Signwave

by Andrew Vachss

  I moved my head just enough to assure Olaf I was listening.

  “There are, in all the world, perhaps less than a dozen such middlemen,” he said. “They can minimize any risk to themselves, but not eliminate it entirely—those who wish to purchase the services of an assassin must have some way of making contact. Why less than a dozen? That is a dozen left. Their success is measured exactly as is the assassin’s…in longevity.”

  —

  “Why do you tell me this?” I asked, my volume tuned to his—pitched as low as a whisper, but without the hiss.

  “Because you have been taught nothing but lies. You still worship the samurai, those men tied so closely to their masters that they were required to take their own lives when their master lost his. Ah, great warriors, the samurai. Like the Vikings. But all they truly have in common is their enslavement.”

  “We are free to—”

  “Serve new masters, yes. Ronin, then, if you like. But only the ninja is truly free. The despised ninja. The stealthy man-for-hire. Not some warrior with a ‘code,’ an assassin with none. Only the assassin has that ultimate freedom—to make his own choices, and to be his own judge.

  “I know I am finished. Finally. I have no fear of what is to come. I know there is no Valhalla awaiting my entrance. That I would fear, if I believed, because I have long since forfeited any such possibility. But no religion will defeat the laws which govern all on this earth. I am quite ready to die. And I know it will happen well before the enemy returns to this spot.”

  “But…”

  “Yes, I heard you. Why do I tell you all this? You could have left me to savages who would prolong my death for their own entertainment. You should have. Why you did not, I cannot know. I doubt you know. If I had money, it would be yours. I would tell you where it was…because you have made no attempt to learn that for yourself. But I have no money. So what I give you is everything I have left. This knowledge.”

  “You had all this knowledge, yet you ended up in this miserable jungle,” I answered him, “fighting as a soldier with no flag. A man for hire. Why, then?”

  “You were a légionnaire. So you have already heard this nonsense the French call ‘philosophique.’ Proudhon says, ‘Property is theft,’ and spawns what? Anarchy? Any man who signs on as we did knows anarchy better than some café philosopher. Or perhaps we have all achieved existentialist perfection? We know the world is absurd, and all attempts to understand it are doomed. We are what we do, so we have chosen to invent and live by our own values, rather than slavishly follow those of another.”

  His throat spasmed as he fought back a cough. But he expelled flesh from his mouth, so I knew whatever had hit his midsection had finally reached a lung.

  “There is no inherent truth in any philosophy. Everything is ‘flexible’; all ‘open to interpretation.’ Your great Camus, he was an existentialist, but so was Nietzsche. Camus resisted fascism when his country was invaded by Nietzsche’s ‘supermen,’ the Nazis. A contradiction? No. But what position did Camus take on the French campaign to keep Algeria in slavery?”

  I didn’t know, so I didn’t answer. And I could feel Olaf was almost gone.

  “Here is my only legacy. When you leave, take my scribes with you. They will write the truth. And this electronic address”—he dropped his voice even lower—“it will allow you to contact one of the few middlemen still alive. You say you are selling special ice cubes from the best of refrigerators; he will then know I am gone, and that your message is genuine.

  “What I have passed on to you was passed on to me,” he said, very softly. “I listened with respect, but I failed to listen closely enough. The need for…I don’t know what to call it, perhaps the need for another person to be in my life, that need is what has now cost me my own.”

  “You picked the wrong person to…?”

  I never finished the question I wanted to ask. When I glanced down, I saw that the man who had willed off his approaching death long enough to pass along his legacy had finally finished his journey.

  —

  And started mine.

  The last man I killed for pay had wanted to die. Desperately, needfully wanted to die. The job had come to me from a cyber-person I would never meet. I say “cyber-person” because I never knew if communication was with a man or a woman—a machine has no gender.

  But I didn’t fear betrayal from that source. Long ago, I had told myself that, somehow, “he” was the grandson of a man Luc had served with in La Résistance. Luc was my father—in all ways but biological. Luca Adrian was the name he gave me, knowing that it would no longer exist the moment my nom de guerre was entered on the roster of La Légion Étrangère.

  It had been so many years since the cyber-ghost had entered my life that betrayal was not a question in my mind.

  Later, a woman—a girl, really; I believe she was too young to have served with Médecins Sans Frontières without having erased her past as I had mine—triggered something in me. She was everything the man who had once been an assassin had warned me against.

  Maybe that started when she took my weapons: my pistol, the Vietnam tomahawk, and my garrote. No weapons inside their field hospital allowed. I never got them back.

  It was years—and that blind tumble of the dice that fools call “destiny” or “karma”—before I saw that woman again. More accurately, our paths crossed for a second time. But from that moment, I knew she was real, not some angelic phantom my fevered brain had summoned up while I was close to dying. In another jungle, another war.

