SIXTEEN

“I haven’t really had a chance to settle in yet,” Lisa told me, after she’d poured us a couple of vodka martinis and started the tour of her condominium in the heart of Alexandria.

“I still need to ship some things from El Paso,” she went on. “Artwork, mostly, but a couple of pieces of furniture, too. Stuff I wanted to pack myself that I didn’t want to trust to the movers.”

“Looks pretty good to me the way it is.”

I stopped at a grouping of three eye-catching prints, hanging in the living room where no one could miss them. Goya, I thought, as I examined the first of them—a windswept scene featuring a circle of seventeenth-century aristocrats dancing under a mostly leafless tree on the banks of a river—but the other two were mysteries.

I told Lisa what I’d been thinking.

“You’re right,” she said, “the first one is Goya. ‘Dancing on the Banks of the Mazanare.’”

She moved to the next one, a very dark room this time, a young boy seated next to an open window, staring at his bruised and bloody feet.

“Bartolome Murillo,” she said. “Earlier than Goya. ‘Young Beggar,’ he called it. The original has been in the Louvre for over three hundred years.” Her voice dropped a bit. “Lots of beggars around at the time, plenty of children like this to choose from. I’ve always wondered where Murillo got the courage to actually show one of them to the people who paid him to paint.” She nodded toward the Goya. “People like that, I mean. The people dancing while the child tries not to starve.”

I stepped to the last picture in the trio. Larger than the other two, almost three feet across, and abstract as hell. Large black letter A, along with a short algebraic equation and some formless scribbles, surrounded by a rough brown border against a plain background of pale violet. Definitely not seventeenth century, or the next one either. I looked at Lisa.

“This one finishes the story,” she said. “Twentieth century. Antoni Tapies. It’s called ‘Lettre à 1976.’”

“Dare I ask what it means?” I waved my hand toward all three of the prints. “You say there’s a story here.”

“For my father there was. For me, too, although I didn’t live it like he did.” She shook her head, said something in Spanish.

I looked at her. “Sorry, I’m afraid I don’t—”

“Always the rich, always the poor. Siempre los ricos, siempre los pobres.”

“What about this one? What’s the big A mean?”

“A fresh start, a new beginning.”

She reached for my arm. “Come on. Let’s freshen our drinks.”

To get to the kitchen we went through the dining room. The table had to be eight feet long, dark and massive, the chairs as well. On the wall behind the table hung a framed tapestry, a hunting scene in the Middle Ages. The room reminded me of a refectory in a Castilian monastery. I could almost see the monks gathered to dine, almost hear their mumbled prayers before the meal.

The only thing that didn’t jibe was the setting Lisa had laid for us. Crystal wine goblets, heavy silver utensils, oversize plates rimmed in gold leaf. Silver candleholders, green tapers already lit. No Spanish monk, I’d have been willing to bet, had ever seen such luxury. The abbot, maybe, but none of the working stiffs.

“Wow” was the only thing I could think to say.

She laughed, her eyes somehow even more magical in the candlelight. She’d dressed to match the decor, I realized. A white blouse buttoned to the neck, frilly, relieved by a topaz brooch hanging close to her throat. Dark-blue skirt, tight around her hips, then flaring away in pleats to fall an inch above her black boots. Formal and casual, all at the same time. Her thick dark hair brushed her shoulders, and the effect stunned me into silence. We stood that way for an awkward moment before she spoke.

“Let’s go back to the living room, Puller. I’ll bring some munchies. We can sit for a while, enjoy our drinks before cooking.”

In the living room—after she’d fetched a silver platter covered with tapas—we sat across from each other in matching upholstered chairs, dark chairs with swirls of red, green, and yellow in a sort of Oriental pattern.

“Close,” she told me when I said as much, “but it’s Moorish. Almost the same thing, when you think about it.”

“I’m confused,” I said after dispatching two of the tapas, baked dough wrapped around some kind of spicy meat. “You speak Spanish with what sounds like native fluency, but your English doesn’t have a trace of accent, and your last name is nowhere near Hispanic.”

She laughed, took a sip of her martini, and set the glass on the coffee table between us. “You haven’t read my personnel file, have you?”

“Not closely enough, obviously, but I was seriously thinking about looking at it again before coming over here tonight.”

