Paris is a Bitch

by Barry Eisler

  For most couples, a quiet dinner for two at Auberge de la Reine Blanche on the Île Saint-Louis would be just the thing to smooth out the complications in a romance. But for gorgeous Mossad operative Delilah and trying-to-retire contract killer John Rain, nothing is ever easy, and when Rain sees a crew of hard-looking men setting up outside the restaurant, he realizes someone has been bringing her work home with her. Is it a hit — or something even worse? When it comes to killing, business and pleasure are the most dangerous mix of all.

  Paris Is A Bitch

  Excerpt: THE DETACHMENT

  Excerpt: Chapter 1

  Excerpt: Chapter 2

  Excerpt: Chapter 3

  Excerpt: FLEE: A Thriller, by J. A. Konrath and Ann Voss Peterson

  Excerpt: RUN, by Blake Crouch

  Personal Safety Tips from Assassin John Rain

  About the Author

  Books by Barry Eisler

  Contact Barry

  Delilah and I were enjoying a late dinner at Auberge de la Reine Blanche on the Île Saint-Louis. Softly lit, intimate, and unpretentious, it was one of her favorite restaurants, and though I typically shun any behavior that might be used to fix me in time and place, an occasional last-minute reservation was something I was learning to live with. Delilah was grateful for the concession, and expressed her thanks not in words, but in kind, ceding me the seat with the view of the entrance and, through the large front windows, open now to the fine spring air, the antique street and sidewalk without. She never suggested that she might watch my back, as she was willing to let me watch hers. I wondered if she was afraid of my response, and how it might reveal the limits of my trust, limits which she sensed but wasn’t yet ready to face head-on.

  I had arrived earlier that evening, a longtime habit for which Delilah typically affected neither approval nor reproach. An astute tactician, she understood the importance of examining terrain through a potential enemy’s eyes before occupying it oneself. And though her own routines were less rigorous—she would say less paranoid—than mine, she was patient with these vestiges of the life I was determined to leave behind. She believed in me, she’d told me, believed I was more than the iceman, the killer inside me who’d been running my life and was constantly, insidiously trying to regain his position in the driver’s seat of my psyche. She told me she understood that I wanted to be done with all that, out of the life, free of the past, the iceman departed, deliquesced, deceased.

  It was never going to be easy. I’ve known men returned from war who had trouble sleeping without their boots on and a rifle close at hand, and I’ve understood their difficulty. It’s hard for the most primal, powerful regions of the mind to abandon habits that were once crucial to the organism’s survival, even when the higher mind recognizes those habits are no longer warranted. What can the habits hurt? the survival mind wants to know. And, sadly, things like a chance for peace and hope of redemption aren’t responses it finds much persuasive.

  But even worse than the tenacity of my psyche was the stubbornness of my circumstances. Because how was I going to get out of the life while Delilah was still in it, while her own behavior was constantly, insidiously cuing and inciting my own? And why should I even want to, when she was always implicitly telling me her work with Mossad was more a devotion than her relationship with me, when she was always refusing the commitment to me that I was trying to make to her?

  We fought a lot, and the fights were getting worse. Sometimes she would belittle my professed desire to get out of the life, pointing out my ongoing need for tactical behavior, which I in turn would blame on her. We took turns with patience and frustration. But no matter the argument, no matter whoever or whatever was at fault, it was true I couldn’t relax when I saw her without first performing what, to a civilian who didn’t know better, would probably be diagnosed as a weird species of obsessive-compulsive disorder. So in the hours before our scheduled dinner, I strolled the narrow lanes of the island, reminding myself of its routes and rhythms, reacquainting myself with its lines of entry and points of escape. It was a beautiful evening, the sky pastel blue, the trees budding with tentative green, and the banks of the Seine were thronged with pleasure seekers, talking and laughing and drinking wine. Just past Rue Boutarel on the Quai d’Orléans, I paused and joined them, admiring the sunset silhouetting Notre Dame Cathedral on the Île de la Cité, a short walk away across the Pont Saint-Louis. I watched the sky glowing pink, deepening to red, and finally surrendering to violet and indigo, and wondered what it all must have looked like a few thousand years earlier, before this small spit of rock in a river had been subject to the minds and hands of men, and what it would look like a few thousand years hence, when war or climate change or some deep immune response from the earth itself had cleansed the area of the humans who claimed it now, and nature made it once again her own.

