Generation of Liars (6 page)

“I can’t believe you were
eavesdropping on my conversation.”

“The walls are paper thin in this
place.”

“Does Motley know that? Since he’s
the one paying your rent, he might want to know the shortcomings of his
investment.”

“Oh stop, Alice. So, was it really
your ex-boyfriend that shot you?”

“Yeah. My boyfriend from home. I
was dating him when the November Hit happened and I ran away without telling
him why.”

“He can join the club, since you
never told any of us why you ran away.”

“Rabbit, I’m really getting tired
of you constantly drilling me for details about my secret. My reasons for
leaving home have nothing to do with my ability to do my job. What happened
before I met you and Motley is in the past, and it’s staying there.”

“So if this ex-boyfriend of yours
doesn’t know your secret, and he doesn’t know that you’re here, what is he
doing in Paris?”

I gritted my teeth. “I have no
clue, and that’s what worries me.”

“Do you think he recognized you?”

“I was his first love. Do you
really think he would forget my face?”

“Not likely,” Rabbit replied.
“Plus, he shot you, and you seem to have that effect on people who know you
well. So chances are good that he recognized you.”

“Hey,” I said, tossing a pillow at
him, “I resent that.”

“Speaking of your natural
inclination to piss people off,” he shielded his face from the pillow, “if you
don’t want to risk pissing Motley off more than you already have tonight, you
better rush on catching that flight to Rio.”

“You’re right.” I rolled off the
bed and walked to the bathroom to get my bag. I stood in the doorway with my
fingers smoothing my hair. “Do you really think my hair looks good like this?”

“Alice, please don’t miss your
flight.”

“What about you? Aren’t you coming
to Rio?”

“I haven’t gotten orders yet.”

“Oh baloney, you’re going to wait
until I leave and then you’re going to board a privately-chartered plane to get
down there. I know it.”

“Alice, stop.”

“Because that’s how it always is.
Motley plays
favorites
. I am so sick of these games.”

“Alice, I think I am beginning to
fully understand why your first love felt compelled to shoot you.”

Chapter Three: Kitto Katsu

B
ENEATH
THE AIRPLANE’s wing, Paris looked like a hamlet of tiny twinkling dollhouses as
I shot away from the tarmac at Charles de Gaulle Airport. The Eiffel Tower
appeared as a small, gray triangle fading from view. I closed my eyes and
nested into my seat, consoling myself with the thought that getting on the
other side of the world was just what I needed to alleviate the fear of seeing
my ex-boyfriend, Pressley Connard, in Paris. Just thinking about him finding me
after all this time made the airplane feel like a
Tilt-A-Whirl
; but I
couldn’t even use my sick bag since that’s where I was hiding my cigarettes
from the flight attendant. This flight was going to be brutal. My legs were
shaking like motors. From behind a pair of oversized face-hiding sunglasses, my
eyes were scanning the length of the airplane aisle, scoping out any potential
dangers. I was constantly on the lookout for people I had made an enemy of.
Motley had gotten me tangled in some tricky situations in the past three years.
I had screwed a lot of people in order to collect bits on the dynamite stick. I
had pretended to be dozens of people, and I had schemed and stolen my way to
some pretty important information. These blackhat criminals I had tangled with
travelled a lot too, and you never know who you might bump into in first class.
But there was something else. Something I feared more. The itch in my shoe. I
feared being discovered by anyone from my past, by anyone who knew me before
that fateful night in November, the story of which unravels on the words
written on the confession inside my shoe.

I jumped out of my seat, wobbled
down the thin airplane aisle, and crashed into the bathroom. This is where I
proceeded to wretch out the contents of two shakers worth of that cheap, awful
alcohol from Rabbit’s mini bar into the efficient airplane toilet. I lifted my
head from inside the toilet and stumbled to my feet to face the mirror. I
surveyed my reflection, which resembled a blurry Impressionist painting of a
girl. I was something Andy Warhol would paint on a bad day. The skin on my face
was a ghastly shade of porcelain, framed by wings of dark hair matted to the
side of my cheek by a glistening slick of sweat. Green eyes, made large and
crooked from messy black eyeliner, were leaking mascara spiders down my cheeks.
My lips were full like a poison lotus flower. The acid-dissolved white pills
that had come up with the vomit tasted like poison in my mouth. Damn it, I was
tired. I wanted that dynamite stick in my hands and I wanted to crush it with
the force of Hercules. I straightened myself up and stumbled back to my seat
and passed out until we landed in Rio.

