“Oh,” she demurs, “that’s okay ...”
“Hey, you turned me down as a client, but that doesn’t mean you have to turn down my coffee.” He flicks on the kitchen light, raises an espresso pot in one hand. “Let me make it easy. I’m making coffee. Do you want one?”
Her pause is only brief enough to preserve her dignity. “Yes. Thank you.”
“Great. Hold on.”
Nomi watches him go through the process of filling the funnel part with dark, aromatic grounds, adding water, screwing the sections back together. “You even make coffee the Italian way. Have you considered that you might actuallybeItalian?”
He rinses his own mug, gets out another one. “I don’t think so. I woke up speaking English, with this accent. And there’s my American dental work. Cream?”
He warms half-and-half on the stove. When they both have their mugs back at the table, he finally lights his cigarette, which she suspects he’s been wanting to do for nearly an hour. “This guy with the Italian charge sheet, he’s someone you’re tracking?”
“Something like that.” The espresso is rich and delicious; it’s a long way from her budget Mr. Coffee brew.
“But he’s involved with some case you’re working on. Is this for Solange’s case?”
“It’s for a client,” she concedes. But he’s been poring over the fax-copy information with her; she can give some ground. “Solange is my only client right now, but the case is ... challenging.”
“So Lamonte is connected to Solange ...” Noone’s eyes are alert, thoughtful; then they turn sharp. “You should be careful with this guy. He appears to be someone who doesn’t play nice.”
“Oh, he definitely doesn’t play nice.” As she’s already well aware; she’s most concerned about Lamonte’s pandering charge. But best to put that aside right now. Nomi sips her coffee and decides it doesn’t hurt to be a little curious. “So. Guatemala.”
“Yes.”
“Amnesia.”
“Yes.” He gets up to fetch a glass ashtray from the windowsill, returns. “I don’t quite know why you’re hung up on that word.”
“Never met anyone with amnesia before.” She tidies her notes and crosses one knee over the other. “You said you were pulled from the river.”
“Yeah. November, 1982.”
“What happened?”
He draws, exhales. “I mean, if you’re asking how I got in the river, I can’t tell you. A farmer found me on the riverbank. They took me to a village medical clinic.”
She cups her mug. “A village doctor treated your gunshot injury?”
“An Anglo-Mexican, Richard Flores.” Noone sips his coffee, focuses on the ashtray as he taps into it. “He’d trained in London.”
“What the hell is a London-trained doctor doing in the Guatemalan jungle?”
“He was a Marxist.” Noone sits back, watches his cigarette burn. “He got booted from the medical establishment in London, ended up back in Mexico, then over the border. Guatemala has been in a state of civil war for a long time, he’d done a lot of battlefield medicine.He patched me up, and I was in recovery for over a year. I still get headaches, and I sometimes have serious migraines, as well as vision problems.”
His eyes dart away when he mentions the migraines. Something off there. Nomi’s own eyes narrow. “It’s amazing you’re still alive.”
“At least I got a cool scar,” he says brightly.
When he sets down his cigarette on the edge of the ashtray and parts the dark hair near his left temple, it takes a second to work out what she’s looking at. Then she realizes it’s a thick striation of white, like the vein of a mineral deposit on a cave wall, running over a dent in the bone as if someone once pressed their thumb into the wet clay of his skull. The scar tissue straggles back, dividing behind his ear into a lightning bolt that darts for his crown.
Nomi finds herself reduced to gasping. If there’s one thing she knows, it’s scars, and that is real; that is absolutely real. “Holy shit.”
“There’s still bullet pieces inside there somewhere.” He lets his hair fall back into place, recovers his cigarette. “I avoid metal detectors when I can.”
“Very funny.” She’s never seen anything like it before, and she’s still getting over it. “So when you woke up, you had no idea who you were.”
“Correct.”
