Paris is a Bitch

Delilah and I were enjoying a late dinner at Auberge de la Reine Blanche on the Île Saint-Louis. Softly lit, intimate, and unpretentious, it was one of her favorite restaurants, and though I typically shun any behavior that might be used to fix me in time and place, an occasional last-minute reservation was something I was learning to live with. Delilah was grateful for the concession, and expressed her thanks not in words, but in kind, ceding me the seat with the view of the entrance and, through the large front windows, open now to the fine spring air, the antique street and sidewalk without. She never suggested that she might watch my back, as she was willing to let me watch hers. I wondered if she was afraid of my response, and how it might reveal the limits of my trust, limits which she sensed but wasn’t yet ready to face head-on.

I had arrived earlier that evening, a longtime habit for which Delilah typically affected neither approval nor reproach. An astute tactician, she understood the importance of examining terrain through a potential enemy’s eyes before occupying it oneself. And though her own routines were less rigorous—she would say less paranoid—than mine, she was patient with these vestiges of the life I was determined to leave behind. She believed in me, she’d told me, believed I was more than the iceman, the killer inside me who’d been running my life and was constantly, insidiously trying to regain his position in the driver’s seat of my psyche. She told me she understood that I wanted to be done with all that, out of the life, free of the past, the iceman departed, deliquesced, deceased.

It was never going to be easy. I’ve known men returned from war who had trouble sleeping without their boots on and a rifle close at hand, and I’ve understood their difficulty. It’s hard for the most primal, powerful regions of the mind to abandon habits that were once crucial to the organism’s survival, even when the higher mind recognizes those habits are no longer warranted. What can the habits hurt? the survival mind wants to know. And, sadly, things like a chance for peace and hope of redemption aren’t responses it finds much persuasive.

But even worse than the tenacity of my psyche was the stubbornness of my circumstances. Because how was I going to get out of the life while Delilah was still in it, while her own behavior was constantly, insidiously cuing and inciting my own? And why should I even want to, when she was always implicitly telling me her work with Mossad was more a devotion than her relationship with me, when she was always refusing the commitment to me that I was trying to make to her?

We fought a lot, and the fights were getting worse. Sometimes she would belittle my professed desire to get out of the life, pointing out my ongoing need for tactical behavior, which I in turn would blame on her. We took turns with patience and frustration. But no matter the argument, no matter whoever or whatever was at fault, it was true I couldn’t relax when I saw her without first performing what, to a civilian who didn’t know better, would probably be diagnosed as a weird species of obsessive-compulsive disorder. So in the hours before our scheduled dinner, I strolled the narrow lanes of the island, reminding myself of its routes and rhythms, reacquainting myself with its lines of entry and points of escape. It was a beautiful evening, the sky pastel blue, the trees budding with tentative green, and the banks of the Seine were thronged with pleasure seekers, talking and laughing and drinking wine. Just past Rue Boutarel on the Quai d’Orléans, I paused and joined them, admiring the sunset silhouetting Notre Dame Cathedral on the Île de la Cité, a short walk away across the Pont Saint-Louis. I watched the sky glowing pink, deepening to red, and finally surrendering to violet and indigo, and wondered what it all must have looked like a few thousand years earlier, before this small spit of rock in a river had been subject to the minds and hands of men, and what it would look like a few thousand years hence, when war or climate change or some deep immune response from the earth itself had cleansed the area of the humans who claimed it now, and nature made it once again her own.

And now, satisfied that I had a way out if I needed one, I sat in the back of the restaurant on one of the old wooden chairs, enjoying the sounds of French and German and English, all pleasantly scrambled by the close walls and the dark, beamed ceiling; enveloped by the smells of bœuf à la bourguignonne and soupe à l’oignon and petites bouchées d’escargots sauce roquefort; and savoring the sight of the beautiful, deceptively elegant blonde across from me, who, if we could find a way past our professional tensions and make common cause of something better, I thought might actually be the best thing that had ever happened to me.

Delilah smiled and asked me in French, “What are you thinking?”

She was wearing a simple, cream-colored silk wrap dress with tasteful but still tantalizing décolletage, and the candle on the table between us was casting distracting shadows. I let my I eyes linger where they wanted to linger, then smiled lasciviously and said, “About what I might want for dessert.”

She smiled back. “Well, for that, you have to see the menu.”

“I’ll have to take my time with that. If it all looks good enough, I might even order more than one.”

She raised an eyebrow. “You think you can handle that much?”

I looked into her blue eyes. “I don’t know. I’ll have to taste it and see.”

She gave me a challenging look, the kind that would make weak men wilt and strong men wild. “Then come back to my apartment. We’ll see if your eyes are bigger than your stomach. But…”

“Yes?”

“You can’t stay tonight. I have to leave early tomorrow.”

“Where are you going?” I said, immediately irritated at myself for asking a question to which I already knew the answer. Or rather, the response.

“John. Why do you ask me that? You know I can’t tell you.”

