A Knife Edge

SIX

It was after 2030 hours by the time the taxi pulled up outside my apartment in D.C. I'd moved back to the city after being released from the hospital. My new residence was a one-bedroom apartment in a four-story block over a couple of restaurants duking it out for survival — a Korean barbecue joint on one side, vegan on the other. After three months' residency, I was on a first-name basis with Kim, the proprietor of The 38th Parallel, but was barely on nodding terms with the people in Summer Love, Kim's tie-dyed competitors next door, which says a lot about my dietary preferences.

“Vin. Good to see you.” Kim looked up from his cash register as I walked in lopsided, struggling with my suitcase. “Where you been?”

“Disneyland.”

“Hah, Disneyland, always Disneyland. You wan' the usual?”

“You got jellyfish on the menu?”

He shook his head after a moment of consideration. “No, no, sorry…”

And to think I could have learned to hate it months ago. “Never mind,” I said. “I'll stick with the usual.”

“Yes, sure, sure. Good choice, good choice. One large serve of bulgogi coming up. You wan' rice?”

I nodded. The exchange with Kim was all very cheery. And, in fact, I was cheered to be home, even though there was nothing and nobody waiting upstairs for me, not even a potted plant.

Kim's toothy good humor changed to a scowl as he barked the order to his wife like he was a vicious dog going at an intruder. His old lady seemed impervious to it and simply trudged off into the back room to rustle up my order. Mr. Kim attended to several other take-out customers over the phone while I flicked through a couple of old People magazines on the counter. The covers featured the usual parade of Hollywood fuckups, people who had every reason to believe they'd won the lottery of life, but were instead hooked on a brand of narcissism that ensured they were unable to love anyone as much as their own manufactured self-image. Divorces, tantrums, dishonest trysts, clinics, bizarre surgery, drunken traffic accidents, affairs. If it wasn't pathetic, it'd be hilarious.

I sifted through the pile. On the bottom lay a three-day-old copy of the Post. According to the front page, since I'd been away, Pakistan had had a change of government. A couple of soldiers in the previous president's bodyguard had decided they didn't like his policy of being friendly toward the U.S. and so they'd peeled open his vehicle like an orange with a dozen or so pounds of Composition B while he was still inside it. Fundamentalist gangs were roaming through Karachi and Islamabad beating up anyone who looked like they were living in the twenty-first century. India was jumpy. America was nervous. After years of relative quiet, shots had already been exchanged over the long-disputed territory of Kashmir. Everyone's nightmare was no longer just a bad dream: we now had a bunch of religious dimwits sitting on top of an unknown number of fission-boosted atomic warheads and the missiles capable of delivering them. Another pressure cooker — just what the world needed.

“Here you go, Mr. Vincent, sir. You enjoy.”

“Thanks.” I dropped the newspaper back on the counter and exchanged the plastic bag he was holding toward me for the handful of shrapnel jangling in my pocket. “Keep it,” I said, knowing the tip was around five bucks. As Mr. Kim was also the building's unofficial security guard, I figured he'd earned it.

I avoided the elevator, my usual practice, and took the fire stairs to the second floor. The stairwell was poorly lit, with a little halfhearted graffiti here and there as if the artists could barely be bothered. I knew how they felt. The place was around forty years old and going through a kind of architectural midlife crisis. The ceilings were a little low, the rooms just a bit too tight for comfort, like wearing a sweater that shouldn't have been thrown in the dryer. The place was in need of a new coat of paint, or maybe a wrecking ball, I couldn't decide which. But the rent was cheap, and Mr. Kim's bulgogi—beef in soy sauce — was a real winner.

I arrived at my apartment, put down my suitcase, and fed the key into the lock. Problem. The door was already unlocked. It was only then I noticed a faint strip of light outlining the door's bottom edge. Did I leave the place that way, unlocked with the lights on, before heading off to Japan? No, I did not. There wasn't much inside worth stealing, but that didn't mean I wanted some stranger looting it. What I did have was a small safe bolted to the floor, where I kept various articles that were valuable to me — passport, birth certificate, favorite lucky rabbit's foot, my M9 Beretta service pistol as well as a worn U.S. Army-issue Vietnam War-era Colt .45 an uncle of mine confiscated from a dead VC. I put my ear to the door panel but heard nothing within. Was the intruder still inside, or long gone? I turned the knob and pushed. The catch scraped against the plate. The hinges squealed. Shhh, goddamn it! I hunched, ready to charge. And then the doorknob was wrenched out of my hand.

