Requiem for an Assassin (6 page)

I needed a place that was familiar to me, but where he was unlikely to have much local capability. Something inside me spoke up, and before I could think more about it, I said, “Saigon.”

There was a pause. He said, “When?”

“The night after tomorrow.”

“I can’t make it that fast. For Vietnam, I’ll need a visa.”

I know,
I thought.
And that’ll give me one more datapoint I can use to track you.
“One of the services can get you one in a day,” I said.

“What about you?”

I’d be traveling under a Japanese passport, which doesn’t require a visa. But Hilger didn’t need to know that. Better to let him think I was going to arrive the day of our meeting. That way, not only would I have time to reconnoiter, but he wouldn’t know I’d had time.

“I can get one in a day,” I said. “Keep Dox’s phone with you, and I’ll keep this one. The bulletin board will be backup. We’ll meet somewhere public, somewhere we can trust each other not to misbehave.”

“I trust you. Because if there’s a problem, the screaming you just heard is going to sound like music by comparison.”

I clenched my jaw and exhaled. “Careful how you use that leverage, Hilger. Right now, it’s the only thing keeping you alive.”

“Maybe. But you’re what’s keeping Dox alive. If you step out of line, you’ll kill him.”

“Put him on again.”

“After the first job. Assuming there aren’t any problems.” I started to protest, but he had already clicked off.

I walked in the direction of the place de la République, where I knew there was a travel agency. My survival paranoia felt like a brewing riot, and I didn’t want to be on the Internet searching for and purchasing flights to Saigon so soon after being tagged in Paris. Better to have the transaction done on a closed system.

From what I knew of Hilger and the number of government officials he had in his pocket, I guessed he might have access to customs information. If he knew what flight I was coming in on, it would be too easy for him to have a team waiting at the airport in Saigon. In fact, the safer alternative would be to fly to Hanoi and arrive in Saigon by some land connection. But there was no time for that. So the best I could do was to avoid leaving directly from Paris. That would at least obscure my arrival time.

There was a flight from Frankfurt at 7:20 that evening, with a change in Bangkok that would put me into Saigon at 3:25 the following afternoon, and of course my pick of flights on other airlines from Paris to Frankfurt. The woman who helped me was a little confused about why I wouldn’t want to just fly nonstop from Paris on Air France. Miles, I told her. I wanted to be able to upgrade to first. But damn, I didn’t have my frequent flyer number with me…. I would take care of it later, directly with the airline. I booked the flight for Taro Yamada, the name on the passport I would be using and the Japanese equivalent of John Smith. Yamada was currently my most solid alter ego, fully nurtured into a mature identity, including driver’s license, credit cards, bank accounts, and the other indicia of unremarkable citizenship.

I hadn’t been to Saigon in over three decades, and I knew there would be a lot to learn, and not much time to learn it. Well, I could pick up a guidebook at the airport and read it on the plane. With that, plus the time I’d already spent there, plus the extra day I’d have on Hilger, I’d have an advantage.

I was actually in my apartment packing a bag—a few changes of clothes, a little less than ten thousand dollars in cash—when I realized I was supposed to meet Delilah for a drink in Montparnasse.
Shit.
I thought for a moment. Call her on her mobile? And tell her what?

I checked my watch. With just a carry-on, I could meet her and still make my plane. I went out to boulevard Henri IV and caught a cab.

Now that the logistics were taken care of, I was gripped by a creeping unease, entirely separate from the fear I felt for Dox. Maybe Vietnam was a bad idea. Saigon offered security advantages, yes, but for me it would also be a land of unburied memories, of a world that could never be forgotten, only, perhaps, left behind. I wondered why the iceman would want to go back there, what he was trying to accomplish in doing so.

I would have to let it go for now, and trust him as I always had before. What mattered is that he was here, invoked by crisis. The trick would be to get him to leave when the crisis was done.

D
ELILAH SAT AT
a corner table in the brasserie of La Closerie des Lilas in Montparnasse. She liked that John wasn’t there yet. For a long time she had always been able to count on him to come early. She would ask him about it, and he would tell her he had some extra time, that he just wanted to read the paper or people-watch. She knew better, and knew he knew, too, but what was the point of saying anything? He arrived early because it was an old habit, a means of avoiding an ambush. She engaged in similar tradecraft herself, of course, but Rain was extreme.

