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 unconventionaclass="underline" 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.