by Barry Eisler
Manny came out forty-five minutes later. He was with a pretty Filipina and a boy of about seven or eight who looked to be of mixed heritage. Manny was wearing dark trousers and a cream-colored silk shirt; the woman, dark-skinned, petite, showed a nice figure in a yellow floral dress. The little boy was wearing a blue blazer and khaki pants. He was holding Manny’s hand, and in the instant my mind put all the pieces together in some sort of preconscious shorthand, I realized, He’s just happy to be with his daddy, and was surprised at the acuteness of the pang that accompanied the thought.
They got into the back of the Benz and I watched as it pulled away from the curb. My cell phone rang. It was Dox.
“He’s moving,” he said.
“I know. I’m watching.”
“What do you see?”
I paused, then said, “He’s not staying at the hotel because he’s got a family here in Greenhills. A woman and a son.”
“How do you know?”
“I just saw them all together. From the way they’re dressed on a Sunday morning, I’d say they’re on their way to church. And it makes sense. The file says Manny has a family back in Johannesburg. My guess is that somewhere along the line, say seven, eight years ago from the apparent age of the boy, Manny knocked up a Filipina. That’s why he’s been coming out here so regularly and for so long. It’s not business, or at least it’s not just business. He keeps a room at the hotel so his Johannesburg wife doesn’t get wise, and he goes back there once or twice a day. Think about the times he shows up at the hotel—morning and afternoon in South Africa. Probably calls home from the room so she can see the caller ID readout.”
“I thought old Manny was of the Israeli persuasion. When I was growing up, I didn’t go to church too often, but I don’t remember seeing a whole lot of Jews there at the time.”
I thought for a moment, then said, “If I’m right about where they’re going, he’s probably doing it as an accommodation to the woman. Filipinas can be pretty serious about their Catholicism.”
“All right, I’ll buy that. Any angle on how we reach out and touch him?”
“We’ve got a pretty good idea of where he’s actually staying. That’s a start. Keep me posted on where the car is heading, and I’ll follow them from a distance until they stop. Maybe I’ll learn more.”
“Roger that.”
As it turned out, they weren’t going far: a nearby gated community called East Greenhills. I had to show a guard my ID, which was fake in any event, but he let me in when I told him, following my hunch, that I was there to attend morning Mass. He could have tested me on the liturgy if he’d wanted. My American mother, who was Catholic, had taken me to church regularly enough for the experience to have made an impression.
The approach to the church was clogged with cars, and I had to park some distance away and walk. That was fine. I preferred to keep the car out of view, so as not to give the bodyguard too many opportunities for multiple sightings.
Inside it was crowded, nearly full. I recognized the subject of the sermon, which was being delivered in English—spoken almost universally, along with indigenous Tagalog, throughout Manila. The priest was discussing the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi, who opined, among other things, that it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
My own experience has led me to contrary conclusions, but I didn’t see the point of arguing.
The priest’s voice echoed from the front of the long room, competing with a series of wall-mounted ceiling fans that swayed forward and back as though alternately entranced by and then distracted from the cadences of his speech. The room was open on three sides to the outside, and the air was heavy with tropical moisture.
I sat in back on one of the varnished wooden pews, feeling the weight of the edifice settle in around me. It had been a long time, a lifetime, since I’d been in a church, and that was fine with me.
I could see Manny and his family, to the left and six rows forward. The boy sat between Manny and the woman. I sensed I’d been right in suggesting to Dox that periodic church attendance was an accommodation Manny made to the desires of the woman. Probably he didn’t really give a shit on a religious level. Or maybe the whole thing was uncomfortable for him. Either way, that he was willing to participate was further evidence that he cared a lot about the woman, and, I assumed, about the boy, too.
I watched from where I sat, wondering what the boy made of the ritual to which he was being subjected. I didn’t know if his father’s participation would make things better for him, or worse. My own visits to church had always been exclusively with my mother, over the silent protests of my Japanese father, who objected to such silliness, and, I realized later, to the Western infection it would impart.
Yes, I thought. Four-hundred-plus years ago, the Spanish infect the natives. And now the infection perpetuates, persists. The woman passes it on to the boy.
My own father was killed when I was eight, in a Tokyo street riot. Since then there have been a number of what I suppose might be called “defining moments,” but that first death was the original. I can still feel the terrible fear and shock as my mother broke the news to me, trying and then failing to hold back her own tears. If I choose to, and I usually don’t, I can vividly recall the years of strange dreams after, in which he would be back with us and alive but always insubstantial or mute or dying or in some other way less than whole. It had taken me a long time to recover from all that.
I realized that seeing Manny with his family was stirring up this shit. And being in a church, that wasn’t exactly a plus, either.
I thought of the photos Boaz and Gil had shown me. If Manny were to die in an accident today, there was no question that many innocent lives would be saved. How could it be a sin, then, to facilitate his demise? On the contrary, wouldn’t the sin lie in forbearance? Wouldn’t such forbearance, in fact, be a form of complicity in those later deaths?