Even when he was on time, she would sense that he’d been nearby, watching their meeting place beforehand, wanting to see her arrive first. Once she’d actually gotten in position two hours early and sure enough, she had barely arrived in time to watch him move through the area, checking the hot spots. The last one he checked was hers, and rightly so, because she had chosen a less obvious place, farther down the street, not a particularly good view. She’d given up after that, knowing that if he knew she was going to show up two hours early, he would just come an hour earlier still.

The nice thing was, he’d been getting better, to the point where every now and then he seemed comfortable arriving on time. He wasn’t going to sit with his back to a door, not soon, maybe not ever. And she knew never to come up behind him, or approach him from his blind side, not that approaching his blind side was easy because he tended not to keep his head trained in one direction for very long. She’d also learned not to stand close if she had to wake him. She’d made that mistake once, and Rain had sprung on her like a panther. He hadn’t hurt her—he’d managed to pull back in time—and although he hadn’t said anything beyond an embarrassed apology, she could tell he was horrified at what he’d very nearly done. She was careful after that, as much for his sake as for hers.

Still, he was changing. She noticed it in little things. He always had a great way of listening, with his eyes, even his whole body, a quality that made him rare among males. It was still there, but now he was more inclined to talk, too, and when he did, he gestured more with his hands. She hadn’t seen that before Paris, and knew it was part of the chameleon in him, or what a colleague of hers had once referred to as the shape-shifter, because chameleons change only color, while Rain’s ability to blend with his environment ran much deeper than that. She liked the taste he was developing in French music—Jean-Louis Murat, Patricia Kaas—and the way it was symptomatic of a more general openness to an unfamiliar culture. She wondered to what extent his ability to embrace the new, to make it part of himself and himself part of it, was attributable to his Japaneseness, and to what extent it was attributable simply to his own nature. She wanted to ask, but was afraid to, lest he become self-conscious, which might impede the very changes that pleased her so much.

It wasn’t easy for him, she could tell. While he was effecting changes, the changes were affecting him. What did Nietzsche say? “When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.” But the phenomenon expressed itself in more positive ways, too.

She wondered sometimes what had happened with Midori and Rain’s son, who as far as she knew were still living in New York. Rain had never told her exactly how the situation had been resolved, only that they were no longer in danger and that he could never see them again. Delilah was secretly pleased on both counts and recognized, from the time he told her, that the subject would be taboo. What had happened, though? Whatever it was, he seemed reconciled to it. Perhaps he was satisfied, consciously or unconsciously, that he had done the right thing in going to see them and in protecting them afterward, and simultaneously relieved that, for reasons beyond his control, he didn’t have to have them in his life. She could respect him for the first while being glad at the second.

She looked up and there he was, and the instant she saw him she knew something was seriously wrong. He was dressed nicely as always, in this case a blue cashmere blazer and a striped shirt she had bought for him at Charvet. And his features were the same, of course, Asian with a hint of something else, a nice head of dark hair with just a little gray over the ears. The difference she had immediately spotted was in his eyes. They were businesslike, almost blank, which in Rain’s case made him look dangerous for anyone attuned to such things. And his body, she realized. He kept in shape and was always light on his feet, but now he looked almost too ready, with his shoulders rolling slightly and his head swiveling, eyes logging details as he moved. It was all back, as if the months in Paris had been suddenly emptied out of him, leaving the killer ascendant.

He sat down and glanced at her, then scanned the café.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Hilger’s got Dox.”

“What do you mean, ‘got’?” she asked, feeling the blood drain from her face, already suspecting the worst.

“Rendered him. Kidnapped him. They’re holding him on a boat somewhere. I got a message from them on the bulletin board I use with Dox. I don’t know what they did to make him give it up and I’m trying not to imagine. I…”

He stopped for a moment as though confused. “I have to go. But I thought I should tell you.”

“Of course you should tell me. What were you going to do, just disappear without saying a word?” Even as she said it, she knew that was precisely what he had almost done. In fact, he had done it before. It was his realization that he had to account for himself, that he couldn’t just drop everything, that had produced his confused expression.

He didn’t say anything, and she realized he was struggling just to stay there. “Where are you going?” she asked.

“To meet Hilger.”

“Are you crazy? He might have…”

“Yes, I’ve already thought about all that. I’m taking steps to mitigate.”

“He’s got you reacting. You need to slow it down.”

“I know what I’m doing.”

“John, don’t…”

“Don’t tell me what to do. You run risks all the time, and you’ve never listened to me when I’ve asked you to get out.”

