By way of answering, he reached over and pulled me to him. We didn’t kiss. I could barely breathe. My face was mashed into his tie, my rib cage was getting crushed right where I’d been stuck in a bathroom window, and there was that console thing between us and a gun attached to his waist where one of my hands held on to him, but love is a strange thing.
Love. That word he was whispering in my ear. It covers a multitude of sins and a lot of other things. Pain. Awkwardness. Doubt.
Half an hour later he pulled into a parking lot near Hugo’s and smiled at the attendant, who stared at us like a monk greeting the pope, nearly weeping over the Bentley. It’s only the cheap Bentley, I could’ve told him, but why spoil his day?
The “L” word, once said, changes things. There are people who throw it around like salt on popcorn. Others are more comfortable with profanity than endearments. I’d have bet Simon was in the latter camp, that I’d heard it wrong, that he must’ve said, “dove” or “glove.” But I couldn’t come up with a good reason for someone to whisper “glove” with such heat.
I felt myself undergoing metamorphosis.
Simon told our waiter to bring us two spinach-and-mushroom egg-white omelets with sides of fruit, and that brought me back to earth. It’s one thing to hear someone say “love” and another to let them order your breakfast.
“And pancakes for me,” I said, snapping my menu shut. Simon smiled, but he didn’t say anything until the waiter had gone. We were back in business. I was a CW, a cooperating witness for the FBI. He was my handler. For one last day.
“At three P.M.” he said, “a man named Esterbud will drive you to the set, get you wired, and go over your instructions. You’ll sign a waiver, acknowledging your consent to wear recording equipment and have your voice recorded. If you have problems, he’ll be able to reach me. You won’t. Anything you need in the next twenty-four hours, go through Esterbud.”
My stomach clenched up at the news that he was going to disappear. Even for a day. I don’t like people disappearing.
“Tonight’s shoot will use all six contestants, to deflect attention you might attract for being on the set. Don’t ask how I arranged it. The show will use a boom microphone, so the only body mike you’ll wear is ours. You’ll activate it at ten P.M. At that point an Indian woman and a companion will enter the restaurant and sit in a booth near you.”
“American Indian or Indian Indian?”
“Calcutta. Heavy accent. One of ours.” He paused while a waiter refilled our coffee cups, waiting for him to leave. “The woman will have a conversation with her companion. This is what you’re picking up. When you hear her say, ‘The best part of Thanksgiving is the leftovers,’ stop talking, clanking silverware, all extraneous noise. When she says, ‘It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity,’ it’s over. She’ll go to the restroom. Notice who in the cast or crew her companion makes contact with. Esterbud will go over all this again.”
I nodded, wondering who in the FBI made up the code sentences and whether they took courses in that sort of thing at Quantico. Wondering if anything would be more hazardous than Fredreeq, Venus, Savannah, Kim, and me in the same room at the same time. “Why can’t Miss Calcutta wear the wire?” I asked. “Or just memorize the information?”
“Big Fish’s people will frisk her. And we need the conversation on tape, later, to elicit… cooperation.”
Cooperation. A nice word in other contexts. In this context, code for blackmail.
“Not to sound petty,” I said, “but again, what about the quid pro quo? Annika.”
“In twenty-four hours I’ll contact you. I’ll explain things I’m not able to talk about now. Anything you need before then, Esterbud will be nearby.”
“Simon, what about Annika?”
“Twenty-four hours, Wollie.”
I saw in his face the stress I’d been feeling myself, the lack of sleep, the proximity to danger. I thought about what it was he wasn’t telling me, the thing so big I might not want to see him after tomorrow. Something in me went cold. “Simon,” I said softly, “I just have to know she’s not already dead, that you haven’t found Annika in the last day or two, and you’re not telling me, because-”
“Because?”
“You need me to keep working for you.”
He stared. “You think I’d do that?”
“I think that you-” I couldn’t say love me. Yet. Even though he’d as much as said that. Even though I believed him. I said, “I think for you, the end justifies the means.”
“That depends on the end.”
I focused on my napkin. “That’s the wrong answer. It should depend on the means. There are lines you don’t cross, even to serve a greater good.”
“But whose lines? Drawn where? Good people cross lines all the time. On your behalf.”
I shook my head. “I don’t want them to.”
“Yes, you do. You just don’t want to know about it.”
Was he right? I raised my eyes to his. A waiter came and plunked down two small bowls of sliced fruit on the table between us. Neither of us looked at him. “But if I don’t want to know about it,” I said, “what am I doing with you?”
He picked up his fork. “That’s the question, isn’t it?”
Leaving Hugo’s, Simon drove east, toward Laurel Canyon.
“Where are we going?” I asked, alarmed.
“I’m driving you to work. We’re carpooling.”
“Carpooling? Nobody carpools. I need my car. How am I going to get home?”
“Esterbud.”
“No.” I could feel my temperature rise. “I’m not kidding. No. My God, this is L.A., you don’t leave people stranded without a car. What happened to civil liberties?”
“I’m not taking chances. I want you on the set tonight, not in jail in San Pedro.” He glanced at me. “I guess you don’t watch the morning news. I hope Joey’s got a lawyer. She’s getting slapped with a lawsuit.”
I closed my eyes. This was turning into a very long day, and it wasn’t even noon.
“Want to tell me what you were doing there?” Simon asked.
“No.”
“All right. We should have a talk one of these days about which laws you obey and which ones you ignore when it suits you.”
“We should,” I said. “You can explain the nuances of crime, like how driving people to the Valley against their will doesn’t constitute kidnapping. Seriously. What if I need to go to the store while I’m working, what if I need paints? How do you know I have keys with me?”
“I imagine your whole apartment’s in that backpack. Whatever you need, send Esterbud.”
“So nice seeing our tax dollars at work.”
“Wollie, you’d make my job easier if you kept your cell phone on. And returned your calls occasionally.”
When we got to Sherman Oaks, to the Mansion, which he found without asking directions, I did not say good-bye. I did not kiss him good-bye. I got out of the car with as much grace as possible and slammed the door behind me. I did not look back.
The way he gunned the engine and took off down the street, they could hear his cheap Bentley in San Pedro.
I looked out the window of the Mansion. There he was, not even bothering to hide. Esterbud. Parked in some kind of big Chevy with tinted windows. Drinking out of a liter bottle of Coke. That must be lunch. He’d be knocking on the door in an hour to introduce himself and use the bathroom.
I turned my back on Esterbud and his liter bottle and looked into the yellow eyes of my West African goliath, Conraua (Gigantorana) goliath.
He was monumental.
I’d avoided him for days, so the effect was stupefying. Either he’d grown recently, or the wall had shrunk. It was a poster for some low-rent sci-fi horror movie, it was an amphibian the size of a bear, a bald green grizzly holding the kitchen hostage. It was impossible that something that big existed, I don’t care what the book said, maybe it was a printing error, that ninety centimeters, no frog could be that long-