by Barry Eisler
We talked more about this and that. She never let on that she knew anything about Manny, or that the botched hit in Manila had anything to do with her presence here now. And as the evening wore on, I realized I couldn’t accept that the timing of her contact had been a coincidence. So the absence of any acknowledgment had to be an omission. A deliberate omission.
If she had been anyone else, and if this had all happened just a year or two earlier, I would have accepted the truth of what I knew. I would have acted on it. Doing so would have protected my body, albeit at some cost to my soul. But sitting across the table from her, no doubt affected by the wine, as well as by the surroundings and the feelings I still had for her, I found myself looking for a different way. Something less direct, less irredeemable, something that might have as its basis hope instead of only fear.
And there was something strangely attractive about the feeling that I was taking a chance. It wasn’t anything as base as the thrill of “unsafe sex,” as Dox had suggested. It was more a sense of the possibilities, the potential upside. Not just the possibility that, if I confronted her and she cracked, she might give me information that would help me understand where I stood regarding Manny. I was aware, too, of a deeper kind of hope at work, for something more than information alone, something intangible but infinitely more valuable.
After a dessert of fruit and Thai sweets followed by steaming tureens of cappuccino, we strolled back to the pavilion. We left the lights dim and sat on a low teak couch facing the sea, present by the sound of the surf but unseeable in the darkness without. The silence in the room felt heavy to me, portentous. My previous, oblique conversational gambits had afforded me only hints and clues. I decided it was time to be more direct. My mouth felt a little dry at the prospect, part of me perhaps afraid of what I might discover.
“Did your people tell you about what they’ve involved me in?” I asked.
She looked at me, and something in her expression told me she wasn’t happy with the question. This wasn’t why we had come back to the room. It wasn’t part of the script.
“No,” she said. “Everything is ‘need to know.’ If I don’t need to know, it’s better that I don’t.”
“They sent me after a guy in Manila.”
She shook her head. “Why are you telling me this?”
“I don’t want what’s between us to be nothing more than ‘need to know.’ If it is, we’re just gaming each other.”
“Protecting each other.”
“Would you protect me?”
“From what?”
“What if something went wrong?”
“Don’t put me in that position.”
“What if you had to choose?”
Her eyes narrowed a fraction. “I don’t know. What would you do?”
I looked at her. “It’s easy for me. I don’t believe in anything, remember? I can make up my own mind.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s more of an answer than what you just told me.”
“I told you I don’t know. I’m sorry if that wasn’t the answer you were looking for.”
“I’m looking for the truth.”
“You know who I am.”
“That’s what I’m asking you.”
She laughed. “Look, I’m like a married woman, okay? With a family I always have to return to.”
I didn’t respond. After a moment she said, “So stop pretending you don’t know all this.”
That sounded dangerously close to a rationalization, one with which I’m all too familiar: He knew what he was getting into. If he hadn’t been in the game, they wouldn’t have wanted him dead.
Of all the potential angles, the possible gambits, it seemed to me that the truth would be what she was least prepared for. The closer I got to it, the more it was putting her off her game.
“You’re here only for personal reasons?” I asked her.
She shifted a fraction on the couch. “Yes.”
“Look in my eyes when you say that.”
She did. A long beat went by.
“I’m here only for personal reasons,” she said again.
No. I knew her, from the time we’d spent together in Rio. If what she just said were true, my suspicions would have provoked her instantly. But now she was trying to manage her behavior in the presence of fatigue, conflicting emotions, and alcohol, and under pressure from my questions, and the unaccustomed effort was showing.
I looked at her silently. She returned my gaze. A long time went by—ten seconds, maybe fifteen. I could see some color coming into her cheeks, her nostrils flaring slightly with each exhalation.
All at once she looked away. I saw her shoulders rising and falling with her breathing. “Goddamn you,” she said, her voice just above a whisper. “Goddamn you.”
She glanced around the room, her head moving in quick, efficient jerks, here and there and back again.
She got up and started pacing, slowly at first, then more rapidly, her head nodding as though internally confirming something, trying to accept it. She looked everywhere but at me.
“I have to get out of here,” she said, more to herself than to me. She walked over to one of the dressers, pulled open a drawer, and started shoving things into her bag.
“Delilah,” I said.
She didn’t answer, or even pause. She pulled open a second drawer and stuffed its contents into the bag, too.
I stood up. “Delilah,” I said again.
She threw the bag over her shoulder and headed toward the door.
“Wait,” I said, and moved in front of her.
She tried to go left around me. I stayed with her. She went right. That didn’t work either. She moved left again, more quickly. No go.
She had become almost oblivious to my presence. Something had gotten in her way, she had been blindly trying to go around it. But her lack of progress forced her to change her focus, and all at once she saw that the obstacle was me. Her eyes narrowed and her ears seemed to settle back against her head. In my peripheral vision I took in a shift in her weight, a slight rotation of her hips. Then her right elbow was blurring in toward my temple.
