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Clark was taking home three times Napoleon’s UNCLE salary. With nary a bruised rib or black eye. Home by supper every night. Pipe and slippers.
“I should have gone to law school.”
He realized he’d muttered it out loud when the Russian lying beside him grumbled something unintelligible into his pillow. Napoleon, upright against the headboard, ruffled the blond head apologetically and returned to his brooding.
He remembered the day clearly. The agent in her spike heels, the gun holster visible under her jacket. She wasn’t even inside the career fair, but was leaning against one of the concrete pillars of the student union building smoking a cigarette and looking at her watch. What career fair? Napoleon had thought. Sign me up to be whatever she is. She noticed Napoleon’s staring, flashed a daring wink, and held an UNCLE recruitment card out toward him between two long red-taloned fingers.
Uncharacteristically, Napoleon had felt his face warm as he fumbled the card into his satchel. When he looked back up the agent had vanished.
He never made it through the doors of the student union that day. And he hadn’t had a second thought about it since that evening when he slipped away from his and Clark’s dorm room and dialed the number on the card from the lobby payphone.
The saber wound in his pelvis from the affair in Morocco last October was aching again. He and Illya had had to forgo their evening activities on its account. Probably why Napoleon was still awake.
“Polya, If you’re going to pout all evening, you could at least pout like a man: Into a glass of scotch in the other room. So I can sleep.”
“Clark and I did everything together, Illya, and we were both accepted into Columbia Law but I turned it down. That could be me hosting cocktail parties at the Hamptons villa,” rather than me turning down your advances tonight and limping back into Medical tomorrow morning.”
Napoleon heard his own self-pity reverberate for a few moments in the dark and wondered if Illya had fallen back to sleep. Hoped that he had.
“You don’t get to protect the world from domination and be one of its masters.
“Besides, I only advance on oligarchs when I’m at work. Go back to sleep, Napoleon.”
And though the pink glow of dawn was beginning to suffuse their bedchamber, Napoleon did.