A KNOCK on the front door shocked Hiroshi from sleep, and he fumbled for the pistol on the nightstand. His wife rolled over, taking the covers with her, muttering in her dreams.
Quietly, so as not to alert the visitor, Hiroshi slipped on his robe, put the pistol in his pocket, and crept across the cold tiles to the den.
So quiet he could hear his own heartbeat. So dark that dots swam in his vision. Right index finger on the trigger, he unlatched the lock with an awkward left hand. He aimed the hidden gun muzzle at what should be the visitor’s stomach and flung open the door.
Kinch. “Hey. You already asleep, you dumb motherfucker?” The American was drunk. And loud.
Hiroshi’s eyes indexed the background shadows; then he ushered him in. “What time is it?” he asked, turning on the floor lamp.
“Time to wake up and smell the coffee. Rise and shine! Oops. Got the little woman up.”
Hiroshi turned. A sleepy form stood in the gloom. He glared at his wife until she withdrew.
“Satellite’s in place,” Kinch said.
“You should not come here.” A wail from the back of the house. Kinch’s noise had awakened the baby. Taguchi, head down in shame for her intrusion, shuffled through the den to the hall.
“Oh, jeez,” Kinch said with drunken sorrow. “Baby’s screaming. I hate when that happens.”
Hiroshi hissed in an exasperated breath. “It is dangerous for us both that you come here.”
Kinch’s eyes cut to his, and he realized with a start that the American was stone—cold sober. “Tora, tora, Hirohito,” he whispered. “The nigger cunt’s going down.”
Hiroshi’s mouth went dry. He pried his cramped finger from the trigger.
Kinch nodded toward the hall, cocky—drunk again. “Hey. Sweet dreams and everything. Sorry I woke the kid.” He left, closing the door with a bang behind him.
Taguchi came in, holding the baby. “Is everything all right?” she asked.
He didn’t dare look at her. “I will buy plane tickets for you and the baby tomorrow. You will visit your sister in Osaka.”
“When will I come back?”
“I don’t know.” The gun felt heavy and useless in his pocket. War was coming. There would not be one target, but a hundred and fifty million. And the Americans would make a mess of it.
* * *
Something soft pressed down on her mouth, her nose. It shut off her air. Dolores woke, flailing. The bedroom was empty. The clock shone a bilious green 1:35 A.M.
Heartbeat booming in her ears, she rose, shivering in the dry high—altitude chill. She felt for the cheap homemade alarm she had placed by the door. With both hands, she picked the Coke can up and set it aside, her palms softening the clink of the nuts and bolts inside. She crept downstairs.
The guest room door was ajar, she saw to her surprise. The inside was dark but for a sliver of light that angled from the floodlamp outside the window. It glinted against the aluminum walker, the oxygen bottle. A form sprawled across the bed where Harry had died. The glow illuminated a trouser cuff, a single herringbone sock.
Quietly she took a blanket from the armoire and tucked it around him. Even more quietly she took the suitcase and camera bag from the room and carried them into the kitchen. She shut the door and turned on the light.
She searched the outside of the suitcase for simple traps: a hair—thin wire, a telltale thread. Nothing. The snaps of the latches were loud as twin gunshots. Dolores froze, alert. The night was so silent she could hear the creak of the lemon tree in the wind.
Pants. Jockey shorts. Shirts fresh—folded from an American laundry. She gently squeezed the rolls of socks. Shook his can of shaving cream. Peered through his amber bottle of Aramis, opened the cap, and sniffed the liquid. She was careful to return everything to its place.
She ran her fingers through his pockets. Searched by touch for hidden compartments. Unzipped the camera bag. Opened the back of his Canon AE1.
Her thighs ached from crouching. Grasping the edge of the kitchen counter, she pulled herself stiffly to her feet.
Maybe they were cleverer than she thought. Maybe Roger was trained in hands—on wet work. She was getting old, and it wouldn’t take much: a karate chop to the back of the neck, strangulation. Smothering.
That’s right. She’d had the dream again: Harry, holding a pillow to her face. She lifted the receiver from the wall phone and dialed.
“Palácio da Alvorada,” a voice answered.
“President Bonfim.”
“The president is asleep and cannot be disturbed. May I ask who is calling?”
Dolores looked at the black square that was the kitchen window. Snow, she thought she remembered, always made the nights bright. “A friend. Give her a message, will you? Tell her she’s wrong. Tell her I don’t miss him at all. Ask if she spoke from experience.” A pause, then. “Can you remember all that?”
“I’ll tell her.” There was a click, and the hum of an empty line.
Dolores replaced the items in Roger’s suitcase the exact way he had packed them. The spy game honed short—term memory. It was in long—term memory that she failed. Ice storms. Leafless twigs dipped in glass. If she closed her eyes she could hear the sound—stage quality of snapping branches, like walking through a winter war movie.
The phone rang. Dolores lunged for the receiver before it could ring again. “Hello?”
That familiar sleepy voice, a burble of laughter in it. “You lie, you bitch. I know you too well.”
Dolores sat cross—legged on the floor, her back against the cabinet, and pulled her robe about her knees. “If you loved me, you’d make it snow.”
“It’s snowing now. Go to the window and look. The Germans brought it with them. I think, querida, that I made a mistake.”
Dolores twisted the phone cord around her fingers till it cut off circulation. She held onto it for dear life. “It’ll be all right, Ana, I promise. You don’t have to tell them everything.”
“Too late. It’s snowing already.”
“No, listen! They just want some assurances. Throw them a bone. A little bone. Something to chew on, something to keep them ...”
“Did you kill Harry?”
... to keep them away from me.
The tick of the clock on the kitchen wall. The slow dirge of a dripping faucet. “I didn’t need to kill him.”
And a single soft noise. A chuckle? “You lie. You hated him, and couldn’t leave him. You didn’t have the courage. I speak from experience,” she said.
“Staying with someone because they’re helpless is one thing. Clinging to someone because you can’t live alone, Ana—that’s different.”
“Clinging. Do you think that’s how Jaje feels?”
“I didn’t mean ...”
A sigh. “I saw snow once. The nice thing about it—it eventually covers everything.”
“Ana ...”
“Go to bed,” she said, and hung up.
When Dolores walked out of the kitchen, the suitcase and camera bag in hand, she saw Roger standing in the darkened dining room.
“I can take the bags from here. They’re pretty heavy.”
She put them on the floor and started up the stairs. He called after her. “I’m sorry they dropped me on you like this. Without warning and everything, I mean.”
“Not your fault.”
“I met a guy at Camp Pearcy who knew you. He said you killed somebody once.”
She halted, her palm on the cold metal of the bannister, her fingers clenched.
“He said you did it against Company orders.” He stood in the rectangular glow from the kitchen, his expression innocent.
She forced her cramped fingers to relax. Took a breath. “A tire blew. That was all.”
“They told me you put something in that tire. Were they lying?”
“Everybody lies, all the time. They tell us assassination is never authorized; then they teach us wet work.”
“Hey. Not me, okay?” He spread his hand over his chest as if she had shot him in the heart. “Six weeks ago I didn’t even know what ‘wet work’ meant. I was at Pearcy for two days—two big deal days—and it rained the whole time. I just came to Brazil because I’m curious about the UFOs. I’m from fucking NASA, Dee.”
But an innocent would have been irked at the invasion of his privacy. A poorly trained spy would have asked what she had found.
“See you in the morning,” she said.
Without another word, Roger carried his bags back to the guest room. He was a good Company man.