I like love. Always have. And though I grew up on the darker side of things and saw the crazy side of love, I concluded, from a very young age, that for the most part, love did good work.

It made me nervous, though, so I stayed out of its way, figuring if love ever needed me, it knew where to look. It never came looking, until Natasha.

Still, it wasn’t love at first sight. I respected Natasha’s beauty and professionalism, yes, but that’s not love. I was further impressed over silly things, like the fact that she and I were both left handed.

Besides that, I was in awe of her athleticism and gracefulness. In a black Karen Millen evening gown, she tripped up a target as he came up the stairs. Gripping the railing, she quickly wrapped her left leg between both of his, and pushed him at the chest, back and away from the banister, and then grabbed his left arm so he couldn’t use it to brace himself. On his way down, I caught him by the head and snapped his neck. Through all of that, Natasha glided like a ballerina as Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro played in the background. What stayed with me was the look on her face as the target slid down the stairs, his head bouncing off the marble steps. It was as if I were looking into my own soul. I saw in her eyes a sadness and yet a pride to be the one to carry out a necessary evil. Until that moment, I didn’t realize how I felt about my profession. It was an epiphany, but an epiphany isn’t love.

That assignment was part of what Natasha and I had affectionately named “the Plan,” an improbable two-week, six-assignment project in Naples, Italy, in which all six assignments had to be “accidents.” The “Figaro” assignment was the most challenging. Pressed for time, we came up with the risky “stairs” implementation on the fly. After Figaro, we knew the Plan, in its entirety, would succeed. It was magical, yes, but still, it wasn’t love.

Not until our chance encounter in a Philadelphia supermarket two and a half years later, did I realize that I was in love with Natasha. We were both in Philadelphia for business. We left the supermarket and spent the next few hours together. With fondness, she called me Bruno, my codename for the Plan. Bruno this and Bruno that. The evening was a dream. She was lively, humorous, and sweet. Walking hand in hand, we talked about how smoothly the Plan had gone. We didn’t kiss or share contact information; it wouldn’t have been unprofessional, but where would it lead? There she was, absolutely radiant: brunette, five-nine, a hundred and twenty pounds, thin, fit, shapely, with high cheek bones and sharp facial features. I figured I just needed to remember her like that and I’d be set for life.

For a short while after Philadelphia, I was flying high. In the three weeks following my encounter with Natasha, I completed two assignments. They went well. Two weeks after that, I broke up with Chelsea. I never broke up with women, so I was surprised. Usually, they broke up with me after about six months, which was a perfect arrangement. I’d only been seeing Chelsea for three months, though. Chelsea wasn’t Natasha.

Suddenly despondent, I turned down the next few assignments that came my way. Stan, my agent, was concerned. He and his wife, Doris, were the closest thing I had to friends, so I enjoyed seeing them on occasion. Maybe, I was hoping Stan could find Natasha for me. About three months after Philadelphia, I drove from L.A. to Scottsdale to visit them. Finding a parking spot near Old Town Galleria, I walked to Doris’ antique store. Doris and Stan were standing outside, near the entrance.

‘Hey, hey! There he is,” Stan said as I approached.

He looked his age, 70, but he’d never looked his age before. Doris had looked 70 for years. So, Stan finally caught up to her. I found my observation humorous and was grateful to see humor in anything at all.

We chatted outside until the conversation turned to business; then, we stepped inside. I liked their store: well lit, a lot of small furniture pieces, not too cluttered.

Stan brought up my hiatus. “Is this about the woman from the Naples assignment?”

“Natasha? No. I don’t know. Yeah. Maybe.”

Doris laughed supportively.

Stan looked disappointed. “She’s all you’ve talked about since Philly. But you were so jazzed at first. What happened?”

Doris nodded knowingly. “That’s love. Don’t you remember, dear?”

Stan turned to her, smiled, then turned back to me. “Nick, you had your chance. Why didn’t you get her contact info?”

What a stupid ass question, Stan! is what I was thinking. I was beating myself up about that daily. What I actually said was “Bruno, I’m going by Bruno now. Not Nick.”

