Toxic

by witling

Summary:

Eames tackles him from behind, brings him down onto his belly on the carpet, and plants a knee in his back. “What,” he pants, “the hell.”

 

Arthur gets into trouble, and can't remember how he got there. Eames lends a hand.

Notes:

Why yes, this story does recycle several situations from other stories I have coughed up in this fandom! Essentially: Arthur Takes a Beating And Is Quite Stupid, and Eames is Very Patient.

And yes, it is way too long and full of meandering conversations and not enough sex!

Essentially this is the same story I have written several times before, with extra words in different places.

Enjoy!

Eames gets a phone call in New York, in the middle of March, in the middle of the night. He hasn’t assigned an address book entry to the number--never write down what you can remember--but he knows who it is.

“Hello,” he says, rolling over and checking the hotel clock. Two thirty am. “I hope this is very, very important.”

There’s no response. The call’s dropped, he thinks--but when he looks it’s still connected. He listens. Faintly, he can hear breathing. His neck prickles. He’s about to hang up--his thumb is over the screen--when he hears his name spoken. He puts the phone back to his ear.

“Who is this?” It’s Arthur, he knows it is, but no sense giving anything away. Arthur might not be Arthur, just at the moment. Eames is often not Eames, so he knows how it is.

There’s a pause--the sound of an indrawn breath, the sound of swallowing. Shit, Eames thinks, rifling options. Drunk, injured, gun to the head. None of them good, none of them things he particularly wants to consider or be associated with.

“Eames?” Arthur sounds faint, as if he’s holding the phone too far from his mouth. “What...what do you want?” His tone baffled, a little peevish, as if Eames is the one who’s called him.

Drunk, Eames thinks. Drunk and disoriented. But if Arthur has ever been in that state, he hasn’t called to share it. Why would he start now?

“I don’t want anything,” he says slowly. “You called me.”

There’s a considering pause. Eames looks at the clock again. Two thirty-one.

“Where are you?” he asks.

“I think--” Arthur says. He sounds...feeble, if Eames had to put a word to it. “I think I’m in LA.”

“You think?” Eames sits up, clicks on the light, and reaches for the hotel stationery. “You don’t sound good.”

“I think...I’m not.” Arthur swallows again, then there’s a complicated tumbling sound, as if he’s dropped the phone. Eames listens with his head tipped, trying to make things out. He can imagine Arthur crouching, fishing for the phone, fumbling it up. Or maybe it’s Arthur who’s hit the floor. More breathing, a scuffling sound. Then silence.

“...Arthur?” Eames presses the tip of the pen into the pad. “Are you still there?”

A long pause, while Eames tries out several different scenarios in his mind. Has Arthur ever been a sleepwalker, a sleep-talker? Not to his knowledge. To his knowledge, Arthur is so tightly tied that he hardly moves in his sleep. Like a patient etherized upon a table.

“Arthur,” he says again. “Where are you?”

There’s an indrawn breath. Then: “I’m fine,” Arthur says, sounding...not normal, exactly. A few shades off normal, but not drunk, either. “I didn’t mean to call you, sorry.”

“Who’d you mean to call?”

“Nobody. It’s fine. Forget it.” He’s biting off his words now, sounding like he’s trying to cut this off before someone overhears.

“Arthur,” Eames says. “I’m sorry to persist, but you sound completely mental. Where the hell are you?”

“Forget it,” Arthur says again, and hangs up.

Eames stares at his phone, the red light blinking. Then he hangs it up and dials Arthur back. The phone rings and rings, until at last it goes to a numbered voice mailbox that’s already full.

 

 

He calls a woman in Los Angeles, a point who knows the business, who owes him a favor about the right size. He asks her to track down a job done sometime in the last few days, probably corporate, certainly professional. Then he goes back to bed and lies staring at the ceiling with his hands behind his head, considering possibilities.

Probably it’s nothing. A combination of drink and poor judgment, or sleeplessness, or something else entirely. Something he hasn’t considered because he can’t think of it, because there’s nothing that really fits. Arthur doesn’t get sloppy drunk—the few times Eames has seen him drink after a job he’s smiled a little more than usual, laughed a few times, got a little color in his cheeks. That’s it. Unless he’s hiding some secret life, some alter ego with another personality, the explanation isn’t drink. And Arthur’s judgment isn’t poor.

Which leaves sleeplessness, another non-starter as far as Eames knows. Arthur sleeps when he has to, hooked to a PASIV or jammed in a tiny Eurostar seat bouncing through bad weather between Paris and Brussels—and he wakes up when you so much as pass through his light. Arthur sleeps efficiently and well, the way he does everything.

Eames thinks of Cobb, who’s also in California, and wonders if this merits a call. But Cobb’s been out of the business for three years, ever since the Fischer job—and he’s made it abundantly clear that he wants no piece of his former life in his new one. Hard to blame him, with the children. Better to wait until there’s more news on whatever Arthur’s been up to, before fobbing this off on Father Cobb. Better still not to involve Cobb at all—Arthur’s been prickly on that point before.

The phone doesn’t ring, and Eames doesn’t fall asleep. Finally he gets up and turns on the television, watches some horrible war history programme with half an eye, and goes over his background files, not that he needs to. In six hours he’ll be winkling trade secrets from a mid-level biotech manager. In eight he’ll be depositing a large infusion into one of his own ailing bank accounts. In twelve—he doesn’t know it yet, but it turns out to be true—he’ll be on a plane to Los Angeles, where Arthur has just finished a middling-sized job having to do with hydrogen fuel cells, then disappeared off the face of the earth.

 

 

He hasn’t disappeared completely, of course. Lani, the point who owes Eames the favor, has run him to ground by the time Eames gets through his arrival gate.

“He’s changed hotels,” she says. “He’s at the Wilshire Grand.”

“I thought he was dead.” That was part of it, or one version of part of it—the information Lani’s given him is frustratingly piecemeal, contradictory, and incomplete. Arthur has, according to different sources she’s chased down: punched a hotel bellman, caused a scene in the same hotel’s restaurant, and dropped dead in the lobby of the place. That report was quickly rectified: not dead, only unconscious. And then, somehow, disappeared to parts unknown. Eames was very glad to have at least that much of a correction before his plane left the ground at JFK. “How does a comatose man change hotels?”

“Quickly. He passed out in the lobby of the Standard, then checked out twenty-five minutes later and now I’ve got him registered at the Wilshire, under the name—“ There’s a pause. Eames heads for ground transportation. “Seares. Thomas Seares.”

“Does he know you’ve traced him?”

“No.” Lani’s tone is terse; she has her professional pride.

“Sorry. Has he contacted anyone else?”

“Apart from you? Not as far as I can tell. Not without hacking his cell phone records.”

“Could you do that?”

“Do it yourself, when you see him. Pick up his phone and hit that little button that shows recent calls.”

“Good thought, thanks.”

“I should say, this is all I’m getting for you. Do you even know what I charge for this kind of wire work?”

“I do appreciate it.”

“And if he gets pissed off at me down the line, I’m throwing you under the bus.”

“Of course.”

“He’d better not get pissed off at me, Eames.” Lani’s tone is even terser. “This had better not be some fucking end-run.”

“I’m sorry, I have to go.” He hangs up, already moving on to the next thing. A cab to the Wilshire Grand please, no bags, the quickest route possible, in a bit of a hurry. Before Mr. Seares decides to change hotels again, he doesn’t say. Instead he sits back and watches the flat, sunburnt afternoon freeway race past. Southern California depresses him. It always feels like the end of days has already happened there, and the rest of the world just hasn’t had the news yet.

 

 

There were two other people on the job—a small crew, but not unheard-of. As the cab pulls under the hotel’s port-cochere, Eames goes over what he knows of them. The chemist, a man named John Hood. The architect, a fellow called Matthews. Both on the young side, with good reputations. No forge, no extractor. That wasn’t odd—not every job needed a forge, which was one reason Eames had trouble with his bank accounts from time to time. And for some kinds of extraction, Arthur could probably do just fine on his own.

Arthur would have been the senior man, Eames thinks, as he pays the driver. It’s odd to think of Arthur, Cobb’s little shadow, as the senior anything, but they’re all older now. Not many people stay in the business more than a few years, or live if they do. Surely Arthur’s earned the right to boss younger folk around.

Eames wonders if he should check up on Hood and Matthews, see if they’ve been making prank phone calls or falling down in public places. Of course, if they haven’t then he’ll be giving Arthur’s game away. And it’s not his game to give away, whatever it is.

He takes a seat on a sofa in the lobby and starts to dial Lani’s number. As he does it, he gets a text.

M. and H. both fine so far. No more from me. SERIOUSLY. L.

The message makes him smile, until he thinks about what she’s told him. Matthews and Hood are both all right. Arthur’s the only one behaving oddly after the job. Which means a bad mix is less of a possibility. Not that Eames has ever heard of a mix making someone punch out a bellman.

On a whim, he tries Arthur’s phone again. It rings to voicemail. Either he’s lost the phone or he doesn’t want to pick up, doesn’t want to be found.

Still. Eames has flown all the way across the country on a forged passport for this.

He goes to the front desk, holds up his phone in a charmingly helpless way, and tells the young woman at the desk that he’s just been cut off in his conversation with Mr. Seares. Thomas Seares, yes. Could she connect him on the hotel line?

She could, and she does.

A couple is waiting behind him. He steps to the side, elaborately polite. Very English, very accommodating. It gives him an angle on the phone, beneath the counter. While she takes the couple to the far side of the desk, he reads the room line number. 1268.

The line rings and rings, no answer. He doesn’t expect any. When she comes back he holds up the receiver with a shrug.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “Would you like to leave a message?”

“Thanks,” he says. “If you can tell him Peter Hanrahan, please. At my work phone. He has the number.”

He lifts a key card from the back pocket of a man struggling with two suitcases and a stroller—“Sorry, sorry,” “Not at all, it’s quite all right,”—and takes the farthest elevator from the desk. In case the young woman at the desk is watching him, still smiling in that receptive, beguiling, beguiled way.

The elevator is mirrored and silent. He smooths his hair, considers the state of his beard, wonders if he’s going to walk in on Arthur’s stiffened corpse.

If he’s died he’s chosen a good place to do it. 1268 is the last room at the end of the hall, separated from the next one by a little alcove. There’s an emergency stairwell a couple of doors down. It gives the slightly ominous impression of a place of last resort—a kind of posh, anonymous entrenchment.

He leaves his bag a few steps back, puts his coat over his arm, and holds his picks in that hand. With the other, he knocks lightly.

If Arthur’s awake and alive, the phone calls will have put him on alert. And he’s almost certainly armed.

“Mr. Seares,” Eames calls, after a long moment of silence. No sound of movement from inside the room, nothing at all. “It’s Peter Hanrahan. We’d arranged to meet, I think.”

For another long moment, nothing. Then, very softly, a footstep just inside the door. It kicks his heart up, even though he’s been expecting it.

The door cracks open, no more than an inch. It’s dark inside. He can’t see Arthur, can’t see anyone.

“Hello Mr. Seares,” Eames says, as if this is all perfectly normal. “Hanrahan, from Des Moines.”

The door closes. The bolt flips back, and it opens again. This time wide enough to let him through, and to show Arthur standing inside with his hand behind the door, his face set in hard lines. He looks thin, there are circles under his eyes. A red mark high up on his forehead, like he’s bashed it on something.

He’s wearing a white T-shirt and dark trousers. No waistcoat, no jacket. The shirt’s untucked, and there’s a tear in the neck. Eames notes that, and weights it more than the mark on the forehead. Arthur doesn’t wear torn clothing. Even when he dresses down, he’s tidy.

“I hope I haven’t got the date wrong,” Eames says, in the same jovial tone. Arthur jerks his head inward, toward the room. Eames picks up his bag and goes in.

It’s a double room, not a suite but the next best thing, with a corner view out over the city, mostly obscured by blackout curtains. A couch and armchairs, a bar by the window. There’s one lamp lit, on the table between the beds. One bed is still neat, the other’s in disarray, the covers dragged down off the foot and half onto the floor. There’s a bottle of water on the coffee table, a glass half-full. Water puddle on the tabletop, a wet spot on the floor. The bathroom door is standing open, towels wadded on the floor.

No booze, no drugs that he can see.

Behind him, Arthur closes and latches the door. The back of Eames’s neck prickles, but he doesn’t turn at once. He puts down his bag, places his coat over it, then folds his pick case closed and slips it into his pocket where Arthur can see him do it.

When he turns, Arthur’s standing by the door with a gun in his hand, watching him in silence. The gun’s not pointed at Eames, but it’s not pointed away, either.

“You called me,” Eames says, leading with the best information he has.

“No, I didn’t.”

There’s a pause. Eames looks pointedly at the gun, but Arthur doesn’t move.

“I’m sorry to contradict you,” Eames says. “Especially since you’re armed. But you did. Last night. You told me you were in L.A., and you sounded…” He pauses, and peers more closely at Arthur’s face. There’s a great deal of strain there, just below the surface. It doesn’t take a genius to see it. “You’re not well.”

“How did you find me?” Arthur’s voice is flat and quiet. Impersonal, Eames thinks. As if they hardly know each other, as if Eames is some stranger who’s dropped in unannounced.

“I made inquiries,” Eames says, speaking carefully. “It wasn’t simple, believe me. You changed—“

“I just think it’s strange,” Arthur says. “You showing up like this. For no reason.” His face is very still.

Oh, Eames thinks. Of course. Arthur is careful, Arthur is paranoid. Arthur’s job is to be suspicious, to second-guess everyone and everything, to see patterns where others miss them. Of course he thinks Eames is up to something.

“Arthur.” He holds out his hands, to reinforce how unarmed and harmless he is. “I understand you’re in a…certain frame of mind. But I promise you, I have no idea what’s going on here. All I know is that you called me in the middle of the night—“

“I didn’t call you,” Arthur snaps. He presses his lips together, as if he’s preventing himself from saying more. Then, after a breath: “Why the hell would I call you?”

“Check your phone.” Eames keeps his hands out, but points with one finger at Arthur’s phone, on the table beside the spilled water. Arthur looks at it, then back at him. “I’ll go look at the view, shall I?”

He doesn’t wait for an answer, just turns his back and goes to the window. Behind him, Arthur goes to the table and picks up the phone. After a few seconds he puts it back down.

“So,” says Eames. He turns, in time to see Arthur wobble on his feet, then catch himself. He’s gone a nasty shade of white. The lines in his throat stand out when he swallows. “All right?”

