Butterfly Stomp Waltz

Chapter 14

14

Despite Rob’s usual decadent tastes, this hotel is nice but small, mid-priced, an eight-story stucco with an ochre tile roof down in the coastal part of Montijo, decorated in mass-produced but vaguely tasteful wood and fake leather. It’s exactly the sort of place I’d pick out myself, a place for normal working people. At the polyurethane-glossed front counter, my broken Portugese—it’s mostly broken Mexican Spanish with a few extra vocab words—suffices to confirm my reservation and get me an easily forged keycard for the fifth floor.

The reservation’s for one night. Apparently we’ll be moving on.

A smarmy Brit college boy makes to follow me into an elevator that might hold three very friendly people, but I give him a glare that should have left only a pair of smoking sand shoes and he decides to wait.

The suite has a black lacquered desk too small for any real work and a wide pine dresser topped by a forty-inch flat-screen. The bathroom’s so small that when I sit on the toilet my knees overhang the bathtub. Most insidiously, a luxuriously decadent plush bed tries to lure me into its blue baby-soft blankets. If I go to sleep now, though, I’ll never adjust to Lisbon time. As soulless hotel rooms go, it’s not too bad. I don’t bother to check for spy bugs—of course there’s bugs. Rob reserved the room for me, he bugged the crap out of it. If anyone wants to watch as I shower the plane away, then stretch for an hour while I study enough tourist pamphlets to paper the walls, well, it wouldn’t be the first time.

If you’re wondering how I stay awake while stretching, you’ve never stretched properly. There’s this dull pain that says you’ve gone just beyond what your body wants to do. Plus, I cranked up some Screaming Females as a bonus for any eavesdroppers. (If I didn’t like Rob, it’d be the first Nurse With Wound album.) Then it’s half an hour of katas just to loosen up and I’m off for a quick walk, then riding the buses in search of one of the famous tramcars. The roads are straight but narrow, and none of the intersections are at proper Midwestern right angles. The white and gray and pink buildings all have decorative bands of color in bright reds and yellows and blues. Every gap beneath a crumbling stoop or at the corner of an old church seems to house skinny but muscled feral cats. By three PM I’m back in the room to rinse off the sweat and dust of a Mediterranean summer, then it’s khaki capris and a loose pink T-shirt with leather sandals.

I’m sitting in this feeble plastic chair out on the balcony, letting the warm breeze wash over me and soaking up the Atlantic air as I lazily study the warren of red and green tile roofs around the hotel, when someone knocks at the door.

Precisely four PM.

I don’t bother with the door chain. If it’s some neckless thug with a gun, I’ll take the gun away from him, return it to him, and send him scurrying off to his proctologist.

But it’s Rob.

Rob’s maybe five-six, with age-wrinkled cocoa skin and pale white hair cut short to disguise the toilet bowl. (You know, a ring of hair around the sides, with a great big bald patch up on top.) When I first met him a few years ago he was trim and tight, but now he’s beginning to show just a bit of a belly. If you avoid all the other ways to wreck yourself, old age always catches you. He’s also wearing a linen summer suit, which isn’t a surprise, but it’s rather shabby. The sleeves are worn, the cuffs trailing short stubs of broken thread. His thin ruby-red tie went through an elephant some previous year. It’s been cleaned and ironed many times since then, but not enough to hide the stains. The knot at his neck is exquisitely precise. The black Oxfords have seen better years, but they’ve been well-polished to hide the scuffed leather at the tips.

He always smells of sandalwood, but I smell something else as well. Garlic?

“Dearest Billie,” he says, smiling with teeth too brilliantly white and too straight to be his own. His hands are spread as if for a welcoming hug, but his elbows are tucked at his side. Rob doesn’t like to be touched by women. He’s very gay, but not really happy about it. I think it’s a generational thing.

“Rob,” I say. “Thanks for the invitation.” The last time I’d seen Rob had been right after a gig, six months ago or so. Deke and Rob and I, along with Lou and Sharon, had gotten in and out of this ridiculously guarded corporate plant without anyone even noticing us. Perfect execution. Lou and Sharon had vanished into the ether afterwards, as they do, but Rob had taken us to this fantastic restaurant in the backwater of yet another country I’m not going to name.

We’d had a great evening.

A tight band of sorrow wraps itself around my ribs. I try not to let it show.

“How could I not?” He glances down the hall towards the elevator. “I know you’ve had a long and trying day, so I thought we might dine in tonight.”

And we have things to talk about. “That sounds delightful.” Dang it, now he’s got me talking elegantly too. I’ll have to throw in some ain’ts.

He raises a strong, veiny, age-spotted hand and steps aside.

A convoy of waiters in worryingly identical slacks, red polo shirts, and white cotton aprons enter, bearing two low-back metal-frame chairs with slung canvas seats, a mosaic-topped table with folding legs, and a tiny wheeled cart with a chrome bucket of ice and a bottle. After all this fancy stuff comes two more waiters, bearing an incongruous blue picnic cooler between them. I have no idea how they got all this up that elevator. There’s got to be a cargo elevator behind some unremarkable door. Once the table is set up on the cool slate floor and the chairs arranged to Rob’s standards, he shoos them out.

