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“May I?” Perhaps an ironic request considering how they had just spent the past hour. But it seemed right.
“Yes.”
He lifted her tawny braid and studied the twined strands.
The symmetry, the perfect intervals between turns … they touched Hale on some visceral level and gave him unusual pleasure.
“Your mother, she teach you?”
“She wasn’t part of my life.”
“Then how?” Maybe her father. Why only a mother could teach her child to braid hair was a thought from an older era. But if the topic of her maternal superstructure was off-limits, then paternal might be as well. “If you’re okay with it,” he said.
“Of course. It was my mentor. A former nun. She delivered food in sub-Saharan Africa. The outpost kept getting hit by a warlord. He told her to order twice the food she was allotted by the charity running the place and give it to him. If she didn’t, he and his men would take girls from the village instead. He ended up taking more than half and some girls anyway. She prayed they would stop. When that didn’t work, she quit the church. The warlord didn’t survive till their next encounter. He was gunned down.”
“And how did she become your mentor?”
“I found myself in Africa too. I was there with someone.” A pause. “Circumstances changed. I needed work suddenly. One of the men she paid to deal with the warlords turned on her. I found myself in a position to remedy the situation.”
Hale too used such euphemisms in his work.
Remedy …
“It seems I had a talent.”
She was not inclined to elaborate on this aspect of her biography either. He sensed there was nothing in the tale that was troubling or too sensitive to share. It was more that the narrative was tedious to her and, therefore, to anyone else.
Their original topic, though, enlivened her: “Braids have ahistory. Archeologists found figurines and statues that’re more than twenty-five thousand years old. Africa and France. Asia too. I do a different one every few days. They could be this.”
It was a single strand.
“Or a fishtail, a five-stranded rope, a French, a waterfall. Some I make up as I go. In some cults—even today—women are required to wear them. Their husbands insist. A sign of subservience. I like the irony.”
“You can also pin it up quickly if you need to fight.”
Her expression said that she had done just that.
The strands ended in a blue ribbon.
She rolled toward him. Her breasts, compact, pressed into a crease. He mirrored her pose and his hand went to her shoulder, near the bullet ink. The muscle was solid, which he knew not from this touch, but from their fierce joining. Legs too. He supposed she ran. Was it an attempt to bleed away some tension, some concern, some fire within her? She presented calm, to the edge of blasé. He didn’t believe it.
He had examined her scars. Now she looked at his. With the trigger-calloused index finger she touched the raised skin over a bullet wound. Then a longer one. It had been created some years ago when an IED meant to kill him had not, though it had turned a Coca-Cola can into an improbable but efficient piece of shrapnel.
Touching the braid again.
He had not been with a woman in this way—without paying—for several years. He found it consuming. And for Charles Hale to be consumed was a rare thing. It could be dangerous.
She seemed aware suddenly of the ticking of a clock, a Royal Bonn porcelain, which sat nearby on a shelf. Her eyes were on it and swung slowly to him. “I’ve followed you. When Brad told me he’d gotten your message, I told him I wanted the job. I wanted to work with you.”
He made a gesture toward his face, his scalp. “Wasn’t exactly who you were expecting, though, was I?”
Her face tightened and she scoffed, meaning she had no interest in what he looked like. He recalled their first meeting, at the coffeehouse, she’d glanced at his face quickly, out of curiosity at the surgery, and then focused for the rest of their time together on his eyes.
“I’ve wondered. Why clocks?”
“When you build watches, boredom is not a possibility.”
“Ah, boredom.” A very faint tightening of her lips. She understood.
