“How do you know that?”
“I ate there. I talked to them.”
“The natural reporter. I never talk to anyone unless I’m on a story.”
“That’s the way women are trained. Nice girls don’t talk to strangers.”
She smiled. “Like you? I talked to you.”
“I talked to you first. Come on, Rita. What do you say?”
“What kind of a line is that?” she asked.
“Terrible. Terrible line.” For a moment, they stood and looked at each other. “I’ve been out of work, too, Rita. And I’ve had stories that just lie there and don’t bark.”
“Come on, now you’re appealing to self-pity.”
“Mine. Or yours?”
“Do you feel sorry for yourself?”
“All the time. Like now, when I make a perfectly honest and straightforward offer of dinner and the woman turns me down.”
“Maybe I have something else to do?”
They were suddenly shy with each other. They stood apart in silence a moment longer. “I have other people’s money to spend,” Devereaux said at last.
“That’s romantic.”
“To a reporter it is. Some expense money I didn’t turn in yet. Dinner on the company is always better.”
It was as though she had decided something about him in that moment. “Are you alone? I mean, down here?”
“Alone. Sure. Is that all right?”
For a moment more, she gazed directly at him, her face impassive. And then she shrugged. “Why the hell not?”
He left change on the bar. He took her arm and they walked down the ramp to the sidewalk in front of the hotel entrance and then on to Gulf View Boulevard. Traffic streaked past them quietly on the narrow thoroughfare. “We can walk,” he said, and then they did not speak at all as they walked the half-mile to the restaurant set at the water’s edge near the iron bridge to Sand Key. They took a table near the windows in the semicircular wood-paneled room. The place was almost empty at this hour. Evening closed in the Gulf waters. A few night shark-hunter boats were moving slowly down the channel under the bridge into the blackness of the open sea, their running lights winking in the gloom as they passed.
When the waitress brought white bread, Rita smiled. “Here’s what you came back for. White bread in America.”
The fish was red snapper prepared in the Greek-Albanian style. They shared a bottle of sparkling German wine and ate slowly, savoring the meal and the small talk that they made in the soft lights of the room.
She told him a little of her life story and he listened, absorbed it all, only broke in now and then for little probes of questions:
“How did you meet Kaiser?”
“Kaiser? I just met him when I went to work there. I was bombarding everyone with applications. On my vacation, when I was still at the Press-Gazette, I came out to D.C. I had a friend at AP. I interviewed at the Post and the Star but they didn’t have any use for someone as inexperienced as I was—”
“But Kaiser did.”
“Yes.” She sounded the note of regret again. “He said I was bright.” She blushed quickly, modestly, and stared at her plate. “I worked cheap. He said that, too. And I did.”
“You hated fighting with him.”
She looked up. It was so unexpected of him to say that. For a moment, she studied the winter face, the harsh lines cutting through the dry, pale skin like scars of old roads. Was she attracted to his unconventional good looks? Or was it just the quality of vulnerability that seemed to hide beneath the hard, rough layers?
“What about you?” she said at last. “This is a two-way street. Where did you come from?”
“Chicago,” he began. That was true. Very little of the rest was true until he reached the part about going to Columbia University twenty years before to teach Asian studies.
“And you went to Asia?” Her voice quickened.
“Of course. I was so sure I knew so much about it that I had to go to have my facts confirmed.”
“And were they?”
“No. Not at all.” He spoke quietly, staring at the last of the wine in his glass. “I knew nothing.” He looked up and smiled quickly. “Then I went to Central Press. I wanted to go back to Asia. I had contacts in the business in New York. They sent me back to Asia, to Vietnam to cover the war.”
She made a little fist then and held it tight against the white tablecloth. “Stupid war,” she said.
“As opposed to intelligent wars?”
“Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a pacifist.”
He sighed then. “Neither am I.” No, that was the last thing I would be, he thought. For a moment, he had been distracted by her, by her charm and her quiet voice and the sincerity of her words. He must remember it was only a game and he was merely constructing a simple deception for her.
And yet.
He felt warmed in her company, had liked her from the moment he met her in the music of the dying afternoon. The music had broken his reserve of cynicism, thawed the coldness that had frozen a world of regret, feeling, desire. The music had wounded him. And now he saw that her eyes waited honestly for the trap he would put out for her. He had to stay in control of himself. He had to remember that she was only a device in a complex game.
“I give out catchlines,” she said. “Maybe I should have gone into television. ‘Stupid war.’ What does it mean?”
“It means we didn’t win,” Devereaux said.
“Yes. I suppose. And that’s why World War II was not stupid.”
“A good war,” he said with a bitter edge.
“My father was a patriot. He was in that war. And my brother—”
“Your brother?”
She glanced away. There was a secret there after all, Devereaux thought suddenly. Something was hidden and she had almost shown it to him.
“What about your brother?”
“Nothing about him. War. We were talking about wars.”
“Good wars and stupid ones,” Devereaux said.
“Pour me some wine.”
He gave her the last of it. She drank it slowly, the color filling her cheeks, her green eyes turning smoky and velvet.
“To good wars,” she said, mocking herself, saluting with the wine.
“The good wars are the ones we survive,” he said quietly.
“Is that cynical? Or only true?” she said.
“Both.” He stared into the night beyond the windows. He saw memories he could not describe. His words became detached from his thoughts, running alongside them, obliquely defining them. “The man who makes the summing up is the only winner because he’s the survivor. The hero dies in battle and when he’s gone, he’s gone, blown away, obliterated. All the monuments and graves and memorials don’t mean anything next to that.”
“No,” she said, firmly, just as quietly. “That can’t be true. We can always remember.”
“Who? Your father?”
The words were calculated to cut quickly, like the first slash of a razor.
She was wounded; he saw and did not feel pity, only curiosity. He had led her to this moment; would she reveal her own secrets now?
“Yes. And others. We all remember someone. And it makes us act now the way we do.”
“Survival,” he said. “That’s all that counts.”
“For what reason? For what?”
“Ah.” His smile became cold now, it came from the cold place within him. November. “That is the puzzle I’ve never solved. I know that survival is winning but I don’t know why. Maybe it’s just that the survivors make the rules of the game after the game and decide who won and who lost.”
“But what if you didn’t play? What if you didn’t want to play? What…” But she did not continue.
He felt unsure of himself now. He was lost. The brother was the boy in the photograph he had seen in her apartment. The father was the old man. Names to be checked out in the NSA computer. Names and memories. Or demons that pushed her now.