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life!”
    â€œIt’s not a good time to start.” He got her into a waiting taxi, where she curled up in the back seat like a wounded animal.
    The emergency-room doctor didn’t believe in anesthesia. Willy didn’t believe in screaming. As the curved suture needle stabbed again and again into her arm, she clenched her teeth and longed to have the lunatic American holdher hand. If only she hadn’t played tough and sent him out to the waiting area. Even now, as she fought back tears of pain, she refused to admit, even to herself, that she needed any man to hold her hand. Still, it would have been nice. It would have been wonderful.
    And I still don’t know his name.
    The doctor, whom she suspected of harboring sadistic tendencies, took the final stitch, tied it off and snipped the silk thread. “You see?” he said cheerfully. “That wasn’t so bad.”
    She felt like slugging him in the mouth and saying, You see? That wasn’t so bad, either.
    He dressed the wound with gauze and tape, then gave her a cheerful slap—on her wounded arm, of course—and sent her out into the waiting room.
    He was still there, loitering by the reception desk. With all his bruises and cuts, he looked like a bum who’d wandered in off the street. But the look he gave her was warm and concerned. “How’s the arm?” he asked.
    Gingerly she touched her shoulder. “Doesn’t this country believe in Novocaine?”
    â€œOnly for wimps,” he observed. “Which you obviously aren’t.”
    Outside, the night was steaming. There were no taxis available, so they hired a tuk-tuk, a motorcycle-powered rickshaw, driven by a toothless Thai.
    â€œYou never told me your name,” she said over the roar of the engine.
    â€œI didn’t think you were interested.”
    â€œIs that my cue to get down on my knees and beg for an introduction?”
    Grinning, he held out his hand. “Guy Barnard. Now do I get to hear what the Willy’s short for?”
    She shook his hand. “Wilone.”
    â€œUnusual. Nice.”
    â€œShort of Wilhelmina, it’s as close as a daughter can get to being William Maitland, Jr.”
    He didn’t comment, but she saw an odd flicker in his eyes, a look of sudden interest. She wondered why. The tuk-tuk puttered past a klong, its stagnant waters shimmering under the streetlights.
    â€œMaitland,” he said casually. “Now that’s a name I seem to remember from the war. There was a pilot, a guy named Wild Bill Maitland. Flew for Air America. Any relation?”
    She looked away. “Just my father.”
    â€œNo kidding! You’re Wild Bill Maitland’s kid?”
    â€œYou’ve heard the stories about him, have you?”
    â€œWho hasn’t? He was a living legend. Right up there with Earthquake Magoon.”
    â€œThat’s about what he was to me, too,” she muttered. “Nothing but a legend.”
    There was a pause in their exchange, and she wondered if Guy Barnard was shocked by the bitterness in her last statement. If so, he didn’t show it.
    â€œI never actually met your old man,” he said. “But I saw him once, on the Da Nang airstrip. I was working ground crew.”
    â€œWith Air America?”
    â€œNo. Army Air Cav.” He sketched a careless salute. “Private First Class Barnard. You know, the real scum of the earth.”
    â€œI see you’ve come up in the world.”
    â€œYeah.” He laughed. “Anyway, your old man brought in a C-46, engine smoking, fuel zilch, fuselage so shot up you could almost see right through her. He sets her down on the tarmac, pretty as you please. Then he climbs out and checks out all the bullet holes. Any other pilotwould’ve been down on his knees kissing the ground. But your dad, he just shrugs, goes over to a tree and takes a nap.” Guy shook his head. “Your old man was something