“It’s different. My country…”

“I don’t want to hear about your country. This is my friend.”

He stood up. Suddenly she was afraid, and she didn’t even know of what. She said, “At least tell me where you’re going.”

He shook his head. “I can’t.”

She stood, too. “Let me help.”

He shook his head again. “You’ve helped me too many times on too many things. This isn’t your problem.”

“I’m not offering you charity, damn it. I care about Dox, too. And my organization has a score to settle with Hilger, don’t you realize? For killing Gil. I could call Boaz. He would help.”

Boaz was a colleague, and an ally, too, a competent, dangerous field operative and bomb specialist with a deceptively easy laugh. Along with Gil, Boaz had brought Rain into the Manila op that initially had gone so wrong her organization tried to kill Rain for it.

“I don’t trust Boaz,” he said.

“I trust him.”

“I don’t want him involved, or anyone else on his end. They wouldn’t care about saving Dox. Only killing Hilger.”

“You’re wrong,” she said, but without conviction.

She wanted to argue with him, but knew if she did he would just play tit-for-tat again. He was being stupid, and childish, and she didn’t know how to get through to him.

She tried to think of something to say, some way of reasoning with him. But before she could, he turned and walked away. She watched, stunned. It was as though he’d already forgotten her.

I
HAD HOPED
to sleep on the thirteen-hour flight from Frankfurt, but for a long time I couldn’t. My mind was too preoccupied with Dox, with where I was going, with what I was walking into. And with Delilah. Maybe I’d been too…abrupt with her. She’d only been trying to help. I should have been grateful, should have found a way to show her I was grateful. But her intentions, good as they were, wouldn’t overrule her organization’s imperatives. When Gil had gotten killed in Hong Kong, he’d been hunting me. The same kind of thing could easily happen here. And although the Mossad’s reasons for wanting me dead—a job that had gone sideways in Manila before I finished it in Hong Kong—no longer applied, I wasn’t enthusiastic about reappearing on the organization’s radar screen, either.

Yeah, but Delilah herself could help. Discreetly. She’s helped before. Dox is her friend, too, like she said.

Bullshit. She’s compromised. Look how devoted she is to her organization. How many times have you tried to convince her to leave?

But I trust her. If I thought she would say anything about the two of us, to be safe I’d have to leave Paris. Leave her.

That’s different. She has no obligation to them about you. Hilger killed one of their own. Anything you tell her about Hilger, she’ll feed to them.

I put my fists to my temples and squeezed my eyes shut. Christ, it was like two different people, struggling inside my head. Trust and suspicion. Hope and fear. The rationalist and the iceman.

Eventually I slept. When I woke, we were landing in Saigon, Ho Chi Minh City only in name. I don’t think it was until I got off the plane that I really understood where I was, what I had returned to. I walked across the tarmac to a waiting bus, and the thing that brought it all home was the wet heat, the heat and that fecund earth smell, mud and competing tropical growth and rot. Then the doors closed and for a moment it was gone. But of course it was all still there. It always had been.

Outside the airport was tumult. Crowds and honking taxis and the wet heat again. The weirdly familiar cadences of the language itself, tonal like Chinese but softer, lower-pitched. I smelled diesel and spices and that jungle smell again, the mud that had caught in my mind the way it had once stuck in my boots.

I doubted Hilger could have put anyone in position quickly enough to intercept me here. Even if he’d wanted to, the way I’d traveled, he couldn’t have known quite when I was arriving. And even if he’d guessed right, the airport, with all its cameras and other security, would be a poor place for a hit. Still, I haven’t survived this long by taking anything for granted, and the first thing I wanted to do was make sure I was clean.

I shouldered my overnight bag and asked a taxi driver who seemed to speak decent English to take me downtown. I stayed with a Japanese persona and used a Japanese accent. With Hilger I’d be American. At all other times I wanted to be Japanese. The two personas have always been subtly distinct for me, and slipping from one to another would make me harder to describe, and therefore to track.

I watched behind us as we left the airport. Several cabs followed us into the thick traffic. I waited three minutes, then said, “Wait, go back, go back! Forgot sunglasses!”

The driver looked at me, unsure. “Sunglasses!” I said again, gesturing to my eyes. “Airport, please.”

He nodded, then turned into the oncoming traffic with a U-turn that for an older passenger might have meant a coronary. I watched behind us as we returned to the airport. No one, not even one of the motorcyclists in their hundreds, replicated the U-turn.