“How long will you be gone?”

“And I can’t tell you that, either. As you know.”

I felt a stupid petulance taking hold of me and tried, without much success, to shrug it off. I shouldn’t have pressed, but I said, “A day? A month? How long this time?”

She sighed. “Longer than a day, less than a month. I think.”

I looked away, nodding. “You think.”

An American in an expensive blazer and with perfectly groomed three-day facial stubble was blathering into his mobile phone at the table next to us. I hadn’t noticed until just then, having been focused more on whether Delilah and I were speaking quietly enough not to be overheard than with whether anyone else was talking too loudly. I looked over, and his girlfriend touched his arm to let him know his phone monologue was annoying someone. He glanced at me but didn’t change his volume. My irritation with Delilah was looking for an outlet, and I considered snatching the phone out of his hand, breaking it in two, shoving one half down his throat and the other up his ass, and putting the whole thing back together inside his chest. But that would get me noticed, and then some, and with my mostly Asian features, I was already a bit more noticeable in Paris than I liked.

Delilah said, “I’m sorry.”

I didn’t respond. Stubble Boy was yammering on, something about structural asset-backed securities and tranches. I tried to tune him out.

Delilah said, “I know it’s difficult for you. I can imagine what it’s like. And I’m sorry.”

I looked at her. “Yeah? What do you imagine?”

There was a pause. She said, “You wonder what the new assignment is, and whether that means I have to go to bed with someone.”

High-value-target honey trap operations were Delilah’s métier, and if she hadn’t been so effective in the role, the Mossad would have cut her loose ages earlier because she wouldn’t take any of the shit their bureaucracy tried to serve her.

“That’s not what makes it difficult,” I said, although the sentiment was less than solid.

“What, then?”

“You know what. It’s not what you do in the life—I know that, and I get it. It’s you in the life, period. It’s making me feel like I have one foot in and one foot out, and I can’t find my balance.”

Stubble Boy said, “Fuck that! You tell him if he wants the higher coupon payments, he takes the higher risk. That’s—”

“Excuse me,” Delilah said, switching to Parisian-accented English, her voice suddenly projecting. “It might just be the acoustics in here, but your phone conversation seems awfully loud. Why don’t you take it outside? Or, better yet, for the sake of your date, wait until you’re alone?”

Stubble Boy looked briefly incredulous, and I half-expected him to stammer something born of baseless entitlement such as, Do you have any idea who I am? Instead, he held the phone away from his head and said dismissively, “Look, there’s plenty of noise in here. I don’t know what the problem is.”

He turned as though to resume his conversation. I knew Delilah wasn’t going to let it go, so I leaned across to his table and took hold of his free wrist. He looked at me, shocked, and tried to yank free. Eccentric hand and forearm strength is one of the consequences of a lifetime of near daily judo, and I do additional exercises to augment my grip—enough so that I can crush an apple in one hand if I want to. This time, fortunately for Stubble Boy, I didn’t want to. But I let him know I could.

“Put the phone away,” I said quietly. “And lower your voice.”

He looked like he was going to protest, but a little more effortless pressure on his wrist and the flat look in my eyes made him think better of it. “Jesus, you don’t have to get so huffy,” he said. I looked at him for a moment longer, then released his wrist and turned back to Delilah. I heard him say into the phone, extra loudly to try to restore some of his damaged pride, “Hey Bob, I’ll call you back. Couple of rude Parisians here.”

Delilah smiled and said to me in French, “Well, that was diverting.”

I shrugged, having already largely forgotten the idiot. “Anyway. This whole situation would be a lot more tolerable for me if there were at least an endpoint to look forward to. Six months, six years, if I just knew there was a time when…”

I let the thought trail off. On the sidewalk outside the restaurant, a swarthy young man of what looked like Arabic, maybe Algerian, descent was scrutinizing the menu in the window. He had a narrow, ferret-like face, and his eyes darted around in a way that suggested he felt jumpy. Nothing alarming in itself, necessarily, but this was the second time I’d seen him in the last ten minutes. Both times he had examined the menu, but had also spent a fair amount of time scoping the inside of the restaurant. Again, in itself nothing out of the ordinary. People read menus and look inside restaurants, sometimes repeatedly, while they try to decide where to eat. But the behavior is more common in a pair or a group than it is in a singleton. Also, there was something purposeful, rather than inquiring, in the way he was looking around inside.

“What?” Delilah said.

“There’s a guy outside. Second time I’ve seen him and I don’t like his vibe.”

“Shall I look?”

“No. If it’s anything, I don’t want him to know he’s made. Wait, he’s coming inside.”

I slid my chair back so if necessary I could clear the table instantly, then picked up the glass of house Bordeaux I was drinking. Most people have trouble recovering from a glass of wine in the eyes, especially if it’s followed by an immediate barrage of much worse. Delilah’s hand dipped discreetly below the table, no doubt accessing the FS Hideaway knife—basically a steel talon on a double finger ring—she typically wore on her inner thigh.

