Cohen made an ostentatious show of pondering the question. He was doing his blonde bombshell act tonight. The fact that he could pull it off in Roland’s body was a display of pure programmer’s bravura. Li had spent just enough time around Roland while Cohen wasn’t shunting through him to know that he was boringly straight in every sense of the word. But somehow Cohen managed to pull shades of Marilyn Monroe from the kid. “Well,” he purred eventually, “at least you’re not a prude.”
She leaned into him in what even she knew was an unusual display of public affection, and pressed her lips to Roland’s smooth young forehead just below the hairline. Cohen returned her kisses, moving under her hands like water, making her forget the stranger’s body that came between them.
“I love you,” she whispered.
“Is that why you went sneaking off to see Ash last night?”
She jerked back to stare at him from the farthest end of the sofa. He was sitting, hands folded in his lap, in the state of unnatural stillness that she’d learned to recognize as a sign of the most violent emotion.
Her mind raced. How did he know? Had router/decomposer told him? Or was this just one more sign that his access to her internals went deeper than he was willing to admit to her?
She looked at him, forcing her pulse to stay even, her eyes to remain level. “So you’ve been spying on me again.”
“Apparently with good reason.”
“Cohen—”
“Don’t make excuses. It’s beneath you.”
The silence was suffocating, both instream and off. Cohen bent his head to light a cigarette, and Roland’s eyes vanished beneath the thick golden fall of forelock. Roland’s eyes closed as he took a first long drag on the cigarette. Li sat there feeling like a mouse caught between a cat’s paws. Finally the cigarette dropped and Roland’s eyes opened. His face was so blandly expressionless that for a surreal moment she wondered whether Cohen was still on shunt.
“I can live with an innocent flirtation,” he said in a voice that made her soul squirm. “Or even a not-so-innocent flirtation. But I willnot be lied to.”
His words hung in the air like one of the bright phosphorus flares that blossomed over the Green Line at night. Ash. Christ, it had never even occurred to her. Did Cohen really think she’d cheat on him for a pair of long legs and a pretty face? The idea was repellent. Infuriating. Humiliating.
But warring with her urge to set Cohen straight was the realization that he’d just handed her an unbreakable, uncheckable alibi for her meetings with Nguyen’s contact.
She’d be a fool not to take it.
Wouldn’t she?
“I was going to tell you,” she said, feeling her heart wrench with the lie.
“Of course you were.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” His voice was level and pleasant…but when she probed the intraface, none of his firewalls would so much as shake hands with her internals.
“Have a drink,” he told her, not even acknowledging the aborted contact.
Their eyes met. Li frowned. Cohen smiled.
Except it wasn’t his real smile. It was the bland, pleasant, impersonal smile that meant he’d decided to write someone off so completely he wasn’t even going to bother mentioning it to them. She’d seen that smile only twice before, and neither occasion had made for good memories. She’d never imagined she’d be on the receiving end of it.
“Right.” She picked up the cocktail menu and pretended to look at it. “What’s the plan then?”
“There is no plan. We’ll talk to Fortuné, then we’ll see.”
“And where do we go to talk to the man?”
“The International Zone. Fortuné’s got a favorite bar there, a little place called the Sauve Qui Peut.”
The Sauve Qui Peut was a Legionnaire’s bar: cheap beer, an abiding odor of steak and frites,and Brel and Bénabar chuttering out of speakers that had been blown long before the oldest of the place’s regulars had rotated into the Zone.
The bar back boasted a cluttered shrine of Legion paraphernalia. Flat photos and holos of soldiers fording swollen tropical rivers or jumping out of ancient airplanes, or marching with the medieval battle-axes and butcher’s aprons that the Fathers of the Legion (a few of them Mothers, at least technically) wore on parade days. The shrine’s centerpiece was an antique hand-colored photograph of Colonel Danjou’s famous hand, so immense that the screws where the metal hinges met the wooden fingers were visible at twenty paces. The place was packed but the floor around the back table was empty. And from the minute they walked in Cohen could see Fortuné waiting for them in the shadows.
“Bienvenues en l’Enfer,”Fortuné said, rising behind his table to greet them. His smile was friendly, but the eyes behind the smile were as sharp and precise as the creases in his dress shirt.
If the Sauve Qui Peut was the prototypical Legionnaire’s bar, then Colonel Jean-Louis Fortuné was the perfect Legionnaire. Five foot nine in thick socks and spit-shined jump boots, and not carrying an ounce of fat anywhere on his wiry frame except in the coffee-colored baby face that was the legacy of his Haitian ancestry. A fifth-degree judo black belt. An inveterate but eminently discreet womanizer…or so it was whispered around barracks. His hairline had already been receding when Cohen first met him, and now he was going bald in the no-nonsense manner that was synonymous, to French eyes, with being a man of intelligence, education, and virility.
Li took the hand Fortuné offered and delivered what Cohen suspected was her most bone-crushing handshake. Fortuné bore up well under it; but then he too was wired to the gills, though his dark skin hid the delicate subdermal filigree of ceramsteel filaments.
“I’m a great admirer,” Fortuné said when he’d retrieved his hand from Li’s grasp. “It is a pleasure and an honor to welcome the hero of Gilead.”
“Some people would say the Butcher of Gilead.”
Cohen had never been quite sure how closely Li followed the press coverage of her court-martial. Now he guessed he knew.
“Some people would not be me,” Fortuné said placidly. “They nailed you up for sins above your pay grade. That was the opinion on the chow line when it happened. It still is.”
Li blinked at that, but her internals were so tightly locked down that Cohen couldn’t get any sense of what was going on behind her eyes.
They sat down. Fortuné was drinking a Lorelei, and a wave to the bartender brought two more bottles over at double time. Cohen sipped the crisp, sweet Alsatian beer and smiled at the taste of Hyacinthe’s centuries-gone youth.
Li and Fortuné started talking war. Tours of duty. Planetside rotations. Combat drops. Cohen, who had never been a soldier nor wanted to be, let the talk flow past him like current lifting a swimmer. He came back to Earth with a thump when he heard the word employmentroll off Fortuné’s lips.
“I’m not looking to get hitched again,” Li said into the silence that followed. “And even if I were, what’s it to you? Last time I checked you work for UNSec, same as I did.”
“Only in the most limited sense, I assure you.”
“Then who do you answer to?”
Fortuné smiled urbanely. “La France, ma chère,defender of the civilized world.”
“Is that like the free world but with better food?”
Fortuné laughed, and Li unleashed her most dazzling smile on him. She had charisma in spades when she felt like putting out the effort. And for reasons that Cohen didn’t want to think too closely about, she’d decided it was worth her while to charm Fortuné.
“She’s quite a woman,” Fortuné said when she got up to hunt down fresh drinks.
Cohen turned on him. “Don’t even think about it.”
“My friend, I’m neither wealthy enough nor handsome enough to compete with you. I was speaking merely in a professional sense.”