Rufus had been expecting her to give him a medal or a letter of commendation. Blow job hadn’t entered his mind. He got tunnel vision and felt his heart pounding in a way that hadn’t happened since he had been on the runway at Waco, closing in on Snout and unslinging his Kalashnikov. He now wished that he had taken an extra minute to put on clean underwear, since his penis was
getting bigger and rubbing against the rugged mil-spec stitching. “You have a problem with cargo shorts?” he asked, stalling for time.
“Only when they are in the way. I see their practicality.”
“Well, I just wouldn’t feel right about the first option you mentioned. It doesn’t seem decent given your dignity and so on. I would feel bad.”
“It was just an example.” Saskia’s phone buzzed and her eyes flicked to it. “My daughter,” she said, “demanding a progress report.”
“On the conversation you and I are having right now!?”
“On my romantic life in general. She worries about my solitude and wonders if something similar is in her future.”
Saskia’s face then fell as she perhaps realized that the remark was double-edged. Rufus too was solitary. But he had no Lotte to look after him. Just occasional checkins from Mary Boskey.
“What about that Michael character?”
“You mean Michiel?”
“Yeah. I saw you checking him out.”
“Did it make you jealous, Rufus?” she asked hopefully.
“Oh, I never dared have any such thoughts. There’s a history here, in Texas and in the South—”
“I know.”
“One of the worst lynchings was actually in Waco.”
“I shouldn’t have gone there. You asked about Michiel. He is obviously attractive. The sort of man that the tabloids would set me up with, if they had the power. But there isn’t the connection.” She pointed back and forth between herself and Rufus.
“Of what happened on the runway, you mean?”
“Partly that. But . . . both of us suffered losses some time ago and have been alone since then. That’s really what I meant.” Saskia’s phone buzzed again. With exaggerated annoyance she picked it up and held down the button that shut it off.
Rufus made himself a little more comfortable by plucking at his shorts and leaning forward, elbows on knees.
“It has been a long time for me,” he said. “I’m worried I forgot where everything goes.”
“We can google it.”
“You think Google will come up with anything?”
They both laughed.
“I ain’t coming over there because of the history I alluded to,” Rufus said. He looked at the chair he’d been sitting on. It was narrow, hard, old-fashioned Antiques Roadshow stuff. He eased down out of it and sat on the carpet, back against the wall. “Plenty of room here now, though, if you are feeling disposed to come on over my way.”
Saskia glanced at the door （still locked） and the window （curtain still drawn）， then padded over and sat down next to him, very close. She put her head on his shoulder. This felt so good he was stunned for a few moments. Then he summoned the presence of mind to put his arm around her.
“You have beautiful arms,” she said.
“Push-ups,” he explained. “Got no time for gyms. Look now, in case something happens and we get carried away, I gotta ask . . . birth control?”
“Taken care of. We have socialized medicine.”
“These cargo shorts contain many things,” he said, “but it’s been a long time since I packed a . . .”
She reached into the pocket of her bathrobe and produced a condom in its little foil packet. “Any particular size?” she asked.
“That’ll do.”
Her thigh came up over his, making contact along the way with two different knives, phone, notebook, spare magazine, a couple of Sharpies, and other sundries.
“Ouch. Those really do have to come off,” she announced.
ROHTANG
While arguably the areas being disputed between China and India were far from the Punjab and belonged to distant provinces, the truth was quite different once you started to think about the Five Rivers of the Punjab and their significance. For all five of them, as well as the Indus into which they all eventually flowed, originated in the Himalayas. Once you had gained control over a river’s headwaters, you could put a dam there. As soon as you did that, you could control its flow, and thereby control the lives of all who lived downstream of it.
Sorting out the details of where to go and how to get there had been a somewhat bewildering process because of the convolutions and forkings of the river valleys in the mountains. But once Laks had uploaded the geography into his head, the place that leapt out as being of greatest interest was where the Chenab and the Beas originated within just a few kilometers of each other on opposite flanks of a high spine of rock spanned by a nightmare of switchbacks called the Rohtang Pass. Northeast of there was the even higher region of Ladakh, indistinctly bounded by the Line of Actual Control.