Chapter 19

19

Eva

Sherri is already tipsy when I get to the bistro the next morning. The champagne is chilling in one of those cute ice buckets. The sun is barely up, winking at the pink Parisian clouds.

"Sorry!" Sherri lifts her second glass, to toast my sitting down, I guess. "I couldn't wait."

"You never do," I say. Sherri has been working for the agency for years. She always complains about it, but she used to be a madam and she's said that was worse. She can sleep at night now, she says.

"Right." She fills my glass and refills hers. "I don't want to talk about last night except to say I think congratulations are in order." She lifts her glass for a toast. "Happy thirtieth."

We clink glasses and I take a sip. The bubbles tickle my nose. I'm not a huge fan of champagne, but I won't give up on it.

"Actually, it's my thirty-third." She's forgetting the kills I had before I started with the agency.

She grimaces. She knows my history, but she tends to forget it. Lucky her.

"Well, whatever the count is, I wanted to tell you that the agency is very happy with you. You're organized and efficient and reliable. You do the jobs exactly as we tell you to. You'd be surprised how hard it is to find employees like that." That's because all their other assassins are men. This industry is really tough for women to get into, even tougher for them to be taken seriously in. I like to think I'm breaking the glass ceiling, one murder at a time.

"Thank you," I say. "I really appreciate the positive feedback. This job is very important to me. It's nice to know I'm doing well."

Sherri's glass wobbles as she brings it to her lips. I don't think she can tell if I'm serious or not. But I am serious. This is the first time in my life I've ever been really good at something. I've finally found my thing. Too bad it had to be murder.

"There's a lot of goodwill for you in the agency," Sherri continues. "Which means bigger jobs. And bigger paydays."

"Excellent." I raise my glass to her again. Why not? The champagne is popping through my brain, deepening my rose-colored glasses. La vie en rose.

"But let's not talk about work," Sherri says. "Let's talk about nice things. Life." I feel attacked.

The thing is, in this line of work—especially for a woman—it's better not to form attachments. I did with Andrew. He was an assassin, too. He was actually the one who got me into the business.

When I first started dating Andrew, I was working at a real estate office in Rome. I hated my job. I smoked cigarettes, drank red wine, snorted bad coke on the weekends. I was just like everyone else. I stayed out too late clubbing. I bitched about the cost of Ubers. I tried to keep up with politics.

Andrew claimed he was a bouncer but I suspected he was dealing drugs. He kept weird hours, went away on random trips and came home jumpy and rattled. We were dating for six months before he turned to me in bed one night and said, "Don't take this the wrong way, but I think you would make an excellent assassin." I laughed. I thought it was a joke until he told me more. Until he told me everything.

"This is my work phone," he said, taking out an old-school burner phone that just screamed "drug dealer." He scrolled through all his texts, showing me how to find the codes inside what looked like error messages. "2F04" means "red," means "stop." "022F02" means "green," means "go."

I thought he was crazy. I thought he was making it up.

"It's okay if you're a drug dealer," I reassured him. "I mean, it's kind of cringey, but you don't have to lie about it." It was a little weird that he seemed to think being an assassin was more acceptable, but it was definitely cooler.

Then Andrew got out of bed and walked over to his safe. He had told me it was his dad's and that he used it to store his watch collection. I had never seen inside before. I didn't really care about watches.

He carefully worked the lock. I sat up in bed. He opened the safe and revealed eighteen guns, twenty-two knives, forty-seven types of poison. Give or take.

"Oh," I said. "Shit."

He got slightly giddy then. I know now it was because of the euphoria of just being honest with someone. Of telling someone the truth. Of not hiding.

He explained how he got his start. Told me his kill number.

"Remember when I went back to England last month?" he said, bouncing with excitement. "I wasn't home. I was in London, killing a fella in Camden." He held up his hand. "That's how I broke my thumb. I cracked it on my mark's nose."

I didn't immediately buy it—I mean, who would? I treated it like an unfortunate glitch in his character: My boyfriend farts in front of me, he never puts the seat down and he thinks he's an assassin. You know how it is with the men!

Then he let me listen in on a call. Then he let me come with him on a job.

"I really shouldn't be doing this," he kept repeating. We were sitting in a busted Fiat around the corner from the Parliament offices in Rome at eleven thirty at night.

He did it. I watched him kill a man. I kept the engine running as he shot a man point-blank. He jumped into the front seat and leapt across the console to kiss me. I had to push him off.

"We're going to get caught if you start doing all that," I said professionally, zooming away from the scene.

He was shocked by my cool head. Honestly, so was I.

But I had seen murder close-up before. I had killed. Watching an organized execution seemed almost civilized by comparison. It felt almost normal . Like I expected it. Because what had happened to me when I was a child had fucked me up. Being surrounded by death made me feel normal.

I don't know if I even realized it at the time. I told myself it was fun and exciting. Heroic. Cinematic. Badass.

Andrew started training me every day when I got home from work. He taught me how to fight, how to stab, how to shoot and poison and how to kill. When he went away on jobs, I studied by myself. I went to big Italian libraries and read the classics—the Italians were pretty damn expert at killing. I became infatuated, obsessed. I stopped going out, stopped drinking and doing coke and being like everyone else. I started being like me.

Then Andrew introduced me to Sherri.

We flew to London to meet her in person. It was important, he said, that she meet me. "Then she'll know. She'll see what I mean."

It was a bizarrely normal meetup at a nightclub in Chelsea. We were in a back room drinking champagne. We even danced a little.