Arthur nods and sinks into the couch. He safeties the pistol and lays it carefully on the table, beside the phone. He was serious, Eames realizes. It wasn’t a bluff, the safety was off. Arthur was prepared to shoot him in the middle of a Los Angeles hotel room, in the middle of the day.

“You’ve been calling me,” Arthur says, falling back into the couch as if he’s lost all his bones. “I didn’t know—I couldn’t figure out why you’d be calling me, out of the blue right now. When I’m—“ He shrugs, tugs at the neck of his shirt, and swallows. “It was freaking me out.”

“You did call me first,” Eames says, a little pettily. “And if you’d clear out your inbox, I could have left a message.”

Arthur doesn’t answer. He sits staring at nothing, then suddenly pushes the heels of his hands into his forehead. He sits like that for a second, as if he’s trying not to pass out. Eames watches.

“I’m fine,” Arthur says, sounding strained. “You should go.”

“You look fine, yes.”

“I’m dealing with it.” Arthur releases his head and looks up at Eames. His eyes are watering. Eames goes to the bathroom and puts his head inside. There’s a bottle of Tylenol lying sideways on the counter, pills spilled out.

“Headache,” he observes, coming back out. Arthur says nothing. “And dizziness?”

“I’m dealing with it.”

“Do you even know what it is?”

Arthur says nothing. Eames goes to the couch and stands over him, looks down more carefully into his face. Arthur stares back, clearly annoyed.

There’s no obvious crookedness, but even so Eames says, “Put your arms out.”

Arthur shakes his head. “It’s not a stroke.”

“Put them out.”

After an obstinate pause, Arthur puts out both arms. They’re level. Eames reaches down and pushes experimentally on the top of Arthur’s left hand. It drops almost at once, as if there’s no strength in it. Arthur snaps both arms in and stands up. “Look, I’m sorry you—“

Then he drops, so suddenly and bonelessly that Eames doesn’t really manage to catch him. He provides a kind of crash pad instead. Arthur falls into him and Eames stumbles backward, hits the coffee table with the backs of his knees, and goes down with Arthur on top. They land in a messy sprawl on the floor. Arthur’s dead weight, and heavier than he looks.

Eames gets himself up on his elbows, shoves Arthur off, and considers him. For a few seconds, nothing. Then Arthur’s eyelids flicker. He twitches. Very suddenly, as if a switch has been flipped, he snaps awake and sits bolt upright. He looks fully wired, frightened, maybe angry. Probably both.

“You passed out,” Eames says, getting to his own feet. Arthur stays where he is, sitting on the floor, staring up at him. “Just now. You passed out when you stood up.”

“I know.” Arthur clears his throat and rubs his hands together. They’re shaking, Eames notices. “I get that.” Belatedly, he adds, “Sorry.”

“Let’s get you to the bed, then.” Eames leans down to take Arthur’s arm, but Arthur pulls it away. He stands up carefully on his own, but doesn’t go toward the bed. He picks up his phone and walks away from Eames, his attention on the screen. Eames stays where he is, trying not to feel irritated. When he fails, he goes to the bar and opens a bottle of gin. “How long has it been going on?”

“Eames, seriously.” Arthur’s parked himself on the arm of the sofa, still deeply engaged with his phone. Classic deflection, Eames thinks, finding tonic. “You don’t need to be here.”

“How long?”

Arthur doesn’t answer. Eames takes the lime provided in the bar refrigerator, cuts it into quarters, and puts ice in his glass. The gin is Bombay Sapphire, and there’s a decent-sized bottle. He sloshes in as much as he thinks he’s owed by now, minus the amount he needs to stay sober to deal with Arthur’s mystery ailment. “Who have you called?”

Arthur doesn’t answer. Eames picks up an ice cube and pegs him in the head.

“Hey!” Arthur jumps and gives him a stung look.

“Who’ve you called?”

“For fuck’s sake--“

“You called me, I’m here. Who else have you called, Arthur?”

Arthur stares at him for a second, then gestures loosely with the phone. “Yusuf. And Ed Orner.”

“And?” If it’s not the mix, Yusuf won’t be much help, and anyway he’s in Mombasa. Orner is a doctor, he’s in Los Angeles, but he’s also a colossal prick, not likely to go out of his way to help.

“And…nothing. Yusuf said to send him the rundown on the mix, he’d take a look. Orner said walk it off.”

“Did you send the rundown?”

Arthur’s expression turns wry. “I tried. I made it as far as the lobby at the Standard.”

“Right. You punched someone?” Off Arthur’s flat look, Eames shrugs. “I told you, I made inquiries.”

“Lani.” Arthur snorts. He’s rubbing the face of his phone against his thigh, an unconscious nervous tic. “Tell her not to run three identities at once, next time. I do actually notice when someone taps that many of my records.”

“It’s all my fault, I forced her hand, don’t blame her. Et cetera. Why did you hit the bellman?”

Arthur looks momentarily remote. His hand stills against his leg. “I…I sort of lost it.”

“You were angry?”

“No. Well, yes. I woke up on the floor and there was this guy standing over me, and I just—“ Arthur shrugs. “Nailed him.”

“And there was some scene in the restaurant?”

Arthur looks confused. “I don’t remember…” Faintly, something dawns on him. “Oh. Right.”

Eames swirls the ice in his glass, waiting.

“I wasn’t thinking straight,” Arthur says. He sounds shamefaced now, and he’s studying the phone again. “I kept losing time and waking up in weird places. I didn’t know what was going on.” He presses the phone hard between his palms, then seems to notice he’s holding it, and tosses it onto the couch. “I still don’t.”

“Hm.” Eames watches Arthur for a minute, waiting to see what he’ll do. There’s a curve in Arthur’s spine that isn’t usually there, a slump of exhaustion. Eames has seen Arthur work hours that would kill most men, and he’s never looked like that. “Are you sleeping?”

Arthur shrugs, then shakes his head.

“Eating?”

Arthur just looks at him. Eames fishes around by the bar and brings out a box of crackers. He takes them over to the coffee table and opens them, offers to Arthur. Arthur looks at the crackers, then at Eames.

“Go on.” Eames waggles the box. “I won’t nursemaid you for long, I promise. Just until we find a decent doctor, and then I’ll fuck off. And someday you can buy me a five-course dinner for my trouble.” He smiles, throwing in a little flirtation for the hell of it. Half the time that sort of thing puts Arthur’s back up, but the other half he likes it.

Arthur looks at the crackers again, his mouth narrowing. He shakes his head in a gesture of profound resignation, of disbelief at his situation. He takes a cracker.

“Good man,” says Eames, and takes one himself.

 

 

They go over the job. A basic corporate information grab, the client a competing company, everything according to rule. The kind of thing they’ve both done dozens of times.

“What about Hood?” Eames asks. He’s on the couch, his feet on the coffee table beside Arthur’s pistol, his glass on his stomach. Arthur’s in an armchair, slowly eating crackers. “Could he have got the mix wrong?”

It’s a delicate way of asking whether Hood could have sabotaged the job, and Arthur knows it. He shakes his head, frowning.

“Hood’s decent. I’ve worked with him before.”

“Lovely, but that doesn’t answer the question.”

“I saw his numbers. They looked right to me.”

“Who’s his supplier?”

“If it was a bad mix, it would have hit all of us. Not just me.” They’ve already established what they both know—that Hood, Matthews, and the mark have all walked away fine. Arthur turns a cracker in his fingers, frowning.

“Eat that,” Eames says, turning back to his drink. Arthur glances at him. “I hate people playing with their food. Eat it or put it back.”

“’Eat it or put it back’?” Arthur snorts, then puts the cracker in his mouth. “You sound like my mother.”

“And don’t talk with your mouth full.” Eames ignores the look Arthur gives him. “I don’t suppose you’ve got something helpfully obvious, like a secret heroin addiction.”

“Never had the time.”

“Because those sort of drugs, mixed up with Somnacin—that would be a very neat explanation.”

“Sorry.”

“Damn.” Eames shifts uncomfortably—it’s getting late, he’s stiff from the plane ride, from the days of sedentary study before the last job. “Try Cobb?”

“What’s he going to do?” Arthur’s touchy again, at the very suggestion. “He’s got kids. I’m not dragging him back in just because I’ve got the vapors.”

Eames laughs despite himself, stretching his legs. “Right, first thing tomorrow I’ll take you to see Orner. He can find time in his busy schedule to look you over, I think.”

Arthur says nothing, which Eames decides to take as agreement. He stands up. It’s getting dark outside, the orange lights of the city are burning through the flimsy curtain between the blackouts. “I’ll take the rundown for Yusuf. They can send a Fedex from the desk, most likely.”

Arthur starts to get up, then stops short and sits back down. “It’s in my bag,” he says in a careful voice. He’s gone a shade paler, and he’s holding tightly to the arm of the chair with one hand.

Eames goes to Arthur’s bag, sitting open between the beds. It’s small, just a canvas overnight bag—he must have left most of his things in his car. Though the image of Arthur driving here, in the state he’s in, is harrowing. Inside the bag is a second pistol, a couple of rounds of ammunition, one of Arthur’s small black notebooks, a wad of bills rubber-banded together in a zipper pocket, and a folded sheaf of papers--the rundown. Seeing it makes Eames think of something.

“The PASIV?”

“In the safe.” Arthur looks grim now, the circles under his eyes dark purple, his face drained of all other color. He’s staring fixedly at the table in front of him. Eames turns back to the bag, slips the papers into his pocket, and shoves the bag against the baseboard, between the bed and the nightstand.

“I can stay here,” he says, going back to pick up his own bag. “If you want.”

Arthur shakes his head.

“It might be wise. You don’t look terrifically well just now.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

“It’s not shameful, you know. Being sick.”

“It’s not the fucking flu, Eames. It’s—“ Arthur stops short, blinks rapidly, then falls forward, just barely catching himself with one hand against the edge of the table. Eames puts his bag back down and goes over to take him by the shoulder.

Without any warning, Arthur whips around and punches him hard in the ribs. Once, twice—and while Eames is still stumbling back, catching his wind, Arthur goes for the pistol on the tabletop. He’s awkward, loose-fingered: he fumbles the grab, but he still gets it up, snaps off the safety, and is swinging it around straight-armed at Eames’s head before Eames knocks it out of his hand. Arthur doesn’t pause. He swings, a wild punch that forces Eames back a step, clearing a path to the door. With no hesitation, he bolts for it.

Eames tackles him from behind, brings him down onto his belly on the carpet, and plants a knee in his back. “What,” he pants, “the hell.”

Arthur twists beneath him, gasping for breath. For safety’s sake, Eames pins his wrists behind his back.

“Jesus Christ.” He waits, expecting Arthur to stop fighting. Arthur doesn’t stop. “Arthur. For fuck’s sake, Arthur. Stop it.”

Arthur somehow twists up onto one hip, gets a leg free, and snaps it backward across Eames’s kidneys. The force shoves Eames forward and yanks Arthur’s wrists higher. He lets out a strangled sound into the carpet.

“Fucking Christ--“ Eames gets his leg back over Arthur’s hip, and forces his weight down on the small of Arthur’s back. He’s torn between irrational anger, the automatic urge to hit back—and the fear that he’ll do damage. When he hauled Arthur’s wrists, he thought he felt something give way. “Arthur, stop it. Fucking stop it.”

Slowly, Arthur does stop. He’s rigid, breathing in trembling gasps. Eames has the sense that if he shifts his weight a fraction, Arthur will immediately try for escape again. But escape from what?

“Arthur,” he says, trying to sound reasonable. As unthreatening as he can, given that he’s kneeling on Arthur’s back. “Stop it, all right?”

For another minute, which feels like an hour, there’s no change. Just Arthur’s body iron-hard beneath his, contorted silently into a shape that must hurt like hell. Panting and shaking. Eames’s hands start to ache on Arthur’s wrists. His back throbs where Arthur kicked him.

“I’m going to let go your hands,” he says at last, although he has the bad feeling that the moment he does, Arthur will flip over and punch him in the face. Before he can do it, though, Arthur’s body trembles once, hugely and definitively. Then the tension goes out of him, like water down a drain. He’s lax.

Eames lets go of his wrists, and slides off his back to sit on the carpet beside him. Arthur’s face is turned the other way, so Eames doesn’t see it when he slowly, carefully starts moving his arms. Still, it's clearly painful. Eames rubs his back and waits.

Laboriously, Arthur gets his arms up and pushes himself over onto his back. His breath catches with the movement. He makes a grunting sound in his throat. When he turns his head toward Eames, he seems dully startled.

“You tried to shoot me,” Eames tells him. It’s not the kindest thing to say, but it’s true. “And then you tried to bolt.”

Arthur stares at him, his eyes dark and vague. He wets his lips with his tongue. His face is red, blotchy with exertion and carpet burn.

“I—“ he says. “What?”

It occurs to Eames that none of this is really his problem. So Arthur called him in the middle of the night, sounding lost and confused. So they’ve worked together, off and on, for a few years. So he knows Arthur’s habits and attitudes, his tics and tells, better than almost anyone in the business. He’s not a doctor, he’s not a chemist, and he’s not a magician. He’s also not Arthur’s wife. There’s no reason for him to stay once a gun’s been pointed in his face.

Arthur’s gaze has moved into the middle distance. He’s rubbing his wrists slowly and carefully, alternating hands.

“Do you remember any of it?” Eames asks. Arthur shakes his head, but the movement is loose and vague, disconnected from his expression, as if he’s just responding for form’s sake. “Do you know where you are?”

Arthur shoots him a sharper look, and Eames realizes: he doesn’t. He doesn’t know where he is, maybe doesn’t know who he is.

To cover his own confusion, the cold weight that’s just settled in his gut, he reaches for Arthur’s hands. “Here.” Arthur does nothing when he takes them one by one and tests the wrists. Nothing obviously broken. “Sorry about that. But you did try to shoot me.”

Arthur nods, braces one hand against the floor, and sits up. He moves shakily, cautiously, as if everything hurts. He sits for a moment staring into space, then swallows hard and nods.

“Los Angeles,” he says, as if he’s confirming it to someone. “At the…” He pauses, starts to form a word, then stops. Glances at Eames, as if looking for confirmation. “The Wilshire.”

Eames nods slowly. Arthur takes a deep breath then gathers himself up, getting unsteadily to his feet. He circles a shoulder, pushes a hand against his jaw. His gaze falls on the pistol, lying on the carpet by the coffee table. “You should put that away. In the safe.” He looks at Eames, his expression somehow more familiar. More controlled. “And change the combination.”