As Doris beamed, Stan shrugged.

“Jeez!” he said.

 “Stan, I’d like to take an assignment, but I need a new handgun.”

Stan looked at me sideways. “The last three jobs I offered you didn’t require a handgun… BRUNO.”

“Still,” I replied.

Attentively, Doris pulled a thin drawer out from the back wall and placed it on the counter. It contained several handguns.

“Look, BRUNO,” Stan said, “I have a blind search job: thirty days, $10,000, $200,000 if you implement. You want it?”

“Sure!”

“Good, it might fit your current state. Ten thousand and you probably won’t need to do anything. I’ll pull up the data.”

He walked toward the back office.

Giggling, Doris whispered, “So serious,” as Stan walked away.

“I’m not much in the gun business anymore, but I have a few. I like this one,” she said pointing to a Beretta 9mm. “Mostly for its story. Supposedly, it was stolen from a police evidence room in Hermosa Beach.”

I picked up the Beretta and it felt great. I switched it from hand to hand. I’m back.

I accepted the blind search job. The first assignment I’d ever accepted that I was actually unlikely to implement on.

On the twenty-ninth day, through dumb luck, I implemented. It was ugly, though. I took out the bodyguard, too: collateral. Another career first. I came upon the target almost completely by surprise. The shock showed on my face and the bodyguard sensed something.

Two weeks after implementing, I was back in Scottsdale. This time I visited Stan and Doris’ home directly. I was barely dragging myself through each day, so when I got there, I didn’t much notice them, just went through the motions, greetings and such.

Stan assured me that the job went well. “Nick, uh, Bruno, whatever! It’s okay. It wasn’t an innocent, just a bodyguard. You having trouble with this?”

“Yes,” I answered. “I showed surprise. How stupid of me! I could’ve walked on and taken the target from the shadows. I wasn’t comfortable in the days leading up to it; the gun didn’t feel right; I was depressed about Natasha.”

Stan frowned, and I noticed how thin he was. I glanced at Doris who looked serious. I’d been there thirty minutes but hadn’t paid attention to them. Doris sat at the kitchen table not talking, hardly making eye contact.

“Nick, get over this woman,” Stan demanded. “You know nothing about her, not even her real name. What’s gonna happen if you find her? You’re gonna be a happy assassin couple?”

“I don’t know Stan, but I need to find out. Can you help me locate her?”

It was a question I knew not to ask. I’d wanted to ask it for a while, but resisted. I was torn up inside, though, and it slipped out. There were lines of demarcation, a division of labor, checks and balances. Stan didn’t know Natasha, didn’t know her agent. If he were to back channel searching for her, it would send up so many red flags it’d be downright dangerous. I knew all that, but hoped there was a way.

“What the fuck!?”

I’d never heard him swear.

Doris looked up, nervous. “Honey.”

He looked at her. “No. He’s gonna get us killed.”

Turning to me abruptly, “I’ve known you a long time, Nick. I only took you on cuz of your father. I didn’t like the drunk, violent, unpredictable bastard, but I owed him. Naturally, I had my doubts about you, too. But you’ve always been real rational, until now. You meeting up with Natasha on that Naples job was the client’s doing. Somehow, he got you and Natasha to agree to it. I never would’ve.”

I regretted mentioning it. “I’m sorry Stan. Anyway, part of the problem with the blind search job was the gun, so I was unprepared when I came across the target like that.”

“The gun again?” Stan asked. “I thought the Beretta worked for you. It didn’t?”

“I didn’t use the Beretta. The Beretta’s great, best gun I’ve ever had. But there’s something in its history. It didn’t want to be involved in that assignment or any assignment, I guess.”

He looked at me like I was a monkey. I eyed Doris, who was breathing deeply.

I blundered on: “It’s not that the Beretta wouldn’t do the job, but it would prefer not to kill if it doesn’t have to.”

 “Okay, that’s it. You’re done! You can’t do this work anymore. You’ve lost your fucking mind! This Natasha woman’s sent you over the fucking brink, Nick!”

I saw tears building in Doris’ eyes.