I paid the driver five dollars—still the street’s preferred currency, and about what the trip downtown would have cost had we completed it—went back into the terminal, and waited inside, watching. No one tried to follow me in, and I saw no one setting up outside. I found another cab and had it take me to the Rex Hotel.

In the thick traffic, the five-mile trip took almost an hour. I sat in the backseat, jostled by the occasional pothole, surrounded by the buzzing and honking of armadas of motorcycles, with nothing to do but watch and think.

I hadn’t ever intended to come back here. It’s not that I hated these people, although there are plenty of soldiers who still do—hell, there are American World War II vets who still hate the Japanese. I hated them at the time, yes. I wanted to hate them, to prove that despite my Asian face I was different, I was American, more American even than the soldiers who suffered and fought alongside me.

And there were plenty of opportunities to hate, plenty of reasons. The Vietnamese were masters of psychological torture. They could turn anything, any harmless, neutral thing in your environment, into something deadly, until the world itself started to seem like your enemy. They booby-trapped pens, C-ration cans, the bodies of dead soldiers. They hid trip wires behind branches and mines under the dirt. They would lay spikes alongside a road and then ambush you so when you dove for cover you’d be impaled.

Imagine losing a buddy that way, one of the men whose smile could always cheer you up, who’d saved your life, who had your back no matter what. Imagine how you would hate. But then imagine this. Before you’ve even had a chance to process what’s happened, while your uniform is still soaked with your friend’s hot blood, two guys you’ve never seen before and never will again have zipped him into a bag and tossed him rudely onto a medevac chopper, and an instant later he’s gone, so gone you wonder where all that blood could have come from. There’s no funeral, no burial, just a grief so confusing and bitter you start to choke on it, and the only thing that saves you from being paralyzed by that grief, being killed by it, is a rage so white-hot the sane can barely begin to imagine it.

The rage has a purpose, you see: it offers an outlet. But it carries a heavy price. You do things you couldn’t have imagined doing, couldn’t have imagined anyone doing, things you can’t talk about afterward, not even with the men who acted with you. In that state, the things that make you human, your empathy, even your fear, they’re gone. You feel like you’ve died already, and you’re right in a way, part of you has died and will never come back. At that point, being killed is almost a mercy. Because if you survive it, if you survive your own death, the path back to life is almost impossible. After the war, there were men, hollowed-out men whose means of negotiating the world had been reduced to alternating silence and rage, who would try with earnest futility to explain themselves that way. “I died there,” they would say.

I thought that, too, for a long time after. But now, watching from the back of a cab images of that stark country that had swallowed up my innocence, I thought,
No, I didn’t die here. Vietnam is where I was born.

And I’d never left. Not really. I’d been back to the States, then all around the world, then finally settled, at least for a time, in Japan. But the person who was born here had never grown up, never fundamentally changed. His body had wandered, but his mind had remained in the place that had formed it.

Once, when I told Midori I wanted out of the business, she had asked me how hard I was trying. I felt my jaw clench at the memory. What horror had she ever endured? How could she, how could anyone who wasn’t there, imagine the way war changes you?

Losing people, and not being able to properly grieve them, shrinks your world. You try to avoid attachments, anything that could hurt if you lose it. You start to say
don’t mean nothing
about everything, the important things especially. You learn that only a few people can be trusted, fewer and fewer, in fact. You feel used by your own government. The equipment sucks, the orders suck, you know the politicians don’t give a shit if you live or die as long as they’re reelected. And then, if you’re special, the way I apparently was, you get sent on a certain mission, where you can kill your own out-of-control best friend: my blood brother Crazy Jake, still the most dangerous man I’ve ever known. That brings it all together: the horror, the stifled grief, the silence, the distrust, the raging, all-consuming hatred.

I got out of the cab in front of the Rex and declined a bellboy’s offer to help me with my bag. I wasn’t going to stay here, but I remembered the hotel from leave in Saigon and thought it would be a good starting point from which to refamiliarize myself with the city. I was glad it was still here, the silly crown over the marquee and all. Not just because it was inherently comforting to know that my memories weren’t only of relics, but also because familiar terrain would save me time and help keep me safe.

I looked across Le Loi Street and smiled. The oddly named Saigon Tax shopping center was still there, looking much as it did in my memory, the main difference being the replacement of a Sony neon sign by one advertising Motorola instead. The French-designed City Hall to the Rex’s right also remained, its cream-colored balustraded façade illuminated grandly in the day’s fading light.