  From that moment, I did everything I could think of to bring her to me. She’d told me her secret. I knew that her “it will never happen” dream was a place where she could live in peace, finally out of that unrelenting stream of dead, dying, and tortured human beings. The stream she’d been trying to stem with her own life—body and soul—since what seemed like forever to her. She knew if she didn’t get out she’d be swept along, too. And what good would she be to anyone then?

  I found that place, just as she’d envisioned it. I offered it to her. I offered myself, too. I knew I had not been part of her dream, so all I could do was ask to join her.

  That meant telling her the truth.

  I did that.

  When she accepted me, I lived without fear of what Olaf had warned me against. If my Dolly were to betray me, I would not want such knowledge to precede my death.

  —

  Before Dolly, I had given up many things.

  Some taken from me, before I learned. Some after, when I had to discard weight to move quickly.

  Both my childhoods—the one that had been wiped from my memory before I ran from that “clinic” in Belgium, and the briefer but so much richer one that I’d had with Luc—gone forever.

  To be a mercenary may not have been my fate, but it was the only option I had. When that first five years was up, I left La Légion. I’d served long enough to walk away…but to where? The five years gave me French citizenship, but I didn’t want that any more than the French wanted me. No gitan could be truly French, and that part of my chromosomal chain was stamped across my face as clearly as the thickened slab of scar tissue on my wrist. And I couldn’t cover my face with a sleeve.

  Soldiering was all I knew. I went back to Darkville, and signed on with one of the mercenary outfits. Being a former légionnaire was all the credential I needed. They knew no man would make such a claim falsely—too many of us had later become soldiers-for-hire to take that much risk.

  But waiting with Olaf as he stayed alive long enough to deliver his only legacy, that was when I decided. That was the moment I knew that the day would come when I would walk away from soldiering for paymasters, and never return.

  Still, in a strange way, I have always followed his rules. Killing for money, that I did. But when Dolly accepted me, that part of me was gone—the man she wanted was no killer-for-money, and I had to be that man.

  —

  And now, so many years later, I was an im
possible construct. A force mathematics could not rule; an assassin who once would kill anyone for money and now would forfeit his own life with equal lack of concern.

  Worse, he would do that only for the one person who could really, truly betray him.

  —

  I spent half my life searching for what I would spend the rest of it defending.

  That wasn’t some random thought. It wasn’t something I ever consciously considered—it was simply the way things were.

  If others are trying to kill you, “Why?” is a question you get to speculate about only if they don’t succeed.

  “Simple” isn’t the same as stupid. My world has been black-and-white ever since I could remember.

  But my memory—my actual memory, a past I could look back on—that started much later than most. I’m not even sure how old I was—nine, ten, eleven, even?—when I escaped that “clinic.” That’s the word they used for it, but it wasn’t healing anyone. Or curing them, or whatever clinics are supposed to be doing. It just kept us.

  And there really was no “us.” I didn’t actually understand this until many years later. Not until I was a légionnaire did I learn that even POW camps aren’t what they appear to be. The razor wire and the armed men walking the perimeter—some with shoulder-strapped machine pistols, some with dogs—you’d think that was just one side guarding its captives. But those captives weren’t a single unit. They probably killed more of their own than any guards did; the only weapon they would need for that was betrayal.

  None expected to be traded for their side’s captives. Men awaiting execution are desperate. Men who would welcome execution instead of the daily “interrogations” are driven past the edge of sanity. Digging a tunnel is a madman’s task. But the plotting, that never stopped. And was never shared.

  When the guards learned of a plot, or even discovered a weapon, some captives died. Not just the ones the guards took away; those who had betrayed them, too. The most deadly thing in those camps was always their inhabitants—suspicion was God, and traitors were sacrificed on that altar all the time.

  If any of the captives wondered if perhaps the man they killed hadn’t actually been proved a traitor, they would keep such thoughts to themselves.

  No barbed wire had surrounded my childhood. There were no patrols. The adults—doctors, nurses, orderlies—they were kind to us. The food was plentiful, and it was good food, not a prisoner’s slop. The place was always the same temperature, and the inside air was clean.

  But the children inside that place had nothing in common, not even whatever brought us there. Some kids were malformed, huge heads on stick bodies. Some drooled. Some never stopped talking, in a language I didn’t understand. Some hardly moved.

  All we had to share was the truth, and it wasn’t a truth we could share. Only this one truth: It had to be very expensive to keep us there. All that equipment, even the buildings and the grounds, never mind the salaries. So, really, two truths: whoever put us there didn’t lack for money…and didn’t want us in their lives.

  I knew what “retrograde amnesia” was. Not because I was so smart, but because the doctors explained it to me. That was why I had no memory of anything before that place, they said. They also said that, if the trauma that had wiped my mind had been powerful enough, those memories might never come back.

  “You have to start from now,” they would say. Kindly, but unyielding. They either didn’t know what had erased any memory of my life before I woke up in that place, or wouldn’t tell me. For me, those were the same.

  They would say this “Start from now” as if it was a magic chant. But they never would say where I would be going once I started.

