She looks back blankly, takes him in and then smiles. Her beauty is remarkable, so much so she almost seems to glow, which didn’t come through in the photographs.
“Well, come on then,” she says. “As it happens I’m in need of company,” and then a Japanese guy with slicked-back grey hair and a black suit strides into the corridor looking poisonously angry and though he isn’t big something about him says “martial arts,” probably judo, these things have a feeling, and Akemi grabs Kern’s hand and says, “Run!”
He slows his step to match hers. More angry Japanese from behind and she says, “Must go faster!” and she’s grinning wildly as she tries to keep up with him, and he wonders who they’re running from, if he should be ready to fight and where the corridor goes.
“I’ve been looking for you,” he says. “I crossed the ocean to find you.”
“Sweet. Don’t think I don’t appreciate it,” she says distractedly, already out of breath, and then they burst through double doors onto the street outside. Immediately cold, he wonders if she means to run off into the city but she raises an imperious hand toward a double-parked armored town car and says, “Open!” The car’s lights flash and a door swings wide.
“What was that?” he asks, as she bundles him in.
“Tadao’s manager. He’s trying to seize assets before probate starts, but it’s my goddamn mink. Nasty little man. Serves him right, being robbed. Which reminds me—car, disable remote override.”
“Disabled,” says the car in a neutral baritone exactly the same as his first cab’s voice, as though all the cars in this city share a single soul.
“I meant, before,” he says, ungrounded by her apparent indifference to the lengths he’s gone to, and for that matter to her own freedom. “I thought you were in trouble.”
“I’m usually in trouble,” she says breezily. “The wild life, you know?”
“I’m sorry about Tadao.”
“I’m not. We had some fun, but he was an asshole, and I don’t have time to pretend he wasn’t because he got his ass killed. I was this close to putting money on Vola. Wish I had, seeing how it turned out.”
“Destination?” asks the car, its calm fathomless.
“Downtown,” she says. “Just drive.”
*
Sheets of snow cover the windows, concealing the outside except for the blued glow of passing lights. “I like it this way,” she says, “though it takes some getting used to, not seeing where you’re going.” She takes off her fur and spreads it companionably over their legs and it feels like they’re sequestered in a sealed private world.
“There’s so much I want to ask you,” he says.
“There’ll be time for that,” she says vaguely, looking at him with a strangely fixed expression, and then she’s straddling him, and her mouth tastes like cigarettes and brandy, and he wants to explain that he sought her out for the purest reasons, that he wasn’t looking for this at all, but she won’t let him talk, and is insistent, pulling at his shirt as she laughs a little gurgling laugh, and then he says okay.
“Damn, boy,” she says, dropping his shirt on the floor. “Work out a little?”
“You said that before,” he says but she doesn’t seem to have heard him as she rubs her cheek against his stomach, seeming to take great pleasure in his skin, and now she’s fumbling with his belt, and in the diffuse pale light he watches her, and he wants to hold onto this image forever, because he doubts he’ll ever be so happy again, and he’s thinking, I will hold onto this moment, no this, this, this, this. She’s only his third woman and he’d supposed it would be someone but is amazed it’s her. She guides his hands to grasp her hair and his fingers find the socket behind her right ear, and he means to explore its strangeness, but then forgets.
*
He wakes aware of the car’s motion and its cabin’s heat. She’s beside him, dressed, engrossed in her phone. “Put your clothes on,” she says, and lowers the window, its wall of snow fragmenting and falling away to reveal the street gliding past. She slides out through the window of the slowly moving car while he’s bucking into his pants—she falls out, and he sticks his head out after her, sees her rise laughing, brushing herself off, her fur crusted in snow. He wriggles out of the window, pushes off with his feet from the door. He lands on four points on frozen asphalt and bounces up with his palms barely skinned.
The narrow street is walled in by towering buildings that have the look of expensive hotels. The one before them has WARWICK-REGENCY incised in noble capitals on its portico. The uniformed doorman pretends not to have been watching as Akemi takes Kern’s hand and pulls him inside.
Impression of hardwoods and Turkish carpets and high chandeliers and he’s intensely aware that he’s been sleeping under a bench in an airport and having sex in a car. He’s never been in a hotel like this, or known anyone who has, except for this one thief who long since went to prison.
At the front desk Akemi says, “We need a room. A quiet one.” As the clerk consults his laptop she fumbles through her wallet and finds only gleaming cards. “Hmmn. Got any cash?” she asks Kern, so he takes out his money—after all, it’s really hers—and pays for the room, which costs almost as much as a plane ticket.
The room is on the fifty-first floor. In the elevator he says, “Are you hiding from Tadao’s manager?”
“Him? Well, I suppose so. It was his car, or in any case he rented it. But he’s not who I’m afraid of.”
He’s going to ask her if it’s Hiro but she starts kissing him again and puts her hands under his shirt even though the elevator’s door could open.
The room is beige and grey and white, so clean and well kept that it feels like nothing very bad could happen there. There’s a white-painted fireplace and a view of the darkness that’s probably the ocean, and out on the balcony he looks down onto terrace upon terrace of the other balconies below, arranged like steps reaching down to the beach, most of them covered in new snow. “Casing the joint?” she asks, but not like she minds, and she gives him a glass of whisky, which ordinarily he wouldn’t drink but now he does, and then she leads him to the bed and the clouds through the windows look remarkable, wind-torn and metamorphic, and at some point he asks her if she has birth control and she says it doesn’t matter, she doesn’t care, he can just go to town.
*
He wakes to cold, realizes the balcony door is open. She’s sitting at the end of the bed wearing nothing but her mink and smoking a cigarette. She offers him a drag but he declines, and for a while it’s enough to look at her in her haphazardly draped fur. She looks worried as she pulls on her cigarette, and he says, “Is it Hiro you’re afraid of, or Cromwell?” at which her face freezes.