“Maybe she’s not even home,” Pax said, and he rang the bell.
He almost didn’t recognize the woman who opened the door. Gone was the tailored, expensive, but drab suit. She wore an ao dai, a flowing silk tunic-and-pants ensemble, white with irregularly placed peacock-blue and ultramarine-blue and saffron-yellow flowers, classic Vietnamese apparel, a garment as feminine as any in the entire world of women’s fashions. Her hair was usually drawn back into a bun that looked as dense as stone, that gave her the severe appearance of a nineteenth-century pioneer woman who had been hardened by decades spent in a contest with the heat and cold and wind and Indians and innumerable hardships of the prairie; however, on this Sunday afternoon, she had let down her graying hair, which revealed itself as less gray than silver-blond, lustrous and thick, as silken as the ao dai. Her skin, always flawless in photographs and public-television appearances, was flawless now, but appeared more like flesh and less like quartz. Her eyes, which Bibi had once described as the blue of the chemical gel in a refreezable ice pack, were precisely that color, but there was nothing icy about her stare. Clearly, the professor had once been a head-turning boy-stunning all-American babe; at fifty-something, she still was, when she wasn’t being her public image.
“Dr. St. Croix—” Pax began.
Before he or Pogo could say another word, Solange St. Croix saw the ink on Pax’s right bicep, said, “I don’t believe it,” and with one finger pushed up the T-shirt sleeve that half concealed his only tattoo. It was the official SEAL emblem: an eagle in an overwatch position on a trident that was also the cross of an anchor, with a flintlock pistol in the foreground, rendered in shades of gold with black detailing. “Are you a fraud, young man?” she asked.
“Excuse me, ma’am?”
“No, you’re not,” she decided. “You’re the real damn thing, an honest-to-God Navy SEAL. I’ve only met one before, and everything I wrote about him is locked away where no one can see it, where it’ll remain until I’m old enough to want everyone to see it.”
Letting the T-shirt sleeve slide half over the tattoo once more, the professor looked at Pogo and smiled, and Pogo blushed, which Pax had never seen him do before.
To Pax, with girlish enthusiasm, she said, “I could use a jolt of the exotic. Tell me you’re here in an official capacity, on a mission of grave importance, you’re military intelligence conducting an investigation on which the fate of the nation depends.”
“Not the fate of the nation, ma’am. But it is a matter of life and death,” Pax said.
He didn’t confirm or deny that he was with one branch or another of military intelligence, allowing her to infer that, with academic perspicacity, she had known the truth of him at first sight. Judging by her manner and the delighted surprise in her eyes, Pax thought that this Sunday had been of a grayer cast than she had hoped, as perhaps had been some number of days before it, and that she would insist upon the risk of believing he was what she imagined, welcoming them into her house. More than anything at this moment, perhaps she needed color in her life, while Pax and Pogo offered all the hues of a box of forty-eight crayons.
“Ma’am, I’m Chief Petty Officer Paxton Thorpe, and this is Averell Beaumont Stanhope the Third.”
“Of the Boston Stanhopes?” the professor asked.
“No, ma’am,” Pogo replied, lest there be no Boston Stanhopes and her question a trap. “Of the Virginia Stanhopes.” Which was a lie, but a reasonably smooth one.
Pax said, “If you can spare us fifteen minutes, we’d be most grateful, but we can meet with you tomorrow, in your office at the university, if you prefer.”
He still half expected her to ask for proof that he was with one intelligence service or another, whereupon he would be able to produce only his military ID, which would not identify him as what he was now pretending to be. But she stepped back from the door and welcomed them inside and led them through dramatic but sterile rooms of starkly modern décor, her ao dai both loose and yet clinging to her as she seemed almost to float through the shadowy spaces with the grace of a brightly painted koi in half-lit waters. She was barefoot, and her feet were small for a woman of about five foot eight, like the well-formed feet of a child destined for ballet.