He shook his head again. “Don’t do that, Jared, you’re really terrible at it. Either lie with conviction or speak the truth.”
“You’re right,” I confessed. “I’m not a good liar and I don’t get enough practice. But, even so, what made you decide I was lying?”
“The very persistent trend of your questions—your insistence that my invitation needs to be explained. You’re obviously wondering how you managed to fool me.”
I wasn’t sure he was right about this, but I was too thick-witted—too clogged with smoke and booze—to think about it clearly.
Suddenly there was a third person sitting at our table. I took it in that way: first, that it was a person; second, that it was a woman; third, that it was a woman I’d seen before. It was the woman from Der Bau—the woman who had translated B’s talk into sign language, the woman in the rawhide jacket with the strange butterfly opened across the center of her face. The woman (I suddenly realized) who had exerted a powerful attraction on me from the moment I saw her, with her broad, athletic shoulders, her ranch-hand clothes, and her wild tawny hair.
She was talking to B—with her hands. He was “listening” intently. Suddenly a big smile swept across his face, and he looked at me … and laughed: “A priest!”
I said, “What?”
“You’re a priest?”
I looked at the woman and she met my gaze without expression, as if I were a lizard or a fish.
B said, “She found your breviary.”
I stared at him without comprehension until he added: “In your room at the hotel.” Even then it took me most of a minute to figure it out. He had invited me f
or a hike across Radenau so his assistant would have time to find my hotel, work out which room was mine, and go in. I was grateful she hadn’t found my diary; that travels with me.
I didn’t know what to say. I felt profoundly stupid and incompetent, like a kid who might pick Tiffany’s as a terrific place to make his debut as a shoplifter.
“Are you an assassin,” B asked, “or just a spy?”
The woman laughed—not sarcastically, it seemed to me, but with genuine amusement. I was surprised when she spoke—that she could speak.
“Not an assassin,” she said, looking at me now as if I were a cocker spaniel that someone had just mistaken for a pit bull.
“No, I’m sure you’re right,” B said. “Not an assassin. What then?”
It was almost funny. At that very moment Piaf started singing “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien”—no, I don’t regret anything! I couldn’t think of a single thing to say.
The next few minutes passed (as they say) as in a dream. Theda got paid. B and the woman stood up to leave and seemed surprised when I didn’t follow their example.
“Are you going to spend the night?” B asked.
“No.”
“Then come on, we’ll give you a ride back to your hotel.”
Feeling even more idiotic than before, I rode in the backseat of the Mercedes I’d seen earlier outside the theater. The woman drove.
“This is Shirin, by the way,” B told me.
I nodded mutely.
Fifteen minutes later we pulled up outside the hotel. I struggled out of the backseat and thanked them for the ride.
Shirin gave me a shake of her head and a pitying smile, then drove off.
I trudged gloomily into the hotel.
Saturday, May 18 (cont.)
The night should have been over then …