A Lonely Resurrection

having known better.” I told her a sanitized version of how they had set him up, and how he had refused to listen to me.
    “I liked him,” she said when I was done. “I wondered whether he was lying to me when he told me you were dead. That’s why I hired those people to watch him. But he seemed like a good person. He was cute and shy and I could tell he looked up to you.”
    I smiled wanly. Harry’s eulogy.
    “If I were you,” I said, “I’d be careful in Tokyo. They lost me, but they’ll be looking for me again. If they know you’re here, they might take an interest. Like they did with Harry.”
    There was a long pause. Then she said, “I’m going back to New York tomorrow anyway.”
    I nodded slowly, knowing what was coming.
    “I won’t see you after this,” she said.
    I went for a smile. Didn’t quite make it. “I know.”
    “I figured out what I want from you,” she said.
    “Yeah?”
    She nodded. “At first what I thought I wanted was revenge. I kept thinking of how to hurt you, how to cause you pain, like the pain you caused me.”
    I wasn’t surprised.
    “And I resented you for that,” she went on, “because I’ve always believed hate is such an unworthy emotion. So weak and ultimately pointless.”
    I marveled briefly at how innocent a life someone would have to have led for such a philosophy to emerge credible and intact, and for a second I loved her for it.
    She took a sip of her Ardbeg. “But seeing you the other day changed that. Part of it was realizing you really did try to get that disk back and finish what my father had started. Part of it was knowing you were trying to protect me from the other people who were trying to find the disk.”
    “But what was it really?”
    She looked away, over to where the band had been playing, then back to me. “Understanding what you are. You’re not part of the real world. Not my real world, at least. You’re like a ghost, some creature forced to live in the shadows. And I realized someone like that isn’t worthy of hatred.”
    Whether I was worthy of hatred and whether she hated me weren’t the same thing. I wondered if she understood that. “Pity, instead?” I asked.
    She nodded. “Maybe.”
    “I think I might have preferred hate,” I said. I was trying for light, but she didn’t laugh.
    She looked at me. “So all we have left is tonight.”
    I almost said no. I almost told her it would hurt too much.
    Then I decided I would deal with the hurt afterward. The way it’s always been.
    We went to the Park Hyatt in Shinjuku. She was staying at the Okura, but going back there together would have been too dangerous.
    We took a cab to the hotel. We looked at each other on the way but neither of us spoke. I checked us in, and when we got to the room, we left the lights off. It seemed natural that we should walk over to the enormous windows, where we watched the urban mass of Shinjuku twinkling in the violet light around us.
    I looked out at the city from my lofty perch and thought of all the events that had led to this precise instant, this moment I had imagined and ridiculously longed for so many times and that I was now trying to savor even as I felt it slipping irrevocably away.
    At some point I felt her looking at me. I turned and reached out, tracing the outline of her face and neck with the back of my fingers, trying to burn all the details into my mind, wanting to have them with me later when she would be gone. I found myself saying her name, quietly, over and over, the way I say it when I’m alone and I’m thinking of her. Then she stepped in close and put her arms around me and pulled us together with surprising strength.
    She smelled the way I remembered, clean, with a trace of perfume that remains a mystery to me, and I thought of wine, the kind you wait and wait to decant and then hesitate to drink because afterward it’ll be gone.
    We kissed for a long time, gently, not hurrying, standing there in front of the window, and at some point I really did forget what had brought us here together and why we would have to depart alone.
    We pulled off each other’s clothes the way we had that first time, increasingly fast, almost angrily. I removed the baton from where it was taped to my forearm and set it down. She knew better than to ask about it. When we were naked, still kissing, she pressed against me so that I had to move backward toward the king-sized bed. My legs bumped against it and I sat down on its edge. She