"That's a big hit, "she said, pretending to believe him and knowing that he could tell she was pretending, "that bad investment."

He nodded. Carla was a faithful jogger, and the same inner discipline that drove her regimen of physical training shaped her sense of integrity. It wasn't his withholding that was eating at her here. t.i.tus didn't tell her everything about the business, of course, and she never expected him to. But she knew that something else was going on here, something was wrong.

They sat in silence.

"Look, "she said, leaning toward him, her short, brindled hair framing her face and raised eyebrows in a kind of tousled discipline, "when I came into the house a minute ago, I saw some kind of technician coming out of the guest house wearing headphones. I walked into the kitchen and there was Rita standing at the sink, staring out the window. When I hugged her she didn't even react to my surprise at seeing her home early."

She kept her eyes on him.

"And just now, when I walked through the house to come in here, I saw another technician wearing headphones. "She paused for emphasis. "It looked to me like he was listening to a little bookcase."

She shrugged. Who was she to find that odd? Her forearms were resting on the table, and when she paused her hands opened and her fingers spread out as if she were trying to convey a feeling of sincerity. Her fingernails were carefully manicured to an oval-edged practicality. She never wore polish.

"I'll go along with the bad investment story, "she went on. "That's fine. "She nodded. "Okay? But listen, t.i.tus, something's terribly not right here, I think. Are you sure ... you know, that you don't want to go into it just a little bit?"

He stared at her. He was tempted. The room had been swept. Who could possibly know if he said anything to her? He didn't have any doubt about her being able to keep a secret, but he felt that telling her would be like splashing her with a radioactive chemical. It could only be dangerous for her to know.

"Give me a week, "he said, swallowing again. "We'll talk about it then."

"You and Rita, "Carla said, "everything's okay there?"

"A lot of tension, "he said honestly. "But we're okay."

She nodded solemnly. "Good, "she said. "Then you can handle anything else, can't you."

"Yeah. I can handle anything else."

His right hand was resting by his laptop, and she reached over and touched the back of it with the back of her hand.

"Okay, "she said. "Then I guess we'd better get some work done."

t.i.tus worked several hours with Carla, and by the time she left it was late in the afternoon. He checked for messages and found that Luquin's instructions for the meeting had arrived. They were terse: At exactly twelve-thirty A.M. he was supposed to drive through the gates of his property and make his way by a specific route to an isolated intersection in the hills, where he would receive further instructions. He sat down and stared at the screen. Burden would have this by now, too. Surely t.i.tus would hear from him soon.

He found Rita in the kitchen, making pasta for dinner. She was still agitated, and he didn't really have anything to add to what he'd said before. Her temper was on a hair-trigger setting, and he knew that there would be little to gain from an argument with her.

He opened a bottle of wine, poured a gla.s.s for each of them, and then helped her make the salad. They ate dinner under the most strained silence that he could ever remember between them. He doubted if either of them would be able to digest what they were eating.

Chapter 25.

The room was dark and he was lying on his side in his underwear, looking out through the parted curtains of the opened window. The glow from a street lamp floated over the weedy compound, where the swing set and the merry-go-round and the slide stood out against the glow-haze like the ruins of childhood. It could've been anywhere, that playground. Abandoned. Things abandoned looked the same everywhere, and childhood, in some places, was grotesquely abbreviated.

The idea of childhood nauseated him, and he got up and went into the bathroom and vomited. He washed his face and walked back into the other room and fell onto the bed. He sighed and rolled over on his back. The sheets were limp, almost sticky. He pulled the wadded screws of toilet tissue from his nostrils. He didn't know which was worse, the discomfort of the tissue or the odor. Immediately he tasted the stink of mildew and dank walls.

He got out of bed and went to the opened door. Maybe it was too hot to sleep, though he didn't know. There were so many other reasons not to sleep. He looked at the cottage across the gravel drive where the old couple slept. He could hear their window unit humming. He'd tried his, but the air that came out of it was repulsive with rot and the stale breath of strangers.

