Namaste (9 page)

He closed his eyes, focusing inward, falling into contemplation.

You must not use your skills to fight, Amit
.
 

Woo and the abbot didn’t agree. The order trained and trained without ceasing. They sparred monk on monk, and monk on machinery. The Sri went through pads and punching bags the way most groups their size would go through food. The average shadow monk could perform surgery with his toes and twist his muscles away from a point of impact on a micro level to dissipate a blow like a car’s crumple zone. But they were also trained to be non-combative, nonviolent. The older boys had picked on Amit as a child; he’d been expected to turn the other cheek. Whenever he’d fought — other than in designated sparring sessions — he’d been reprimanded. To Amit, all that training was a waste without application. Yes, the discipline of training was good for both spirit and soul, and for their connection to the Great Beyond. But if they were enlightened, didn’t it also make sense to use their skills to defeat the enemies of enlightenment? Wasn’t what happened to Nisha enough to break the seal on his training and draw evil’s blood? What use was their training if it could not address wrongs and advance rights?
 

Amit heard the abbot in his head, as if Suni was watching from above:
You have addressed enough wrongs. You have spilled enough blood to counter that lost by Nisha
.
 

But if Amit stopped now, she would have died for nothing: no lesson learned. Everything had purpose, and if Nisha died in front of him, it was to catalyze Amit into action. Some of his duty was done, but he had only chipped the fingernails of the hand behind the strings. If he did not continue and strike at the heart, the evil’s hand would buff its nails and deal more death. That was far worse than Amit’s transgressions.

He thought of the compound and the wall. He thought of the seven armed guards at the gate and the pairs around the edges, all within easy sight of each other. He could take out one man, then possibly retreat. But to what end? He’d never be able to take another. And they would surely add more guards tonight, now that the killer monk had declared his intentions. The Right Hand had been comparatively easy.
 

He could wait for the boss to come out, but there was little chance that he’d do it in the way Amit needed. The man had to be alone before his guts could spill. This wasn’t an assassination; it was, at least in part, an interrogation. If he came out, the boss would be in his car, in public, surrounded by guards.
 

Amit could attempt to infiltrate as a guard, but he wasn’t big enough, and they didn’t wear helmets.
 

He could try to scale the wall in stealth, but he’d circled several times and hadn’t seen any expanse without at least four guards in view.
 

He kept his eyes closed, deeply inhaling the day’s sweet air. The sounds of nature surrounded him, down to the slightest rustle of brush. Animals skittered. Beneath his legs, he felt the rock where he sat. He breathed, feeling lighter, until the deeper part of his mind heard nothing. While his outside layer remained hyper-aware, a pure calm descended inside. Amit was in a void, with nothingness around him. Floating, as if in a tank.

Everything had a weakness.
 

Amit waited for the situation’s vulnerability to surface from the void.

Chapter 10

A
WEEK
LATER
, J
ASON
A
LFERO
set the supreme pizza on a tray he’d taken from a high cabinet above his stainless steel refrigerator. The tray was oversized, like Jason. Sometimes, it occurred to him that he was a cliché: fat, Italian, and able to pretend that his wife believed their money came from a line of designer vitamin waters — when in fact she knew about the dirty dealings and neck-breaking that were part of NutriBev’s ancillary marketing plan. Julia was a good woman and didn’t like what her husband had dragged them into, but Jason was a good liar, and she mostly believed they were barely criminals.
 

Everyone cheated on their taxes; everyone bought shoes that were sewn together by Third-World kids working in some Malaysian sweatshop. Every American had benefitted from the theft of land and the murder of natives, and had the luxury, today, of outrage because nothing could be changed and outrage cost nothing. Everyone was complicit in crimes against the environment, and everyone here was party to the segmentation of the very poor into the gutters. Jason wasn’t a bad guy; he was a realist. He had a few businesses that skirted legality. So what? He was being honest; everyone else was a hypocrite.

