Persuader

greens. Much more intimidating than wearing a bikini, I guessed. "And?"
    "And I made him explain his end of the deal. His little girls are twelve months and two.
    The two-year-old disappeared for a day, two months ago. She won't talk about what happened to her while she was gone. She just cries a lot. A week later our friend from Military Intelligence showed up. Suggested that the kid's absence could last a lot longer than a day, if daddy didn't play ball. I don't see any innocent explanation for that kind of stuff."
    "No," I said. "Nor do I. Who is the guy?"
    "His name is Francis Xavier Quinn," she said.
    The cook brought the next course, which was some kind of a rib roast, but I didn't really notice it because I was still thinking about Francis Xavier Quinn. Clearly he had come out of the California hospital and left the Quinn part of his name behind him in the trash with his used gowns and his surgical dressings and his John Doe wrist bands. He had just walked away and stepped straight into a new identity, ready made. An identity that he felt comfortable with, one that he would always remember deep down at the primeval level he knew hidden people had to operate on. No longer United States Army Lieutenant Colonel Quinn, F.X., Military Intelligence. From that point on, he was just plain Frank Xavier, anonymous citizen.
    "Rare or well?" Beck asked me.
    He was carving the roast with one of the black-handled knives from the kitchen. They had been stored in a knife block and I had thought about using one of them to kill him with. The one he was using right then would have been a good choice. It was about ten inches long, and it was razor sharp, judging by how well the meat was slicing. Unless the meat happened to be unbelievably tender.
    "Rare," I said. "Thank you." He carved me two slices and I regretted it instantly. My mind flashed back seven hours to the body bag. I had pulled the zipper down and seen another knife's work. The image was so vivid I could still feel the cold metal tag between my fingers. Then I flashed back ten whole years, right back to the beginning with Quinn, and the loop was complete.
    "Horseradish?" Elizabeth said.
    I paused. Then I took a spoonful. The old army rule was Eat every time you can, sleep every time you can, because you didn't know when you were going to get another chance to do either. So I shut Quinn out of my mind and helped myself to vegetables and started eating. Restarted thinking. Everything I'd heard, everything I'd seen. I kept coming back to the Baltimore marina in the bright sunlight, and to the envelope and the newspaper.
    Not this, but that. And to the thing Duffy had said to me: You haven't found anything useful. Not a thing. No evidence at all.
    "Have you read Pasternak?" Elizabeth asked me.
    "What do you think of Edward Hopper?" Richard asked.
    "You think the M16 should be replaced?" Beck said.
    I surfaced again. They were all looking at me. It was like they were starved for conversation. Like they were all lonely. I listened to the waves crashing around three sides of the house and understood how they could feel that way. They were very isolated.
    But that was their choice. I like isolation. I can go three weeks without saying a word.
    "I saw Doctor Zhivago at the movies," I said. "I like the Hopper painting with the people in the diner at night."
    " Nighthawks," Richard said.
    I nodded. "I like the guy on the left, all alone."
    "Remember the name of the diner?"
    "Phillies," I said. "And I think the M16 is a fine assault rifle."
    "Really?" Beck said.
    "It does what an assault rifle is supposed to do," I said. "You can't ask for much more than that."
    "Hopper was a genius," Richard said.
    "Pasternak was a genius," Elizabeth said. "Unfortunately the movie trivialized him. And he hasn't been well translated. Solzhenitsyn is overrated by comparison."
    "I guess the M16 is an improved rifle," Beck said.
    "Edward Hopper is like Raymond Chandler," Richard said. "He captured a particular time and place. Of course, Chandler was a genius, too. Way better than Hammett."
    "Like Pasternak is better than Solzhenitsyn?" his mother said.
    They went on like that for a good long time. Day fourteen, a Friday, nearly over, eating a beef dinner with three doomed people, talking about books and pictures and rifles. Not this, but that. I tuned them out again and trawled back ten years and listened to Sergeant First Class Dominique Kohl instead.
    "He's a real Pentagon insider," she said to