Betrayal (6 page)

The waiter left. Tara sipped her water. “I said I didn’t want to fight, but we’re allowed to talk if you want. If we don’t, it might get to be a long night.”

“I’ve been trying to avoid sensitive subjects.”

“Okay, but you haven’t said two words since my apartment.”

“That’s because everything I thought of seemed risky.”

“Like what?”

Nolan hesitated, came out with it. “Like how lovely you look. See? I’ve offended you already.”

“I’m not offended.”

“I think you are. You frowned.”

“I did?”

“Definitely.”

“I didn’t mean to frown. I’m not offended. It wasn’t an offended frown. I’m even flattered. Thank you.” She scratched at the napkin next to her plate. “I’m just not very comfortable with compliments, I suppose. Plus, I’m a little nervous. This might have been a mistake.”

“What?”

“You and me. Going out for dinner. It just sounded so good to go out and…” Sighing, she killed a moment with another sip of water. “I don’t want to give you the wrong impression.”

“About what?”

“About if this is a date. Like a boy/girl date.”

“Okay, I’ll try not to get the wrong impression. What would be the right one?”

“That it’s just dinner. Two people out at a restaurant together.”

He smiled across at her. “As opposed to what? A romantic dinner?”

“I guess. I wasn’t thinking this was going to be a romantic dinner. That’s probably why I frowned.”

“Back to that, huh? You frowned because I said you were lovely, which means I’m romantically interested.”

“Something like that, I suppose.”

The waiter arrived with their drinks, and Nolan waited until he’d moved out of earshot, then sipped at his martini and picked up where they’d left off. “Okay,” he said, “I promise I’m trying not to be romantically interested. You’re the girlfriend of a pal of mine, so that would be awkward, except you said that you’re done with him.”

“I think.”

“Ah. A change in the story.”

“No, not really. I just wasn’t thinking that I was going to go out with anybody else so soon. I mean on a date.”

“I’ve got an idea. How about we don’t call this a date or anything else? Just let it be what it is. Do you have to decide that right away?”

“Maybe not. I just don’t want to send you any mixed signals. I’m not really with Evan anymore, but I’m…”

“You still care about him.”

She raised her shoulders. “I don’t know. Not answering his letters is a decision. Not having feelings about him isn’t something you just decide. I can’t say I’m there yet. And now here we are, you and me. You asked me out and I said yes. I don’t know why I did that.”

“You were hungry?”

“We could have gone to McDonald’s. I didn’t have to get dressed up. This feels…different.”

“Than McDonald’s? I’d hope so.” Nolan leaned in across the table, caught and held her gaze. “Look, Tara, it’s not that complicated. I don’t know you, and the only two things I know
about
you are, one, that we probably disagree about the military, which we’re not allowed to talk about. And two, you’re very pretty. That’s just an observation, and risky because you might think I was coming on to you, which would put this more in the line of a date, I admit. So let’s get that off the table right now.” He straightened back up. “This is not a date. I’m way too old, and what are you, twenty-two?”

“Try twenty-six.”

“Well, I’m thirty-eight, that’s too much right there. I could be your father.”

Around a small smile, she sipped wine. “Only if you were a very precocious eleven-year-old.”

“I was,” he said, and held out his stem glass. “Here’s to precocious children.”

She stopped, her glass halfway to his. “I don’t know if I can drink to that. I teach eleven-year-olds. If they were any more precocious, we’d need bars on the windows.”

Nolan kept his glass where it was. “All right,” he said, “here’s to peace, then. Is peace okay to drink to?”

She clinked his glass. “Peace is good,” she said. “Peace would be very good.”

N
OLAN PULLED INTO A SPACE
in the parking lot by her apartment. He killed the engine and his lights and reached for his door handle.

“You don’t have to get out,” she said.

“No, I do. A gentleman walks a woman to her door on a dark night.”

“That’s all right. I’ll be fine.”

He sat back in his seat, then turned to look at her. “You’re trying to avoid that awkward here-we-are-at-the-door moment. Understood. You don’t have to ask me in for a nightcap. I won’t try to kiss you good-night. Even if I am finding you marginally more attractive than before we’d had such a good time. That was a great meal.”

“It was.” But she spoke without much enthusiasm. Her hands clasped in her lap, she sat facing forward, stiff and unyielding.

“What is it?” he asked. “Are you all right?”

She exhaled. “Do you still have Evan’s letter?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She didn’t move. “I think I should read it. I should read the other ones.”

