15

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THE CASINO WAS a dingy room smelling of body odor, stale liquor, and pungent perfumes. Filled with high-rollers and low-bidders, of spit-and-polish men with mustaches and festooned women with drive, of natives and drifters, and of the forlorn and the laughter-ridden. All were waiting for their luck to change.

Damn them for their illusions. He wanted to shout out and tell them they were living in a dreamworld doomed for disappointment. Taught by society that if they were clever enough and merry enough and full of enough quips and delightful tales, the world would be offered to them on a gilded platter, and they would want for nothing. They couldn’t be more wrong. No matter how many goals were met, there would always be another and yet another. Since one toilet is not enough, install two, and hey, why not three. Because a five-room house is too tiny, buy a two-story house, and if that isn’t enough, a mansion. If a twenty-foot boat is not impressive enough, work up to a yacht. So it goes, on and on, reaching for more, and yet more, and each time discovering they’re not any happier than the day they arrived on earth, squeezing wetness in the grips of their tiny fists, and wailing at the coldness against their naked skin. Eventually the disappointment settles in until they realize none of it brought them true happiness, only momentary elation. And still they go on striving. Acquiring more. Padding bank accounts. Collecting trinkets. Buying shiny new cars. And building castles in the sky.

He noticed the slightest movement at the edge of the room, like the wink of an eye or the pucker of a kiss. She must have been standing at the entrance of the casino for some time, adjusting her eyes to the dimness. Only after measuring him from a safe distance and catching the curious look in his eyes did she broach closer, striding toward his table, her eyes angled downward and her gait hesitant, unusual for a bold woman such as her. She pulled out a chair and tucked herself in, tossing back her hair with a flick and meeting his circumspect gaze with truculence. A few strands of hair fell across her forehead, veiling her eyes and allowing her to maintain a mental distance even if not a physical one.

“May I, mate?” Madelyn asked. “I trust I’m not imposing.”

“Change of plans?” he asked.

“I was supposed to meet somebody else. He’s ...” She looked around, then glanced at the face of her watch, all while framing pretexts and plausible excuses. “... late. I don’t like sitting alone. Gives some men the wrong impression.”

“You want me to act as the beard while you wait for another man.” Jack said it humorously, but in the back of his mind he was jealous of any man who might be in this woman’s life.

Her tongue slipped between her lips and wet them, leaving moistness behind. She wanted to say something but remained silent, as though she were holding onto the protective bar of a rollercoaster car and waiting for the next sharp descent. For the first time since meeting Madelyn Gibbons, Jack saw an unsure woman. Slightly nervous, somewhat insecure, and fearful of revealing what lay beneath her usually unruffled mask. She didn’t know what to do with her hands. She made a vague gesture, then a wave of dismissal.

“When we parted ... from the look in your eyes ... I thought our goodbye was really a hello. You seemed ...” She searched for the right word. Or maybe she had the word at the ready but hesitated to speak it. “You seem,” she said in the present tense, “lonely.”

Feeling deflated, as if he were a helium balloon popped by a pin, Jack subsided against his unyielding chair. That single word lonely, pronounced with such clarity, was a bitter reminder of the way his life had irreversibly changed. Or more truthfully, hadn’t changed. He had always been lonely. Adrift. Searching for something, anything to make him feel connected and not quite so alone.

“Or did I read you incorrectly? If I did ....”

She must have read beneath the disciplined neutrality of his face. With the realization of having hit on a profound truth, she sensed victory. Her face became animated. She leaned closer, her chair positioned near enough for her arm to brush against his. Immediately she resumed her straight posture, this time assuming a rueful though engaging look on her face, almost as if she were laughing at him, and herself. Under the lamplight, she appeared younger, less severe, and considerably more relaxed.

“There really isn’t another man,” he said. “Is there?”

The casino’s overhead lamps, dimmed for mood, afforded a woman—any woman really, but especially an assertive woman like Madelyn Gibbons—the relative obscurity of being with a man amid a hooting and hawking crowd, even as dice were tossed and cards were shuffled and chips were thrown down on felt surfaces.

“I thought you understood,” she said. “Our meal was only the appetizer.”

Even in the dark, he was able to see the embarrassed blush to her cheeks, surprising considering the brashness of this woman he had known for less than a day. “Thirsty?”

“Always.”

Jack signaled a nearby hostess. Madelyn ordered a fancy tropical cocktail loaded with assorted rums and fruit juices, unexpected since she appeared to be a woman who would have chosen whiskey or vodka or brandy. This was the purely feminine side of Maddie Gibbons, frillier and more girly than the stringent woman he met at the agency, or even the confident woman he dined with earlier in the evening. She was notably more appealing, even charming, and quicker to smile. He waited for her to say whatever she came to say.

