Delilah smiled and asked me in French, “What are you thinking?”
She was wearing a simple, cream-colored silk wrap dress with tasteful but still tantalizing decolletage, and the candle on the table between us was casting distracting shadows. I let my I eyes linger where they wanted to linger, then smiled lasciviously and said, “About what I might want for dessert.”
She smiled back. “Well, for that, you have to see the menu.”
“I’ll have to take my time with that. If it all looks good enough, I might even order more than one.”
She raised an eyebrow. “You think you can handle that much?”
I looked into her blue eyes. “I don’t know. I’ll have to taste it and see.”
She gave me a challenging look, the kind that would make weak men wilt and strong men wild. “Then come back to my apartment. We’ll see if your eyes are bigger than your stomach. But…”
“Yes?”
“You can’t stay tonight. I have to leave early tomorrow.”
“Where are you going?” I said, immediately irritated at myself for asking a question to which I already knew the answer. Or rather, the response.
“John. Why do you ask me that? You know I can’t tell you.”
“How long will you be gone?”
“And I can’t tell you that, either. As you know.”
I felt a stupid petulance taking hold of me and tried, without much success, to shrug it off. I shouldn’t have pressed, but I said, “A day? A month? How long this time?”
She sighed. “Longer than a day, less than a month. I think.”
I looked away, nodding. “You think.”
An American in an expensive blazer and with perfectly groomed three-day facial stubble was blathering into his mobile phone at the table next to us. I hadn’t noticed until just then, having been focused more on whether Delilah and I were speaking quietly enough not to be overheard than with whether anyone else was talking too loudly. I looked over, and his girlfriend touched his arm to let him know his phone monologue was annoying someone. He glanced at me but didn’t change his volume. My irritation with Delilah was looking for an outlet, and I considered snatching the phone out of his hand, breaking it in two, shoving one half down his throat and the other up his ass, and putting the whole thing back together inside his chest. But that would get me noticed, and then some, and with my mostly Asian features, I was already a bit more noticeable in Paris than I liked.
Delilah said, “I’m sorry.”
I didn’t respond. Stubble Boy was yammering on, something about structural asset-backed securities and tranches. I tried to tune him out.
Delilah said, “I know it’s difficult for you. I can imagine what it’s like. And I’m sorry.”
I looked at her. “Yeah? What do you imagine?”
There was a pause. She said, “You wonder what the new assignment is, and whether that means I have to go to bed with someone.”
High-value-target honey trap operations were Delilah’s metier, and if she hadn’t been so effective in the role, the Mossad would have cut her loose ages earlier because she wouldn’t take any of the shit their bureaucracy tried to serve her.
“That’s not what makes it difficult,” I said, although the sentiment was less than solid.
“What, then?”
“You know what. It’s not what you do in the life—I know that, and I get it. It’s you in the life, period. It’s making me feel like I have one foot in and one foot out, and I can’t find my balance.”
Stubble Boy said, “Fuck that! You tell him if he wants the higher coupon payments, he takes the higher risk. That’s—”
“Excuse me,” Delilah said, switching to Parisian-accented English, her voice suddenly projecting. “It might just be the acoustics in here, but your phone conversation seems awfully loud. Why don’t you take it outside? Or, better yet, for the sake of your date, wait until you’re alone?”
Stubble Boy looked briefly incredulous, and I half-expected him to stammer something born of baseless entitlement such as,
He turned as though to resume his conversation. I knew Delilah wasn’t going to let it go, so I leaned across to his table and took hold of his free wrist. He looked at me, shocked, and tried to yank free. Eccentric hand and forearm strength is one of the consequences of a lifetime of near daily judo, and I do additional exercises to augment my grip—enough so that I can crush an apple in one hand if I want to. This time, fortunately for Stubble Boy, I didn’t want to. But I let him know I could.
“Put the phone away,” I said quietly. “And lower your voice.”
He looked like he was going to protest, but a little more effortless pressure on his wrist and the flat look in my eyes made him think better of it. “Jesus, you don’t have to get so huffy,” he said. I looked at him for a moment longer, then released his wrist and turned back to Delilah. I heard him say into the phone, extra loudly to try to restore some of his damaged pride, “Hey Bob, I’ll call you back. Couple of rude Parisians here.”
Delilah smiled and said to me in French, “Well, that was diverting.”
I shrugged, having already largely forgotten the idiot. “Anyway. This whole situation would be a lot more tolerable for me if there were at least an endpoint to look forward to. Six months, six years, if I just knew there was a time when…”