“Hands are empty,” I said quietly, looking at Delilah and keeping the guy in my peripheral vision. He strode to the end of the restaurant, just past where I could see him. My scalp prickled with the discomfort of letting him get behind me, but Delilah was watching him now and I knew her expression would tell me instantly whether action was required. I heard him ask the waitress what time they closed, and then he was heading back out. I watched him go, and again something in my gut told me he was trouble.

“What do you make of that?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Could be just what it looked like. He’s trying to decide where to eat, maybe because he’s meeting friends later.”

“Come on. Did that guy feel like Île Saint-Louis to you? He didn’t even feel like the Quartier Latin. More like la Goutte.” La Goutte d’Or was a rough part of the city in the 18^th arrondissement, populated largely by Arabs and Africans, and known for its drugs, crime, and presence of illegals from the Maghreb.

“Are you trying to make a point?”

The question irritated me. What kind of point would I be trying to make?

Stubble Boy and his girlfriend stood to go. “Have a great night,” he said, his tone sarcastic and his voice overly loud. Delilah rolled her eyes but other than that didn’t engage him.

When they were gone, I said, “Did he look at you when he turned to leave the restaurant?”

She shrugged. “Men always look at me.” She said it without self-pleasure, just as a simple statement of fact.

“But how did he look at you? Did it feel sexual? Appreciative? Or like something else?”

“Why are you pushing this?”

“Why are you resisting?”

“Because I think you’re trying to make a point. Trying to show me how my being in the life is putting you on edge, keeping you off-balance, something like that.”

I tamped down my irritation. “Delilah. You know me. Have I ever played games with this shit? Tried to make a point by pretending there was a problem when I didn’t really think there was one?”

There was a pause. She said, “No.”

“That’s right, no. So let me tell you what I think just happened. Ferret Boy scoped the restaurant from the outside ten minutes ago and saw the back of your blonde head. He reported back to whoever that you were in here. Whoever, who’s more senior and seasoned than Ferret Boy, asked him how he’d determined that. When Ferret Boy admitted he’d only seen you from behind, Whoever told him to get his ass inside the restaurant on some pretext and get a positive ID of your face. Which he just did.”

“How do you know he wasn’t scoping for you?”

“You know the answer to that. With where I’m sitting, he could see my face from outside the restaurant. Besides, my enemies aren’t from that part of the world. Yours are.”

“Isn’t that profiling?”

“It is if you’re doing it right.”

“Or it could be about someone else in the restaurant. Or it could be just a coincidence.”

She was smarter than that and her resistance was really beginning to agitate me. “Look, maybe I’m wrong, I’ve been wrong plenty of times before. But only on the side of caution. You really want to bet your life on ‘maybe it’s a coincidence’? You want to bet your life to prove a point in a stupid argument with me?”

She looked at me for a long moment, then nodded, her expression suddenly sober. “What are you thinking? A hit?”

I was glad to see she was finally taking this seriously. “Maybe, but I’d guess no. If it were a hit, they could have waited to make the positive ID outside. If it wasn’t you, they just walk away. Hell, they wouldn’t even need to wait outside. The hitter could just walk into the restaurant in light disguise, march up to the table, get the ID, bam, two shots in the head, then back outside beating feet before witnesses even have a chance to process what just happened.”

“You know why I’m so attached to you?”

“No.”

“Because most people wouldn’t consider something like that fit dinner conversation.”

I smiled tightly, liking that even though she was taking the situation seriously now, she was still cool under pressure. “But if it’s something other than a hit, and they need to set up carefully, they’d want to know it was you before committing. The only thing is, that guy didn’t feel like a pro to me. And anyone who really knows you wouldn’t send an amateur to do the job.”

“Well, it could be someone who doesn’t really know me.”

“Why would anyone who doesn’t really know you want to kill you?”

She smiled, a little sadly. “Remember the kind of work I do. The target wouldn’t have to know of my professional affiliations to develop a grudge. What he thought was personal would be enough.”

That was a good point. I said, “Well, whatever it is or isn’t, I’d rather not find out. But there’s no rear entrance to this restaurant. They take deliveries straight through the front door.”

She didn’t have to ask. She knew I never went into a room I didn’t know every way out of.

“How do you want to handle it?” she said.

I considered. “Ask the waitress if you can bum a cigarette. Woman-to-woman, she’ll be more likely to want to help out.”

“You’re going to have a smoke?”

“Just outside the door. Like any well-mannered Parisian.” Paris had gone no-smoking, thank God, forcing smokers to head outdoors to indulge.

“I don’t like it. You don’t know what’s out there.”

“That’s why I want to have a look. They’re not after me, remember? Anyway, if I see something I really don’t like, I’ll head back in and we’ll reconsider.”

