by Barry Eisler
The girl laughed, her eyes sparkling. “Oh, Mr. Dox, this isn’t hot today, you know that.”
He made a show of mopping his brow. “Darlin’, you’re tougher than I am.”
The groceries cost him a whopping four hundred thousand rupiah—about forty bucks. He wondered if anyone had ever done a study on the prospects of countries where buying groceries cost half a million of the local unit of currency. He doubted there was much correlation between economic health and all those zeros.
He loaded the groceries into his backpack, shouldered it, said goodbye to Wan, and headed outside.
A foreigner, a big blond dude, was pacing in front of the building near where Dox had parked the Honda, a mobile phone to his ear. He was wearing shades and speaking a language Dox didn’t recognize—not German, not French, Dutch, maybe? When he looked up and saw Dox, he closed the phone and smiled.
“Hello, maybe you can help me,” he said, with a slight, indeterminate accent. “Do you speak English?”
“Depends on who you ask,” Dox said. The guy seemed like your typical lost European tourist—not exactly an unknown species in the area—but still, Dox immediately glanced left and right. The perimeter check was a learned reflex, triggered whenever a stranger tried to engage him. The danger is that the person asking for directions, or the time, or a light, or whatever, is there to distract you from his cohorts, who are flanking you from your blind side, and Dox wasn’t about to get caught that way.
To Dox’s left, a guy in a full-face motorcycle helmet was leaning against the wall under the awning, doing nothing in particular. On the right—another guy in a full-face helmet, moving leisurely in Dox’s direction.
Later, his conscious mind would articulate all the factors that his unconscious had just instantly, wordlessly spotted and assessed. He would be able to describe what was wrong with this picture: the positions of the guys in the helmets relative to the blond dude; the way they were waiting in places in which they had no ostensible reason to wait; that they were wearing helmets in the heat even though they were off their bikes; how smoothly and deliberately the one on the right was closing the distance.
But for now, his understanding took the form only of a sudden heat in his gut. He knew the feeling. He especially knew not to doubt it. A single word—fuck!—blaring in his mind like a klaxon, he braced and reached for the Civilian.
The blond guy moved—much faster than Dox thought he’d be able to, given his size. He took a long step forward and pivoted, and then his right foot crashed into Dox’s midsection like a freight train.
Dox had just enough time to react by tightening his stomach, and that saved him from having the wind knocked out of him entirely. But the kick still blasted him backward and cost him his grip on the knife. The Civilian clattered to the ground, and Dox struggled to regain his balance. A part of him understood that he was already far behind, that whatever this was, it was going very badly.
One of the guys in helmets latched onto his right wrist. Dox found his footing, pivoted, and smashed his free elbow into the guy’s head. If he had connected with the guy’s skull the blow might have killed him, or at least knocked him off, but the helmet kept the guy in the game, and now he was dragging on Dox’s arm, trying to pull him off balance. Dox spun clockwise, getting behind the guy, sucking him in close with his giant forearm, and reached under the tee-shirt with his left hand. He pulled free the La Griffe, its ring handle encircling his first two fingers and its razor-sharp blade protruding from his fist like a claw. But before he could get it under helmet boy’s chin and rip out his throat, the blond guy had wrapped himself around Dox’s left arm, both hands securing the wrist. Something stung Dox in the neck from behind and he knew with a sickening lurch what it was. He struggled against the men on his arms. They felt heavier, and his vision blurred. He staggered and thought, John, fuck, I’m sorry. And then he was gone.
3
I SHOULD HAVE known they’d get to me through Dox. He was no soft target, true, but he was easier than I am, and a little easier is sometimes all it takes.
I was living with Delilah in Paris at the time. Or living with her separately, you could say. Her job was such that security required different apartments, and various other minor inconveniences. Although I suppose that when half the romance is a retired contract killer and the other half a committed Mossad agent, separate dwellings can be the least of your troubles.