“Looking for …”

“An advantage, of course, although I wouldn’t say that to anyone but another FBI agent. An edge. Something to know about you that you wouldn’t know I knew.”

“Am I as threatening as all that?”

“I don’t know yet. I guess what I really want to ask is who are you? I know the basics, but the way you handle yourself, the way you respond to me as your supervisor … Nothing about you makes sense for an FBI agent less than a year out of Quantico.”

“Wonder Woman, that what you’re saying? By day a mild-mannered new agent, by night …” She laughed. “You can fill in the blank tomorrow morning.”

I stared at her, not sure I’d heard her correctly. She leaned forward, stretched her arm across the table to touch mine.

“Okay, Puller, I’ll behave.” She stood suddenly. “Give me your glass. If we’re going to start telling the truth, we’d better have another drink.”

I handed her my glass, she took both of them away. I could hear her in the kitchen. Refrigerator opening and closing, clink of ice, her voice humming a ballad that sounded familiar. I thought about what she’d said, about telling the truth. I shook my head. Not a bad idea, one day, but probably not tonight.

Then she was back, sitting in her chair, one leg crossed over the other.

“I’ll go first,” she said. “My father’s name before he came from Spain—before the Spanish Civil War made being an outspoken intellectual a very dangerous thing to be—was Luis Saenz, but when he got to El Paso he found himself treated as just another Mexican, even though he had light skin and blue eyes. His first impulse was to leave, to leave Texas altogether, but his cousin lived in El Paso and his cousin was the only person in the United States he knew. So he worked his tail off to learn English without an accent, and became Lewis Sands. He’d been a certified public accountant in Barcelona, a respected professional, but until he became fluent enough in English he had to work as a bookkeeper.” She smiled. “He married an Anglo, I wasn’t born until he was sixty. After he’d become successful enough to fill our home with the things he’d given up by changing his name. The things that were all around him the day he died.”

“And your mother?”

“Mom’s much younger. Dad might have given up some Spanish things, but he never gave up their ways. He married a woman twenty-five years younger, and I never heard her complain about it.”

“UTEP first. I do remember that from your file. Then law school, and the D.A.’s office back in El Paso.”

“I moved up to Austin for law school, but I really loved El Paso, and my father was getting pretty old by the time I got out into the real world. The district attorney in El Paso was hiring, so I went back and became a prosecutor.”

“Must have been a tough job to leave. Prosecutors and judges run the world you and I live in. Why switch to our level?”

“The boredom. As the new kid, all I got were misdemeanors, by the truckload. A pipeline filled with petty criminals from both sides of the border. I felt more like a garbage collector than a prosecuting attorney. A monkey could have done my job. One day I had a real case for a change, got involved with a couple of FBI agents, realized I wanted to be them instead of me.”

“Happened that way for me, too, except I was a C.P.A. sick to death of sitting behind a desk and waiting for the clock to get to five.” I shook my head. “Now look at me. Sitting behind a desk all day. I’m not watching the same clock, but other than that, it’s pretty much the same.”

“You call the last few days sitting behind a desk?”

“Of course not, but I don’t get enough weeks like this one, out on the street where I belong. Makes it all the harder to go back to the tedium.”

“So why were you out among the rabble this time? You could have assigned somebody else to go to Brookston with me. You didn’t have to work with me yourself.”

I glanced into those eyes. Was she having fun with me? The vodka was running higher in my brain now, and I almost slipped up and told her the truth.

“I did have to work with you,” I told her instead. “Supreme Court nominee, really bad downside potential for the supervisor. No way I sit back and let somebody else determine my fate.”

“A control freak. Do you keep such tight rein on everything, or is it just SPIN cases?”

“Part of the job, I guess. Hard to survive if you let go of the wheel for long.” Boy, was it ever, but this wasn’t the night to get into that. I glanced toward the kitchen. “I’m starving. Why don’t we take a crack at those groceries?”

It had started to rain again as Lisa mixed a couple of salads and warmed the French bread I’d brought with the groceries. I laid the filets on the preheated broiling grill, and the kitchen began to fill with good smells. I opened a bottle of Pepper Lane cabernet. Ten minutes later we were ready to sit down.

Back in the dining room, the candles were an inch lower, but the light was just as mellow. Lisa disappeared for a moment, and when she came back there was music playing. Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. We sat across the big Spanish table, nothing between us to block our view of each other. We sipped cabernet, listened to Ella and Louis. I lifted my glass.