But I also knew that Manny’s death would leave this boy bereft, crucify him in grief and loneliness. I knew that very well.
All at once I hated being faced with this dilemma. I resented all the forces, past and present, that had conspired to impose it on me. I wanted to be one of the ignorant, the undeserving recipients of the fruits of awful choices like this one, who could sleep secure in their beds and dream innocent dreams and enjoy the profits of the sacrifice I was about to impose on this child, and the sacrifice I would make in the process, without bloodying their own hands in the process. They didn’t deserve the benefits any more than this boy deserved the burden, and goddamn if I was going be the one to present them with such a bloody gift.
And then I thought, Maybe this is the sacrifice that’s required of you. This is the sacrifice that you owe. All those lives you’ve taken . . . do lives saved count against them?
I shook my head, confused. I’ve been at this for more years than I care to acknowledge, and I’d never been troubled this way before. At least not in the middle of the proceedings. Sometimes you learn something afterward, or see something when it’s too late to turn back . . . it bothers you later. But not like this.
It’s the boy, I told myself. You never want to see that the target has a family. And the boy is reminding you of yourself. Perfectly normal reaction. It’ll pass, like it always does. Focus on the job, on doing the job. That’s all you can trust, that’s the thing that gets you through.
I took a deep breath and let it out. Right. The job.
Mass lasted another forty minutes. When it was over, I drifted behind Manny and his family, staying well back in the crowd. As we exited the church, the boy clambered onto Manny for a piggyback ride. I could hear his delighted laughter carrying across the tropical air. I watched the three of them load into the Mercedes, then walked back to my car.
I called Dox. “They were at church. My guess is that they’re on their way to a meal now. Let me know where they’re heading and I’ll stay with them. This might be our chance, too, so be ready to move.”
“Alre
ady am.”
With Dox apprising me of the direction they were taking, I was able to follow them without maintaining a visual. It turned out I was right about the meal. They stopped in the Ayala Center, a sparkling mega-mall almost across the street from the Peninsula. I got to the mall only a minute behind them, and took my best guess, based on where they had parked, on where they had gone inside. From there, it was mostly a matter of checking restaurants. It took me only a few minutes to find them, in the main food court on the third floor. They were sitting in front of a place called World Chicken, already working on a meal. The bodyguard was standing off to the side. I picked him up in my peripheral vision, but gave no sign that I was aware of him. I felt confident he hadn’t noticed me. The area was crowded with shoppers and diners and I had plenty of cover.
I called Dox. “I’m on him again. They’re at the Ayala Center, right across the street from you. Walk over and you’ll be here in less than ten minutes.”
“I’m on my way.”
“Switch to the commo gear when you get here.”
“Roger that.”
I bought a coffee from one of the vendors and sat down on the other side of the food court. After a few minutes, I heard Dox.
“I’m here,” he said. “First-floor atrium. Where are you?”
“A place called Glorietta Food Choices, third-floor Glorietta. One floor under one of the cineplexes, right next to a video game arcade. I’m sitting near the windows, farthest from the escalators. Our friend is getting lunch ten feet in front of the escalator. Guard is staying with them. Come up and move to your left right away and he won’t see you. Then stay at the periphery until you ID the players. I don’t want him to recognize you from the hotel.”
“Roger that.”
A minute later, I saw Dox enter. He circled wide as I had suggested, keeping the crowd between himself and the principals. I saw his eyes move past me without stopping.
I realized that Manny hadn’t taken a restroom break since church. I was thinking that at some point, maybe after lunch, he was going to heed a call of nature. The bodyguard would be watching for anyone moving in after him. But it wouldn’t occur to him that some antisocial someone might be in there already.
I felt a small wave of adrenaline coming ashore.
“Hey,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“There’s a men’s room on this floor. I’m going to wait inside it. I have a feeling our friend is going to go after he finishes his lunch. With luck, he’ll come alone.”
“I’ll watch your back, partner.”
“Good.”
Restrooms are nice because they’re one of the last urban places where you can’t find a security camera. I would wait inside, come up behind him, break his neck, and be out the door before he hit the floor. There were no cameras in the vicinity of the restroom, so my entrance and exit would go unrecorded. No one would check on Manny for at least two minutes, and probably more like five, giving Dox and me plenty of time to slip away unnoticed. Not quite the level of naturalness that the Israelis were hoping for, or that I would have liked to be paid for, but I thought it would do. The police can be as lazy as anyone else, and for anyone disinclined to fill out a lot of paperwork, a broken neck would be easier to file under “slip and fall” or “accident” than would a bullet hole in the forehead. The main thing was that no one would be able to attribute it to my client.
I imagined Manny’s family, waiting for him to return. Two minutes becomes three, three becomes four. Someone makes a joke about how Daddy must have fallen in. The woman goes to the door and calls for him. There’s no answer. She feels confused, possibly a little concerned. She pokes her head inside and sees Manny on the floor, his head at an impossible angle. She screams. The boy comes running. He stops at his mother’s leg and looks through the door she’s holding open. The image carves itself into his brain and never, ever leaves him.
