Barry Eisler: Requiem for an Assassin

Inside the store, a couple of mothers with diapered toddlers in tow prowled the cramped aisles, shopping for tonight’s dinner, a few household supplies, maybe a bit of candy to keep the baby smiling. Dox had nowhere special to go, and spent a leisurely half-hour moving methodically through the store and loading up a small cart. When he was done, he rolled up to the register, where a pretty girl he knew as Wan was working.

“How are you today, Mr. Dox?” the girl asked him with a beautiful Bali smile.

Dox smiled back, but kept a little distance in his expression. Wan was a tasty-looking little treat, no question, but a sensible man knew not to shit where he ate. Or in this case, shopped. Besides, he could get all he wanted and more an hour away, in Kuta and Sanur.

“Fine, Wan, and how about you? Putting up okay with the heat?”

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.

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.