Rainfall

predicament. She knelt down again and held the ice against my eye, smoothing my hair back at the same time. Better if she’d just dumped the cubes in my lap.

    She eased me back on the couch and I grimaced, intensely aware of how near she was. “Does that hurt?” she asked, her touch instantly becoming tentative.

    “No, it’s okay. The guy who cut up my face hit me in the back with a cane. It’ll be okay.”

    Midori held the ice against my eye, her free hand warm on the side of my head, while I sat stiffly, afraid to move and embarrassed at my reaction, and the moment spun slowly out.

    At one point she shifted the ice, and I reached to take it from her, but she continued to hold it and my hand wound up covering hers. The back of her hand was warm against my palm, the ice cold on my fingertips. “That feels good,” I told her. She didn’t ask whether I meant the ice or her hand. I wasn’t sure myself.

    “You were gone for a long time,” she said after a while. “I didn’t know what to do. I was going to call you, but then I was starting to think, maybe you and those men in my apartment set this up, like good cop, bad cop, to get me to trust you.”

    “I would have thought the same. I can imagine how this must all seem to you.”

    “It was starting to seem pretty unreal, actually. Until I saw you again.”

    I looked at the towel, now speckled red where it had been pressed against my face. “Nothing like a little blood to make things seem real.”

    “It’s true. The thing I kept coming back to was how hard you kicked that man at my apartment — I saw blood shoot from his nose. If I hadn’t seen that, I think I would have left while you were gone.”

    “Makes me glad I caught him in the head.”

    She laughed softly and pressed the towel against my face again. “Tell me what happened.”

    “You don’t have anything to eat here, do you?” I asked. “I’m starving.”

    She reached for a bag next to the couch and opened it for me. “I brought back some
bento
. Just in case.”

    “Give me a few minutes,” I said, and started wolfing down rice balls, eggs, and vegetables. I washed it all down with a can of mixed fruit juice. It tasted great.

    When I was finished, I shifted on the couch so I could see her better. “There were two of them at my apartment,” I said. “I knew one — an LDP flunky I know only as Benny. Turns out he’s connected to the CIA. Would that mean anything to you? Any connection to your father?”

    She shook her head. “No. My father never said anything about a Benny or about the CIA.”

    “Okay. The other guy was a
kendoka
— he had a cane that he used like a sword. I don’t know what the connection is. I managed to get both their cell phones. Maybe it’ll give me a clue about who he is.”

    I took the ice from her with one hand and leaned across the couch to reach my coat, feeling angry bites of pain in my back as I did so. I pulled the coat over, reached into the inside breast pocket, and pulled out the phones. Both standard DoCoMo issue, small and sleek. “Benny told me the Agency is after the disk. I don’t know why they’re coming after me, though. Maybe they think . . . maybe they think I’m going to tell you something, put something together for you? That I can make use of what you’ve got? Figure out what it is? Prevent them from getting what they want?”

    I flipped open the
kendoka
’s phone and pressed the recall button. A number lit up on the screen. “This is a start. We can do a reverse telephone number search. There might be some numbers preprogrammed, also. I’ve got a friend, someone I trust, who can help us with this.”

    I stood up, wincing at the pain in my back. “We’re going to need to change hotels. Can’t behave any differently than the other satisfied patrons.”

    She smiled. “I suppose that’s true.”

    We changed to a nearby place called the Morocco, which seemed to be organized around some sort of Arabian Nights theme — Oriental rugs, hookahs, belly bracelets, and other harem gear for the woman to wear if she were so inclined. It was the picture of Bedouin luxury, but there was only one bed, and sleeping on the couch was going to be like a night on the rack.

    “Why don’t you take the bed tonight?” she said, as though reading my mind. “With your back like that, you can’t very well sleep on this couch.”

    “No, that’s okay,” I told her, feeling strangely embarrassed. “The couch is