“No.”
“Divorced?”
“No. My husband died.”
“What did he die of?”
“I’m not telling you my life,” she said, suddenly repulsed. “Leave me alone.”
He regarded her with a bitter gaze. “The privilege of a private life.”
She shook her head, focused on her tea cup.
“Look,” he said. “If you really were from the future, so that you knew for sure there were people walking the Earth today fighting change, so that they were killing your children and all their children, you’d defend your people. In defense of your home, your life, your people, you would kill an intruder.”
“An intruder like you.”
“Exactly. So, if your organization represents the people who will be born after us, well, that’s a heavy burden! It’s a real responsibility! You have to think like them! You have to do what they would do if they were here.”
“I don’t think they would countenance murder.”
“Of course they would!” he shouted, causing her to flinch. He shook hard, he quivered where he stood; he reached up and held his head as if to keep it from exploding. His eyes looked like they might pop out of his head. He turned his back to her, kicked the front of her refrigerator, staggered and then went to the window and glanced out, hissing, fuming. “I’m a fucking dead person already,” he muttered to himself. He put his hands to the windowsill, leaned his forehead on the glass. After a while his breathing steadied, and he turned and faced her again. He sat down across from her again. “Look,” he said, visibly pulling himself together. “People kill in self-defense all the time. Not to do that would be a kind of suicide. So people do it. And now your people are under assault. These supposed future people.”
She heaved a sigh. She kept her eyes on her tea cup.
He said, “You just want someone else to do it. Someone with less cover than you have, someone who will suffer more for doing it. That way you can keep your good life and your nice kitchen, and let the desperate people take the hit for trying. The very people you’re tasked with defending.”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“I know. I met with some of them in India. I wanted to join them, but they wouldn’t have me. They’re going to do what you should be doing. They’ll kill and they’ll be killed, they’ll commit some petty act of sabotage and be put in prison for the rest of their lives, and all for doing the work you ought to be doing.”
“You didn’t join them?”
“They wouldn’t have me.”
A spasm contorted his face. He wrestled with the memory. “I was just another firangi, as far as they were concerned. An imperial administrator, like in the old days. An outsider telling them what to do. Probably they were right. I thought I was doing the best I could. Just like you. And I could have died. Just by helping a little health clinic. I did die, but for some reason my body lived on after my death. And here I am, still trying to do things. I’m a fool. But they didn’t want my help. Probably they were right, I don’t know. They’ll do what they need to without me, they don’t need me. They’re doing what your agency should be doing. That’ll be harder once they go outside India. They’ll get killed for it. So I’ve been trying to do what I think they might want, here, where I can move around better than they can.”
“You’ve been killing people?”
“Yes.” He swallowed hard, thinking about it. “I’ll get caught eventually.”
“Why do you do it?”
“I want justice!”
“Vigilante justice is usually just revenge.”
He waved her away. “Revenge would be okay. But more importantly, I want to help to stop it happening again. The heat wave, and things like it.”
“We all want that.”
His face went red again. Choked voice again: “Then you need to do more.”
Her doorbell rang.
It was well after midnight. There was no one who would call on her now.
He saw that on her face and lunged toward her. They both had stood up instinctively. “You gave me away!” His terrified face inches from hers.
“I didn’t!”
And because she hadn’t, she could meet his wild-eyed glare with one of her own. For a second they stood there locked in a gaze beyond telling, both of them panicked.
“There are cameras everywhere,” she said. “We must have been seen out on the street.”
“Go tell them you’re okay.” He put his hand in the pocket with the gun.
“All right.”
Heart pounding harder than ever, she went to her door, out onto the landing, down the flights of internal stairs to the building’s outside door on the ground floor. She opened it, keeping the chain on.
Two police officers, or perhaps private security. “Minister Murphy?”
“Yes, what is it?”
“We received a report that you were seen entering your apartment with a man.”
“Yes,” she said, thinking hard. “He’s a friend, there’s no problem.”
“He’s not listed among your known friends.”
“I don’t like the implications of that,” she said sharply, “but for now, just know that he’s the son of an old schoolmate of mine from Ireland. I tell you it’s all right. Thanks for checking on me.”
She closed the door on them and went back upstairs.
Her apartment was empty.
She wandered around. No one there. Finally she checked the door that led out onto the little balcony hanging over the back lot of the place. It had been left ajar. All dark down there. Overhead, the bare branches of the giant linden that covered the yard blocked the stars with a black pattern. She leaned over the metal railing, looked down. Probably one could downclimb one of the big square posts at the outer corners of the balcony. She wouldn’t have wanted to try it herself, but the young man had looked like someone who wouldn’t be stopped by having to downclimb a single story.
“I told them you were a friend,” she said
