Requiem for an Assassin

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