by Barry Eisler
“I didn’t… I didn’t…” he stammered between gasps. “But your face—”
I smacked him again. “Idiot, you think I’m supposed to look like GIGN? What about the woman, did she look GIGN to you? You think we should wear signs, maybe, so punks like you can identify us?”
An oh, fuck expression stole across his face, and I knew he believed completely. And why not? How else could he understand how a defenseless woman and her innocuous date had mowed down his entire crew?
He panted and shook his head. “I didn’t know.”
“You’re part of a cell? This was a terrorist hit, yes? You know what we do with terrorists who attack GIGN?”
His eyes were bulging in exhaustion and panic, but I knew a part of his brain was still reasoning, thinking, we’re talking, if we’re talking, I can talk my way out. I wanted to encourage that sensibility.
“No!” he said. “Not a terrorist. I swear, I didn’t know.”
“Who are you working for?” I said. “Al Qaeda? Yes, this is a big night for me, to break up an al Qaeda cell. Come on, we’re going to Satory, GIGN headquarters. I have two partners, we all lost friends in Afghanistan. They’ll want to interrogate you themselves.”
“I don’t know any al Qaeda!” he said. His breathing was becoming a little less labored. “Please, this was a mistake. I’m not a terrorist.”
“No? You’re not a terrorist? Then you’re what? What was tonight?”
“A mistake. I’m sorry.”
“You were trying to kidnap my partner. Why?”
“I was hired.”
“By whom?”
“One in my crew knows a Saudi. But not al Qaeda! One of the royals, he said. The Saudi hired us to kidnap the woman. That’s all I know.”
It probably was all he knew. I doubted anyone who hired a bunch of street toughs would have shared more than that. But it couldn’t hurt to try for a little more. So I smacked him again. At this point, the smacks would be almost comforting, maintaining my dominance, which he now accepted, and implying that if he played his cards right, this was the worst he might receive. “That’s all you know? A Saudi? Listen, you want to avoid disappearing in Satory, you better stop insulting me with this bullshit.”
“It’s not bullshit. My boss told us the Saudi wanted the woman to be hurt. He gave us five thousand Euros, with five thousand more on completion.”
“You believe that? Your boss took probably twice that. He played you for a chump. And what were you supposed to do?”
“Just… look, I’m giving you cooperation, all right? I’m telling you the truth. I didn’t know she was GIGN. That she was your partner.”
“What were you supposed to do?”
“We were supposed to rape her. All of us, every way possible. And then slash her. Slash her face. Make her ugly. I’m sorry.”
I maintained my expression of stern professional skepticism. But inside, something was uncoiling, something I would need to keep in check if I was going to keep my promise to Delilah. I was distantly aware of the hypocrisy of my reaction to what he had been hired for. After all, I’ve killed people for money. It’s what I used to do. I never had a problem with it, or much of a problem, anyway.
But still.
“Who was the Saudi?” I said. “What is his name?”
“I don’t know. Vincent didn’t tell us that.”
“Vincent?”
“My boss. The one you pulled from the back of the truck.”
Whether he was bullshitting me or was legitimately ignorant, I wasn’t going to learn anything more from him. It was time to go.
“You have contraband?” I asked him.
“Contraband?”
“Drugs. Weapons. You’re carrying?”
“No, man, I’m clean.”
I gestured with my head to the stone wall along the entrance to the bridge. “Put your hands on the wall. I’m going to pat you down. If you’re telling me the truth, you can walk. If you’re lying, I take you to Satory.”
He gave me a sly look, probably thinking what I really wanted was to take his contraband, not arrest him for it.
Sad, how cynical people can be.
He turned and put his palms on the wall.
“Feet farther back,” I said. “Weight on your palms. And spread your legs.”
He complied.
I watched him for just a moment, savoring what I was about to do. Then I reached one hand between his legs and took hold of his badly exposed balls, which I then proceeded to pretend were one of those apples I sometimes use to test my grip.
An apple would have done better.
When I was done, I left his unconscious body in a heap and walked away without looking back. I crossed the Pont Louis-Philippe, made a right on Voie Georges Pompidou, and five minutes later I was at the park. Delilah was waiting by the monkey bars as promised, the playground a small triangle of stillness and dark against the sounds and headlights of the streets surrounding it.
“It was what you thought,” I said. I told her what happened, and what I’d learned from the guy I’d left by the Pont Louis-Philippe.
When I was done, she touched my face, an intimate gesture I had always welcomed from her but that just then irritated me. “Thank you,” she said.
“What are you going to do about it?”
“I told you, my organization—”
“Mossad. I know who you work for. Why can’t you say the name?”
“You know the name. Why do I have to say it?”
I didn’t answer. I knew I was being petty.
“Anyway,” she said, “my organization will move me to a new apartment. They’ll watch me. I’ll be fine.”
“You’ll be fine? Your organization wasn’t even competent enough to protect you tonight, now you’re going to be okay because they’ll watch you? Do you even believe that?”
She didn’t answer. It was maddening.
“What about the Saudi?” I said. “You think he’s going to just quit?”
