She didn't know the city as well as he did. She'd told him that at dinner, and he'd used it as his excuse to ask her out again: She couldn't live as close as she did to one of the world's great cities and not know very much about it. It was morally wrong.
So they hit the Palace of the Legion of Honor, then swung back through Golden Gate Park, stopping for tea at the Japanese Tea Garden after an hour inside the De Young Museum. The fine August weather was holding up, and parking at Ghirardelli Square, they walked back up Polk Street and ate baguettes and pâté and drank red wine at one of the outdoor tables of a French bistro. Taking a walk afterward, idly sightseeing, they essayed the descent of Lombard, the "crookedest street in the world"-although it wasn't in fact even the crookedest street in the city, Nolan told her. That distinction belonged to Vermont Street down in Potrero Hill. Nevertheless, Lombard was crooked and steep enough, and he told her that she might want to put her hand on his arm for balance, and she did.
In North Beach, at Caffe Trieste, Nolan brought their cappuccinos over and put them down on the tiny table in front of her. "Okay," he said, "risky-question time again."
This time, more comfortable with him by now, she smiled and said, "Uh-oh."
"Think you can handle it?"
"You never know, but I'll try."
"Evan's letters."
"What about them?"
"Have you read them?"
She looked down at her coffee, lifted the cup and took a sip, then put it down carefully. "Why don't you just tell me I'm pretty again and we'll run with that instead?"
"Okay. You're pretty again. After that ugly time you had back there for a while."
"Yeah, that was terrible." But the gag wasn't working. Her mouth went tight and she closed her eyes, sighing, then opened them and looked him full in the face. "Not yet. I tried starting to read them the other night, but I'm still too emotional about him. I haven't changed my mind about what he's doing, so there's really nothing he can say…"
Nolan took a long moment before he sipped his coffee, another one before he spoke. "You don't see anything noble or glorious or even good in the warrior, do you?"
She briefly met his eyes. "The warrior," she said in a derisive tone.
"The warrior, that's right."
She shook her head. "Evan's not a warrior, Ron. Evan's a simple soldier, a grunt who's taking orders from men he doesn't respect, fighting in a country that doesn't want us there, risking his life for a cause he doesn't believe in. I have a hard time with words like noble and glorious and good coming into that equation when I keep seeing waste and stupidity and ignorance."
"Okay," Nolan said. "We could maybe get in a good fight about this particular war. But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the philosophical concept of the warrior."
Her face was still set in stone. "I never think about the warrior, Ron. War is what's wrong with the world, and always has been."
Again, Nolan let a silence accumulate. "With all respect, Tara," he said quietly, "you owe it to yourself to think about this."
"To myself?"
"If you're dumping the guy you're in love with over it, then yes. To yourself."
"I've told you, I don't know if I'm in love with him anymore."
"Because he went to fight?"
She slowly turned her coffee cup around. "I told him we could go to Canada, or anywhere else."
"And what happens when Canada or wherever feels threatened and needs soldiers?"
"But that's the point, Ron. There was no threat. Iraq was no threat. It was preemptive, like Germany invading Poland. America doesn't do that, that's the point. There are no WMDs, you wait and see. The whole thing's a sham. It's about oil profits and that's all. Halliburton and those people. Can't you see that?"
"Defense contractors, you mean?"
"Yes. Defense contractors. Big business. Cheney and his buddies."
"Well, of course I see what you're saying, but I'm in a little bit of a bind here, because a defense contractor is who I work for. But from my perspective, we're the guys who are protecting the Army and the civilian admin guys over there. We're the ones feeding our troops, moving water and supplies, doing good work, saving lives, trying to rebuild the country."
"That we destroyed in the first place."
Nolan took a breath. "Look, Tara, war may be hell but that doesn't mean everybody involved in it is evil. I've seen evil, and believe me, it's a whole different animal than what you're thinking of. So let's not talk about this war. I grant you it's got some issues. Let's talk about the warrior."
"The warrior, the warrior. I don't want the warrior in my life, that's all. I don't want the warrior in the world."
"Ah, but there's the crux of it. Of course it would be wonderful if there didn't need to be warriors. Just like it would be great if there were no evil in the world. But here's the thing-there is evil. And without warriors, evil would triumph."
"How 'bout this, Ron: Without warriors, evil couldn't attack."
"So it's chicken and egg, is that it? Which came first? No"-he put his hand on hers, took it away as though it burned him-"listen. My point is this: There is always going to be evil and, yes, it will attract evil warriors. You buy that so far?"
She managed a small nod.
"Okay," he went on. "So evil and its minions are a given, right? Right. Come on, you admit that. You've just admitted it. And, P.S., it's true."
She hesitated, then said, "Okay. Yes. So?"
"So once evil's on the march, what's going to stop it except a greater force for good?"
She sat back and folded her arms. "The greater force doesn't always have to be physical. It can be spiritual. Look at Gandhi, or Martin Luther King. Fighting should be a last resort. I think a lot of so-called warriors are really warmongers picking fights to justify their own existence."
"Sometimes they are, yeah. And Gandhi and King, great men, both of them, no question. And both assassinated, I might point out. And neither used their nonviolence in an actual war. Okay, they fought evil, but it wasn't on the march. It wasn't to the warrior stage yet. But even so, for every King or Gandhi, you've got a Neville Chamberlain or somebody who doesn't want to fight. It's not till you get yourself a warrior-like, say, Churchill-that you really can stop active evil. You think Hitler would have stopped by himself? Ever? Or Saddam Hussein, for that matter?"
"We did stop him, Hussein," she said. "He wasn't a threat."
Nolan let his shoulders relax. His face took on a peaceful neutrality. His voice went soft. " Tara, please, you've got it backward. If he wasn't a threat, it was because we did already stop him once. Our warriors stopped him in Kuwait. That's the only thing he understood."
Tara was twirling her cup around in its saucer, biting on her lower lip. Eventually she raised her eyes. "I don't like to think about this, Ron. About evil's place in the world."
He kept his voice low, met her eyes, again put his hand over hers and this time left it there. "I don't blame you, Tara. Nobody likes to think about it. And some places, like here in the U.S., and on a gorgeous afternoon in this great city, it can seem so far away as to be nonexistent. Thank God. I mean, thank God there are islands where the beast is kept mostly at bay. It's in its cage. But the thing to remember is that somebody, sometime, had to put the beast in there, and has to keep it there. And that's why we need-we all need, the world needs-warriors. How did you feel about Evan being a cop?"
Her frown deepened, her head moving from side to side. "I don't think I was exactly thrilled, but that was different."