What had Delilah said, both dismissively and sympathetically, when I had ticked off those items? All things.
And: If you live only for yourself, dying is an especially scary proposition.
The walks got longer. I began to supplement them with bike rides. My wounds lessened, but their presence continued to serve as a paradoxical reminder both of certain mortality and of continued life.
My city by the sea was still beautiful. But over time, I noticed that Rio no longer relaxed me the way it once had. In fact, in the oddest way, I found myself longing for Tokyo, for something I once had there, although at the time I hadn’t properly appreciated it for what it was.
Tokyo’s suddenly renewed presence in my thoughts was strange, because I had never thought of the city as home while I lived there. Strange, too, because, despite a childhood spent partly in the city and twenty-five subsequent years there as an adult, the associations that had welled up when I had returned were all about Midori.
Well, maybe that’s what home would always be to me-the place I’d miss when I had to move on. Love seemed like that, too. Because the woman I loved was the one I couldn’t have.
What had most defined Tokyo for me, I realized after Kwai Chung, was that it had always made me feel like there was something there, something I might find that would fulfill me, some answer to a question I couldn’t quite pose. Whatever that thing was, though, if it existed at all, it had always eluded me, frustrated me. It took without giving back.
But I realized now that the thing’s elusiveness didn’t mean I should stop seeking it. Life after Kwai Chung felt like a reprieve, a second chance. What a waste, not to make something of that.
I wasn’t sure how much longer I would stay in Rio. But I was equally unsure of where else I would go. I was like a kite suddenly cut loose from its line: for the moment exhilaratingly free, yet certain now to lose the wind that had borne it aloft and plummet back to earth.
I needed to find that line again. But I didn’t know where to reach for it.
There was Naomi, of course. Sometimes I thought about going to see her. But I never did. Maybe she was getting over the way things had ended between us. Maybe she was moving on. I didn’t want to interfere with any of that. Most of all, I didn’t want an association with me to be the thing that got her hurt, or worse than hurt.
Still, there were nights when I would lie in bed, listening to “De Mais Ninguém,” the song that had been playing in Scenarium the night I had gone to see her, or listening to some of the other music she had played in her apartment while we made love there, and the thought of how near she was would be almost unbearable.
I thought of Delilah, too. I wondered how things had turned out for her. I wondered how much of what she had told me had been true. I asked myself inane “what if” questions. I found myself wanting to believe her, wanting to believe that something was there, or could have been there, and I found this reaction weak and somewhat foolish.
Yeah. But look at Dox. He surprised you.
Yeah, he did. But not enough to reverse my whole view of human nature.
I’d been back for about two months when I found a message on one of my bulletin boards. The message said, “I’m vacationing in a wonderful city. Every morning I swim at the most famous beach there. The older beach, the one further north. I wish you could join me.”
It was the bulletin board I had been using with Delilah, password Peninsula. No one else knew of it.
I stared at that message for a long time. Then, without even being conscious of a decision having been made, I started packing a bag.
That night I checked into the Copacabana Palace Hotel, Rio’s grandest, positioned on its eponymous beach. I took an ocean-view room on the fifth floor. I had brought along a pair of binoculars-not quite the quality of the Zeiss model that I had employed at Kwai Chung, but good enough for gazing at the ocean. Or the beach.
I slept poorly. At sunup I started watching. At ten o’clock, she showed.
She was wearing a dark thong bikini, navy, almost midnight blue. I decided it would have been a crime for her to wear anything else.
She swam for twenty minutes, then lay down on a towel in the sun. She seemed to be alone, but the beach was filling up. I had no way of really knowing.
I told myself that she had no reason to try to set me up. And that was true. But the funny thing was, I just didn’t care. For the moment, I didn’t even care how she knew where, or almost where, to find me.
I pulled on a bathing suit and a hotel robe and walked out to the beach. The sun was beating down hot from overhead, and I squinted against the glare coming off the ocean and the sand. I put the robe down next to her and sat on it.
“Is this spot taken?” I asked.
She opened her eyes. They were bluer than I had ever seen them, taking on some of the hues of the sea and sky.
She smiled and sat up and looked at me for a long moment. Then she said, “You got my message.”
I nodded. “It was a surprise. Pleasant surprise.”
“You want to know how I found you.”
She was beautiful. She was just… beautiful. I said, “I want to know how you’ve been.”
She didn’t say a word. She just looked into my eyes, leaned in, and kissed me. The taste of her, the feel of her mouth, the fact of her presence, it was all like a waking dream.
I pulled back and looked around us.
“It’s all right,” she said. “I would, too, if our positions were reversed.”
I looked at her for a moment. It was good to be with someone who understood my habits. Who shared them.
She glanced at my arm and my thigh. The dressings were gone now, and the slowly healing results of Belghazi’s handiwork were clearly visible. Whoever had patched me up must have been more concerned about closing the wounds than with their subsequent cosmetic appearance. It looked as though I’d been attacked by a pissed-off lawn mower.
“I know what you did at Kwai Chung in Hong Kong,” she said.
I shrugged. “What, that thing? I read that was the CIA and Hong Kong police.”
She chuckled. “You know where those missiles were going?”
I shook my head.
“To Saudi-funded groups that would have used them against Jerusalem and Haifa and Tel Aviv. The missiles have a ten-mile range. Israel is nine miles across at her waist. They could have reached anywhere.”
“So it was the missiles you were after?”
She nodded. “We didn’t have a fix on the seller. But we were tracking Belghazi, tracking him closely, as you know. Once he took possession, the shipping information would have been in his computer. He kept everything in it. Encrypted, of course, but we have people who could have cracked it.”
“What then?”
“We would have tracked the ship that we learned was moving the missiles. Almost certainly it would have been destined for a Saudi port or to Dubai. So in the South China Sea, the ship would have been boarded by naval commandos, the cargo confirmed and appropriated.”
“Lots of pirates in that part of the world,” I noted.
“And not all ‘pirate’ activity is publicized, either. Some shipping companies would prefer to keep a theft quiet. Depending on the cargo involved, of course.”
“So it was the handoff, and the shipping information, you were waiting for.”
“Yes. If something happened to Belghazi before then, we would have lost track of the missiles. There would have been another buyer.”
I nodded, thinking. “I don’t think Belghazi was planning on moving those missiles through ordinary container port shipping. From what I understand, one of his last acts was to have them loaded into a van.”