“Nobody else, babe,” he answered. The security door buzzed. He grabbed the latch and let himself in before the noise stopped.

As he climbed the stairs to the second floor, he suddenly wondered how the CIA guys had got into his building. It used the same kind of security setup as this one. Maybe they’d followed somebody else in. That happened. Or maybe they’d talked to the manager, whose apartment was right there. If they claimed to be cops or private eyes or whatever, odds were they’d have badges or papers to back it up. The stuff might not be legit, but it’d look legit. Jerry was sure of that.

He hurried down the walkway to the door with the tarnished bronze 264 on it at eye level. He was about to knock when the door opened. “Heard you coming,” Anna said, “so I baked a cake.”

“Cool,” Jerry said. He had to bend down to kiss her. She was only five two, a foot shorter than he was. She was blond, and carried ten more pounds than she wanted to. In Jerry’s biased opinion, she carried them goddamn well, too. He’d given up trying to persuade her of that. Better not to start fights you couldn’t win.

When he came up for air, the King of Siam was glowering at him from the hallway that led back to the bathroom and bedroom. Those blue eyes held more ancient evil than a cat had any business knowing.

“I swear that beast used to belong to Queen Berúthiel,” he said.

Anna poked him in the ribs. She had long, pointed nails. That wasn’t why he flinched, though; she’d found a ticklish spot. “So why did you want to come over tonight? Besides that, I mean?” She glanced toward the King of Siam and the bedroom beyond him.

He took a deep breath. This wasn’t going to be easy or fun. “Hon,” he said, “we need to push the wedding back a couple of months, maybe a little longer.”

She stiffened in his arms. Then he wasn’t holding her anymore. He didn’t know how he wasn’t, but he wasn’t. “And why do we need to do that?” she asked, her voice dripping liquid helium.

“Because out of the blue this afternoon I got an offer to go on the ocean-mining ship that came into Long Beach last fall, the Glomar Explorer. Remember?”

“Not really,” she said. He believed her; she paid more attention to people she cared about—and to that damn cat—than to the wider world.

“Anyway,” he went on, “it sails on June twentieth, and that’s firm. I really want to go.”