Page 47 of Assassin Anonymous

“French film from the sixties. Very cool. I wouldn’t say no to Alain Delon, either.”

“Thought you didn’t like action movies.”

“I didn’t say I didn’t like them. I just said I don’t prefer them.”

“Okay,” Astrid says, as a smile stretches across her face. “Favorite movie of all time.”

I know the answer, but it’s not an answer I want to give, so I offer a worthy runner-up. “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.” Then, tired of this line of questioning, I nod up at the building in front of us, reaching into the overcast sky like an obelisk. “You sure about this?”

“He works here, and he’s inside,” she says. “He’s not, like, the top guy. But he’s near enough to the top.”

The building contains the headquarters to a bank. Apparently our man works for said bank. Apparently he’s an introvert who doesn’t spend a ton of time socializing outside home or work, and he lives nearby, so the plan is simple: wait for him to come out, follow him home, then pop in to see what we can brace him for. Our flight to New York doesn’t leave until late tonight, so it seems like a decent enough lead to chase down.

It’s just after five, so I have to figure he’s leaving soon. Still, I’m antsy and I have to piss. Astrid is bundled up in her little bubble jacket next to me and all I want in this world is to show her the maelstrom swirling in my chest. Maybe if someone else witnessed it, it’d lessen the intensity. But I can’t. Can’t tell her what I’m feeling because the second I do that, I’m admitting to the things I used to be, and the things I no longer am.

She hasn’t asked me about my errand and I haven’t asked her how she found this guy. I don’t really need to know the origin of it, I just need it to work. I don’t even know what this guy can do for us, but it’s better than plan B, which is to go home and pour a glass of whiskey and cry into it while I pray for all the people who want me dead to get distracted and move on to something else.

Which is unlikely to happen.

We’re surrounded by people, and even though nobody knows who I am, I feel like there are eyes on me. Any one of these faces could be a person prepared to shove something sharp between my ribs.

Astrid, meanwhile, is slurping down a cup of tea and grinning. This is a blast to her. If she only knew. I think she’s falling into the thrill and romanticism, thinking this is a game. It’s not. It’s a terrible stupid thing and I hate this and I hate myself and I hate everything.

I glance into the bookstore behind me and figure if I can’t find a little serenity, at the very least I can find a bathroom. But also, me and Kenji did agree to exchange gifts. A book would fit well within the spending limit. It’s something to do. Replacing the bad memory with a good one. Maybe this can count as a little recovery.

I tell Astrid, “Bang on the window if you see him?”

She nods at me without taking her eyes off the entrance. “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

“What about it?” I ask.

“My favorite movie of all time,” she says. “Not that you asked.”

“My apologies. That’s a good one.” She mutters something under her breath, but it’s lost as I duck inside, the warmth of the bookstore and the smell of the paper enveloping me. The girl behind the register is drowning in a fuzzy beige sweater and maroon wool cap. She has a barbell nose ring and heavy black gauges in her ears. She smiles at me when I enter, then goes back to the book she’s reading.

After hitting the bathroom, I roam the aisles, thinking: What do you get someone who used to murder people for a living?

If we were still assassins, it’d be easy. A knife is always nice. If he had a favorite rifle, I could get him a new scope—one of those really nice ones, with a ranging reticle that allows for bullet-drop compensation. But his go-to weapon was a katana. Maybe there are katana accessories? Like a nice cloth to clean it with? Then there’s dark clothing, always a plus in this profession. And snacks. You spend so much time waiting for people to show up that a stash of protein bars or some trail mix really takes the edge off.

Except, that’s the old programming.

Who is Kenji today?

He drinks tea. When we get dinner, he tends to go with the vegetarian option. We once had a very long discussion about Akira Kurosawa’s filmography. His favorite is Yojimbo, mine is The Hidden Fortress. I think we both appreciated that neither of us said Seven Samurai or Rashomon. One time I met him in the park and he was reading an Agatha Christie novel.

I poke at the book spines as I pass them. Agatha Christie seems like too safe a bet; what if I get him one and he’s read it? I could get him something in Japanese, or by a Japanese author. I want to find someone that he’s never read. Someone new and surprising. Of course, it doesn’t help that I spent more of my life killing than reading.

Damn it. Stop thinking like that.

This feels like an exercise in futility, until I stumble across a long row of Dostoyevsky novels. A little bell rings in my head. Something familiar. I pull Crime and Punishment off the shelf. A nice modern hardcover edition.

This is a book I read, a long time ago. It’s about a man who decided that he was a superior person and that meant it was okay for him to murder his landlord? I think that was the gist. But I’m pretty sure the message was that killing is bad. That could work. I don’t want to get him something where killing is an okay thing. I did take up reading a little after I went sober, just to do something with my time, and found that too many modern thrillers wrote off murder as an acceptable means to an end, with no thought to the real-life impact.

Doesn’t matter how “bad” a person is—likely there was someone somewhere in this world who loved them, and that person has to live with a whole lot of pain in the aftermath. That’s why I moved away from action movies, too. I found myself mourning all the henchmen getting mowed down in the background.

I take the book over to the counter and go fishing for my wallet.

“Oh, that’s a good one,” the girl says. “Loved it.”

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