Satori - Don Winslow [16]
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“I’m fine. A bit more winded than I’d like to be, perhaps.” He wondered at his lack of emotion, then decided that the adrenaline surge had yet to recede and was masking whatever he might feel about his close call, and the killing of two men.
Nicholai looked at the knife in her hand and asked, “Were you going to use that?”
“If I had to,” she answered. “Are they dead?”
“Yes.”
“You are sure.”
“Quite sure.”
Solange walked into the kitchen and came back with two squat glasses of whiskey. “I don’t know about you, but I need one.”
Nicholai took the drink and knocked it back in one swallow. Perhaps, he speculated, I feel a bit more than I thought.
“You are trembling a little,” she said.
“Perceptions to the contrary,” Nicholai answered, “I am not a practiced killer.”
It was true. He had killed Kishikawa-san out of love — something a Western mind would struggle to understand. But that act of mercy could not inure him against the professional dispatching of two sentient beings, who, despite the fact that they tried to kill him first, were still human. As the adrenaline faded, he felt an odd, contradictory mix of elation and regret.
Solange nodded her understanding.
The “cleanup” crew arrived before Nicholai and Solange could finish a second drink. Haverford, uncharacteristically dressed in an untucked shirt and blue jeans, came in through the kitchen door. “My God, are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” Nicholai answered.
“What the hell happened?” Haverford asked.
Nicholai told him about the assault, omitting the details of his counterattack, only saying that he was sorry to have killed the second man. He could hear the soft sounds of the crew working outside, removing the bodies, wiping up the blood, restoring the pebbled paths to their pristine order. As if, he thought, nothing had ever happened.
The head of the crew came in, whispered something to Haverford, and left.
“They were Japs,” Haverford said.
Nicholai shook his head. “Chinese, or at least in the employ of the Chinese.”
Haverford looked at him curiously.
“The Japanese don’t use hatchets,” Nicholai explained. “The Chinese do, and only Chinese tongs, typically. Besides, no Japanese assassin would have fallen so easily for “The Angry Monk Paints the Wall.” Someone in China wants me — or Michel Guibert — dead.”
“I’ll get on it,” Haverford answered. “And I’ll increase security around here.”
“Don’t,” Nicholai said. “Security will only draw attention. The interesting question is, How did they know where I was.”
Haverford frowned and Nicholai enjoyed his discomfiture, a welcome crack in the wall of his confidence, almost worth a near death to see. The agent said, “We should probably move you.”
“Please don’t,” Nicholai answered. “It’s pleasant here and there’s really very little danger. If the assassins were Japanese, they would try again and again until they succeeded. But the Chinese think differently, they would never repeat a failed stratagem. I’m safe until I leave here.”
Haverford nodded. “Could I have some of that scotch?”
After Haverford and the cleanup crew left, Nicholai and Solange went to bed but did not make love. Neither of them felt particularly sexual after the events of the evening. They lay in silence for a long time until Nicholai said, “I am very sorry. Please accept my apology.”
“What for?”
“For bringing bloodshed into your home.”
Solange could see the shame on his young face. Truly, it was the end of youth, this killing business. She knew that any decent person who still had a soul felt revulsion at the taking of life. And she knew that she couldn’t remove his pain, only share it with him, make him know that he was not a monster, but a flawed human being trying to exist in a flawed world.
“Do you think,” she asked, “I have not seen bloodshed before?”
Her head on his chest, his arm around her, she told him her story.
She was a beautiful child, the pride of the quartier.