of defending myself.

I thought for a moment about the scores of other men she would have played before me, about how, in her eyes, I was just a new fool, another mark to be led by his dick and manipulated. The thought irritated me, which was what I needed. It short-circuited my unavoidable mechanical reaction and gave me back some of the air I wanted to project.

“Hey, Delilah,” I said softly, letting her see a little coldness in my eyes, “let’s cut the shit. I’m not here to flirt with you. We might be able to help each other, I don’t know. But not if you keep trying to play me like I’m some testosterone-addled fourteen-year-old and you’re my date at the prom. Okay?”

She smiled and cocked her head, and of course her poise only added to her appeal. “Why would I be trying to play you?” she asked.

I wanted to snap her out of this mode, move her outside her comfort zone. So far, I hadn’t managed.

“Because you’re good at it,” I said, still looking at her, “and people like to do what they’re good at. Hell, if they gave out Academy Awards for what you do, I think you’d get Best Actress.”

Her eyes narrowed a fraction, but other than that she kept her cool. Still, I thought I might be heading in the right direction.

“You seem to have a rather low opinion of yourself,” she said.

I smiled, because I’d been half expecting something like that. Most men won’t do anything that could lessen their perceived chances of taking a gorgeous woman to bed. They’re horrified even at the thought that something might accidentally dim the temporary glow of an attractive woman’s sexual adulation, lest all those longing looks be exposed as farce, deflating the always fragile façade of the needy male ego. Delilah knew the dynamic. She had just explicitly acknowledged, even invoked it.

“Actually, I have a rather high opinion of myself,” I said. “But I’ve seen you working Belghazi, and he’s smarter than most. I know what you can do, and I want you to stop doing it with me. Assuming you can stop, of course. Or have you been running this game for so long that you can’t help yourself?”

For the first time I saw her lose a little poise. Her head retracted a fraction in a movement that was not quite a flinch, and her eyes dilated in a way that told me she’d just received a little helping of adrenaline.

“What do you want, then?” she asked, after a moment. Her expression was neutral, but her eyes were angry, her posture more rigid than it had been a moment earlier. The combination made her look quietly dangerous. I realized this was my first peek at the person behind the artifice, my first chance to see something other than what she wanted me to see.

The crazy thing was, it made her look better than ever. It was like seeing a woman’s real beauty after she’s removed the makeup that only served to obscure it, a glimpse of a geisha the more stunning shorn of her ritual white camouflage.

“The same thing you do,” I told her. “I want to make sure we don’t trip all over each other trying to do our jobs and both get killed in the process.”

“And what are our jobs?”

I smiled. “This is going to be tricky, isn’t it,” I said.

“Very,” she said. Her expression had transitioned from I’m-pissed-and-trying-not-to-show-it to something reserved and unreadable. I knew what I’d said had rattled her, although I wasn’t sure precisely what nerve I’d managed to touch, and I admired her swift recovery.

“Why don’t we start with what we know,” I said. “You want something from Belghazi’s computer.”

She raised her eyebrows but said nothing. That hint of incongruous good humor was back in her eyes.

“But you haven’t managed to get it yet,” I went on. “Belghazi keeps the computer with him all the time. When you finally got a crack at it, you couldn’t get past the password protection.”

“We should talk about the other things we know,” she said.

“Yes?”

“Like what you want with Belghazi.”

I shrugged. “I’ve got other business with Belghazi. What’s on his computer doesn’t interest me.”

“Yes, you seemed uninterested in his computer. More interested in him.”

I said nothing. There was no advantage in confirming any of her insights.

“And he was right there. Unconscious. Helpless. I asked myself, ‘Why did this man leave without finishing what he came for?’ ”

“You don’t know what I came for,” I said, but of course she did.

“You’d knocked me down, and I obviously didn’t have a weapon,” she said, looking at me. “I couldn’t have done anything to prevent you. And you knew it. But you didn’t follow through.”

I shrugged, still looking for a way to throw her off. “Maybe I didn’t want to harm a naked woman,” I said.

She shook her head. “I’ve known some hard men, men who can act without compunction. I recognize the type.”

“I wasn’t expecting you. You startled me.”

She smiled, and I knew I wasn’t changing her diagnosis. “Maybe. Or maybe your ‘business’ with Belghazi has to be carried out in a… circumspect way. So that no one would know that any business was done. And you couldn’t pull that off with someone else in the room.”

I hadn’t expected her to follow this line of reasoning. I’m usually good at putting myself in the other person’s shoes, anticipating his next move. But she had outplayed me on this one. Time to try to regain some initiative, give myself a second to think.

“It’s funny, I’m asking myself some of the same things about you,” I said. “For example, ‘Why hasn’t she or her people just taken the computer and run?’ ”

She smiled just a little, maybe conceding the point.