“I do hope you don’t object,” he says. “Lisbon has some truly impressive dining establishments. Their seafood is extraordinary—the things their chefs can do with salted cod! And we simply must have a paella while we’re here, if our schedule permits. But I took the liberty of preparing our meal myself.”

I try not to let my surprise show, but there’s a dangerous little itch in my eyes. Dammit. Nobody in our world actually cooks. We eat at fine restaurants, or packaged meals. I eat small, high-protein meals just to keep in fighting shape. Deke, now, he’d scramble a half-dozen eggs or grill salmon filets, but that’s not cooking. That’s making dinner.

Deke was the last person to cook for me.

I draw a shuddering breath. “Of course that’s okay.”

“I fear it’s not terribly imaginative, but I preferred to honor your usual culinary habits.”

“It’s a giant vat of yogurt?”

“Honor them, my dear.” Rob squats to open the cooler. “Not be foolishly enslaved to them. No, no, please permit me to finish what I have begun.” He needs no more than two minutes to lay everything out, starting with cloth napkins and gold-trimmed silver cutlery. The table is the size of a typical card table, but by the time he’s arranged small platters with silver dome lids between the china plates, he needs to pull the cooler to a convenient distance so that he can place two smaller plastic containers atop it. He even walks around to pull out my chair. “If you would permit me?”

I’m a sucker. The effort he’s gone to eases some of the tightness around my chest. It wouldn’t matter if the food tasted like one of those injection-molded gas station sandwiches. But he’s grilled an unfamiliar dark fish with a bit of garlic and celery salt. There’s crisped steamed carrots and broccoli and cauliflower. “You have to reduce the balsamic vinegar yourself,” Rob says as he adds a tiny drizzle of dark sauce to the vegetables. “Even some Europeans have started adding sugar to their balsamic reduction. Dreadful American custom. You would expect them to know better.”

He’s brought steamed jasmine rice as well. I normally wouldn’t eat it, and I don’t doubt Rob knows that. But he puts maybe a teaspoon on my plate and tells me I simply must have a tiny taste with the fish, I’ve been flying overnight and after the wretched offal they foist off on us in airports I need my strength. He says I absolutely require at least half a glass of this white he found at a little winery deep in the Portugal hinterland, not that a tiny nation like Portugal has much room for hinterlands but they do make an effort.

Everything is delectable.

Rob keeps the conversation light as we eat, so I go along with it. “I have to ask,” I say after devouring half the fish as politely as possible. “I know you spend a lot of time keeping up your professional skills. How—how did you possibly manage to learn how to cook like this too?”

Rob’s smile is a little sad. “I always said you were a sharp one.”

“No, really.”

“More and more frequently,” Rob says, “I find myself doing more administrative work than hands-on.”

My fork stills itself. “But you’re one of the best in the world.”

“Indeed.” He sips the wine. “But age pursues us all. One day, not too distant from now, I must decide. Either entirely retire from the field, or accept an early and ignominious demise. Although, given my career and my age, any demise would be rather late.”

“You were on site a few days ago, weren’t you?”

“We had obtained access cards with legitimate codes. I had an incursion specialist—not as skilled as yourself, I fear, but you weren’t answering my emails.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. I stab a cauliflower with my fork.

“Entirely understandable, of course. Most of the team, including myself, reached the lobby via the elevator. The guards are accustomed to seeing technology staff at all hours of the day, even on holidays. I posed as a storage engineer. Quite a romp.” He takes a moment to savor a morsel of fish. “The specialist disarmed the alarms from inside, and the show began.”

Rob puts the fork down and looks at me with earnest eyes. “I must thank you for completing the performance, however.”

To hide my embarrassment, I take a sip of wine. He’s right, it really is fantastic. But exhausted as I am, I can’t afford more than half a glass. If that. “It was the least I could do. Call it professional courtesy.”

“We were on competing shows. I would not have blamed you for sending a disarm code. Or bringing down the house as soon as you were clear.”

“One civilian already died.”

“Regrettable.”

And that’s what it comes down to, really. We’re hired specialists. Occasionally, that specialty means people die. Usually other people, like that poor geezer security guard. Sometimes it’s one of us.

The flavor has evaporated from the meal. I finish it anyway. Nobody can work on an empty stomach. If Rob is right, and we were set up, I really want to do the work to find them. I’m carefully placing the fork across my barren china plate when Rob says “I gather that supper met with your approval.”

“Delicious,” I say. It’s not Rob’s fault I couldn’t appreciate the last of it.

“I am thrilled to hear it.” Rob lays his own fork across his half-eaten meal and his face loses a portion of its geniality. “I fear we must discuss what happened to you and Deke.”

I knew this was coming. I still stiffen.

“I’ve heard some generalities.” Rob sits back in his chair. “I know they found him afterwards. I have my theories about what happened. But selecting our next script requires better information than I have now.”

His voice is calm and placid as he says, “I must ask you exactly what happened at Newcastle.”