Chapter Three

CHAPTER THREE

The packet arrived in the mail in late November 2018, a predictably gloomy time of year. Contract assassination is surprisingly busy during the holidays—targets are as much creatures of habit as the rest of us, and you can often knock them off when they’re traveling over the fields and through the woods to grandmother’s house—but I had finished my last assignment the week after Halloween, leaving me rattling around my rented town house like Miss Havisham, only with leftover breakfast tacos instead of a wedding cake. There was no more work on the horizon, the Astros had lost to the Red Sox in the playoffs the month before, and to add insult to injury, it had actually snowed in Houston. In short, I was ripe for anything that hinted at adventure, and an all-expenses-paid retirement cruise embarking the day after Christmas was better than nothing.

I flicked through the brochures, noting the deliberate omission of prices.

It was too much. I gave up after reading about the thread count of the sheets (“hand-loomed from cotton grown in the Nile delta”) and threw the packet into my tote bag. It was still there a month later, buried under a bottle of sunscreen, a pack of cigarettes, and a bag of licorice whips, when I boarded the boat in San Juan for a late-afternoon departure that felt like a class reunion. Mary Alice and I had met up in the Dallas airport on our way east; Helen joined us in Miami. Leave it to Natalie to dash on at the last possible minute, spilling lipsticks and miniature liquor bottles from her bag as she ran up the gangplank in the harbor in Puerto Rico.

“She’s going to break a hip doing that,” Mary Alice said mildly. We were standing at the rail next to Helen, watching as Natalie teetered across the deck on wedge espadrilles that were four inches high and tied halfway up her leg with yellow satin ribbons.

“Or by falling off a porter,” I said, nodding to where Natalie was furiously batting her lashes at some poor twenty-year-old who didn’t know what had hit him.

“Leave her be,” Helen said, a little too sharply. I raised a brow at Mary Alice but neither of us replied. Natalie shifted her gear into the porter’s waiting arms and waved him away as she launched herself at us. She was the smallest, barely coming up to Helen’s shoulder, but somehow she managed to gather us into a group hug.

“It’s been so long!” she cried, pulling back to see us better. “Let me look at you! Christ, you’re all so old!”

“It’s been six months,” Mary Alice told her, smoothing out her linen tunic from where Natalie had crushed it in her exuberance.

Natalie flapped a hand. “Bullshit. It’s been longer than that.”

Helen was calculating. “It was my last birthday. You all came to Washington,” she said. She didn’t finish the thought. We’d gone to DC armed with dinner reservations and tickets to the Camelot revival at the Kennedy Center to get her out of the house.

I gave her a close look. She’d worried me on that trip. Kenneth’s death had hit her hard and I wasn’t sure she was going to make it. He’d been gone for three months when we showed up. The blinds had been drawn and the house dark, smelling of gin and unwashed sheets and even more of unwashed Helen. We stayed for four days, rousting her out of the house for spa trips and movies and a baseball game. We made her promise to keep her hairdresser’s appointments and her volunteer commitments and signed her up for pottery classes and a meal-delivery service. And then we’d gone home and gotten back to our own lives with a sense of having accomplished what we’d set out to do, like Helen was a chore on a to-do list. Check off the box marked console widow and move on to the next thing.

Only Helen hadn’t moved any further, I suspected. She was perfectly groomed now, her pale grey-blond hair shimmering with platinum streaks that matched the ostrich Birkin bag hanging from the crook of her arm. But she’d lost more weight. One good hug and I could snap her in two, I thought sadly.

Just then, Natalie’s young porter appeared with a basket and a pair of tongs. “Chilled towels, ladies? They’re scented with lemon verbena?” Everything the kid said ended in a question.

“Thank you, Hector,” Natalie said with a broad smile.

One by one he dealt the little towels out like cards. Mary Alice gave her arms a purposeful wipe while Helen patted her cheeks daintily. Natalie stuffed hers in her bra while I draped mine around the back of my neck with a moan of relief.

“Hot flash?” Mary Alice asked with a sympathetic look.