Stan’s outburst broke me out of my delusion. And though I questioned my mental stability, I was in a defensive mode and wouldn’t submit. “It’s not so crazy, is it, to think that an inanimate object could, at least, give off a vibe?”

“Yes, it’s crazy Nick!”

As Doris stood, teardrops fell onto the kitchen table. Stan looked to her nervously.

“It isn’t crazy, Stan. Energy’s never lost, they say, only transferred. Maybe in the past somebody who pulled the trigger of that gun, shaking, sweating, crying, transferred energy into it, which is slowly seeping back out. Maybe Bruno’s feeling that energy.”

Stan was speechless.

“You don’t know everything Stan,” she concluded.

I felt guilty for starting a fight between them. I didn’t know why Doris would defend me. I’d clearly lost touch with reality.

Doris turned to me. “Bruno, take a walk with me. I’d like to talk to you.”

The tension eased as Stan stepped back.

With a subdued tone, Stan spoke: “Nick, I’m sorry I lost my temper, but never, ever bring this up again.”

“Okay.”

“The gun talking to you, me finding Natasha for you, none of it. Never, ever again.”

Soon, Doris and I were walking down the block. She took my arm.

“Bruno,” she said solemnly, “Stan’s got pancreatic cancer. He’s got six months maybe.”

“I’m sorry, I’ve been self absorbed. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It’s good what you’re going through.”

“Doris, he’s right. I’ve lost it, and here he’s dying?”

“Well, you’re going through a tough time yourself. You’re being spiritual, mystical, religious. Right now, Stan wants scientific.”

Doris couldn’t have known, but I found her words unsettling. Throughout my childhood, my mother ricocheted from one religious belief to another with a mystical vengeance. Early on, it brought me serenity. I didn’t know any better and took to fanciful fits of spirituality, talking in tongues and such. Not until I was a teenager did I rebel. Then, I buried my propensity for such nonsense deep inside. Unexpectedly, in my crisis over Natasha, my psyche hauled that lunacy back up, creating a spiritual world where the Beretta had a soul and I was connected to it. However, as Doris talked, I made a decision to stay alert, to never, ever give my subconscious the free reign to bring that psychosis up again.

Doris explained that she wanted Stan out of the business but felt he’d been in a temporary state of denial about the cancer, a state she believed I had just shattered. She thanked me profusely, insisting that Stan would now agree to get out.

“If you ask me,” she said, “the business of killing is the cancer. It’s just spread to his body.”

Just like that she decided that we were all getting out. She and Stan would sell the house and the store, then Stan would search for Natasha. Next, we’d disappear together, if we found Natasha or not.

“But Doris, Stan just told me to never mention Natasha again.”

“Don’t worry, Bruno, that’s not what he really wants.”

I took her word for it and I felt more sane.

Without talking to Stan, I headed out the next morning, leaving the Beretta with Doris. I returned to L.A feeling better. Doris and I started communicating regularly. She was right about Stan, he agreed to her plan.

Besides my car and a suitcase of clothing, I got rid of everything, including all of my weapons. It was liberating. I missed the Beretta, though, and was frustrated with myself for that.

Stan and Doris made tremendous progress. In two months, almost everything was done. How Stan handled his business was never discussed, but Doris kept me updated on her business, their belongings, the house: everything else. Closing escrow on their house was all that remained.

Three days before they had to be out of their house, Stan called me.

“I want to apologize,” he said. “I shouldn’t have gotten angry with you last time you were here. You were right.”

“No, I was having a mental breakdown of sorts. You snapped me out of it.”

“No, no, I shouldn’t have told you not to bring those things up again. You saved me! Even as I’m dying and we’re selling off everything, I feel better, more passionate! That’s you! Your drive to find Natasha no matter what. Your connection to the Beretta. You woke me up Bruno. Now, I’ve held it! Fired it! Have you fired it?”

Besides being thrown off by the manic flow of his sentences, I was uncomfortable with what he was saying. I finally answered: “The Beretta? Yeah, I was ridiculously accurate with it.”

“Me too! I can’t miss with it! The Beretta’s special, Bruno. I keep it with me now. You were right about it!”