Eames gets up, presses his hands into his back, then limps over and picks up the gun.

“There’s another in the bag,” Arthur says. Eames gets that one too, removes the clips, and safeties them.

“Any others?”

Arthur shakes his head, then seems to think of something, and hobbles into the bathroom. He comes out with a short-bladed tactical knife, which he holds out to Eames. Eames takes it.

“I’ll stay here,” he says. “Do you have any sleeping pills?”

Arthur, looking as if he’s working on some difficult maths problem in his head, shakes his head.

“I do,” says Eames. “You’ll take two. And I’ll stay up.”

Arthur doesn’t argue. He sits on the foot of the messed-up bed and rubs his wrists while Eames puts the weapons away.

Eames fills a glass at the bar sink and puts it on the nightstand, beside two pills. Arthur takes them quickly, as if he can’t wait to be knocked out.

“I tried to shoot you,” he says. Eames nods. “Jesus Christ.”

“It’s not exactly the thanks I’d expected, no.”

He says it with a kind of mordant humor, while he takes a couple of Tylenol along with a swig of his nearly-drained gin and tonic. But Arthur flinches, and immediately Eames feels cruel.

“It’ll be all right,” he says, distracting himself with rinsing the glass out in the sink. “We’ll see Orner, we’ll get you fixed up. First thing tomorrow.”

“You should...tie me up or something,” Arthur says tonelessly. “So you can sleep.”

“Don’t be so dramatic.”

“I tried to shoot you.”

“I’m sure you meant it kindly.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Go to sleep, Arthur.”

He turns the lights down low and watches television with the sound turned almost to nothing.

Arthur sleeps sprawled on top of the sheets, in his torn T-shirt and trousers. Motionless, like a dead man.

Around midnight, after he’s cycled through fatigue and back into the sleeplessness of jet lag, Eames goes to the bed. He crouches beside it, leaning close to Arthur’s face as if he might see something different about it, some kind of clue.

He studies the abrasions on Arthur’s cheek and forehead, the short dark growth of beard along his jaw. He takes hold of Arthur’s arm, extends it, and studies the mark of the cannula. It’s an ordinary-looking pinprick, almost healed. Whatever’s inside him, whether it went in through the needle or some other way, it’s invisible. There’s no sign of it except for the bruises on Arthur’s wrists, the marks on his face, and the miserable downturned set of his mouth, even in sleep.

 

 

Eames showers at six, orders coffee and toast, and shaves while he waits for it to arrive. He takes the tray at the door, so the waiter won’t see what looks like a battered corpse laid on top of the bed. The coffee’s good, black as sin. Eames drinks it watching the morning news, then brushes off the crumbs and goes to wake Arthur.

It takes some doing. Arthur’s not a pill-taker, and he was exhausted to begin with. He hasn’t moved all night. When Eames snaps his fingers around Arthur’s face, he gets no response. It takes a couple of pinches on his earlobe to get him to stir, and when he does he looks drowsy and doped, still half-asleep.

“Drink this,” Eames tells him, putting a cup of coffee on the nightstand. Then he goes to phone Orner, keeping an eye on Arthur to make sure he doesn’t drop off again.

“It’s the mix,” Orner says, sounding curt and bristly as always, as if Eames has interrupted him in the middle of life-saving surgery. “If I listed all the possible side-effects of those chemicals, you’d never go under again.”

“I’d like to bring him by. Better for you to see him in person, I think.” Rather than diagnosing over the telephone, Eames thinks, but doesn’t say. Arthur is starting to sag back into the mattress, and Eames snaps his fingers, pointing at the coffee.

“You do realize I have a practice,” Orner says. “I can’t just drop everything for every malingering point man in the business.”

“Not malingering,” Eames says quietly. “This is Arthur we’re talking about, Ed.”

“I already talked to him. If he’s not better in forty-eight hours, call me back.”

Eames turns away from Arthur, toward the window, and lowers his voice another notch. “He tried to shoot me.”

There’s a pause.

“Yesterday. He had a…fainting spell, and then he attacked me and tried to run. When it was over he didn’t know where he was.”

Eames waits, listening to Orner think that one over. Outside, it’s a sunny day and the streets are full of traffic.

“Well, I don’t want you bringing him to my office,” Orner says at last. “I’ll meet you somewhere. Do you have a pen?”

Eames takes down an address, agrees to be there in an hour, and hangs up.

“What did he say?” Arthur’s slumped on the edge of the bed, his elbows on his knees, his head hanging. He’s favoring his hands, Eames notices. Both wrists are swollen, the undersides bruised. His voice is rough, a little slurred.

“He says get up and take a shower. He’ll meet us in a bit.”

“Here?” Arthur stands up carefully, turning for the bathroom.

“No, we’ll go to him.”

Arthur turns back, one hand holding onto the back of the couch and then letting go abruptly, unconsciously—the wrist must hurt. “We’re driving?” When Eames nods, he frowns. “What happens if I freak out in the car, and try to deck you?”

“I’m sure I can handle it.” It’s not a very nice thought, but he’ll make sure Arthur’s unarmed at least. “You’re not really up to snuff right now anyway.”

Arthur stares at him, obviously about to disagree. Eames waves it off and points at the bathroom. “Leave the door open, will you?”

“Why?” Before Eames can say the obvious, Arthur’s mouth twists in annoyance. “In case I drop, right. Great.”

Eames shrugs. “In an hour, he said.”

Arthur looks sour, but he goes. Eames sits on the couch reading the paper with one ear out, but he doesn’t hear any sounds of catastrophe. Arthur comes out after ten minutes, still unshaven but washed and looking a little more alert. His hair’s combed back flat and he’s somehow got most of the wrinkles out of the T-shirt. Belatedly, Eames realizes he should have called down for Arthur’s bags.

“I’ll pick some things up later,” Arthur says, seeing the direction of Eames’s gaze. “I didn’t want anyone going into the car.”

“You can wear something of mine.”

Arthur appears not to hear that. He goes to the closet and pulls a black hoodie off a hanger, zips it to his throat, and finds his shoes. “Let’s go.”

 

 

The address is in East L.A., off Whittier. It’s a trip that should take twenty minutes, but after forty-five they’re still sitting in traffic on the Pomona Freeway, with the windows rolled up and the air conditioner on. Arthur’s spent most of the trip staring out his window, biting alternately at his lip and thumbnail. Eames drives with his head propped on his hand, trying for patience.

“Ariadne’s doing well for herself,” he says at one point. Arthur nods, as if he already knows or isn’t listening.

Eames switches the radio on. It’s satellite but it’s still all shit, and he flips for a couple of minutes until Arthur says sharply, “Could you just pick something?”

Eames waves his hand to say, you pick, and goes back to staring at the road. Arthur turns the radio off.

“You’re not allergic,” Eames says.

“I think I’d know by now if I was.”

“Maybe there was something new in the mix—“

“There was nothing new in the mix. I saw the numbers, I told you.”

“All right, don’t take my head off.”

They roll forward, get up to twenty miles an hour for a minute or two, then get stuck again.

“Sorry,” Arthur says. “I’m just—“ He grimaces, shaking his head. “This is fucking humiliating.”

Eames considers sticking a pin in that, because he’s tired and irritable too, but instead he just makes a considering hm sound. It is humiliating, of course. Once or twice already he’s felt very glad that it’s not him suffering from some unknown ailment, showering with the door open and sitting in the passenger seat. It’s annoying to have been pulled into this, but at the end of the day he knows he’ll walk away whole, and take up his own life again. Arthur can’t feel certain about that right now.

“When I was twenty-one, twenty-two,” Eames says, “I got flu in Kenya. Horrible. One day I was fine and the next I had such a fever I didn’t know who the hell I was or what I was supposed to be doing.”

Arthur’s looking out the window, the muscle in his jaw tensed.

“I was supposed to be stealing something,” Eames says. “Doesn’t matter what, anymore. But it was in the middle of the fucking job, and we had to push everything off until I could walk straight again. I just remember lying in this hotel room, staring at the ceiling, for what felt like weeks. People coming in and asking was I better, and no I wasn’t better. Was I going to die, no, probably not. Could I fucking hurry it up then please.” He smiles, sits up straight, and fishes in his pocket for a toothpick. “I was lying there thinking, who’s this bloke they’re talking about? Why the fuck won’t he do his job?”

Arthur smiles, very slightly.

“I was supposed to be this bluff, hale young man.” Eames chews the toothpick, grinning. “Young Turk, you know? Rich as Midas, made out of gold. And I looked like a corpse. All my clothes were hanging off me.”

“Sounds like fun.”

“Oh, tons. They shoved me out the door the minute I could stand upright, and I was trying to be charming and posh, and remember who I was supposed to be. Sweating like a dog. Trying to talk my way through it.”

“So did it work?”

“Christ no.” Eames rolls the toothpick to the other side of his mouth. “I was made before I walked in. They ended up tossing me over the border and letting the SPF deal with me.”

Arthur pauses. “That sounds rough.”

“That’s another story.” Not one he’s going to tell now, especially given the comparison he’s drawing with Arthur’s condition. “The point is, I got better. And it’s not that bad, whatever you’ve got. Orner’ll figure it out.”

Arthur watches him for a long moment. Eames keeps his eyes on the road, and chews on his toothpick.

“Okay,” Arthur says at last, looking away out his window. “Thanks.”

 

 

“The condition you’re describing,” Orner says, “does not exist.”

Eames, leaning against a steel storage locker with his arms crossed, the toothpick chewed to a frayed end, says nothing. Neither does Arthur, who’s sitting on Orner’s examining table with his shirt off, looking thin as a welterweight under the flickering fluorescent light. Orner’s behind Arthur, listening to his lungs with a stethoscope that, judging by Arthur’s flinch, has come straight from a freezer.

They’re in a tiny, grungy exam room, behind a stale strip mall office that Orner seems to keep for dubious purposes. On one side is a nail salon, on the other a taco joint. The parking lot was almost empty when they pulled in, and at first Eames thought they had the address wrong. Then he saw Orner’s SUV—with the plates that read BESTMD—and caught Arthur’s grimace.

It’s the same expression Arthur is wearing now, staring at the wall while Orner moves the stethoscope around on his skin.

“What’s this?” Orner asks, tapping Arthur’s lower back. Arthur twists to look, and Orner grabs his shoulder to straighten him out. “Hold still.”

“It’s…nothing,” Arthur says. Orner frowns, makes a shushing gesture with his free hand. Arthur purses his lips and stares at his feet.

“This from last night?” Orner asks, staring at Arthur’s back. It takes Eames a moment to realize the question is directed at him. He hesitates, then walks around the table and glances at Arthur’s back. Orner’s got a finger in the middle of a welter of red bruises, where Eames had his knee the night before.

He nods. “Probably, yeah.” When he goes back to the locker, he catches Arthur watching him closely, with that particular intent expression he gets when he’s assimilating information. He doesn’t remember the details, apparently. “The wrists, too.”

“I’m not there yet,” Orner says. “Cough.”

Arthur coughs obediently, for what feels like minutes on end, while Orner moves the stethoscope around. Then he takes the plugs from his ears, walks around to face Arthur—the room is so small Eames has to move over by the door to allow him space—and picks up his hands. He examines the wrist bruises, the mark of the cannula. He takes a light from his pocket and shines it in Arthur’s eyes. He studies the carpet burn and the scrape on Arthur’s forehead.

“Fugue state,” he says in a musing tone, and taps Arthur’s chin. Arthur does nothing, and Orner taps him again, harder. “Open up.”

Arthur opens his mouth, and Orner uses a ballpoint pen to depress his tongue. He pokes around inside until Arthur pulls back, gagging. Then he clicks off the light, wipes the pen on his trouser leg, and puts it back in his pocket with a shrug.

“Nothing wrong with him that I can see.”

“Then why—“ Arthur has to pause to swallow, his throat working. “Why am I passing out?”

“I didn’t say there wasn’t anything wrong with you,” Orner says, taking a sealed hypodermic and a length of dirty rubber tubing from a drawer. “Just nothing I can see.” He grabs Arthur’s arm from behind, and Arthur jumps. Orner ignores it, cinching the tube. “Make a fist.”

Arthur makes a fist, and Orner leans over his arm, flicking his inner elbow.

“Any theories?” Eames asks, watching Orner rub Arthur’s vein to prominence. “Seen anything like this before?”

Orner looks up at him, letting the pause draw out as if to emphasize how stupid he finds the question. “Like I said, the condition you’re describing doesn’t exist.”

He goes back to the vein, and Arthur looks at Eames over the top of his head. Eames meets his gaze.

“IV drug use?” Orner asks. Arthur shakes his head. Orner waits pointedly, until Arthur says, “No.”

“Sex with men?”

Arthur colors. Eames says quietly, “I thought they didn’t ask that sort of thing anymore.”

“Who’s ‘they’?” Orner asks, without turning. He pops the needle from its wrapping and checks the tip. “I ask what I need to know. If you’re out there filling your blood vessels with every virus available, that’s going to affect my diagnosis.”

“No unprotected sex,” Arthur says. “No IV drugs, no blood transfusions.”

“Well, well,” says Orner. “Don’t you just know all the questions before I ask them.” He pushes the needle into Arthur’s vein. Arthur’s lips compress. “Maybe you should diagnose yourself.”

They’re silent while he draws the blood. He doesn’t offer Arthur cotton or a bandage, just pulls the needle out and leaves it to him to slap two fingers over the hole.

“I’ll send this to my lab,” he says, scribbling on the vial label with a Sharpie. “It’ll be self-pay, but I’ll cover it for you for now. I’ll let you know the balance.”

“Okay.” Arthur lifts his fingers, checks the hole, then presses on it again. “Thanks.”

“Schizophrenia in the family?” Orner’s still bending over the tube, checking his notes. Eames clears his throat.

“I’ll be out front.”

“No you won’t,” Orner says. “Because he’s intermittently violent and if he’s going to stab anyone with a scalpel, it’s going to be you. All right?”

There’s silence.

“Schizophrenia in the family?” Orner says again. Arthur stares at the steel locker in front of him.

“No.”

“Bi-polar, MPD?”

“No.”

“Depression, anxiety, alcoholism?”

Arthur hesitates. Eames feels a flush of embarrassment. For Arthur, for himself. It’s one thing to run a background on someone, to know that their mother was in and out of mental care hospitals for years, with half a dozen different diagnoses and never any resolution. It’s another to stand in the corner while he tells it to his doctor.

“Some,” Arthur says, in a hedging tone. “I don’t think it’s relevant.”

“I’ll decide what’s relevant,” Orner says. “And I’ll tell you when to put that back on.”

