“So it is for God and Country.”
“Most exactly, that’s what it’s for. On the trip, if you’re still game, it’s going to be a lot harder; you’re going to have to listen very carefully and do precisely as you’re told, while at the same time improvising with all your heart to attain certain objectives.”
“Such as?” Her fingers were still on the watch; she wanted a cigarette but didn’t want to use the gimmicked lighter; then she did, and its little indicator was blithely green.
“It won’t make sense to you yet; we’ve got a lot more talking to do.”
She didn’t like it when he got tutorial. She said, “Then tell me something I can understand: tell me about your wife—any kids?” She wanted to know about her competition.
His stare flickered, then steadied: “I’ve been trying not to think about them; everybody has survival tricks, and mine is discipline.” As he spoke, he was pulling a crocodile wallet from his jacket’s inside pocket.
Then she realized what he was intimating: “You mean, they’re over there? In the States? Oh, Christ, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry….”
“It’s all right.” He took out a family snapshot—a blond woman in her early thirties on a sloop with a jauntily cocked captain’s cap and children under either arm: a teenage boy with his father’s angular, fine-featured face, and a chubby-cheeked girl with golden curls, perhaps ten. “If they were lucky, they were incinerated, vaporized in some strike zone, rather than being downwind and taking five hundred or a thousand Rems in a day.”
She felt horrid and petty and didn’t take the photo from him. His finger pointed them out: “Jennifer. Seth.” His children. “Muffy.” His wife.
“Ha!” The tense laugh exploded unbidden: “Muffy? Not Muffy, really!”
“Why not?” He took his photo back and put it and the wallet away.
“Nobody’s actually named ‘Muffy.’”
“Melissa, then. And you may be righter than you know.” For the first time, she saw a deep sadness in him, deeper than her own, deeper than she’d ever seen in anyone but the factions fighting in the Middle East.
“I’m sorry,” she offered lamely.
“So am I.”
An anguishing silence ensued, broken only by the waiter who came to take their dinner order.
When the first course arrived, he said, “If you’re willing, I’d like to take you back to my place to work later—that way, we can enjoy our meal.”
Which was what he’d intended, she realized, before she’d put her foot in her mouth up to her knee. “That would be very nice,” she said as tenderly as she could, trying to let him know that she’d realized her mistake and would never make another like it, and that she wanted to be with him, even comfort him if he’d let her.
When they left the King David, he pulled two of the rubber respirators with their replaceable filters that had become Jerusalem’s new status symbol out of his raincoat pocket and handed her one as a limousine at the curb pulled obediently forward. By then, he’d lightened both their moods adroitly, helped along by Dom Perignon—“We’re earning it, don’t feel guilty”—and the festive meal itself.
“You’re kidding me,” she giggled, her voice muffled through the mask, leaning against him with his hand at the small of her back as the chauffeur, looking like a black-tie frogman, got out and smartly opened the door for them; she’d expected Elint in his Chevy, or Beck’s own gunmetal Plymouth.
“Goes with the territory; when we’re out together, it’s got to be business as usual,” he murmured into her hair before he took her hand to help her ease inside.
At his apartment, his jacket and tie came off and so did his gloss: “We’ve got lots to do. I’m sorry I was out of touch so long, but it’s good for you. On the fact-finding mission, you and I can be friendly, though I’d really prefer antagonistic, but never intimate. You’re no good to me if the IMF reps and the NATO honchos and the Japanese don’t trust you implicitly, see you as the impartial observer, the member of the adversary press I want you to be.”
“Oh,” she replied with all-too-evident disappointment, “you’re going to work me on the tour.”
“Run you,” he corrected absently as he collected pencils and notepads that said DEPARTMENT OF STATE in raised blue letters and then the tea kettle he’d put on screeched above the jazz from his stereo.
She followed him into the kitchen, watching as he filled a Melior with hot water. “Run you close at hand,” he continued while, as if to demonstrate, he ran the taps and washed hands that didn’t need washing, “the most difficult way. But don’t worry, we’ll manage.”
Right. I don’t know what he’s talking about or why he thinks we’ll live that long, but we’ll manage. Anything you say, sir, as long as we end up in that bed of yours before dawn. Even in his suit pants, his tight buns were reminding her what had gotten her into this in the first place.
A bell rang somewhere and he shut off the water and turned to her: “Expecting someone? Tell anyone you’d be here?”
While she tried to convinced him that she’d done nothing of the kind, he leaned over the sink and peered out the window at the parking lot below, then knifed past her to hit the intercom button: “Yes?” His voice was terse and defensive.
She thought he was going to tell her to go hide in his closet, but a voice said, “Zaki,” and his whole body slumped as he said into the mouthpiece, “Come on up,” and pressed the button which would unlock the front door.
He seemed relieved, but she saw him run splayed fingers angrily through his hair as he went to wait at the front door, taking something from the single drawer of a table in the hallway, putting it on the tabletop and covering it with a newspaper.
A gun? She was almost sure it had been.
Without turning, he said, “Don’t stand there. Go sit in the living room.”
She did and soon the door opened, no shots rang out, and Elint came ambling in with his swinging gait and a broad grin on his unmasked face, carrying a small black bag: “Good evening, Miss Patrick. Just the person I wanted to see.” For the first time she realized that Elint never bothered with any of the paraphernalia the Forty-Minute War had forced on the rest of them: no raincoat, no high boots, no radiation badge, nothing.
They’d spoken quietly in the hall and she hadn’t been able to make out the words, but Beck was already rolling up his right sleeve when he told her, “We’ve both got to have shots; it’s easier if we have them here. It won’t take long.”
Elint was taking alcohol and hypodermics of the single-use sort from the bag. Holding a bottle with a rubber top upside down, he drew viscous liquid into one hypodermic, squinting critically. “Very thick. It will leave a little bump for a week or so, but not to worry.”
Beck was sitting on the sofa’s back, his bare arm proferred for Elint to swab and stab. “First batch?” he said to Elint so softly she might have heard him wrong. “First time you’ve tried it?”
“All have had it but the three of us, no ill effects,” Elint said in that same maddening undertone, so that the music from the stereo nearly overwhelmed his words as he pushed the plunger down slowly and with infinite care. Beck watched him as if it were someone else’s arm, not his own.
“Hurts like a son of a bitch, Chris,” Beck warned her when he rolled down his sleeve and Elint got out a second needle.
“Do I have to? I hate shots.”
“You’ll learn to love this one,” Beck said mysteriously as Elint came toward her with that kindly, patient expression he must use on children and small animals and she rolled up her own silk sleeve.