“How long does it take you to ride an elevator to the second floor?” said Major Anna Masters, standing in front of me, hand on hip, wearing one of my shirts and a smile.

“I took the stairs,” I said. Anna was the last person I expected to see. She was in Germany, at Ramstein Air Base, wasn't she? “What are you—” Our bodies slammed together. Our lips found each other, tongues searching. I was instantly erect, like any good soldier should be.

“Get your clothes off, for Christ's sake. I'm hungry,” she said, breaking from the clinch.

I fumbled with my belt. “I usually dress for dinner.”

“Not tonight,” Anna replied, breathless, like she'd just run a race.

I kicked off my shoes and left a trail of socks, pants, and other items on the floor. I ripped my shirt off, the one Anna was wearing, and lifted her as I walked. Her back was hard and lean and her legs wrapped around me. I wasn't going to make it to the bedroom.

“There,” Anna commanded, gesturing at the table, which was set for dinner. I lowered her onto a place mat. She swept the cutlery away, sending it clattering among my clothes on the floor. Then she wound a hand around my neck, grabbed the edge of the table for leverage and ground her pubic bone into me. Neither of us wanted to bother with the entree. We went straight for the main course.

We had a second helping in the bedroom. Afterward, we lay in each other's arms in bed and watched the reflected neon from The 38th Parallel's sign below my window change color on the ceiling. It brought back Tokyo and, for the barest instant, the image of Dr. Tanaka rolling around in a stainless-steel tub. Professor Boyle's little inconsistency about seeing his partner leaving the party swam about in my mind. If Anna and I were working the case together, that would have been something we'd discuss. Perhaps later I could play back the recording I'd made of Boyle's statement to see if it also struck her as odd. And then the memory of Michelle Durban and our dinner in the sushi bar sprang up, along with a pang of guilt even though nothing had happened. But, if it had, I'd been outside the five-hundred-mile zone, which would have absolved me, wouldn't it?

Anna's weight shifted on me and her perfume flooded my brain. “I forgot I mailed you a key when I took this place,” I said. “When I saw the door open and the light on, I thought you were a burglar.”

Kim could have warned me. He knew Anna, and I'd have put money on him knowing she was upstairs, but he'd chosen to keep the secret. I might have to ask him for that five dollars back.

“So … haven't given a key to anyone else?” she asked.

“Handed out about a dozen. You're just lucky my harem's out of town.” I thought of Durban again.

“What?” Anna had caught the slightest twitch, or perhaps it was the slimmest surge of electricity beneath my skin. Whatever, she read it like a polygraph.

“Nothing,” I said, wondering how it was that women could do that — read a man's conscience.

“You're looking fit,” she said, tracing the definition of my stomach muscles with a fingernail.

“I've discovered Jane Fonda's home-workout video. How about you? Over the headaches?”

“Hope so. Haven't had one for a few weeks.” She sipped coffee, holding the mug between two hands like she was praying. Those headaches were bad ones, so maybe that's exactly what she was doing, praying they'd gone for the duration.

I'd been shot twice on my last case, once in the flesh under my upper right arm, the slug passing clean through the skin and missing the triceps muscle. Not such a big deal — a few stitches and purple, puckered scarring to remember it by. The other bullet, however, had shattered the humerus in my left arm — the big bone between shoulder and elbow — drilled a hole through the shoulder muscles, clipped a rib, executed a back flip with pike, and found its way into the subclavian vein, where it was then flushed through my heart. They located the slug in the bottom of my lungs. The good news, the doctors told me, was that I would live. The bad news was, so they believed, it would not be very well. I responded as I usually do to professional opinion and ignored it, in this instance the advice being to sit in a recliner rocker for the next forty years and watch sitcom reruns. Instead, I chose to do the opposite and put myself through eight hours of daily torture. Once I could crawl, I forced myself to walk. When I could walk, I tried to run. Now, most mornings, I was running twelve miles. After the run, I was doing pushups — a hundred or so. I'd more or less given up the booze and was working on my halo. In truth, I was probably in the best physical shape of my life, and I had the doctors to thank for it. Had they said I'd recover fully, I'd probably still be a pin up boy for Jack Daniel's.

Anna also had permanent injuries by which to remember our case together. In fact, she lost the big toe off her left foot due to the car accident, or should I say car crash — it had been no accident — that put her into a coma for a week. There appeared to be no physical impairment resulting from her head injury, although she was now suffering from regular and terrible migraines.

