Free Once a Spy by Keith Thomson

lapel, imprinting it with something oily. “How about you go to your hotel now?”
    Fielding recoiled. “You had fish for dinner, didn’t you?”
    “That’s it, cabrón.” Blackbeard balled his free hand into a fist.
    “Now, now, sir, please,” Fielding said. “We can settle this without resorting to violence.”
    The second thug clucked his opinion that Fielding was chicken. The third called Fielding, “Maricón.” Fielding knew enough Spanish to understand it as an appraisal of his sexual bent.
    He told the group, “Recently I took a seminar called Emotional Balances, which, if you haven’t heard, is like anger management, except it’s conceived by accredited behavioral scientists. What we learned is that people feel better when they talk about their feelings. It eases the burden of facing our fears and offers us an emotional release. So what do you say we listen to one another, give it the best of our understanding, and see where it leads?”
    The woman studied him, her mouth wide open in mystification.
    She had beautiful lips, he thought.
    “You a fucking crazy little pedazo de mierda , aren’t you?” Blackbeard said to him.
    Fielding turned the other cheek. “It’s not easy, talking about your feelings, I know. But let’s try, okay? Just try? One of my favorite sayings is, ‘Every accomplishment starts with the decision to try.’”
    He would have attributed the saying to “that great friend of Cuba, John F. Kennedy.” But Blackbeard’s fist was flying at his face.
    He sidestepped it with ease.
    “I tried,” he sighed.
    He set his bottle of rum on the wall in time to meet the advance of Blackbeard’s confederates. He hit the first with a karate slash, causing the man to grab his wrist and cry out like an injured beast.
    Fielding ducked the haymaker thrown by the second thug, then three-sixtied, gaining force, leverage, and surprise. To the man’s exposed elbow, he delivered a karate strike with perhaps a little too much squash backhand. Still, it sounded like it broke bone.
    Hearing Blackbeard rushing him from behind, Fielding whirled around and seized him by the waist, bursting the wind out of the big man. In the same motion he heaved him over the seawall. No splash rose from the bay ten feet below, just a heavy smack against a slab of sea rock.
    Fielding spun around again, gearing up for the others’ retaliation.
    They were running away.
    “The good news,” he told the woman, “is now there’s more rum for us.”
    She smiled, restoring some healthy pink to her face.

2
    “So who sent you?” Fielding asked Alice.
    He was fond of saying that the time they’d spent together—four weeks now—was like the mid–romantic movie montages that invariably feature the couple romping through the surf, except, despite a shared affinity for both jogging and the beach, he and Alice had yet to get around to that.
    “Sent me?” She shifted uncomfortably on the silk-upholstered Louis XV settee in his den. Behind her, the exterior wall had been opened; the starlit beach appeared to be a mural. He paced before her, beneath the great white shark jawbone he’d kept above the mantel despite the decorator’s pleas.
    “Sent you, yes,” he said. “Who sent you?” For the first time in a month there was no mirth in his tone. This, as opposed to some combination of the bare arms and legs protruding from her cocktail dress, the breeze off the sea, and the bamboo ceiling fans, probably explained her shiver.
    Delicately, she said, “I’m not sure I know what you mean, darling.”
    “Let’s save the trouble and pretend I’ve now asked, ‘Who sent you?’ ad nauseam, and endured all your variations of ‘Sent me where?’ and ‘Why, nobody sent me anywhere, darling,’ with you looking at me all the while like I’ve spent too much time in the wine cellar, shall we?”
    “Okay, but I still won’t know what you mean.”
    “All right, stick with that tack. I’ll counter with a threat. But first,