“All right. It’s in the glovebox, right in front of you. Help yourself.” He opened the car door and stepped out. The night smells of gardenia, jasmine, magnolia—he’d forgotten how beautiful it could be here in California in the summertime. Walking around the car, he opened the passenger door.

Tara sat still another second, then opened the glove compartment, picked out the envelope, swung her legs, and got out. She said, “Really, Ron, I’m okay. That’s my place, right up there, you can see it from here.”

“Yes, you can, but it’s against my religion to let you walk up there alone.”

She sighed. “Okay.”

“And no funny stuff,” he said. “From you, I mean.”

Amused in spite of herself, she looked up at him and shook her head. “I’ll try to keep myself under control.” Holding up the letter so he could see she had it, she turned and he fell in beside her—across the parking lot, up the outside stairs. Unlocking her door, she pushed it open and turned on the inside light. “Safe,” she said. “Thank you.”

“You’re very welcome.” He executed a small bow. “I had a great time,” he said. “You sleep tight.”

S
ATURDAY HE TOOK HER
up to San Francisco. This one was a nondate, he told her, because it was in the daytime and a real date by definition had to be at night. He picked her up at ten-thirty in the morning and with the top down on his Corvette, they took Highway 280 up to the city, the beautiful green back way, Crystal Springs reservoir on their left, and then, farther on, the great expanse of the glittering Bay down to their right.

She didn’t know the city as well as he did. She’d told him that at dinner, and he’d used it as his excuse to ask her out again: She couldn’t live as close as she did to one of the world’s great cities and not know very much about it. It was morally wrong.

So they hit the Palace of the Legion of Honor, then swung back through Golden Gate Park, stopping for tea at the Japanese Tea Garden after an hour inside the De Young Museum. The fine August weather was holding up, and parking at Ghirardelli Square, they walked back up Polk Street and ate baguettes and pâté and drank red wine at one of the outdoor tables of a French bistro. Taking a walk afterward, idly sightseeing, they essayed the descent of Lombard, the “crookedest street in the world”—although it wasn’t in fact even the crookedest street in the city, Nolan told her. That distinction belonged to Vermont Street down in Potrero Hill. Nevertheless, Lombard was crooked and steep enough, and he told her that she might want to put her hand on his arm for balance, and she did.

In North Beach, at Caffe Trieste, Nolan brought their cappuccinos over and put them down on the tiny table in front of her. “Okay,” he said, “risky-question time again.”

This time, more comfortable with him by now, she smiled and said, “Uh-oh.”

“Think you can handle it?”

“You never know, but I’ll try.”

“Evan’s letters.”

“What about them?”

“Have you read them?”

She looked down at her coffee, lifted the cup and took a sip, then put it down carefully. “Why don’t you just tell me I’m pretty again and we’ll run with that instead?”

“Okay. You’re pretty again. After that ugly time you had back there for a while.”

“Yeah, that was terrible.” But the gag wasn’t working. Her mouth went tight and she closed her eyes, sighing, then opened them and looked him full in the face. “Not yet. I tried starting to read them the other night, but I’m still too emotional about him. I haven’t changed my mind about what he’s doing, so there’s really nothing he can say…”

Nolan took a long moment before he sipped his coffee, another one before he spoke. “You don’t see anything noble or glorious or even good in the warrior, do you?”

She briefly met his eyes. “The
warrior
,” she said in a derisive tone.

“The warrior, that’s right.”

She shook her head. “Evan’s not a warrior, Ron. Evan’s a simple soldier, a grunt who’s taking orders from men he doesn’t respect, fighting in a country that doesn’t want us there, risking his life for a cause he doesn’t believe in. I have a hard time with words like
noble
and
glorious
and
good
coming into that equation when I keep seeing waste and stupidity and ignorance.”

“Okay,” Nolan said. “We could maybe get in a good fight about this particular war. But that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the philosophical concept of the warrior.”

Her face was still set in stone. “I never think about the warrior, Ron. War is what’s wrong with the world, and always has been.”

Again, Nolan let a silence accumulate. “With all respect, Tara,” he said quietly, “you owe it to yourself to think about this.”

“To myself?”

“If you’re dumping the guy you’re in love with over it, then yes. To yourself.”

“I’ve told you, I don’t know if I’m in love with him anymore.”

“Because he went to fight?”

She slowly turned her coffee cup around. “I told him we could go to Canada, or anywhere else.”

“And what happens when Canada or wherever feels threatened and needs soldiers?”