The pizza was medium. He used to get larges, but his doctor said in stern terms that eating more large supremes was tantamount to driving a stake into his heart. He’d shown Jason a few photos because his most frequent patient was great at getting terrified about his own health in short bursts. The photos showed blood vessels so tightly constricted with arterial plaques that blood hadn’t been able to go through them. “You’re begging for a heart attack, Jason,” Doctor Altieri had told him.
 

But heart attacks were too common for hypochondriacs, so when his behavior failed to change, Doc A had discussed a few more exotic diseases, constantly flicking his eyes away as he listed them, as if embarrassed about what he was saying. Jason wrote them all down, and looked them up at home: multiple symmetric lipomatosis, lipedema, Dercum's disease, more. None of those rare lipid disorders seemed to be
caused
by obesity, but Doc A had suggested that they might be
masked
by obesity, thus preventing a proper diagnosis. It seemed absurd for a few minutes, then terrifying. Home and fretting while browsing WebMD for diseases he was certain he had, Jason had called the doctor, requesting some testing. Shirley the receptionist said she’d have the doctor get back to him, but that in the meantime, the doctor had noted that Jason should start losing weight immediately.
 

Doc A never had returned that call, probably because he was violating one of his doctor oaths. It smelled like bullshit, and for all of five minutes after hanging up with Shirley, Jason let himself dismiss the whole thing. It was a ruse: the doctor’s listing of odd disorders that he’d surely looked up moments before entering the exam room to meet with his fat gangster patient, the receptionist delivering medical instructions instead of just taking the fucking message. For five minutes, Jason had laughed, before deciding he had acute lipedema. He’d already forgotten what the condition was and what it meant, but it made sense. Maybe whatever lipedema was would work together with the brain tumor he was also certain he had. He’d recently had that CT scan, but scans missed things. His vision sometimes blurred when he watched TV. It had to be a tumor.
 

Laziness was about the only thing that could go toe-to-toe with Jason Alfero’s hypochondria. Worrying about your health could be exhausting and traumatizing. Gobbling through some favorite foods was a great way to feel better fast. He compromised, certain he was dying from something he couldn’t see, feel, or imagine. He got the medium pizza, same as he’d been doing every Thursday night for months. It was significantly smaller than the large. Saving those extra calories might buy him a bit more time before the blood parasites drove him to insanity, or before the many latent aneurisms waiting to explode in his brain finally did.
 

None of it made him feel better. But eating pizza pushed those ever-present concerns into the corners of his head, allowing him to forget as much as he could for the tiniest while.
 

He set the pizza on a tray, still in the box. He set a stack of napkins next to the pizza, then poured himself a large glass of Coke, in a plastic tumbler that matched precisely none of the rest of his expensive kitchen, and placed it beside the napkins. Julia was already on the couch, and had set the kids up as well. They were 16 and 14, but both had their mother wrapped around their fingers. They needed to start doing more for themselves, start taking responsibility. As soon as Jason thought of it, he looked down at the pizza, still in its box on his tray. He looked at his own massive gut. Julia was slim, like Anthony and Marie. Each had a single piece of the other pizza on their plates, and Marie was eating hers with a fork and knife — something Jason saw as thoroughly stupid. But it beat stuffing your face, worrying about all of the ways you were about to die — both through the bogus diseases Jason was certain he had and the legitimate ones built brick by brick by his neverending gluttony.
 

“You started the previews.” Jason looked from Julia to the TV. “What the hell?”
 

“You were taking too long. Besides, you never care about previews on DVDs.”
 

“Why do they put previews on DVDs? We wanted to watch the movie, not a bunch of advertisements.”
 

Julia looked back at him, then nodded:
Exactly my point
.

