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slate floor.
    She laughed. “That’s quite an act.”
    “In honor of your dress,” Michael said. I held her chair for her, and he added, “Nair will hold your chair.”
    “I just bought it at the shop at the Papa Leone. It’s from the Tisio Valley.” She modeled for us, turning this way and that. The dress was mostly white, with a floral pattern, perhaps red—it was hard to say by candlelight—ankle-length, sleeveless and low cut and soft and clinging. I was aware, everybody was aware, of her arms and hands, and the insteps of her sandaled feet, and her toes. She dropped her shopping bag and sat down and smiled.
    “It’s almost as wonderful as you.” Michael took both her hands in his own, leaning close. “Such eyes. How did they fit such enormous eyes into your beautiful face? They had to boil your skull to make it flexible to expand the sockets for those beautiful eyes.”
    He was trying to embarrass her, I guessed. She didn’t blink. “Thank you, such a compliment.”
    Davidia wore her hair short and almost natural, but not all the way, not tightly kinked, rather relaxed into close curls. She was of medium height, more graceful than voluptuous. She had a face I’d call the West African type, a wide face, sexy, cute, with a broad nose, full lips, soft chin, a child’s big eyes, and she looked out from deep behind them with something other than a child’s openness.
    Michael took over and ordered for us all, a little of everything, more than anybody could have eaten. Two youthful waiters both wanted the honor of serving us—serving Davidia—competing for it with a kind of stifled viciousness. Davidia seemed to accept this as her right.
    As striking as she was, she had an unformed, girlish quality, and I was surprised to learn she’d interrupted her pursuit of a PhD to put in time at the Institute for Policy Studies, and more surprised to learn she’d interrupted all of that for Michael Adriko. I counted back, and this was the fourth fiancée he’d introduced me to. He didn’t ask them to marry him. He asked them to get engaged.
    Michael and I both talked a lot during dinner—competing to show off, I suppose, like our waiters. Michael volunteered nonfacts from his store of misinformation. “Nair has family in South Carolina.”
    “Georgia,” I said. “Atlanta, Georgia.”
    “Family?”
    “Everybody but me and my father.”
    “His father is Swiss.”
    “Danish,” I said. “I’m half Danish.”
    Michael was about to speak, but Davidia said, “Quiet, Michael,” and then, “I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody from Denmark.”
    “Denmark is misunderstood. I’m not sure I understand it myself.”
    “I don’t know what that means,” she said.
    “How did you and Michael meet—may I ask?”
    “We met at Fort Carson.”
    “Were you in the military?”
    “No.”
    “Good.”
    Michael said, “When I met Nair here in 2001, he was with NATO.”
    “NATO? Here? This isn’t exactly the North Atlantic.”
    “NATO had people here two weeks after nine-eleven,” I said.
    “Are you still with them? What do you do now?”
    I handed her a business card from my wallet. “Budget and fiscal.”
    “Who’s ‘Technology Partnerships’?”
    “We crunch numbers for corporate entities interested in partnering on large projects with the public sector. In the EU, that is. We’re not quite global. It’s dull stuff. But I get around quite a bit.”
    Michael said, “When we met, Nair was with NIIA.”
    She waited until I said, “NATO Intelligence Interoperability Architecture.”
    “A spook!”
    “Nobody says spook anymore.”
    “I just did.”
    “In any case, I wasn’t one. I sent cables in plain English. Just comparing the project to the schedule, so they could revise the schedule to fit the project and go home winners every weekend.”
    “And what was the project?”
    “Boring stuff.”
    “Nair had something to do with laying fiber-optic cable for the CIA.”
    “NATO doesn’t deal