I liked Paris, liked almost everything about it. Along with Barcelona, where I’d spent a month with Delilah a year earlier, it was as beautiful a city as I’ve ever seen, the architecture and the open spaces and the endlessly walkable streets. I loved the coffee culture, and relished a place where I could indulge my enthusiasm for the bean in an endless profusion of sidewalk cafés. I wondered at little mysteries, like the abandoned bicycles chained to the park gates at the place des Vosges, slumped insensate against their shackles, their wheels bent and broken, like crippled pets whose owners cared too much to kill them and who compromised instead by leaving them to die. I thought of the generations that had visited the city before me, dreamers and cynics, romantics and radicals, the ones who had come here to find something, and the ones who wanted only to forget what they had lost or left behind.
I’d never been to Paris before, and when I first arrived, my impressions were all secondhand. I expected an ambience born of architecture, romance, history, gustation. I pictured the Louvre and its glass pyramid; the Seine and Notre Dame; intellectuals arguing over philosophy and smoking ceaselessly in clusters of Left Bank cafés.
What I saw on the train ride from the airport, therefore, was unsettling. Paris, it seemed, was besieged, ringed with tenement towns not unlike Rio’s favelas. Many of these were walled off, at least from the highways and the train tracks, and the gray concrete barriers, some topped with razor wire, were covered, every inch of them, with ugly, angry graffiti, like sea walls braced against a seething tide. By the time I arrived at Gare du Nord in Paris proper, the graffitied walls had abated, but their import lingered: this was a civilization encircled by its enemies, living uneasily under some implicit, eroding truce, slowly losing a war the signs of which were everywhere but that its citizens preferred to ignore.
I took a small apartment on rue Beautrellis in the Fourth Arrondissement, the same block where Jim Morrison had once lived, on the edge of the Marais. The rent was high, but I’d walked away from an operation in Japan a year earlier with two million tax-free dollars, and I could afford it. I liked the feel of the neighborhood, the glow of its streetlamps, the sounds of laughter and conversation from its bars and bistros. In a strange way, the area reminded me in its intimacy of Sengoku, the Tokyo neighborhood I’d been forced to leave a thousand years earlier.
Delilah’s work kept her busy, and we had to be careful about seeing each other regardless, so I had ample time alone. That was good: partly because being alone suits me; partly because in Paris it gave me time to adjust to the new sensation of having someone in my life. It wasn’t just the unfamiliarity of plans several times a week—dinner at Le Petit Célestin on the quai des Célestins; a walk on the narrow streets of the Ile Saint-Louis; a night at my apartment; sometimes a night at hers. It was the whole notion, the feeling, of being someplace primarily because of another person’s presence there. There was a lot I liked about that feeling, but it was taking me a while to get used to it, and I was glad circumstances permitted me to go slowly. I used the time alone to explore the city, and read, and practice French with tapes. It was my fourth language, after Japanese, English, and Portuguese, and I remembered some of it from high school. It was coming back quickly.
I’d been telling myself for a long time that I wanted out of the life, but it was only recently, with Delilah, that the longing had become real. For a while, she had been heading in the same direction. Her organization blamed her for losing a colleague, an assassin called Gil, in an otherwise successful terrorist takedown in Hong Kong, and was set to cut her loose. But she’d face
d them down and forced her way back in, and now she was more determined than ever to stay.
I was ambivalent about her work. On the one hand, it gave me space, which I liked. On the other hand, her continued presence in the life inhibited my own efforts to leave it. Part of it was the behavioral cues—the need for a ready cover story when I was with her in case she ran into someone she knew, and her routine perimeter checks and other tactics—which continued to remind me of who I’d always been. Part of it was ongoing operational necessity, because as long as she was in the life, she was at risk, and if you’re with someone at risk, you’d better believe you’re at risk, too. And part of it was notional: if I was this involved with someone still in the life, how far could I have left the life behind?