“But that’s the point, Ron. There was no threat. Iraq was no threat. It was preemptive, like Germany invading Poland. America doesn’t do that, that’s the point. There are no WMDs, you wait and see. The whole thing’s a sham. It’s about oil profits and that’s all. Halliburton and those people. Can’t you see that?”

“Defense contractors, you mean?”

“Yes. Defense contractors. Big business. Cheney and his buddies.”

“Well, of course I see what you’re saying, but I’m in a little bit of a bind here, because a defense contractor is who I work for. But from my perspective, we’re the guys who are protecting the Army and the civilian admin guys over there. We’re the ones feeding our troops, moving water and supplies, doing good work, saving lives, trying to rebuild the country.”

“That we destroyed in the first place.”

Nolan took a breath. “Look, Tara, war may be hell but that doesn’t mean everybody involved in it is evil. I’ve seen evil, and believe me, it’s a whole different animal than what you’re thinking of. So let’s not talk about this war. I grant you it’s got some issues. Let’s talk about the warrior.”

“The warrior, the warrior. I don’t want the warrior in my life, that’s all. I don’t want the warrior in the world.”

“Ah, but there’s the crux of it. Of course it would be wonderful if there didn’t need to be warriors. Just like it would be great if there were no evil in the world. But here’s the thing—there is evil. And without warriors, evil would triumph.”

“How ’bout this, Ron: Without warriors, evil couldn’t attack.”

“So it’s chicken and egg, is that it? Which came first? No”—he put his hand on hers, took it away as though it burned him—“listen. My point is this: There is always going to be evil and, yes, it will attract evil warriors. You buy that so far?”

She managed a small nod.

“Okay,” he went on. “So evil and its minions are a given, right? Right. Come on, you admit that. You’ve just admitted it. And, P.S., it’s true.”

She hesitated, then said, “Okay. Yes. So?”

“So once evil’s on the march, what’s going to stop it except a greater force for good?”

She sat back and folded her arms. “The greater force doesn’t always have to be physical. It can be spiritual. Look at Gandhi, or Martin Luther King. Fighting should be a last resort. I think a lot of so-called warriors are really warmongers picking fights to justify their own existence.”

“Sometimes they are, yeah. And Gandhi and King, great men, both of them, no question. And both assassinated, I might point out. And neither used their nonviolence in an actual war. Okay, they fought evil, but it wasn’t on the march. It wasn’t to the warrior stage yet. But even so, for every King or Gandhi, you’ve got a Neville Chamberlain or somebody who doesn’t want to fight. It’s not till you get yourself a warrior—like, say, Churchill—that you really can stop active evil. You think Hitler would have stopped by himself? Ever? Or Saddam Hussein, for that matter?”

“We did stop him, Hussein,” she said. “He wasn’t a threat.”

Nolan let his shoulders relax. His face took on a peaceful neutrality. His voice went soft. “Tara, please, you’ve got it backward. If he wasn’t a threat, it was because we did already stop him once. Our warriors stopped him in Kuwait. That’s the only thing he understood.”

Tara was twirling her cup around in its saucer, biting on her lower lip. Eventually she raised her eyes. “I don’t like to think about this, Ron. About evil’s place in the world.”

He kept his voice low, met her eyes, again put his hand over hers and this time left it there. “I don’t blame you, Tara. Nobody likes to think about it. And some places, like here in the U.S., and on a gorgeous afternoon in this great city, it can seem so far away as to be nonexistent. Thank God. I mean, thank God there are islands where the beast is kept mostly at bay. It’s in its cage. But the thing to remember is that somebody, sometime, had to put the beast in there, and has to keep it there. And that’s why we need—we all need, the world needs—warriors. How did you feel about Evan being a cop?”

Her frown deepened, her head moving from side to side. “I don’t think I was exactly thrilled, but that was different.”

“How?”

She worried her lip for another moment. “Soldiers, their job is to kill. Cops, they mostly protect.”

“And sometimes to protect, don’t they have to kill?”

“But it’s not the main job.”

“Could that be because individual bad guys don’t need an army to defeat them?” He took his hand away from hers and sat up straighter, lifted his cup to his mouth, put it back down. Looking at her, he saw that her eyes had gone glassy and tears hung in their corners. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to ruin your day and make you cry. We can stop talking about this.”

One tear fell, leaving its streak on her face. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. It’s so hard.”

“It is,” he said. “I know.”

“I’m trying to do the right thing.”

“I can see that.”

“I should at least read his letters.”