“Only occasionally,” I told her.

“I can’t believe you’re still not finished with that,” Natalie said, plucking the towel out of her neckline. “I haven’t had a period since 2005.”

“Natalie, please,” Mary Alice said, darting a look around to see if anyone was paying attention.

Nat shrugged. “Why do I care if anyone hears me? Periods are a perfectly natural phenomenon.”

“I know how periods work, Natalie,” Mary Alice said, setting her teeth. “I just think maybe some of the other passengers might not want to know about your gynecological endeavors.”

When we were younger, Natalie would have met a remark like that with fire, but she merely shrugged and grabbed two frosted glasses of rosé from the tray of a passing waiter. She shoved one at Mary Alice. “Here, Mary Alice. Drink this and I’ll see if I can find you a flashlight.”

Mary Alice furrowed her brow. “Flashlight?”

“To find the stick up your ass. Let me know if you need a hand getting it out,” Natalie said sweetly.

I grabbed another two glasses and thrust one at Helen, raising mine quickly. “A toast,” I said, narrowing my eyes at Mary Alice and Natalie. “To us. Forty years on, and still kicking.”

They joined in, even Helen, although she hardly seemed to have enough energy to clink glasses. By the time we watched the sun sink over the horizon as we put to sea and moved into the dining room for grilled swordfish, we’d had two more rounds. We polished off an obscene amount of coconut tiramisu and were ready to stagger off to bed when Heather Fanning, as toothy and perky as I’d feared, accosted us with a wide smile.

“I hope you had a wonderful arrival dinner!” she enthused. “I have a special treat for you!”

She beckoned us to follow her, and Mary Alice fell into step next to me. “Ten bucks says that child used to twirl a baton.”

“Flaming,” I agreed.

Heather took us up to the bridge, where she introduced us to the captain, a man who looked enough like Idris Elba that Natalie made a beeline for him as he gave us a tour of the ship. He took us up stairs and down ladders and around decks, pointing out all the luxurious features and safety measures. He was proudest of his engine room, keeping us standing for half an hour while he explained the intricacies of the NGL tanks—natural gas liquids, in case anyone ever asks you. He talked until my calves were cramping and all I wanted to do was curl up behind the nearest engine and take a nap. But we all smiled and thanked him, and when we returned to the lounge area on our deck a bottle of champagne was waiting with his compliments. It had a tag on it—happy retirement!—and four flutes. We toasted and immediately the mood turned nostalgic.

“I don’t even think I’m ready to retire,” Nat said mournfully. “I love my job.”

“Me too,” I said.

“I’m relieved,” Mary Alice commented. “It’s time to start a new chapter.”

“I would have liked to finish the old one,” Helen said, knotting her fingers around her flute. “Properly, I mean. If I’d known the job in Qatar was my last, I would have paid more attention.”

“I would have paid more attention to all of them,” I said. “It’s gone so fast.”

“I’m going to miss the adrenaline,” Nat told us, her expression wistful. “I mean, how else am I going to find anything that makes me feel that alive?”

“You could take up recreational drugs,” Mary Alice suggested.

Natalie stuck her tongue out, then turned to me. “I know you get it, Billie,” she said.

“I do. It’s like going from playing high-stakes poker to nickel slots for the rest of your life.”

Natalie threw out her hands in a dramatic gesture. “Thank you. It’s the kick, the constantly measuring yourself against the odds and figuring out how to zig when you expected to zag, balancing on that knife’s edge.”

I knew exactly what she meant. No matter how well you planned, no matter how extensively you prepared, something always went differently than expected. And every job was a chance to prove Darwin’s simple maxim: adapt or die. We adapted; they died.

I turned to Mary Alice. “Are you going to miss it?”

She thought it over for a minute. “Probably not. Akiko and I have a good life, you know? We have our softball league and Akiko will be starting pitcher next year. I’ll be able to join an amateur orchestra finally and dust off my viola. We can travel without always wondering if a job is going to come up and derail everything. I’m down to my last few excuses. I think Akiko is afraid I’m having an affair.”

