We were silent again for a moment. I asked, “Why’d they send you?”

He reached down and rubbed his knee. “You know why. We know each other, they figure you trust me.” He smiled. “Don’t you?”

“Sure,” I told him. “Completely.”

“Well, that’s it,” he went on, pretending he was too slow to understand sarcasm. “Plus, I figure they want you to hear from me that what they’ve got in mind is real, get you interested that way. I’m like a customer reference, you know what I mean?”

“Sure,” I said again.

“Okay, so here’s the score. I’ve been doing some work for Uncle Sam, deniable shit, off the books. High risk, high ‘they’ll fuck you in the end’ potential, but lucrative.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. They thought you might be interested. But contacting you wasn’t my idea, by the way. I didn’t even know you were still around, man. A lot of people we knew in ’Stan, they’re not breathing so much these days.”

“Whose idea, then?”

“Look, there’s a program. Something new, something big. They’re hiring people like me and you, paying good money, is what I’m saying.”

“Dox, do you know what a ‘pronoun’ is?”

He frowned. Then his face brightened. “Ah, I know what you mean. I keep saying ‘they’ and shit like that. Not telling you who really.”

I looked at him and waited.

He smiled and shook his head. “C’mon, man, you know who ‘they’ is. Christians In Action.” He shivered in mock excitement. “The Company.”

“Right.”

“They’ve got some sort of new mandate. You should hear it from them.”

“I’d like to hear it from you first.”

“Hey, I don’t have all the details. And I can’t give you the specifics about what I’ve been up to. I’ll just tell you that they’re paying me a lot of money to make certain people who are causing problems stop causing problems. They want to make the same offer to you.”

“Through your handler?”

He nodded. “I’ve got a number for you to call.”

I wrote the number down in code, then left him there and made my way back to Naomi’s apartment. The move was predictable, and I took extensive precautions. The caution was mostly reflex, though. If they’d wanted to kill me, they wouldn’t have sent someone I knew to contact me first. They would have known that doing so would only tune up my alertness, possibly even convince me to run.

No, I had a feeling Dox’s story was straight. But no sense being sloppy, regardless.

I thought on the way to Naomi’s about what Dox had told me. The Agency must have connected the bodies outside Naomi’s Tokyo apartment with the contemporaneous death of Yukiko, the ice bitch who had set up and then disposed of Harry after the yakuza had used him to find me. They knew, despite the absence of real proof, that I’d been involved in all those killings. They knew that Naomi and Yukiko had both been dancers at the same Nogizaka club. It wouldn’t be too great a leap to deduce, from the pieces they had, a connection between Naomi and me.

I used the intercom at the front entrance. Naomi was surprised that I was back, but she buzzed me in. I took the stairs. She was waiting, holding the door open for me.

I went in. The room smelled of brewing coffee. Her hair hung wet against the shoulders of a white terry-cloth robe-she had just gotten up and out of the shower, it seemed.

“Someone was following me this morning,” I told her.

“Following you?” she asked.

“Yeah. Not in a good way.”

“A mugger?”

“Not a mugger. A pro. Someone who knew just where to go.”

She looked at me, her expression more frightened than confused.

“Tell me what’s going on, Naomi.”

There was a long pause, then she said, “I didn’t tell them anything.”

“Tell who?”

“I don’t know exactly. They call every month or so. It started when I came back to Brazil from Tokyo. Someone came to Scenarium and started asking me about you.”

“Describe him.”

“He called himself Kanematsu. American, but ethnic Japanese. He had slicked hair and wire-rimmed glasses. Thirtyish, I think, but younger-looking. He told me he was with the U.S. government and that he was a friend of yours but wouldn’t say more than that.”

Kanezaki again, operating under a pseudonym. “What did you tell him?” I asked.

She looked at me, her expression an odd mixture of vulnerability and defiance. “I told him I knew you, yes, but that I didn’t know where you were or how to find you.”

If that was true, it was also smart. If she’d denied even knowing me they would have known she was lying. They would have assumed the rest was a lie, too, and might have started to pressure her.

“And after that?”

She shrugged. “I get a call once a month or so. Always from the same guy. And I always tell him the same thing.”

I nodded, considering. “What did they offer you?” I asked.

She looked down, then back at me. “Twenty-five thousand U.S.”

“Just for putting them in touch with me?”

She nodded.

“Well, it’s good to be appreciated,” I said. “Did the guy you met leave you any way of contacting him?”

She got up and walked into her bedroom. I heard a drawer open, then close. She came back and wordlessly handed me a card. It included an e-mail address and a phone number. The latter had a Tokyo prefix. It was the same number I had just gotten from Dox.

“Twenty-five thousand is a lot of money,” I said, flipping the card around in my fingers.

She stared at me.

“You were never tempted to take it?” I asked.

Her eyes narrowed. “No.”

“Not even with everything you’ve invested in the restaurant? That kind of cash would be a big help.”

“You think I’m going to give you up?” she asked, her voice rising. “For money?”

I shrugged. “You never told me about any of this. Until I pressed you.”

“I was afraid to tell you.”

“And you kept the card. A keepsake? Souvenir?”

There was a pause. She said, “Fuck you, then.”

I told myself I should have seen this coming.

I told myself it was all right, that I wasn’t disappointed, that it was better this way.

I wondered in a detached way whether it was all part of some cosmic punishment for Crazy Jake, the blood brother I had killed in Vietnam. Or perhaps for the other things I’ve done. To be periodically tantalized by the hope of something real, something good, always knowing at the same time that it was all going to turn to dust.

Maybe she didn’t tell them anything. Maybe they nailed you some other way.

Then why didn’t she say anything to you? And why did she keep that card?

I had convinced myself that, in Rio, I had become safe enough to see her. I realized now that I’d been wrong. The disease I carried was still communicable.

And still potentially fatal. Because, even if I could trust her to stay quiet, the Agency was watching her. She had become a focal point, a nexus, just like Harry had been. And Harry had wound up dead. I didn’t want that to happen to her.

Well, now for the hard part. You don’t have to like it, a boot camp instructor had once told me. You just have to do it.

I looked at her for a long moment. Her eyes were angry, but I saw hope in them, too. Hope that I would put my arms around her and pull her close, apologize, say I’d just been startled, that I’d been out of line.

I got up and looked into those beautiful green eyes, now widening with surprise, with hurt. I wondered if she could see the sadness in mine.

“Goodbye, Naomi,” I said.

I left. I told myself again that I wasn’t disappointed, that I wasn’t even terribly surprised. I learned a long time ago not to trust, that faith is to life what sticking your chin out is to boxing. I told myself it was good to get some further confirmation of the essential accuracy of my worldview.

I took extra precautions to ensure I wasn’t being followed. Then I went to a quiet beach near Grumari and sat alone and looked out at the water.