thousand piastres — several months’ pay.”
She touched my face again, and I saw a deep sympathy in her eyes. “You were right. You’ve been through horrors. I didn’t know.”
I took her hands and gently moved them away. “Hey, I didn’t even tell you the best part. The intel on the village being a V.C. stronghold? Bogus. No tunnel networks, no rice or weapons caches.”
I shrugged. “Not even any telltale tire tracks, which, c’mon, we could have taken a second to check for before we started slaughtering people.”
“But you were so young. You must have been out of your minds with fear, with anger.”
I could feel her looking at me. It was okay. After all this time, the words sounded dead to me, just sounds without content.
“Is that what you meant that first night?” she asked. “About not being a forgiving person?”
I remembered saying it to her, remembered her looking like she was going to ask me about it, then seeming to decide not to. “It’s not what I meant, actually. I was thinking of other people, not of myself. But I guess it applies to me, also.”
She nodded slowly, then said, “I have a friend from Chiba named Mika. When I was in New York, she had a car accident. She hit a little girl who was playing in the street. Mika was driving at forty-five kilometers per hour, the speed limit, and the little girl drove her bicycle out right in front of the car. There was nothing she could do. It was bad luck. It would have happened to anyone who was driving the car right there and right then.”
On a certain level, I understood what she was getting at. I’d known it all along, even before the psych evaluation they made me take at one point to see how I was handling the special stress of SOG. The shrink they made me talk to had said the same thing: “How can you blame yourself for circumstances that were beyond your control?”
I remember that conversation. I remember listening to his bullshit, half angry, half amused at his attempts to draw me out. Finally, I just said to him, “Have you ever killed anyone, Doc?” When he didn’t answer, I walked out. I don’t know what kind of evaluation he gave me. But they didn’t turn me loose from SOG. That came later.
“Do you still work with these people?” she asked.
“There are connections,” I responded.
“Why?” she asked after a moment. “Why stay attached to things that give you nightmares?”
I glanced over at the window. The moon had moved higher in the sky, its light slowly ebbing from the room. “It’s a hard thing to explain,” I said slowly. I watched her hair glistening in the pale light, like a vertical sheet of water. I ran my fingers through it, gathered it in my hand and let it fall free. “Some of what I was part of in Vietnam didn’t sit well with me when I got back to the States. Some things belong only in a war zone, but then they want to follow you when you leave. After the war, I found I couldn’t go back to the life I’d left behind. I wanted to come back to Asia, because Asia was where my ghosts were least restless, but it was more than just geography. All the things I’d done made sense in war, they were justified by war, I couldn’t live with them outside of war. So I needed to stay at war.”
Her eyes were pools of darkness. “But you can’t stay at war forever, John.”
I gave her a wan smile. “A shark can’t stop swimming, or it dies.”
“You’re not a shark.”
“I don’t know what I am.” I rubbed my temples with my fingers, trying to work through the images, past and present, that were colliding in my brain. “I don’t know.”
We were quiet for a while, and I felt a pleasant drowsiness descend. I was going to regret all this. Some lucid part of my mind saw that clearly. But sleep seemed so much more urgent, and anyway what was done was already done.
I slept, but the pain in my back kept the sleep fitful, and in those moments where consciousness briefly crested I would have doubted everything that had happened if she hadn’t been lying next to me. Then I would slide down into sleep again, there to struggle with ghosts even more personal, more terrible, than those of which I could tell Midori.
PART TWO
— MIYAMOTO MUSASHI,
14
THE NEXT MORNING I was sitting with my back to the wall at my favorite vantage point in Las Chicas, waiting for Franklin Bulfinch to show himself.
It was a crisp, sunny morning, and between the bright light streaming through the windows and the overall hip atmosphere on which Las Chicas prides itself, I felt comfortable in my light-disguise knockoff Oakley shades, which I had picked up en route.
Midori was safely ensconced in the music section of the nearby Spiral Building on Aoyama-dori, close enough to meet Bulfinch quickly if necessary but far enough to be safe if things got hairy. She had called Bulfinch less than an hour earlier to arrange things. Most likely he was a legitimate reporter and would come to the meeting alone, but I saw no advantage in giving him time to deploy additional forces if I was mistaken.
Bulfinch was easy to spot as he approached the restaurant, the same tall, thin guy in wireless glasses I had seen on the train. He had a long stride and an erect, confident posture, and again struck me as having an aristocratic air. He was wearing jeans and tennis shoes, dressed up with a blue blazer. He crossed the patio and stepped inside the restaurant proper, pausing to look right, then left, searching for Midori. His eyes passed over me without recognition.
He wandered back in the direction of the rest room, presumably checking the separate dining space in the back