I heard Dox’s voice in the earpiece: “You all right, partner?”
I looked around the food court. “Yeah, fine. Why?”
“You looked a little spooked there, for a while. Thought maybe you saw something I didn’t.”
“I’m all right.”
“Well, you’ve got company, coming up from behind you. I was afraid you hadn’t noticed.”
“What kind of company?”
“The kind that’s wearing a big bulge under the back of a suit jacket.”
“Bodyguard?”
“That’s right.”
I wondered how he had managed to get a gun inside. He must have been licensed. Manny had been coming to Manila for a long time and was probably well connected.
“Tell me if I need to turn, let him know I see him coming.”
“I think you’re okay. His hands are empty. But he’s definitely coming to check you out.”
I knew what had likely drawn the man’s attention. It wasn’t something I did. It was something I am.
No one can completely obscure the signs of a profound acquaintance with violence. The obvious ones are the hard cases. These are men who’ve lived through the shit and have no ability, and certainly no inclination, to hide the predacious air such survival conveys. This type, which includes gangbangers, ex-cons, and a certain breed of former soldier, gives off the strongest, most distinctive vibe, and is the easiest to detect.
There’s another type, too, as intimate, if not more so, with violence as the first, but better aware of the scent they now carry and more inclined and better able to conceal it. This type, which includes your average undercover operator, is harder to detect, but is often noticeable anyway not so much by the presence of a particular vibe as by the absence of any vibe at all. These people have become aware of the danger signals they put out and have reacted, or in a sense overreacted, by retracting everything. Within the energy of a given social environment, these men show up as an absence, a missing something, like gray in a color canvas, or a black hole against a tableau of stars.
The third type is the hardest to pick up, and is probably unrecognizable to the first two and certainly to civilians. It, too, includes men who have been forged in violence, but who also are natural camouflage artists, chameleons. These men hide their predator’s mark not so much by trying to retract the vibe, but by concealing it behind a new persona that they recognize in civilians and then imitate and project like a hologram. I know this type because I call it my own.
But even the third type is detectable sometimes, at certain moments, if you know what to look for. I find it impossible to articulate just what gives the chameleons away. Sometimes it’s something in the eyes, something that doesn’t fit with the clothes, the gait, the speech patterns. Sometimes it’s something that feels like a ripple at the edge of the persona, a not-quite-perfect fit in the façade. Whatever it is, it’s something the intuitive mind can flag, but that remains too subtle for the conscious mind to label. And as I sat in the food court, troubled by my thoughts, something must have surfaced in my expression, and it was this the man coming toward me must have keyed on and felt worth examining more closely.
Operators don’t let people move in from their blind side, so if I didn’t turn or otherwise let him know I was aware of his approach, it might help persuade him to ignore whatever had caught his attention, to conclude that I was a civilian after all. He might then simply move on after taking a sniff. Or, if he got too close and forced me to act, he would be less likely to be properly prepared for what he encountered.
“How close?” I asked, without moving my lips. I picked up a packet of sugar, tore it open, and started pouring it into the coffee cup. If you’re trying not to be spotted, it helps to do mundane things, and, if possible, to think mundane thoughts. Don’t ask me why, but it does.
“Eight yards. Seven. Six . . .”
“Hands?”
“Still empty. Four yards.”
At four yards, I should have heard his footfalls. Either he was naturally stealthy, or he was deliberately approaching quietly. Eith
er way, I knew I was dealing with something more than typical rent-a-cop security.
“Three yards. He’s stopped, next to a big old potted plant for partial concealment. Hands are still empty. I don’t think he knows what to make of you, but I don’t think he wants to be friends, either.”
I busied myself swirling sugar into the coffee with a wooden stirrer, thinking, Hmmm, I hope this tastes good, I prefer my coffee black, well, this coffee was fairly bitter anyway, maybe it’s an arabica, yeah, dark-roasted, I wonder what country it’s from . . .
I heard Dox’s voice again: “All right, he’s heading off. Must have decided you weren’t interesting after all.”
I took a sip of the coffee. Actually, with the sugar it was pretty good. “I’m not,” I said.
I heard him laugh.
When the bodyguard had moved off, I got up and walked away, shuffling like a typical Japanese sarariman. I sensed him watching me go, knowing that he would take my exit as further confirmation that I didn’t present a threat.
But at the far end of the food court, with the arcade between us, I ducked into the restroom. The room was rectangular, about five meters by six, with the entrance on one of the short ends. Three urinals along one long side; two stalls on the other, sinks against the connecting wall. Two Filipino teenagers were zipping up when I came in and left a moment later.
I went into the corner stall and closed the door.
“I’m in,” I said. “Tell me when he’s moving.”
“Roger that.”
I waited ten minutes. Then: “They’re getting up. Looks like he’s saying good-bye to the woman and the boy. Yeah, they’re heading down the escalator.”
They were splitting up. Good.
“Bodyguard’s staying, though. No surprise there.”
“No, no surprise.”
A moment passed. Then: “He’s coming toward your position. I think your hunch was good.”