Delilah told the waitress that Zut!, she really needed a smoke but had forgotten her cigarettes; could she hit the waitress up and thank her in the tip? The waitress smiled understandingly and produced a Gauloise Blonde. Delilah requested a lighter, and that was forthcoming, too. I put four twenty-Euro notes on the table, which would cover the meal if we had to bug out, nodded to Delilah, and went to see whether there was anything to my suspicions.

I kept as far left as possible as I headed out of the restaurant, maximizing my view of the street to the right, then cut the other way just before I got to the door, widening my view left. I saw nothing, but any reasonably competent surveillance would have accounted for a maneuver like mine before taking a position.

At the threshold of the door, I could see there were no immediate problems to my left, so I immediately swept right. Twenty meters down the street, on the opposite side, I saw Ferret Boy, leaning with his back against the dark stone façade of the École de Garçons, bathed in shadows.

Houston, we have a problem.

This was the quiet end of Rue Saint-Louis-en-l’Île, far from the gravitational force of Notre Dame. There were few stores down here, just some galleries, all of them closed and almost all of them dark, and the opposite side of the street was occupied entirely by the lightless monolith of the École. The only illumination came from a few widely spaced yellowish streetlights affixed to the façades of the old buildings on one side of the narrow street and the École on the other. The nearest cross street was Rue Poulletier, sixty meters to the left. When we departed, we wouldn’t just be walking out into the dark. We might as well be entering a tunnel.

Well, that’s the thing about the dark and tunnels. They work both ways.

I noticed another guy walking toward Ferret Boy. They did nothing to acknowledge each other, but they both looked the same to me: young, Arabic, somehow jumpy. I fired up the cigarette and gave no sign that I had particularly noticed them or particularly cared.

To my left, ten meters down on the opposite side of the street, was a panel truck. Could have been a coincidence, but I didn’t like it. I couldn’t see on the other side of it, but I had a feeling someone else was leaning against a stone wall in the dark there.

I tracked a few degrees further left. All the way down at the corner of Rue Poulletier was another guy. I didn’t think it was a hit before, but now I was nearly sure it wasn’t. No one needed this kind of manpower for a hit. And with that panel van parked where it was, I was starting to think it might be a snatch. Overall, compared to a hit, I rated a snatch as a positive. More people to deal with, true, but they would be constrained in their actions.

Also, as I’d told Delilah about Ferret Boy initially, these guys didn’t feel like pros to me. In which case, Delilah must have been right. Whoever had hired them didn’t know who she really was, or what she was capable of. They’d be assuming they were here to grab a helpless woman, maybe after knocking down her feeble dinner date.

Dinner for two at Auberge de la Reine Blanche? Eighty Euros. Being underestimated by the punks outside? Priceless.

I puffed on the cigarette for a few minutes without inhaling. I hadn’t smoked since I was a teenager, and a coughing fit would have been bad for my cover. When I judged I’d been there long enough, I pinched off the filter, which had my DNA on it, and shredded the rest of it on the sidewalk with the sole of my shoe. Then I went nonchalantly back inside. I handed the waitress her lighter. If she was annoyed that I had smoked the cigarette Delilah had asked for, she gave no sign of it.

I sat down and said to Delilah, “It’s not a hit. I’m guessing a snatch.” I told her about the panel truck and the disposition of forces.

She listened quietly. When I was done, she said, “It doesn’t make sense. How could they have found me? No one followed me here. I’m certain of that.”

I glanced at the python shoulder bag slung over her chair back. “Your cell phone?”

“But you said they look like amateurs. How could they have tracked my cell phone?”

“Maybe they’re working for someone a little more sophisticated than they are. Someone who provided your whereabouts and turned the risky part over to them. What I don’t get is, why would someone want to snatch you? I mean, if they want to take you, it’s because they know who you are. If they know who you are, they don’t outsource it to a handful of punks from La Goutte. They bring in professionals.”

A moment passed, then she said, “I think I know what this is.”

“What?”

“I can’t tell you.”

I felt the blood drain from my face. “Delilah. I’m about to walk out that door with you into I don’t know what. I don’t care what. Now you don’t have to thank me for that. But Goddamn it, you do have to tell me what you know so I can be as prepared as possible for whatever it is I’m about to deal with.”

Another long moment passed. “You’re right,” she said. “I’m sorry. I just—”

“Forget it. Who are they?”

“For the last year, I’ve had to spend time with a wealthy man. A Saudi. A financier. You can imagine what he finances.”

“Okay.”

“He’s very well connected. Which is why I was assigned to him. When my organization had learned what it needed to learn through me and had acted on the intelligence, I broke the connection with him.”

“He never knew you were using him?”

“No. He thought it was just an affair. The problem was, he became obsessed with me. To get him to stop contacting me, I told him I was in love with someone else. He still wouldn’t stop. So I told him if he didn’t leave me alone, I would tell his wife of the affair. He’s a very pious man, or pretends to be, and his piety is critical to his influence. So it was a serious threat.”

“How did he take it?”

“He was enraged.”

“Enraged enough to want to do something in response?”

