After the waitress served them, Hook asked Liz about the incident yesterday.

“I haven’t been able to understand it,” he said. “What Douglas did. What he had Parnelli do. It doesn’t make sense. He could have killed me.”

Liz sipped at her coffee. “If you knew Jack better, you wouldn’t be so puzzled,” she said.

“You mean he often tries to kill people?”

“I mean he’s not what he seems, that’s all. He always appears to be in control, to be cool and stable. But he’s not. Actually he’s very unstable.”

“In what way?”

“He’s unpredictable, moody, impulsive. Like after he lost last year’s election, he went around cheering everybody else up. He took it like it was nothing. But a few weeks later he killed a neighbor’s dog that barked at him when he was riding a bike. He kicked it to death.”

Hook thought of himself in the water yesterday and a feeling of panic brushed lightly past him, like a cruising shark. “I thought that was Parnelli’s bag,” he said.

Liz shook her head. “He’s hotheaded all right. A brawler. But Jack’s worse. He’s sick. He needs barbiturates to sleep and amphetamine to get through the day. He was in the hospital twice last year for bleeding ulcers. He’s a mess.”

“And that’s the man you want to send to Congress.”

Behind her sunglasses Liz’s eyes remained level, calm. “I believe in the same things he does. Politically, I mean. And his votes would be out in the open. It wouldn’t be like putting him in charge of the FBI or something like that.”

“That you wouldn’t do.”

She looked down at her cup of coffee. “I wish you wouldn’t patronize me.”

Hook said nothing.

She smiled and shook her head. “Although I can imagine what you’re going through, trying to be calm and reasonable and patient. And all the while your body must be begging you to grab me by the scruff of the neck and drag me down to the courthouse and wring it out of me.”

“But that wouldn’t work, would it?”

“No. And neither will this.”

“This?”

“Waiting me out. Being nice.”

“Then you’ve got no reason to be alone today,” he concluded. “No reason to leave me.”

“You think not?”

“It follows.”

“Not for me.”

She said nothing for a while then, just sat there watching him eat, and he could see her pain even through the dark glasses.

“If there was only some way I could make you understand,” she said finally. “I don’t want it this way, believe me. I’d like nothing better than to be able to tell the truth, shout it for the whole world to hear. For Chris’s sake the same as yours. But I can’t.”

“Because of Douglas’s career.”

“I never said that.”

Hook had taken off his sunglasses, and now she did the same, as if to prove she was not ashamed either, had nothing to hide. “Maybe last night I didn’t hear you right,” he said.