The garden behind Wine House wasn’t much to look at, which Cal suspected was part of its appeal. The backs of three apartment buildings leaned inward like co-conspirators, their windows blind and indifferent, the noise of traffic reduced to a distant hiss. An ancient outdoor table squatted in the only reliable patch of sun, its surface scarred by decades of weather and carelessness.
They’d just settled in when a voice carried across the grass.
“Can’t be too careful,” said Niles loudly, as if competing with an intervening sound that Cal couldn’t quite place. The old man sat a few yards away in a sleek electric wheelchair, wrapped in a blanket despite the sun, his attention fixed on a large tablet balanced in his lap. His thumbs worked the screen with surprising dexterity.
“A beautiful stranger on the tube," he continued. "She might be a Russian agent, or she might be your next ex-wife. You never know, sometimes not even after you’ve married.”
Cal glanced at Frank. “Is he talking to us?”
Frank winced. “I might have told him about Eeva.”
Niles’s accent was like someone holding a marble in their mouth while reciting nursery rhymes; the vowels rounded and consonants crisp. He had the elegance of one of those old British actors whose refinement barely concealed hard edges. His enormous eyeglasses magnified his eyes, making him look both ancient and alert. He looked like Goggles from the tram, but endearing because he was old. Whatever occupied Niles's tablet continued to hum faintly through the trees above them, circling.
“Oh!” Niles said suddenly, looking up. “The wine’s here. Jona’fin, would you be a dear?”
Jonathan had been seated at the table already; his long frame folded into a chair that looked borrowed from a different scale of human, not just tall, but big. He marked his place in a paperback and rose without comment. The cover flashed briefly as he closed it. Khyber Run: a Jack Trinity thriller. Missiles, men with perfect hair, and explosions audible just from the cover's font.
Jonathan carried a glass across the grass and set it on the small fold-out tray attached to Niles’s chair.
“Just one for today,” he said quietly.
Niles grunted, a sound that might have been protest or agreement, and waved him away. Jonathan returned to his seat and his book, the world-ending stakes of fiction resuming where he’d left them.
“Listen to the old man,” Frank said, picking up the thread like it had never been dropped. “Especially overseas. Remember my Rule Number One?”
"But she's Estonian," Cal protested.
"Rule Number Two: don't assume."
Cal drank his wine instead of landing in an argument he wouldn't win. Maybe he'd ask Jonathan for a paperback instead.
Niles kept his eyes on his tablet, but the focus was gone. “They’re all Russian if they aren’t British or a Yank. Unless she's French—and if she is—your heart’s safer with the Russian!”
Maybe it was the wine, but trying to decipher the old man had given Cal a headache. He seemed genuine, but not harmless given his advanced age. Cal stepped away from the table to clear his head.
Only one thing was clear.
The old Brits were more than just their downstairs neighbors.