A Knife Edge (4 page)

“In the car going home, the husband asks his wife, ‘So what did the doctor say?'

“She replies, ‘You're gonna die.' “

Durban laughed. “Yep,” she said. “That's us.”

A tune from a well-known musical began playing in her jacket pocket. Durban pulled out her cell, then excused herself to answer it, turning toward a plate of raw salmon brought to us earlier by a fembot.

“This place one of your favorites?” I asked when she snapped her cell shut and put it in her pocket. I wasn't sure what I liked least, the food or the entertainment. I chewed on something cold and rubbery, which, come to think of it, was also a suitable metaphor for the music.

Durban nodded. “One of my regular haunts. It's cheap and it's authentic Tokyo. You ever eaten jellyfish before?”

“Never,” I said.

“You have now.”

It squeaked between my teeth like a piece of inner tube as I chewed. “Actually, it's not bad,” I conceded. “Have some. Show me how it's done.”

Durban shrugged and picked a few strands out of the bowl with disposable chopsticks. What I wanted more than anything was to spit my mouthful out and go find a hamburger. The sake
was good, though, and it killed the taste of the cuisine. Maybe that's why they served it. I reached for the flask.

“No, no—you never pour your own sake. It's bad luck,” said Durban. I switched cups and filled hers instead. She drank it down, perhaps a little too eagerly.

I said, “Don't think much of jellyfish either, eh?”

“Busted. More, please.” She held out her cup. I topped it up again. “It's the one thing on the menu that makes me gag.”

I picked up a napkin. “Do you mind?” I asked.

“Go right ahead,” she said.

I spat the jellyfish into the napkin, then rolled it into a ball.

“Sorry,” she said. “That was a bit of a test.”

“How'd I do?”

“You passed.”

A couple of businessmen beside us were tucking into a lobster pinned to a slab of wood. I saw its front legs move. They picked at it with their chopsticks while it tried in vain to escape. I lost whatever appetite I had left.

The guy doing over “Hard Day's Night” left the stage to wild applause—I guessed because he'd finally finished. “So, what about your boyfriend?” I asked Durban. “Is he going to be joining us?”

She studied me for a moment. “Boyfriend? A, how do you know I'm not married? And B, how do you know who I was talking to?”

“In answer to A, while you're wearing a ring on your wedding finger that suggests you're married, the finger next to it bears the indentation of a ring recently removed. I'd say you've been asked by someone to baby-sit me and you've shifted the ring across to your wedding finger in case I turn out to be creepy and you need an excuse to hurry on home. As for B, and I admit this one's a stretch, that cell ringtone of yours, the tune ‘The One That I Want' from the musical
Grease?
Just a guess, but, given the title of the song, I'd say that you've downloaded it especially and assigned it to a caller group of one. As I've just established you're
not married, that one has to be your boyfriend. Also, it's the time of day when lovers call each other to see what's up” I'd just pulled the investigator's party trick, the equivalent of a clown twisting a balloon into the shape of a poodle. Nothing to get excited about, really, unless you were an impressionable girl with a few drinks in her, thrilled about being a long way from home. I was almost disappointed in myself.

“Hey, not bad. I'm impressed,” she said, gazing at me with, if I wasn't mistaken, lust. “You're right on all counts—even about the baby-sitting gig. I've had to do it a couple of times in recent months and every time I've been hit on by a guy who thinks he can play because he's beyond his spouse's reach—you know, outside the five-hundred-mile zone.”

“The what?”

Mischief curled a corner of her full and, I had to admit, sexy lips. “The chances of bumping into someone you know while you're out on the town, or ending up in bed with someone your partner went to school with, for example, reduce the further away you get from home. Five hundred miles, they say, is when your survival odds are greater than the risk of being caught.”

“Nice to hear something useful is being taught at spy school these days,” I said. Her knee brushed against mine under the table. Her cheeks were flushed with color brought on by the rice wine.

“As for the boyfriend, I've been dating my boss, the deputy assistant director, but it's not going anywhere,” she informed me.

“Why's that?” I asked, not knowing what else to say.

“Because he's married.”

“So much for the five-hundred-mile zone.”

Durban wrangled those lips of hers into a pout. “Don't approve?” she asked.

I answered her question with a noncommittal shrug.

“What about you?” she asked. “Married?”

