Rainfall

later there was a quiet knock at the door. I got up and looked through the peephole. The light in the room was off, so the person on the other side wouldn’t know whether the occupant was checking to see who was out there. Leaving the light on can make you a nice target for a shotgun blast.

    It was Midori, as expected. I let her in and bolted the door behind her. When I turned toward her, she was looking around the room. “Hey, it’s about time we stayed in a place like this,” she said. “Those love hotels can get old.”

    “But they have their advantages,” I said, putting my arms around her.

    We ordered a dinner of sashimi and hot sake from the room-service menu, and while we waited for it to arrive I filled Midori in on my meeting with Tatsu, told her the bad news about Bulfinch.

    The food arrived, and, when the hotel employee who brought it had left, Midori said, “I have to ask you something a little . . . silly. Is that okay?”

    I looked at her, and felt my gut twist at the honesty in her eyes. “Sure.”

    “I’ve been thinking about these people. They killed Bulfinch. They tried to kill you and me. They must have wanted to kill my father. Do you think . . . did he really have a heart attack?”

    I poured sake from the ceramic flask into two small matching cups, watching wisps of steam rise from the surface. My hands were steady. “Your question isn’t silly. There are ways of killing someone that make it look like an accident, or like natural causes. And I agree that, based on what they learned of your father’s activities, they certainly would have wanted him dead.”

    “He was afraid they were going to kill him. He told me.”

    “Yes.”

    She was drumming her fingers on the table, playing a furious tune on an imaginary piano. There was a cold fire in her eyes. “I think they killed him,” she said, nodding.

    There’s no home for us, John. Not after what we’ve done.
“You may be right,” I said, quietly.

    Did she know? Or did her mind refuse to go where instinct wanted to take her? I couldn’t tell.

    “What matters is that your father was a brave man,” I said, my voice slightly thick. “And that, regardless of how he died, he shouldn’t have died in vain. That’s why I have to get that disk back. Why I have to finish what your father started. I really . . .” I wasn’t sure what I was going to say. “I really want to do that. I need to do it.”

    Warring emotions crossed her face like the shadows of fast-moving clouds. “I don’t want you to,” she said. “It’s too dangerous.”

    “It’s less dangerous than it seems. My friend is going to make sure that the police who are there know what’s going on, so no one is going to take a shot at me.” I hoped.

    “What about the CIA people? You can’t control them.”

    I thought about that. Tatsu had probably already figured that if I got killed on the way in, he would use it as an excuse to order everyone out of the car, search for weapons, and find the disk that way. He was a practical guy.

    “Nobody’s going to shoot me. The way I’ve got it set up, they won’t even know what’s going on until it’s too late.”

    “I thought that, in war, nothing goes according to plan.”

    I laughed. “That’s true. I’ve made it this far by being a good improviser.”

    I took a swallow of sake. “Anyway, we’re about out of alternatives,” I said, enjoying the feeling of the hot liquid spreading through my abdomen. “Yamaoto doesn’t know that Holtzer has the disk, so he’s going to keep coming after you if we don’t get it back. And after me, too.”

    We ate for a few minutes in silence. Then she looked at me and said, “It makes sense, but it’s still terrible.” Her voice was bitter.

    I wanted to tell her that eventually you get used to terrible things that make sense. But I said nothing.

    She stood up and wandered over to the window. Her back was to me, the glow through the window silhouetting her. I watched her for a moment, then got up and walked over, feeling the carpet taking the weight of my feet. I stopped close enough to smell the clean smell of her hair, and some other, more exotic scent, and slowly, slowly let my hands rise so that my fingertips were just touching her shoulders and arms.

    Then my fingertips gave way to my hands, and when my hands made their way to her hips she eased back into me. Her hands found mine and together they rose up, covering her belly and stroking it