“He’s a selfish man,” she said. “And cruel. The kind of man who, if he couldn’t have something for himself, would try to keep it from anyone else.”

I exhaled long and hard, trying not to imagine the psychic price she must have paid for repeatedly offering her body, and even a simulacrum of her mind, to someone who obviously repulsed her.

“You know,” I said, “it wouldn’t have hurt for you to tell me that before we were trapped in a restaurant with an ambush waiting outside.”

She said nothing, and I wondered if she could sense what I’d really been thinking. Probably she could.

“All right,” I said. “Never mind. This guy… is he connected enough to track you to Paris?”

“He knows I live in Paris. I didn’t try to hide that.”

“Does he know your particulars?”

“Of course not.”

“Is he connected enough to find out? To track a cell phone?”

“Yes.”

“Then what do you think these guys are here for? Kidnap you? Take you back to Saudi Arabia, put you in a harem?”

She looked at me, her face expressionless. “I think they’re here to hurt me.”

“Hurt you how?”

She cocked her head as though in wonder at how thick I was, then said, “If you and two or three other thugs had a woman alone in a panel van and wanted to hurt her in the worst way possible, wanted to ruin her for anyone else, what would you do?”

I didn’t answer. There was nothing to say.

“Well,” she said. “I imagine that’s how they’re planning to hurt me.”

I was quiet for a moment. Then I said, “When this is done, I want you to tell me who the Saudi is.”

“No. I don’t want you involved.”

“I’m already involved. I’m not going to let you walk out there alone.”

“My organization will take care of it. Let’s just focus on tonight.”

I wanted to press the point, but she was right. About the tonight part, anyway. The rest we could figure out later.

“All right,” I said. “I only saw one on the right, but there was another guy mobile so there could be two. Could you handle two on your own?”

“Yes.”

“Then here’s how we’ll play it. If I go with you, and the ones on the left see me help you drop the opposition on the right, I lose the element of surprise if they come after us. If I hang back, and anyone pursues you, they’ll have to get through me, and they won’t even understand I’m a real obstacle until it’s too late. Okay?”

She nodded. “It’s a good plan.”

“So we walk out together and kiss goodnight at the door. You go right, I hang back. If you need help, I’m close enough to back you up. If you don’t, I’ll mop up the others.”

Suddenly she looked alarmed. “You can’t kill them. Not unless you absolutely have to.”

I tamped down my frustration. I wasn’t used to having to consult on this kind of thing. I said, “Don’t make this harder than it has to be, okay? We’re up against four. Maybe more. We don’t know if they have weapons, we don’t even know for sure what this is about. When I hit these guys, I don’t want them getting back up. If you’re smart, you’ll do the same.”

“Think, John. We can’t leave four bodies, or more, outside a restaurant where we just had dinner, where we’ve eaten, what, eight, ten times before? The police will get a description. An attractive blonde and a Japanese guy, you want to be worried about the police looking for something like that every time we share a kiss on the Pont de Sully?”

Goddamn it, she was right. I was letting those images of what they would do to her in the truck affect my judgment.

I blew out a long breath. “You’re right.”

“I mean it,” she said, knowing me, realizing how I was feeling.

“I get it. I’m not going to kill anyone.”

But I’ll make them wish I had.

“If the plan is to get you into the truck,” I said, “that’s the center of gravity of this thing. So when you’re done taking care of business, you keep going in the same direction you started. Away from the truck. I’ll handle my end, you just get out of Dodge. You understand?”

“Yes,” she said. There was no need to affect protest. She was good, but she knew I was better. Sending the target back into the center of the op would have just been stupid.

“Good. And don’t go back to your apartment when it’s done. We don’t know how they tracked you. If it’s your mobile, they could have logged your movements to your apartment, we don’t know. So when we’re done—”

“Yes, I’ll turn it off and remove the battery. Where do you want to meet?”

“There’s a park, by Sully Morland Metro.”

“The Square Henri-Galli.”

“Yes. The playground inside it, the monkey bars—I’ll meet you there and we’ll figure out what to do next. But like you say, first this.”

“Okay.”

I rotated my neck, cracking the joints, and popped my knuckles. I felt a surge of hot adrenaline spread out from my gut and it felt like coming home.

“All right,” I said. “You ready?”

She nodded and we stood. She pulled on the cream suede jacket that earlier she’d hung on the back of her chair, slipped one arm and her head through the strap of her shoulder bag, and eased the Hideaway onto the first two fingers of her right hand, concealing it alongside the shoulder bag. I drained the last two inches of wine remaining in my glass, but didn’t swallow it, instead holding it in my mouth. Delilah bid the waitress au revoir, merci, and we walked to the door, each of us eyeing the area outside. Just beyond the threshold, we paused, facing each other, and kissed in the French style, one cheek, then the other, giving each of us two opportunities to see what was waiting a little way down the street.

