Body Surfing

suspicions, a young man, little more than a boy really, who wore his wispy mustache with the pride of someone only recently able to grow facial hair. He couldn’t have been more than eighteen or twenty. His dusty gray business suit was too small for his long legs, but he wore it as he did his mustache, with an air of adolescent panache. More to the point, he seemed to be checking Ileana out. She couldn’t be sure because of the pair of knock-off Ray-Bans that covered his eyes, despite the dimness of the smoky room.
    Beside her, Dumas sighed heavily. “What I wouldn’t give for a nice glass of Pernod.”
    Ileana ignored her companion. She stared into the reflective black lenses and made a silent offer.
    “A chair at a cafe in Montparnasse. Paris, you know, in the springtime…”
    The boy bit. He took his glasses off and glanced at her once, then quickly looked away. But the glance was all Ileana needed. The adolescent shyness, the nervousness of a john. The poor boy seemed to think the brazen Western woman in her revealing (if not exactly feminine) attire was for sale.
    Ileana nearly jumped at the sound of her own sigh of relief. Calm down, she told herself, or you’ll be useless when Soma really does show. Easing onto her stool, she turned and gave her attention to Dumas.
    “Paris.” She forced a laugh. “You would settle for the Seine when you have the Nile—the three Niles—at your disposal?”
    “It’s true, the Seine is a trickle from a rusty tap compared to the Father of All Rivers. But the liquor—” Dumas held up his glass “—makes up for the lack of scenery.”
    “I would have thought your work had inured you to the need for such creature comforts.”
    Dumas laughed mirthlessly. “I do not think anyone ever becomes inured, as you say, to such…things.” His English was good, but Ileana had to admit it was hard to come up with synonyms for what they’d seen in Darfur. “Such…”
    “Atrocities?”
    Dumas’s expression wasn’t so much unsympathetic as resigned. “The brutality of war is old news, no? Especially this kind of ethnic war?”
    “I’m Croatian,” Ileana murmured. “I know.”
    “Ah!” Dumas didn’t heed the warning in her voice. “I have been wondering about your accent for the past two weeks.” He smiled a little too eagerly. “I did two years in Bosnia and Herzegovina with Médecins Sans Frontières . Doctors Without Borders. Ninety-three and ’94. Believe me, I understand.”
    Ileana nodded, but doubted that even someone who’d pulled bullets from flesh and sewn up limbs ravaged by shrapnel could understand what she’d endured. She poured two more shots. Alcohol offered its own kind of understanding, and she touched Dumas’s glass with hers and swilled the fiery liquid as though it were a toast to the fallen.
    Dumas shuddered as the whiskey went down. “Are you sure you’re not Russian?” he said when he could talk again. “You drink like a professional.”
    “Self-discipline.” Ileana smiled. “Self…possession,” she added, but so low the last word was inaudible.

2
    C aitlin Reese’s parents had been planning their twenty-fifth anniversary for the past six months. They’d booked a suite at the Waldorf-Astoria for the weekend—where, unbeknownst to their daughter, they were entertaining a fifty-seven-year-old Russian and his nineteen-year-old girlfriend, who referred to themselves in certain online forums as “The Master and Margarita”—leaving Caitlin to throw the blow-out party of the year. Almost everyone in the senior class at Dearborn Academy was crowded into the Reeses’ prim, two-story Shaker and neatly manicured backyard. There were kids playing quarters and spin the bottle, boys passed out on couches, a claque of girls gathered around the keg and snickering each time someone worked the pump too vigorously and ended up with a cup full of head. The usual couples were pressed into corners or trashing the flowerbeds or wrapped in the pile of jackets on Caitlin’s parents’ California king, although the clear award for Most Original Place to Do It had to go to Stan “the Mandible” Sabory and Lipless Leslie Barton, who had folded themselves into Caitlin’s little sister’s Preschool Playhouse and rocked it so hard that it fell over—a fact that, judging from the continued rocking, neither of them noticed.
    Jasper Van Arsdale tried to slip into the party surreptitiously, but his best friend found him almost immediately (at