Room 618 had a king-sized bed, a window that would show a fair swath of the city by daylight, and a Persian carpet which didn’t look like anything near the money Kelly knew its equivalent would cost in the shop in the lobby.
There was also a small refrigerator in one corner.
Kelly set the attache case down on the writing desk and knelt beside the refrigerator. “Gimme the key,” he said, holding out his left hand behind him. When nothing slapped his palm, he turned and seated himself on one buttock on the edge of the desk.
Elaine stood with the thumb and index finger of either hand on the keys, the larger one for the door and the small one that unlocked the refrigerator which formed the room’s private bar. Her face was as blank as it would have been if construction workers had whistled at her from across a street.
“You’ve got no right to judge me, woman,” Kelly said. His right leg was flexed, and his hand gripped the raised knee in a pattern of tendons and veins. “No fucking right!” he shouted as if volume could release the pressure inside him or crack the marble calm of the woman who met his eyes.
“I have the job of judging you, Tom,” she said with no emphasis as she bent and handed the paired keys to him. “Shall I get a bucket of ice?”
“Naw, I’m not warm,” the veteran said, his throat clogged with residues of the emotion he hated himself for having let out. “Thanks.” He fitted the key into the lock and opened the little door. “I’m not warm, just thirsty. Anything for you?”
“Orange juice,” Elaine said as she rotated the three-dial combination of the attache case. “Grapefruit, something citrus.”
At least, and for a wonder, it wasn’t Perrier – which Kelly had always found to taste like water from a well contaminated with acetylene. And at least she did not stare at what Kelly brought out for himself, a minibottle of Jack Daniel’s and a can of Löwenbräu.
“There’s a really good Pilsener beer in Turkey,” he said as he twisted a chair so that he could see both the woman and the files that she was beginning to place on the desk. “I got to like it.” He twisted the cap off the bottle of whiskey, took a sip, and washed the liquor down with a swallow of beer.
When Elaine still said nothing, the veteran prodded, “You’ve got a dead Kurd and a dead alien. And you’ve got me, until I drink myself into a stupor, hey? So why don’t we get to it?”
“I don’t like self-destructive people,” the woman said as she set the emptied case to the floor and sat at the other chair by the desk. “I like it even less when an exceptionally able person I have to work with seems bent on destroying himself. But I don’t like it when an airline manages to lose my luggage, either, and I’ve learned to live with that.”
Kelly finished the whiskey, his eyes meeting the woman’s. “My work gets done,” he said, wishing that his tone did not sound so defensive.
“And it’ll continue to get done,” Elaine responded coolly, “until one day it doesn’t. Which may mean that people get dead, or worse. But since it’s like the weather, something that can’t be helped, then we don’t need to talk about it any more.”
She wasn’t particularly tall, Kelly thought, but she looked just as frail as her black linen jacket, through which light showed every time the fabric fluffed away from her body. He felt like a pit bull facing a chihuahua which was smart enough to be afraid, but wasn’t for all that about to back down.
He got up, carrying the can of beer, and walked toward the bathroom. “What is it you think I can do for you?” he called over his shoulder, the phrasing carefully ambiguous. He poured the rest of his beer down the sink and ran water into the aluminum can.
Elaine, still seated, twisted to face him when he returned from the bathroom. “Your personal contacts with the Kurds are more likely to get you information about what’s going on than the formal information nets are. The fact that we’ve heard so little about something so major proves that there’s a problem.”