“Divorced,” I said.

“Everybody's doing it,” she opined. I considered telling her
that I'd caught my wife having an affair—all four inches of it in her mouth, as I recall—if only to put a little distance between us, particularly between Durban's hand and my thigh, which she'd started kneading like she wanted to bake it. The truth was that while I was technically single, I still felt attached to Anna. And yet… there was a conflict of interest about this burgeoning between my legs. If I were going to avoid waking up tomorrow with Durban in my bed and a head full of regret, I had to leave, or get rescued. And fast. “So, is your boyfriend joining us?” I repeated with as much nonchalance as I could manage.

“No. I just told him I was working late.” Her nails were now tracing figure eights on the fabric of my pants, the circles getting wider and coming dangerously close to The Wakening Serpent. “I told him we were going through the case … you know…”

There wasn't that much to go through that we hadn't already covered, but I said, “Good idea.”

An ancient woman shuffled up to us and exchanged our empty sake flask for a full one. I protested, but she just waved at me and told me in Japanese not to be stupid. While I didn't speak Japanese, I'd been told not to be stupid enough times in a multitude of languages to know exactly what she said. Obviously, I was in the middle of some female plot to get me drunk, and it was working. “So, as I was saying, a recap of the case is a good idea.”

“What's to go through?” Durban said. “The guy got drunk, fell off the boat, and became bait.”

She picked up the flask and poured me another shot. Yeah, this girl had Trouble tattooed on her forehead. I felt a pang of sorrow for Mrs. Deputy Assistant Director—the woman was getting screwed, along with her husband. Time to refocus. “We don't know that as fact, do we?” I asked.

“Know what?”

“Exactly what happened to Tanaka?”

“So you don't think he got eaten by a shark?”

“Yeah, I'm sure he got eaten, but that's
all
we know.”

“I guess.” Durban sucked in her bottom lip and held it there.

“Tanaka was drunk,” I said.

“I remember. So?”

“He didn't drink. Ever. Not according to the FBI, anyway.”

Durban's eyes widened, like she'd just discovered a plot. “Really?”

“The Bureau could have been wrong. Or maybe Tanaka just chose that night to take a stroll with Johnnie Walker—either was more likely than any other reason.”

“Like murder,” said Durban.

“Yeah, like murder.” The other minor outstanding issue was those twelve hours. Why had it taken so long for anyone to discover that Tanaka was missing?

Durban interrupted my thoughts. “So, what do you DoD people do, exactly? No specifics, of course, just in general. You guys are even more hush-hush than we are.”

The CIA was “ hush-hush”? That was a new one on me. Every now and then Durban said something that reminded me she was still really just a kid, albeit an oversexed one. First impressions aren't always right, but this was mine: The biggest struggle in her life had probably been with the occasional tight peanut butter jar lid. That, and she was way too pretty for her own good. Or anyone else's, for that matter.

“No, it's okay. I can give you specifics,” I answered. “For the past five months I've been waging war on apostrophes. You know, whether they go before or after the
5
? It's a huge problem. You'd be surprised how many people get that stuff wrong. Next month, I'm going after parentheses.”

“You're kidding me.”

“Honestly, all I've done since being transferred out of OSI is review paperwork—other people's. This is my first real case in six months.”

“Six months?” She was surprised. Almost as much as I was. What was I still doing in the armed forces, anyway?

The fat business guy had muscled his way up to the microphone again and was launching into “Stairway to Heaven.” Or
hell, depending on your point of view. The female company at his table applauded. I wanted to throw tomatoes, or, this being Japan, star-knives.

“So that's your background, the Air Force's Office of Special Investigations?” Durban asked.

I nodded.

“OSI.” Something flickered across her face. “Jesus! I recognize you now.”

“Recognize me?”

“Yeah. The rank threw me. You were a lieutenant back then, right? Lieutenant Cooper. That's right, I remember reading about you. You busted up an arms-smuggling ring in Afghanistan. You were on that CH-47 that got shot out of the sky by the Taliban. Yeah, I read about you.”

I ignored the wrath of the gods, poured myself sake, and tossed it down. The whole Afghanistan thing was still giving me nightmares.

