Jakarta

We sprinted with shoulders hunched from the shelter of his car to the shaky awning angling over the external stair to his apartment, heads bowed in inadequate defense against the pummeling rain--bowed also, possibly, in gratitude for our deliverance. Amos held the door for me, then turned to lock it and left me dripping on the door mat while he ducked through the doorway straight ahead. I stood in the dim light trying to twitch water droplets from my dress before they could absorb, still awash and thrumming with epinephrine.

The apartment was slightly larger than I had imagined, based on the sliver I saw the day I came to find him. It was still small, and unfurnished save for an armchair, an end table, and the desk that held his closed laptop and shadeless lamp. The door at my back was kept company by a large closed window in a chipping-paint frame. The next wall (moving clockwise) was broken by a closet door of the sliding variety (slightly open and nearly empty), the next by an open arch to the kitchenette and the door through which Amos had vanished--now to return with one towel around his shoulders and a second which he handed to me--and the last solid but inscribed with deep furrows marking out a rectangle, with a dangling rope handle near the top edge. A Murphy bed, I guessed, though the underside was plastered in the same bubbling wallpaper as the other faces. It looked like he could fit just about everything he owned in a suitcase not much larger than the one back at my hotel room.

Amos had paced straight from the bathroom to the kitchenette and was unloading the fruit I'd forgotten I'd bought at the market that morning into his humming refrigerator. The rattling was almost painful to my still-ringing ears.

"I feel almost giddy," I said as I kicked off my squishing sandals and wiped my feet on the towel before stepping onto the thick brown carpet. I wrung out my hair and peered behind the makeshift drapes (a pair of colour-clashing sarongs hung by their fringes from the curtain rod) at the flash flood outside. "I've never been shot at before, have you?"

"Once or twice," he called from inside the fridge. "It loses its charm."

"Oh. It's never happened to me before." Which was repetitive and stupid I know, but I couldn't think of anything else to say. It felt strange to be speaking at all, neither of us had said a word since Amos had breathed in my ear "go" and nudged me down the alley, walking fast and not looking back, and then the world had exploded with sound and we'd been running, running hard and I grazed my elbow on the stucco going round the corner and then the car doors slammed and we fishtailed out of there as the rain started pelting.

The alley where he'd left the car was by now a single clay-coloured puddle, ankle-deep, into which new drops collided with enough force to send them ricocheting back up, thigh-high or higher. Aside from the creeping vines on the opposite building and a couple of sparrows on a telephone wire, there was no life in sight. "Got any Jack Daniels?" I asked, only half-joking.

"Sorry. I've got a thing of Orangina, though."

I dropped my backpack and Gemma's purse onto the armchair, on top of Amos' sloppily-folded bed linens, and sat down on the floor beside it to inspect my blisters. "Even better," I called back.

Amos returned with two glasses of hissing yellow liquid and handed one to me with another wry grin. It was cool from the fridge but floated no ice. "I quit drinking the same time I gave up my other vices. It was harder than most of them."

He pulled an iPod from his pocket and connected it to the portable speakers on the desk, turned up the volume. I think it was Alejandro Escovedo but I didn't recognize the song. The picture of Gemma I'd given him at our first meeting was propped against one of the speakers, next to a stack of bills in a currency I didn't recognize.

I blotted rain and sweat from my neck with the bunched towel. The air felt thick as Amos sank to the floor beside me with a groan and held the cool glass to his sticky forehead. I watched his movements, the stiffness with which he extended his legs and the care with which his head balanced on the top of his neck.

Where had this fragility come from? In all the few short days of our acquaintance he'd seemed perfectly assured in everything he did. He'd stayed so calm and confident through situations that had made me want to cry (granted, he had a lot more experience than I did with both the country and the disreputable characters with whom we'd been dealing, and all the subtle rituals by which they both operate), but now inside the walls of his own shitty apartment with the rain beating arhythmically on his windows all the smoke had gone out of him and left only hollow glass. I leaned over and kissed him.

He pulled away, leaving my lips drinking vainly the humid air. He refused to meet my eye but stared at the carpet with his face in shadow. "You know you'd still have to pay."

