"Zeno, you are my best friend."
Christ. I had spent a lot of time with Dick over the last two years, and I liked him fine, but I didn't know him at all in a way, didn't even know where he was from. He never talked.
"I am from Palestine."
Shit. I sure didn't know he was a mind reader.
"I have seen much suffering. Much violence, a lot of death. It is why I work as a doodlebug crew person, away from my country, where I would be an engineer if it were a sane place. But this is the craziest time of my entire life, worse than my home, and I feel like we are on a different planet or something like this."
Let me just say that in two years of working and drinking and generally debauching around the world together, this was the largest number of words I had ever heard Dick say, cumulatively.
"Now I think I don't really know who you are, and I am lost where we are here in this cold and crazy place. What have we done to bring this to ourselves? I thought you were a peaceful person, but you broke and killed that terrorist like you do it every day. People are dying all around us all night, and it seems to all be about us. Everyone dead was surprised and confused. What is happening all of a sudden in this strange country? Why is this happening to us?"
I don't know if I was more shocked about what had gone down in the last three hours, or with Dick's suddden soliloquy. I wouldn't have believed he had all those words in him. Not to mention my shock at finding out that I was his best friend. Apparently he had been around a lot of really disappointing people up until now.
"Dick," I said, "I am your friend, and I will tell you my story later, but right now, we need to think about our next move so that we don't end up dead or in a very bad prison for a long time, wondering about what we did to deserve being there. What do you think we should do?"
Dick stood there for a minute, lost in thought. He looked up. " We need to get to our hotel and get our possessions and find a way to leave. The authorities in this country will not believe we had nothing to do with this. Maybe we need to try to find Rommell as well."
"OK. Let's do that. When we are out of here, we can figure out what is going on, maybe, and see if we can straighten all this out."
We started walking again. All this time, not a car or a person to be seen. It was bitterly cold, and the wind cut through my clothes like a coroner's knife.
The hotel wasn't far or hard to find, because the town was small, and laid out like a grid over a long rectangle. We turned left down a side street a block away, and I saw the car before I saw the hotel. I grabbed Dick's sleeve and jerked him into a recessed doorway with me. I was pretty sure it was the same car I had seen pull away from the police building a second ahead of the cops, and it was parked half a block from the front of our hotel door. The exhaust vapor said it was running, and it was the only car on the street for a block in either direction.
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