Chapter 7
I was not in Seattle for any of the subsequent proceedings. I was in a city I will not name, in an apartment rented under a name I will not use here, working on the next assignment, which had its own shape and its own thread and its own months of preparation that would have to be done before the thread could be followed.
Gerald sent me a message the week the Vulov verdict came through, through the protocol we used for secure communication between assignments. It said: clean result. Good eight months.
I read it in a coffee shop.
I did not answer immediately because I was watching the door, the way I always watch the door in coffee shops, the particular professional attention that had become so habitual that I no longer experienced it as attention and simply experienced it as the way a room looked.
Two men came in. They were not following me. They ordered coffee and sat by the window and talked about something I could not hear.
I answered Gerald: ready for the next one.
He sent back a file.
I opened it and looked at the shape of the new man I was looking for, and the shape was different from Falco's shape and different from Vulov's shape but was, in the way that all of them were in some underlying sense the same shape, recognizable to someone who had been looking for shapes like this for nine years.
I finished my coffee.
I closed the file.
May you like
I left a tip that was neither too large nor too small.
And I went to find an apartment in a new city under a new name with nothing in my pockets that was real except the things that had always been real, which were the bruises on my knuckles and the patience and the specific skill of making powerful men believe they understood what I was before they discovered they had never looked closely enough.
