"If all people are equal, doesn't that mean all of their beliefs are equal as well? So what is it that makes your belief more correct than mine?"

Tenma looked down. Eva was right, of course, and she always had the talent of beating people at their own game, but something that was at the core of your being, the rationale that propelled you to live and how to live, was not going to be beaten by logic.

"I'm not trying to change your opinion, Kenzo. I'm not even going to ask you to reconsider predicating your entire life on sophistries."

"It's not a sophistry," he began angrily, but she cut him off. "I understand what it feels like to have an unyielding belief. You may be the best of men, Kenzo, but don't act like the rest of us are idiots. Just like you feel it in your bones that two lives carry the same weight and importance, I feel that this isn't true. That whichever random force runs the world, whether you want to call it God or Karma or even Coincidence, has assigned different values to all of us. I'm not even saying that we're stuck with those values... people can change, they can improve or degenerate."

"But that's exactly my point!" he interrupted her. "If we're all malleable... if all of us are perfectible, then how can you determine the value of one life at any given moment? Bonaparta... Didn't he become a good man?"

"After wrecking hundreds of lives," she said dryly.

"And how do you know a person now good will not be corrupted and cause even more damage?"

Eva wrinkled her nose with disdain. "I have you as a prototype. People like you are incorruptible."

Tenma looked at her in exasperation. "I was also a self-serving, ambitious, careerist–"

"No, you weren't," she said tiredly. "You were a good man. A man with absolute standards. Life is so simple for you, isn't it? There is a clear ideal, and all you have to do is strive for it. The rest of us don't have your ideals, Kenzo. You know..."

"Yeah?" he prompted when she trailed off into silence. The older they got, the more it surprised him when she threw away the mask of the spoiled, polished whore to say something intelligent, but the truth was that no one could excite his interest quite as well as she could. Beneath the pretense of contempt and apathy, she was one of the smartest people he knew.

"I don't know. You say all life is equal. But when all is said and done, when two people are dead and gone and you tally up what each has done in his lifetime, can you really not judge one to be better than the other?"

He ran his fingers through his hair. It was getting long again. If there was one thing Eva could not stand in a man, it was long hair. It was sloppy and effeminate, and it insulted every rule of good breeding and presentability. But it didn't look bad on him, and she wished for a moment, wistfully, that he was still her Kenzo, his hair hers to play with, and the lean, precise fingers reserved for her body.

"It's not that simple. Every way of a man is right in his own eyes."

"Are you seriously quoting the Bible at me?"

"I'm trying to say that everything can be rationalized somehow. Maybe not everything. But no one does evil randomly, or with the intent of benefiting no one. What I'm trying to say is that, if you harm another person, but by harming another help someone else, how do you decide who to help and who to harm?"

"Help the one who will not hurt others."

"But how do you make that choice?" he asked. She sensed an impassioned, almost childishly fervent strain in his voice. "How is person A more important than person B?"

"No one needs to be inherently more or less important than anyone else. It's just a matter of curtailing the damage. The good of the many versus the good of the few."

"Do you really believe that?"

She pursed her lips tightly. "No. I believe in the good for the good, the bad for the bad. Karma. Balance. Just deserts."

"Life doesn't work that way."

"That's the last thing I want to hear from an idealist."

He smiled sheepishly. His fingers closed into a loose fist beside his plate, and Eva, out of habit, reached out to take his hand before realizing what she was doing and stopping in midair.

"I have to leave soon," she said.

He nodded. There was no disappointment or longing in his eyes – but, by then, she had learned not to expect any.

They shook hands. Like men, like equals, like two people who had never been interested in spending their lives with one another. She felt a surprising lack of bitterness – just the nagging feeling of not having said what she had wanted to say.

"Kenzo... Your life is worth ten of mine."

He walked to his hotel with a strange languor, his hands shoved into his pockets, and his steps exaggeratedly slow. It was a beautiful evening, and he told himself that it was fresh air, not loneliness, that kept him outside, pausing in front of stores' windows, stopping for ice cream with ten other people in the line in front of him. He kept to the crowded areas, well-lit boulevards swarming with tourists and teenagers. The city felt familiar, but also like his place wasn't in it, had never been in it, and all memories of belonging were false. He kept wishing to see her, though she was miles away, cities away. A bit of ice cream melted, rolling down his hand, and as he bent his head to lick it off, his eyes caught an elderly couple pointing surreptitiously at him, the wife trying to convince her husband in hushed but excited tones that the man they were looking at was indeed the philanthropic doctor from the news a couple of years ago. He quickly averted his gaze and walked away without acknowledging the attention.

Later, he wondered when it was that he became so introverted.