I went into the hotel. The lobby had gotten a face-lift, but in its déclassé essentials it remained unchanged. I smiled in quiet amazement that a place could survive war, and communism, and the passing of decades so unperturbed. I moved in from the entryway, feeling like I was stepping back in time. The young man I was had come here with a prostitute, more than once. I was astonished at the clarity with which I could remember faces, and moments, even the names they had called themselves ten thousand nights ago.

I took an interior staircase to the fifth floor, and then, ignoring the signs warning that only registered guests were permitted beyond, I explored the mazelike interior of the hotel. Beyond the public areas, it was all as it had been: hallways with open balconies at their ends; faded wood paneling and stalwart tiled floors; empty couches facing upholstered chairs in hidden antechambers, coffee tables and ashtrays absurdly at the ready, set out in melancholy hopes of a party that had moved on decades before. Even the fat geckos, feasting on insects attracted to the corridors’ stark fluorescent lighting, it was as though it had all been waiting for me.

I followed one of the staircases down to the third floor, then made my way to a balcony at the end of the corridor. I had a perfect view of City Hall and the plaza in front of it. Excellent.

There was only one problem: a single inset incandescent light in the ceiling directly above me. I took out a handkerchief and un-screwed it a few turns until it went out. I doubted anyone would notice and fix it before tomorrow. If they did, I would just unscrew it again.

I took the stairs back down and walked over to the statue of Ho Chi Minh on the plaza in front of City Hall. I looked up at the hotel. The balcony I had darkened was noticeable, but not egregiously so. There were plenty of other lightless patches in the hotel’s façade, and I doubted Hilger would zero in on this one. Even if he did, he’d have no way of knowing I was standing there, shrouded in darkness.

Saigon Tax was a little less familiar, primarily because it had gone upscale since I had last seen it. In addition to jewelry, watches, plasma televisions, and home theater systems, there was a section selling Panasonic massage chairs. Slowly but surely, Saigon was getting rich. But the layout was as I remembered: four floors, with an open atrium from the ground floor all the way up; three sets of staircases, two escalators, one elevator; entrances and exits on three sides. Perfect.

Long into the night, I wandered District 1, the city center, re-familiarizing myself, absorbing details. It wasn’t just the Rex: I was astonished at how little the city itself had changed. I’d been to Bangkok less than a year earlier and the place was barely recognizable as the city I had first visited during the war, but communism had retarded things here, and it was only recently that Saigon had begun to take off. Some of the street names had changed, yes. And there were a few new high-rises—a Citibank building, one for HSBC—but the low skyline was largely the same. I recognized some of the Rex’s contemporaries: the Caravelle, with a tall new wing; the Majestic, still perched above the Saigon River. The presidential palace, whose wrought-iron gates had come crashing down under the North’s tank treads when the South fell in 1975, had been preserved and renamed the Reunification Palace, and was now a tourist attraction. I was amazed at the almost palpable presence of the young man who had walked these streets and seen these sights. I no longer was that man, but his memories were now mine, his dark gift to me; they united us as surely as the progeny of a dissolved and loveless marriage.

I walked. The ubiquity of commerce, I noted, that too was unchanged: motorcyclists offering impromptu taxi rides; stores selling a few spare feet in a corner for someone to park a scooter; street vendors hawking secondhand watches and rebuilt engines and coconut milk in plastic cups. The raw capitalism, the economic dynamism, of the place was stunning. I wondered why anyone had ever feared that communism could take root in this culture. The North had swallowed Saigon like a diner ingesting a virus, and within twenty years the virus had so infected the host that Hanoi was calling for
doi moi,
politely described as “reforms,” more accurately understood simply as “capitalism.” Save these people from communism? Christ, it was Hanoi that needed saving now. We could have just sat back and enjoyed the show.

But that would have required patience, I supposed, and perspective, too, neither of which was ever likely to feature prominently in anyone’s list of the top ten American virtues. Well, at least I wouldn’t have to participate in the current sequel: America Uses Military to Remake the Middle East and End Tyranny in Our Time.

Sequel, my ass,
I thought.
It’s a fucking remake. And the end is going to be just the same.

I was pleased to find the Opera House I remembered, now known as the Municipal Theater. Likewise, the Notre Dame cathedral, a remnant, along with City Hall, of French rule. I liked that the locals hadn’t tried to eradicate the country’s colonial heritage. Their acceptance, even embrace of the past suggested a cultural maturity I found I admired.