I squeezed her arm and she moved off, her footfalls echoing quietly on the stone sidewalk in the dark, and there was something about the sound as it faded away that almost could have panicked me. I hadn’t expected it to be so hard to let her walk alone into whatever she was facing. I suddenly wondered if I’d made a mistake, if the odds weren’t better with us sticking together. But too late to go back now.

I took out my mobile as though to make a call, using it as an excuse to linger in front of the restaurant a moment longer. I kept my head down but my eyes up and saw the two on my end of the street start moving in our direction. They weren’t even looking at me. They were completely focused on Delilah. Bad enough that they’d underestimated her. But thinking I was a civilian, too… this just wasn’t going to be their night.

I glanced right. Someone had stepped out of the gloom in front of Delilah. I heard him say, “Désolé.” Someone else had peeled himself off the dark wall of the École and was moving to flank her. Delilah’s arm moved in a blur and the first guy stumbled back, clutching his face, crying out, “Ah! Putain de merde!” She’d slashed him with the Hideaway. I hoped across an eye.

The second guy, obviously not understanding what had just happened or not having time to process it, reached her and grabbed her wrist, pulling on it as though trying to haul her in the direction of the truck. Delilah pulled the other way and the guy braced with his forward leg, straightening his knee. I saw it coming a second beforehand: she chambered her forward leg and blasted a stomp kick into his outer knee, blowing it outside in. As the guy shrieked and crumbled to the ground, something an old instructor had once said popped up crazily in my mind—Actually, the knee bends both ways, it’s just that one of them requires surgery afterward—and then Delilah was running, and I heard footfalls to my left.

I turned, slipping my phone back into my pocket. There were two of them, hauling ass to catch Delilah or to help their buddies or both. The one in the lead barely glanced at me as I stepped into the street on an intercept course. As he came abreast of me, sprinting, I rotated my hips and launched my right arm into his path at neck level, catching him full in the throat with the forward edge of my hand. I felt something break in his cricoid cartilage and another crazy thought—that had to hurt!—flared and disappeared somewhere in my consciousness. Then his feet were sailing past me and I dropped my weight, guiding the back of his skull into the stone street where it connected with a satisfying crack.

The second guy pulled up short just a few feet away, his eyes bulging, his circuits obviously jammed with the effort of trying to work through how a simple plan had just gone so incredibly wrong. His right hand went to his front jeans pocket, and before he could access whatever weapon he had there, I spewed a mouthful of wine directly into his face and eyes. He cried out in pain and disgust and stumbled back, his hand still groping at his pocket. I swept in, simultaneously securing his right wrist with my left hand and catching the collar of his leather jacket with my right, spun counterclockwise, and blew his legs out from under him with harai-goshi, a classic and powerful judo throw. I used the collar grip to bring his head toward the ground faster than his body, and the back of his cranium crashed into the street like his partner’s with a satisfying and doubtless disabling crack. I released him, stood, and stomped his right hand, turning his metacarpals to mush and thereby rendering his weapon hand useless, maybe permanently so.

I glanced behind me. The two men Delilah had dropped were still down. I glanced the other way. The truck was quiet. Either it was empty, or whoever was inside didn’t realize what had just happened to his buddies. I strode over to the back door and gave it two brisk raps with my knuckles. “Open up,” I said in French. “There’s been a problem.”

I heard movement inside, then the door started to swing out. I grabbed the handle and flung the door wide, and the guy who’d been opening it spilled out onto the street with a startled cry. As he came to his knees, I grabbed his hair with both hands and shot a knee into his face, then a second time, and again. By the third shot, his arms had dropped away and I was supporting dead weight. I let go and he slumped to the street, his head smacking the fender of the truck with a theatrical clang along the way.

As I used the hem of my jacket to wipe down the handle I’d grabbed, the driver’s door blew open. I immediately moved counterclockwise around the truck, buying myself time and distance in case whoever it was had a weapon. But then I heard the sound of feet and saw the guy’s back as he turned left on Rue Poulletier, and I realized he was running away. He would have been better off driving, but maybe he’d thought I was the police, or maybe he’d just panicked.

I went after him. It wasn’t carefully planned, just an impulse, born of cold rage at what would have been happening in that truck if things had gone the way they’d planned. And it wasn’t as though I wanted to stick around the crime scene anyway.

He headed west on the Quai d’Anjou. I thought he would break right over the Pont Marie, but he didn’t, he just kept going, I suppose thinking he could outlast me. He wasn’t much of a runner, though, and it wasn’t long before his pace was slackening. By the time we had reached Rue Le Regrattier, he was going not much faster than a man who was running late for an appointment, which, other than his loud panting, he might in fact have been. I could have overtaken him there, but wanted a quieter place, somewhere we might have a moment alone.

On the short riser of stone stairs that led to the Pont Louis-Philippe, he stumbled and collapsed. I circled around him as I approached, watching his hands, making sure they were empty. There were a few people around but not so near as to present a problem.

“Okay, okay,” he said in French, coming to his feet. He was panting, doubled over, his hands on his knees. “Please. Okay.”