He turned the corner, nearing the river, his wish stronger and stronger, gradually giving rise to a fanciful scenario playing out in his head. He would run into her. She would have come to Dusseldorf – for a short vacation, maybe, or a concert, or something, anything, maybe wrapping up some legal issues concerning the wills of the Lieberts, maybe, ideally, impossibly, finding out from Reichwein that he would be in the city and deciding to visit? And he would run into her, and they would have dinner, and on the cab ride back to wherever she was staying, she would tiredly lean her head on his shoulder, as she'd done so many times in the past, and he would brush his lips against her scalp in a secret kiss. And she would hold him on the curb in front of the hotel, her shoulders raised so that her arms could reach his neck, her light jacket riding up under his fingers until he could touch the warm bare flesh of her back. She would say, I missed you, Tenma, because she always called him Tenma, never Kenzo. Never Mister. Never Doctor. Just Tenma, just the way he thought of himself. She would say, I'm not tired yet. Come up with me.

The glare from a car's headlights cut into his fantasy. He blinked, startled. He was on the quay. A lone female figure leaned against the fence, smoking a cigarette. It was Eva. Even if he hadn't seen her an hour before in that same outfit, even if he hadn't recognized her impeccably combed hair, he would have known her anywhere by that straight, slightly haughty posture of hers. She tapped the cigarette to break off the ashes and took another pull.

"Eva," he called. She turned around, calmly, although she had felt a jolt of surprise. "What are you doing here?"

He shrugged. "Just walking."

Eva turned to the water again. When they were younger, when they were together, they came to the river sometimes. Not as often as he would have liked, but she had found herself compromising, letting him pick date spots even though she hated nature.

He joined her at the fence in silence. There was no tension – just the acute, consuming loneliness that each of them felt – and he found himself abruptly embracing her, pressing her body against his and burying his face in her neck. Caught off guard and suspicious of his motives, she tried to break away, but he held her so tightly that she gave up. And then, whether it was habit or despair, whether it was him or her who started it, they were kissing, he was hard, he was moving her to a darker shadow and hitching up her skirt, she tasted her own lipstick on his tongue, and he tasted coffee on hers, and then his zipper was down and her eyes shut with pleasure.

"Sorry," he said. She smirked. "I figured you weren't getting laid. I didn't expect you to last long."

"That's not what I meant, Eva."

"Let me guess, you don't want to give me the wrong idea."

Tenma stayed silent. It was a mistake, yet it did not feel like a mistake. It felt cathartic.

"Believe me, Kenzo, I know that after everything that I've put you through, I'm lucky that you're still speaking to me. I expect nothing from you, trust me. And even if I did, even a blind man can see that you're still into that girl. Speaking of which, I thought she was madly in love with you. What happened?"

He blushed. Eva was the last person he wanted to discuss Nina with, but who else could he talk to? Dr. Reichwein would give him a wink and a conspiratorial nudge, Dieter took it for a fact that a marriage was in the cards, and Rudy was busy with his book. He had a few close friends at MSF, but none so close as to understand his attachment to a girl seventeen years his junior.

"She's too young."

"Oh, don't be coy," she waved away his excuse with a new cigarette. "If Reichwein and that little kid are to be believed, she worships the ground you walk on."

"If she still feels the same way, I'll contact her after her graduation. But I doubt she will."

Eva grinned mercilessly. "I don't."

"She can easily find someone. She's beautiful and intelligent and hard-working. She can have anyone she wants."

"Apparently not. Listen, Kenzo. You're not getting any younger. At least let her enjoy what's left of your youth. By the time you decide that the age difference doesn't matter, she'll be saddled with a flabby, graying man with erectile dysfunction."

"Shit, do you have to put it that way?"

She exhaled a curlicue of smoke. "I must be cruel only to be kind. But don't worry. You still look much younger than you actually are."

He laughed. "I think you're just saying that to retroactively soften the blow."

He offered to walk her home, though he kept dreading that she would invite him in. Thankfully, she didn't.

"So... What are you going to do?"

"My flight is at two tomorrow. I'm going to Paris for two days, and then, back to work."

"I meant about Lolita."

"I don't know," he said, choosing to ignore the dysphemism. "I'm planning to stay with the MSF for a while. I can't be abroad and be with her at the same time."

Eva sighed. "Be careful over there, okay?"

"I will. Stay in touch."

"I will," she promised. She wondered how to say good-bye – a handshake, a hug, a kiss on the cheek? She wanted nothing too warm or physical, but, at the same time, you couldn't be reserved with someone you were not going to see for a while.

"Well," he said. His voice was husky from the talking and the laughter. "Take care."

She nodded, and impulsively grabbed his face with both her hands, kissing the middle of his forehead.

"Sorry. You have a smudge now."

He smiled. He didn't care. "Good night, Eva."

"Good night. Thank you for visiting. And give Nina a kiss for me."

He blinked, nonplussed.

"On the lips."