The Great Warrior
Sitting in a coffee house at two, the very lean man stared at his phone.
But that was not true. With his defocused eyes, he watched the barista and the room.
She knew he was here, of course, but showed no sign of it. His very fashionable leather jacket, the groomed beard, the sharp gaze. She would ordinarily watch a man like him, brushing the reddish hair back from her face.
She would, if she did not know him well. She rubbed her forearm scar she had acquired two jobs back. She blocked a knife for him, that day. He owed her. She owed him, too, the day she would have drowned in the canal…
He tensed. She saw that. Her grey eyes flicked past the foreground customers to the door. The man they sought was entering — Central Asian, greying. He looked distracted.
She ran her lower teeth across the bottom of her upper teeth. There will be one chance at this, she thought.
As the greying man approached the cash register — two customers away, one customer away — the very lean man rose from his seat by the window. He slipped his phone into his jacket. He began to walk toward the counter.
The distracted man reached the counter as the lean man came behind. She took a deep breath. In a voice she kept carefully low, her head dropped, she said “Yes, what would you like?”
The customer half cocked his head and leaned the slightest bit forward. Her partner came behind him at the same moment, reaching with an elbow-extended right arm for an energy bar.
The elbow brushed the customer, pushing him forward just a bit more, against the counter, driving the air from his lungs. She bit down on the capsule by her tooth. The solution filled her mouth. I hope the antidote works, passed through her mind. Keeping her lips rigid, contracting her belly, she blew an airstream into the customer’s face. No one reviewing a video would see the flow.
The customer inhaled, turned to the man who had pushed him and began to protest. But the lean man was already apologizing, in the deviated-septum voice of a person with noseplugs. He was fulsome. He set down the energy bar. He was gone.
The barista took the order and filled it. She gave the man his credit card back. She watched him go. He would not be back. He would fall to the pavement in three or four blocks. Beýik Batyr “the great warrior” would not return home. The Turkmen War would not happen. At her next break she would hang up her apron, step out for a cigarette and join the very lean man in another time and place.
