Barry Eisler - Requiem for an Assassin

What I’d said was logical. Which is why I wanted him to refuse. If he did, I would have no choice. I could butcher him and whatever happened to Dox after wouldn’t be my fault.

He didn’t say anything. He might have been considering my point. He might have been thinking about the hostess, and wondering whether she was freaked out enough to call the police. He might have seen in my eyes how much I was hoping he would refuse. Regardless, after a moment he nodded.

We left Saigon Tax through the garage entrance, heading southwest on Le Loi and then turning left on Pasteur. I flagged down a cab and had it take us to the Ben Thanh Market, a labyrinthine produce emporium stretching out over an entire city block. I watched behind us as we moved, but couldn’t be sure amid all the motorcycles that no one was following us. Inside the market, there were hundreds of Vietnamese, shuffling along. Hilger and I moved fast and directly, and I didn’t see anyone trying to match our pace, but still, I wasn’t as sure as I usually am, or as I like to be. I reminded myself Hilger had been in the city only for a day. Hiring and deploying local talent that fast would have been a hell of a stretch.

Hilger kept up and didn’t give me any more trouble. We got another cab on the Le Thanh Ton side of the market, which I had take us to the Park Hyatt. The route gave me another opportunity to check behind us, when we turned right on Hai Ba Trung. I didn’t think I saw anyone follow us from the market, but…damn it, there were just so many motorcycles, and so many dark stretches of street, and so many of the riders were wearing face masks against the pollution. Did I see that guy earlier, the skinny one in the white tee-shirt, with the black bandanna around his face? Or had that been someone else?

We rode in silence. I noted again that, whatever was motivating Hilger to do all this, it had to be powerful. But what?

I hadn’t counted on so much motorcycle traffic. When I was here during the war, it had been mostly cars, along with jeeps and lumbering deuce-and-a-halfs, of course. The countersurveillance environment was tougher now. I would have to use extraordinary caution later, when I left the meeting. But at least I’d be safe inside. The reason I had chosen the hotel, Saigon’s newest and most deluxe, was that it offered the kind of camera surveillance, guards, and other security that would inhibit an on-the-premises hit.

The cab deposited us at the midpoint of a semicircular driveway. Twin bellmen opened the hotel’s wide double doors and welcomed us. We made our way to the lobby lounge along polished wood floors and muted Persian rugs. There was some jockeying for position as we chose where to sit. In the end, we wound up adjacent to each other at a table along the exterior wall, both of us facing the expansive, two-storied room. The lounge was lit softly by several hammered-metal chandeliers high overhead, and we were surrounded by the sounds of conversation and laughter from the mostly expat crowd around us. It was a safe scene, and therefore surreal.

We sat silently for a few moments, each trying to wait the other out. A pretty waitress broke the standoff by coming to our table and handing us menus. “My name is Ngan,” she said. “May I bring you something to drink?”

Hilger surprised me by asking, “Are you hungry?”

In fact, I was. I’d been keyed up all afternoon and evening, and hadn’t realized that my pho lunch was long gone. And now that the immediate danger was under control, my stomach was demanding attention.

I nodded warily.

“Why don’t you order for us,” he said. “You know the cuisine better than I do.”

I took a quick glance at the menu and selected a variety of spring rolls and dumplings. Hilger surprised me again by ordering a beer. I stayed with orange juice.

Neither of us spoke until Ngan had returned with the drinks and food. When she was gone, Hilger took a sip of his beer and said, “It must feel strange for you to be back here.”

I figured the comment was an elicitation ploy, an attempt to draw something out of me. But I wasn’t sure what. “Why do you say that?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Memories. My place was the desert. I was in Iraq for the first go-round, and now, you put me someplace with a lot of sand and superheated dry wind, and bam, I go all the way back, body and soul. Like I never left. People who haven’t had that kind of experience…they don’t understand. It’s like they live in two dimensions and you live in three.”

I knew what he was talking about. The part of you that’s formed in battle will always respond to being back on the battlefield. And when you return, I was learning, it feels as though some fitfully sleeping part of you stirs to wakefulness, while the person you thought you were surrenders as quietly as a dream. Maybe that was the paranoia I was feeling. That older self, the self that had kept me alive in the jungle, in places and circumstances where so many other men had died.

We started in on the spring rolls. A table full of Americans to our right erupted in loud laughter at something one of their party had said. Hilger glanced over and shook his head.

“Look at those people,” he said. “Think they own this place, don’t they, think they own the world. Makes me sick sometimes.”

I watched them for a moment, and found I couldn’t disagree. What I saw was a collection of overfed, overprivileged sheep who were born to whatever they had and whose only understanding of real fear and privation was what they received from images broadcast on CNN between commercial breaks for smile-whitening toothpaste and mountain-fresh fabric softeners. They condescended to the locals because the locals needed their money and had to serve them to get it. They didn’t understand that the service was like what the staff provides to the inhabitants of a nursing home. They confused stoicism with passivity, service with servility, the current world order with some ordained plan. They didn’t realize the people they looked down on now were going to own them a little later this century. Or, at the rate the West was going, maybe just bury them, instead.

He popped a dumpling into his mouth, chewed, and swallowed it. He shook his head. “Makes me wonder why I bother.”

I looked at him, intrigued that he was able to laugh and break bread with someone who not an hour earlier had very nearly executed him. I didn’t read this as weakness. On the contrary, Hilger’s easy recovery from our earlier encounter suggested a long and comfortable acquaintance with violence. And more than that, a man so ruthlessly adept at compartmentalizing the personal and the professional that he would be capable of almost anything. If he deemed something necessary, I expected he would act with little compunction and even less warning.

“Why do you bother?” I asked.

He looked away, and for a moment his gaze was distant. I wondered what he was seeing.

“Because things are broken,” he said. “People used to think broken meant a system that could only respond to a crisis. But that’s not broken. Broken is a system that can’t even respond to a crisis.”

“What crisis are you talking about?”

He took a swallow of beer. He glanced at me, then shook his head as though disappointed. “If you have to ask, you wouldn’t understand.”

“Why don’t you try me?”

“I’m talking about America. The wheels are coming off, haven’t you noticed? And what are you supposed to do if you care? Join a protest march? A letter to your gerrymandered congressman? What?”

It’s been my experience that people who can express their political views only in metaphors and passionate generalizations are fanatics. Hilger might have been one of them. Or maybe he was trying to obscure his true affiliations, or his lack of any at all. Or this whole conversation was his attempt to draw me out, to gather intelligence about me. Or all of the above.