Ed shrugged and waited while the waiter presented the wine to Vlad before pouring it.
"I don't know if involved is the right word. We were engaged in an ongoing flirtation that sometimes felt more like verbal combat..." he chuckled, wondering if Vlad knew Jude well enough to appreciate the comparison. "But I cared about her, despite the fact that we seemed to snarl at each other a lot."
The landlord posed a problem. "It is hard to get a bead on an enemy that you can't locate or even identify. It's terrible to feel that we're more or less at his mercy, unless we're all prepared to move en masse."