Sole Survivor

spelling the hostess. Now she escorted two men to a nearby table.
        Both of these new patrons were dressed in black slacks, white silk shirts, and black leather jackets as supple as silk. The older of the two, approximately forty, had enormous sad eyes and a mouth sufficiently sensuous to assure him a contract to star in Revlon lipstick advertisements. He would have been handsome enough to be a waiter-except that his nose was red and misshapen from years of heavy drinking, and he never quite closed his mouth, which gave him a vacuous look. His blue-eyed companion, ten years younger, was as pink-faced as if he had been boiled-and plagued by a nervous smile that he couldn't control, as if chronically unsure of himself.
        The willowy brunette having dinner with the movie-star-slash-heroin-addict developed an instant attraction for the guy with the Mick Jagger mouth, in spite of his rose-bloom nose. She stared at him so hard and so insistently that he responded to her as quickly as a trout would respond to a fat bug bobbing on the surface of a stream-though it was difficult to say which of these two was the trout and which the tender morsel.
        The actor-addict became aware of his companion's infatuation, and he, too, began to stare at the man with the melancholy eyes-though he was glaring rather than flirting. Suddenly he rose from the table, almost knocking over his chair, and weaved across the restaurant, as if intending either to strike or regurgitate upon his rival. Instead, he curved away from the two men's table and disappeared into the hall that led to the restrooms.
        By this time, the sad-eyed man was eating baby shrimps on a bed of polenta. He speared each tiny crustacean on the point of his fork and studied it appreciatively before sucking it off the tines with obscene relish. As he leisurely savoured each bite, he looked toward the brunette as if to say that if he ever got a chance to bed her, she could rest assured that she would wind up as thoroughly shelled and de-veined as the shrimps.
        The brunette was aroused or repulsed. Hard to tell which. With some Angelenos, those two emotions were as inextricably entwined as the viscera of inoperable Siamese twins. Anyway, she departed the actor-addict's table and drew up a chair to sit with the two men in leather jackets.
        Joe wondered how interesting things would get when the wasted actor returned-no doubt with a white dust glowing around the rims of his nostrils, since current heroin was sufficiently pure to snort. Before events could develop, the waiter, Gene of the twinkling eyes, stopped by to tell him there would be no charge for dinner and that Demi was waiting for him in the kitchen
        Surprised, he left a tip and followed Gene's directions toward the hallway that served the restrooms and the cookery.
        The late summer twilight had finally arrived. On the griddle-flat horizon, a sun like a bloody yolk cooked toward a darker hue.
        As Joe crossed the restaurant, where all of the tables were now occupied, something about that three-person tableau-the brunette, the two men in leather jackets-teased his memory. By the time that he reached the hallway to the kitchen, he was puzzled by a full-blown case of déjŕ vu.
        Before stepping into the hall, Joe turned for one look back. He saw the seducer with fork raised, savouring a speared shrimp with his sad eyes, while the brunette murmured something and the nervous pink-faced man watched.
        Joe's puzzlement turned to alarm.
        For an instant, he could not understand why his mouth went dry or why his heart began to race. Then in his mind's eye he saw the fork metamorphose into a stiletto, and the shrimp became a sliver of Gouda cheese.
        Two men and a woman. Not in a restaurant but in a hotel room. Not this brunette but Barbara Christman. If not these two men, then two astonishingly similar to them.
        Of course Joe had never seen them, only listened to Barbara's brief but vivid descriptions. The hound-dog eyes, the nose that was “bashed red by… decades of drinking,” the thick-lipped mouth. The younger of the two: pink-faced with the ceaselessly flickering smile.
        Joe was more than twenty-four hours past the ability ever to believe in coincidence again.
        Impossibly, Teknologik was here .
        He hurried along the hallway, through one of two swinging doors, and into a roomy antechamber used as a