Arthur, in the middle of pulling his shirt back over his head, stops. Carefully, he takes it off again and heaps it on the counter beside his leg. His skin, Eames notices, has gone goose-fleshed. It’s not that cold in the room.

“Mental illness,” Orner says, “is often hereditary. And it can lie latent for years. You’re thirty-one?”

Arthur nods.

“Late for onset,” Orner says, “but not impossible. No one knows what effect dreamwork has on the mind, not really. It’s a wonder you’re not all in the loony bin after a couple of years, in my opinion.”

“Your professional opinion,” Eames says, unable to stop himself.

“My professional opinion,” Orner says. “Any hallucinations?”

“No.”

“So what were you thinking when you tried to shoot Eames?”

Arthur blanches. He looks at Eames, then quickly away. “I…don’t remember.”

Orner taps the Sharpie against his chin. “What about when you tried to escape?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know or you don’t remember?”

“I don’t…neither.”

“Hm.” Orner tosses the syringe into the trash, drops the blood vial into his pocket, and walks over to the table. “Pants off.”

Arthur takes a breath. “Look—“

“I’ve seen it before, I’ll see it again. Off.”

Arthur gives Eames a hopeless look over Orner’s shoulder, then clenches his jaw and starts on his belt. Eames looks at the ceiling. There’s a moment of silence, then a sort of thumping sound.

“Is this what you’re talking about?” Orner asks. “With the fainting?”

Arthur’s lying in a pile on the dirty linoleum floor, almost on Orner’s feet.

 

 

“I want to see him again,” Orner says through the window of his SUV. “As soon as I get the bloodwork back. And call me if anything changes. If he has another fugue spell—“ His phone buzzes and he pauses to check it, frowns, and pockets it again. “Keep track of the details.”

“Details?”

“If he says anything, or does anything new. Seems to want to go anywhere in particular. And if there’s any obvious trigger.”

“There wasn’t last time.” Eames rubs his mouth, looking back over his shoulder at his own car, where Arthur waits in the passenger seat, staring straight ahead through the windshield. “He just went down and came up swinging.”

“That’s why I’m asking you to pay attention to the details,” Orner says, with elaborate simplicity. “You’re a forge, aren’t you? You’re supposed to know how to do that.”

Eames bites back a reply about what doctors are supposed to know how to do. “Well, what do I do with him in the meantime, then?”

“Do with him?” Orner gazes at him in surprise. “Park him in front of the TV, stick a potted palm on his head. I don’t care.”

“No, I mean—is there someone else…somewhere I can take him?” It feels low to ask it, but somehow, without meaning to, he seems to have become Arthur’s de facto guardian. It’s not a role he wants, no one he’s suited for. When he booked the flight from New York he thought he’d drop in, connect some dots, make sure Arthur was in decent-enough hands, and bugger off again. He likes Arthur well enough, in a backward kind of way. He respects Arthur’s work. But he didn’t imagine himself entangled in Arthur’s medical mystery, or charged with tending Arthur, alone, for what looks like the foreseeable future..

Orner’s still staring at him, looking exasperated. “Does he have a girlfriend? Or…a boyfriend, or whatever?” He sounds impatient with the idea. “Some kind of family?”

Eames shakes his head.

“Well that’s fucking pathetic,” Orner says, looking over at the car. Eames experiences a strange moment of doubled emotion. On the one hand, he feels a rueful recognition that it is sort of pathetic, to be so alone. At the same time, he feels an irritated indignation on Arthur’s behalf. Arthur is many things—precise, literal, obstinate, occasionally so unbelievably dull and pragmatic that teasing him feels obligatory—but he’s not pathetic.

Also, Orner is a colossal prick.

“You could hire someone, I guess,” Orner says. “He has money?”

“And what if he gets violent again?”

“Hire a ninja nursemaid, then. It’s L.A., for Christ’s sake, there are probably dozens of them out there. This is not my problem.” Orner’s phone buzzes again and he checks it with gritted teeth. “Just tell him to keep his phone turned on, so I can call him when I have the results.”

He pulls out, leaving Eames standing under the hot sun, sweating into his collar and the armpits of his shirt.

Arthur says nothing when Eames gets back into the car. The engine’s on, the air conditioning’s running full blast. It’s blessedly cool.

“Just drop me at the hotel,” Arthur says after a minute. “I’ll take it from here.”

“Not fucking likely,” says Eames, putting it in drive.

 

 

“No,” Arthur says, for what feels like the hundredth time. “I’m serious.”

“He’d want to know.”

“Sure, and I’ll tell him some other time. When it’s over. I’m not calling him in to fix it.”

“He might know something helpful to do.”

“Like what, breathe into a paper bag? He’s not a doctor.”

“He’s been in the business longer than you have.”

“That doesn’t mean shit. Orner’s been in it forever, he doesn’t know what this is.”

“Orner’s a crap doctor and he hasn’t been in the field for years.”

Arthur flexes his blood-draw arm and grimaces. “Still.”

“I appreciate your not wanting to trouble him—“

“It’s not that I don’t want to trouble him, it’s that he’s out of the business—“

“But I think he’d want to know.”

“Eames.” Arthur settles himself more firmly into the corner of his seat, against the passenger door. “This is not the first time I’ve stumbled into some shit, all right? If I called Cobb every time I broke a nail I’d have him in a revolving door.”

“You called me.” Eames glances over to see how Arthur will take this. Arthur takes it by opening his mouth, then shutting it abruptly. “I’m just saying,” Eames goes on. “If it’s all right to call me, why isn’t it all right to call Cobb? I’m not a bloody doctor either, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“I’m sorry I called you,” Arthur says. “I don’t remember doing it, I don’t know why I did it—“

“I’m not angry, I’m just saying—“

“I called Yusuf because he’s a chemist, and Orner because he’s a doctor,” Arthur says. “If I called you, I must have been confused.”

“You knew it was me, though.” Eames keeps his eyes on the road. “You said my name.”

“I probably said a lot of things. I probably called a lot of people.”

“Did you check your phone?”

Arthur says nothing.

“Just me then,” Eames says.

“I’m sorry,” Arthur says. “Can we let this go?”

“You needed someone you could trust,” Eames says. “And you wouldn’t call Cobb. So I was next in line.”

Arthur stares out the windshield.

“I’m not angry,” Eames says. “I’m flattered, honestly. But this thing about not calling Cobb—“

“He’s got kids,” Arthur says, for the hundredth time. “What don’t you get about that?”

“But just calling him, that’s all. Because really, Arthur—“ Eames glances over again, and decides what the hell. “If you run out and throw yourself under a bus or something, and he might have been able to help, don’t you think he’ll be annoyed?”

Arthur looks out his window, and when he looks back there’s a flat, humorless smile on his lips. “Throw myself under a bus? Really?”

“Well, God forbid and all that—“

“You’ve done my background, right?” Arthur says. “You know all that stuff about my mom.”

Eames says nothing.

“Yeah,” says Arthur. “Then you should know, you can’t give me a guilt trip I haven’t had.” He shakes his head and laughs. “Throw myself under a bus. Jesus Christ.”

“Have it your way.”

“Just drop me at the hotel.”

And that, Eames thinks sourly, as they inch through traffic, is exactly where they started this conversation.

 

 

It’s another struggle to get Arthur to let him come back up to the room, and Eames only wins because he’s left his bag there. For some reason Arthur seems to think that having been to see Orner means he’s cured, and Eames can fuck off. Or maybe he just wants Eames to fuck off.

“Arthur,” Eames says, feeling very tired. “Please see reason.”

“You’ve already been here two days. Last time I checked, you had a life.” Arthur’s at the bar, pouring a glass of water to go with his Tylenol.

“You’re checking up on my life,” Eames says, letting his head fall back onto the armchair. “I’m flattered.”

“Go, already.”

“I don’t want to go,” Eames says, even though he does want to go. He wants very much to go, to be shut of this whole mess, to be able to stop worrying and get a decent night’s sleep and breezily assume that this will all end well without him.

At the same time, he can’t quite see it. Leaving Arthur alone to cope with Orner, to sit around wondering when he’s going to fall down next, or where he’s going to wake up.

“You can’t just move in,” Arthur says. “I’m not under house arrest.”

Eames pinches the bridge of his nose.

“I’m kicking you out,” Arthur tells him. “Thank you for coming. I appreciate it, and I’ll try to make it up sometime.”

Eames gets up and walks to the spare bed, sits down on it, and takes off his shoes. Arthur watches him, his cheeks coloring.

“I’m not going,” Eames says. “Not yet, anyway. Also, I’m very tired and I’m going to take a nap. Please try not to kill me in my sleep.”

“Eames.” Arthur sounds edgy. “Seriously. You can’t stay here.”

“I’m a light sleeper. Stay clear of the bed and we’ll be fine.”

“Eames.”

Eames doesn’t answer. He isn’t lying; he is a light sleeper when he needs to be. He also thinks there’s only a small chance Arthur will come after him with a length of pipe. The last time, Arthur didn’t seem hostile so much as panicked. Which was understandable, almost, if he’d woken up trapped in the small space between the chairs and sofa, with a strange man grabbing at him. The gun had been self-defense, and then he’d tried to run.

If he comes to in a room with a strange man sleeping on a bed nearby, Eames hopes he won’t feel quite so threatened.

He pretends to sleep for a few minutes, listening carefully to what Arthur does. Arthur drinks his water, checks his phone. Paces a little, by the window. Finally he goes to the other bed and lies down. Figuring, maybe, that he’s less threat if he’s asleep. Which may be true.

Just a quick nap, Eames thinks. Everything’s better after a few hours of sleep.

 

 

He wakes up in darkness, and it takes him a few seconds to remember: Los Angeles, the Wilshire. He only meant to sleep a couple of hours. But he hasn’t slept at all since New York, and his body doesn’t take that kind of abuse as well as it once did.

He finds the light on the nightstand, clicks it on, and sees Arthur curled on the other bed. That’s a relief, at least—he hasn’t let Arthur go running off into the night. The clock reads a little past eight pm. Eames sits up and runs a hand through his hair, over his face. He wants a shower and a steak, in that order.

When he looks up, he sees that Arthur’s woken up too. He’s watching Eames closely, and there’s something about his expression that rings a warning bell. Eames sits up a little straighter, feeling wary.

After a moment, Arthur rolls onto his back and extends his arm into the space between the beds. He keeps his eyes on Eames’s face. He’s holding out his hand, Eames realizes. And smiling. Just a little smile, a sort of quirk at the corner of his mouth, but it’s in his eyes too. He looks happy.

Eames has only seen Arthur look happy a few times—after jobs have gone well, when they’ve all been paid and nobody’s been hurt, when the pressure’s off for a little while. The rest of the time, when he’s working, he looks grim. Irritated, preoccupied. If he jokes, he does it economically. His sense of humor skews cynical.

He doesn’t look cynical now. Squinting a little in the light from the nightstand, he looks years younger, almost like a different person. He twitches the fingers of his extended hand, an obvious invitation.

For one irrational moment, Eames considers putting his own hand out. Letting himself be pulled into Arthur’s bed, as a kind of counterpoint to the way he’s been pulled into Arthur’s problems. It’s a ridiculous thought.

Then he thinks of Orner in the parking lot. Keep track of details. If he says anything, or does anything new.

“Arthur,” he says. “Are you...feeling all right?”

Arthur looks at him for a minute, his brow furrowing. He sits up in the bed, swings his feet to the floor, and drops to his knees on the carpet, between Eames’s legs. Eames leans back instinctively.

“Hold on.”

He’s afraid of several things: that Arthur’s going to tiger-crawl up onto him, that Arthur’s going to crack into a sudden rage and punch him in the balls. That Arthur’s going to come to his senses here, right here, on the floor in front of Eames’s fly. He’d almost rather be punched in the balls, than try to explain that situation.

Arthur doesn’t do any of those things. He sits back on his heels, his eyes on Eames’s face. He looks sober and attentive, more than anything else.

“I don’t think you’re yourself right now,” Eames says. Carefully, he pulls his feet up onto the bed and crosses his legs. It’s not a good position to fight from, but it’s the best he can manage. “I think you’re...confused.”

“Confused how?” Arthur says. His voice sounds normal, just a little slow. “I feel fine.”

“Do you?” Eames studies Arthur’s face. His eyes have a sort of intense openness. Most people don’t let that kind of thing show through, they hide it behind layers. Arthur is a master of layers. “Do you know where you are right now?”

“On the floor of a room in the Wilshire Grand,” Arthur says. “Room 1268. It has a good entry, there’s an alcove. Why?”

“Do you know why you’re here? Why you switched from the Standard?”

Arthur frowns, and for a moment his eyes lose their intent focus on Eames’s face. He looks lost, confused. Then his face sharpens again. “I didn’t like the sheets.” He smiles, bringing out a dimple in his cheek.

“You weren’t well,” Eames tells him. “You’ve been ill for a few days. Since the job with Hood and Matthews.”

Arthur shakes his head. “It doesn’t matter.”

“It does matter. Do you remember anything about the job? Anything unusual?”

Arthur rises up off his heels, and puts his palms on Eames’s knees. He wraps his fingers around Eames’s thighs. His palms are warm and firm.

“Arthur,” Eames says, shifting backward. “You’re not well.”

“I told you, I feel fine.”

“Tell me about the job. Did something happen?”

Arthur takes a deep, patient breath. “Nothing happened. It was fine. I’m fine.” He leans forward across the bed, slides his hands up Eames’s legs and palms his lower back. “It’s good to see you.”

With a distinct sense of the wheels coming off, Eames tries on a smile. “So why did you call me, exactly?”

Arthur pauses, and looks at him as if he’s stupid. “Why the hell wouldn’t I call you?” He gets a knee up on the bed, slings his other leg across Eames’s lap, and nuzzles his neck. “You need a shower.”

“Right, I should—“

“Later.” Arthur lifts his head and kisses Eames’s jaw. His lips are warm and soft. Eames tries to move his head away without seeming to be panicking. Then Arthur says, in a clear continuation of his thoughts: “Because I love you. Asshole.”

Eames sits very still, while Arthur runs a palm across his chest and up, gently, the side of his throat to his cheek, where he applies a little pressure to turn Eames’s head. Arthur’s mouth is soft, his tongue is warm and wet against Eames’s lips. Eames registers it all blankly, in a uselessly detailed kind of way. He doesn’t kiss Arthur back. After a minute, Arthur realizes it and pulls away.

“What?”

