She looked away for a moment. I wasn’t sure if it was a flinch.

We finished the champagne and I ordered a ’99 Lafon Volnay Santenots. Delilah had a disciplined mind, I knew, but no one does as well in the presence of wine and jet lag as in their absence. And if she were here for something “nefarious,” as Dox had put it, the discord between her feelings for me from before and her intentions for me now would be producing a strain. I wanted to do everything I could to turn that strain into a fault line, the fault line into a widening crack.

We talked more about this and that. She never let on that she knew anything about Manny, or that the botched hit in Manila had anything to do with her presence here now. And as the evening wore on, I realized I couldn’t accept that the timing of her contact had been a coincidence. So the absence of any acknowledgment had to be an omission. A deliberate omission.

If she had been anyone else, and if this had all happened just a year or two earlier, I would have accepted the truth of what I knew. I would have acted on it. Doing so would have protected my body, albeit at some cost to my soul. But sitting across the table from her, no doubt affected by the wine, as well as by the surroundings and the feelings I still had for her, I found myself looking for a different way. Something less direct, less irredeemable, something that might have as its basis hope instead of only fear.

And there was something strangely attractive about the feeling that I was taking a chance. It wasn’t anything as base as the thrill of “unsafe sex,” as Dox had suggested. It was more a sense of the possibilities, the potential upside. Not just the possibility that, if I confronted her and she cracked, she might give me information that would help me understand where I stood regarding Manny. I was aware, too, of a deeper kind of hope at work, for something more than information alone, something intangible but infinitely more valuable.

After a dessert of fruit and Thai sweets followed by steaming tureens of cappuccino, we strolled back to the pavilion. We left the lights dim and sat on a low teak couch facing the sea, present by the sound of the surf but unseeable in the darkness without. The silence in the room felt heavy to me, portentous. My previous, oblique conversational gambits had afforded me only hints and clues. I decided it was time to be more direct. My mouth felt a little dry at the prospect, part of me perhaps afraid of what I might discover.

“Did your people tell you about what they’ve involved me in?” I asked.

She looked at me, and something in her expression told me she wasn’t happy with the question. This wasn’t why we had come back to the room. It wasn’t part of the script.

“No,” she said. “Everything is ‘need to know.’ If I don’t need to know, it’s better that I don’t.”

“They sent me after a guy in Manila.”

She shook her head. “Why are you telling me this?”

“I don’t want what’s between us to be nothing more than ‘need to know.’ If it is, we’re just gaming each other.”

“Protecting each other.”

“Would you protect me?”

“From what?”

“What if something went wrong?”

“Don’t put me in that position.”

“What if you had to choose?”

Her eyes narrowed a fraction. “I don’t know. What would you do?”

I looked at her. “It’s easy for me. I don’t believe in anything, remember? I can make up my own mind.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s more of an answer than what you just told me.”

“I told you I don’t know. I’m sorry if that wasn’t the answer you were looking for.”

“I’m looking for the truth.”

“You know who I am.”

“That’s what I’m asking you.”

She laughed. “Look, I’m like a married woman, okay? With a family I always have to return to.”

I didn’t respond. After a moment she said, “So stop pretending you don’t know all this.”

That sounded dangerously close to a rationalization, one with which I’m all too familiar: He knew what he was getting into. If he hadn’t been in the game, they wouldn’t have wanted him dead.

Of all the potential angles, the possible gambits, it seemed to me that the truth would be what she was least prepared for. The closer I got to it, the more it was putting her off her game.

“You’re here only for personal reasons?” I asked her.

She shifted a fraction on the couch. “Yes.”

“Look in my eyes when you say that.”

She did. A long beat went by.

“I’m here only for personal reasons,” she said again.

No. I knew her, from the time we’d spent together in Rio. If what she just said were true, my suspicions would have provoked her instantly. But now she was trying to manage her behavior in the presence of fatigue, conflicting emotions, and alcohol, and under pressure from my questions, and the unaccustomed effort was showing.

I looked at her silently. She returned my gaze. A long time went by-ten seconds, maybe fifteen. I could see some color coming into her cheeks, her nostrils flaring slightly with each exhalation.

All at once she looked away. I saw her shoulders rising and falling with her breathing. “Goddamn you,” she said, her voice just above a whisper. “Goddamn you.”

She glanced around the room, her head moving in quick, efficient jerks, here and there and back again.

She got up and started pacing, slowly at first, then more rapidly, her head nodding as though internally confirming something, trying to accept it. She looked everywhere but at me.

“I have to get out of here,” she said, more to herself than to me. She walked over to one of the dressers, pulled open a drawer, and started shoving things into her bag.

“Delilah,” I said.

She didn’t answer, or even pause. She pulled open a second drawer and stuffed its contents into the bag, too.

I stood up. “Delilah,” I said again.

She threw the bag over her shoulder and headed toward the door.

“Wait,” I said, and moved in front of her.

She tried to go left around me. I stayed with her. She went right. That didn’t work either. She moved left again, more quickly. No go.

She had become almost oblivious to my presence. Something had gotten in her way, she had been blindly trying to go around it. But her lack of progress forced her to change her focus, and all at once she saw that the obstacle was me. Her eyes narrowed and her ears seemed to settle back against her head. In my peripheral vision I took in a shift in her weight, a slight rotation of her hips. Then her right elbow was blurring in toward my temple.

I retracted my head and shrugged my left shoulder, bringing my left hand up alongside my face as I did so. Her elbow glanced off the top of my head. Her left was already coming in from the other side. I covered up, dropped through my knees, and deflected it the same way.

She shifted back and shot a left palm heel straight for my nose. I weaved off-line and parried with my right. Other side-same drill.

She took two more quick shots, hooks to the head. I avoided the worst of both. She grabbed my arm and tried to drag me to the side, frustration and anger eroding her tactics.

If there’s one thing my body learned in twenty-five years of judo at the Kodokan in Tokyo, it’s grounding. She might as well have been trying to move one of the room’s thick teak posts.

She made a sound, half rage, half desperation. She stepped back and whipped the bag around at my head. I dissipated some of the blow’s force by flowing with it, and absorbed the rest by covering up with my shoulder, bicep, and forearm. She reloaded and swung again. Again I flowed and absorbed.

She started swearing something in Hebrew and hammering at me with the bag, with no obvious goal now other than to vent her fury. I let her pound on me, taking most of the impact along my arms and shoulders. She was in shape, and it took longer than I would have liked for her to tire. But eventually the power of the blows lessened, the interval between them lengthened. She stood, the bag hanging at her side, her breath heaving in and out. I lowered my arms and looked at her.