Profiling

Amanda pulled her station wagon along the curb in front of Lee's apartment building on a cold February evening. Lee was away on a covert assignment, and he wanted her to feed his fish. Or at least, that's how she'd interpreted his cryptic message.

She'd come home from work earlier that evening in a piss poor mood. Lee wasn't anywhere to be found, Billy refused to give her any details other than he was on a "top secret, need-to-know mission", and Francine had mocked Amanda for not needing to know. Placing a bag of groceries on the kitchen island, her eyes rested on a bunch of bananas, next to a single key attached to a rabbit's foot keychain.

"Mother, I told you I was going to the store after work. Why'd you buy more bananas?" she called out to Dotty, who was upstairs.

"Those were there when I got home today, sweetheart. I assumed you'd been home at lunch and dropped off the groceries then."

"Oh, right. Sorry. That's what I did. I just forgot." The lies she told her mother were going to land her a front row seat in hell.

She puzzled over the bananas. There was only one person who would break into her home, leave fruit, a key, and disappear without a trace. Lee. But Lee was supposed to be out on a mission, with zero contact with her until he was done. Clearly, there was more going on here than a concern for her potassium levels.

"Think like a spy, Amanda."

The bananas each bore a sticker indicating they were the product of Honduras. There were five of them. A rabbit's foot was meant to bring good luck, and the key looked to be one for a dead bolt. What was Lee trying to tell her?

Honduran bananas. Five of them. Good luck charm. Locked door.

The government of Honduras would soon be attempting the first democratic transfer of power after years of military coups. The US government would want some unofficial eyes and ears on the ground, making sure the transition went smoothly. The election was in five days' time. Lee had once called her his good luck charm. His apartment locked with a deadbolt.

Lee was in Honduras. For five days. He wanted her to check in on his apartment.

That was simple. Or completely wrong. Maybe he really was concerned about her potassium levels, but she thought not.

"Mother, I have to run out for an errand. Can you put the boys to bed?" She grabbed her coat, her car keys, and a banana and ran out the door before her mother could ask any questions she didn't have truthful answers to.

And so here she was, parking in front of Lee's building and letting herself into his apartment with her very own key. She felt bold, and a little out of place. Like a girl trying on her mother's high heel shoes for the first time, knowing they wouldn't fit, but wanting to walk in them all the same, just to see how it felt to be someone else.

She picked up the envelopes scattered on the floor below the mail slot and placed them on the coffee table. Lifting the lid on Lee's tropical aquarium, she shook some fish flakes onto the water's surface.

"Hello, men. The big fella's out on active duty for a while, so I'm filling in for him. Straighten up and swim right."

Satisfied that all was in order with Lee's fish, Amanda looked around the room. The apartment was decorated in what could be referred to as bachelor chic. Lee's tastes ran to strong neutrals colours, ethnic art, and bold prints. It wasn't really her thing, but she had to admit that he had a good eye. Everything in the apartment looked like it had been selected to match and complement the décor, which was a lot more than you could say about most bachelor apartments. She briefly wondered if there was a woman's hand at work, but quickly discarded the idea. Everything exuded masculinity and she knew Lee had never lived with a woman before. Or at least, not at this address.

There was a disturbing thought. Lee living with a woman. It made her feel vaguely nauseous, and she pushed the idea from her mind.

Walking into the dining area, Amanda noticed the stacks of bone china and silver candlesticks he kept on the sideboard. For entertaining lady friends, obviously. Again with the twist in her gut. But she couldn't help picking up a candlestick and turning it over in her hand. It was heavier than she expected, and she considered its practicality as a weapon as she tested its weight in her palm. Curious, she turned it over so that she could look at the base. 925. No wonder the candlestick was so heavy. It was nearly pure sterling, and old too, by the look of the maker's mark.

"Why would Lee own $300 antique candlesticks?" she wondered aloud.

Putting down the mysterious candlestick, she walked back into the living room and settled into the sofa. A mohair blanket was draped over the back, and since she was still a bit cold from the outside air, she curled up underneath it. As her body heat began to warm the blanket, it released an aroma that was pure Lee, and she let out a happy sigh. She loved the way he smelled. Like fresh air, leather, and Paco Rabanne. Like a man.

Forcing her thoughts back to the present, she picked up the stack of mail she'd left earlier on the coffee table, thinking she could sort out the junk mail for him. As she sorted, she noticed one was postmarked Switzerland and bore the return address of a bank in Zurich.

"That's strange. Why would Lee be getting mail from a bank in Switzerland? He banks with Chase Manhattan."

But even as she formulated the thought, she knew the answer. He did his day-to-day banking with Chase. That was where he deposited his bi-weekly cheque from the Agency. The cheque that would hardly cover the rent for this apartment, his utilities, and basic necessities. The cheque that most definitively did not pay for his expensive sportscar. Nor his well-tailored suits and tuxedo. Nor those sterling silver candlesticks, and certainly not any beach vacations to Borneo.

