Page 168 of Antihero

Devine pressed his hands to the polished mahogany bar on either side of the resting shaker. He jerked his head to one side, cracking his neck. “I’ve noticed lately that my aches, my dysregulation, they feel more pronounced. Muscles, joints. Up here.” With one hand, he tapped his forehead. “I can see now a time when my usefulness will be diminished. And I am so useful.” He said it without arrogance. It was merely a fact. “There is so much more work to be done.”

“Always,” Evan said.

“I can’t afford to burn out.”

“No.”

“You helped me see that. You were…” Devine’s eyes searched the soaring ceiling. “Well, I don’t know what to say.”

“That,” Evan said, “is the greatest accomplishment of my life.”

Devine laughed. “I don’t know how you did it. How you got me to … I don’t know.”

“I thought about everything I would do to damage you,” Evan said, “and then I did the opposite.”

Devine’s mouth puckered downward, a thoughtful frown. Then he fitted the top to the tumbler and hoisted it beside his ear. He shook and shook and shook and then shook some more. From a freezer drawer, he removed a stainless-steel martini glass. The vodka poured syrupy, cloudy from the workout. Ice crystals pocked the surface, unique as snowflakes, augmenting the subtle froth.

With a gleaming silver cocktail pick, Devine skewered a single Spanish Queen olive, dunked it once into the vodka, and set it on a tiny square plate. He slid glass and plate to Evan.

Evan’s favorite drink. Distilled fourteen times, filtered through birch coal and then quartz, Kauffman’s was the world’s first vintage vodka, made from the wheat harvest of a single year.

He sipped.

It was perfection.

His eyes were closed. He kept them closed. He could still sense it, the single sip, the heat on his palate, the glow down his throat, in his stomach, that pure-as-the-driven-snow finish.

He set the drink down. One sip was all he required.

He offered his hand across the bar.

“I’m Evan,” he said.

Luke took it. “Pleasure.”

They shook.

Evan inched the barstool out and stood. He had a long flight ahead of him yet.

He withdrew the black box from his pocket, set it on the bar before Devine, and walked out.

Devine stood for a moment, the once-sipped martini before him. He stared at the calligraphy on the giant piece of art on the facing wall: YOUR PAIN IS THE BREAKING OF THE SHELL THAT ENCLOSES YOUR UNDERSTANDING. There was a faint smudge mark on the lip of the martini glass where the Nowhere Man had sipped.

He watched it evaporate.

For a moment, he wondered if Mr. Nowhere had ever been here at all.

The black box chimed and then spoke in Rawlings’s voice: “Mr. Nowhere?”

“No,” Luke said, “me again.”

A half second of surprise, but Rawlings was one to recover his composure quickly. “Sorry to bother you, sir, but there’s a problem that has come to a head. North Korea.”

Devine looked at the little black box. He did not touch the button to reply.

“I don’t want it,” he said, to the empty barstools, to the rows of bottles, to the watercolored poet looking down from the enormous framed painting. “I don’t. Want it.”

He closed his eyes.