Eames blinks, then shakes his head. “Nothing. Sorry. I’m a little jetlagged, I think.” He smiles apologetically, and eases his legs off the bed. “I thought, dinner.”

Arthur raises his eyebrows, but doesn’t stop Eames from standing up. Sitting on the rumpled bed in his torn T-shirt, his hair falling out of its combed lines, he looks young and unfamiliar.

“You’re sure about the job,” Eames says. “Nothing strange about it.”

Arthur shakes his head. “Nothing.”

“What about after?” Eames steps away from the bed, toward the bar. “Where did you go when it was finished?”

“Why are you so fixated on this job?”

“Just think. After it was over, anything odd then?”

This time Arthur hesitates. It’s small, but Eames sees it. “What?”

“Nothing.” Arthur shakes his head again. “I came to the…to the Standard. Then here.”

“You remember how you got there?”

“What are you saying? That this is a dream?” Arthur sounds amused, but there’s an edge to it. “Should I check my totem?”

“No. Just tell me how you got to the hotel.”

Arthur says nothing. He’s not smiling anymore.

“Arthur. I think it’s important.”

“I don’t.”

“You think that’s normal, not being able to remember what you did two days ago?”

“I think you should back off.”

“Something happened, didn’t it? With Hood and Matthews?”

Arthur’s face has gone flat and still. Bizarrely, Eames finds it comforting—this is the Arthur he knows. This is the Arthur who drags drugged men into warehouses and executes their projections until he gets what he wants.

“Eames,” he says. “Back off.”

“I’m trying to help you. I’m trying to figure out why the hell you’re blacking out like this, attacking people and climbing all over me—“

Arthur’s face freezes. He flips off the bed and starts for the door. Eames grabs him before he gets three steps, keeping his head back so he doesn’t get clocked, but this time Arthur doesn’t go berserk. He twists to shove Eames away, but doesn’t follow up with a punch.

“Arthur,” Eames says, after the initial surge of nerves has passed through him. “What are you doing?” Arthur shoves him again, but Eames grabs hold of the waist of his trousers and yanks him back. “Stop it, will you? For Christ’s sake.”

Arthur stands still, panting. He’s more out of breath than he should be, and he’s started to sweat. He looks at Eames’s hand on his trousers, then at Eames. His face is white.

“What--?” he says. Eames lets him go. Then, when Arthur starts to crumple, Eames catches him and shoves him back onto the bed.

Arthur lies flat out on his back, his arms thrown loosely askew, sweat soaking the T-shirt to his belly. Eames stands watching him until he sees Arthur’s eyelids twitch and flutter. He goes to the bar and has a slug of whiskey, straight from the bottle.

 

 

“Hang on.”

There’s some complicated noise at the far end, a clattering sound and some cursing. In the far background, a child shrieks. “Phillipa?” Cobb puts the phone to his mouth again and says hurriedly, “Hang on, just a minute.” Then the receiver’s muffled, and all Eames can hear is the muted sound of Cobb calling to someone who must be at the other end of the house. There’s some exchange, Cobb listening and then calling again.

“Sorry,” he says, back again. “It’s just, the nanny’s about to leave.”

“Bad timing,” Eames says. “I’ll try again later.”

“No, it’s okay. It’s fine.” The sound changes at Cobb’s end—he’s gone into a separate room. No more background noises. “Okay. Something about Arthur?”

Eames looks at his glass, sitting on the coffee table in front of him. It’s mostly ice, just the dregs of two fingers of whiskey left in it now. He shouldn’t be drinking, but he feels it’s his fucking due at this point.

Arthur’s in the shower. When he came to on the bed, Eames told him a highly edited version of events. They’d had another scrap, not as serious. A little shoving, that’s all. Really nothing.

“He’s not well,” Eames says. “He’s having…I don’t know what to call it, exactly. I took him to Ed Orner, who’s calling it fugue.”

Cobb’s silent for a second. Then he says, “So…memory loss?”

“Right. Basically he’s having spells, and then later he doesn’t remember them.”

“What kind of spells?”

Eames rubs his mouth. It would be easy to spill it all, to tell Cobb about the gun and the punches, the panic, the disorientation. Maybe not the part about Arthur being in love with him. But the rest of it, he could make it sound bad enough to get Cobb off his ass and down here to take over. It is bad enough. And after all the years Arthur spent organizing Cobb’s life, surely Cobb owes him something.

It would be easy, and it would be a relief. He could walk away from the whole thing, and never tell Arthur about the pass on the bed.

It would be a huge relief.

“Not so bad,” he says, glancing at the bathroom door. “Just small stuff, but you know Arthur, he worries over every little detail.”

“Small stuff…what, like conversations?”

“Mm.”

“Side effect from the mix?”

“Doesn’t seem likely. He checked the numbers on the last job he did, before he went in. Orner’s doing bloodwork to be sure.”

“Good.” There’s a bang at the other end, as of a door slamming somewhere. Thinly, a child starts to wail. “Listen, can I call you back?”

“Better not. He doesn’t want you trying to fix things.”

“But you think I should.”

“I think—“ Eames pauses, staring at his glass. “I think it’s under control. I just thought you’d want to know.”

“Okay. Good. I mean, thanks.” Cobb clears his throat. “I’ll give him a call in a few days, maybe. I won’t mention you called.”

“Right.”

“Tell me if things change,” Cobb says. “I can come down. I just need a day to get a sitter organized.”

Eames smiles mirthlessly at his glass. “Right, will do.”

He hangs up as the shower shuts off. When Arthur comes out of the bathroom five minutes later, shaved and washed and still wearing his wretched T-shirt, he’s watching football on TV.

“Who was that on the phone?” Arthur asks, from the bathroom doorway.

“Next job,” Eames says, without looking away from the screen.

Arthur studies him for a minute, then goes back into the bathroom without saying anything else.

 

 

“Good news,” says Orner. “He’s chock-full of midazolam and dexmedetomidine, and his glucocorticoids are through the roof.”

Eames switches the phone to his other ear, and gestures for Arthur to turn the sound down on the television. Arthur mutes it, his eyes on Eames’s face. “And what’s all that when it’s at home?”

“Boyfriend got roofied,” Orner says.

“What’s he saying?” Arthur asks. “Put it on speaker.” Eames waves him off.

“How?”

“That’s not my department,” Orner says. “But chances are he won’t remember. I can tell you, whoever got hold of him had a field day. He’s rolling in residues. Hypnotics, analeptics, you name it. Plus a bunch of Frankenstein stuff that looks like Somnacin fucked every entactogen in the book. He’s lucky he’s still got a brainpan.”

“All right,” Eames says, getting up and walking away from the couch. Arthur glares, but he ignores it. “So what do we do about it?”

“We, huh?” Orner laughs. “I guess you’re the official babysitter after all.”

“Jesus Christ,” Arthur says. “Could I talk to him, please?” Eames holds up one finger—just a minute.

“Well,” Orner says, “I don’t think dialysis would catch half this garbage. You could do a full transfusion, but it’s risky. I wouldn’t.”

“What else?”

“How the hell should I know? I told you what you wanted to know—he was drugged. Check him for injection sites and be happy it’s not schizophrenia.”

“I am,” says Eames. “Extremely. Can you send the lab report?”

“Sure. But it’s not going to do you much good at this point.”

“And can you say—“ Eames glances back at Arthur, who’s watching him closely. “What about the effects? The symptoms, I mean. If you had to guess.”

Orner grunts. “You’re seeing them. He’s alternating paranoid fugue with good old-fashioned fainting spells. Frankly, there’s so much crap in there I’m surprised he hasn’t jumped off a building.”

“Is that likely?”

“Like I said, I don’t even know what half this shit is. If he’s not suicidal yet, he probably won’t get there. But you never know. His judgment’s way off, reality perception’s unreliable, he’s got exaggerated responses, disorientation, mood swings.” Orner sounds like he’s listing off his fingers. “Or hey, with all that methylenedioxymethamphetamine in there, maybe he’ll just bliss out and try to rub your shoulders.”

“Sorry, methyl—“

“Ecstasy. Tweaked, in this case. Usually he’d have flushed it by now, but the whole package is sticking around longer than it should. Part of the mystery.” Orner’s phone clicks. “I’ve got the other line. Check the leg veins—that’s what I was going to do when he passed out in the exam room. I’ll send the report. And the bill.”

“Thanks.” Eames hangs up and turns to find Arthur staring at him. “He had to go.”

Arthur takes a deep, frustrated breath, lets his head hang for a second, then squares his shoulders and looks up. “Okay. What did he say?”

“That you’ve got a full chemist’s in your bloodstream.” Eames puts the phone down and stands back, rubbing his jaw, thinking about Ecstasy. “It explains a few things, at least.”

Arthur sits back in the couch. “A full…” He shakes his head. “That’s not possible.”

“According to the bloodwork it is.”

“Then he screwed up the bloodwork. I’d know if I took drugs, Eames.”

“Not if they were the right kind of drugs.”

Arthur stares at him, his hands loose on his knees.

“Two things,” Eames says. “One, Orner says check the leg veins for an injection site. And two, can you remember how you got to the Standard?”

For a minute Arthur does nothing. Then he stands up and walks into the bathroom, closing the door behind him. Eames sits down to wait. After a couple of minutes, Arthur comes back out, buttoning his trousers.

“Right here,” he says, touching his left thigh, inside the knee.

Eames nods, and watches Arthur sit down opposite him.

“The job was fine,” he says. “No problems, nobody hurt. Nothing out of the ordinary.”

“You got paid.”

“I collected the payment, did the distribution. Everybody was happy. I was staying in town for a few days so I had a drink with Hood that night.”

“Just Hood? Not Matthews?”

Arthur nods, then pauses. He looks puzzled. “Yeah. Just Hood.”

There’s a pause. Finally Eames says, “Go on.”

“That’s it. We went to some place in Silver Lake. We had a drink, talked about the job—“ Arthur stops. He looks like he’s fishing for some memory, but can’t quite catch it.

“Did he come back to the hotel with you?” Eames asks. Hood’s young, good-looking. It’s possible.

Arthur gives Eames a quick look. “No. At least, I…don’t think so.”

“You don’t think so?”

“I don’t know.” Arthur’s expression is bewildered. “I thought I remembered all this. I was sure.”

“It’ll come back.” Eames has no idea if it actually will, but it’s something to say. “Do you remember leaving the bar?”

“No.”

“Going there?”

“Yeah. I remember parking was a bitch.” Arthur laughs without amusement. “That’s just about my last solid memory, trying to park in L.A.”

“What then?”

Arthur shakes his head. “Work talk. He wanted advice. On something…” He frowns. “I can’t remember.”

Eames props his head on his hand. “Why wasn’t Matthews there?”

“Hood didn’t ask him.”

“So was it a date?”

“Come on.”

“Did he think it was a date?”

“No. He’s got a fiancée.”

“So why didn’t he ask Matthews?”

“They don’t really get along.” Arthur grinds his palms into his eyes, leaning back into the couch. “It doesn’t make any sense. Hood’s a good kid. If anything he’s too good. He’s a keener. Why would he roofie me?”

“Maybe he didn’t. Maybe it was someone else.”

“I don’t know about you,” Arthur says, “but I don’t think I have a lot of enemies lurking in L.A. bars.”

“But you don’t remember whether Hood came back to the hotel with you.”

“I think—“ Arthur looks pensive. “I feel like no, he couldn’t have. I mean, why the hell would he?”

“Just because a man has a fiancée...”

“Not Hood. And Jesus, not me.”

“He’s not married yet.”

“I don’t fuck engaged guys, I don’t fuck twenty-three year-olds, I don’t fuck guys I work with. I wouldn’t fuck Hood if he fell under me. Okay?”

“Why not?”

Arthur gives Eames a hard look. “I didn’t fuck him. Can we let that idea go?”

“I’m just saying, you don’t remember if he came back with you. Which points to something.”

“Okay. But not that. Something else.” Arthur steeples his fingers and presses his forehead into them. “We were at the bar, we were talking…” He’s silent for a long moment. “Shit.” He leans back, rubbing his hands down his thighs. “What kind of drugs are we talking about, exactly?”

“Orner’s sending the lab results. He seemed…impressed.”

“That doesn’t sound good.”

“I can’t remember half of what he said, to be honest.” Eames gets up, stretching his sore ribs. “But it sounded as if whoever mixed it up had both training and resources.”

“I want Yusuf to look at the labs.”

“I expect he’ll tell us the same thing.”

“I’m not asking.”

Eames pauses, and looks at Arthur until Arthur drops his gaze.

“Sorry. I guess I’m a little...off.”

“No you’re not. You’re always a bossy, officious prick.”

“You can go any time.”

“I think I’ll hang around a bit longer, see what happens.” Eames starts for the bathroom. “If you start feeling like you might fall over, give me a shout.”

“Why, so you can watch?”

Eames closes the door, starts the water, and stands with his hands on his hips, looking at himself in the mirror. Ecstasy, tweaked. Part of the mystery. He should be on his way to London by now. There are people he should see, things he should do. As Arthur said, he does have a life.

He checks the half-dozen messages on his phone, sighs, strips, and gets in the shower. Has a dutiful wank that turns, in its final stages and against his will, into something different. Into Arthur’s hands on his thighs, his legs straddling Eames’s hips. His lips, warm and gentle. His voice in Eames’s ear, soft and startling. I love you. Asshole.

When he’s done he scrubs himself down mercilessly with the face cloth, then steals Arthur’s razor off the counter and shaves in the steam. He’s got twice Arthur’s beard, the blade’s destroyed when he’s done. It gives him a bit of satisfaction.

 

 

Arthur spends the afternoon going through paper files and emails from the job, obsessively revisiting every detail, looking for a clue. It doesn’t seem to get him very far. At last he lies back on the bed, surrounded by paper, and stares a furious hole through the ceiling.

“Cheer up,” Eames tells him, from the couch. He’s eating peanuts and watching footie, pretending not to be irritated by any of this. “Sounds like it’ll wear off eventually.”

“Eventually,” Arthur says. “What the fuck does that mean?”

“Don’t ask me. I’m just the bellboy.” After an obnoxiously long argument, Arthur finally allowed Eames to go down to the garage to get some of his things from the car. It was an opportunity to snoop, at least. Disappointingly, Arthur’s rental car betrayed nothing about him except that he chewed wintergreen gum and pushed his seat too far forward.

“I’m going to sleep,” Arthur says, still staring at the ceiling. “And when I wake up, I seriously hope you’re gone.”

“Hope is a feathered thing.”

“Hope is a thing with feathers.” Arthur turns over, punches his pillow as if he’s trying to subdue it, and lies still.

