The recital, p.1
The Recital, page 1
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Joey was scared.
Very scared.
More scared than she knew.
Her Orphan training, even aborted, had taught her many things about preparing in the face of fear. In keeping with the assassins’ Third Commandment, she had mastered her surroundings, walking the facility multiple times each week for the past month to stay familiar with the layout, check entrances and exits, and scan for possible threats.
This morning’s preparation started with the Second Commandment: How you do anything is how you do everything.
She had done her four-square breathing.
She had visualized the approach.
She had dressed the part. Torn black jeans with fishnets beneath them—not porny fishnets but rocker ones from Spencer’s in the mall. Her hipster-sexy Doc Martens, the ones with embroidered roses on the toes. Her black-brown hair swept up in a ponytail to show off her right-side undercut, emerald nose stud to turn up the wattage on her eyes, skull bracelet.
She was mission-prepping in a bathroom stall of UCLA’s Schoenberg Music Building. In this case, mission-prepping meant fighting with her nerves, which were debating whether they should make her puke. She’d done several rounds of the mission already but the lead-up each time remained daunting. Just as she fought her gorge back into place, a trio of Popular Girls swept through in a breeze of laughter, upspeak, and Bath & Body Works scents—the frilly ones like Champagne Toast and Iced Lemon Pound Cake that she was afraid to try in case someone laughed at her overreach. She waited, bathed in Popular Girl banter and their emanated ease of existence.
Once they left, she emerged into the left-behind haze of sugary fragrance and regarded herself in the mirror. She adjusted her hair, pulling a few tendrils forward to frame her face, which distracted from the remaining baby fat of her cheeks and chin and made her look slightly more grown-up.
If she squinted, she looked pretty enough. But the stakes were high. Was she pretty enough to pass?
The manila folder grew sweaty in her hand.
She was breathing too hard.
Back to four-square breathing.
She closed her eyes, visualized martial-arts movements of the grappling Okinawan tegumi tradition. Sweat, force, power. Enacting kata even in her mind reminded her nervous system what strength and solidity felt like.
She opened her eyes.
She had this.
She walked out with determination, hitting the swinging door with the heels of both hands.
She had to slide her student BruinCard—Josephine Morales—into the window slot to reserve the practice room. She’d been safe from governmental kill squads for long enough now to reclaim her true name. Evan Smoak, her uncle-person, had wiped her trail clean and put the last of her would-be killers in the ground. He was a serious assassin who’d killed a bunch of people all over the world as Orphan X but now was, like, a feel-good assassin who only helped folks who were being terrorized by assholes and abusers and had no one to else to help them.
It was weird that the safest person she knew was also the most dangerous.
But if you thought about it, it made perfect sense, too.
Inside the practice room was a baby grand piano.
Joey sat on the bench.
She waited.
The shining ivory and ebony looked supremely luxurious, like behind-the-glass items in a fancy jewelry store that she wasn’t allowed to touch.
Her hands trembled.
A moment later, her instructor entered in a clatter of wooden bracelets, ensconced in a miasma of patchouli. Ms. De Vries removed her bracelets and set them on a side table as she always did so there’d be no distracting clinks.
“Are we ready?” she asked.
She had a great Dutch accent, guttural on the “k”s, “g”s, and “ch”s, flaky on diphthongs. On rare occasions she took a brief call from her elderly mother and Joey had to pretend she didn’t understand the language because she’d learned long ago not to freak people out with the improbable scope of her knowledge.
Joey nodded.
But she did not feel ready.
She had zero problems breaching the Swiss National Bank’s data centers or repelling a handsy dude-bro behind a bar with extreme prejudice. But she wanted to be good at something other than hacking and strangling people. Not that she’d strangled people. At least not to death.
So this kind of thing?
Learning to do this?
It was terrifying.
It was something for other girls, richer girls, girls who had the time and leisure and personalities to learn to do something not because it was expedient or effective or utilitarian but merely because it was beautiful.
She wanted to make something beautiful.
Maybe if she could do that, it would make her feel beautiful, too.
Ms. De Vries clapped her hands twice, briskly. “Mozart Minuet in C Major.”
A good warm-up. Short, simple key signature, not too tricky crossing up the hands, not too many accidentals with sharps and flats flying outta nowhere. And Joey had already figured out the phrasing so it didn’t sound robotic or all stumbly.
She played it through.
“Nicely done,” Ms. De Vries said.
“Not great though.” The Second played in Joey’s mind again as it was wont to do: How you do anything is how you do everything. “My left-hand finger position’s still not right and my groupings were off.”
Ms. De Vries said, “Your grouping was fine. Shall we move to the next piece you selected?” She lifted a page of sheet music from Joey’s folder, said, “Ah. Ben E. King. A nice choice.” She set it on the music rest.
