by Barry Eisler
I passed a vendor selling knives, and took the opportunity to arm myself with a knockoff Emerson folder with a wooden handle and a four-inch, partially serrated blade. For a long time I had gotten by without carrying a weapon, and I had liked it this way. For one thing, you tend to comport yourself differently when you’re armed, and there are people who can spot the signs. Also, my lawsey, lawsey civilian cover would have been compromised somewhat if I’d been picked up carrying, say, a folding karambit or other concealed cutlery. And then there’s the matter of blood, which can get all over you and severely compromise your attempts to blend with the crowd after a close encounter. But I sensed that the balance of costs and benefits was changing now. I wasn’t as fast as I once was, for one thing. Or as durable, for another. I wondered whether what had happened to me in that restroom with Manny, also, was in part the consequence of age. I had needed Dox to bail me out there, as he had at Kwai Chung a year earlier. On top of all this, being back in Sukhumvit was itself a reminder that I had aged in the intervening years, and that things I had once ably done with my hands might now be accomplished more effectively with tools.
I caught a tuk-tuk for the final leg over to Sukhumvit 23. Dox and I were supposed to meet at the restaurant at noon, but I arrived early to scope the area out, as I always do on those rare occasions when I agree to a face-to-face meeting. A sneak preview tends to prevent surprises. In this case, though, the surprise was already waiting for me, in the form of Dox. Resplendent in a cream-colored silk shirt, he was sitting in one of the cushioned teak chairs at the back corner of the main room sipping some tropical concoction from a tall glass through a long straw, and looking, I had to admit, utterly at ease and at home in his surroundings.
“I knew you’d get here early,” he said, grinning. He put down the drink and got up from the table. “Didn’t want to be rude, keeping you waiting.”
I walked over, looking around the restaurant as I moved. The clientele was about half local, half foreign, and all seemingly more interested in the Baan Khanitha’s excellent traditional Thai food than in whatever might be going on around them. I realized, though, that I was doing my security check out of habit, not because I thought Dox would have brought trouble. And then I was surprised, almost stunned, to realize that I trusted someone this way. I looked at him, and my discomfort must have showed, because he raised his eyebrows and said, “You all right, man?”
I gave him a nod that was half exasperation, half pleasure at seeing him after our scrape in Manila. “Fine. I’m fine.”
I reached for his hand, but he ignored it, instead clapping his arms around me and pulling me in for a hug. Jesus, I thought. I patted his back awkwardly.
He stepped back from me, looked at my face, and laughed. “Hey, man, you’re blushing! You don’t have a crush on me or something, do you?”
I ignored him. “Any problems on the way over?”
He laughed again. “No problems. Hey, it’s good to see you, man, even if you’re starting to have unnatural feelings for me. You want to eat here, or should we go somewhere else? I recommend we stay. The poo nim pad gra pow is the best in the city.”
I looked around again. Dox might have known his poo nim, whatever that was, but his tradecraft wasn’t always up to my standards. Although in fairness, I don’t know whose would be.
“You’re leaving your cell phone off, right?” I asked.
“Yeah, Mom, I’m leaving it off. Disappointing all the ladies who want to reach me.”
“You sure you weren’t followed?”
He rolled his eyes. “C’mon now, you’ve got to get over this lone-wolf, international-man-of-mystery shit. You can’t live like that twenty-four-seven. It’ll bum you out, man, I’ve seen it happen.”
“Does that mean you weren’t followed?”
He frowned. “Yeah, that’s what it means. You know, I might not be quite the urban ghost you can be, but I do know how to be careful. I’ve made my way doing this fucked-up thing of ours for a long time on my lonesome, and I’m still breathing even though there are plenty of people who’d rather I wasn’t.”
“Weren’t.”
He clasped his hands to his head and said, “Somebody save me, my partner’s a schoolmarm!”
I raised my hands in surrender. “All right, all right.”
“ ‘John Rain, killer and grammarian.’ You ought to put it on a business card.”
“All right,” I said.
“ ‘Use the subjunctive correctly or he’ll take your life.’ ”
Jesus, I thought, looking around. “Look, let’s just eat here,” I said.
“Well, thank God. I’m starving.”
We sat down at his table. The waiter came over and Dox ordered the food. He knew what he was doing—even his Thai seemed passable. We also asked for a couple of iced coffees. It had been a long few days.
“Okay, what’s the status?” Dox asked, when the waiter had departed. “I hope the Israelites aren’t pissed.”
I had told him who the client was. They, of course, didn’t know about Dox. They didn’t need to.
“I’m not entirely sure,” I said.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning as soon as I was out of Manila, I contacted my friends Boaz and Gil. I told them what had happened. They seemed to take it in stride. They were disappointed that Manny got away, and concerned that he would harden his defenses now. But they were reassured that I had made it out of there without further incident.”
“You mean without being caught and implicating them.”
