Free Water to Burn by Katharine Kerr Page A

the standard version. I know the standard and the Palestinian dialect well, and then I can get by with the Egyptian version.”
    I was impressed. I only know three languages, if you don’t count Latin, which I don’t, since there aren’t a lot of people around who want to speak Latin back.
    The waiter returned with rose-flavored sodas and a tray of appetizers, a more generous selection than I’d ever seen before. With the place so empty, he hovered at the table for a while, talking with Ari. Both of them laughed now and then—at jokes, I supposed. After he brought the main dishes, he lingered some more, and this time Ari began asking him questions in between bites, which the waiter answered at some length.
    It dawned on me that the boy had no idea that he was talking with an Israeli, because as far as I could tell, Ari’s accent was identical to his. I smiled and looked vacant in what I hoped was the proper public manner for the girlfriend of an Iranian guy. At the end of the meal, Ari paid in cash, not a credit card with his giveaway name on it. He left a good tip, too.
    We walked outside just as the rain started. As we scurried across the street, dodging cars, I saw Hansen loading scrap glass into the back of his truck. Brand-new glass gleamed in the bay window of my apartment.
    “All done,” Hansen called out.
    “Thanks!” I said and waved.
    We managed to avoid Mrs. Z as we went upstairs. I’m sure that she needed to lie down and rest after writing the check for the windows. As soon as we got inside the apartment, Ari strode over to the new windows to examine the workmanship. I turned on the heat.
    “What was all the conversation about?” I said. “In the restaurant, that is.”
    “I was asking him how Johnson got up to the roof,” Ari said. “The night you were attacked, no one in the restaurant would tell the police anything. It made me wonder if they’d assisted him.”
    I experienced a retroactive frisson. “Uh, had they?”
    “No, or at least, I doubt it. The waiter was too forthcoming. The Shah’s Iran was a police state, and this new regime is no better. One gets used to acting ignorant around authorities. They saw Sanchez as a threat and told him nothing.”
    I was planning on running various Agency procedures that evening in the hopes of picking up traces of the coven members and through them, of the hooded man. I changed into work clothes, a pair of jeans, and a green top with a watercolor print and a deep V-neck. When I booted up my computer for a routine run on TranceWeb, I found nothing new in my inbox.
    “I still haven’t gotten that file on Reb Ezekiel,” I said.
    Ari muttered something in Hebrew, then took his cell phone out of his shirt pocket. “I’ll see what I can do to speed things up,” he said. “The sodding thing should have come through by now. I wonder if someone’s intercepted it.”
    “Could be, but I’ll bet the bureaucrats just haven’t cleared it yet. It has to come to the Agency via the State Department and the two guys there who know we exist. I—”
    His cell phone went off with a loud burst of sour Bach. We both yelped. He clicked it on and wandered into the kitchen to answer the call in private, but he reappeared almost immediately.
    “It’s Sanchez,” he said to me. “Evers apparently committed suicide this afternoon.”
    I murmured something unladylike. Ari alternated between listening to Sanchez and relaying the details.
    “He drowned in the bay right by the Ferry Building . . . around four o’clock . . . jumped from one of the piers . . . witnesses . . . they said what?”
    A long pause while I squirmed in curiosity. Four o’clock—just about the time when I should have been doing an LDRS on Evers. Thanks to Hansen, I’d missed the chance, not that I could have reached Evers to warn him. By the time we’d headed for the Persian restaurant, Evers must have been dead.
    “That doesn’t seem possible,” Ari continued. “Yes, yes, I know