Read The Box for Free Online Page B

Tripoli.”
    “Oh.”
    She waited a moment but Quinn said nothing else. He thought, Whitfield is a friend of this Remal, and she is a friend of this Remal. Everybody is a friend of this Remal. He has no enemies.
    “Just a friendly gesture,” she said. “Mine is the only good car in town, aside from Whitfield’s two trucks. You wouldn’t care to ride in one of those, on these roads. Quinn, you’re staring again.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    She shrugged and smiled. “What did you see?”
    “I like your tan.”
    She did not answer anything but closed her eyes for a moment and kept smiling. She sat still like that as if feeling her own skin all over. Now she also has a face like a cat, thought Quinn. I can see her lie in the sun like a cat, the way they lie and you want to touch them. And the cat face, very quiet and content, with cat distance.
    “You know,” she said, and opened her eyes, “I like to be looked at.”
    Quinn finished his Scotch, put the glass down, and felt light-headed.
    “In that case,” he said, “you, looking the way you do, should have a good time of it all day long.”
    She laughed, because a laugh was now expected. This is the first time, she thought, that I’ve heard him say something flip. Maybe that’s how he used to be.
    “Clever of you to say that,” she told him, “but you’re forgetting this is Okar.”
    “You must have picked it, and not because of being broke or anything like that.”
    “What made you say that?”
    “You told me you got the only good car in town.”
    “Oh.” She wondered whether he was being flip again. Then she said, “Yes. I’ve got enough. I’ve been married enough.”
    “Often enough or long enough?”
    “Often enough.”
    Quinn looked the length of the hall again and wished he were leaving. He would have to leave anyway and Okar meant nothing to him.
    “With your dough,” he said, “why sit here? Why not Rome, Madrid, Paris? That kind of thing.”
    “Why here?” She had her hands on the table and looked at the backs of her hands and then turned them around and looked at her palms. “I don’t know why. Confusion. I came the way you came. In a box. What do you know when you come in a box?”
    “Nothing.”
    This stopped the conversation so abruptly that Beatrice felt she had to do something immediately.
    “Anyway, what did you used to do, before nothing?”
    “I was a lawyer. Which also means nothing. Right now I’ve got to know what to do next.”
    “You’ll hang around. We all do.”
    “I have no papers. And no money.”
    “Money?” She looked at him as if she disliked him. “Well, there must be something you can do while you wait for papers. Don’t you Americans always have something to sell?”
    He shrugged and didn’t answer.
    “I used to be an American myself.” She felt embarrassed and laughed.
    “And now?”
    “All very confusing.” She sipped from her drink without liking it.
    “You are sort of confusing right now.”
    “I was born in Switzerland,” and she sounded like a document, “but I’m not Swiss. Parents from the States but I lived there only like a visitor. My last name is Rutledge, because of the British husband. Also Fragonard, because of the French one.” She took a breath and said, “I know. That’s only two of them.” But Quinn didn’t answer her.
    “I could sell my cans,” he said.
    “What was that?”
    “The water cans I had in the box.”
    Quinn, sitting opposite her, was as surprised by his sudden thought about the water cans as was the woman who did not know him at all.
    The mayor and the clerk came down the stairs in the main hall, and when they could see Quinn and the woman from the arch that led into the dining hall they stopped, or rather the mayor stopped, holding the clerk by one arm.
    “You understand, Whitfield,” he said, “the quicker the better.”
    Whitfield peered along one leg of the arch at the couple in back and then straightened up again.
    “You’re now worried