“That might be nice.”

“But I’m still…” She stopped, looked at him, shook her head again. “I don’t have any answers. I don’t know what I should do.”

“You don’t have to decide anything today. How’s that?”

She gave him a grateful smile. “Better.”

“Okay, then,” he said. “I think that’s about enough philosophy for one day. Why don’t we blow this pop stand?”

O
NE OF THE LANDMARKS
of old San Francisco was Trader Vic’s, the restaurant where the mai tai was purportedly invented and a favorite hangout for the famous columnist Herb Caen and his pals. The original Vic’s had gone out of business decades ago, but a couple of years back, they’d opened a new one near City Hall. It had a great buzz and was the same kind of place—a Pacific-island-themed destination spot serving enormous “pu-pu” platters of vaguely Asian appetizers that could be washed down with mai tais or any other number of generous rum drinks, many of them served for two out of hollowed coconut shells.

Nolan and Tara had ordered one of these when they sat down and then had another with their dinner. Their relaxed sightseeing and later the intense conversations had drawn them closer somehow and blurred the distinction between date and nondate, and by the time the waiter cleared the dinner trays and left them the check, Nolan was beginning to let himself consider the possibility that this incredible woman might like something in him after all. Clearly, Tara had an ambiguous commitment, at best, to Evan Scholler, and she seemed to be enjoying his company—laughing, teasing, drinking. Not quite outright flirting, certainly not coming on to him overtly, but giving him a lot of her time and attention, her foot nowhere near the brakes. His personal code of honor regarding a fellow warrior wouldn’t permit him to pursue her if she claimed any sort of allegiance to Evan, but she’d rather definitively avoided that, and if she responded to one of his overtures later, then that would be a clear answer in itself.

Nolan had known that they had valet parking at Trader Vic’s, but as a general rule he wasn’t too comfortable letting valet attendants get behind the wheel of his Corvette. So, keeping his eyes open, a few blocks before they’d reached the restaurant, he had spied a miraculous section of free curb and he’d pulled into it without much thought. It had still been warm, with a certain softness to the dusk light, and walking a few extra blocks with Tara had seemed both natural and appealing.

Now, outside, it had grown dark. In typical San Francisco summer fashion, the temperature had dropped twenty degrees in the past two hours and a chill, biting wind off the Pacific was scouring the dust off the streets and making the very air gritty. They were on Golden Gate Avenue, an east-west street that funneled the blow and intensified the unpleasantness.

Tara said, “How’d it get this nasty this fast?”

“The city got the patent on this weather back in the Forty-Niner days. It was supposed to keep out the riffraff. I don’t think it’s worked too well, but they’ve kept it up. Why don’t you go back inside and I’ll get the car and come back for you?”

“We don’t have to do that. It’s not that far. I can take it.”

“You’re not too cold?” Tara was wearing sandals and shorts and a T-shirt with the midriff showing—California summer gear. Now ridiculously inappropriate.

But she just laughed. “It’s only a few blocks. It’s invigorating, don’t you think?”

Nolan, in civilian shoes, khaki-colored Dockers, and a Tommy Bahama silk shirt, nodded and said, “Invigorating. Good word. You sure?”

“Let’s go.”

At the first corner they hit, Polk Street, they stopped at the curb for the light. He noticed that her teeth were beginning to chatter. “It’s closer going back to Trader Vic’s than it is to the car. You’re sure you don’t want to do that?”

“You think I’m that much of a wimp?”

“I never said that. But you do seem cold.”

“I’ll be fine. Promise.”

“Okay, then.” He put his arm around her. “This is for warmth only,” he told her. “Don’t get any ideas.”

Perhaps a little tipsy, she folded her arms across her chest and leaned slightly into him. “Warmth is good,” she said, then added, “Come on, light, come on.”

But just then, before the light changed, a break in the traffic opened up, and taking her hand, he squeezed it.
“¡Vámonos!”
And they darted out into the street. In the next block, and the one after that, the streetlights weren’t working. Even though they were only a few blocks from City Hall, Nolan realized that they were entering the Tenderloin District, one of the city’s worst neighborhoods, where services tended to need upkeep. They walked quickly, still holding hands, their footfalls echoing, and, at the next crosswalk—Larkin—had to stop again for traffic and the light. Behind them, a prostitute in a black minidress and fishnet top stepped out from the lee of a building. “Are you two looking to party?” From the voice, Nolan realized that the woman was a man. “I’ve got a place right here behind us.”