Arkady finally tired himself out, presumably by smiling, eating, and drinking nonstop for four hours. One minute he was there, and the next he was gone. There was a curfew of sorts, but it had been relaxed. And Westerners were usually given a pass where Indians might have been rounded up. Or at least stopped and questioned. I figured Birgit and I would have to make a quick dash across the road to the President Hotel. Willy said it wouldn’t be a problem. Relax.

She didn’t seem ready to leave anyway. Engrossed in a long conversation with Willy, she might have been interviewing him for a television program. She hadn’t exchanged more than three words with me since we’d arrived. If I’d been the jealous type, Willy would have had a fat lip by then. Of course he might have felt the same way about me and my attentions to Sushmita.

It was just the four of us now, Willy, Birgit, Sushmita, and me. There were the two servants and a cook in the kitchen, but in India they didn’t really count. I was struggling to understand such attitudes toward other human beings. I wasn’t so idealistic to think that the help had to be treated like guests. Or friends. But they were people. And they were there. How could you ignore them? Yet they might as well have been part of the décor. Until you needed them to fetch you something.

“Now you’re sad,” said Sushmita in my ear so as not to disturb her lover and my stewardess in their tête-à-tête. Her breath whispered warm on my neck, provoking an intensely intimate shiver that ran down my spine.

I turned to face her, probably blushing. Practically nose to nose, we sat there in silence for a brief moment before I found an acceptable excuse to feed her.

“I was thinking about work.”

“Liar,” she said.

“No, really,” I lied again. “You see, there’s this man I interviewed about a bombing. The one that killed that CID policeman last year. I met him.”

“Are you a spy, Danny?” asked Birgit. Everyone laughed.

“No, seriously,” I answered, probably slurring my words a bit. “He’s some kind of revolutionary. Claimed he planted the bomb that killed that poor cop.”

“So why are you thinking about that now?” asked Sushmita. “In the middle of a pleasant evening?”

“Because I’ve had too much to drink. And because the story worries me. I took pictures of him.”

Willy remarked that it all sounded quite dangerous.

“He was wearing a mask,” I said. “To protect his identity.”

“Then you never saw him?” asked Birgit.

I frowned. “Well, about that … I was putting away my camera, and the guy stood up. The scarf dropped, and …”

“You snapped a pic,” said Sushmita. “Danny!”

“He never realized.”