I looked around again to ensure we were alone, then smacked him in the side of the head—a blow to establish dominance, not inflict damage. “You know who you fucked with tonight?” I said. “GIGN.”

He blanched at that. The Groupe d’Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale was the French Gendarmerie’s elite counterterrorism unit. GIGN operators had a reputation for toughness, and were especially feared in the Parisian slums. If you were an illegal, and I was betting this guy was, a GIGN operator was just about the last person in the world you wanted taking a personal interest in you.

“I didn’t… I didn’t…” he stammered between gasps. “But your face—”

I smacked him again. “Idiot, you think I’m supposed to look like GIGN? What about the woman, did she look GIGN to you? You think we should wear signs, maybe, so punks like you can identify us?”

An oh, fuck expression stole across his face, and I knew he believed completely. And why not? How else could he understand how a defenseless woman and her innocuous date had mowed down his entire crew?

He panted and shook his head. “I didn’t know.”

“You’re part of a cell? This was a terrorist hit, yes? You know what we do with terrorists who attack GIGN?”

His eyes were bulging in exhaustion and panic, but I knew a part of his brain was still reasoning, thinking, we’re talking, if we’re talking, I can talk my way out. I wanted to encourage that sensibility.

“No!” he said. “Not a terrorist. I swear, I didn’t know.”

“Who are you working for?” I said. “Al Qaeda? Yes, this is a big night for me, to break up an al Qaeda cell. Come on, we’re going to Satory, GIGN headquarters. I have two partners, we all lost friends in Afghanistan. They’ll want to interrogate you themselves.”

“I don’t know any al Qaeda!” he said. His breathing was becoming a little less labored. “Please, this was a mistake. I’m not a terrorist.”

“No? You’re not a terrorist? Then you’re what? What was tonight?”

“A mistake. I’m sorry.”

“You were trying to kidnap my partner. Why?”

“I was hired.”

“By whom?”

“One in my crew knows a Saudi. But not al Qaeda! One of the royals, he said. The Saudi hired us to kidnap the woman. That’s all I know.”

It probably was all he knew. I doubted anyone who hired a bunch of street toughs would have shared more than that. But it couldn’t hurt to try for a little more. So I smacked him again. At this point, the smacks would be almost comforting, maintaining my dominance, which he now accepted, and implying that if he played his cards right, this was the worst he might receive. “That’s all you know? A Saudi? Listen, you want to avoid disappearing in Satory, you better stop insulting me with this bullshit.”

“It’s not bullshit. My boss told us the Saudi wanted the woman to be hurt. He gave us five thousand Euros, with five thousand more on completion.”

“You believe that? Your boss took probably twice that. He played you for a chump. And what were you supposed to do?”

“Just… look, I’m giving you cooperation, all right? I’m telling you the truth. I didn’t know she was GIGN. That she was your partner.”

“What were you supposed to do?”

“We were supposed to rape her. All of us, every way possible. And then slash her. Slash her face. Make her ugly. I’m sorry.”

I maintained my expression of stern professional skepticism. But inside, something was uncoiling, something I would need to keep in check if I was going to keep my promise to Delilah. I was distantly aware of the hypocrisy of my reaction to what he had been hired for. After all, I’ve killed people for money. It’s what I used to do. I never had a problem with it, or much of a problem, anyway.

But still.

“Who was the Saudi?” I said. “What is his name?”

“I don’t know. Vincent didn’t tell us that.”

“Vincent?”

“My boss. The one you pulled from the back of the truck.”

Whether he was bullshitting me or was legitimately ignorant, I wasn’t going to learn anything more from him. It was time to go.

“You have contraband?” I asked him.

“Contraband?”

“Drugs. Weapons. You’re carrying?”

“No, man, I’m clean.”

I gestured with my head to the stone wall along the entrance to the bridge. “Put your hands on the wall. I’m going to pat you down. If you’re telling me the truth, you can walk. If you’re lying, I take you to Satory.”

He gave me a sly look, probably thinking what I really wanted was to take his contraband, not arrest him for it.

Sad, how cynical people can be.

He turned and put his palms on the wall.

“Feet farther back,” I said. “Weight on your palms. And spread your legs.”

He complied.

I watched him for just a moment, savoring what I was about to do. Then I reached one hand between his legs and took hold of his badly exposed balls, which I then proceeded to pretend were one of those apples I sometimes use to test my grip.

An apple would have done better.

When I was done, I left his unconscious body in a heap and walked away without looking back. I crossed the Pont Louis-Philippe, made a right on Voie Georges Pompidou, and five minutes later I was at the park. Delilah was waiting by the monkey bars as promised, the playground a small triangle of stillness and dark against the sounds and headlights of the streets surrounding it.

“It was what you thought,” I said. I told her what happened, and what I’d learned from the guy I’d left by the Pont Louis-Philippe.

When I was done, she touched my face, an intimate gesture I had always welcomed from her but that just then irritated me. “Thank you,” she said.

