Chapter 19

The windows were his self-given Saturday morning chore and meditation. Quinn had come to think of them that way; some kinds of activity made for a quiet mind. His morning runs did it. The fence line in Montana had done it. And window washing did it too. The squeegee’s clean arc and the glass sparkling afterward. Window by window. A solid sense of accomplishment.

The morning was cold and bright. He’d done the library windows from the outside, then the sitting room, working his way methodically around the building’s south face. He was at the front of the house with the extension pole, the upper windows requiring the full reach of it.

He was thinking about Tocqueville’s call for intellectual diversity and debate.

The Colonel had assigned it to him to re-read. He had written in the margin of the first chapter in his clear, firm hand: What has changed since your first reading? Which was not a question about Tocqueville. Quinn had been sitting with it for three days, reading and rereading and trying to uncover the changes in his understanding between the first time he’d read it and this one.

He was thinking about it when the car came through the gates.

It had diplomatic plates. The information registered automatically. A black Toyota Century. It came up the drive at a measured pace and stopped neatly at the front entrance.

Quinn was on the ladder. He watched them get out.

The man was fiftyish, trim and precise, a Japanese in a dark suit, carrying himself with the contained quality of wealth and status. The woman beside him was elegant in the way that some Asian women are elegant, not as performance but in posture and bearing. They moved toward the door with coordinated ease.

Quinn came down the ladder.

He ran through what he knew — the diplomatic plates, the bearing, the quality of the car — and made a reasonable assessment. Then he ran through what greeting he should give. He acted because standing on a ladder holding a squeegee while guests arrived was not how you received anyone at the Colonel’s house.

He set the squeegee on the bucket, came around the foot of the ladder, and arrived at the foot of the steps at the same moment they did.

He performed the bow — the correct thirty degrees, the way one met someone for the first time in a formal context. He’d practiced against the bathroom mirror for two months last year to pass his Japanese final.

“Konnichiwa. Hajimemashite. QuinnNormanmoushimasu. Yoroshiku onegaishimasu.”

He’d considered the name issue for a fraction of a second — the Colonel’s name was what was relevant here, not his — but introducing himself was what the phrase required, and it was the honest thing, so Quinn Norman it was.

The two of them stopped. The man looked at him with an expression that processed and updated rapidly — the boy on the ladder, the window-washing equipment, the bow, the Japanese spoken by someone who had been studying seriously. Something moved in his face that was not quite amusement but was in the neighborhood, warm rather than condescending.

They responded in kind, their Japanese considerably faster than his. The woman, with particular grace, moderated her speed in the way of someone who has encountered second-language speakers before and knows how to make the exchange comfortable.

Then the door opened, and Sullivan was there.

He took in the scene with the comprehensive, instantaneous assessment that was his standard operating mode — the guests, Quinn, his bow, the exchange that had apparently just occurred. His face did the thing it did, the almost-thing, the barely-there movement.

“As you can see,” he said in English to the couple, “the Colonel has hired a greeter.” A pause, precisely timed. “Who also does windows.”