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The movies make it look like one can simply shrug off non-fatal bullet wounds. But shrugging is the last thing I am doing. I’ve been on desk duty the last six weeks waiting for my left shoulder to stop throbbing so I can get back into the field and out of both my sling, and this interminably raw and gray Manhattan. It’s been an endless March of filing backlog reports, translating Soviet data files, and checking boxes on other UNCLE agents’ romantic adventures (and misadventures) in warmer, more vibrant climes.
Slogging into HQ, this morning, the cold rain soaked through my overcoat, nestling right down into my bones. It is the fourth straight day of this dreary weather. Best I can say for it is at least it isn’t sleet. Like it was for the three days before that.
Napoleon, who’s back in New York this week, is looking more tanned and well-rested than usual. The condescending lilt in his voice, as he dropped the 29 latest files on my desk and accused me of pouting, was even more Napoleon than Napoleon.
“....so what do you say?
“Tov-ar-isch?”
I realized, as he sing-songed his badly pronounced pet name for me and leaned his head down closer to my face, that he was still standing by my desk, evidently waiting for an answer to something. I pivoted my glower up from the paper I had been perusing to meet Napoleon’s unwelcomed smirk.
“I was just saying,” he went on after no invitation, “that once you stop feeling sorry for yourself and get these done, I’ll take you to fifty-second and we can catch a jazz show.”
That taunting tone and that trademark Solo gleam– how I wanted to garrote him.
Although… he sure did look like a man with a sudden great hunger for a good lounge act. Of a sudden, so was I. And feeling the start of a warmth in my belly and lightness in my head– as though from the horrible Americanized vodka I hadn’t yet had the pleasure of ordering and being disappointed by.
“Provided, of course, your shoulder isn’t aching too bad from the rain.”
Yes, come to think of it. Some bad American vodka, some world-class crooning, and a table for two so tiny our knees press companionably together, sounded like just the balm for six long cold weeks of pain and paperwork.
“What rain?”