“What are you going to do about it?”

“I told you, my organization—”

“Mossad. I know who you work for. Why can’t you say the name?”

“You know the name. Why do I have to say it?”

I didn’t answer. I knew I was being petty.

“Anyway,” she said, “my organization will move me to a new apartment. They’ll watch me. I’ll be fine.”

“You’ll be fine? Your organization wasn’t even competent enough to protect you tonight, now you’re going to be okay because they’ll watch you? Do you even believe that?”

She didn’t answer. It was maddening.

“What about the Saudi?” I said. “You think he’s going to just quit?”

“They’ll take care of him, too.” She paused, then said, “Are you interested?”

I looked at her, incredulous. “In the job? You can’t be serious.”

“Why not? A half hour ago, I had to beg you not to.”

“For you. I would have done it for you. I’m not going to be hired by your organization. Don’t you understand? I can’t modulate this shit, Delilah. Maybe you can, but I can’t. You know how hard it is to fight that part of myself, to keep him in check? Because he’s always looking for a way back in. Tonight he found a personal one, because of you. And now you’re offering a professional opportunity on top of it. What’s wrong with you? How many times do I have to tell you, I just want—”

“Out of the life, I know.”

“Then why are you trying to drag me back in? So you won’t have to leave? When are you going to be happy, when your work gets us both killed?”

“They were just punks.”

“This time. Next time, it’ll be fucking Delta Force. One of us has to make a decision here, Delilah. I’m tired of you refusing to make it.”

“What are you saying?”

I knew I was being pigheaded and reckless. But I was still jacked on adrenaline, and I was pissed.

“I’m saying I want to know when. Right now. Tell me when you’re out. Because if you can’t tell me that, I’ll know the answer is never. And I’ll know to stop wasting my time.”

A long beat went by. I heard the sounds of traffic, and distant voices laughing, and the branches of elm trees swaying in the dark above us.

Finally, she said, “I can’t tell you that. Because the truth is, I don’t know.”

In the dim, diffuse light, I couldn’t read her face. I supposed it didn’t matter.

“You shouldn’t go back to your apartment,” I said. “Not that it makes any difference to me.”

I turned and walked away.

I wanted her to say something. John, wait. Anything.

But she didn’t.

I walked across the Pont de Sully back to the Île Saint-Louis, confused, seething. It was completely un-tactical, but I wanted to hurt someone. I didn’t think I’d killed Vincent or anyone else in his crew—though the throat shot and two cranial slams had been hard enough so that I couldn’t be sure—and maybe I would find some straggler still skulking around near the restaurant.

They were all gone. No police, either. All told, probably for the best, but I was left with all my helpless rage and no where to direct it. Why couldn’t she have just given me an answer? How many times had I stood by her, backed her up, let her disappear for a month at a time without asking where she’d been or what she’d been doing? And for what? So that right after I helped save her from about the worst thing possible, she could just let me walk away without even a word of protest, or doubt, or regret?

And the worst of it was, part of me still wanted to go to her. She could be headstrong, and maybe she would disregard my admonition about her apartment. Maybe she was angry enough to ignore my advice just to make a point. She might need my help.

No. If she needed me, all she had to do was ask, but she didn’t. She could have, but she didn’t.

I looked around, and this city I’d become so comfortable with felt suddenly alien to me, a pretty oasis built for someone else, inhabited by strangers, my own presence that of a ghost. Paris made no sense for me without Delilah, and the loneliness and alienation I felt right then settled into my gut with an almost physical weight.

I paused and considered. She would take me back if I wanted. We wouldn’t even have to discuss what had just happened. Everything would be the way it had been.

I shook my head and walked on. On the Pont de la Tournelle, heading toward the Quartier Latin, I was surprised to see Stubble Boy coming toward me, still glued to his cell phone, walking with his girlfriend. He saw me and his face twisted into an unpleasant smile.

“Hey,” he said, pulling the phone momentarily away from his face. “If it isn’t the Parisian politeness police. Struck out with your date?”

And suddenly, everything was clear.

I spent only a few moments with him, testing the conventional wisdom that you can’t fit a square peg in a round hole, the peg in this case being his cell phone, the hole being his mouth.

It turns out the conventional wisdom is off by a little. In fact, the whole thing depends on how hard you jam the peg.

When I left him, crumbled and gagging and spitting out teeth, his broken phone tossed in the river and his girlfriend shrieking over him, I knew what would happen next. The downed man, and the shrieking woman, would soon attract attention, including police attention. A tourist assaulted right on one of the famous bridges of the Île Saint-Louis would be bad for business, especially if the culprit weren’t caught. Luckily, this particular tourist was acquainted with his assailant, and would tell the police all about him so they would know who to look for: an unassuming but dangerous Asian man who enjoyed dinner at Auberge de la Reine Blanche, and who was known to be accompanied by a stunning blonde.

But I didn’t care. Because they’d be looking for that man in Paris. And after tonight, he’d never be there again.

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