When it was so late that we couldn't leave without seeing sun, we sat down in a private booth and had one of those intense bonding conversations reserved for the very intoxicated.

I told her all about my childhood: the real story. I pulled no punches, too drunk to edit. I gave her the kind of dirty details that I usually regret sharing the next day. Then I jumped to my life after: the girls' home, college, how studying abroad led me to Italy, and to Andrew.

Sherri pulled back to consider, with drunken enlightenment, all the things I had told her. "It's incredible, really, how you've managed to pull your life together from such tragedy. You graduated from college. You have a good job."

"I didn't have a choice," I confessed, speaking words I had considered many times before. "A man with my backstory would be a tragic hero. I was a freak. There was no place for my story, so I buried it."

She took my hand. I used to jump when people touched me. "Thank you for trusting me." She took a deep breath. She shook her head. "I've never been through anything like that, but in a way, I know what you mean. I used to be a dominatrix, and then I was a madam. My husband doesn't even know that."

"Weirdly, I think your backstory might be even less accepted by society," I told her.

She shrugged limply, not disagreeing. "There is no place in this world for a woman who sins."

I thought she was right, and yet: There we were. The two of us together, two women who had sinned. We had a place with each other.

She squeezed my hand. "I like you. And more than that, I want you to succeed. We need more women in the field." She sat back, patted my hand. "Let me run this up the flagpole. See if we can get you something easy to start."

Andrew walked over, hearing that last bit. "We could do something together," he suggested.

But Sherri was adamant: "No. We don't run jobs like that. Every assassin is independent." I was actually relieved. I wanted to prove myself. I wanted to do it on my own.

My first kill was easy. So easy, it felt like destiny. It felt good .

I had killed the bad guys once, but I had killed them too late. And I think it was almost therapeutic killing them on schedule.

I loved the approval, the praise I got from Sherri and Andrew for every kill. The truth is, I sometimes felt bad about my past. I sometimes felt guilty and weird and fucked-up. So being congratulated on a kill felt like someone saying I was okay. And "okay" is a powerful drug.

The thing about Andrew was, it was never really love. Not for either of us. It was honesty . In some ways, that felt more important. It was acceptance. Acceptance that we would never find another person who would accept what we did for a living. Andrew wasn't a very good liar, and I wasn't very good at being alone, and there was a kind of intimacy in the truth, at least. In being able to tell each other, I killed someone today . People build relationships on way less.

I miss him. For real. Sometimes I wish I could just go home and tell someone about my day. That's it. That's all I want. To wash the blood off with someone watching. But that's impossible. I know from experience—it only ends in tragedy.

I can't even talk to Sherri about my work life. Even though she's a part of it, she doesn't have the stomach for it. All she wants to talk about is everything else . All the things I don't have. All the things I can't have.

Right now, she's just waiting for me to give her something. She needs me to reassure her that I'm not some subhuman murderess. That I have thoughts and interests and hopes. That I have a life that's not just taking lives.

I want to give her that. She's my friend, so I want to lie for her.

"I met someone on the train," I find myself saying.

She squirms with excitement. "Tell me more."

"We had sex," I say. She groans with pleasure. She's seriously so relieved. "On the luggage rack."

"Christ on a cracker!" She slaps me, but she's grinning. She's so happy. And then I'm so happy, too.

I tell her about his glasses and his jaw and his single dimple. I conjure him up like he's more than a man. Like he's a solution. The life I'm missing. Because everyone knows relationships are what make you human , what make you one of the everyone.

It's what every mother asks. What every friend checks up on. It's the thing that carries the most premium in society, the most meaning. Yes, you are thriving! Yes, you are rich! But what are you doing, really , if you're not fucking someone on the reg? All the world pities and fears you if you aren't fucking someone. It's a pretty ridiculous but undeniable fact.

My love story is giving this meetup meaning. It's making the sky brighter, the birds more singing. It's making the champagne sweeter. Then I get to the sad part: "I went back to our compartment, and he never came back." I leave out the part where he left behind a suitcase filled with weapons. That doesn't really scream "romantic hero."

I'm worried that the ghosting will devastate Sherri, who is clinging to this story like it's a lifeline, but she surprises me.

"Ohh! Noo!" She calls the waiter. She waves frantically, like this is an emergency. "We need another bottle of champagne," she says in French. "Quick!"

She practically leaps across the table to clasp my hand. "He's such an asshole! What a fuckwit! Absolute tosser!"

That's when I realize she loves this part, too. Maybe even more than the sex part. The ghosting.

Sherri and I spend actual hours giddily berating Jonathan, dismembering all the parts of him we recently loved, until he is a regular swarm of inefficiencies.

He has bad eyesight!

A horrible constitution!

He'd probably get motion sickness in bed!

He is not going to solve you, but somebody will. Don't worry! Don't lose faith! Somewhere out there is a man who will solve y-o-u! You just have to keep looking. You just can't give up!

A strong woman like you needs someone really, really special.

I'm seriously so jazzed when our meetup is over. I'm ready to have sex again. Or go shopping. Or kill someone.

When we part, we're both so drunk that we can barely walk to our separate cabs. We exchange air-kisses—three, like true friends do.

I ask Sherri to get me another job as soon as possible. I don't want to hang around in Paris. I don't want to risk running into Jonathan. He's nothing to me. He couldn't be anything, even if I wanted him to.

All he could ever be is another person to lie to, another person to pretend for.

Another person to break my heart.