“Amor y pesetas,” I said, repeating a Spanish toast I’d memorized in the days when it was important to be California cool.

“Y tiempo para gustarlos,” she responded. The language sounded so much better coming out of that beautiful mouth.

We ate in a comfortable mixture of small talk and silence, the wine gone far too quickly. I thought about the second bottle I’d brought, mentioned it to Lisa, but she shook her head, and it was a good thing. A couple of martinis, two and a half glasses of cabernet, and I was brimming with good fellowship and so—I was certain—was she. We continued to chat as we finished the steaks, and by the time we’d worked through the cherry pie we were pretty good friends. Afterward I rose and picked up my plate, came around the table and reached for hers, but she took the one I was holding and set it aside.

“Forget about the dishes,” she said. “Where I come from, the night’s for dancing.”

She came around the table, grabbed my hand, and led me into the living room.

“Take off your shoes, for God’s sake,” she ordered. “You’re too damned tall as it is.”

I did so as Ella and Louis came to the end of their set. We waited for the next CD to start. Linda Ronstadt, I heard a moment later, with the Nelson Riddle orchestra, Linda’s voice so pure it gave me shivers.

Lisa slid into my arms and we began to dance. I looked at her, at her hair and her eyes, at the look in those eyes as she put her head on my shoulder. Relax, Puller, I told myself. She works for you. This isn’t what you came here for. There isn’t a single good reason for holding her like this and smelling her hair. No possible good can come of it.

And other lies.

I went on like that through the first song, but the second one was even tougher.

Lover man, oh, where can you he?

The words wobbled around in my brain, then finished me off.

I lifted my arm from Lisa’s back and used my hand to pull her face up to mine. I kissed her mouth and she kissed mine. Our arms tightened around each other, our steps no longer keeping time with the music. Suddenly we were leaving the living room, pausing just long enough for her to pick up the second wine bottle and the corkscrew, me the glasses. Moments later we were in her bedroom. She left the door open after we got there. What little light there was from the hallway was more than enough as she led me to the bed.

“Sit,” she whispered.

I sat on the edge of the bed.

She put the wine bottle on the nightstand, grabbed the glasses from me and did the same thing with them, then stood in front of me and unsnapped the fastener on her right hip. Her long skirt slipped to the floor. I looked at her legs, all the way up to her white bikini panties, then down again. I could hear my breathing grow ragged over the music. She reached behind her back and unbuttoned her blouse, shrugged her shoulders until it fell away. Her bra was so white it made the tops of her breasts look tan, even in the middle of winter.

“Now you,” she said, her voice husky as she pulled me to my feet.

She undid my belt, unzipped me, and eased my pants down. I stepped out of them and reached for my polo shirt, pulled it off and flipped it into the corner. I reached for my shorts, but she whispered, “Not yet.”

We lay together on the bed for an instant before I kissed her again, then slid down her neck and kissed the tops of her breasts. I brought my hand up and undid the fastener on her bra. It fell aside. Her breasts were perfectly round, small enough never to sag, big enough to fall in love with. I kissed each of them, all around the nipples, then the nipples themselves. She arched her back, her breathing suddenly faster. I slid down her belly, tugged at her panties with my teeth. She reached down and pulled them aside. I could smell her, and in the next moment I was tasting her. Then I was rising to my knees and pulling her panties down. She lifted her legs and I slid them past her feet.

“You want to make love to me?” she whispered.

I’m not sure I said anything intelligible as I tugged my shorts off and did just that.

We moved together, faster and faster. She came first, a warmth spreading through her body that I couldn’t get enough of, then a single long gasp, a shudder, and a sudden tightening of her arms around my neck. I groaned in the warmth of her breasts, the smell of her body, the taste of her skin.

Afterward we lay together, our legs entwined, our breathing gradually coming back to normal.

“Yum,” she said.

“Indeed,” I said.

And that was about it for conversation.

After a while, she looked down my body and smiled. “Goodness, Puller. Is that a dagger I see before me?”

I looked down, and damned if it wasn’t.

She slid down my body this time, used her mouth to turn the dagger into a broadsword—a bigger dagger, anyway—and we did it all again.