“But,” Joey said, shuffling the sheet music back to Mozart, “it could be better.”
“This is only the second week you’ve practiced it.”
“Yeah, but I only have to play it. Mozart composed it when he was five years old.”
Ms. De Vries considered Joey through her round spectacles with their translucent maroon frames. “You’re quite hard on yourself.”
Lady, Joey thought, you have no idea.
* * *
Lani Hall seated just over a hundred people and all one hundred seats were filled. Joey slipped inside, easing the door closed, and lingered at the back, hoping no one would notice her.
Up on stage, a rosy-cheeked freshman in an ill-fitting suit played Stravinsky and Joey thought, Wow.
She watched him bask in the applause after, lit up before all those faces and clapping hands.
Next up, a super-cool-looking girl with two-strand twist locs sang Alicia Keys’s “Fallin’” and Joey thought, Holy shit.
The girl got a standing ovation.
Joey pictured herself up there with her hands moving across the keys, not in service of digital intrusion, which she’d already elevated to an art form, but for something that wasn’t dark and secretive, something that people could see, feel, enjoy.
Something they could admire.
The recital was over.
As the girl moved off stage she was mobbed by a big family—parents and siblings and cousins too from the look of it. Her mom gave her a bouquet of purple irises.
From the back of the hall, Joey smiled, taking it in.
She noticed the rosy-cheeked boy hugging his mom and dad.
And all the other performers in their groups of family and friends.
Her smile was still there on her face but she felt it grow stiff, felt the muscles of her cheeks holding on to the shape even though the emotion had shifted beneath it.
She withdrew quietly from the buzz of conversation and excitement.
The halls of Schoenberg were empty.
The sound of her own footsteps was her only company out.
* * *
X was being all weird and rubbing his forearms at the counter of the sushi roll place, the one they went to in Westwood near campus. And since there were students, like, everywhere, he was embarrassing her.
But she didn’t want to point it out because she had a favor to ask him even though it was a stupid favor she was super nervous to ask.
She said, “Do you ever, like, go hear music?”
“Only when I’m out of town and not operational. Post-mission, usually. Not before.”
“Why not before?”
“I don’t want to feel too much.”
This was what it was like having an assassin as your uncle-person.
“Okay,” Joey said. “Where do you go?”
“La Scala,” Evan said. “When I’m in Milan. Sydney Opera House but more for the architecture. Jazz and blues clubs on occasion in New York or New Orleans—but not the touristy Bourbon Street crap.”
“Okay,” she said. “Ever go to music
“No.” He wiped at his forearm some more.
“Would you?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Wouldn’t want to blow cover.”
“Well, we’re in here, aren’t we? Chillaxing in a sushi joint like ordinary people?”
“I have clear sight lines to the entrance and bathrooms. I know the layout of every floor of every building on this and the surrounding five blocks. I have my 1911 in an appendix carry under my shirt, a Strider knife in my pocket, and a hammerless S&W 351C in an ankle holster. My rig’s in the parking lot through the rear door from the kitchen and the vaults in the bed hold two battle rifles and an army tanker grenade box filled with flashbangs and German Stielhandgranates.”
“Jesus,” she said. “Fine. I guess we’re not chillaxing.”
He looked at her. “You’re upset.”
“No, I’m not upset.”
He said, “Okay,” and bit into a lobster hand roll.
He was the worst, like, ever.
She ate angrily.
Then she said, “Well?”
“Well, what?”
“Aren’t you gonna ask me, like, what I’m upset about?”
“You said you weren’t upset.”
“Well, obviously I am.”
He finished his roll and rubbed at his biceps some.
“What are you doing?” she finally said with exasperation.
“Feels slimy. My skin.”
Weirdo.
“Why?” she said.
“Water softener in a shower I used. I hate water softeners.”
X could garrote a human-trafficker in a sweaty Muscovite banya and belly-crawl through six kilometers of sewer line to escape without giving it a second thought. But in the real world he got all OCD like the Princess and the Pea if the Princess was also a black-ops trained executioner.
Her suspicion aroused, Joey remembered that Evan had mentioned swinging by to see his counterfeiter Melinda Truong. In addition to being a major badass, Melinda was supremely attractive.
“Where’d you shower that had a water softener?”
His mouth twitched—either annoyance or amusement. “That’s classified.”
He was so stupid.
The next roll—bay scallop—was set atop the counter and he snatched it up. Her yellowtail was sitting there on her plate but for once in her whole life she didn’t feel hungry.
“So if I played piano somewhere—not like serious or anything but just decent, like a recital…”
“You play piano?”
“No. Kind of. I’m learning. So if I played somewhere, you wouldn’t want to come?”
