Requiem for an Assassin

to, she had a tendency to come out swinging.
    “Why not retire?” I asked her once, over café-crèmes and croissants at Le Loir dans la Théière, a restaurant on the rue des Rosiers named after the dormouse in the teacup in Alice in Wonderland. Delilah had introduced me to the place, and I loved the mismatched chairs and small wooden tables, the eclectic wall art, the wonderful smell of years of fresh ground coffee. “We could buy an apartment on the beach in Barcelona. Make love to the sounds of the waves at night, walk on the beach in the morning. Nothing but the feel of the sun and the smell of coffee and cava and no bad memories.”
    She smiled and pushed back a strand of blond hair. Her blue eyes were lit by sunlight coming through the restaurant’s large front windows. “You make it sound enticing. Especially the making love part.”
    “That was my favorite, too.”
    She laughed. “I don’t know, John. I don’t know.”
    I took a sip of coffee and watched her. I liked it when she called me John. My Rolodex is slim, and the few people in it tend not to use my first name. Midori had called me Jun, short for Junichi, my Japanese given name, and at the time I had liked that very much, too. But that was before she had betrayed me to protect our infant son, and thereby denied me a part in his life. Among the bad memories I had just mentioned, Midori held a prominent position.
    “What would you do if you were doing something else?” I asked. “If you’d never gotten into the life. Do you ever think about that?”
    “Sometimes,” she allowed.
    “What would it be?”
    “I don’t know,” she said again. “Maybe fashion photography. That’s the cover I’ve been living in Paris, and I like it. I suppose I could have done it for real.”
    “Then do it now.”
    She took my hand. “You know I can’t. Iran is poised to go nuclear, we have Hamas in the territories and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Things are going to get worse before they get better, if they ever get better at all. I can’t just walk away to photograph anorexic girls on catwalks.”
    “Is that all you’d be walking away for?”
    “You know what I mean.”
    I tried again one evening as we stood pressed together on Pont Sully, taking in the glowing lights of the Ile Saint-Louis and the illuminated buttresses of Notre Dame. “Your organization is using you,” I told her. “You’ve said so yourself. Why don’t you just walk away?”
    I felt her stiffen, and she took a half-step back. “I’ve told you before,” she said, looking at me. “The ‘organization’ isn’t the point. This is about my country. My people.”
    I shook my head. “I don’t buy it. I think this is about you standing up to the men who blamed you for Gil getting killed in Hong Kong. Showing them you’re tougher than they are, that they can’t drive you out.”
    “Why does everything have to be so one dimensional with you? Yes, I have personal reasons for staying. My dignity is involved, fine, I admit it. But why can’t you at least acknowledge there are other reasons, too?”
    “Because…”
    “I’ll tell you why. It’s because you’ve never been tied to anything larger than yourself. You don’t believe in anything. So you can’t imagine someone who does. She must be either deluded or lying or naive.”
    I felt myself flush. “I understand your selfless reasons better than you know. I also understand the more devotion you give to the organization or the corps or the country, the more it’ll hollow you out when you realize your love was always unrequited. The more you’ll feel betrayed.”
    We were quiet for a moment. She said, “It doesn’t have to be that way for everyone.”
    “You know anyone whose experience has been different?”
    We stared at each other. Her eyes were narrowed and her nostrils flared slightly with her breathing. That’s the way it was with us. We could go from bliss and harmony to anger and recriminations as fast and with as little warning as a tropical storm. What made it bearable, what made it good, was that the foul weather would pass with equal suddenness, usually leaving something glorious in its wake.
    “Anyway,” I said, “I am tied to something larger than myself. I’m tied to you.”
    Her eyes softened. Then she stepped in close and kissed me. I turned my head away, still irritated, but she reached up and turned me back. I resisted for another moment, mostly for form’s sake, and then gave in.
    We stood