Requiem for an Assassin

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.