Through the screen door he could smell the dust that fogged up gently from the gravel drive when cars crept into the motel compound, and he could smell, faintly, the hot asphalt of the sun-heated streets. He could smell weedy vegetation. And he could also smell the first untainted light of tomorrow, even though it was still many hours away. And just beyond that ... once, he thought he could smell the quintessence of eternity. But it dissipated instantly, and he wasn't sure.

He reached up, and as carefully as he would touch a spider's web he placed the tips of his fingers on the filthy screen of the door. It was caked with particulate matter of cigarette smoke laden with strangers'breath. He moved his fingers lightly across the screen, and he could feel the soiled wire with the grain of his fingerprints.

Then through the screen he saw the face. He went cold, and sweat covered him in an instant. Squinting, he peered through the filthy screen into the gloomy shadows. There, where the lower limb of the tree draped past the edge of the old couple's cottage, that line was the arc of the right eyebrow. The darkened trees behind were the shadow of the cheek, and the curve in the drive was the curve of the left side of the jaw.

He swallowed, blinked, and tried to refocus to make the illusion go away. But it wasn't an illusion, and it had been watching him all along.

He couldn't remember when he'd first seen the face, too many cities ago, too many streets ago, too many deaths ago. Sometimes it was hidden in things, like just now, sometimes it was on people on the sidewalk or in a crowd. He could never tell if it was a man or a woman, if it was angry, or wistful, or menacing. And now, as he tried to distinguish a furrowed brow, a sad decline of the eyebrow, tension at the corner of the mouth, the face began slowly to recede so that the tree was no longer the arc of an eye, the cottage was only a cottage, the drive was only a dusty caliche smear.

He accepted that. The bizarre had long since ceased to be bizarre. The outrageous and the mundane settled together on the same indistinguishable plane of experience where visions became reality and reality dematerialized. Sometimes, physiologically, as now, he reacted. Sweat. Heart palpitations. The instant urge to urinate. But emotionally, he was calm. Stable. Unshakable.

Something moved through the screen, a breath, a soft expiration.

He slipped off his underwear and stepped out of it. He raised his arms and put them on either side of the door frame and spread his legs and stood in the doorway facing out. The waft moved in through the screen and covered his body. It moved around him like a loosened spirit, searching for a roost within. It touched every pore, encircled his dangling genitals, set his pubic hair vibrating.

He was standing like that when the figure materialized at the edge of the darkness and stopped. The two regarded each other across the murky distance. Then the figure moved toward him, approaching right up to the door, and stood close to him, their faces separated by inches. They looked at each other through the filter of the screen; neither moved. He saw a glint of moisture in the other's eyes.

"Me recuerdas? " the other man asked softly. the other man asked softly.

With his body forming a corporeal X across the open s.p.a.ce of the door, he remained silent, motionless.

And then: "Ahhhh, " he purred in his chest as recognition coalesced out of muddled memory. he purred in his chest as recognition coalesced out of muddled memory."Si, Garcia. Yo recuerdo."

Still naked, he sat in one of the two chairs in the motel room and Burden sat in the other, the rumpled bed between them like a huge coffee table. The frail light from outside was enough for the two men to see ghostly highlights of each other. It was hot in the room.

"I didn't know it was you who had sent for me, "he said to Burden, sitting back in the chair.

Of course he didn't. His latest address was handed around in certain dark streets like a very dangerous illicit drug. People were eager to turn loose of the paper it was written on. He never knew who would hire him next until the people showed up, and most of the time he dealt only with go-betweens. Sometimes he never knew for sure who'd paid him for the things he did.

"Tell me about yourself, "he said.

The words were amiable enough, but simply dealing with him was inherently menacing. Yet Burden wasn't afraid of him, though he recognized his instability. No one at Burden's level would come to him themselves. Burden knew that this fact was not lost on the other man and that it set Burden apart in his eyes.

"I left the Agency. Freelancing now, "Burden said.