“Aren't you going to ask me what I'm doing here?” Anna inquired.

“I know exactly what you're doing here, and who you're doing it to.”

She punched me in the arm. “No, I mean in D.C.”

“So tell me.”

“I volunteered to escort a prisoner Stateside.”

“How'd you manage that?”

“Like I said — volunteered. You know, took one step forward. The opportunity just came along.”

Anna moved her head and I felt her hair slide across my chest. I pictured her standing in the doorway when I first arrived home, the hair that reminded me of melted dark chocolate flowing over her shoulders. I lingered on the image, the light from the kitchen behind highlighting her curves beneath my borrowed shirt. Anna's breasts were larger than I remembered. Back in the here and now, I cupped one in my hand. It was warm and heavy and it filled my palm, the nipple still hard with excitement from the recent sex fizzing through her cells.

“I've missed you,” I said.

“I can tell,” she whispered, reaching for the erection that refused to go away, stroking it softly, apparently happy that it wasn't going anywhere.

“How's the Bible study going?” I whispered back, getting short of breath.

“Coming along nicely,” she answered. I felt the heat in the caress of her lips as she kissed me on the way down. She bit me several times, in case I forgot who was boss, and then, beneath the sheet, I felt her mouth close around me. I clamped my eyes shut. The pleasure was almost unbearable. Almost.

“So what was Japan like?” she asked, sitting at the table in Class As, eating a little reheated bulgogi and rice for breakfast. She had bought something from the vegetarian restaurant before coming up to the apartment, but after a night in my fridge, it looked far less appealing than Mr. Kim's finest, and there was nothing else in the fridge that was edible unless you were a mold.

I poured Anna a cup of coffee. “What was Japan like? Well, they have vending machines there so that if you feel the need you can get a pair of girl's underwear — used — packaged up with a picture of the young woman herself wearing them.”

“That's sick.”

“I know. You'd think they'd at least wash them.”

“You're sick too.”

“Actually, I haven't felt this good in a long while,” I said honestly.

“Yeah, me too.” Anna smiled. Her eyes caught the morning sun streaming through the window and flashed blue-green like they'd received a jolt of electric current. We looked at each other in silence, neither wanting to speak and break the moment, perhaps because we both knew that a particular set of difficult questions and answers was hovering too close for real comfort.

I broke first. “So, when are you heading back?” There it was. I'd said it.

Anna took a breath and slowly let it out. I knew I wasn't going to like what was coming. “This afternoon.”

“You're kidding.”

She shook her head. “Got a court-martial at Ramstein starting midday tomorrow.”

I said nothing, which pretty much said it all.

“That'll teach me to volunteer.” Anna was suddenly finding eye contact difficult.

A loud burst of silence followed. It reminded me of our telephone calls.

I said, “Y'know, after our last conversation, just before I went to Japan, I was pretty sure things between us were done.” What had Anna said on the phone? You and me, us, our relationship — it's going precisely nowhere … We had fun … we should have just left it at that.

Her turn not to say anything.

“Why'd you come?” I asked. Our mood hadn't so much as shifted as completed a one-eighty.

“Well, you know… a girl has needs,” she said, trying to lighten it up. The attempt flew like the Hindenburg, and she knew it. She glanced down at her coffee again. “Perhaps I shouldn't have come.”

Yeah, perhaps you damn well shouldn't have, I thought. I was just getting used to the idea of being apart. But one night and I was hooked on her again.

“I don't know when I'm going to be back,” Anna said.

I nodded. “ Uh-huh.”

“I was going to suggest you take the day off and spend it with me, but I think I know what you'd say to that.”

Perhaps the heat in my face had given her a clue.

Anna's chin trembled and there was a film of tears in her eyes. “I'm sorry,” she said.

“Me, too.” I stood and took my coffee cup to the sink and poured the remains down the drain. “Anna, I have to go,” I said. I wasn't being a martyr. Captain Clownfish was expecting me at 0930.

“The defense of our great land waits for no one.” She forced a smile.

“Stay as long as you like,” I replied. If she wanted me to be big and tough, I could be that guy. “Just leave the key downstairs with Kim when you go.”

“OK…” she said. The privilege of surprising me in one of my shirts had been rescinded.

I drove my old Pontiac Parisienne to the Pentagon. It was snowing lightly, the early morning sun having been swallowed by a sudden cold snap. I didn't have an accident, but I probably caused a few.