As the conversation shifted to Natasha, Stan’s cadence slowed, and I started to breathe more easily. According to Stan’s plan, he’d start putting out feelers for Natasha in four days.

Two days later, on a Wednesday, he called in a panic.

“Bruno, something’s up! We’ll fill you in as info comes in, but start driving out here immediately.”

I was on I-10 passing Palm Springs when they started calling: sometimes Doris, sometimes Stan. We threw caution to the wind. I used my cell phone for everything and spoke freely. The entire scenario was surreal, but it felt like an inevitable culmination of events.

A $330,000 assignment had come through with Natasha as the target: a vengeance kill, in public. Though Stan accepted the job, it was quickly retracted.

Stan’s guess was that Natasha had failed on an assignment to take out a witness testifying against Steve Thompson, son of Anthony Thompson, a relatively unknown organized crime figure. The witness testified and Steve was convicted of second degree murder. However, he was killed while still in county jail.

The witness was scheduled to testify again on Friday in San Francisco against another defendant, and Natasha was given a second chance. The location was specified as the lobby of The Fairmont in San Jose at 2 PM Thursday. The original assignment that Stan accepted was an implementation on Natasha after she took out the witness.

Stan kept trying to decipher the information. The way he saw it Anthony Thompson had gone berserk and was sending in a crew of thugs to take out Natasha.

A sense of purpose overcame me. I was convinced that Natasha was as much in love with me as I was with her and that we were both lost without each other.
 
“This is reckless,” Doris said in one of our several phone conversations during my drive. “Anthony Thompson won’t go through with it. It would ruin him. He’s got other children. Besides, the authorities are gonna catch wind of something this careless.”

“No, something blunt is gonna happen.”

“But Bruno, Natasha won’t show up. It’s too obvious.”

“She’ll show.”

“Why?”

“I would.”

“What, to commit suicide?”

“Theoretically, yes. Can you tell Stan I need the Beretta?”

It was 6 PM when I got to their place. All their stuff was gone, except for Stan’s laptop on the floor.

“You beating this cancer thing, Stan?” I asked.

“Feels like it, but not according to the doctors’ tests.”

He looked strong, though.

The three of us went out to dinner, then returned to do some planning. Just past midnight, Stan handed me the Beretta and hugged me. Doris kissed me, wishing me luck. Heading out, I felt good. Time passed pleasantly.

I got into San Jose at 10AM. I drove up Market Street with The Fairmont on the right. It was four hours before the assignment, but as I approached the public area just before the hotel, I half expected to see Natasha. I looked as I drove by and there she was.

Everything seemed right in the world. I parked illegally on N. 1st Street and entered the public area from that side.

Approaching Natasha, I looked around and noticed we had company: a “homeless” guy on my right who didn’t look homeless, a guy bobbing in and out of view from a side door of the hotel, other potential threats.

Natasha was wearing jeans and a blue sweater. She had a black jacket folded on her lap as she read the Economist. She looked thinner. Lines of character showed clearly on her face. She was more beautiful than ever.

When I was within twenty feet of her, she looked up and smiled the warmest smile. In an instant we were embracing. For the first time in our lives, we kissed, and I felt like I belonged. She caressed my cheek with hers. Everything was perfect.

“I missed you,” she confided. “I thought you weren’t gonna make it.”

“I feared that myself. We better go.”

“There might be some trouble.”

“You got a gun?”

“Yeah, in my coat.”

“Well, let’s see what happens.”

Putting on her coat, she slipped her left hand into the left coat pocket. I took her right hand in my left. As I reached into my coat pocket to hold the Beretta, I realized I had it in the wrong hand, but hoped there wouldn’t be any gunplay. I led the way, maneuvering around innocents while keeping an eye out for threats.

The “homeless” man was visibly anxious, but he didn’t make a move. Neither did anyone else. I tried to get a decent hold on the Beretta as we negotiated our way around an elderly man, when the Beretta went off. I don’t know how. Though it was awkward in my right hand, it didn’t seem so awkward I could unintentionally pull the trigger, but I guess that’s what happened, firing a bullet that went through my coat and into the old man’s stomach. He went down; a gun dropped out from under his coat. I quickly reassessed the situation. Natasha grasped my hand more firmly as the old man fell to his knees, feebly reaching for his gun. The next shot, I fired purposely, directly into his forehead.