“Yes.”
“They’re probably a little despondent that you weren’t just killed in the fracas.”
“It’s just business.”
“Wishing it is just business. Trying to bring it about is different.”
“I don’t think we need to worry about that. It wouldn’t be worth it to them. It looks like I’m clear of it, so they are, too.”
“Yeah? Whatever happened to the professional paranoid we all know and love?”
“I’m being careful. I told you what I think is likely, but I don’t assume anything.”
“What did you tell them happened?”
“That two unknown players that I hadn’t managed to spot popped onto the scene and turned it into a shooting gallery. That said players were good and might have been CIA.”
“What did they say to that?”
“Like I said, they were concerned. But they’ll verify the body count easily enough. It’s in all the English-language Philippine newspapers today.”
“You checked?”
I nodded. “Spent the morning online.”
“Well, what do the papers say?”
“One dead Filipino, two dead foreigners whose identities are being checked. Witnesses seem to think there were two shooters. Both Asian.”
He smiled. “Both Asian, huh?”
I nodded. “Even in the best of circumstances, people don’t see straight. Add adrenal stress, they don’t remember what the hell they saw. They could be searching for Martians right now. Boaz and Gil are looking into the dead men’s identities, too. When they learn more, they’ll tell us. In the meantime, we just have to monitor the situation and wait.”
The waiter brought over our food and departed. Poo nim turned out to be sautéed soft-shelled crab. Dox hadn’t been exaggerating. It was excellent, soft and fresh and redolent of basil.
“I think they were Agency,” Dox said.
“They could have been, I don’t know. You didn’t see them before heading into the bathroom?”
“Sure, I saw them. They were sitting in the food court, just the two of them. But they didn’t look like hitters to me. Although I admit I might have been distracted by what was going on with Manny and the bodyguard, and not paying attention to the little signs like I might have otherwise. What about you?”
“The same. Damn, they were low-key, I’ll give them that.” I dug into the crab. “My guess is they were hooked up with Manny in some way. They we
ren’t there to harm him, otherwise they would have looked to drop him as he exited the bathroom, like I did. They were trying to protect him.”
“Yeah, I kind of picked up on that. More bodyguards?”
“Maybe. But we hadn’t seen them earlier. I think they were there for a meeting.”
“With Manny?”
“Yeah. They didn’t look like locals, so figure they were staying at a hotel—maybe the Peninsula, the Mandarin Oriental, the Shangri-La. They’re all a stone’s throw from the Ayala Center, and that’s where Manny took his family for lunch, even though Greenhills shopping center would have been closer.”
“So he has lunch with the family, says good-bye, the woman and the boy leave, and he gets down to business with the people who are waiting for him.”
“Yes. And when they see a huge, goateed, dangerous-looking guy busting into the bathroom along with Manny’s bodyguard, they realize something’s going down. They go in, too.”
He nodded. “Well, I’ll buy that. They were cool and their tactics were good. And like you said, they wore their cover well. I didn’t make them until it was too late. That’s my fault, man, and I’m sorry. I told you, you saved my life there, you really did.”
I wanted to tell him the truth—that by bursting in as he had, Dox had saved my life, not the reverse.
Instead I said, “The thing is, we still don’t know for sure who they were. Who they were with. Why they were meeting Manny. If we knew those things, we might get a second chance.”
“You think we could still get that close?”
“Depends. I hate to leave things unfinished, though.”
He laughed. “You mean like an uncashed paycheck?”
I nodded. “That’s part of it. And letting Boaz and Gil know that I’m still after Manny gives me an excuse to be in touch with them, and an opportunity to continue to evaluate them.”
“To make sure they haven’t changed their minds about just letting the whole thing go.”
“Of course. And they’re also a potential channel of information.”
“About who those shooters were.”
“Etcetera.”
We ate quietly for a few minutes. Then Dox said, “There’s one thing I want to ask you.”
I raised my eyebrows and looked at him.
“When I got in there, I was surprised Manny was still vertical. I know what you can do up close with your hands. You were alone with him for long enough.”
I didn’t say anything.
“You going to tell me what happened?” he asked.
I looked away. “I don’t know, exactly.”
“Are you leveling with me, partner?” I heard him say.
I paused, then said, “I don’t know. He came in, his back was to me, I moved out of the stall. Then you told me the boy was coming. I went to move back into the stall before the boy came in, but I must have made a sound, because Manny turned. I looked in his eyes . . .”
“Whoa, why’d you look in his eyes, man?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
“Shoot, man, when I look through the scope, I never look in the eyes. Or if I do, I just look at one of them, and then all I see is a bull’s-eye, you know what I mean? I never see a man. Only a target.” He looked at me, then added, “If you see a man, you might . . . hesitate.”
I thought of several things to say, but none of them came out.
