“Okay,” Swagger said, “you tell me if I’m right. You’re smart. I only went to high school.”

“New rule: sarcasm not permitted. Sarcasm out of bounds. Get it?” she said angrily.

“I apologize. It was stupid. It won’t happen again. Okay, here’s where we are. Nick found something. We don’t know what. But somehow they heard about it and came after him. He gave you a clue. So somehow he had enough time to hide what he had and to call you. ‘Susan, I fed the dragon.’ Then he cut his own throat, knowing that if they got to him, they’d torture him and he’d give everything up. Little skinny Nick, more samurai than any of those boys. And here’s another thing I have figured out. See if you agree.”

“Okay.”

“They didn’t burn the place for no reason. They figured out he’d learned something, and they were worried he’d left it. They couldn’t find it. They burned the place so that whoever he was working with couldn’t find it either. There’s no point in burning the place otherwise. It just attracts attention and the last thing these people need is attention.”

“That makes as much sense as anything.”

“Okay, so let’s think about the clue Nick gave you. Maybe I’m full of shit, but it can’t be that hard. He cooked it up in two seconds. You said he sounded scared on the phone. He knew they were there. He hid whatever it was fast, he came up with a clue fast, and it was something only you knew.”

“But what does that tell us?”

“It means it plays off something you know. ‘I fed the dragon.’ No, no, ‘Susan, I fed the dragon.’ Not dragons in general, not dragons in history, not dragons in no poetry or movies or songs, but a dragon that Susan knows. So what we have to do is find a point where three things touch: Susan, Nick, and a dragon. What does Susan know about dragons?”

“Nothing.”

“Did you ever discuss dragons with him?”

“No.”

“Did he ever mention them to you?”

“No. Never. The first time I heard the word ‘dragon’ from his mouth was last night.”

“What was the first thing you thought when he said ‘I fed the dragon.’”

“Oh, this is helpful. I thought, What the fuck is he talking about?”

“Are there any dragons in your past?”

“I dated a couple, that’s all. I was married briefly to one.”

“Think of what a dragon could be or relate to. A team name? Your high school football team-I’m betting you were a cheerleader-was it the Dragons?”

“I was the head cheerleader. It was the Panthers.”

“Ever study, uh, what’s it, dinosaurs?”

“Paleontology, archaeology, geology. No, never. Russian and Japanese literature.”

“Oh, that’s helpful. You can make a lot of dough off that.”

“Swagger, I gave you sarcasm warning number one. One more violation and you’re on your way to Arkansas.”

“Idaho. Let me say some dragon things to you. You react. Maybe it’ll jog a memory.”

“Fire away.”

“Flying dragons.”

“Nothing.”

“Sleeping Beauty.”

“Nah.”

“Prince Charming?”

“No such thing.”

“Reptiles.”

“Are dragons reptiles?”

“Well, they’re green and scaly. They’re like dinosaurs or big alligators.”

“Do they have two-chambered hearts? Are they cold-blooded?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t know either.”

“Chinese dragons?”

“No.”

“Dragons in parades? You know, people under a long dragon thing?”

“Wouldn’t that be a Chinese dragon?”

“Dragon bones? Dragon wings? Dragon tracks? Dragon breath?”

“No, no, no, no.”

“Flying Dragons.”

“You said that.”

“A gang called the Dragons?”

“No.”

“A triad called the Dragons?”

“No.”

“A flying dragon kick from karate?”

“No.”

“The sleeping dragon? That’s a kendo move, low to high.”

“I know what it is. No, not that.”

“A Chinese restaurant called the Dragon.”

“No.”

“Saint George?”

“No.”

“Saint Andrew?”

“No.”

“Prince Charming.”

“You did that one already. This isn’t working.”

“Well, I’m pretty much out of dragon stuff. Could it be a picture, a movie, a book, a poem, an article, a paper, a-”

“Hmmm,” she said.

He saw something in her eyes. It was that faraway look: seeing the mountain as if it’s close at hand.

“Article?”

“Paper. If dragons are reptiles, does that make them lizards?”

“There are no dragons, so can’t they be anything?”

“Well, as you said, green and scaly. That makes them reptiles. So wouldn’t they be lizards?”

“I suppose. Why?”

“It’s just that-oh, it’s nothing.”

“Try it. What the hell?”

“Lizards. I have something in my life dealing with lizards. I may have mentioned it to Nick.”

“But you’re not sure.”

“Swagger, nobody can remember everything they’ve said to a casual acquaintance over a five-year period.”

“Of course. Sorry. But you said a paper. School paper. Lizards.”

“Yeah, it’s a story I’ve told a few times in embassies and at the department, at parties and dinners, that sort of thing. Did I tell it to Nick? It’s possible. I met him at a party at the Japanese ambassador’s residence on Nebraska in D.C. about five years ago. It was low-key professional: I was supposed to chat him up, he was supposed to chat me up. There was some drinking. I may have told him.”

“Tell me.”

“I had a petty good-girl’s ambition to graduate from high school with a four-point-oh average. I had to be perfect, and for three years, I was perfect. But my senior year, I dropped a couple of points in advanced-placement biology. I had to somehow make it up, or I’d get a B, and there would go the four-oh. So I went to the teacher and I said, you know, I can’t quite make it up on the remaining tests. If I ace them, I still just get an average of three-nine-nine in here. Is there any extra credit thing I could do? He was a good guy. He said, ‘Well, Susan, if you wrote me a paper and it was really good on an original subject, I don’t see how I could keep from giving you the A that you need so badly.’ The joke is, I have no feeling for biology. I just learned it by rote. I had no gift at all and there was nothing I was capable of writing an A paper on. I had no inspiration, no anything. So I went to the National Geographic bound volumes in the library and just paged through them. I was looking for something that might stimulate my imagination.”

“And you found something?”

“A lizard. A big, ugly lizard. God, it was ugly. It was about ten feet long, green, carnivorous, with a forked tongue. It was limited to seven islands in the West Pacific near Java. The biggest island was called Komodo, and so the lizard was called a Komodo lizard. So I became an overnight expert on the Komodo lizard-this is before the Internet, I should add-and I did a paper on its prospects in an environmentally diminishing world. I got the A, I was valedictorian, my parents weren’t disappointed, and I went on with my life as planned, except of course I didn’t marry Jack McBride, but that’s another story. The funny thing is, that lizard really helped me by being so interesting. So the joke is, now and then if I’m happy and I’ve had a few drinks and people are toasting, I toast. My toast is ‘Here’s to the lizard.’ And they all laugh, because it’s so unlike little Susan Okada, the Asian grind with the four-oh average who never makes a mistake. I may have told that to Nick, after toasting the lizard. I think a bunch of us, some Japanese journalists and some State people, I think we went to a sushi place in Georgetown. That may be where I did it.”

“And that’s it?”

“Yeah. But see, here’s the thing. That creature is also sometimes called a Komodo dragon. Maybe I toasted the dragon and that’s what Nick was thinking of.”

“Komodo? Is that a Japanese word? It sounds Japanese.”

“No, it’s Indonesian, I think.”

“It sounds Japanese. Os, lots of syllables. It could be Japanese.”