Guns came out from everywhere. Natasha brought out her gun, a Glock 17. I took out the Beretta and started firing it with such skill it was like I was suddenly right handed. Still holding hands tightly, Natasha and I did a 360, firing strategically. Next down was the “homeless” guy. As he raised his gun, I shot him in the throat. The recoil of the Beretta was poetic and productive. After each shot, the gun moved naturally into position for the next target. We were being fired upon, too, but as Natasha spun, she dropped shooters with the same elegance she demonstrated in Naples. In a flash, we’d circled completely around taking out seven shooters, and not one innocent.

We walked briskly toward N. 1st street, passed the light rail, got into my car, and drove off.

Natasha’s car was parked at a mall a few miles away. She’d left it there and taken the light rail to the hotel. We drove to the mall, bought new clothes, changed, and switched cars.

Over the next two days, we took turns driving down highway one. With great passion, we shared everything about ourselves, such as our real names. Hers was Janet. It felt like we’d been close since childhood. Childhoods that were very similar, from the harrowing to the thrilling.

One more task awaited us before we met up with Stan and Doris for our disappearing act.

On Saturday morning at 11 AM, we pulled up to Aldo D’s Restaurant in Hermosa Beach. Though it was Stan’s idea, Doris set up a meeting for us with Thomas Martinez. We met him on the patio. The plan was to return the Beretta to him. He looked very comfortable receiving it in a public place.

Using the Internet, the phone, and her intuition, Doris rather easily found Thomas and confirmed that he was the Beretta’s rightful owner.

As Natasha and I approached, Thomas struggled to stand. His entire right side was noticeably weak. He shook hands with us using his left.

“I’d like to use my right hand, but it doesn’t have the flexibility yet.”

While sharing small talk, we sat down. Natasha took a brown paper bag from her purse and handed it to him.

Pulling out the Beretta, “It’s you,” he said.

Turning to us, “I haven’t seen it in two years.”

He put it in his right hand and guided it through the air. “Wow, my right hand! How’s that possible?”

I fidgeted uncomfortably in my chair.

“It’s got a very positive energy,” he said weighing the gun in his hand, “and renewed pride!”

Nodding supportively, Natasha made listening noises.

Thomas started a monologue that shed light on how the Beretta ended up in an evidence room.
 
“It was late night, early morning. I woke up to a noise, so, I took it out,” he said motioning with the gun. “Did I call the police? No, I’m a man! Turned out to be some junkie with a gun. He ignored my warning and kept coming in. I pulled the trigger.”

Thomas started crying softly but continued speaking.

“I was scared. I guess I didn’t pull the trigger hard enough cuz nothing happened. But the junkie fired his gun, no problem. I pulled the trigger again. It worked that time. We just kept shooting. We took two bullets each. Then we laid there bleeding for hours before my brother found us. The junkie died. Died. I should be dead, too.”

Thomas seemed eager to keep talking, but I wanted to leave, and sensing my discomfort Natasha politely explained that we needed to go.

Thomas thanked us and shook our hands.

“Look at that, I’m shaking hands with my right hand; it almost feels natural. That’s amazing. Isn’t that amazing?”

As we walked from the restaurant, I felt both relieved and sad. I stopped and looked back, hesitant to leave.

“That Beretta brings out a certain kind of craziness,” I remarked.

Smiling in agreement, Natasha took my right hand in her left. “I guess different things bring out different kinds of insanity. Love’s got its own crazy.”

Through the grace of her touch, I felt complete serenity. With our fingers intertwined, she caressed the back of my thumb with hers, looked down the street, and led the way.


Bio:

John Domenichini is currently a technical writer in Los Gatos, California. He has worked as a teacher and journalist amongst other occupations. He’s had several fiction pieces published in overseas language learning publications. He also has a fictional piece that will appear in Bartleby Snopes in January 2011.