44

Duvivier settled into a window seat and took a magazine to ward away potential chatter. He needn’t have. The gentleman on his right carried a similar shield, a weathered copy of The Wall Street Journal. It would be a good flight.

He had lied to Lida again, saying that he would arrive in Washington late that afternoon. In fact, he would arrive late that morning. But such a small lie, a lie that would give him a few hours at the Library of Congress.

And then a few hours with her.

And then … The Play of Herod.

He had rather shocked himself by suggesting that she come to his hotel. Sporting with the doomed Lida seemed heartless, even for Duvivier. Why had he done that? She would have been willing to meet him there, at the cathedral. That, it seemed, had been his plot, even as he dialed her number.

Had she asked for those hours? He remembered their talk. No. The revision had been his own doing.

Though threatened by her in the abstract—by what she knew and what she might learn—he was aware of an absence of strain in her presence. He had, for instance, mentioned his days as a teacher. That was in response to something she had said of her own teaching experience. It was a harmless enough remark. And he had mentioned Riley. But only that the man lumbered around the campus with his pants always stuck in the crack of his ass. And Lida had laughed, saying that she knew the type.

But the fact that he had dropped his guard, or very nearly dropped it, only served to convince him of the danger she posed. No question, Lida must die.

“I just want to relax.” That’s what she told him, early on. Not a notable line, but a notable feeling. And yet her honesty, if that’s what it was, seemed more habit than moral code.

He smiled, recalling the attempts he had made to anger her, to send her away. Six pigs and a gazelle. Or had it been the other way around? Yes, it was six gazelles and a pig. If anything, he had confirmed the very persistence he now feared. Oh, the pity of it!

He remembered holding her in the predawn gloom. “Tell me how you feel,” he had said, “in words, tell me.”

“I don’t feel in words,” she had replied, her voice muffled by the proximity of her body to his own. She told him, then, with those fingers.

He laid the magazine across his lap.

Perhaps Duvivier was not heartless. Perhaps he was generous.