Eames watches television for a while, then starts answering messages on his phone. He’s in the middle of a text to Lani when the room phone rings. He reaches backward over the arm of the couch and picks it up, expecting to hear the front desk.

Instead, there’s silence. He hasn’t said hello yet--long-time habit, don’t identify yourself if you don’t know who’s on the other end--and neither has the other party. Instead, he can hear the faint sound of background traffic. Whoever it is, they’re calling from the street.

He checks his watch--another habit. It’s four fifty-three. While he’s noting it, he hears something else on the other end of the line. A siren passes in the distance. It’s not American. It has a nasal, singsong quality--French, or German.

“Hello,” he says, hoping to jog things. The line cuts off.

He holds the receiver away from his face and looks at it, then looks over at the bed. Arthur’s still lying on his back but he’s propped on his elbows, frowning.

“Expecting a call?” Eames hangs up. “Nobody there.”

Arthur’s eyes narrow, and for a moment Eames thinks he’s working the problem. Then he notices the particular flavor of Arthur’s gaze--the suspicion, the tightness. He feels a sinking sensation.

“Arthur,” he says. Thinking, Christ, not again. “Do you know where you are?”

Arthur says nothing. His lips have thinned to a flat line. Keeping his eyes on Eames, he sits up and swings his legs over the edge of the bed.

“Please don’t make a run for it,” Eames says. He tries to keep his body language casual, non threatening. “I just got comfortable.”

Arthur hesitates.

“You’re in Los Angeles,” Eames says patiently. “At the Wilshire Hotel.”

“I know what the Wilshire is.”

“Fine. You had trouble on your last job, you were drugged. You’ve having...” Eames tries to remember what Orner called them. “Fugue states.”

Arthur’s neck and shoulders are rigid. “I was drugged,” he repeats. “Who drugged me?”

“Don’t know.”

“Why?”

“Don’t know.”

Arthur chews on that, looking tenser with every passing moment. Like it’s costing him hugely just to sit there, to not break and run. He’s trying to think it through. Eames sits and watches him do it.

“Why are you here?” Arthur says at last, and the look he turns on Eames is probably supposed to be hostile but it just looks desperate. The look of a man adrift in chaos, clawing for order.

Eames sits up. “You called me,” he says, as gently as he can. Arthur’s started to shake, just a little. Muscle strain, probably. “Look--” There isn’t much he can say. “If I come over there, do you promise not to assault me?”

Arthur doesn’t say anything.

“Because I’m getting tired of our little squabbles,” Eames says. He smiles to take the edge off.

Arthur swallows, then nods.

“Good,” Eames says. He brushes peanut crumbs off his shirt, stands up, and walks around the couch to the bed. Arthur flinches, and for a moment it seems as if he’s going to bolt. Eames goes to the other bed, careful to leave an exit route clear. He sits down so that they’re facing each other.

“Okay,” he says, keeping his hands clearly visible, on the bedspread beside his legs.

“Now what?” says Arthur.

“I don’t know. You could have a nap, I suppose.”

“I mean, what are we doing?” Arthur’s terse, the words bitten out. When Eames gives him a questioning look, he says, “About this. About me being...about this.”

“I don’t think there’s much we can do. Orner’s sending the lab report.”

“I want to see it.”

“And see it you shall.” Eames tries again to smile. “I’m here to help, I promise.”

Arthur’s eyes narrow. “You don’t even like me.”

“Well--” Eames tries not to pause too egregiously. “Let’s not dwell on who likes whom.”

“Why would I call you?” Arthur rubs his palms down his trouser legs, probably to wipe away sweat. “Of all the people I know, why would I call you?”

Paranoid fugue, Orner had said. Eames tries not to sigh.

“We’re not friends. You’re not a chemist. Why wouldn’t I call Yusuf?”

“You did--”

“Orner looked at me?” Arthur’s talking faster now, his gaze slipping off Eames’s face and scanning the room. “Orner’s a quack. He’s paid more to keep his license than I make in a year. Why wouldn’t I call a real doctor?”

“I don’t think you--”

“Why didn’t I get out of town?” Arthur asks. He’s not talking to Eames at all anymore. He wipes his hands down his trouser legs again. “I hate L.A. I hate California. Why didn’t I get on a plane the minute I knew something was--” He turns and looks straight at Eames. “Where’s Hood?”

Eames, startled, takes a second to reorient himself. “Hood, your chemist. Do you remember something about him?”

Arthur stares at him for a moment, but his gaze is distracted, as if he’s seeing something else play out in front of Eames’s face. Then he jerks to his feet. Eames flinches. Arthur doesn’t seem to notice. He’s walking quickly--not to the door, Eames sees with relief, but to the bathroom. He opens the door, looks inside, then retraces his steps and stands on the carpet a few feet from the bed, wiping his hands on his trousers, looking distracted.

“John Hood,” Eames prompts. “He was your chemist on the last job. You went out for a drink after you did the distribution--”

“We came back here,” Arthur says. He’s pale, his face shiny with sweat. He looks at the carpet, at the bed. “I was there, I took my trousers off--” He points at the bed behind where Eames is sitting. “I was lying down--” He looks at Eames, distressed.

Eames takes a breath. “He’s not married yet.”

“No.” Arthur looks back at the bed. One hand plucks at the front of his T-shirt, where sweat has started to soak through the fabric. “Not...not like that. He had the PASIV.”

Eames frowns. “He put you under?”

Arthur nods. Then he shakes his head. He swallows and looks at Eames again, as if hoping Eames will provide the answer. “I don’t know.”

“You’ve got a hole in your leg. Someone stuck you with something.”

Arthur stares at Eames blankly. He’s started to wobble. “We set up in the bathroom,” he says. Licks his lips, stares at bed. “And did it here. It didn’t seem like a big deal at the time.”

“What didn’t?”

“Except for the needle,” Arthur says. “14 gauge. Fucking horse needle, Jesus.”

“You should sit down,” Eames says.

“I’m fine,” Arthur says, sounding practically normal: peevish and distracted. Then he crumples.

Eames sits looking at him. He sighs, stands up, and cracks his back. Hauling Arthur up from the floor is starting to feel familiar. Laying him out on top of the bed, likewise.

Except this time, Arthur’s eyes flutter open while Eames is still leaning over him. They’re face to face, close enough that Eames can feel the faint heat of Arthur’s breath.

“Hello,” he says.

“Hi,” Arthur says.

Eames starts to stand up, but Arthur puts up a hand and catches loose hold of his shirt. It’s not much of a grip--he could pull free if he tried. But he doesn’t. He puts his hands back on the cover beside Arthur’s shoulders, and waits.

“I called you,” Arthur says. He’s frowning again, but he doesn’t look panicked or angry. He looks as if he’s just remembered something strange about himself. Eames nods. “Why did you come?”

For a moment, Eames is caught without an answer. Why did he come? He could have ignored the whole thing. Written off the late-night phone call as a fluke, waited for someone else to fill him in on events in some casual conversation six months from now. Oh Arthur, hadn’t he heard, Arthur went mad on dope and threw himself into traffic on La Cienega. It’s always the quiet ones.

Arthur’s still holding onto his shirt. His face has more color in it now, and his eyelids look heavy. His eyes glassy. He’s starting to slip.

“Nothing better going on,” Eames says.

“We’re not friends,” Arthur says, but it sounds different this time.

“Not as such, no.”

“But you came.”

They look at each other for a long moment. Arthur’s eyes are dark, his eyelids falling. A smile curves the corner of his mouth. Eames is conscious, again, of Arthur’s breath on his face. The light, almost unconscious hold that Arthur has on him.

“You should go to sleep,” Eames says. Arthur’s eyes are already closed.

Carefully, Eames disengages himself. His back twinges when he stands up. It’s dark outside the windows now. He walks away from the bed, goes into the bathroom, and closes the door. Stands staring at himself in the mirror.

“Fuck,” he says.

 

 

Orner emails the lab report. Eames passes it on to Yusuf, dutifully copying Arthur despite the fact that Arthur is passed out on the queen bedspread. It’s Christ-o’clock in Mombasa, but half an hour later his phone rings.

“My God,” Yusuf says, without any greeting. “What kind of madness is Arthur practicing?”

Eames looks over at Arthur, who hasn’t stirred. “I have no idea. I’m the patsy in all this.”

“First off, Orner shouldn’t have let him walk out of the clinic. This is a very serious mixture. MKUltra-style stuff. You’ve got hallucinogens, psychedelics, sedatives--”

“You don’t have to tell me.”

“Did you know there’s Ecstasy in there?”

Eames rubs his eyes. “Little bit.”

“His labs look like they came out of some kind of horrible fraternity hazing ritual. Somnacin’s the least of it.”

“Right, but what do we do about it?”

“Well, you don’t let him walk out of your clinic with a pat on the shoulder.”

“And?”

Yusuf pauses. “He’ll probably flush it,” he says at last, sounding a little deflated at Eames’s failure to be suitably impressed. “When did it happen, do you know?”

“A few days ago.”

“And is he getting any better?”

Eames considers. The first fugue, when Arthur punched him and broke for the door--that hasn’t happened again. Neither has the tiger crawl, or the declaration of love. In general, Arthur’s fits seem to be getting, if not less disturbing, at least less aggressive. A little more in control of himself. “I think so.”

“Good. Give him a couple of days to work it out. The drugs, and the withdrawal. Then--” Yusuf’s tone goes dry. “Don’t let him shoot up any more mystery mix.”

“Fair enough.”

“But my God,” Yusuf says, and Eames can hear he’s smiling now. “Whoever the chemist is, I’d like to meet him.”

“My guess is Hood.” Eames looks at Arthur again--no movement. “I think it might have been something they did together.”

“You think Arthur took this mix on purpose?”

“Maybe.”

“What for?”

“No idea.”

Yusuf’s quiet for a moment. “Well,” he says at last, “if I had to guess at a legitimate use for it...” He trails off.

“Hard to think of one, really.”

“It could lower inhibitions, or increase suggestibility. But I don’t think of those as therapeutic outcomes, really. Not something Arthur would agree to beforehand.” There’s quiet on the line--Yusuf is thinking. “I did notice traces of something that looked like adenosine, which is interesting.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s not adenosine, it’s likeadenosine. Adenosine is a purine nucleoside made up of a molecule of adenine attached to--”

“Yusuf.”

“It’s a brain chemical. Whatever’s in the mix isn’t quite that, but it’s close.”

“What’s it for?”

“It could be a sedative--but there are already half a dozen sedatives in there.”

“And it’s the only thing you don’t recognize?”

“Everything else is horrible, but bog-standard, yes. That’s new. And it was built.” Yusuf pauses. “You think John Hood did this?”

“If he didn’t make it, he delivered it.”

“Hood’s a good man.”

“So everyone keeps telling me.” Eames checks his watch. “Go to bed, Yusuf.”

“I really should. Meena is already angry with me.”

“Go and face the music, then.”

He’s about to thumb the button when Yusuf says, “Wait--” He puts the phone back to his ear.

“I just thought,” Yusuf says. “Adenosine has some uses for depression. For severe cases, I think.”

“That sounds therapeutic.”

“Have you spoken with John Hood?”

“Not yet,” Eames says. “But I think I will.”

 

 

“Dinner with Takeshi Saito,” Lani says. Eames holds the phone away from his ear and looks at it. Then he puts it back to his mouth.

“You’re joking. Try again.”

“You already owe me for finding Hood and Matthews the first time.”

“So this is just an add-on. You already have the number.”

“And I will happily give it to you. In exchange for getting me onto Saito’s calendar. I’m not greedy, I’ll take lunch.”

“I doubt he eats it.”

“He can fit me in while he gets a manicure, then. Or a pedicure. I don’t care. I just want a face-to-face.”

Eames rubs his hand over his face. “I’m not trying to be difficult. Just injecting a little reality into our conversation.”

“I know you know him.”

“Not ‘know.’ We don’t go down the pub on Thursday nights. He’s the richest man in the world, he doesn’t associate with the likes of me. Or you.”

“Not the whole world, do your homework. I’ll take coffee. Ten minutes.”

“What you don’t understand is, I don’t know the man. And if I did, I wouldn’t squander my capital setting you up on a date with him.”

“I don’t want to date him, Jesus—I want to pitch him for a job.”

“Well, either way.”

“Though I guess if he wanted a date, I wouldn’t say no.”

“Good-bye, Lani.”

“Goddamn it. Fine. I’ll take—“ She thinks for a minute. “You’re doing that petroleum job with Neil next month, right? In Nigeria?”

“Hm.”

“Bring me in on that.”

He considers it. He’s not point, so it’s not his decision to make, but Neil’s a reasonable fellow. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“Full cut,” she says. “None of that latecomer-gets-ten-percent-less bullshit. If I get a low cut and I find out about it after the fact, I’ll set up a Neiman-Marcus account in your name and shop for platinum cock rings.”

“Text me the number,” he says. “I’ll let you know what Neil says.”

A minute after he hangs up, the number’s on his screen, with a 718 area code. He pauses to glance at the bed. Arthur’s still passed out. It’s gone eight o’clock, he’s been asleep for hours.

“Lucky sod,” Eames says, and dials Hood’s number.

It rings four times, long enough for him to resign himself to voice mail, before someone picks up. “Hello,” a man says. Hood, presumably. Eames has never spoken to him, doesn’t know his voice.

“I’m calling for Mr. Hood,” he says, keeping his tone light and easy. “On behalf of a mutual friend. Thomas Seares.”

There’s a pause. Then the other man’s voice comes quiet, close to the receiver. “Just a minute.” There’s some rustling, movement. A woman’s voice, sleepy and interrogatory. The man says something muffled, and there’s the sound of a door closing. When the man speaks again, he’s in another room. Somewhere smaller, by the sound of it.

“Who is this?”

“Who’s this?” Eames says, still friendly. “Pardon me for asking, but I like to be sure.”

“Hood.”

“Excellent. I’m a friend of Mr. Seares. Name of Hanrahan.”

“I’ve never heard of you.” Hood sounds distracted, nervous. And young—Eames is reminded that Hood is very young. “Put…put Mr. Seares on.”

“I’m afraid Mr. Seares is indisposed at the moment. But I thought you and I might have a chat.”

“About what?”

“I thought you might tell me. Our friend Mr. Seares is…” Eames looked at the bed again. “Unwell.”

There’s a pause. He can hear Hood breathing, a little unsteadily.

“You called the hotel,” Eames says, not because he’s sure but because he wants to see what effect this will produce. “But you didn’t like the sound of my voice, I suppose.”

