Via Dolorosa(60)

“Spain pulled their troops, friend, because it was the thing to do,” Ben admonished. “Unlike this bully of a country, this U.S. of A., storming villages, picking on poor, helpless bastards, shooting up mosques with machine guns and bombs…”

“I wasn’t aware you had been over there fighting,” Nick said. “What outfit were you with?”

Ben sipped his drink, looked down at it as he set it on the table, then pretended to find interest in his cuticles. “I don’t have to be over there firsthand to know it takes a bunch of schoolyard bullies to blow up a mosque.”

“It is a bunch of cowards who hide in a mosque in the first place. And I’m not your friend.”

Those words paved the way for a simmering silence. Then, grinning like a magician about to perform his much-rehearsed closing trick, Leslie Hansen stood from behind the table and put a hand on Ben’s shoulder. A waft of cologne rose with him. “We’re just talking, champ. No need for anyone to get their feathers ruffled. Just talk. We’ll cool it, if it bothers you that much.”

“It bothers me that much,” he said.

“How many innocent people you kill over there, Nick?” Ben said.

“I may just kill one right here, tonight,” Nick said back. “Although his innocence is questionable.”

“Punch him in the nose,” Joseph called to Ben from behind the table. “Punch the son of a bitch in the nose, Ben. Teach him the two-step.”

“How many medals they give you for shooting Iraqi women in the back?” Ben said.

“Come on,” Hansen said, urging Ben up from his chair. Ben’s face was stone-cold sober, his eyes the most lucid eyes Nick had ever seen. At his friend’s behest, though somewhat reluctantly, Ben rose from his seat, finished his scotch, and ran his thumb across his lips. “You, too, Pyg,” Hansen called to Joseph, who stood with much more difficulty than his friend.

“Adios,” Isabella cooed, not looking at any of them.

“My apologies,” Hansen said, nodding at Nick, and ushering Ben past him and through the crowd. Joseph quickly followed. Turning to watch them leave, Nick did not look back at the table until he saw the three of them file neatly out the door

“Sit,” Isabella told him.

He did not sit.

Emma slipped into the booth and slid beside Isabella, put her head on the darker woman’s shoulder. A drunken smile threatened her lips.

“Go to the bathroom, Nick,” Emma said. “Just go. Give me thirty seconds to not see you right now. Please.”

To hell with all of this, he thought and went to the bathroom, washed his face and hands. There was a hot, smoldering coal in the pit of his gut. He’d wanted to hit that Ben. Even more, he’d wanted to hit that bastard Hansen. Ben had been shooting his mouth off all right and deserved to get clocked, but he was just speaking his mind. Hansen, on the other hand, had been a smug son of a bitch. There was nothing noble about Hansen.

When Nick returned to the table, he found the pinot gris almost gone. Isabella and Emma were laughing again, as if nothing had ever happened. Maybe nothing had. Was this all a dream? In unison, both women looked up at him and followed him with their eyes as he entered and sat across from them. In the brief time he’d been in the bathroom, he could see that the alcohol had lifted Emma to a different place; she looked flushed and only half there, while trying at the same time to be overtly alert to her surroundings. Her eyes continued to alternate between too wide to squinty.

“You don’t want to sit on this side of the table with us, Nicholas?” Isabella asked. “Do you not like us anymore? Or are you just sitting there to protect us in case those horrible beasts come back?”

“Man is a horrible beast,” Emma said.

Isabella cheered the comment. “Your wife is such a smart woman, Nicholas. Do you love her?”

He felt his eyes alternate between the two.

“Yes,” Isabella said. “Don’t answer that. I have a gun in my car outside, Nicholas. It’s in the compartment under the dashboard.”

“That’s nice,” he said.

“I don’t know what kind it is, as I’m not too familiar with guns, but I know that it shoots, and I would think that would be enough to know about a gun.”

“Jesus…”

“Would you like me to get it for you? Then you can go out into the street and shoot those three men. Boom-boom-boom. We can even swim to their boat and wait for them to come aboard, if you’d like. We can shoot them right on their boat then dump their bodies into the sound. No one will be the wiser.”

“We ordered another bottle,” Emma said. It was as though she hadn’t heard a word Isabella had just said.

“Of course, after time,” Isabella went on, “we’d probably begin to distrust each other, too. Murder, inherently, is not a group effort. And that can be very dangerous. I wouldn’t want to keep looking over my shoulder at you, Nicholas.”

“You’re crazy,” he told her.

The absinthe came. It was in a dark, narrow, suspicious bottle without labels. The proprietor brought it over to the table personally. From a tray he removed a slotted spoon, a small carafe of water, three rocks glasses, and a porcelain bowl filled with sugar cubes, and set these items down on the table beside the bottle of absinthe. The proprietor was an abbreviated, tar-faced black man with a bad complexion and eyelids swollen with chalazia. When he spoke to Isabella, he referred to her by her first name.