Legends

“That more or less narrows our relationship down to dancing,” Lucia said, her body starting to sway to the music again. Shrugging the filmy blouse so far off one shoulder that the aureole on a breast came into view, she held out a hand.

“She’s a nut case,” Leroy muttered. “But she sure has got the hots for you.”

“I have a bad leg,” Lincoln informed the girl.

“Go ‘head and put her out of her misery,” Leroy urged. “Jesus Christ, you can’t catch nothing jus’ dancing with her.” When Lincoln still hung back, Leroy nudged his ankle under the table. “You ain’t being a gentleman, Lincoln, that’s for goddamned sure.”

Lincoln pulled a face and shrugged and slid off the banquette to his feet. The Italian girl gripped one of his large hands in hers and pulled him limping into the middle of the room, then turned and, stomping out her joint on the floor boards, melted against him, both of her bare arms flung around his neck, her teeth nibbling on the lobe of his ear.

In the booth, Leroy slapped the table in delight.

Lincoln was a good dancer. Favoring his game leg, and with the girl glued to his lanky frame, he launched into an awkward little three step that set the other girls around the bar to watching in admiration.

After a bit Lucia whispered in Lincoln’s ear. “You don’t need to tell me your names if you don’t want to. Wouldn’t change anything if you did—around here nobody uses real names.”

“Name’s Lincoln.”

“That a first name or family name?”

“First.”

“That your name during daylight or at night?”

Lincoln had to smile. “Both.”

Without missing a beat, Lucia said, “Giovanni da Varrazano, who gave his daylight name to the bridge that connects Brooklyn to an island named Staten, was killed by Indians during an expedition to Brazil in 1528. A little bird whispering in my ear told me you would be thrilled to know that.”

Lincoln stopped in his tracks and pushed her off to arm’s length. The smile sat like a mask on his face. “As a matter of fact, I am.”

Lucia, quite pleased with herself, tucked her breast into her blouse with a dip and toss of her shoulder and sank back into his arms, and they started dancing again. Lincoln, suddenly edgy, pressed his mouth to her ear. “So it’s you, the cutout,” he said. He thought of Djamillah in the room over the bar in Beirut, with the faded night moth tattooed under her right breast; he remembered telling her I am addicted to fear—I require a daily fix. You had to be addicted to fear to get into the business of spying; this is the thing he had in common with the Italian girl Paura—she had surely been the cutout who had seen the FBI asset thrown to the crocodile. Lincoln identified the source of his edginess: He hoped against hope she wouldn’t suffer the same fate. “Do you have a good memory?” he asked her now. Without waiting for a reply, he said, “Here goes nothing: I was picked up by the Texan sitting at the table with me, I believe his name really is Leroy Streeter because he mentioned that his father had burned down a Negro church in Alabama. He took me to a room over a bar in Ciudad del Este. The Egyptian named Daoud was there.”

“It’s no skin off my nose if you don’t want sex,” Lucia said. “I’ve had enough sex for one day. My pussy and my mouth are both sore.”

“Daoud checked out my bona fides—I heard him go upstairs and make a phone call—my guess is he was getting his people to confirm that I’d been treated in a Trieste clinic, that I’d written the book I said I wrote. I must have passed the initial muster because he sent me back here and told me to hang out with Leroy until I was contacted again, which is what I’m doing now.”

“The reason we play the same record all the time,” Lucia whispered, her tongue flicking inside his ear, “is because ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’ is the opposite of our lives down here. Except for Lucia, all we do is worry about not being happy.”

“With any luck, the next step is for me to be taken to meet the Saudi.”

“The girls who work here,” Lucia said, “use abortions as birth control. If you ever come back again, it will be appreciated if you would bring us a carton of condoms.”

“Leroy told me why they’re shopping around for ammonium nitrate,” Lincoln went on. “I don’t know if he’s bragging or inventing, but he says he plans to fill a moving van with explosives and blow it up in the middle of Wall Street.” He let one of his palms slip down to her tight toreador pants and the swell of a buttock. “What will you do when all this is over?”

Lucia dropped one of her hands to reach under the back of Lincoln’s shirt. “All this will never be over,” she breathed.

Her answer startled Lincoln; that was what the Alawite prostitute Djamillah had told Dante Pippen as he was leaving the room over the bar in Beirut a legend ago. “It will end one day,” Lincoln promised her. “Where will you go? What will you do?”