  And now, satisfied that I had a way out if I needed one, I sat in the back of the restaurant on one of the old wooden chairs, enjoying the sounds of French and German and English, all pleasantly scrambled by the close walls and the dark, beamed ceiling; enveloped by the smells of bœuf à la bourguignonne and soupe à l’oignon and petites bouchées d’escargots sauce roquefort; and savoring the sight of the beautiful, deceptively elegant blonde across from me, who, if we could find a way past our professional tensions and make common cause of something better, I thought might actually be the best thing that had ever happened to me.

  Delilah smiled and asked me in French, “What are you thinking?”

  She was wearing a simple, cream-colored silk wrap dress with tasteful but still tantalizing décolletage, and the candle on the table between us was casting distracting shadows. I let my I eyes linger where they wanted to linger, then smiled lasciviously and said, “About what I might want for dessert.”

  She smiled back. “Well, for that, you have to see the menu.”

  “I’ll have to take my time with that. If it all looks good enough, I might even order more than one.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “You think you can handle that much?”

  I looked into her blue eyes. “I don’t know. I’ll have to taste it and see.”

  She gave me a challenging look, the kind that would make weak men wilt and strong men wild. “Then come back to my apartment. We’ll see if your eyes are bigger than your stomach. But…”

  “Yes?”

  “You can’t stay tonight. I have to leave early tomorrow.”

  “Where are you going?” I said, immediately irritated at myself for asking a question to which I already knew the answer. Or rather, the response.

  “John. Why do you ask me that? You know I can’t tell you.”

  “How long will you be gone?”

  “And I can’t tell you that, either. As you know.”

  I felt a stupid petulance taking hold of me and tried, without much success, to shrug it off. I shouldn’t have pressed, but I said, “A day? A month? How long this time?”

  She sighed. “Longer than a day, less than a month. I think.”

  I looked away, nodding. “You think.”

  An American in an expensive blazer and with perfectly groomed three-day facial stubble was blathering into his mobile phone at the table next to us. I hadn’t noticed until just then, having been focused more on whether Delilah and I were speaking quietly enough not to be overheard than with whether anyone else was talking too loudly. I looked over, and his girlfriend touched his arm to let him know his phone monologue was annoying someone. He glanced at me but didn’t change his volume. My irritation with Delilah was looking for an outlet, and I considered snatching the phone out of his hand, breaking it in two, shoving one half down his throat and the other up his ass, and putting the whole thing back together inside his chest.
But that would get me noticed, and then some, and with my mostly Asian features, I was already a bit more noticeable in Paris than I liked.

  Delilah said, “I’m sorry.”

  I didn’t respond. Stubble Boy was yammering on, something about structural asset-backed securities and tranches. I tried to tune him out.

  Delilah said, “I know it’s difficult for you. I can imagine what it’s like. And I’m sorry.”

  I looked at her. “Yeah? What do you imagine?”

  There was a pause. She said, “You wonder what the new assignment is, and whether that means I have to go to bed with someone.”

  High-value-target honey trap operations were Delilah’s métier, and if she hadn’t been so effective in the role, the Mossad would have cut her loose ages earlier because she wouldn’t take any of the shit their bureaucracy tried to serve her.

  “That’s not what makes it difficult,” I said, although the sentiment was less than solid.

  “What, then?”

  “You know what. It’s not what you do in the life—I know that, and I get it. It’s you in the life, period. It’s making me feel like I have one foot in and one foot out, and I can’t find my balance.”