  Somehow, I knew I could not “start” unless I stopped waiting. One night, I just dropped out the second-floor window of my room onto the soft, moist grass of the manicured lawn, and walked into the darkness.

  How long it took, I couldn’t be sure—time is more difficult to measure when you move only in darkness. I know I walked all the way to Paris. There, I became a gutter rat. I was sometimes very cold. I was always hungry. But it never occurred to me to try and return to that clinic.

  Then Luc found me.

  —

  I was a boy then.

  By the time I was big enough to lie to La Légion about my age, the time had come for Luc to leave. I think he probably stayed longer than he should have, but he wanted to be sure I had…a chance, is the best way to put it.

  The same thing Olaf had done, many years after that.

  English—“American,” as it was called by some men I served with—was my native tongue. French I had learned: some in the clinic, more from Luc. He had warned me not to let anyone see I knew more than the few words La Légion required us all to learn.

  I knew I must have a mother—a woman who gave birth to me—somewhere. A father, I never thought about. Luc was my father. I could reason that whoever had placed me inside that clinic must have been wealthy. But if they ever spent a sou looking for me after I’d fled, I never knew.

  —

  I never looked for them, either.

  I had Luc. Then Patrice. Both long dead. One from age, one from bullets. But, really, from the same cancerous truth: They could never go back to what they had lost. There was no “home” for them.

  Olaf had been my friend, too. Not as I was with Patrice, but we were close enough to watch out for each other in that jungle.

  All those I had once cared for were gone. After they left, I became a man very skilled in making people dead.

  —

  Making them dead in exchange for money, that is what I always told myself.

  Had I not found Dolly—found she was a real woman, not an apparition—I would never have abandoned my life. Nor ever become part of hers.

  Now none of that mattered. For the man I had become, killing wasn’t about tools, or even skills—it was embedded, forever to be a part of me.

  And that part, no amnesia would ever enter.

  —

  The Crown Jewel of the Coast is what they called it on the signs that welcomed tourists.

  I couldn’t really say if this little town was a strange place. It always seemed so to me, but I’d never lived in any one place before. I’d been many places, but I was always a stranger, passing through. Or an invader, with a job to do.

  After La Légion, after I’d stopped working as a soldier for pay and followed Olaf’s last advice, there was only one thing that mattered. All I’d ever looked at was how to get out…as soon as I’d done whatever I’d come there to do.

  Maybe towns are no different from cities; it’s just that the cities divide themselves into neighborhoods. Maybe every little spot has its own personality, because people who feel the same way always seem to clump together.

  For me, it never mattered how people felt. I didn’t go to those places to find a job; I went there to do one. I didn’t need to make friends; I only needed to make myself a part of my surroundings. And never for very long.

  I never wanted people to remember me. It would be best if they never saw me at all.

  —

  Now all I wanted was to be left alone.

  But to be alone with my Dolly was impossible. I knew the truth of this village before I found the little cottage near the ocean, the place Dolly had dreamed of for so many years. Why would a tiny little town be any different from the biggest city?

  I never said this aloud. To me, it meant nothing. There is a perimeter around our cottage, one several layers deeper than any fence that could be built. Inside it, my Dolly would always be safe.

  That was my mistake—thinking the barrier built to protect her would also contain her. I may have wanted only to be left alone, but Dolly, she couldn’t leave things alone. Once she got the scent of…I don’t know what to call it, but it would turn her into a rat-hunting terrier. And once she clamped down, Satan himself couldn’t make her drop the bite.

  Dolly was immune to bribery or threats. Any fool woul
d know that a former battlefield nurse who had worked the darkest parts of Africa with a Médecins Sans Frontières team wouldn’t be tempted by money, and couldn’t be scared off. Such attempts would only make her shake the rat by the back of its neck until she heard the snap! that confirmed the kill.

  —

  “What is wrong with these people?”

  “What people, honey?”

  “The people here, Dell. They can get into blood feuds over that stupid ‘paper versus plastic’ thing, but when you add one more layer to any fight, they won’t even look at it.”

  “Paper is better because people throw the plastic away, and the seagulls could choke on it, right?”

  “Dell…”

  I just looked up at her. Once Dolly’s hands went to her hips, I knew anything I said could set her off—silence was always my best course then.

  “They need trees to make paper,” Dolly said, quietly. “So where does a true-blue environmentalist stand?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “When you build a road through the other side of town so the logging trucks can reach the bay, the ‘Buy American’ crowd says you’re helping the local economy. But when that garbage lumber is shipped to China, so they can make crappy furniture or whatever and sell it here, is that supposed to be helping the economy?”

  “I guess both sides—”

  “Don’t even,” she warned me. “The first step you take, in either direction, you’ve started walking in a circle. If the supermarkets have to use paper bags, they say it forces them to raise prices. And the people who have to clean up after their dogs, they want plastic, too. But don’t tell them about jobs for the people who make those plastic bags—those jobs are all in China. And some of those fools actually think you can use dog droppings to make a compost heap. But paper bags are pulp—biodegradable, right?”