"I heard that. I've heard some stories. You tend to leave stories behind, like droppings. Where do you live?"

It was a question no one in his right mind would've answered truthfully.

"San Miguel de Allende part of the time. Paris part of the time. San Francisco. London-"

"Okay, okay. "The man rocked his head from side to side. "Did you ever marry that woman?"

"No."

"But you're still with her."

"Of course."

"Of course. "The man's body was pale, washed in the pale light coming through the window beside him. "Lucia the Gypsy. Beautiful woman."

Burden was uncomfortable hearing him talk about her. But he waited, careful not to show his discomfort.

"Why did you leave the Agency?"

"Descontento."

"Yes, but why?"

"I don't want to tell you."

"Okay, fine."

The dank little room reeked ... of something ... of many things ... sweat, mildew, a lingering uric scent ... of fear ... of nightmares. These were the odors of broken men. Burden had smelled it in women's rooms, too, but those rooms wafted also of perfume, and no matter how cheap it was, no matter how sweet, it lessened the loneliness. But it also left behind a melancholy that was unbearable.

"I never thanked you, "the man said.

"It wasn't necessary."

"Very few things are really necessary. I'm ashamed that I never thanked you. Lo siento." Lo siento."

Burden understood, but he didn't respond. The man lived a life that had no tomorrows. Inasmuch as one man could, he lived in the present, moment to moment. It was a clean life, the life of an animal that knows nothing of the idea of future. It was a horrible life.

"I didn't know where you'd gone, "Burden said.

"Did you look for me?"

"After a fashion."

He heard the man aspirate, and he thought he saw his breath shoot out in a long plume of cynicism into the pale light surrounding his dark silhouette.

"After a fashion, "the man said, to hear the sound of it again. "That's a very Garcia kind of response."

"I thought you wanted to disappear."

"I did. "He coughed a little. "You did the right thing."

Now that he was actually sitting here in front of him, Burden wanted to ask him something he had always wondered about. His curiosity overcame the fear that would have prevented any other man from asking.

"How did you manage to get away from him?"

There was no immediate response. Maybe there would be no response at all. But then the man said, "It was easy. Like suicide. There's nothing easier in the world once you finally decide to do it."

Burden waited for more.

"One sleepless night ... I lay in the dark. I saw no end to it. I reached and got a handful of the darkness and pulled on it. It came, like a black curtain coming down. And I pulled on it and pulled on it. This went on for hours. By daylight I was gone. And that was all there was to it."

Burden nodded. He had heard that the man talked this way, that for him there was no verge between normal and fantastic.

"There's a merry-go-round out there, "the man said, and turned his face toward the window. "And swings. And weeds."

The curtains hung dead behind his face, a pale silhouette against a paler light.

"I have a name for you, "Burden said, "but I don't want to give it to you yet. "He was afraid the man would grow agitated, that knowing who it was would upset him to the point of making him unpredictable. "You remember that I often handle things differently."

"We used to say unorthodox."

"Carefully, "Burden corrected him.

"Unorthodox. But it has no meaning to me anymore. It has no context. It's nothing."

"But you understand?"

"Well, you see, it just doesn't have any meaning."

Jesus. Burden saw the edges of difficulty. But for all the man's psychosis, his reputation was impeccable. It occurred to him that it was he, Burden, who was now having trouble with unorthodoxy. Here he was, insisting on a frame of reference from a madman. Well, here was a lesson, wasn't it. He shouldn't be surprised.

"Is it tonight? "the man asked.

"No."

"Then I don't want to talk about it. Do you still go to pray?"

"Yes."

"Churches? Mosques? Synagogues?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"For all the same reasons."

"You don't see things differently now?"

"Things? Yes, things are always changing, so I see things differently. But I don't see myself differently. So I still go."

"If the stories I've heard are true, "the man said, "I don't know why you still go."

Burden didn't say anything.

Silence.

"But then, "the man said, "what does it matter, really? I don't think it matters at all."

They looked at each other across the dusk of the small room, silhouette to silhouette.