“Are you married?” she asked, then laughed when she saw my reaction. “You think Brazilians are too direct?”
“I’m not married. I was, years ago.”
“Then your fiancée was killed after that. I know. I am sorry.”
“Me, too.” Someone must have had a handheld TV on nearby. I heard a news broadcaster. “Here in San Francisco it’s hard to believe there’s an outbreak elsewhere. Life goes on. But the question in some minds is, are we next?”
She picked up a piece of corn bread and buttered it. She ate in small bites. A dab of butter remained on the corner of her mouth, by a freckle. She said, “Nelson and I worked together for four years. He wanted to be my lover. I tried it once with him. But it was uncomfortable. He was energetic. But he wanted to be more involved.”
“You don’t have to tell me this.”
“Why not? What shall we talk about, then? The ten thousandth conversation about malaria? You know as well as I do what is going on between us. Or not.”
I sighed. I said, “Yeah.”
She placed her hand on top of my wrist. “We are on a crucial investigation, and it is always best to give your body what it needs. It needs to eat. If you do not sleep, you are not fresh. Why is this different? I can’t do anything with Eddie. He is married. To sleep with a married man is against my belief. Joe, if you think that every single waking minute is a moral question, you should be a priest. And not live as a regular man.”
“You won’t sleep with married guys but you shoot them.”
“You do that, too.”
“Very romantic.”
She laughed. I laughed. Neither of us wanted romance. Something in common. It felt as if months had passed since I’d laughed in a way that made my stomach muscles ease, even at the same time that other muscles tightened. The waitress laid down heaping plates of golden crispy chicken, and mason jars of sweet tea. The cook had doubled our portions. This was a gift of respect. The couple by the front door was now taking photos of us on their phones.
Okay, so maybe the city doesn’t give privacy so much.
As I ate, my skin felt alive in a thousand different places. I drank the sweet tea, yet my throat remained dry. The way the overhead light hit the contours of her bare shoulders. The way the coconut smell seemed to roll off her long hair. The way the little freckle by the mouth moved up and down when she was chewing. I could feel my nostrils flare with lust; my fingertips were numb, and inside my knees was the sensation of hollowness. We ate in silence, but with a hungry relish. She told me about growing up in the favelas of Rio, in a one-room concrete shack with a tin roof. She told me about the way gangs had run the favela, and how it was only recently that a woman could work for the Brazilian Federal Police. She said that she had to be tougher than the other cops, the men, and that she had been assigned to work in her own old favela. She said, as she licked the bones clean on a wing and asked the waitress for one of the huge pieces of banana cake sitting under glass, on the front counter, that those favelas were war zones, and in war zones, “you must do special things or you lose.”
Izabel had a small body that demanded lots of fuel.
Ten minutes later we were back out on the street.
“I’ll walk you home, Izabel.”
“Good, Joe. Yes. Very good.”
She had, I thought, been right on every level. Out there at this moment was a group seeking to kill thousands of people who I had sworn as a Marine and as a doctor to protect. You must do special things. I had done them in the past. I would probably do them again. Why be a hypocrite and pretend otherwise? Eddie had not done these things. Nor had Stuart or my old boss, the Admiral. But Izabel had done these things. She was like me.
The apartment that Stuart had arranged for her, a one-bedroom walk-up in a brownstone, lay on Riverside Drive with a third-floor view of the edifice of Grant’s tomb and leafy Riverside Park. She did not turn on the lights. She did not offer me a drink. We both did nothing at first except stand at the window and gaze out at the elms and quietly parked automobiles and the massive general’s tomb and beyond that, the strip of park. We were not delaying. I think we were savoring the immediate future.
“I saw a small boy out there last night, at two A.M.,” Izabel said. “Then I thought I saw a man with him, with a beard. Smoking a cigar. Wearing a uniform. But not a uniform I recognized. Neither person had protection.”
I turned to her.
“They looked up at me. It was foggy and then suddenly they were not there anymore.”
“You saw this?”
“I see these things sometimes,” she said. “Do you?”
“You saw the boy and the general?”
“Maybe only a grandfather and a child, at two A.M.”
I peered out and wanted what she said to be true. Because across the street from the round rising edifice of the general’s final resting place is a child’s grave, one of only three publicly protected single grave sites in the city. The tombstone names a boy who fell to his death in 1797. He is called the Amiable Child. In my brief stint as a part-time visitor to the neighborhood, during strolls, I had seen colorful balloons or bright flowers that some residents still leave at the grave of the boy, as if his spirit relishes presents, as if his pain can be assuaged, centuries later, by recognition or love.
Had Izabel actually seen the boy and the general? It shook me. Because she was telling me that she, like I, sometimes wondered at 2 A.M. whether those who are no longer physically with us still populate a thin space between the past and present. That they travel somehow; maybe scientists call them nanoparticles. That they try to visit, and that they occupy a category without a label; they represent a triumph of spirit over known fact.
I don’t know which one of us moved first. I do know that when my arms encircled her, the body felt surprisingly small, the arm and belly muscles hard. The moon glittered on mica flecks embedded in the general’s mausoleum. There was no blanket on the bed, just sheets. In the heat, I guess, she slept in the nude. Her eyes remained open and smiling the whole time, and the muscles in her belly clenched in slowly, and then faster, and then in a circular pattern that made me want to cry out in pleasure, made me grit my teeth to keep from release.
I was behind her, thigh to rump. Then, on our sides. Her hair was wet at the tips, and those tips were in my mouth. Later, when we woke and started up again, the moon was in a different quadrant of the window. Her tongue tasted like banana cake. It had been too long since I’d done anything like this. The next time we woke up, it was almost dawn and a hawk was on the railing outside, looking in.
When it was over I felt as if the fluid that had pumped out of me had built up for two years and now there was once again space in my head to fill up. I looked into her beautiful eyes and saw pleasure. I knew that what we both felt was not romantic attachment, only the filling of mutual need, and that was more than enough. What is so bad about that? Because we were two assassins, who had shared choices. We were killers who had used each other to armor up so we could go out into the world and fight again.
Aya called as we exited the brownstone and walked toward the office, 9 A.M., on a sullen late July day. Grant’s tomb stood gray and mist coated and half shrouded in a humid fog that resembled the spray from a pesticide container. The Amiable Child’s grave was a small plot contained by a black picket fence, across the grassy median strip from the monument. A trio of joggers passed, in shorts; they’ve got medicines. An ambulance screamed by, heading toward Columbia-Presbyterian. Malaria victim?