*   
*    *

I was sitting in the backseat of a
taxi. Buildings roared by, pink and yellow ghettos, painted the color of
happiness in some half-brained attempt to deflect the miserable conditions.

The taxi driver spun the wheel,
taking sharp corners as we dodged bicycle messengers and wagons that pulled
towers of fruit. The buildings had porch overhangs sagged by the humidity. I
looked down at my legs, covered in the same bright stockings I had been shot
in. I brushed my hands over the thin fabric, thinking of the dreamy doctor and
the way he had so tenderly touched my legs. I tried to remember his name.
Ben
,
he had said. Ben Robinson. An all-American name. I closed my eyes, reliving the
embarrassment of him seeing my confession note. I wondered what type of girls
he dated; classically-educated, well-pedigreed girls spending a semester in
Paris touring the galleries. Not fakes like me, who show up wearing crayon
makeup and bullet holes.

The taxi made a tumultuous turn
onto a dirt road and I turned my head out the window.

“Are you sure this is the right
place,” I asked, forgetting that when I hailed the car outside of the airport,
the driver had spoken only enough English to tell me the cost. I brushed my
fingers over the cell phone in my lap, smooth and black like licorice candy,
and let my eyes skim over the address Motley had texted me. I repeated the
address once more for the cab driver.

I knew the whole trip was Motley’s
twisted version of payback for screwing up the Eiffel Tower job as soon as the
cab pulled up to the house and I laid eyes on a ramshackle pink bungalow with a
brood of filthy chickens loitering out front.

"Wait right here," I told
the driver. I charged towards the house and swung open its moth-ravaged screen
door.

"Alice? Is that you?” a male
voice framed by a Dutch accent was calling from the halls within. A tall,
skinny man, dressed in a tunic and with his blond hair tied back in a ponytail,
eclipsed the doorway. His age was about forty but the sun had textured his skin
to the harshness of a man in his seventies. I recognized him immediately.

"David!" I called out,
dropping my bag and giving him a hug. “The legendary David Xad, live and in
person, I don’t believe this.” His embrace was so delicate that it was easy to
forget he was a trained martial artist who could kill a man with his bare
hands. “It’s so great to see you.” I pulled away to look him over. He looked
exactly the same as he did three years earlier when the two of us spent an
intensive weekend in Tokyo, during which he taught me a mastery of Martial Arts
moves.

“It’s superb to see you, Alice,”
David said through his roseate lips. He helped me inside the house and led me
into the kitchen. He turned on the stove for tea and set out two small oriental
mugs. The crinkly lines in his forehead pushed together in concern as he
announced, “I heard about the little
snafu
on the Eiffel Tower.”

“Ah, my reputation precedes me
again.” I leaned over the gas burner to light a cigarette.

“A reputation is not a terrible
thing to have, but it is said that the reputation of a thousand years may be
determined by the conduct of one hour.”

“I guess screwing up the Eiffel
Tower job wasn’t my finest hour then, huh?”

“Alice, why would you say that? You
did survive, after all. Even a bullet could not destroy your ambition. You have
certainly grown in strength and skill since the last time I saw you.”

“Well, geez, David, when Motley
sent me off for my training with you in Tokyo I had only been working for him,
for what? Two weeks? I was a baby.”

“Your survival speaks to your
acquired maturity.”

“I owe a lot of my survival to you.
I’ve gotten myself into some pretty stupid jams, but I’ve always been able to
rely on the moves you taught me to save my skin.”

David kneeled onto a cushion on the
floor and lit incense beside a small statue of Buddha, and in the background
the sound of a small Zen fountain trickled serenely. There was a deck of Fool’s
Luck playing cards splayed out on the table into a half-built game of
Solitaire. The inside of the house felt like a small oasis despite being an
absolute crap hole. I sat down cross-legged on the floor next to David and
smoked my cigarette. My pinwheel stockings and mini skirt struck a peculiar
contrast alongside his yeast-colored tunic and bare feet.

