“The Yale Club? Swanky.”
“You know it?”
Mike laughed. “Only from the outside. Part of being a New York Field Agent is knowing every nook and cranny of this city. I’ll go up against an old-time New York cabbie any d
ay of the week. The Yale Club is a few blocks southeast.” She looked right and left and pulled out onto Seventh. “I’m starting to think of my bed with lust in my heart. Past time to catch a few hours.”
“Elaine had more trouble when she first moved here, distinguishing the long blocks from the short. She took to running an extra hour each night to learn her way around. She once called and said, ‘Nicholas, you wouldn’t believe how lost I was tonight.’”
He got quiet.
Her stomach growled, and Nicholas looked over at her. “Hungry, are we?”
“Starved. I can’t remember when I ate last; we’ve been going hard since I woke up. I’m exhausted, but I need something.” She smiled at him. “I reheat a mean slice of pizza.”
“Pizza sounds good.”
She heard something in his voice, something that spoke to her. She understood pain. She understood grief. She understood not wanting to be alone. Too well. And she remembered Jon, and let the pain settle in for a moment. Had he really been gone five years?
“We’re only ten minutes from my place. Tell you what, come home with me, it’ll be easiest. I live down in the Village, and I’ve got a lovely long sectional sofa.” She continued without pause. “What’d you do in Afghanistan?”
“Is the sofa long enough for me? It’s classified.”
It could be, but she doubted it; at least what had happened to him wasn’t classified. Whatever it was, she figured it must be bad.
She said, “It’s over seven feet long, and I have lots of comfy blankets. You left the Foreign Office after Afghanistan, left the spy world altogether, and moved to Scotland Yard. Come on, Nicholas, what happened?”
“I doubt your pajamas will fit me. Let me just say I wanted to be out on the street again, back home, in London, get my hands dirty. Work homicide. Help the helpless.”
“You’re James Bond. You don’t wear pajamas.” She drove through a yellow light as it turned red. “At this hour a person’s biorhythms are supposed to be low, and they’ll spill pretty much everything about themselves.”
“I was trained not to,” he said. “I won’t go to bed commando, as you Americans say, to save you any embarrassment. Let’s check out your biorhythms. What’s the name of your last boyfriend?”
She spurted out a laugh. “Classified. Tell me about your ex-wife. She’s the daughter of an earl?”
Safe subject, she thought, because he straightened and turned toward her. “An earl who’s also a very rich man and gives Pamela anything she wants, like backing her online magazine and footing all the bills here in Manhattan.”
“How did you two meet?”
“I met her in London, at some party, I forget. Anyway, two years later, I was finishing an assignment in Zurich. She was skiing at Engelberg. We ran into each other at a bar, and it was good to see someone I knew. She shed her friends. It all happened fast, too fast.” He slouched down in the seat and closed his eyes.
“Sorry, none of my business.”
He didn’t open his eyes. “Not a state secret. Pamela loved the thought of my being a spy. It was all fictionalized cloak-and-dagger to her, dangerous and exciting, and sexy, but the reality stopped being fun after about six months. I was gone a great deal of the time, places she couldn’t travel with me, and when I was in London, I was usually too wiped to go to parties and bars and wild weekend bashes. And then there was Afghanistan.” He didn’t shrug, but he could have. “I guess I changed. Settling in London as a copper’s wife was the last thing on her mind. She was all sharp edges and snark toward me tonight. She didn’t used to act that way.”
“She’s certainly something.”
“She’s also the past. Right now, all I want is some pizza, and sleep, and a new perspective.”
Mike said, “We made great progress today, you know.”
He gave a humorless laugh. “If you think being played for fools is progress, then certainly. Between Anatoly and Browning, our strings have been pulled quite nicely.”
41
Hudson Street and West Eleventh Street
Mike Caine’s apartment