As they left, she bribed the barman to part with a full bottle of Booth’s gin.
On the road back to Santa Fe, he asked, “What’s so special? One gin is much the same as another.”
“No, it’s not. You just take a sniff.”
She uncorked the bottle and wafted it under his nose as he drove.
“See? It’s sort of flowery and oily at the same time. Reminds me of home. God knows why. It’s as though they’d mingled summer and autumn—summer scents and autumn drizzle. A bit of England in a bottle.”
But he wasn’t thinking of England. He wasn’t thinking of Zette. On a rutted, washboard road, rolling into the New Mexico desert under a cobalt sky with the smell of juniper wafting up from the open bottle and the scent of night-blooming jasmine drifting in through the open window, he was thinking of Russia.