He substituted a mouthful of chicken parmesan for an answer.
“Am I actually that easy?”
“No,” he mumbled. “I was willing to take the risk.”
She studied him, twirling spaghetti on her fork, and said, “Tell me about your friend.”
He did, after swallowing. Lowell Santoro. College roommate. One of those running buddies that Jazz had always wanted and somehow never really had, apart from McCarthy—someone to laugh with, raise hell with, experience life with. “He was older than I was,” Borden said. “It didn’t matter, we both acted like twelve-year-olds. He never met a girl he didn’t try to talk into bed, but he never had one hate him afterward, either. Lowell’s always been—honest. I know that sounds strange, but it’s true. He’s just got nothing but truth in him.”
“Uh-huh,” she said doubtfully, and took a sip of crisp white wine. It had a nice cool undertone to it, the perfect counterpoint to the salt of the spaghetti sauce. “So he’s Don Juan and Saint Francis, all rolled up into one. And he was, what? A law student?”
“He changed after the first year, took film courses. That’s how he got into producing. It was a good thing. He wasn’t going to be a great lawyer. Too honest.”
“Unlike you.”
“Unlike me,” he agreed. “He met Susan—his wife—his last year in college. They got married, moved out to L.A. He’s a good guy, Jazz. What’s going to happen to him—he doesn’t deserve it.”
“What is going to happen to him?” Because that wasn’t in the letter. Just instructions on how to conduct surveillance. No warnings. She supposed the Cross Society thought it would predispose her toward what to watch out for.
“It’s not clear,” Borden said. Or prevaricated. “Something fatal. And something painful.”
“Car accident? Building collapse? Bullet?”
“It’s a human agency, that’s all that I know.”
“I hate it when you talk like—”
“Like a member of the Society? Jazz. I am one.”
She knew that. She just didn’t like to think about it. Conversation collapsed into silence as they ate, and the waiter came around to deliver a selection from The Marriage of Figaro, and it was dessert by the time Jazz said, “About the fruit basket?”
He looked up from his tiramisu, took a sip of wine and raised his eyebrows.
“Was it Laskins’s idea?”
“Mine,” he said.
“You’re hopeless.”
Borden had the good sense to look embarrassed as he shrugged. It might have been the wine, or the marinara sauce, but she felt a surge of warmth toward him, entirely unconnected to the undeniable surge of—what the hell had that been? Lust? — she’d felt in her office, when she’d had him up against the wall. That was unsettling. She preferred lust. Lust was simple—it had a beginning, middle and end to it. You could shut lust up by giving it what it wanted.
This feeling…it had more of a feeling of sticking around.
He was watching her. She realized she’d been staring back, felt a rush of blood heat up her face and turned back to the cheesecake she was not really eating.
“How’s Lucia?” he asked. Which was completely the wrong thing to ask at that moment.
“Don’t you know? I mean, don’t you guys know everything?” She heard the edge in her voice.
“Yeah, sorry, I don’t actually sit around and monitor your lives on a daily basis.”
“Who does?”
He changed the subject. “I take it that she’s okay.”
“She’s fine. Better than fine, actually. She’s happy as a clam. That girl really likes undercover work. It’s a little scary, how good she is at it, for somebody who wears a lot of—you know—designer clothes.”
“What’s she doing now?” he asked around a mouthful of brandy-soaked ladyfingers.
“Right now? Probably emptying trash from the sixth-floor restrooms.” Jazz glanced at her watch. “Actually, I take it back. She’s on her break, sitting in the lunchroom, watching Spanish-language soap operas.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I told you. She likes undercover work. You’re not going to do anything stupid like follow me to L.A., are you?” she asked, without any transition, and watched him scramble to keep up with the conversational left turn.
“Do you need me to?” he asked. Not, she noticed, Do you want me to.
“No,” she said. “I don’t need you there. And it would probably be easier if you stayed out of my hair. Having somebody around with a personal stake in things is distracting.”
“It’s just that he’s—like family.” Borden shrugged, but it didn’t look casual. “I don’t have a lot of that.”
“Family? Hell, sometimes I have too much. Want a sister?”
She’d said something wrong. She saw the flinch. Unless he already knew Molly.
“I had one,” he finally said, and met her eyes.
She knew that look, had seen it on the faces of too many families. Lost. Baffled. Wounded. She hadn’t just made a mistake, she’d opened a vein. “What happened?”
“The usual. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time.” His smile cut like glass. “Not everybody’s a Lead. She never even got to be an Actor.”
Not a good time to express her skepticism on the whole theory. “Any other family?”
“My mother lives in Canada. Father—” He shrugged again. “I don’t really know. So, Lowell means a lot to me. He was there when I needed him.”
She studied him. “Then I’ll do everything I can.”
He nodded, sipped wine and fiddled with his fork. “Want me to drive you to the airport?”
“Sure.” She shrugged and then frowned. “You don’t have a car.”
“Rental. I need to take it back to the airport and catch the red-eye back to New York.”
“So you weren’t planning to stay.”
“No, I was planning to go, but which way I was flying depended on you.”
There was something underneath that, something like a cliff she could easily fall from, and she backed up fast. “Okay, then. If you could give me a ride, that would be great.”
Borden called for the check. They argued over who was going to pay it, but in the end, she let him put it on the GPL tab. They exited into a rush of late commuters and a cool whisper of wind, and walked together like a couple along the sidewalk back toward the office. Borden silently took her shoulder bag; she just as silently let him. Her gun wasn’t in it, anyway.
“Is somebody going to start taking potshots at me again?” she asked him. He missed a step, stumbled and lengthened his stride as if trying to leave that awkwardness behind him.
“I doubt it,” he said. “Generally, once Leads are inside the Society, it’s not in the best interest of the opposition to try to get rid of them unless they really present a problem. Their best chance of success is before you’re fully informed, before there are others watching your back. Or to get to you first and put you on their side.”
“Huh,” she said. “So that’s why they tried to kill us in the parking garage. Because we hadn’t actually joined up yet, but we knew enough not to join them.”
“Yes. It was their last opportunity to stop you without directly coming after the Cross Society.”
“This thing—this L.A. thing—this isn’t just to get me out of the way, right? Because something’s going down here?”
He jammed his hands into his pockets and hunched his shoulders, looking lost in thought. “Interesting thought,” he said, “but I don’t think so. I’m not saying it wouldn’t be possible, but…”
“You don’t know?”
“Do I seem like the secret master of the world to you? No, I’m not sure. But I don’t think they’d do that.” Still, he was frowning, concentrating on his feet. She wished she hadn’t brought it up. “I suppose we’d better get you to the airport.”
“Yeah,” she agreed softly.
They walked in silence for another few hundred feet, and then Borden unlocked a dark red rental car and handed her inside—literally, offered a hand, as if she was a lady in big skirts getting into a carriage. She was taken aback by that, but she had to admit, the warm touch of his fingers on hers was nice. And he hadn’t done it to be showy; it was, she sensed, just something he did. She remembered him doing it for Lucia, at the limo door…but not her. She supposed her body posture at the time had been in the language of touch me and die.