“Kidnap,” she says. “I think there may have been an attempt,” and tells him what happened, disguising her fear.
“That’s probably manageable,” he says. “And it might make you feel a little better to know that, while I’m here, I’ll fight to the last for you. There’s no true security in this world, but I’ll do everything in my power for you, and if things go bad and we’re going to die, then I’ll stand in front of you and die first.” He says this casually, like he’s explaining company policy, but his tacit conviction is more of a comfort than she’d have expected and in fact there are tears in her eyes.
The silence is benign now, and she realizes that the tension was in her alone, that he’s comfortable being quiet with his principal. “How did you come by this level of commitment?” she asks.
“Parthenon is very selective,” he says. “I’m under contract not to reveal the specifics, but early on in the selection process they test your dedication in the most revealing ways. And then, it’s a way of dealing with fear. We all have to die sometime, and I’ve chosen to put aside fear in the name of service. It seems like the only way to live with equanimity.”
“You sound like a samurai.”
“The job does require dedication, and a level of comfort with the nearness of death, but actually being a samurai? My god. With all the repression and the social rules and the obsession with caste it sounds even worse than being English.”
Blocks later she has the feeling there’s something he’s wanted to say for a while and then he says, “Do you know who made the kidnap attempt, or do you think it was just speculators?”
“I have no idea,” she says, then thinks of Cromwell, the strangeness around that gig, his latest attentions.
“I don’t mean to speak out of turn, but it seems like you might have someone in mind,” he says. He seems to look for words, then says, “It’s evident that you’re a decent person, and you might not believe the viciousness you can find in the world. Even the gentlest people are sometimes obliged to take aggressive steps. I note that we will never have any interest in, or awareness of, your private business, beyond the minimum required to do the job, and that after the job’s done we forget everything, forever. I also note that we deal in definitive solutions, the details of which needn’t concern you.”
It takes her a moment to realize that he’s offering to find her persecutors and kill them. “Wouldn’t that put you at risk?” she asks.
“It’s a dangerous business. But if you mean legal risk, well, that can be finessed, especially if one is careful to respect the structure of things. But we’re certainly not going to let a client’s interests suffer because of a narrow-minded adherence to the letter of the law.” She’s surprised to find herself already inclining toward the view that the illegality of killing for hire is a burdensome technicality.
“I honestly don’t know what’s happening. Even if anything’s happening. Actually, it doesn’t matter—the only person I have in mind is rich, like private-army rich. He’s out of my weight class in every way.”
“This very rich person. Does he know you suspect him?”
Thinks of the information seized from the reflections in his glasses. “I’d imagine not.”
“Well, it would be expensive, taking care of that for you, but in these matters initiative is everything. You’d just get the one shot, but that’s often enough. Like I said, there’s no such thing as true security.”
It’s heady—discreditably so—to think she has only to give the word and her enemy will be annihilated. (But of course Cromwell might not be her enemy, might in fact just be an exceptionally generous and possibly somewhat smitten client—all she knows for certain is that the coordinates from his laptop led her to the glyphs on the wall of the tunnel underground, and that there might possibly have been a kidnap attempt, though it might have been nothing, and if it was something might not have been him.) She says, “Let me get back to you on that.”
Outside the Doric the doorman is dressed like some kind of Renaissance courtier, a monocle in one eye, and he regards them blankly for a moment until, presumably, the monocle’s facial recognition software identifies her as a guest, at which the massive glass doors swing open and the doorman ushers her in.
The soldier pushes back his hood; his hair is copper in the foyer’s light. He’s rolled up his sleeves and she sees a list of names tattooed on his left forearm, some Anglo, some Indian. It occurs to her to ask him up for, as they say, a drink, and twenty years ago she’d have done it, but now it seems too socially complex and like it might strain his sense of correctness and it’s probably a cliché for a girl (a girl?) to have a crush on her bodyguard and in any case she wants to have a nap and be alone and maybe read before her dinner at Fant?me.
“I never got your name,” she says.
He smiles with his eyes, kisses her hand, walks away.
20
Fundamental Things Never Really Change
Waiting in the rain at the checkpoint into the favelas Kern worries that the soldiers will frisk him and find the money in his pocket—more money than he’s ever seen in one place before—but they just wave him through.
Inside, he says, “Lares’ place isn’t far” to the ghost, though others may think he’s talking to himself, another of the favela’s mad ones.
Everyone hurries through the rain which gives him an excuse to hurry with them. His tension, which had diminished in the city, has returned; he clenches his fists in the pockets of his jacket.
The favela’s old men will shake their heads and fret about the drainage but he’s always loved the storms’ violence, the smell of wet concrete. The music of the water pouring from the ledges reminds him of the light well off his room, how in the monsoon it becomes a cistern, how he could hear its depth in the sound of rain hitting, a sound he’ll never hear again, though he could walk there in ten minutes. He tries to feel the force of that, but nothing comes, until he thinks of Kayla, though he’s sworn never to see her again, has made it his practice to keep her from his mind.