“They’ll take care of him, too.” She paused, then said, “Are you interested?”
I looked at her, incredulous. “In the job? You can’t be serious.”
“Why not? A half hour ago, I had to beg you not to.”
“For you. I would have done it for you. I’m not going to be hired by your organization. Don’t you understand? I can’t modulate this shit, Delilah. Maybe you can, but I can’t. You know how hard it is to fight that part of myself, to keep him in check? Because he’s always looking for a way back in. Tonight he found a personal one, because of you. And now you’re offering a professional opportunity on top of it. What’s wrong with you? How many times do I have to tell you, I just want—”
“Out of the life, I know.”
“Then why are you trying to drag me back in? So you won’t have to leave? When are you going to be happy, when your work gets us both killed?”
“They were just punks.”
“This time. Next time, it’ll be fucking Delta Force. One of us has to make a decision here, Delilah. I’m tired of you refusing to make it.”
“What are you saying?”
I knew I was being pigheaded and reckless. But I was still jacked on adrenaline, and I was pissed.
“I’m saying I want to know when. Right now. Tell me when you’re out. Because if you can’t tell me that, I’ll know the answer is never. And I’ll know to stop wasting my time.”
A long beat went by. I heard the sounds of traffic, and distant voices laughing, and the branches of elm trees swaying in the dark above us.
Finally, she said, “I can’t tell you that. Because the truth is, I don’t know.”
In the dim, diffuse light, I couldn’t read her face. I supposed it didn’t matter.
“You shouldn’t go back to your apartment,” I said. “Not that it makes any difference to me.”
I turned and walked away.
I wanted her to say something. John, wait. Anything.
But she didn’t.
They were all gone. No police, either. All told, probably for the best, but I was left with all my helpless rage and no where to direct it. Why couldn’t she have just given me an answer? How many times had I stood by her, backed her up, let her disappear for a month at a time without asking where she’d been or what she’d been doing? And for what? So that right after I helped save her from about the worst thing possible, she could just let me walk away without even a word of protest, or doubt, or regret?
And the worst of it was, part of me still wanted to go to her. She could be headstrong, and maybe she would disregard my admonition about her apartment. Maybe she was angry enough to ignore my advice just to make a point. She might need my help.
No. If she needed me, all she had to do was ask, but she didn’t. She could have, but she didn’t.
I looked around, and this city I’d become so comfortable with felt suddenly alien to me, a pretty oasis built for someone else, inhabited by strangers, my own presence that of a ghost. Paris made no sense for me without Delilah, and the loneliness and alienation I felt right then settled into my gut with an almost physical weight.
I paused and considered. She would take me back if I wanted. We wouldn’t even have to discuss what had just happened. Everything would be the way it had been.
I shook my head and walked on. On the Pont de la Tournelle, heading toward the Quartier Latin, I was surprised to see Stubble Boy coming toward me, still glued to his cell phone, walking with his girlfriend. He saw me and his face twisted into an unpleasant smile.
“Hey,” he said, pulling the phone momentarily away from his face. “If it isn’t the Parisian politeness police. Struck out with your date?”
And suddenly, everything was clear.
I spent only a few moments with him, testing the conventional wisdom that you can’t fit a square peg in a round hole, the peg in this case being his cell phone, the hole being his mouth.
It turns out the conventional wisdom is off by a little. In fact, the whole thing depends on how hard you jam the peg.
When I left him, crumbled and gagging and spitting out teeth, his broken phone tossed in the river and his girlfriend shrieking over him, I knew what would happen next. The downed man, and the shrieking woman, would soon attract attention, including police attention. A tourist assaulted right on one of the famous bridges of the Île Saint-Louis would be bad for business, especially if the culprit weren’t caught. Luckily, this particular tourist was acquainted with his assailant, and would tell the police all about him so they would know who to look for: an unassuming but dangerous Asian man who enjoyed dinner at Auberge de la Reine Blanche, and who was known to be accompanied by a stunning blonde.
But I didn’t care. Because they’d be looking for that man in Paris. And after tonight, he’d never be there again.
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I hadn’t killed anyone in almost four years. But all good things come to an end, eventually.
It was good to be living in Tokyo again. The face of the city had changed, as it continuously does, but in its eternal, essential energy, Tokyo is immutable. Yes, during my sojourn in safer climes there had occurred an unfortunate profusion of Starbucks and Dean & Delucas, along with their innumerable imitators, but the havens that mattered remained impervious to this latest infestation. There was still jazz at Body & Soul in Minami Aoyama, where no seat is too far from the stage for a quiet word of thanks to the band members at the end of the evening; coffee at Café de l’Ambre in Ginza, where even as he nears his hundredth birthday, proprietor Sekiguchi-sensei arrives daily to roast his own beans, as he has for the last six decades; a tipple at Campbelltoun Loch in Yurakucho, where, if you can secure one of the eight seats in his hidden basement establishment, owner and bartender Nakamura-san will recommend one of his rare bottlings to help melt away, however briefly, the world you came to him to forget.