I pushed her sometimes, but not too hard. I’d learned Delilah was a fighter, and if she felt she was being doubted, or second-guessed, or in any way talked down to, she had a tendency to come out swinging.
“Why not retire?” I asked her once, over café-crèmes and croissants at Le Loir dans la Théière, a restaurant on the rue des Rosiers named after the dormouse in the teacup in Alice in Wonderland. Delilah had introduced me to the place, and I loved the mismatched chairs and small wooden tables, the eclectic wall art, the wonderful smell of years of fresh ground coffee. “We could buy an apartment on the beach in Barcelona. Make love to the sounds of the waves at night, walk on the beach in the morning. Nothing but the feel of the sun and the smell of coffee and cava and no bad memories.”
She smiled and pushed back a strand of blond hair. Her blue eyes were lit by sunlight coming through the restaurant’s large front windows. “You make it sound enticing. Especially the making love part.”
“That was my favorite, too.”
She laughed. “I don’t know, John. I don’t know.”
I took a sip of coffee and watched her. I liked it when she called me John. My Rolodex is slim, and the few people in it tend not to use my first name. Midori had called me Jun, short for Junichi, my Japanese given name, and at the time I had liked that very much, too. But that was before she had betrayed me to protect our infant son, and thereby denied me a part in his life. Among the bad memories I had just mentioned, Midori held a prominent position.
“What would you do if you were doing something else?” I asked. “If you’d never gotten into the life. Do you ever think about that?”
“Sometimes,” she allowed.
“What would it be?”
“I don’t know,” she said again. “Maybe fashion photography. That’s the cover I’ve been living in Paris, and I like it. I suppose I could have done it for real.”
“Then do it now.”
She took my hand. “You know I can’t. Iran is poised to go nuclear, we have Hamas in the territories and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Things are going to get worse before they get better, if they ever get better at all. I can’t just walk away to photograph anorexic girls on catwalks.”
“Is that all you’d be walking away for?”
“You know what I mean.”
I tried again one evening as we stood pressed together on Pont Sully, taking in the glowing lights of the Ile Saint-Louis and the illuminated buttresses of Notre Dame. “Your organization is using you,” I told her. “You’ve said so yourself. Why don’t you just walk away?”
I felt her stiffen, and she took a half-step back. “I’ve told you before,” she said, looking at me. “The ‘organization’ isn’t the point. This is about my country. My people.”
I shook my head. “I don’t buy it. I think this is about you standing up to the men who blamed you for Gil getting killed in Hong Kong. Showing them you’re tougher than they are, that they can’t drive you out.”
“Why does everything have to be so one dimensional with you? Yes, I have personal reasons for staying. My dignity is involved, fine, I admit it. But why can’t you at least acknowledge there are other reasons, too?”
“Because…”
“I’ll tell you why. It’s because you’ve never been tied to anything larger than yourself. You don’t believe in anything. So you can’t imagine someone who does. She must be either deluded or lying or naive.”
I felt myself flush. “I understand your selfless reasons better than you know. I also understand the more devotion you give to the organization or the corps or the country, the more it’ll hollow you out when you realize your love was always unrequited. The more you’ll feel betrayed.”
We were quiet for a moment. She said, “It doesn’t have to be that way for everyone.”
“You know anyone whose experience has been different?”
We stared at each other. Her eyes were narrowed and her nostrils flared slightly with her breathing. That’s the way it was with us. We could go from bliss and harmony to anger and recriminations as fast and with as little warning as a tropical storm. What made it bearable, what made it good, was that the foul weather would pass with equal suddenness, usually leaving something glorious in its wake.
“Anyway,” I said, “I am tied to something larger than myself. I’m tied to you.”
Her eyes softened. Then she stepped in close and kissed me. I turned my head away, still irritated, but she reached up and turned me back. I resisted for another moment, mostly for form’s sake, and then gave in.
We stood like that for a minute or so, and the kiss grew into something more. I could feel her breasts, the heat of her skin, and suddenly I wanted badly to be alone with her someplace.