Anthony reached for a remote, dimmed the lights, then cranked the surround sound. The kid liked his movies loud enough to shatter glass and rattle all five of his fillings. Jason considered telling him to turn it down, but it wasn’t worth it. He just wanted to eat his damned pizza. He had plenty to bury in fatty, carbohydrate-laced good feeling. He had his Dercum's disease; he had the deal Bhoorman had screwed in Germany; he had that letter from the IRS (not taxes, but a troublesome audit); he had the matter of replacing his best man, Telford Hayes. And of course, he had Hayes’ killer haunting the front of his mind.
 

Benny and the guys at the gate hadn’t seen the odd baldy in over a week, but last Monday the freak spotted Kyle coming up from behind “as if he were psychic or something.”

He grabbed a slice, took a fat bite, chewed, and swallowed.
 

“Hey Anthony, why don’t you turn it up? I can’t hear anything.”
 

The kid actually reached for the remote before Jason waved him away. Thinking his teenage son liked things too loud was a sign that he was getting old, and couldn’t be far from standing on his porch in boxers and a wife-beater, yelling at kids to get the hell off his lawn. But what could you do? He was 45, obese, and probably had Hodgkin’s lymphoma, with all the money he’d ever need. He had earned his right to be crotchety.

Jason finished the first slice without even realizing it, then reached for another and showed it no mercy.
 

He looked at Anthony, then Marie, then his wife, Julia. They’d been having a fun time bunkered in over the past week, but their collective nerves were beginning to thin. They’d gone out for dinner once, but the tables to either side of were filled with large, well-dressed men. They’d gone shopping once in the mall, but all together, surrounded by the same large men, this time outfitted casually. Jason tried to spin the whole thing, convince his kids and wife that they were all hanging out together because they deserved some family time. Usually, he was always out of the house, working. Now, he had some time off (because Telford Hayes was dead and those above him were shuffling for a replacement), and they should spend time as a family while they had it. They stayed inside the grounds with the gate closed because they didn’t want to be bothered in the midst of so much family mirth. They went shopping together because it was fun. And they were constantly accompanied by six bodyguards because it was only prudent for a respectable vitamin water kingpin such as himself.
 

The pizza was half gone. He could see Tony’s flier under the wax paper. Jason thought the fliers were as obnoxious as the previews on DVDs. He hadn’t even watched the movie before they were trying to sell him on another, same with Tony and his pizza.
 

He pressed his fist to his chest and waited for a gas bubble to gurgle up his throat. He should stop, and would, if stopping didn’t mean thinking about his leukemia.
 

Jason finished the piece of pizza in his hand, wiped his fingers with the napkins, and looked at the large wall-mounted screen. Still previews. He was halfway done with his dinner, and the fucking movie hadn’t started.
 

His eyes wandered. He looked through the bulletproof sliding glass door, seeing the wall in the distance. Well-lit lawn stretched between house and wall. They were locked down, and if he reached for his tablet Jason could see live footage of the men walking the perimeter. The assassin had infiltrated Hayes’s security, but Hayes’s security, even after the upgrades, had been a joke. Jason’s was 10 times better. No one was getting inside. Still, the blue-robed man had cleaned Telford Hayes’s house in a way that was disturbing like a blood clot in the brain. Jason had seen the photos, and they’d made his gut clench —
his
gut, ample and used to blood from torture. He wondered where the man had gone. Could he have surrendered in the week gone by? He’d gotten to Hayes. Maybe that was enough to settle the man’s debt. Jason had no idea what the man’s grievance might be. Nothing strange had gone down in a while: a few monetary transfers, some purchases, a handful of ordinary lot sales, and a few loose ends that needed tidying. There was that girl who had needed cleanup, too, but Jason barely knew anything about that.
 

He massacred another quarter of the pizza.
 

Still bored by the previews, he looked into the box. The flier was almost entirely uncovered. He shook his head, annoyed, and earned a cursory glance from Julia. Jason was always irritated by something, and part of his irritation was making sure others knew all about it. He and Julia had been married for over 20 years. She didn’t like to play the game, and knew that ignoring his frequent annoyances was the best way to diffuse them.