Margaret shrugged. “Can’t talk about my work,” she said.
“I know about your work,” Kevin said. “You sit in front of a workstation and write reports, like my sister.” But Kevin didn’t really care. It all had to come out now. So he started telling her about everything—how he’d found his way into the Rainmaker’s empire years ago and worked his way to the top, and how an odd bit of work had come across his desk in May, involving some new Jordanian grad students who absolutely had to get into the country no later than mid-July, and who seemed to have an infinite amount of money and influence behind them. About all of the strings he’d pulled, bureaucracies he’d manipulated, little white lies he’d told, laws and regulations he had bent to make it happen. How, having used him for this one purpose, his Jordanian friends had cast him aside like a used condom, and how Larsen himself was becoming ever more distant in recent weeks.
At some point he realized he’d been talking for a solid hour and had made his way through three or four Stolis. He paid the bill and led Margaret down to the garage where he had parked his rental car.
“Now that I’ve shucked my pretense of being the ultimate Washington insider,” he said, “do you think you could give me directions to Adams-Morgan?”
“Easy,” she said. “Give me the keys and I’ll drive.”
“It’s a rental—you’re not an authorized driver,” he said.
“Neither are you, when you’ve had five shots in an hour and a half,” she said. “Shall we take a cab?”
“Okay, okay,” he said, and handed her the keys.
She drove them across the Key Bridge, through the strange mixture of posh and tawdry that was Georgetown, and got them onto the Rock Creek Parkway. “Secret shortcut to points north,” she said, accelerating around a curve into the darkly forested vale. A few minutes later they shot up a steep exit ramp and resurfaced in a different part of the city. Margaret took them eastward, into the border zone between the affluent west side of the District and the war-torn east side, and onto a crowded and neon-lit street of ethnic restaurants, fast-food outlets, newsstands, and bodegas. It was the antithesis of Wapsipinicon, and it was pretty exotic even by the standards of D.C. Margaret braked to a stop in front of the restaurant. “Hop out,” she said, “and grab our table. I’ll park.”
“Are you kidding?” he said. “I’m just enough of an old-fashioned macho shithead that I’m not going to let you walk around here alone.”
“Have it your way,” she said, and then spent fifteen minutes circling for a parking space. The widening gyre of their search took them into darker and less pleasant parts of the neighborhood; finally they found a space on the street, underneath a streetlamp, a block away from the main drag. It looked dark and hazardous from inside the car, but when they got out and began walking down the sidewalk, it didn’t seem so bad. There were a lot of pedestrians about, Hispanics of all ages and both sexes.
The restaurant was great—Kevin had called it right. Dynamite Caribbean beer, ice cold. Chicken, black beans, rice, curried meat wrapped in flat bread, grilled marlin. They did not talk anymore about Kevin’s troubles—instead they talked about his research, and his dreams.
In the back of his mind Kevin was dimly aware that they had spent all their time together talking about him and that he barely knew anything about Margaret. But it wasn’t his fault. It was hard to get the woman to open up when her work was classified, and her family background was apparently a tender subject to be carefully avoided. He made a mental note to redress this imbalance one of these times.
But not right now. Everything was going too well.
Kevin racked up the meal and the drinks on his Gold Card, and they stepped out into the night. The crowd on the streets was different now, mostly young people, not the cross section of ages they’d seen earlier in the evening. And when they turned off the main street and headed into the desolate neighborhood where they’d parked, they found the sidewalk deserted—except for a couple of young Hispanic males carrying a car battery they’d just stripped from a vehicle.
“Hope it wasn’t ours,” Kevin said, and couldn’t help laughing.
Margaret let go of his arm and unzipped her purse.
“What are you doing?” he said.
“Getting the car keys,” she said.
They walked another few yards.
“So where are they?” he asked.
“What?”
“The car keys. You said you were getting them.”
She said nothing. Then Kevin took the car keys out of his pocket and jangled them. “You gave them to me, remember?” He laughed delightedly, but she didn’t seem amused. In fact she didn’t seem to be paying attention to him at all.
“Where’s that damn streetlight we parked under?” he said, looking up the street.