“No.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
He chewed some more. “Why would I want to watch someone train?”
Her face felt hot. “It’s not about watching me train. It’s about being there to hear it.”
“Why would I want to hear someone do something they’re not good at yet,” he said, “when I could sit at home and listen to Ashkenazy play Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto instead?”
“Well, it’s important to me, okay? There. I said it. If I do this, it’s important to me that people come.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know!”
Evan looked around to see if anyone noticed. He disdained conspicuous public interaction. That’s what he called it, too. Conspicuous public interaction. People had no idea what she had to deal with.
“Okay,” he said. “Then I’ll go.”
“Well, I don’t want you to go now.”
“Okay,” he said, and tucked into his toro hand roll.
“I want you to want to go.”
“It’s irrelevant whether the motivation comes from me. If you want me to go, then I want to go. Especially if it will make you stop talking.”
It was a little funny but she was still too mad to smile. “Do you have any idea how much I have to let go of to put up with you? There are, like, whole parts of you I just have to forgive.”
“Of course.”
“What do you mean, ‘of course.’”
“Josephine, think about the things you require someone to forgive to put up with you.”
“That’s just normal human stuff!”
“I know,” Evan said. “Which is why I don’t like dealing with humans. For you, I’m willing to make an exception. I’ll even go to watch you train—”
“It’s not training!”
“—but you’re not gonna sing, are you?”
“What? No. Maybe. I don’t know. Why?”
“Because you’re terrible at it.”
“X! You can’t just say I suck at singing.”
“You do suck at singing. So why would you do it?”
She wanted to shove her yellowtail roll up his nose. “Because sometimes when I’m playing … You know when you just, like … feel it?”
“No.”
She rubbed her face, growled into her palms. “Talking to you is like talking to a robot on the spectrum.”
“I’m pretty sure all robots are on the spectrum.”
“There’s some other people I’d like to have come, too.” She set down a folded piece of notepad paper onto which she’d written the names along with the date of the recital.
Evan took the note, unfolded it. His face changed.
“Joey,” he said, softly, “this is impossible.”
“Why?”
“There’s no way they’ll come.”
She looked down. Her eyes welled but she blinked everything back. “I figured,” she said quietly.
He looked at her and then quickly away. There were no more rolls for him to eat so he just sat there all awkward the way he got when he finally felt feelings and didn’t know what to do with them.
“These people,” he said, gently now which made it even harder, like she was some loser charity case, “they’re not gonna come to a recital, Joey. That’s not their world.”
His gaze rotated from the front door to the bathrooms to the line of people waiting for seats. Appraising, parsing, planning. Always alert, always on mission.
“I just wish you’d try more sometimes.” She sounded like a little girl, a little girl wishing on stars or a penny fountain or whateverthehell stupid little girls wished on.
“Try what?”
“To be more human.”
“Joey, we’re in a public setting surrounded with unknown variables and uncleared individuals. Threats abound. How do you expect me to do that?”
“Practice,” she said, sliding off the stool to leave. “How you do anything is how you do everything.”
* * *
At the workbench in his dungeon-like armory, Tommy Stojack cocked back in his Aeron chair so far that Evan marveled that he didn’t topple over. “A damn piano recital?” His voice was gruff, aggravated.
Evan’s nine-fingered armorer and weapon supplier had readied Evan’s next batch of ARES 1911s, the untraceable ghost pistols he used on missions. A dozen of them nestled in the foam of the Pelican case on the bench between them.
Evan flipped him a wad of hundreds, and Tommy thumbed the bills and made them disappear into his shirt pocket. His lip was wadded out with Skoal, he was sucking on a twenty-four-ounce coffee from Dunkin’ Donuts, and a Camel Wide bobbed forgotten in the corner of his mouth, adding a twist to the edge of his horseshoe mustache.
“Why’s she want me to come?”
“I’m not sure. I think we’re the only people she knows.”
“So sugarbritches wants, what? Fans?”
“I don’t get it, Tommy. But it’s important to her.”
“Okay. I’ll consider it…”
Evan snapped the Pelican case closed and rose to leave.
“… but I need a favor in return.”
Evan grimaced.
* * *
Some black-market reprobate was selling a half dozen shoulder-mounted Russian SA-18 Igla missiles, capable of taking down commercial airliners, and Tommy had been tasked by a contact in the CIA to acquire them. Since the CIA was prohibited from collecting information on United States citizens and since Tommy’s hook didn’t want to hand off eighteen months of work to the FBI, they’d set up the kind of off-the-books arrangement Tommy specialized in.
He and Evan had driven separately to Westchester, a neighborhood adjacent to LAX, no doubt a theatrical choice so the illicit buyer could note the flight paths of the targets overhead.