I told myself no one was looking for me anymore. But I knew if they were, they’d start with a place I’d been known to frequent. Unless you had unlimited manpower, you couldn’t use the bars or coffee houses or jazz clubs I liked. There were too many of them in Tokyo, for one thing, and my visits would be too hard to predict. You might wait for months, maybe forever, and though there are harder surveillance duty stations than the oases haunted by Tokyo’s roving night denizens, eventually you’d start to stand out, especially if you were a foreigner. Meanwhile, whoever was paying you would be getting impatient for results.
Which made the Kodokan a unique vulnerability. I’d trained there for nearly twenty-five years before powerful enemies forced me to flee the city, enemies I had, by one means or another, managed to outlast. Judo at the Kodokan had been my only indulgence of anything like a routine, a pattern that could be used to fix me in time and place. Going back to it might have been my way of reassuring myself that my enemies really were all dead. Or it could have been a way of saying come out, come out, wherever you are.
Randori, or free training, was held in the daidojo, a modern, two-storied space of four connected competition zones open to bleachers ringing the area a floor above. On any given night, as many as two hundred judoka wearing the traditional white judogi, male and female, Japanese and foreign, buzz-cut college stars and grizzled veterans, take to the training hall, and the vast space is filled with cries of commitment and grunts of defense; earnest discussions of tactics and techniques in mutually incomprehensible tongues; the drum beat of bodies colliding with the tatami and the cymbal slaps of palms offsetting the impact with ukemi landings. I’ve always loved the cacophony of the daidojo. I’ve stood in it when it’s empty, too, and its solemn daytime stillness, its enormous sense of patience and potential, has its own magic, but it’s the sound of evening training that imbues the space with purpose, that brings the dormant hall to life.
On training nights the bleachers are usually empty, though nor is it unusual to see a few people sitting here and there and watching the judoka practicing below: a student, waiting for a friend; a parent, wondering whether to enroll a child; a martial arts enthusiast, making a pilgrimage to the birthplace of modern judo. So I wasn’t unduly concerned one summer night at the sight of two extra large Caucasians sitting together in the stands, thickly muscled arms crossed over the railing, leaning forward like carrion birds on a telephone line. I logged them the way I reflexively log anything out of place in my environment, giving no sign that I had particularly noticed them or particularly cared, and continued randori with the partner I happened to be training with, a stocky kid with a visiting college team who I hadn’t yet let score against me.
My play had reached a level at which for the most part I was able to anticipate an opponent’s attack in the instant before he launched it, subtly adjust my position accordingly, and frustrate his plan without his knowing exactly why he’d been unable to execute. After a while of this invisible interference, often an opponent would try to force an opening, or muscle a throw, or would otherwise over-commit himself, at which point, depending on my mood, I might throw him. Other times, I was content merely to flow from counter to counter, preventing battles rather than fighting them. A different approach than what had characterized my younger days at the Kodokan,
when my style had more to do with aggression and bravado than it did with elegance and efficiency. As the offspring of a Japanese father and Caucasian American mother, I once wore a heavy chip on my shoulder. My appearance was always Japanese enough, but appearances have almost nothing to do with prejudice in Japan. In fact, the society’s worst animus is reserved for ethnic Koreans, and burakumin—descendents of leather workers—and those others guilty of hiding their impurities behind seemingly Japanese faces. Of course, my formative years are long behind me now. These days, with my dark hair increasingly shot through with gray, I no longer pine for a country that might welcome me as its own. It took time, but I’ve learned not to engage in those conflicts I’ve always lost before.
From their size, close-cropped hair, and Oakley wrap-around shades, favored these days by Special Forces and their private sector counterparts, I made the visitors as military, maybe serving, maybe ex. That in itself was unremarkable: the Kodokan is hardly unknown among the American soldiers, Marines, and airmen stationed in Japan. Plenty of them come to visit, and even to train. Still, I prefer to assume the worst, especially when the assumption costs me little. I let the college kid throw me with tai-otoshi, the throw he’d been trying for all night and obviously his money move. In my former line of work, being underestimated was something to cultivate. I might have been out of the life, but I wasn’t out of the habit.
I was careful when I left that night, my alertness at a higher than usual pitch. I checked the places I would set up if I’d been trying to get to me: behind the concrete pillars flanking the building’s entrance on Hakusan-dori; the parked cars along the busy, eight-lane street; the entrance to the Mita-sen subway line to my left. I saw only oblivious sarariman commuters, their interchangeable dark suits limp and rumpled from the diesel-laced humidity, their brows beaded with sweat but their expressions relieved at the prospect of a few undemanding hours at home before the next day’s corporate exertions. Several riders on motor scooters went by, the two-stroke engines of their machines whining in and then fading out as they passed, but they weren’t wearing the full-face helmets favored by motorcycle drive-by gunners and they never even slowed or looked at me. A woman rode a bicycle past me on the sidewalk, a chubby-cheeked toddler secured in a basket attached to the handlebars, his arms outstretched and his tiny hands balled into fists at what I didn’t know. No one felt out of place, and I saw no sign of the soldiers. If they didn’t show up again, I’d classify their one-night presence as a nonevent.