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He couldn’t see it.
“What sort of happy ending are you hoping for?” he asked.
“In general, you mean, or…?”
“In the specific, I think. What are we to hope will become of this spy mission of yours?”
She shrugged. “It’s complicated.”
“I’d rather imagined so.”
“You’re English.”
“Hmm?”
“I just figured it out for sure. I thought you might be Australian.”
“Good lord.”
“So where are you from exactly?”
“Most recently, London. But I’ve lived here in New York for the better part of a year.”
“I’ve never been to London.”
“You should go. There’s nowhere else on earth like it for architecture, theater, for sheer history.”
He heard how he sounded, pompous as a butler in a tourism advert, and hated it—not least because he meant every word.
He loved London.
He missed London.
“I can imagine.” Brow furrowed, she reached behind her head with both hands, tugged, and her hat tipped onto the top of the pinball machine. She turned it upside down. “I mean, I can’t imagine, really, which is why I imagine it’s worth going. Because I’ve only seen London in movies and TV and books”—as she spoke, she plucked bobby pins from her hair and dropped them into her hat—“but I know enough to know it’s nothing like Wisconsin, where I’m from, and so I can’t imagine it. I could barely imagine New York.”
Her hair was a light brown. She uncoiled it, separating strands stuck to themselves by their own curling texture. There was a halo of fuzzing ringlets around her head, backlit by the pinball machine.
“This is your first visit?”
“Yeah, I just flew in this morning from Manitowoc. Well, from Milwaukee—then to Chicago, then to Newark, and then over on the train. Which is funny, since I ended up here.” She gestured at the walls around them.
“Funny how?”
“Because it’s a Wisconsin bar.” She pronounced the name of her home state with a nasal aah sound in the middle of it. “And I’m from Wisconsin? Like if you came here from London just so you could drink at a bar where everybody was British and there were Union Jacks and pictures of the queen and pots of tea everywhere.”
“That’s a fair description of the Imperial Club, actually.”
“Do you go there?”
“All the time.”
She smiled—a genuine smile, bright and amused. Her clear blue eyes came alive. “Sorry.”
“It’s quite all right. But tell me…” He put a palm down on the glass surface of the pinball machine and leaned closer. “…what brings you all the way from Wisconsin to New York City for the first time, to this bar, in the rain?”
What makes a woman fly hundreds or perhaps thousands of miles, don a disguise, hail a stranger, grab him by the lapels, and lick his teeth?
What’s got you scared? What’s made you sad?