I retracted my head and shrugged my left shoulder, bringing my left hand up alongside my face as I did so. Her elbow glanced off the top of my head. Her left was already coming in from the other side. I covered up, dropped through my knees, and deflected it the same way.
She shifted back and shot a left palm heel straight for my nose. I weaved off-line and parried with my right. Other side—same drill.
She took two more quick shots, hooks to the head. I avoided the worst of both. She grabbed my arm and tried to drag me to the side, frustration and anger eroding her tactics.
If there’s one thing my body learned in twenty-five years of judo at the Kodokan in Tokyo, it’s grounding. She might as well have been trying to move one of the room’s thick teak posts.
She made a sound, half rage, half desperation. She stepped back and whipped the bag around at my head. I dissipated some of the blow’s force by flowing with it, and absorbed the rest by covering up with my shoulder, bicep, and forearm. She reloaded and swung again. Again I flowed and absorbed.
She started swearing something in Hebrew and hammering at me with the bag, with no obvious goal now other than to vent her fury. I let her pound on me, taking most of the impact along my arms and shoulders. She was in shape, and it took longer than I would have liked for her to tire. But eventually the power of the blows lessened, the interval between them lengthened. She stood, the bag hanging at her side, her breath heaving in and out. I lowered my arms and looked at her.
She glanced around the room. I realized she was looking for a better weapon of convenience than the bag. I tensed to grab her before she could pick up something heavy and blunt, or something sharp.
She must have sensed that I was on to her. Or she didn’t see anything that looked likely to do the job. Regardless, she stopped scoping the room and looked in my eyes. H
er pupils were huge and black—dilated by adrenaline.
Her panting punctuated her words. “Get. The fuck. Out. Of my way.”
“Not until you tell me what’s going on.”
She sucked wind for a moment, then said, “Fuck you.”
I looked at her. “This is going to be a long night.”
“What do you want?” she asked.
“I want . . .” I started to say.
But it had only been a feint. She dropped her right shoulder and charged into me, trying to knock me off balance. The move surprised me and might have worked, but I caught her shoulders with both hands and used her body as a momentary brace. She reared up under me, looking for a head butt, and connected with my chin. My teeth slammed together, narrowly missing my tongue.
Enough. I grabbed her by the biceps and shoved her against the wall.
“Tell me what’s going on,” I said.
She dropped the bag and tried for an uppercut to my gut. I took hold of her wrists and slammed her arms up against the wall on either side of her head. Our faces were inches apart.
I felt her knee coming up and pressed my body against hers to stop it. She twisted right, then left. My cheek was pressed against hers and her smell, that perfume I liked, now mixed with sweat and fear and rage, got inside me and wrought some weird alchemy. I dropped my face to her neck, feeling first as though I was just going to brace it there, but then I was kissing her instead. I heard her say, “No, no,” but she wasn’t fighting me anymore, or at least not the same way.
Keeping her arms and body pinned to the wall, I brought my face around to kiss her on the mouth. She twisted her head away. I let go of her wrists and took her face in my hands. She tried to push me away for a second, but then she was kissing me back, almost attacking me with her mouth. I ran my hands down around her breasts and squeezed her waist, her ass. I realized I was kissing her as hard as she was me.
I reached up and tried to undo one of the buttons on her blouse but my hands were shaking and I couldn’t do it. Fuck it. I slipped the fingers of both hands into the gap between the buttons and pulled hard to the sides. The buttons all popped free. The bra beneath was lace, with a front snap. I could feel her nipples, hard, through the fabric. I struggled to get the snap undone. Fabric tore. The bra opened up and her breasts were in my hands. Her skin was smooth and hot and damp from exertion.
Kissing me so hard I was forced to step back from the wall, she reached up and tore my shirt open the same way I had done hers. Then she reached down for my belt buckle. No, I thought. You first. I yanked her blouse and bra down to her wrists and spun her around so that she was facing the wall. We started to struggle again. I took her left arm in a wristlock and bent it behind her back. I held it high, almost to her shoulder blades, with my left hand, and shoved her up against the wall. I reached under her skirt with my right. She was wet through her panties. I pushed her skirt up, pinned the fabric against her ass with my hip, and tore her panties away. She snapped her head back and caught me on the cheek with a rear head butt. I saw stars. I pushed against her harder and pressed the side of my face against hers so that she was pinned entirely to the wall. I reached down and began to touch her. She closed her eyes and groaned. I moved my fingers inside her and her body shook.
I looked around wildly. To our left—the dresser. I shoved her over to it. There was a stack of travel magazines on top. I swept them to the floor with my free hand. Then I bent her over the dresser, bearing down on her arm and pinning her upper torso. She struggled but the wrist hold was too tight. I stepped to her side, opened my belt, and undid my button and zipper.
I stepped on the cuff of my left pants leg with my right foot and dropped my pants, stepping clear of them with my left leg as soon as they hit the floor. No way was I going to deal with her with a pair of trousers pooled around my ankles. I repeated the procedure with my right leg, then slipped off my boxers. My erection was straining upward like spring-loaded cement.
