“So Massimo is back,” said the woman. She had a cordial yet guarded tone, like a woman who has escaped a man’s bed and needs compelling reasons to return.

“I brought a friend for you tonight,” said Massimo, helping himself to a chair.

“So I see. And what does your friend have in mind for us? Does he play backgammon?”

The pair had a backgammon set on their table. The Swiss mercenary rattled dice in a cup. “We’re very good at backgammon,” he told me mildly. He had the extremely menacing tone of a practiced killer who can’t even bother to be scary.

“My friend here is from the American CIA,” said Massimo. “We’re here to do some serious drinking.”

“How nice! I can speak American to you, Mr. CIA,” the woman volunteered. She aimed a dazzling smile at me. “What is your favorite American baseball team?”

“I root for the Boston Red Sox.”

“I love the Seattle Green Sox,” she told us, just to be coy.

The waiter brought us a bottle of Croatian fruit brandy. The peoples of the Balkans take their drinking seriously, so their bottles tend toward a rather florid design. This bottle was frankly fantastic: it was squat, acid-etched, curvilinear, and flute-necked, and with a triple portrait of Tito, Nasser and Nehru, all toasting one another. There were thick flakes of gold floating in its paralyzing murk.

Massimo yanked the gilded cork, stole the woman’s cigarettes, and tucked an unfiltered cig in the corner of his mouth. With his slopping shot-glass in his fingers he was a different man.

“Zhivali!” the woman pronounced, and we all tossed back a hearty shot of venom.

The temptress chose to call herself “Svetlana,” while her Swiss bodyguard was calling himself “Simon.”

I had naturally thought that it was insane for Massimo to denounce me as a CIA spy, yet this gambit was clearly helping the situation. As an American spy, I wasn’t required to say much. No one expected me to know anything useful, or to do anything worthwhile.