  Stubble Boy said, “Fuck that! You tell him if he wants the higher coupon payments, he takes the higher risk. That’s—”

  “Excuse me,” Delilah said, switching to Parisian-accented English, her voice suddenly projecting. “It might just be the acoustics in here, but your phone conversation seems awfully loud. Why don’t you take it outside? Or, better yet, for the sake of your date, wait until you’re alone?”

  Stubble Boy looked briefly incredulous, and I half-expected him to stammer something born of baseless entitlement such as, Do you have any idea who I am? Instead, he held the phone away from his head and said dismissively, “Look, there’s plenty of noise in here. I don’t know what the problem is.”

  He turned as though to resume his conversation. I knew Delilah wasn’t going to let it go, so I leaned across to his table and took hold of his free wrist. He looked at me, shocked, and tried to yank free. Eccentric hand and forearm strength is one of the consequences of a lifetime of near daily judo, and I do additional exercises to augment my grip—enough so that I can crush an apple in one hand if I want to. This time, fortunately for Stubble Boy, I didn’t want to. But I let him know I could.

  “Put the phone away,” I said quietly. “And lower your voice.”

  He looked like he was going to protest, but a little more effortless pressure on his wrist and the flat look in my eyes made him think better of it. “Jesus, you don’t have to get so huffy,” he said. I looked at him for a moment longer, then released his wrist and turned back to Delilah. I heard him say into the phone, extra loudly to try to restore some of his damaged pride, “Hey Bob, I’ll call you back. Couple of rude Parisians here.”

  Delilah smiled and said to me in French, “Well, that was diverting.”

  I shrugged, having already largely forgotten the idiot. “Anyway. This whole situation would be a lot more tolerable for me if there were at least an endpoint to look forward to. Six months, six years, if I just knew there was a time when…”

  I let the thought trail off. On the sidewalk outside the restaurant, a swarthy young man of what looked like Arabic, maybe Algerian, descent was scrutinizing the menu in the window. He had a narrow, ferret-like face, and his eyes darted around in a way that suggested he felt jumpy. Nothing alarming in itself, necessarily, but this was the second time I’d seen him in the last ten minutes. Both times he had examined the menu, but had also spent a fair amount of time scoping the inside of the restaurant. Again, in itself nothing out of the ordinary. People read menus and look inside restaurants, sometimes repeatedly, while they try to decide where to eat. But the behavior is more common in a pair or a group than it is in a singleton. Also, there was something purposeful, rather than inquiring, in the way he was looking around inside.

  “What?” Delilah said.

  “There’s a guy outside. Second time I’ve seen him and I don’t like his vibe.”

  “Shall I look?”

  “No. If it’s anything, I don’t want him to know he’s made. Wait, he’s coming inside.”

  I slid my chair back so if necessary I could clear the table instantly, then picked up the glass of house Bordeaux I was drinking. Most people have trouble recovering from a glass of wine in the eyes, especially if it’s followed by an immediate barrage of much worse. Delilah’s hand dipped discreetly below the table, no doubt accessing the FS Hideaway knife—basically a steel talon on a double finger ring—she typically wore on her inner thigh.

  “Hands are empty,” I said quietly, looking at Delilah and keeping the guy in my peripheral vision. He strode to the end of the restaurant, just past where I could see him. My scalp prickled with the discomfort of letting him get behind me, but Delilah was watching him now and I knew her expression would tell me instantly whether action was required. I heard him ask the waitress what time they closed, and then he was heading back out. I watched him go, and again something in my gut told me he was trouble.

  “What do you make of that?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “Could be just what it looked like. He’s trying to decide where to eat, maybe because he’s meeting friends later.”

  “Come on. Did that guy feel like Île Saint-Louis to you? He didn’t even feel like the Quartier Latin. More like la Goutte.” La Goutte d’Or was a rough part of the city in the 18th arrondissement, populated largely by Arabs and Africans, and known for its drugs, crime, and presence of illegals from the Maghreb.

