I said, “Don't think much of jellyfish either, eh?”
“Busted. More, please.” She held out her cup. I topped it up again. “It's the one thing on the menu that makes me gag.”
I picked up a napkin. “Do you mind?” I asked.
“Go right ahead,” she said.
I spat the jellyfish into the napkin, then rolled it into a ball.
“Sorry,” she said. “That was a bit of a test.”
“How'd I do?”
“You passed.”
A couple of businessmen beside us were tucking into a lobster pinned to a slab of wood. I saw its front legs move. They picked at it with their chopsticks while it tried in vain to escape. I lost whatever appetite I had left.
The guy doing over “Hard Day's Night” left the stage to wild applause — I guessed because he'd finally finished. “So, what about your boyfriend?” I asked Durban. “Is he going to be joining us?”
She studied me for a moment. “Boyfriend? A, how do you know I'm not married? And B, how do you know who I was talking to?”
“In answer to A, while you're wearing a ring on your wedding finger that suggests you're married, the finger next to it bears the indentation of a ring recently removed. I'd say you've been asked by someone to baby-sit me and you've shifted the ring across to your wedding finger in case I turn out to be creepy and you need an excuse to hurry on home. As for B, and I admit this one's a stretch, that cell ringtone of yours, the tune ‘The One That I Want' from the musical Grease? Just a guess, but, given the title of the song, I'd say that you've downloaded it especially and assigned it to a caller group of one. As I've just established you're not married, that one has to be your boyfriend. Also, it's the time of day when lovers call each other to see what's up” I'd just pulled the investigator's party trick, the equivalent of a clown twisting a balloon into the shape of a poodle. Nothing to get excited about, really, unless you were an impressionable girl with a few drinks in her, thrilled about being a long way from home. I was almost disappointed in myself.
“Hey, not bad. I'm impressed,” she said, gazing at me with, if I wasn't mistaken, lust. “You're right on all counts — even about the baby-sitting gig. I've had to do it a couple of times in recent months and every time I've been hit on by a guy who thinks he can play because he's beyond his spouse's reach — you know, outside the five-hundred-mile zone.”
“The what?”
Mischief curled a corner of her full and, I had to admit, sexy lips. “The chances of bumping into someone you know while you're out on the town, or ending up in bed with someone your partner went to school with, for example, reduce the further away you get from home. Five hundred miles, they say, is when your survival odds are greater than the risk of being caught.”
“Nice to hear something useful is being taught at spy school these days,” I said. Her knee brushed against mine under the table. Her cheeks were flushed with color brought on by the rice wine.
“As for the boyfriend, I've been dating my boss, the deputy assistant director, but it's not going anywhere,” she informed me.
“Why's that?” I asked, not knowing what else to say.
“Because he's married.”
“So much for the five-hundred-mile zone.”
Durban wrangled those lips of hers into a pout. “Don't approve?” she asked.
I answered her question with a noncommittal shrug.
“What about you?” she asked. “Married?”
“Divorced,” I said.
“Everybody's doing it,” she opined. I considered telling her that I'd caught my wife having an affair — all four inches of it in her mouth, as I recall — if only to put a little distance between us, particularly between Durban's hand and my thigh, which she'd started kneading like she wanted to bake it. The truth was that while I was technically single, I still felt attached to Anna. And yet… there was a conflict of interest about this burgeoning between my legs. If I were going to avoid waking up tomorrow with Durban in my bed and a head full of regret, I had to leave, or get rescued. And fast. “So, is your boyfriend joining us?” I repeated with as much nonchalance as I could manage.
“No. I just told him I was working late.” Her nails were now tracing figure eights on the fabric of my pants, the circles getting wider and coming dangerously close to The Wakening Serpent. “I told him we were going through the case … you know…”
There wasn't that much to go through that we hadn't already covered, but I said, “Good idea.”
An ancient woman shuffled up to us and exchanged our empty sake flask for a full one. I protested, but she just waved at me and told me in Japanese not to be stupid. While I didn't speak Japanese, I'd been told not to be stupid enough times in a multitude of languages to know exactly what she said. Obviously, I was in the middle of some female plot to get me drunk, and it was working. “So, as I was saying, a recap of the case is a good idea.”
“What's to go through?” Durban said. “The guy got drunk, fell off the boat, and became bait.”
She picked up the flask and poured me another shot. Yeah, this girl had Trouble tattooed on her forehead. I felt a pang of sorrow for Mrs. Deputy Assistant Director — the woman was getting screwed, along with her husband. Time to refocus. “We don't know that as fact, do we?” I asked.
“Know what?”
“Exactly what happened to Tanaka?”
“So you don't think he got eaten by a shark?”
“Yeah, I'm sure he got eaten, but that's all we know.”
“I guess.” Durban sucked in her bottom lip and held it there.
“Tanaka was drunk,” I said.
“I remember. So?”
“He didn't drink. Ever. Not according to the FBI, anyway.”
Durban's eyes widened, like she'd just discovered a plot. “Really?”
“The Bureau could have been wrong. Or maybe Tanaka just chose that night to take a stroll with Johnnie Walker — either was more likely than any other reason.”
“Like murder,” said Durban.
“Yeah, like murder.” The other minor outstanding issue was those twelve hours. Why had it taken so long for anyone to discover that Tanaka was missing?
Durban interrupted my thoughts. “So, what do you DoD people do, exactly? No specifics, of course, just in general. You guys are even more hush-hush than we are.”
The CIA was “ hush-hush”? That was a new one on me. Every now and then Durban said something that reminded me she was still really just a kid, albeit an oversexed one. First impressions aren't always right, but this was mine: The biggest struggle in her life had probably been with the occasional tight peanut butter jar lid. That, and she was way too pretty for her own good. Or anyone else's, for that matter.
“No, it's okay. I can give you specifics,” I answered. “For the past five months I've been waging war on apostrophes. You know, whether they go before or after the 5? It's a huge problem. You'd be surprised how many people get that stuff wrong. Next month, I'm going after parentheses.”
“You're kidding me.”
“Honestly, all I've done since being transferred out of OSI is review paperwork — other people's. This is my first real case in six months.”
“Six months?” She was surprised. Almost as much as I was. What was I still doing in the armed forces, anyway?
The fat business guy had muscled his way up to the microphone again and was launching into “Stairway to Heaven.” Or hell, depending on your point of view. The female company at his table applauded. I wanted to throw tomatoes, or, this being Japan, star-knives.
“So that's your background, the Air Force's Office of Special Investigations?” Durban asked.
I nodded.
“OSI.” Something flickered across her face. “Jesus! I recognize you now.”