Barry Eisler: Requiem for an Assassin

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, that 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…”

Most people find it hard to do two things at once, like complete a sentence and avoid a palm heel to the nose. Which was why I nailed him that way in mid-thought. It wasn’t the world’s hardest shot, but as a simple setup, it didn’t need to be. It just needed to disrupt his focus and rock him back onto his heels. Which it did.

I stepped past him, my right hand catching his throat in an eagle claw grip and my right leg sweeping both his legs from under him. But for the throat grab and substitution of concrete for a mat, it was pretty much the classic osoto-gari, or big outer leg reap, I had performed hundreds of thousands of times in my years at the Kodokan. Basic, but still one of my favorite throws.

For a split second, Mr. Helper was suspended horizontally. Then he was accelerating downward, assisted substantially by the downward force I was exerting on his neck. The back of his skull blasted into the sidewalk with a resounding crack, like the sound a thick book makes when someone slams it closed.

Palming the folding knife I had clipped to my front pocket, I checked my perimeter. Still clear. I took a step toward his two friends, who were rooted in place. “Do you still want to help me?” I asked, my voice calm.

“No, man,” one of them answered, his hands raised palms out in supplication. They started backing away. “It’s cool, man.”

I checked the papers the next day, and there was nothing about a killing in La Goutte. So Mr. Helper must have had a hard head. The only downside of the whole thing, from my perspective, was that prudence required I steer clear of the area for a while.

There were other places, though, and I continued to visit them at night. Still, the nocturnal prowling helped only so much. Situational awareness for countering potential street crime is one thing. The fever pitch alertness required to survive professionals who are patiently, dispassionately, specifically, maneuvering to take your life is something else. If you’re addicted to the latter, and maybe I was, the former is no more than an occasional dose of methadone in the face of a long-term heroin habit.

As my relationship with Delilah deepened, and as I gradually eased myself away from the mindset you need to survive in the life, it was as though the part of myself that was so adept in dangerous environments, the part that had kept me alive in the jungle in Vietnam and then in countless urban jungles afterward, didn’t like what was going on. That killer inside me, that iceman who could always do what needed to be done, felt he was being marginalized, disenfranchised. But what could I do? I didn’t know how to propitiate him, or even if I could. All I knew was that he was deadly, as deadly as anyone I’ve ever known, and capable of almost anything if he felt his survival required it. I could feel him looking for a reason, a rationale, an excuse to come surging back and shove me out of the way.

Someone who needed him, say. Someone in danger. Someone like Dox.

DOX CAME TO SUDDENLY. One moment he was out, gone, and then it was as though someone had pressed his reboot button. He blinked and swallowed, and for a moment he thought maybe it had been a nightmare. He had that kind of dream from time to time, where the bullets would just plop out of his rifle, or his knives would all get stuck in their sheaths, and when it happened he knew he needed to train, because hard training was the only way to sleep well again. But this time, as he came around, the images in his mind only grew sharper, and he knew it had really happened. He’d gotten grabbed.

Christ, he was sore all over. Must have gotten bounced around some while he was out. He tried to move and couldn’t, then realized why. His wrists and ankles were secured, and his hands were stretched back above his head. Actually, below his head was more like it, because as he recovered his senses he saw that he was strapped to a declined board, with his feet about a foot higher than his head. Well, that wasn’t a good sign.