This time we did talk afterward.

She propped pillows against the headboard and we sat together. In an old movie we’d have been smoking cigarettes, but we did just fine with the bottle of wine we’d brought along. I poured cabernet into her glass, then in mine.

“Do I still have to call you boss?” she asked me.

“When have you ever?”

“I was pretty bold. You could charge me with sexual harassment, I suppose.”

“You could plead insanity.”

She laughed, kissed my neck. “You think I didn’t intend to get you in here? That you just walked in and swept poor little me off my feet?”

“Well, I better read you your rights, then.”

“I demand an attorney.”

“I’m an accountant.”

“Close enough.”

I rose on one elbow. “You have the right to think about me when I’m gone. You have the right to call me up and make me come over here and do this again. You have the right to come to my house and do the same thing. If you cannot afford to get to my house, I will provide transportation both ways.” I leaned closer. “Do you understand your rights?”

“I do.”

“Do you waive your rights?”

She reached down and gripped my diminishing manhood. “I’ve got your waiver right here, counselor.” She gave it a little tug to show she meant business. “And I’m not afraid to use it.”

“Not the briar patch,” I said. “Please don’t throw me in the briar patch.”

We laughed hard enough to make us careful with the red wine on the pale yellow sheets.

Then we tried again, but it was too late and we were too drunk. We gave it our best shot but fell asleep in the attempt.

The next morning, Saturday morning, we were not quite as giddy.

I joined her at the kitchen table for coffee. Her eyes were a little slower this morning, too. She’d been thinking, I discovered when she began to talk.

“Dr. Annie,” she said. “Your veterinarian. Am I getting myself into a problem here?”

“We lived together for a while. Up to about six months ago.”

“I’d have to object to that answer as nonresponsive. What happened? That’s what I really want to know.”

“I’m not sure, Lisa. We just used it up, I guess, whatever we had.”

Lisa shook her head. “You, maybe. Maybe you used it up, but I saw her the other day when I showed up.” She reached out and touched my hand. “By the way, I’m glad I did show up. The two of you weren’t wearing much clothing. I didn’t like the looks of where that was going.”

“What about you?” I asked. “You can’t possibly be unattached.”

“Not unattached, just divorced.” She took a sip of coffee. “Carl’s a Texan. The very idea of moving to Washington sent him scurrying.”

“Kids?”

“I had a feeling we shouldn’t have any, not until we’d been married a few years. One of my better decisions, as it turned out.”

“And what about this decision? What about last night?”

She smiled. “Not something you’d find in the new agents guidelines, but I can live with it if you can.” She picked up her cup, drank from it. “Can you?”

I thought about what Annie had told me about my spinning plate, about leaving the security of the post in the center. Right now I could feel my momentum sliding toward the outside of that plate, and it was all I could do to keep from throwing myself to the very edge. Annie was right, of course. For me, life had reduced itself to two stages: on the edge, or waiting to get back to the edge. I looked at Lisa. It was going to be fun out there on the edge with her.

“I don’t think the office will be an issue, if that’s what you’re asking. You won’t be on my squad much longer, not after the work you did on Brenda Thompson. You’re on the fast track for the Hoover Building, lady. It won’t be long before I’m reporting to you. Before you’ll be the boss sleeping with her tootsie.”

She grinned. “But I’ll never forget the backs I climbed over to get there, will I?” She touched my hand again, squeezed my fingers. “Trust me, I’ll never forget the little people.”

“Little person by day, maybe, but by night …”

She threw her napkin at me. “That’s it. Time for you to go. I know it’s Saturday and I don’t have Brenda Thompson anymore, but I’m still an FBI agent with a boatload of cases. All the Thompson case did is put me further behind. Weekend or not, I’ve got to get to getting.”

The old joke is true, the one about the guy fucking himself to death and the mortician needing an hour to get the smile off his face. I sat behind the wheel of my Caprice, leering at the drivers around me as I cruised on down to the office, feeling for the first time in a while like a whole man again.

I was still grinning when I turned on the Chevy’s AM radio, punched the button for WDC—All Talk, All the Time—and listened to the usual morning roundup of murder and mayhem that passed for news. Still grinning when the announcer turned to news from the White House. Stopped grinning when I heard the name Brenda Thompson. Forgot all about grinning when I heard what he said about her.