He took a sip of iced coffee and looked upward as though contemplating something. Then he said, “Well, each of us has only so much courage in the well. You draw from it too many times, eventually you come up dry. I’ve seen it before. I guess one day it’ll happen to me, too.” He paused, then smiled and added, “Although probably not.”
“That’s not what happened,” I said.
“Then what?”
I looked at the wall, images flickering against it as though it were a screen. “It was something about the boy. Seeing him with his family . . . I don’t know.”
There was a pause. He said, “Sounds like you spent a little too much time watching them this week, man.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“Well, that happens. It can make it hard, it’s true.”
I felt like an idiot. What was wrong with me? Why had I frozen? Why couldn’t I explain to a man I’d fought alongside, a man I trusted?
Trust, I thought. The word felt slippery in my mind, dangerous.
“That’s not it,” I said. “Or, it’s not the only thing.”
“What else?”
I shook my head and exhaled hard. “I haven’t had a partner in a long time.”
“Hang on now, this is my fault?”
I shook my head again. “That’s not what I meant. It’s just . . . I didn’t trust you before, when you first came for me in Rio.”
“Yeah, I got that feeling.”
“But then, after what you did at Kwai Chung . . . I saw that I’d been wrong. That’s hard for me.”
“Guess I should’ve just shot you and taken the money for myself. At least that way you’d have been right not to trust me.”
“Did you think about it?”
He laughed. “Jesus, man, you almost sound hopeful.”
“Did you?”
He shook his head. “Not even for a minute.”
“Goddamnit. I knew it.”
“You want an apology?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“You don’t owe me anything. Like I said at the time, I know you’d have done the same for me. Wait, don’t respond to that, it’ll spoil my reverie.”
The waiter came by and cleared away our plates. We ordered mango and sticky rice for dessert. I watched the man leave.
There was something I wanted to ask Dox, something I’d been thinking about, on various levels, for a long time, and particularly after Manila. It wasn’t something I’d ever said out loud before, and I found myself reluctant to bring it up. Partly because doing so might make it feel more real; partly because it would probably all seem so silly to Dox. But I’d told him a lot already. I wanted to finish it.
“I’ve got a question for you, too,” I said, looking at him.
He pushed his chair away, leaned back, and laced his fingers together across his belly. “Sure.”
“You ever . . . you ever bothered by what we do?”
He smiled. “Only when I’m not paid promptly.”
“I’m serious.”
He shrugged. “Not usually, no.”
“You don’t ever feel like . . .” I chuckled. “You know, like God is watching?”
“Oh, sure he’s watching. He just doesn’t care.”
“You think?”
He shrugged again. “I figure he’s the one who made the rules. I’m just playing by ’em. If he doesn’t like the way things have turned out down here on planet Earth, he ought to speak his mind. I would if I were him.”
“Maybe he is speaking his mind, and no one’s listening.”
“He ought to speak a little more clearly, then.” He looked up and added, “If you don’t mind my saying so.”
I studied my hands for a moment. “It bothered me, thinking about that boy losing his father.”
“ ’Course it did. If it didn’t, you wouldn’t be the good man you are. That’s why it’s best not to get too close to the target. ‘If it inhabits your mind, it can inhibit your trigger finger,’ as one of my instructors once told me.”
“Yeah, that’s the truth.”
“The thing is, you can’t make the decisions and also carry them out, you know what I mean? The judge and the executioner, they’re different roles. The judge does what he does, and then the executioner carries things out. That’s the way it is. We’re just doing what we’re supposed to.”
“That’s an interesting way to look at it,” I said, feeling uneasy.
“It’s the only way. I didn’t know you were such a philosopher, partner. In fact, I think this is the most I’ve ever heard you talk.”
“Sorry.�
�
“No need to apologize. But I do think that pondering too deeply might not be highly recommended for men such as ourselves. We might start thinking we’re the judges or something, and where would we be then?”
The waiter brought the mango and sticky rice. It was good, but my mind was elsewhere.
Dox asked, “Well, what’s the next step? With Manny, I mean.”
I considered. “We can’t get close to him again the way we did. He got too good a look at me, for one thing, and I think we can expect him to be taking extra precautions, for another.”
“Yeah, I’m thinking the same thing.”
“We need a new variable, something to shake things up. And the only one I see coming our way is information from Boaz and Gil. If they can find out the affiliations of the two guys we took out in that restroom, we might have something to go on. Otherwise I think the op is dead.”
“So nothing to do but wait and see what the Israelites can offer.”
“That’s right.”
He leaned back in his chair and grinned. “Well, in my not inconsiderable experience, there’s nowhere in the world better to wait around than here in Bangkok.”
I sighed, feeling like a parent about to remonstrate with a teenager. “We still have work to do. You’re not going to be useful drained of all bodily fluids and nursing a binge hangover.”
He laughed. “Yes, Mom.”
“Look, just be available in case I get a call and we need to move quickly.”