As I ate my meager lunch at the table, I thought of Sushmita, as I had countless times since I’d last seen her. Instead of concentrating on our abrupt, silent parting, I recalled the pleasanter times we’d spent together. I tried to catalogue them all, the time, place, the details … Pathetic, I knew, but I did it all the same, starting with the last time we’d slept together and working backwards to the first. I can’t say the first was the best, because they were all sublime, but it was perhaps the most memorable. Despite all my hopes for such an outcome, I’d been surprised when she’d invited me to put down my bag in her bedroom in Lonavala. And then she’d thrown herself at me in a warm, passionate embrace and kiss.

God, the anticipation had nearly driven me to tear her clothes off, but she did that herself. And I did the same with mine, turning my pants inside out in my haste. I threw them to the floor and fell onto the bed with Sushmita.

Yet, once our bodies were finally together, our passion was patient, not hurried or frenzied. Not like our disrobing had been. Not like when I heard my belt strike the floor so hard once I’d finally freed my last foot from the twisted leg of my pants and hurled them to the stone. I closed my eyes and conjured the scene in my mind.

Funny how you remember little things sometimes. Things that aren’t important in the larger picture. Until they are.

I hadn’t been wearing a belt by the time we got to the bungalow in Lonavala. It was locked in the trunk of Sushmita’s Mercedes.

CHAPTER FIFTY

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 1975, 7:06 P.M.

We pulled into the station a little after seven. The rain fell steadily, not a downpour but enough to make me wish I had a car. Sticking to old habits, I told the taxi driver to drop me at the hotel a kilometer or so from Sushmita’s bungalow. Despite my determination to leave and never come back, I followed the instructions she’d insisted on. No, I wasn’t ever coming back again. But …

It was already dark as I began the slog through the rain and mud. I couldn’t deny, as I made my way, that I wished that she’d be there. Impossible, of course. She was somewhere in England, safe and removed from the responsibility of the attempt on my life, not to mention the heart she’d trampled along the way. My butterflies returned. The ones I’d felt as a kid before a game. The same ones that always disappeared as soon as the umpire cried, “Play ball.”

But there was no game in my future. I was done.