It wasn’t until the toy umbrella had been set aside, the cherry stem picked clean, and the frosted tumbler half-drained that she gazed unblinkingly into his eyes. “You’ve found me out, I’m afraid. I’m not meeting anybody else.” In the room’s mellow lighting, her eyes were a toasted brown, hauntingly eerie in their translucence.

The mating game was often difficult to follow, even when the woman made her proposition quite apparent. It almost seemed tawdry. She was hiding behind the same Kabuki mask she wore earlier. She was closed off, afraid to reveal the feminine side of herself, preferring to hide behind a layer of makeup and an expression of impenetrability. She had been carefully schooled a long time ago, or maybe had learned the hard way, that a woman should never reveal any weakness should it be used against her.

“Hungry?” Neither John Harrier nor John Finlay knew the first thing about seducing a woman. Jack Coyote, though, had acquired enough practice to make up for both of his alter egos.

Madelyn Gibbons had come to seal a deal, and it appeared she wasn’t only interested in closing a financial transaction. “I do believe that I am, mate.”

The connotation for them both was double-edged. For the present moment, they settled for food.

They ordered appetizers, fried delicacies mixed with sourness and sweetness, and eaten with lip-smacking delight and smoldering looks. Madelyn ate the way she yearned to live life and make love, with a snorting appetite and smacking lips. More than once, she brushed a hand across her fair freckled face, momentarily revealing the forward woman within, the lady who knew whom she was and what she wanted, and wasn’t afraid to demand everything in sight. Like a flickering flame, the image of this greedy woman disappeared, quickly replaced with the guarded version, then reverting just as quickly to the unabashed version, inwardly chuckling, a chameleon changing with the whims of the beholder.

Jack was attracted. He couldn’t help but be attracted. She was an attractive woman.

After eating the late-hour snack with more relish than their full-course meal, she reapplied her lipstick, sending coy looks in his direction and making it entirely clear what she expected before the night ended, and what she was willing to put out for the favor. Jack experienced scenarios like this before. Maybe she thought Jack was someone he was not, a rich man who could show her the way out of an ordinary life into an extraordinary one, from humdrum inconspicuousness to jet-set respectability, from an isolated island in an isolated part of the Pacific to the unexplored world.

For Jack, taking a woman into his bed had always been the easy part. The morning after was the indelicate stage. He didn’t want to let her down. He suggested, “We should probably think this over.”

“You misread me, Mr. Harrier. I’m not a flighty woman.”

“I never thought so.”

“Everything I say or do, I say or do with care.” Her lips curled. Her eyes sparkled. She rubbed the arch of her shoeless foot against his ankle. “Don’t get me wrong. This is officially unofficial. I’m not a rogue or a whiner. When it comes to the agency, my work on your behalf will be done with the utmost professionalism, everything clean and neat. It’s just that ... sometimes ... well ... this island can be a very lonely place.”

The foot withdrew. She sat back and crossed her arms as if chilled. The recessed lighting captured her face like a Toulouse Lautrec masterpiece, neon green hues layered with cerise.

“A few years from now, the world will be a different place,” she said. “It already is. In New York City, a drug dealer in a back alley gets paid with digital dollars from an app on his phone. Without human intervention and before he crosses the street, the funds have been transferred via satellite into a Liechtenstein bank. To give you an idea,” she said with a smile on her lips, “a hundred billion dollars have passed through our agency since the beginning of the year. But that’s only a proverbial drop in the proverbial bucket when you consider other operations like ours in other countries. Western nations, hamstrung by laws and regulations, are missing out on a good thing. You don’t have to sell plastic or steel or heroin to make a fortune. But sometimes you have to lie. And lie some more. And you’ve been lying to me, haven’t you, Mr. Coyote. Or whoever you’ll be tomorrow. Or the day after that.”

She shrugged in a way that made her blouse ruffle over small jiggling breasts, tenderly reminding Jack of his isolation in an uncaring world. He wouldn’t mind having a woman such as this woman, here in the middle of nowhere. He wouldn’t mind it all. He had run away from his country in the same way he once run away from home as a boy, only to realize on both counts that he couldn’t run far enough away to lose himself.

“We really should get over this business of will he or won’t he make a play, will she or won’t she romp in his bed. Or have I read you wrongly?” Her eyes were smiling but her mouth hesitated to mirror her expectations, and instead were trembling with expectation, as if she were looking forward to the inevitable and already regretting the goodbyes. “If I have, I can always take my leave and wish you a pleasant evening.”

It took a while for him to answer her, but when he did, he made an admission. “You haven’t read me wrong.”

“It seems we’ve settled everything then.” To her it was a business arrangement not unlike setting up an untraceable bank account.

He finished his drink and set the glass aside. They had signed a contract, not in indelible ink but with fixed looks of shamelessness. “Why don’t we go to my room.”

She shouldered her purse. “What a startlingly good idea, mate. I was wondering when you’d get around to it.”