Lee was independently wealthy.

Now that she'd reached that conclusion, she was shocked she hadn't figured it out sooner. It wasn't just his taste for fine material things. It was everything about him. His impeccable manners. His diction. The way he carried himself. His perfectly manicured cuticles. His taste in books, music, art. Hell, the man knew how to fence. God, she was obtuse. Why hadn't she profiled him earlier?

Four days later, Lee Stetson rested his duffle bag on the floor and unbolted his apartment door. It was good to be home. The election in Honduras had gone surprisingly smoothly, and he'd boarded his plane this morning with the same number of clips in his gun holster as he'd had when he left the States, which was something of a record. But despite the calm, or maybe because of it, he'd found his thoughts often straying to home as he worked long hours in the field. Had she understood his cryptic message? Billy had forbidden Lee from telling Amanda where he was going, but he hadn't specifically forbidden coded messages. He felt pretty confident she would have understood its meaning, which meant that while he was away, she had been here, in his apartment, looking at and touching his things. It gave him a pleasant, odd feeling in his gut as he opened his front door.

He knew it was her before his hand reached his Glock, but drew it anyway, out of habit.

"Welcome home. Don't shoot, please."

"Amanda."

"The same. How was Honduras?" she was curled up in his favourite corner of his sofa, under his favourite blanket, eating a banana.

"Uneventful. What brings you here?" Try as he might, he couldn't keep the note of testiness out of his voice. He wanted her to be in his apartment while he was gone, but he wasn't certain he wanted her to be in his apartment now that he was back. Which was unfair, he acknowledged, but there it was. Loners were not unmade overnight, and he was tired and in need of a shower after his long flight.

"Just wanted to deliver a full report. The fish and I did alright, but I think they missed you. The little orange one especially. Your super stopped by with a package which I signed for and left over there. It's not a bomb and non-perishable – I checked. I sorted your mail into two piles on the table: bills and correspondence. And I stocked up your refrigerator with a few basics, in case you were hungry and didn't feel like waiting for delivery when you got back." She was rambling. She'd been expecting him all evening, but now that he was here, and he was real, and he was standing there in his jeans that fit him just so, a faded t-shirt and a brown leather jacket, his hair looking like it knew a comb by reputation only, she was losing her nerve.

"You never told me you were rich." The words were out of her mouth before she could reconsider them.

"What? What are you talking about? Who says I'm rich?" He was now very certain that he'd made a major miscalculation in leaving her his key. He should have overfed his fish and hoped for the best. All the while he had been imagining her in his apartment, tidying up a bit, maybe sneaking a peek into his underwear drawer, but no. Not Amanda. In typical fashion, she'd jumped over the obvious and landed right where she didn't belong.

"I'm talking about your being independently wealthy. You've been gone awhile, and I thought it might be … interesting … to profile you. And good practice, too. Spy practice, that is. And from the clues and some logical deduction, I think I've pieced together a lot about you that somehow got left out during our almost non-existent conversations about your life before we met."

The hairs on the back of his neck prickled, like they did when he was facing a physical threat.

"Amanda, I'm tired. I'm travel-weary, and I smell like tropical fruit. Can we please save the intuitive hopscotch for another day?" When in doubt and desperate to throw your persistent partner off the scent, act like a jerk. It usually worked, with the unfortunate side-effect that it made him feel terrible afterwards and almost always resulted in some sort of reconciliatory gesture. Come to think of it, he rather enjoyed the reconciliatory gesture part, but not the bit where he felt both like a kicked dog and the foot that had done the kicking.

Sure enough, her demeanour changed immediately. It would be impressive how deftly he could manipulate her emotions, if it didn't make him so damn sad.

"Sure, you're right. You've got better things to do than listen to me practice being a secret agent. I'll leave."

He took a long step and halted her progress towards the front door with a hand on her forearm.

"No, Amanda. Don't go. I didn't mean that I wanted you to leave. It's just that I really need a shower and some clean clothes. If I promise to be more hospitable, will you stay? Once I'm cleaned up, we can grab a snack and I'll tell you all about this spider monkey that tried to frisk me while I was doing surveillance, and you can tell me all about how you figured out, well, what you think you figured out."

"Girl spider monkey or boy spider monkey?" she teased, and he laughed as he brought his duffle bag into his bedroom, swinging the door closed behind him. Despite her better angels, she couldn't help but glance towards the French doors that divided his bedroom from the rest of the apartment, to watch his silhouette as he undressed. Lucky spider monkey.

Damp from his shower and dressed in his varsity sweats, Lee rested his bare feet on his coffee table and shared a plate of crackers, cheese and fruit with his sofamate. She was still chuckling after his dramatic re-enactment of his spider monkey adventure, which he'd exaggerated horribly, just to hear her laugh. Reconciliatory gesture accepted.

