Mike hopes Bishop will show up but knows he won’t. He waits anyway, sitting across the street from the hotel at his café. He orders Coke after Coke. They come in tall, narrow glass bottles, different than in the U.S., and he tries to pace himself. As he watches for Bishop walking in or out of the hotel, he thinks about Christopher Dorr. Makes up stories, actually.

Maybe Dorr was a spy, had a cover as a journalist, but was actually working for the government, bugging hotel rooms, assassinating warlords, fucking cultural attachés. Shit like that. Or maybe he had become consumed by his own writing and couldn’t be bothered with the journalism anymore, rising at dawn every day, punching at a steel typewriter on some overgrown roof garden. Why not? His piece on the Wa was beyond journalism. Or maybe Dorr had finally realized he was a woman and was right now at a club in Patpong in high-heeled boots and purple makeup. Whatever. Mike would find his body, hot with bullets, in a bloodied bathroom and have to go after the killers. Maybe he had married a wealthy dope-dealer widow and spent his days watching animated movies on thick carpeting with his young stepchildren—and the hell with Analect and all the rest of it. All bullshit for sure.

Analect had said that he and Dorr and Mike’s father were like brothers once, but Mike’s father had never talked about it. Mike thinks about this. Why didn’t his father ever say anything? He had always spoken freely about Analect. Maybe there was an argument. Mike imagines the three of them drunk and arguing about nothing, like some of the popped-collar fools he goes to school with. The argument is so loud they can neither remember nor forgive it the next morning. The argument is about money or women or God or art or sports but really is about which of them is the best, because they all know that one of them is but they don’t know who yet.

Maybe none of it is important. Maybe they weren’t at all like brothers, and Analect just said they were. Or maybe brotherhood is completely gaseous, and theirs dissipated thirty years ago in the air behind jet planes and thrown wedding bouquets. Mike doesn’t know.

It gets to be eight o’clock and Mike has called Bishop’s cell phone and left another message, but there is still no sign of him. It is so hot, even in the breezy night, that Mike is sweating through his shirt. He knows that he will have to go to the bar by himself.