"We had reason to hold him. You let him slip away. Tell me why."
The man with the left hand hadn't taken his eyes off me. There was no expression in them, but you wouldn't call it a blank look. I felt pinned to the wall, like a bug. Alright, so he didn't die fifteen years ago. Good for him. He nodded for me to step outside.
5
We went down the stairs without speaking. When we got outside, he kept walking to the front gate. The guards looked at him and then at me. I shrugged and followed him to the street. Finally, he stopped and turned around. "If I shot you right here, do you think anyone would mind?"
"Nice to see you, too."
He lit a cigarette. "You still don't smoke, I assume. No problems of conscience. Just left me for dead and danced home. I wondered what I'd say if I ever saw you again."
"What did you decide?"
"I forget." He threw away the cigarette. "You didn't even look surprised when you saw me."
"It crossed my mind." I started to walk. "Let's keep moving."
He fell in alongside, but didn't say anything.
"Where have you been in the meantime? We'd have run into each other sooner if you'd been in-country."
"Here and there. It took a few years to recover. Pretty good job, the way they put me together again. Good doctors. Very dedicated." He held up his hand. "Too bad I'm left-handed."
"Must make it hard to count."
He stopped. "I think I'll use two bullets. The first one so that it hurts, really bad. And the second one, so it hurts even more." He paused. "I can still count to two."
"You should be able to make it to three, but you're not even armed, so maybe we can skip through the tough talk." He'd lit another cigarette; his good hand was shaking a little, not much. "What did your crowd want with the foreigner?"
"Doesn't concern you." The smoke from the cigarette drifted slowly out of his mouth, as if he weren't breathing. "I'll tell you this, though. There's going to be hell to pay that he got out of the country. You know where he's from?"
"He says he's Swiss." That was true, as far as it went.
"You believe him? He's not Swiss. His mother is a Hungarian, that's why he has a Hungarian name. What did you think Jeno was?"
Actually, I'd checked that with the name trace section. I put in the request on a Wednesday morning, the day after our foreigner arrived. When nothing was back by Friday, I called. Real simple, they said. It's Italian. "You sure about that? His papers say he's Swiss." Don't worry, they said. We know names; it's Italian.
"So, maybe his father is Swiss." I avoided looking at the man's hand and concentrated on his face. There was nothing in it I recognized.
"His father was Israeli."
"Was."
"Dead."
"Is that so? You seem to know quite a bit."
"You'd be surprised." He threw away the second cigarette. "Let me ask you a question. Nothing complicated. Why'd you let him go?"
"We had our orders to be nice, show him around, keep him comfortable. Ending up in one of your holes didn't match the description. Anyway, he hadn't done anything wrong."
"Not in your book."
"Not in my book." I stepped off the curb. "You hungry? I'll buy you lunch." There hadn't been food for lunch for a long time, but we still made the offer sometimes, out of habit.
"No, thanks." He turned around and started walking back toward the gate. "I'd rather choke."
6
Pak didn't look up when I stepped into his office. "We're in a lot of trouble, but you know that. Where you been?"
"I spent some time thinking about noodles. Then I did some walking around. I wanted to clear my head, that sort of thing. Another cold day, we're due for a little break, wouldn't you think? Not that I mind. Cold is good for clearing my head." The cold did nothing for my head besides making my ears ache. Pak knew I was only throwing up chaff in hopes of avoiding the question he was sure to ask.
He asked it. "You know that guy with three fingers?"
"Two fingers, actually; the other one is a thumb. Yes, I do." I sat down and looked out the only window in Pak's office. The view wasn't much, an inner courtyard and, across the way, the Operations Building. It was snowing again, though just a few flakes. Maybe if it snowed more it would warm up a degree or two. My ears still burned from being outside without a hat. This sort of cold gave me an awful headache. "We used to work together."
Pak said nothing, but he didn't go to sleep, either.
"He was in an accident." I didn't think that would end the conversation. It didn't.
"And?"
"And it was a bad accident."
"And?" Pak was going to pull at this, no matter what. He was in that sort of mood.
"The man died. But apparently he didn't."
"To review: You worked together. Somewhere, not to be discussed, he was in a bad accident that killed him, but didn't. And you haven't seen each other since then. Shall I guess the rest, or are you going to tell me? Normally, I wouldn't ask, but this nondead friend of yours seems intent on causing us grief. He was standing in my office this morning, and as far as I'm concerned, that means he has crossed the line from the unmentionable past to a place where none of us want to be-the present. Where was this operation you two were conducting?"
"We were where we weren't supposed to be, not officially, though we had good reason to be there." When I'd left that group, my final orders on leaving were to tell no one what we did-no one, not ever. So far, I'd stuck to that. But this was different. Resurrection hadn't been mentioned as a contingency, one way or the other. "It was supposed to have been worked out ahead of time, our entry into the place we were supposed to visit. Only it wasn't. I thought he was dead, there wasn't anything I could do."
"That's all?"
"More or less. When I got back, they debriefed me, kicked me in the pants, and told me to forget the whole thing. They told me the chief of operations was unhappy, and that if I knew what was good for me, I'd stay as far away from him as I could. We never saw him, so I just assumed that was a fair description of his mood. The man with the fingers must have been overseas until recently; otherwise he'd have shown up sooner on my doorstep. Strange, isn't it? His appearing at this moment? It gives me a funny feeling."
"A funny feeling. Unique investigative technique, we'll have to tell the Minister. These feelings, you get them often?"
"Did I use up my quota for the month already?"
The phone in my office started ringing. I walked down the hall to answer it. "O here."
"Nice to hear your voice." It was the dead man. "We need to meet. I'll see you at the Sosan Hotel, in the coffee shop, let's say at 4:00 P.M."
"How about four thirty?" I hung up the phone because he was no longer on the other end. "Perfect," I said to no one in particular. "Four o'clock is fine." This meant getting the keys for the car from Pak.
Pak was examining his teeth in a small mirror when I walked in. After a minute, he put down the mirror and looked at me. "What?"
"I need the keys to drive over to meet someone."
"Who?"
"The dead man."
"Where?"
"You want to come along? That way you don't have to ask questions, you can see for yourself. In fact, you can take notes. But you have to pay for your own coffee."
Pak picked up the mirror again. "No, you go alone." He smiled into the mirror, a big, phony smile with a lot of teeth. "See, Inspector, with the wrong diet, you can lose your teeth, incisors, molars, the whole works. I'll probably lose mine by the end of the winter. They're already getting loose. I think it's scurvy. And then what will I do? Looks count for a lot, even these days. Everything is in the packaging, you know? At my age, the package isn't doing so well."