Killing Rain

makes all the difference in the world.”
    I looked at her. We’d been down this road before, and I didn’t like the implicit criticism, maybe even condescension, in her comment. Then or now.
    “Then you better be careful about what you believe in,” I said. “And about what it might cost you.”
    She looked away for a moment. I wasn’t sure if it was a flinch.
    We finished the champagne and I ordered a ’99 Lafon Volnay Santenots. Delilah had a disciplined mind, I knew, but no one does as well in the presence of wine and jet lag as in their absence. And if she were here for something “nefarious,” as Dox had put it, the discord between her feelings for me from before and her intentions for me now would be producing a strain. I wanted to do everything I could to turn that strain into a fault line, the fault line into a widening crack.
    We talked more about this and that. She never let on that she knew anything about Manny, or that the botched hit in Manila had anything to do with her presence here now. And as the evening wore on, I realized I couldn’t accept that the timing of her contact had been a coincidence. So the absence of any acknowledgment had to be an omission. A deliberate omission.
    If she had been anyone else, and if this had all happened just a year or two earlier, I would have accepted the truth of what I knew. I would have acted on it. Doing so would have protected my body, albeit at some cost to my soul. But sitting across the table from her, no doubt affected by the wine, as well as by the surroundings and the feelings I still had for her, I found myself looking for a different way. Something less direct, less irredeemable, something that might have as its basis hope instead of only fear.
    And there was something strangely attractive about the feeling that I was taking a chance. It wasn’t anything as base as the thrill of “unsafe sex,” as Dox had suggested. It was more a sense of the possibilities, the potential upside. Not just the possibility that, if I confronted her and she cracked, she might give me information that would help me understand where I stood regarding Manny. I was aware, too, of a deeper kind of hope at work, for something more than information alone, something intangible but infinitely more valuable.
    After a dessert of fruit and Thai sweets followed by steaming tureens of cappuccino, we strolled back to the pavilion. We left the lights dim and sat on a low teak couch facing the sea, present by the sound of the surf but unseeable in the darkness without.
    The silence in the room felt heavy to me, portentous. My previous, oblique conversational gambits had afforded me only hints and clues. I decided it was time to be more direct. My mouth felt a little dry at the prospect, part of me perhaps afraid of what I might discover.
    “Did your people tell you about what they’ve involved me in?” I asked.
    She looked at me, and something in her expression told me she wasn’t happy with the question. This wasn’t why we had come back to the room. It wasn’t part of the script.
    “No,” she said. “Everything is ‘need to know.’ If I don’t need to know, it’s better that I don’t.”
    “They sent me after a guy in Manila.”
    She shook her head. “Why are you telling me this?”
    “I don’t want what’s between us to be nothing more than ‘need to know.’ If it is, we’re just gaming each other.”
    “Protecting each other.”
    “Would you protect me?”
    “From what?”
    “What if something went wrong?”
    “Don’t put me in that position.”
    “What if you had to choose?”
    Her eyes narrowed a fraction. “I don’t know. What would you do?”
    I looked at her. “It’s easy for me. I don’t believe in anything, remember? I can make up my own mind.”
    “That’s not an answer.”
    “It’s more of an answer than what you just told me.”
    “I told you I don’t know. I’m sorry if that wasn’t the answer you were looking for.”
    “I’m looking for the truth.”
    “You know who I am.”
    “That’s what I’m asking you.”
    She laughed. “Look, I’m like a married woman, okay? With a family I always have to return to.”
    I didn’t respond. After a moment she said, “So stop pretending you don’t know all this.”
    That sounded dangerously close to a rationalization, one with which I’m all too familiar:
    He knew what he was getting into. If he hadn’t been in the game, they wouldn’t have wanted him dead.
    Of all the