I stepped between her legs and pushed up the skirt. Her breathing was more like gasping now, and so, I realized, was mine.
Still pressing her down with the wristlock, I started touching her again. I don’t know what I was waiting for. Maybe I wanted to torture her a little, to torture both of us.
“Do it,” I heard her gasp. “Do it, or I’ll kill you.”
My heart was hammering so hard I heard it thudding in my skull. My fingers and toes were tingling. I kicked her feet farther apart, wiped some of her wetness onto myself, and entered her in one smooth motion.
She gasped so loudly I felt the sound of it run back up into me, like a feedback screech through a microphone. I started driving into her, my hips sliding up and forward, my gut and ass clenching and releasing with each profound stroke.
I looked down at her. The side of her face was pressed against the dresser, her eyes squeezed shut, her mouth open and panting, in pain or ecstasy or both I didn’t know. Her cheek was streaked with tears. I kept going. I didn’t slow down at all.
A minute went by, maybe two. I forgot who she was, who I was, why we were there. There was only the room, the heat, a singularity generating a rhythm as old as oceans.
I heard a deep groan and realized it came from me. Or maybe it was hers. She opened her eyes and looked back at me, pleading for something. I let go of her wrist and took hold of her hips. She gripped the edges of the dresser and moved up onto her toes, raising her ass higher. Her lips were moving but if there were words I couldn’t hear them. Her legs were trembling. I felt her start to come and it took me over the edge. I dug my fingers more deeply into her hips. The pounding in my chest and in my head seemed to fuse together with everything else, my legs, my balls, my gut, her body beneath and before me, everything. Through it all I could hear her swearing in Hebrew again, could feel her coming in waves under me and all around me and myself coming with her.
Finally it subsided. I eased down on top of her, supporting some of my weight with my arms. We stayed that way, our breathing abating, our sweat drying, coming back to ourselves.
After a while, I eased myself up and stepped to the side. I touched her shoulder.
She pushed herself up off the dresser and looked at me. Neither of us said anything.
“You okay?” I asked, after a moment.
“Yeah,” she said. “I’m okay.”
“You want to talk?”
“No, I want to get out of here.”
“Is that going to help?”
“No.”
“Then maybe we should talk.”
There was a pause. She looked down at what was left of her blouse and bra, then let them slide off her arms to the floor. She stepped out of her skirt.
“Tell me one thing, okay?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“Tell me that you haven’t done that before. Without a condom, I mean.”
I thought of Naomi, and, even more, of Midori. “Not in a few years.”
She nodded. “Good. Although at this point AIDS or whatever ought to be the least of my worries.”
“Tell me what’s going on.”
She walked over to the shower and took a robe off the peg next to it. She pulled it on. I walked over and did the same. We moved over to the bed and sat on it.
“Those men you killed in Manila,” she said, looking at her hands. Her voice was slightly husky. “Two of them were CIA officers.”
I looked at her. I saw that she was being straight with me.
“Shit,” I said.
She didn’t respond. After a moment I said, “How bad is it?”
“My people are afraid the Agency will find you and you’ll talk. They don’t want to take that chance.”
“So they sent you.”
She shrugged. “What would you have done?”
“You came here to set me up?”
“I thought I did. Now I’m not sure.”
“That’s not quite what I was hoping to hear.”
“It’s the truth.”
> “Couldn’t pull the trigger yourself?”
“What I do is hard enough.”
We were silent for a minute while I digested the news. I said, “What’s next?”
She brushed away a few strands of hair that were clinging to her face. “I’m supposed to call my contact, let him know when and where you’ll be vulnerable.”
“What are you going to tell him?”
She looked up at the ceiling and said, “I have absolutely no idea.”
“What changed your mind?” I asked, and thought, Maybe you haven’t, though. Maybe this is just the best set-up you’ve ever pulled off.
I’d have to keep testing for that. I didn’t think the way her body had responded could possibly have been acting. But maybe there were a bunch of dead men out there who had all convinced themselves of the same thing. And maybe I would be a fool to assume that the body would always follow the mind. Or vice versa.
There was a long silence. Then she said, “You’ve been lucky so far. I don’t know anyone who’s been luckier for longer. But nobody’s bulletproof. I can’t keep bailing you out.”
“Bailing me out?”
“I warned you about that guy in your room in Macau.”
“I didn’t need your warning.”
“No? You took it.”
I let it go. “And this time?”
She looked at me. “Enough, all right? You know why. I don’t want to be responsible for your death. You fucked up in Manila and I don’t know if you’re going to survive it. I just don’t want to be the one who kills you. Or helps make it happen.”
“I wouldn’t want to put you out.”
She glared at me. “Stop being a child. You caused this situation, and now I’m caught in it, too.”
I paused and took a breath. I needed to think. There had to be a way out of this.