She broke the kiss and hooked her fingers through my belt. “Let’s go to your apartment,” she said. “We can fight better there.”
We did. And things were good again, until next time, when the pattern would repeat itself.
But between the periodic swings from bitter argument to sweet resolution, things were mostly good. I haven’t been deeply involved with many women, but among them, only Delilah really knew about, and accepted, what I was beginning to try to think of as my past. The surprising depth of our mutual chemistry, and the improbability of the romance it led to, was a quiet miracle for me. Delilah shared with me intimacies that I sensed came from the deepest places within her, aspects of her mind and her body that by long habit she had learned to protect ferociously and that she conceded now only slowly, cautiously, with fear-tinged hope.
I found myself opening up with her, as well. I’d meant it when I told her I was getting attached. I’d been alone so long, I’d learned to conceive of myself that way, but slowly and strangely, my conception of myself was beginning to include someone else. Sometimes the attachment scared me, and felt like a burden. Other times it seemed like a life raft, or at least like ballast. Either way, it was real, and deepening.
But one thing I didn’t share with Delilah was the onset of periodic…anxiety attacks, for want of a better description. Occasionally, I would get so lost in a book in a café that I would neglect to look up when I heard someone come in, or so lost in thought on a morning stroll that I’d suddenly realize an entire minute had elapsed and I hadn’t checked my back. At those moments, I’d be gripped by a kind of horror, the feeling you get if you accidentally run a red light at full speed and miraculously manage to breeze through the intersection unscathed. You can tell yourself no harm, no foul, but still you know you fucked up, that in another universe you were annihilated by a truck coming from your left, or you mowed down a young mother stepping off the curb, or were overtaken by some similar catastrophe. A primal part of your mind screams, How could you be so careless? Do you want to die?
I was used to living with fear, and there was always a reason for it, typically that someone was trying to kill me. Now that the causes of fear were growing distant, the fear itself diminishing, anxiety was filling the vacuum. Had I been afraid so long that I needed something to be afraid of, something the fear could focus on?
I tried taking long walks at night, the more deserted the streets, the better. There was an area in the Eighteenth Arrondissement, known as La Goutte d’Or, near Barbès, t
hat I particularly favored. Decorated with the incinerated husks of cars the locals had torched, and inhabited by dealers, beggars, and illegals from the Maghreb, the area had a dangerous, desperate edge that kept me on my toes. Its street denizens would observe me as I moved through, not knowing what to make of me. I was in France, but my face was Japanese; my attire was civilian, but my vibe was anything but. Aside from occasional offers of drugs, they mostly left me alone.
Once, a tall Moroccan with a shaved head and ears weighed down by multiple metal studs started pacing me from behind while I walked. I calmly glanced back at him, and at the two friends trailing in his wake, to let them know I was aware of their presence, and to signal thereby that I wasn’t afraid, stupid, or likely to be easy. He mistook my cautionary glance as an opening, though, and called out to me in Moroccan-accented French, “What you doing here, man? You want to buy something? I help you find it. What you want?”
I checked the area to ensure I wasn’t being flanked, then stopped and turned to him. “I’m not what you’re looking for,” I said in French.
But he kept coming. He might have been too stupid to have understood my signals. Or maybe he had decided to resolve his cognitive dissonance over my appearance and vibe by more closely examining me, rather than just shrugging and moving on.
“No, man,” he said. “Wait up. I just want to help.”
His friends were fanning out now, moving toward my flanks. I felt adrenaline churn through my system, and damn if its hot rush wasn’t almost sweet. I checked my rear again. All clear.
It was going to be a fast interview, I could tell. One, maybe two more questions to distract me and confirm my vulnerability; a sucker punch to drop me and signal his friends to move in; a joyous multiple stomping; then off with my wallet, watch, and anything else I would no longer be needing.
“It’s cool,” he said, coming into range. “I know you come for something here in La Goutte. I want…”