“Let me guess,” I went on. “If Belghazi realized that the information on the computer had been compromised, he would implement countermeasures. No, let me amend that. Because if Belghazi were the only one you were worried about, you’d just put him to sleep yourself and take the briefcase at your leisure. So he’s not the only one who might take countermeasures if it’s discovered that the computer has been compromised. There are others, people or organizations who would be affected by the information you’re trying to acquire. And when you acquire it, it’s critical that they not know. Is that about it? Maybe I’m not the only one whose moves might have to be ‘circumspect.’ ”

She cocked her head slightly as though I’d finally started to say something interesting. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, stealing is easy. Stealing without the victim knowing he’s been robbed, this takes some doing.”

The waitress brought our caipirinhas in frosted glasses and moved away. Delilah tipped hers back and took a long sip. “Like you,” she went on. “Killing is easy. Killing and making it look like something else? That would require some… artistry.”

She used “this” and “that” slightly mechanically, as I would expect from someone who had acquired English later in life. “Stealing” was “this.” “Killing” was “that.” The first was hers, the other, mine. I didn’t think these verbal cues were deliberate. I took them as small, additional signs that my conclusions about what she was after were correct.

We were silent for several moments, each digesting what the other had said, reassessing the situation.

She said, “It seems that we’re in mirror-image positions. Maybe we can help each other.”

“I’m not sure I follow you,” I told her, although I thought I did.

She shrugged. “Your presence makes it difficult for me to do my job. My presence makes it hard for you to do yours. Mirror images.”

“Your mirrors might be a little distorted,” I said, taking a swallow of the caipirinha. “If something happens to you, Belghazi would be alarmed. Or his demise might not look ‘circumspect.’ But if something happens to me…”

Her smile broadened in a way that reminded me of Tatsu, the way he would be pleased when I made a connection he was expecting would be beyond me, and I knew that she was well aware of this flaw in her “mirror image” theory.

“Yes,” she said, “that’s true. My people made the same point when we discussed the situation. Some of them wanted to send a team in to remove you.”

“Did you tell them they’d have to get in line?”

She laughed. “I told them I thought that kind of hostile action would be a mistake. I saw the way you assessed the room when you came into the casino. I see the way you subtly check your back all the time. Even this table, you chose it because it was in the corner. So you could sit with your back to the wall.”

“And you, too.”

“You knew I wouldn’t let you put my back to the stairs, especially after you chose the place. This was a compromise.”

“That’s true.”

“Anyway, you’ve got that weight about you, the feel of experience and competence, even though I think you’re adept at concealing it. I told my people that removing you wouldn’t be easy and would probably involve a mess. The kind of mess that could alert Belghazi that something was wrong. He has very keen instincts, as I think you know. I doubt that anyone has gotten as close to him as you did.”

“Only you.”

She smiled, and I saw the bedroom eyes again. “I have resources that you don’t.” She took a sip of caipirinha. “So I think my description of our positions as ‘mirror image’ is apt.”

“All right. What do you propose?”

She shrugged. “I told my people that moving against you would be a poor option, although we couldn’t rule it out if you insisted on behaving unreasonably. If you gave us no choice.”

I looked at her, letting her see some coldness again. “I doubt that your people were able to get you any background on me,” I told her, “but if they had, they would have told you that I react poorly to threats. Even irrationally.”

“I’m not threatening you.”

“Convince me of that.”

“Look, you know what we want from Belghazi. And we know what you want. Stand down for a few days. Let me get what I need. When I have it, I can get you access.”

“I already have access.”

She shook her head. “That was one in a million. You or someone else must have put something in what he was eating or drinking. If that happens to him again, he’s going to know something is wrong. He’ll react accordingly, stiffen his defenses. And he moves around a lot. You tracked him here, all right, but are you sure you could track his next move?”

She sipped again. “But if you work with me, you have someone on the inside. Once we have what we need, we don’t care what happens to him.”

I thought for a moment. There was something obvious here, something she was avoiding. I decided to test it.

“I’ve got a better idea,” I said. “Help me get close, and I’ll do what I’m here to do. You can take his computer when I’m done.”

She shook her head. “That won’t work.”

“Why not?”

She shook her head again. “It just won’t. I can’t tell you why. We have to do it my way. Give me a little time, and then I’ll help you.”

It was what I thought. The information on Belghazi’s computer would lose its value if Belghazi died before Delilah accessed it.

I looked at her and said, “Even if I needed your help, and I don’t, why would I trust you? Once you’ve gotten what you wanted from the computer, you’d just walk away.”

She shrugged. “But that’s your worst case, isn’t it? You wait a few days and then I’m out of your way. Your best case, though, is that I stick around to help you. And I’ll tell you why you can believe me. Because it would be very much to our advantage if, after we acquire what we need from his computer, Belghazi were to expire naturally. As opposed to… violently.”

“You’d have to be pretty confident that I could make that happen.”

She shrugged again. “Your behavior in his suite tells me that you intend for it to happen that way. And if you are who we think you are, we’re also confident that you have the capability.”

I raised my eyebrows.

“You were right, I had my people run a background check on you,” she went on. “I didn’t have too much for them to go on: Asian male, about fifty, American-accented English, adept at close-quarters combat, good with surreptitious entry, very cool under pressure.”