Hood inhales—a dead giveaway. He’s startled, caught out. It was him, the call from Europe. “What did you say your name was?”

“Hanrahan,” Eames says. “And I should apologize for ringing you at such an early hour. Please apologize to your lady friend.”

There’s nothing for a moment, and he thinks he’s gone too far. Hood might take this as a threat, and hang up. When what Eames wants is to impress upon him his own inexperience and vulnerability, in order to start the faucets pouring. What he wants is to reach through the telephone line, take hold of young John Hood by the throat, and bash his head gently into the wainscoting until he talks.

Fortunately, Hood is made of at least slightly stern stuff. He doesn’t hang up. Instead he firms his voice and says, “What do you mean, unwell?”

“Ah,” Eames says. “Well, Mr. Seares seems to have developed some interesting blood chemistry.”

“Is he…” Hood swallows. “Is he all right?”

Eames says nothing. He counts slowly to five.

“Oh my—“ Hood starts, sounding horrified.

“He’ll live.”

“What does that mean?” Hood’s clearly panicking. “Is he…is he in the hospital or something?”

“No.”

“Well, can I talk to him? I’ve called him a hundred times but his voice mail is full—“

“He’s still unwell,” Eames says. “But you can talk to me. You can start by telling me why you stuck a horse needle into his leg and filled him full of street drugs.”

“What? I didn’t— I mean, it wasn’t like that.”

“What was it like?”

“He agreed. He said it would be fine, he’s built up a tolerance. And…we used a low dosage.”

Eames closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “This mixture,” he says. “What was it meant to do?”

Hood hesitates. “How do I know you are who you say you are?”

“Don’t be an idiot, I haven’t even said who I am. What was it meant to do?”

“I want to talk to Arth—to Mr. Seares.”

“That’s too bad, because he’s currently comatose. I don’t know how long you’ve worked in this profession, Mr. Hood, but Arthur’s been in it for some time. He’s known and respected, and if word were to slip that you pureed his brains with your homemade chemistry kit—“

“His brain?” Hood’s voice is a squeak. “What’s wrong with his brain?”

“Don’t know. What was the mix supposed to do?”

“Nothing. Nothing bad, I mean. It was just—“ Hood hesitates. Eames hears him walk a few feet, and lower his voice. “It was just something I’ve been working on. I didn’t twist his arm, I didn’t even ask him to do it. I wasn’t thinking he would—I just wanted to bounce some ideas off him.”

“Ideas about what?”

Hood takes a breath. “I’ve been working on a compound. I call it—it doesn’t matter. It’s structured similarly to adenosine, which is a purine nucleoside made up of a molecule of adenine attached to—“

“Mr. Hood.”

“It’s a brain chemical.”

“Of course it is,” Eames says. “Why did you stick it in Arthur’s leg?”

“I know it’s safe, I’ve been testing it on myself. I would never trial on someone else if I didn’t know that.” Hood sounds miserable. “I just can’t keep good records that way, and Arthur said he didn’t mind--“

“What happened when you tested it on yourself?”

“Nothing. I mean, the Somnacin works, I go into the dream, but that’s it. Well, I get a headache.”

“Arthur’s been having fugue states,” Eames says bluntly. “Doesn’t know where he is, doesn’t know who he is.”

Hood’s silent.

“Hello,” Eames says.

“I—“ Hood’s breathing hard. “I didn’t know about that. He was fine after we did the trial.”

“Define ‘fine.’”

“Fine, normal. He had a headache, but I always get that, so I didn’t think…” Hood trails off. “He went into the dream, I monitored him. Heart rate, BP, REM cycles, everything. Everything was normal. He woke up when I kicked him, and said he couldn’t remember what he’d dreamed. And he had a headache. That was it.”

“So you packed up your kit and left.”

“He seemed fine. And I had to meet—“ He stops. “I had to be here to meet someone. I had a plane to catch.”

“Hardly seems like good clinical practice, abandoning your subject like that.”

“He said he was fine. He was leaving too. I thought the whole thing was just another failure.”

“If your aim was to turn a man’s brains into scrambled egg, I’d say it was a success.”

“Jesus, look, I’m sorry. I didn’t know—“

“What was it supposed to do?” Eames asks again. During the short pause that follows, he studies Arthur’s body on top of the bed covers. Still no movement.

“My fiancée,” Hood says at last, quietly. “Is--has depression. It’s bad. She’s tried a hundred things, and nothing works. I thought maybe, if I combined Somnacin and the sedatives, and then tinkered a little with some of the other stuff—and then the mercy compound—“

“The what?”

“The Mercy compound,” Hood says, and this time Eames can hear the capital. “That’s what I’ve been calling the adenosine analogue.” He hesitates. “That’s her name. My fiancée. Mercy.”

Eames shuts his eyes and lets his head fall against the back of the chair.

“I’ll come back,” Hood says. “I’ll get the next flight. Is he still at the Wilshire? I can come straight there, I just need to book the ticket.”

Eames takes a deep breath. He’s very tired.

“I didn’t know,” Hood says. “I swear to God, I never saw anything like this happen before. And he didn’t tell me. It was supposed to be therapeutic. Lucid dreaming, plus the chemical cocktail—it was supposed to kick the brain into a new groove, sort of.”

“Yes,” Eames says. His voice sounds remote even to him. “I see what you mean.”

“Just let me book the ticket and I’ll call you right back. I can be there by tonight.”

And there’s his opportunity, Eames thinks. John Hood, author of this whole fucking mess—or co-author, if they’re being completely fair—is offering to hop on a plane and fly back to take over the clean-up. Hood’s clearly the one who should be here. It’s his schedule that deserves to be tossed in the rubbish, his social capital that should be spent on favors and fixes. If anyone’s going to get punched on the jaw, it ought to be Hood. Eames deserves to be lying on a chaise lounge under a palm tree, drinking gin and tonics and counting his toes.

Arthur still hasn’t moved. Eames pushes himself to standing, conscious of the effort it takes to do so. From that vantage point, he can see that Arthur is at least breathing properly. He starts around the bed.

“I’ll tell you what,” he says. “Don’t call me back. And don’t book anything. Just stay where you are.”

“But I thought—“

“Get in touch with Lani Calder--you know Lani?”

“Sure.” Hood sounds baffled. “She’s the one that tracked Arthur to the Wilshire for me.”

“Of course she is. You call her up and tell her you’ve bought my debt. Hanrahan, remember. Tell her whatever she wanted from me, you’ll get it for her.” Eames pauses at the foot of the bed. He can see Arthur’s face now, pressed sideways into the mattress. Slack and deeply asleep, more relaxed than it’s been in days. “Tell her the sky’s the limit.”

“Uh—“ Hood coughs. “I think it might be better if I just came there—“

“Of course you do. But if you do, I promise you’ll regret it.”

There’s a pause. Then Hood says, “Lani Calder. I owe her for you.”

“Good lad.” Eames hangs up and tosses the phone onto the couch.

Outside the full-length windows, the city’s turned to a grid of dazzling lights. The sky is the dark, ochre-ish pink of Los Angeles night. Eames looks at it for a while, then cracks his back and turns back to the bed.

When he gets on, the mattress sinks beneath his weight and Arthur opens his eyes. For a moment he looks blurry, confused. Then he smiles.

“Hello,” Eames says. “Which one of you is it this time?”

Arthur gives him a sidelong look, but moves over to make room. When Eames lies down beside him, his smile broadens. He looks tired but young, and happy.

“You are an idiot,” Eames tells him. When Arthur reaches out to touch him, he moves his head away. “Keep your hands to yourself, please.”

Arthur ignores him, shouldering closer across the bed and reaching again. Eames catches him by the wrist. “Lie down.”

“Then what?” Arthur asks.

“Then nothing. You’re still full of Ecstasy and psychedelics. I like my workplace affairs to be consensual.”

Arthur’s smile turns amused. He works his wrist free and reaches again. Eames sits up.

“I am impressed,” he says. “Stick-in-the-mud Arthur, injecting unknown substances. I would never have expected it.”

“I can be surprising.”

“I didn’t say I thought it was intelligent.”

Arthur lets his forearm fall over his eyes, and groans. “I feel…” There’s a pause. “Frustrated.”

“Serves you right.” Eames finds the television remote on the night stand and flicks the telly on. “Anyway, it’s better than trying to punch me.”

“I—“ Arthur sounds lost in thought. “I did that, didn’t I?”

“More than once.”

“I’m sorry.”

Eames waves a hand, dismissing it. For a minute or two he flicks through channels, past storage units and alligators and Congressional testimonies and miracles of weight loss. Arthur lies beside him, watching him. He can feel it. He ignores it.

“I’m not going to know how to handle this,” Arthur says.

“Handle what?”

“This. You.” Arthur rubs his face. “Later, when the drugs wear off. I’m going to freak out.”

“You’ve been fairly freaked out the whole time.”

“I told you I love you.” Eames starts a little at that, and glances over. Arthur doesn’t look embarrassed. He looks intent, as if he’s concentrating hard to keep his thoughts in order. “I remember doing that.”

“You were fairly freaked out.”

“I don’t know.” Arthur props himself up on one elbow. “I don’t think I love you. But I...there’s something.”

Eames keeps his eyes on the television. “You trust me. That’s all.”

“That’s huge.”

“Well.” Eames can’t think of anything to say to that.

“I don’t trust a lot of people. And anyway, it’s more than that.”

“You’re still quite stoned,” Eames tells him. “I can tell because you’re talking about your emotions. You should probably stop.”

“I’m doing it now for a reason,” Arthur says, in a tone that clearly adds you idiot at the end of the sentence. “Because I’m not going to handle this well when the drugs all wear off. I’m going to hate that you saw me like this. I’m going to hate feeling like I owe you. And I’m going to hate that I can’t feel anything...good about you anymore, because I fucking crawled all over you and tried to blow you and that’s going to be so incredibly humiliating I’m going to want to shoot myself in the head. So when this shit wears off I’m going to be a total dick. I’ll probably avoid working with you for at least a year.”

Eames sits holding the remote, feeling slightly stunned.

“So I’m trying to talk to you now,” Arthur goes on, “because I’m sort of stoned and sort of not stoned, and I want you to know that there’s something there. I don’t think I love you. But I feel--” He pauses, frowning.

Eames waits.

“You’re hot,” Arthur says, in the tone of a man evaluating options and setting them aside. “And you’re good at the job. And you can work a problem.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re kind of an asshole, and I like that. I mean, I get it. It works. But I don’t know how to--” Arthur’s face clears suddenly, and he looks up at Eames. “If I wasn’t so messed up, I’d love seeing you just come into a room. It would make my fucking day. Every time.”

“That--” Eames hesitates. “That’s...” He can’t think of a single word to say.

“But I am messed up,” Arthur says, sounding suddenly very tired. “So I can tell you now, when I get sober I’m going to be a total dick.”

He rolls away, stands, and drags himself into the bathroom, looking as if everything hurts.

 

 

Eames sleeps lightly, on the couch. When he wakes up his phone tells him it’s just past seven am. The shower is running, with the bathroom door closed. The bed is empty.

He orders coffee and breakfast, and reads the newspapers on his phone. When the shower shuts off he feels his shoulders tense a little. He’s being ridiculous, irritating himself.

When the bathroom door opens he doesn’t look up from his phone. There’s a pause, long enough for him to feel his neck start to itch. Then Arthur walks across the room behind him and unzips his suitcase.

“Feeling better,” Eames observes, in a neutral tone.

There’s another pause. Then Arthur says, “Yes.”

Pause.

“Breakfast on the way,” Eames says.

“I’m fine,” Arthur says, crossing to the closet. Eames chances a look. Arthur is in suit trousers and a clean shirt, his tie loose and untied around his collar. His hair is combed back. He’s shaved. There’s a nick on his cheek, high up.

He opens the closet, sweeps out the hangers, and takes them to his suitcase. He’s folding things carefully, fitting them inside.

“Are you sure--” Eames says.

“Yes,” Arthur says. He closes the suitcase, stands up, and looks around. “Where’s my bag?

Eames goes to the safe, punches in the code, and walks back to the couch. He doesn’t watch while Arthur collects the smaller bag with the weapons, money, and PASIV.

“I can leave the room open,” Arthur says, shrugging into his suit jacket. “You can stay as long as you want. I don’t have much cash on me right now, but I’ll leave this--”

Eames looks up. The rubber-banded wad of bills from Arthur’s bag is now on the night stand.

“You’re not serious.”

“We can work it out later,” Arthur says. He’s stony-faced, tying his tie while he talks. There are dark circles under his eyes. “Send me an email, tell me your rate.”

“My rate?” Eames stands up. “Christ, you’re even worse than you said you’d be.”

“I don’t want to do a wire transfer over the hotel network.”

“A wire--” Eames walks over to the nightstand, picks up the money and riffles through it with his thumb. Then he throws it at Arthur, aiming for his head. “My rate? What fucking rate is that?”

Arthur stands holding the money, his cheeks flushed. “I’m trying to thank you.”

“Don’t bother leaving the room open,” Eames says. “I’m not here on holiday. I’m not staying on to see the sights.”

“I know that. I’m just trying--”

“Oh piss off.” Eames goes to the other bed and drags his suitcase up onto it. His things are a rumpled mess inside. He starts around the room, collecting his cast-off bits and pieces, chucking them in the direction of the bag.

He expects Arthur to turn his back, to finish slotting his things into their appointed places and zip the whole thing up in an authoritative, definitive way. He expects Arthur to pull himself together and leave.

Instead, Arthur drops the money and sits down on the bed.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m--”

Eames throws a shirt at his bag, missing.

“I’m sober,” Arthur says, and gives a weak, humorless chuckle. “For the first time in...a while. It kind of sucks.”

“You’re an idiot,” Eames tells him. But Arthur’s deflated now, so there’s nothing to shove against. That in itself is irritating, but he doesn’t know what to do about it. “You and Hood are both idiots.”

“I don’t know what to do about that.”

“Too late to do anything. You’ve already binned a week of my life.” That’s petty. Eames takes his jacket off a chair and folds it over his arm, then goes to put it in his bag. “You should see a proper doctor.”

Arthur nods. “You talked to Hood?”

“I did.”

“Is he coming here?”

“No.” Eames sits on the bed and zips his bag. “He’s busy playing secretary for Lani Calder.”

Arthur looks confused, but lets it go. He seems to be chewing something over. For a moment Eames wonders if he’s really sober, if he knows where and who he is.