“You're a bit of a hero,” she persisted, ignoring my body language. I was squirming. I've come to realize that there's not a lot of difference between a coward and a hero. The situation itself rather than a conscious decision often dictates a man's actions. I've seen heroes do cowardly things. And I once saw a man everyone thought was a coward rescue a dog chained to a booby-trapped 155-mm artillery shell. Both were killed when the device blew a swimming-pool-sized crater in the dirt. When I looked back on my service record, the moments recorded as glorious sparked only cold fear, loneliness, and a sense of point-lessness. And, of course, along with the cowards, many of the heroes I've known are also dead. Their heroism had done little or nothing to alter an outcome. Out of all this, one eternal truth has struck me—Death ain't real choosy.

“You okay?” I heard her voice as if from a distance. “Did I say something wrong?”

“What? No, nothing. What about you? Why the CIA?”

“My story's not nearly as exciting as yours, I'm afraid. I grew
up in a Park Avenue apartment. Only child. Father was a banker, Mother a professional drinker—brandy with vodka chasers. Good schools. NYU, poli sci, psych, and languages.”

So much for first impressions being wrong. “That's where you learned Japanese?”

“No. We had a Japanese doorman. I fucked him on my thirteenth birthday when my mom was in bed with the bottle and my father was on some business trip. The doorman was the only one who remembered.” She forgot about the gods and poured herself sake like she was trying to forget. The drink brought back her smile. “You know, the best way to learn a language is on your back?”

The hand was on my leg again. “As for why the CIA,” she said, “I was recruited in college. My mother wasn't too happy about it but I think my father thought it was cool, something to brag about in the Hamptons.” She paused to drink her sake and a thought struck her. “I think their attitudes changed after 9/11.”

“Theirs and everyone else's,” I said. I knew there was a reason why I was still doing this gig and I'd just been reminded of it. I glanced outside. The snowflakes were settling onto the vehicles out in the street like goose down after a pillow fight.

A man appeared to detach himself from the moving press of people shuffling along the sidewalk. He stepped into the sushi bar and launched a smile at me that could have come from a Tommy Hilfiger catalog. I was about to tell him he'd confused me with someone else when he said, “Hey, I knew I'd find you guys here!”

“Bradley!” exclaimed Durban. She spun around on her stool a little too quick when she heard his voice, like she'd been caught in the act. It didn't take Sherlock Holmes to figure out who Bradley was. I wondered why he'd turned up after Durban had given him the brush-off. Maybe he didn't trust her. Maybe he wasn't as vacuous as he looked. Bradley was impeccably dressed in a black Brooks Brothers coat with a bronze silk scarf tucked inside the lapels. He wore the arrogance of an Ivy League fraternity
house like aftershave. I just knew we'd get along—not. He dusted the snowflakes off his shoulders and sleeves and JFK-style light brown hair, then unbuttoned his coat.

“Got a drink there for me, Shell?” he said, avoiding any overt display of affection for his mistress. I wondered how he'd behave if he knew
I
knew. “So, you must be Special Agent Vincent Cooper. Good to meet you. Bradley Chalmers. I'm with State.”

Sure you are, Brad.

He held out his hand to shake. His white fingers were cold and wet, like pieces of sashimi.

“Call me Vin,” I said, playing along.

“So, how do you like Japan, Vin? It'd be nice, only there's so many Japanese, right?” He smiled at his own banality.

“Yeah, it's nice,” I agreed. It occurred to me that someone upstairs must have been listening, for a change. Here was my diversion. Whether I liked the guy or not, Durban's boyfriend and boss was my excuse to exit, stage left. “Well…” I said.

“Hey, where're you going?” Durban said with a frown.

“Yeah, c'mon,” said Prince Chalmers with zero conviction, “you can't leave now.”

“Appreciate the hospitality, folks,” I said, “but I got a report to write.” The requirement to keep on top of the paperwork was something everyone working for Uncle Sam understood, paperwork being a monster with an insatiable appetite for the world's forests. I caught a look from Michelle while the karaoke racket distracted her lover boss. It was the slightest pursing of those lips, the raising of an eyebrow and the suggestion of a shrug. It said,
I'll shake this loser and then you and I can go wring some fun outta this town.
Although I could have gotten it wrong and it might have been just plain,
See you.
I stood and the blood rushed to my feet, leaving my brain bobbing in a high-water mark of sake. I swayed a little.