“Sounds like something you came across in the personals,” I said.

She ignored me. “And probably intending to put Belghazi to sleep in a way that would look natural.”

“Any response?” I asked, my tone mild.

“We had nothing specific in our files,” she said, “but we did come up with some interesting information from open sources, primarily Forbes magazine. A series of articles written by a reporter named Franklin Bulfinch, who died not so long ago in Tokyo. His articles suggested that there is an assassin at work in Japan, an assassin expert at making murder look like anything but.” She paused, looking at me. “I think we may be dealing with this man.”

Whoever they were, they were good, no doubt about it. I liked the way they used open sources. Your typical intelligence service suffers from the belief that if it’s not stamped Top Secret and not nestled between the service’s own mauve-hued folders, it’s not worth considering. But I’ve been privy to some of the secret stuff, as well as to the work of the Bulfinches of the world. I know the spooks would learn more reading Forbes and The Economist than the magazines would learn from perusing “intelligence assessments.”

“How long are we talking about?” I asked.

“Not long. Two days, maybe three.”

“How do you know that?”

“I can’t tell you that. But we know.” She took a sip of caipirinha. “Just trust me.”

I laughed.

She retracted her head in mock indignation. “But I trusted you. I got you out of his suite, didn’t I?”

“When you thought I had a videotape. That’s not trust, it’s duress.”

She smiled, her eyes alight with humor. “You need me to get to him, and you can’t get to him while I’m in the way. This means you’ll have to trust me. Why use an ugly word like ‘duress’?”

I laughed again. What she said was true. I didn’t have a lot of attractive alternatives. I would have to try “trusting” her.

Because direct means of contact would be unacceptably dangerous, we agreed that, if I needed to see her, I would place a small, colored sticker just under the buttons in the Oriental’s four elevators. I had seen the stickers in a local stationery store. The elevator placement would enable me to leave the mark in private, would give Delilah the opportunity to check for it several times a day without going out of her way or otherwise behaving unusually, and would be so small and discreetly placed that anyone who didn’t know what to look for could be expected to take no notice. She would do the same if she needed to see me. The meeting place would be the Mandarin Oriental casino; the time, evening, when Belghazi liked to gamble at the Lisboa.

“I don’t see how Belghazi would hear that we left the casino together tonight,” she said. “But just in case, we’ll use the original story, that I told you I was going to the Lisboa and you asked if we could share a taxi. There are taxis lined up in front of the Oriental all evening, so even if he were inclined to do so, he would never be able to check the story.”

“There are cameras all over the Lisboa casino,” I said, wanting to see how many moves ahead she was thinking. “There won’t be a record of your having gone in tonight.”

“I know. But he has no access to those security tapes. Even if he did, I would tell him that I wanted to get rid of you because you seemed a little too interested, so I went shopping in the hotel arcade, instead. There are no cameras there.”

“What about me?” I asked, already knowing the answer but enjoying her thoroughness.

She shrugged. “You’re Asian, much harder to pick out of the crowd, so it would be harder to be certain that you weren’t there tonight. And even if they could be certain, how would I know why you had decided not to go in? Maybe you hadn’t wanted to go to the Lisboa tonight at all, you were only trying to pick me up. Maybe you were discouraged when I brushed you off, and left.”

I took a long swallow from my glass. “Which would also explain our failure to acknowledge each other if we happen to pass each other in, say, the Mandarin lobby. Ordinarily people who’ve shared some time at the baccarat table and a cab afterward wouldn’t act like strangers afterward.”

She smiled, apparently pleased that I was keeping up with her. “Maybe you were unhappy about the results of our meeting and are in a bit of a sulk?”

“Maybe. But you can’t count on any of this. Even when there’s a reasonable explanation for something, people can overlook it and go straight to assuming the worst.”

“Of course. But again, the overwhelming odds are that no one noticed us and no one cares. The rest is just backup.”

I nodded, impressed. I knew her explanations would go even deeper, positioning her for increasingly remote possibilities. Belghazi learns she was seen in this bar with me; she tells him she was bored because he was gone so much. When I invited her, she came along, then thought better of it. She had lied to him because she didn’t want him to be jealous or to think poorly of her. Confessing to some lesser offense to obscure the commission of the actual crime.

Yeah, she was good. The best I’d come across in a long time.

“I’ll leave first,” she said, getting up. She didn’t need to explain. We didn’t want to be seen together. She started to open her purse.

“Just go,” I told her. “I’ll take care of it.”

She cocked an eyebrow. “Our first date?” She said it only with that attractively wry humor, not playing the coquette.

I smiled at her. “Maybe you better pay up after all. I don’t want you getting the wrong idea.”

She looked at me for a moment, as though considering whether to say something. But in the end she only smiled, then turned and left. I imagined her checking the street through the windows downstairs before moving through the door.

I finished my caipirinha. The couples on the couches continued in their embraces, their soft laughter just reaching me above the music from the ground floor.

I paid the bill and left. I wondered if Keiko would be waiting for me back at the room.

Strangely enough, I hoped the answer was no.