  “Are you trying to make a point?”

  The question irritated me. What kind of point would I be trying to make?

  Stubble Boy and his girlfriend stood to go. “Have a great night,” he said, his tone sarcastic and his voice overly loud. Delilah rolled her eyes but other than that didn’t engage him.

  When they were gone, I said, “Did he look at you when he turned to leave the restaurant?”

  She shrugged. “Men always look at me.” She said it without self-pleasure, just as a simple statement of fact.

  “But how did he look at you? Did it feel sexual? Appreciative? Or like something else?”

  “Why are you pushing this?”

  “Why are you resisting?”

  “Because I think you’re trying to make a point. Trying to show me how my being in the life is putting you on edge, keeping you off-balance, something like that.”

  I tamped down my irritation. “Delilah. You know me. Have I ever played games with this shit? Tried to make a point by pretending there was a problem when I didn’t really think there was one?”

  There was a pause. She said, “No.”

  “That’s right, no. So let me tell you what I think just happened. Ferret Boy scoped the restaurant from the outside ten minutes ago and saw the back of your blonde head. He reported back to whoever that you were in here. Whoever, who’s more senior and seasoned than Ferret Boy, asked him how he’d determined that. When Ferret Boy admitted he’d only seen you from behind, Whoever told him to get his ass inside the restaurant on some pretext and get a positive ID of your face. Which he just did.”

  “How do you know he wasn’t scoping for you?”

  “You know the answer to that. With where I’m sitting, he could see my face from outside the restaurant. Besides, my enemies aren’t from that part of the world. Yours are.”

  “Isn’t that profiling?”

  “It is if you’re doing it right.”

  “Or it could be about someone else in the restaurant. Or it could be just a coincidence.”

  She was smarter than that and her resistance was really beginning to agitate me. “Look, maybe I’m wrong, I’ve been wrong plenty of times before. But only on the side of caution. You really want to bet your life on ‘maybe it’s a coincidence’? You want to bet your life to prove a point in a stupid argument with me?”

  She looked at me for a long moment
, then nodded, her expression suddenly sober. “What are you thinking? A hit?”

  I was glad to see she was finally taking this seriously. “Maybe, but I’d guess no. If it were a hit, they could have waited to make the positive ID outside. If it wasn’t you, they just walk away. Hell, they wouldn’t even need to wait outside. The hitter could just walk into the restaurant in light disguise, march up to the table, get the ID, bam, two shots in the head, then back outside beating feet before witnesses even have a chance to process what just happened.”

  “You know why I’m so attached to you?”

  “No.”

  “Because most people wouldn’t consider something like that fit dinner conversation.”

  I smiled tightly, liking that even though she was taking the situation seriously now, she was still cool under pressure. “But if it’s something other than a hit, and they need to set up carefully, they’d want to know it was you before committing. The only thing is, that guy didn’t feel like a pro to me. And anyone who really knows you wouldn’t send an amateur to do the job.”

  “Well, it could be someone who doesn’t really know me.”

  “Why would anyone who doesn’t really know you want to kill you?”

  She smiled, a little sadly. “Remember the kind of work I do. The target wouldn’t have to know of my professional affiliations to develop a grudge. What he thought was personal would be enough.”

  That was a good point. I said, “Well, whatever it is or isn’t, I’d rather not find out. But there’s no rear entrance to this restaurant. They take deliveries straight through the front door.”

  She didn’t have to ask. She knew I never went into a room I didn’t know every way out of.

  “How do you want to handle it?” she said.

  I considered. “Ask the waitress if you can bum a cigarette. Woman-to-woman, she’ll be more likely to want to help out.”

  “You’re going to have a smoke?”

  “Just outside the door. Like any well-mannered Parisian.” Paris had gone no-smoking, thank God, forcing smokers to head outdoors to indulge.