"Thanks, Amanda."

"Not a problem. The advantage of your penchant for smelly cheese is that the line between what is gourmet and what is mouldy is somewhat blurry. You might want to chase that with something stronger than iced tea, just to be safe."

"I don't just mean for the snack. I mean for checking in on my apartment while I was away. For taking care of my fish. And for putting up with me being, well, me. I'm not sure why you do it, although I'm sure glad you do."

"Maybe I'm just in it for your money." she smirked, making sure he knew she was teasing.

"Yeah. Are you really going to make me talk about that?" He crossed and uncrossed his legs, bumping shoulders with her as he tried not to look like he was squirming. She placed a hand on his thigh.

"No, I'm going to make you sit there listen to me talk about that. Think of it as my homework assignment from spy school."

Amanda then proceeded to explain how sorting his mail had led her to conclude that he was independently wealthy. She spoke quietly, looking straight ahead in the dim apartment, instead of at him. But she left her hand on his thigh, gentling him so that he wouldn't bolt, large nervous animal that he was.

And then she began to relate the conclusions she'd inferred from her chance discovery of his Swiss bank statement. She enumerated all the little details that qualified her hunch, right down to his fingernails. Now she really had his attention, because she was doing a bang-up job of profiling him. He hadn't given her enough credit. She'd really been paying attention. It was quite flattering, if a little off-putting for someone so used to maintaining an air of mystery about him.

"It all started to fall into place once I made the Switzerland connection", she continued. "The fact that you can speak German and French. Your love of smelly cheese. Your Patek Philippe watch. Boarding school?"

Lee grunted.

"Geneva?"

"Lutzern. The colonel wanted me far from any … distractions. I'd caused enough trouble on remote military bases. No way was he leaving me alone in a cosmopolitan city with no legal drinking age. Lutzern was a provincial backwater that made up for its lack of nightclubs by being pretty and clean."

"How old were you?"

"Fourteen. He'd been threatening me with boarding school for a couple years, but a certain, er, indiscretion with a three-star general's daughter sealed my fate."

"It must not have been easy for you, separated from the only family you had at such a young age."

"I grew up when my parents died, Amanda. It was me alone against the world from that day on."

He sensed her sadness at his atypical confession, and interpreted it as pity, which was the last thing he wanted.

"I don't pity you, Lee. If anything, the fact that you had such a difficult childhood and became the man that you are makes me admire you even more."

"You're definitely in it for my money" he quipped, uncomfortable that she'd seemed to read his thoughts.

"Well, I don't know. How much money are we talking about? You can be a pretty big pain in the butt sometimes, so I hope we're talking big bucks."

"About six million dollars, give or take."

"Lee! I was teasing. I didn't actually expect you to say. God, six million?"

"Well, as you said, I'm a pretty big pain in the ass."

"But … I guess I don't understand. How? "

"My parents, Amanda. Well, my mother, specifically. She was the only child of a successful British businessman. When they died, I inherited everything. It went into a trust first, and my uncle used the money to raise me, but when I turned twenty-one, it was all transferred into my name. But I didn't want it. I ignored the calls and letters from my family's banker for the longest time, and then I eventually just told them to invest it in something stable. That was right around the same time I was recruited by the Agency."

"But what changed? You obviously spend some of the money now. I mean, look at your car." she tried to make light.

"I dunno. I grew up, I guess. Saw a lot of good people die. Realized that life is for the living, and that my parents never would have wanted me to feel guilty about spending their gift to me. But I've never squandered it. I set up an annual stipend that's only a fraction of the interest earned on the principal. I won my car in a poker game, for the record."

"Pretty high stakes poker game."

"What's that expression you like? No guts, no glory?"

She smiled, and then looked down at her hand on his thigh.

"I'm sorry, Lee. This makes you incredibly uncomfortable, doesn't it? I probably should have bit my tongue, but I was so proud of myself for figuring it out on my own. You say so little about yourself, and I'm such an open book…"

"Not so open after all, Ms. Spy-in-Training. That was some excellent logical deduction." He was tempted to leave it at that, but it was important that she know that he hadn't been deliberately dishonest with her. "I wasn't trying to keep it a secret from you, Amanda. I just don't like to talk about it." He placed his hand over hers, and she turned up her palm so their fingers could entwine.

"I understand."

They sat in companionable silence for a while, until Lee could no longer suppress his yawn.

"Time for bed, Rockefeller?" she joked, standing up and reluctantly releasing his hand.

"Yeah. Long day. I'll walk you to your car."

"I'll leave your key here on the table." she said, reaching into her purse.

"Keep it. You never know when I might need you to come over here again." He looked at her with sleepy eyes that made it abundantly clear that he wasn't talking about feeding his fish, and her toes curled into the area rug.

"Just say the word, Lee."