“And the mantra helps you too,
doesn’t it, Alice?” he asked.

“
Kitto Katsu
,” I said,
grinning like the Cheshire cat. “
I will surely win
.” I turned my scarred
hands palm up and spread them over my folded knees. “You taught me that motto
as I climbed down the Tokyo Sky Tree during my training. I remember the feeling
of the wind battering all around me and my cheeks burning with tears with each
trembling step my feet took. I pictured myself there again when I crawled down
from the Eiffel Tower after being shot at. That’s how I survived.”

David adoringly studied my hands.
“I brought you up on the Tokyo Sky Tree because sometimes our adversaries are
not other people, but merely ourselves. We can only realize that as we come up
against manmade adversaries of pillar and steel.”

“You know, David,” I spoke with my
eyes surveying the water spots on the wall and the shag rug that had been
chewed by mice, “when you taught me about
Kitto Katsu
, we stayed at your
mansion near Mount Takao, which was, well, to be honest, exactly where I would
expect a guru ninja assassin to live.”

“A man wastes many miles stepping
around his point, Alice. So tell me, is that a statement on my current living
arrangement?”

“No offense, but what are you doing
living in this rundown hovel?” The incense was doing little to mask the stench
from the chicken coop that was wafting inside with the breeze. “Plus, I thought
you had that little villa high up in the Alps in addition to the house I stayed
in during my time in Japan.”

The tea kettle whistled and David
glided over to the stove. “I came down here to do some thinking.” He poured
steaming water into each cup and sank two teabags. “Thinking which can only be
done away from such lavish accommodations. What about you?” He transferred one
of the mugs into my hand. “Are you down here to hide from something, or do you
have a job to complete for Motley in Rio?”

“A job,” I answered, and then I
shot him a playful look of accusation. “Is Rio the kind of place people usually
come to hide? Is that why you’re here, David?”

“A man can never hide from himself,
Alice.”

“So is that a yes?”

“No, Alice, my purpose for being
down here is to complete a degree of advanced training so that I might master
the element of surprise for use on a very special opponent to whom my journey
is leading me to.”

“An opponent? In that case,” I
said, tipping my mug to him before plunging it to my lips, “
Kitto Katsu
.”

“
Kitto Katsu
,” David
repeated, as his lips disappeared behind his mug.

Our serene moment was interrupted
by my cell phone chirping. I knew it would be Rabbit checking up on me. “Excuse
me, David.” I scrambled to my feet and walked outside for privacy.

“Silence surpasses speech,” I heard
David proselytize as I eased the door shut behind me. He found mobile phones a
painful exercise in the human condition’s unease with silence.  

"Oh, Rabbit, you better not be
enjoying five-star accommodations right now," I huffed into the
phone. “I mean it. I don’t want to hear a peep about a cold margarita in your
hand or babes sunning themselves by the pool of the Ritz Carlton.”

"Calm down, Alice. I haven't
checked in anywhere yet. I'm sitting on a stool inside an internet café about
six miles from where you are. I don’t even think there is a Ritz in Rio. How
did you know I was in Rio by the way?”

“Rabbit, in three years Motley has
never sent me on a mission without you riding my rawhide. So, are you ready to
go visit this Benny Nebraska fellow or what? Rabbit?" I did a grunt of
frustration because my phone’s reception was terrible and the chicken coop
stench was nearly asphyxiating me.

"Almost ready,” Rabbit
answered, and I could detect slyness in his voice, even beneath the static.
“But first, Motley wants me to tell you that there’s a gift for Nebraska inside
the chicken coop out in back of the house. You have to go get it so you can
deliver it to him.”

“Gift?” I repeated. “You mean the
payoff money for Nebraska, right?”

“Yup, oh and a helpful hint for
you, the address to Nebraska’s apartment is also scribbled on a paper that’s
attached to the briefcase.”

“That’s cryptic. Wouldn’t it have
just been easier to tell me the address? While we’re being illusive, should I
check the sky for smoke signals to get this guy’s phone number?” I looked out
into the yard, at the coop where the wind was throwing that awful stench at me.
Oh
, I thought to myself,
this was definitely payback from Motely
.
“You get shot out of the Eiffel Tower one time and suddenly you’re on
everybody’s crap list, huh, Rabbit?”