Her voice was light, but I realized how hard it must be to keep that kind of secret from your partner. The job could make demands of you when you least expected it, assignments cropping up without warning. When the notice came, you grabbed your go bag and left. Sometimes for a few days; sometimes for months. There was no way to know.

Mary Alice went on. “Either I’m having an affair or I’m a spy, I’m pretty sure that’s what she thinks.”

Natalie snorted. “Why would she think you’re a spy?”

“Because I am shit at thinking up excuses as to where I’m going when I suddenly have to disappear. The last time I told her I had an accounting emergency.”

The Museum paid us annually, a retainer so we’d always be available when they needed us. Bonuses came with each job, which meant we weren’t hurting for cash, and being gone for a few months at a time made it hard to hold down regular jobs. But it was easy to get bored and we needed cover stories, so most of us freelanced. Mary Alice had a few accounting clients, Natalie made art that occasionally got shown although she was careful to keep a low profile. Helen was happy playing housewife to Kenneth, while I took translation jobs, usually academic books. If you’re imagining it’s dull work, you’re not wrong. But it kept my languages sharp and gave me something to do with my time.

I turned to Mary Alice. “What the hell is an accounting emergency?”

“Believe me, if I could think of a good one, I’d use it. I usually make up some bullshit about client confidentiality and duck out the door. Or I just say that my mother is poorly.”

“Doesn’t she ever want to go along?” Helen asked.

Mary Alice hesitated slightly. “She knows deep down I’m lying and I think she’s afraid to push because of what she might find out. Besides, you know my family. It wasn’t hard to get Akiko to believe she wouldn’t be welcome.”

I shook my head. “So, for the five years you’ve been married, Akiko has believed your family is too homophobic to welcome your wife into their home? And that you would just go along with this?”

She shrugged. “It’s the best way to keep her safe. The less she knows, the less trouble she can get into.”

Helen pursed her lips. “But she must think you won’t stand up for her, that you are willing to put up with whatever your family chooses to throw at you.”

“Oh, they’ve thrown a lot, including actual dishes. You should have seen the one time I tried to bring Akiko home for Christmas,” Mary Alice said with a sigh. “But maybe someday I’ll be able to tell her the truth, now that it’s finally over.”

“I don’t understand why you didn’t tell her to start with. Kenneth knew what I did,” Helen put in.

“Kenneth was CIA. He had his own baggage,” Mary Alice said. She flushed. “I should have told her. I know I should. But I never found the right time. I mean, it’s not exactly first-date stuff. ‘Well, I’m into chamber music and intarsia knitting, and last week I poisoned the head of a multinational crime syndicate’ doesn’t quite cut it.”

“And there was no chance between first date and your wedding day?” I asked mildly.

She nibbled her thumbnail, looking guilty as hell. “I thought she might leave me. I was afraid, okay? I was worried that if I told her the things I’ve done, she might decide she couldn’t live with that. And I couldn’t live without her.”

“You should have told her,” Helen said firmly.

“I never told any of my husbands,” Natalie said.

“None of your husbands ever stuck around long enough for you to tell. You change marital partners like the rest of us change underwear,” Mary Alice retorted.

Natalie shrugged. She tended to view monogamy as a suggestion rather than an imperative—something she finally realized she ought to share with a prospective husband after divorce number two. By the time she split from the third one, she’d given up entirely on marriage and decided to keep a string of what the kids call fuckbuddies.

Natalie turned to me. “What about you? Will you miss it?”

“I won’t miss the workouts,” I said honestly. “Keeping myself in shape because my life might depend on it is getting a little old. My knees are tired.”

“What will you do with your time?” Helen asked.

I shrugged. “I have no idea. Maybe I’ll take up needlepoint or interpretive dance.”

Natalie shook her head. “I can’t imagine you ever not being exactly what you are. We’re all killers, but you’re the Killer Queen,” she said, lifting her glass in a toast.

The others laughed and I even managed to drink, but Natalie’s remark cut a little closer to the bone than I would have liked. Because she said what I’d already started to fear—that without the job, I was nothing.