"What?" I asked, bewildered.

"For the investigation. I don't take favours, you'd still have to pay the same rate."

I laughed, but he wasn't joking. "Good thing this isn't a favour." I shouldn't have said that. Should have stopped and apologized. I should have done a lot of things.

I kissed him again, my hands cupping his jaw and basicranium, fingers splayed so that the wings of the condor tattooed on his neck stuck out between them like feathered boomerangs. His face was prickly with stubble and clammy with perspiration, but his lips were soft and tasted of citrus and salt. For a moment I was alone in the kiss, and I felt my heart constrict in a spasm of confused fear and embarrassment, but then he made a noise somewhere between a giggle and a sob and he was kissing back with clumsy thirst. It seemed like everything I had felt and seen since I stepped off the plane, everything I left behind to board it, slipped away into darkness and this kiss was everything, face-to-face embrace as each sought to devour the other whole, tongues finding teeth finding tastes finding hands finding ears and eyelids and pulse-beating carotids. Or maybe I was just tired and hot and exhausted and worried about Gemma and starting to crash from my adrenalin rush and struggling desperately to hang on to that high lest the fear and understanding of what had just happened creep in to strangle me. Or maybe I'm rationalizing too much--it could be I was just horny. Either way, it was a hell of a kiss.

Amos pushed me back hard into the base of the armchair and the corner jabbed my shoulder blade but I didn't care. I ran my hands down his chest to the hem of his cotton undershirt and under it, feeling the rough denim of his jeans and the warm leather of his belt, then sliding higher. I pushed his shirt up without looking, feeling the rolling hills of ribs beneath his skin, and the smooth hard intrusions of scars (at least the one on his arm was not lonely) like clear-cuts in the coarse-haired forest of his torso. I read his body like a topographic map, trembling with seismic activity, this jungle island riddled with fault lines.

I reached his armpits and he flinched, but he raised his arms and allowed me to pull the beater over his head. The cotton hit the floor without a sound and Amos sat back on his heels, squirming, moving his arms awkwardly to cover his chest before letting them hang by his sides. He couldn't meet my eyes. I think he expected me to be repulsed by what I saw . . . but honestly, I was fascinated.

The scar on his arm, the one I had tried so hard not to stare at in the café that day of our first meeting, that fat worm curled around his right forearm and running half its length, was only the tip of the iceberg. Even my questing fingers had failed to report with any semblance of accuracy the extent and degree of Amos' mutilations. Scars of every size and description riddled his body: an earthquake here, the incisive erosions of a rain-swollen river there, and between them the craterous impression of a meteor impact, the atlas of his skin bearing witness to the turbulent geologic history of his nation-flesh. It was not hard, for my fevered brain, to imagine the tribal tattoo on his right pectoral as a monument erected by his skin's invisibly tiny inhabitants, crying desperately to their gods for some abatement from torment (it had been a long day).

The worst of all was the burn on his left shoulder, a palm-sized patch of skin gone shiny and rippled, crude loops and whorls of blistered cellophane showing pink flesh beneath. Its jagged border peeled right through another tattoo, leaving too little intact to identify the image beyond an impression of militarism. I realized then the care he'd taken to keep this defect concealed: hiding it behind the door when I came to find him at his apartment that first day, keeping it in shadow as he ducked back inside to shut down his computer and pull on that blue buttoned shirt, which he'd worn every other time I saw him until we arrived here today and he'd left it in the bathroom. The burn was only exposed now because the towel had rolled off his shoulders with his undershirt.

I wondered how many violent acts were here betrayed; how many were accidents and how many malicious; and how much pain he'd dealt out in retribution for what he'd received? This last thought gave me pause--Amos hurt people, maybe even killed them; could I continue to trust him?--but watching him sitting there, more naked than many people ever get despite still having trousers on, I felt only warmth. Well, warmth and a vague selfish relief at knowing that if he was this self-conscious about his own body my own cellulite and birthmarks were unlikely to freak him out. "You are beautiful," I said, and leaned in to kiss him again.