Requiem for an Assassin

mysteries, like the abandoned bicycles chained to the park gates at the place des Vosges, slumped insensate against their shackles, their wheels bent and broken, like crippled pets whose owners cared too much to kill them and who compromised instead by leaving them to die. I thought of the generations that had visited the city before me, dreamers and cynics, romantics and radicals, the ones who had come here to find something, and the ones who wanted only to forget what they had lost or left behind.
    I’d never been to Paris before, and when I first arrived, my impressions were all secondhand. I expected an ambience born of architecture, romance, history, gustation. I pictured the Louvre and its glass pyramid; the Seine and Notre Dame; intellectuals arguing over philosophy and smoking ceaselessly in clusters of Left Bank cafés.
    What I saw on the train ride from the airport, therefore, was unsettling. Paris, it seemed, was besieged, ringed with tenement towns not unlike Rio’s favelas. Many of these were walled off, at least from the highways and the train tracks, and the gray concrete barriers, some topped with razor wire, were covered, every inch of them, with ugly, angry graffiti, like sea walls braced against a seething tide. By the time I arrived at Gare du Nord in Paris proper, the graffitied walls had abated, but their import lingered: this was a civilization encircled by its enemies, living uneasily under some implicit, eroding truce, slowly losing a war the signs of which were everywhere but that its citizens preferred to ignore.
    I took a small apartment on rue Beautrellis in the Fourth Arrondissement, the same block where Jim Morrison had once lived, on the edge of the Marais. The rent was high, but I’d walked away from an operation in Japan a year earlier with two million tax-free dollars, and I could afford it. I liked the feel of the neighborhood, the glow of its streetlamps, the sounds of laughter and conversation from its bars and bistros. In a strange way, the area reminded me in its intimacy of Sengoku, the Tokyo neighborhood I’d been forced to leave a thousand years earlier.
    Delilah’s work kept her busy, and we had to be careful about seeing each other regardless, so I had ample time alone. That was good: partly because being alone suits me; partly because in Paris it gave me time to adjust to the new sensation of having someone in my life. It wasn’t just the unfamiliarity of plans several times a week—dinner at Le Petit Célestin on the quai des Célestins; a walk on the narrow streets of the Ile Saint-Louis; a night at my apartment; sometimes a night at hers. It was the whole notion, the feeling, of being someplace primarily because of another person’s presence there. There was a lot I liked about that feeling, but it was taking me a while to get used to it, and I was glad circumstances permitted me to go slowly. I used the time alone to explore the city, and read, and practice French with tapes. It was my fourth language, after Japanese, English, and Portuguese, and I remembered some of it from high school. It was coming back quickly.
    I’d been telling myself for a long time that I wanted out of the life, but it was only recently, with Delilah, that the longing had become real. For a while, she had been heading in the same direction. Her organization blamed her for losing a colleague, an assassin called Gil, in an otherwise successful terrorist takedown in Hong Kong, and was set to cut her loose. But she’d faced them down and forced her way back in, and now she was more determined than ever to stay.
    I was ambivalent about her work. On the one hand, it gave me space, which I liked. On the other hand, her continued presence in the life inhibited my own efforts to leave it. Part of it was the behavioral cues—the need for a ready cover story when I was with her in case she ran into someone she knew, and her routine perimeter checks and other tactics—which continued to remind me of who I’d always been. Part of it was ongoing operational necessity, because as long as she was in the life, she was at risk, and if you’re with someone at risk, you’d better believe you’re at risk, too. And part of it was notional: if I was this involved with someone still in the life, how far could I have left the life behind?
    I pushed her sometimes, but not too hard. I’d learned Delilah was a fighter, and if she felt she was being doubted, or second-guessed, or in any way talked down