“I’m fine,” Arthur says, before Eames can ask. “And I’m really sorry. About all of this.” He waves a hand, encompassing the room, the city outside the windows. “And, uh, I’m sorry about the things I said. I appreciate your not...decking me.” He stops. His cheeks have reddened.

“You presume an awful lot,” Eames says.

“I know.” Arthur’s ears have gone pink. “I know I said a lot of stuff that was out of line. If I could take it back, I would.”

“No,” Eames says. “You presume I wanted to deck you.”

Arthur looks at him for a moment. “Then I guess,” he says slowly, “I appreciate your not letting me suck your dick while I was blitzed.”

“Think nothing of it.” Eames zips his bag and stands up. “Hood told me about his wife.”

Arthur looks away. “Fiancée.”

“Right,” Eames says. “Mercy. Anyway. And I know about your mother, as well. I understand why you did it. Even though it was a stupid thing to do.”

Arthur takes a breath, and nods.

“There’s breakfast coming,” Eames says. “You should probably eat it, you look like hell.” He takes his bag to the bathroom and clears out his things. When he comes out, Arthur is still sitting on the bed. “Be in touch.”

Arthur looks up. He’s tired but he’s Arthur again. His face is hard to read, in a familiar way.

“Thanks,” he says.

“You’re welcome,” Eames says, and leaves.

 

 

Three weeks later he gets a text from a number he knows.

Did you take the C job in M?

C for Connelly, M for Munich. He texts back: Yes.

Half an hour later, his phone buzzes.

Don’t.

He studies the screen for a minute, then sets the phone down. A few minutes later he picks it up and dials.

“Why not?” he asks, when Arthur picks up.

“Connelly dropped off the map for three weeks last March, in Dublin.”

Eames nods as the waitress takes his empty glass. “You think that’s iffy.”

“It was right when Interpol started the big push on cyber crime.”

“Hm.”

“And that job’s too good for Connelly. He wouldn’t have it unless someone handed it to him.”

“You think it’s a bait job.”

“Put it this way,” Arthur says. “He offered me fifty thousand just to show up with a PASIV.”

Eames winces. “Fuck.”

“Just thought you’d want to know.”

“Right.” Eames leans back as the waitress puts a new glass down. “How are things?”

There’s a pause.

“Fine,” Arthur says. “But I should go. Sorry.”

“Another time,” Eames says, and hangs up.

He cuts himself out of the Connelly job. A month later there are three people awaiting extradition hearings in Munich. None of them is him.

He texts Arthur: Thanks.

Arthur doesn’t reply for several days. When he does, it’s brief: You’re welcome.

 

 

That’s the end of it, Eames thinks. Arthur’s good turn wasn’t really much of a reach--it’s the kind of thing you do as a matter of course. You get wind of a good man about to do a dumb thing, you drop him a line to straighten things out. It’s only good sense. There are enough pricks in the business, it’s worth a little effort to keep the few decent coworkers in the mix. Call it employment insurance.

And that, Eames tells himself, is exactly what he did for Arthur. Helped straighten things out, kept him in the business. Arthur’s a good point man. Whatever his deficiencies, he’s worth keeping around.

And if there are a few nights, here and there, when Eames is alone somewhere boring, flicking past insane Japanese game shows or earnest Czech newscasts, when he gives up and wanders into the bathroom with a bottle in his hand, and ends up in the shower jerking off, it’s not a problem that he thinks of Arthur’s lips. Arthur’s thighs straddling his lap. Arthur’s arms around his neck, his mouth to Eames’s ear. I love you. Asshole.

It’s not a problem. And it’s nothing he wants to dwell on. So he doesn’t.

 

 

Several months later, they work a job together. Eames goes in thinking This should be interesting. He hasn’t heard from Arthur since the Connelly tip. He expects repression, awkwardness, possibly some harsh words.

There are a couple of bad moments. When he first walks into the schoolroom where they’ve set up shop, Arthur’s writing on the chalkboard with his back turned. Eames pauses to read the notes, and Arthur turns around unexpectedly. They both jump. Arthur flushes, mutters something, and walks away.

But by the end of the day he’s handling himself fine, treating Eames the same way he treats every other member of the team. Which is to say, picking holes in everything he says. Eames, wearily packing up his kit at the end of the day, doesn’t know whether to feel pleased or annoyed.

“Early start tomorrow,” Arthur says on his way by, carrying loops of computer cable and a laptop. “Be here by six.” Eames settles on annoyed.

 

 

There’s nothing remarkable about that job, or about the next one, three months later. A year passes. Eames gets laid, here and there. He presumes Arthur does too. If he wanted to pry he could probably find out, but he doesn’t want to pry. Strictly speaking, there’s nothing to pry into.

He signs on for a job in Texas, knowing Arthur will be on it too. What he doesn’t know is that the work site is a Quonset hut on the outskirts of Houston, without air conditioning. It’s August.

“Fucking Christ,” says Solveig, fanning herself with her background folders on the first afternoon. “How do you Americans stand this?”

“We don’t,” Arthur says. He’s stripped down to a T-shirt, sweating freely. They’re all soaked. “We have AC.”

“It’s insane,” Eames says. After years in Africa he’s used to heat, but still. It’s insane. “Tell Omar we can’t work like this.”

Arthur thins his lips and says nothing. He’s already had one conversation about work conditions with Omar, Eames knows. They all know, because the conversation escalated quickly to shouting over Omar’s workstation, and ended with Omar calling them all a bunch of pussies and Solveig throwing a stapler at his head.

“I don’t care how much money it is,” Solveig says. “If I die of heat stroke while I’m making it, it doesn’t matter.”

“It’s two days,” Arthur says. “And four hundred thousand dollars.”

Solveig fans herself.

“Let me see what I can do,” Arthur says, sounding tired.

He leaves. While he’s gone Omar stalks around looking dangerously annoyed. He’s a very good extractor--in dreams, he’s one of the more frightening people Eames has ever met--but working with him in the real world can be tiresome.

Arthur returns hours later, and Omar immediately starts shouting at him about having been gone. Arthur ignores him, unloading boxes from his car. They turn out to hold portable air conditioning units. Eames and Solveig help him set them up, and after that the building is practically tolerable. Even Omar calms down.

“I think he goes a bit mad in hot weather,” Solveig murmurs, glancing across the room to where Omar is now bent over his computer, working steadily.

“Don’t we all,” says Eames.

It’s midnight when he lifts his head and finds the place almost deserted. The only one left is Arthur, straddling a chair backward on the far side of the room, reviewing folders.

Eames stands, cracks his neck, grimaces at the dampness of his shirt, then wanders over. Arthur glances up.

“Late,” Eames observes. Arthur nods. “Remind me next time Omar dangles a huge wodge of money in front of my nose, not to take it.”

“Same.” Arthur throws the folder onto the table and sits back, rubbing his eyes.

“Feeling all right?” Eames asks. He keeps his tone deliberately, obviously casual, so that Arthur will know that he’s not just asking about back strain. “Fully recovered?”

Arthur pauses, his arms still out in a stretch. Then he clears his throat and says, “Yeah. Pretty much. Still some headaches, but--” He shrugs.

“And have you spoken to Mr. Hood about his therapeutic practices?”

To Eames’s surprise, Arthur smiles. “Yeah. He’s...” He glances at Eames. “Apparently you made quite an impression on the phone. He thinks you’re some kind of crimelord.”

“As I am.”

“Yeah, he’s kind of a kid.” Arthur reaches for the folder, fiddling with the cover. “Anyway. Mercy’s doing better.”

Eames raises his eyebrows. Arthur glances at him and shrugs, still smiling.

“He’s a good chemist. And it was a good idea. He just had to iron out some kinks.”

“He gave her the stuff?”

“Not the same mix he gave me. He dialed it down, I think Yusuf helped. Anyway, she’s doing better.”

“That must be satisfying.”

“Yeah, they’re pretty happy.”

“I meant for you.”

Arthur smoothes the cover of the folder with the tips of his fingers. “I’m okay,” he says at last. “No real damage.”

Eames says nothing. He just lets the silence sit, waiting to see what Arthur will do. The air conditioners hum. It’s still insanely hot.

“Listen,” Arthur says. “Back in L.A., when you were leaving. You said I presumed a lot.”

“Yes.”

“I kind of let that go at the time. Because I was--” Arthur shrugs. “But I’ve been wondering about it.”

“Have you.”

“Yeah.”

They’re both quiet.

“So here I am,” Arthur says. “Out on this limb.”

“You haven’t said anything damning. Or even comprehensible.”

“I think I was pretty comprehensible in L.A.” Arthur looks sideways up at Eames. His skin is flushed and damp. “When I wasn’t trying to kill you. And I thought maybe...subtler, this time around.”

Eames studies him, then pulls over another chair and straddles it so that they’re facing each other. “There you are. Out on that limb.”

Arthur’s looking at his posture, a faint curve at the corner of his lips as he studies Eames’s spread legs and folded arms. “Yeah.”

“And what are you hoping will happen next?”

“I don’t know. I guess I was thinking--” Arthur starts to lean forward. Eames draws back. Arthur frowns.

“You’re sober,” Eames says, in a clarifying tone. Arthur nods. “And you’re not going to try to shoot me in the head.” Arthur winces. “Well, I like to be sure.”

“Do you think you could let that go?”

“I could,” Eames says. “But I’d have to send you my rate.”

“Asshole,” Arthur says, and leans forward, and kisses him. He tastes like salt. His lips are soft. Eames reaches out, grabs the back of Arthur’s chair, and pulls. The chair squeaks across the concrete floor until it bumps into his own.

The air conditioners blow a warm wind through the building, over the stacks of paper and the dark, silent computer screens and the cast-off clothes left on the desks. Eames feels the warm breeze on his neck, on the backs of his hands. He’s got hold of Arthur’s arm, he can feel the heat of Arthur’s skin beneath the damp fabric of his shirt.

Arthur makes a throaty little sound, unbelievably gratifying. It goes straight to Eames’s cock, and he thinks that he’s wanted to kiss Arthur like this for ages. Months, at least. Maybe longer. All those showers.

“I should say,” he says, pulling away, “that I’m not really all that trustworthy.”

“Uh-huh.” Arthur kisses him again, this time with his fingers in Eames’s collar.

“And,” Eames says, a little out of breath, “that I’ve fantasized about doing terrible things to you ever since last spring.”

Arthur pauses, pulling on Eames’s collar. His eyes are dark and steady. “What kinds of terrible things?”

“I don’t like to say.”

“Things like shooting me in the face?”

“No.”

“Things like selling me out to Interpol?”

“Oh, fuck no.”

Arthur smiles. “I guess I’ll take my chances.”

“I don’t know. I am a crimelord, after all.”

Arthur pulls on his collar. Eames stands, turns his chair around, and puts it carefully down in the same spot. Arthur watches him do it. When Eames sits down, Arthur stands and pushes his chair to the side.

“You’ll ruin your trousers,” Eames says.

“Shut up,” Arthur says, kneeling.

There’s a part of Eames’s brain informing him that this is a bad idea, but he doesn’t listen to it. He lets Arthur unbutton his shirt, unzip his trousers, run a sweat-damp hand down his chest and stomach and into his briefs. He lets his eyes close when Arthur wraps a hand around his cock.

“Things like that,” Eames says. His voice isn’t quite steady. “Like--ah--right--”

Arthur laughs quietly and shuffles his knees in closer, pushing Eames’s knees apart.

It’s probably too quick to be dignified, but Arthur doesn’t really give him a choice. His hand is strong and clever and his mouth is soft and wet. Eames squeezes his shoulder in the universal warning but Arthur just slips his free hand around and down, his fingers sliding sweat-slick and hot over Eames’s spine to his ass. Eames says, “Fuck--” And that, eloquently, is it.

Arthur laughs at him, the bastard. Then, while Eames is still wiping himself off and catching his breath, Arthur stands up and starts gathering his things. His keys, his wallet, his bag.

“You’re joking,” Eames says. He can see from where he’s sitting that Arthur has a trouser tent. “Where the hell are you going?”

“My hotel.” Arthur slips the strap of his bag over his head. His T-shirt is pasted to him, his muscles cleanly outlined. “The Four Seasons. Under Thomas Seares.”

Eames sits back and watches him square a few papers and slip them into his bag. “What if I don’t feel like visiting?”

Arthur presses the heel of his hand to his crotch, wincing a little. “Then I guess I’m going to jerk off by myself.” He turns and starts for the door. “Turn the lights out when you go, will you?”

“Christ, you’re a cunt.”

“There’s real AC. And I’ll buy dinner.” Arthur turns at the door, smiles, and blows him a mock kiss. Then he walks out. The door clangs shut.

Eames sits in silence for a moment, feeling sweat and come trickle down his inner thigh. Outside, Arthur’s car starts and pulls out.

“Unbelievable,” Eames says. He pulls his shirt off, balls it up so the messiest part is outside, and chucks it onto Arthur’s piles of paper.

 

 

He stands for a minute outside the hotel door, listening. Inside, he can hear the television. Not porn. Baseball, maybe. Some kind of sport. He hears the roar of a crowd.

He could change his mind. He hasn’t called ahead, or knocked. It was a forty minute drive and he’s had some time to think. Arthur is hot. Arthur is good at his job, and he can work a problem. Arthur is a bit of an asshole. Eames quite likes that about him. But still.

Having fuck fantasies about Arthur is different from actually fucking him. And it’s almost never a good idea to fuck someone at work. Now that his brain has re-engaged, Eames has had time to think about that.

But he’s also had time to think about other things. About Arthur sitting on the bed in the Wilshire, his eyes bleak and shadowed, trying to put things together. About the little smile he had, saying Mercy was better. About his lips against Eames’s ear, whispering. It wasn’t true, what he’d said. But still. It was something to think about.

Eames stands outside the door, listening to the applause die down. He can still turn around and walk away. One handjob, one blowjob, does not a working relationship end. Or it doesn’t have to.

He rubs his lips, looks away down the corridor, then straightens up and knocks.

There’s a pause. He can still go, he tells himself.

Then the lock flips back and the door opens, and Arthur is standing there in jeans and a T-shirt, holding a beer loosely by the neck.

“You came,” he says, looking startled. As if he didn’t invite Eames, as if this is some kind of unanticipated invasion.

“You asked,” Eames says, immediately on the defensive. But then he sees that Arthur’s broken into a smile. A grin, really. The grin of a man whose day has been completely and unexpectedly made.

He smiles back, feeling a little stupid.

“Peter Hanrahan,” he says. “From Des Moines.”

“Come on in,” Arthur says, and Eames does.