Reckless Endangerment by Robert K. Tanenbaum

indestructible body and a mild desire to see what the next day might add to an already incomprehensible life. That he now found himself amanuensis to a remarkable woman and bodyguard to various other women and to this little girl was a situation no stranger than the rest of his life, which he had begun with the desire to teach French literature in a Saigon lycée and raise a family. Now he no longer thought of making plans beyond the day, beyond sharing a little meal with this child and walking her home.
    Lucy, for her part, was as fond of Tran as she was of any adult besides her parents. He taught her things, he was amusing in three languages, and he did not treat her like a baby, which her father, for all his many virtues, still did. At ten, Lucy had entered that period when the interior life is first discovered, the period to which many intelligent women look back across the bleeding battlefield of sex as to a golden age. She had always been a somewhat secretive child, but now she fully inhabited a world separate from that of her parents, and resented their intrusions into it, especially those of her mother. Lucy loved her mother dearly and admired her to the high heavens, but would have preferred a mom who was not, by profession, a detective. Thus she cherished her outings with Tran, a man at home with secrets, a man from a world utterly outside the conventional tedium of home and school, a man with the air of those mysterious characters that appeared in the fantasy novels she had recently discovered and now devoured in stacks. She knew, of course, that Tran was a … no, not an assassin, but someone who could efficiently and calmly kill. She had the previous summer observed this with her own eyes. She accepted this as she accepted, in the reasonable manner of children, the presence of violence and danger in her own life, as a child living near a pulp mill accepts the stench or the daughter of coal miners will come to ignore the omnipresence of black grit. On a similar level of subconsciousness she understood that Tran loved her and would do, within very broad limits, what she asked, and would not necessarily tell her mother about it. This knowledge contributed in no small way to her already remarkable self-confidence, similar to that exhibited by children in fairy tales who come into possession of a genie.
    “Uncle Tran,” she said around a mouthful of chocolate éclair at Ferrara’s, “will you take me shooting this weekend?”
    “I will,” said Tran, “providing you have done your lessons properly and if your mother permits. You know we must borrow the little revolver.”
    “I don’t want to shoot the little revolver. I want to shoot your pistol, the Tokarev.”
    Tran’s face did not show it, but he was surprised. He was not aware that Lucy knew he owned a Tokarev TT 7.62mm pistol. Of course, he lived in a room behind Marlene’s office, and Lucy had the run of the place. He wondered what else she had discovered. He became conscious of the hard lump the pistol made in the small of his back. He had owned the thing for nearly thirty years, ever since it had been sent from the Soviet Union with a load of other military junk as a gesture of fraternal socialist solidarity with the Viet Minh in their anti-colonial struggle, had hidden it when he was arrested, and it had been nearly the only thing he had taken with him when he fled his country. It had gallons of blood on it and even Tran, who was the last thing from squeamish, did not care to see it in Lucy’s little white hand.
    “That would not be wise,” he said. “It is too large for you, and your mother would never allow it.”
    “It is not too large,” said Lucy, shifting from French to Cantonese, where she had the advantage of fluency. “My mother let me shoot a nine once, which is larger. Also, suppose a kidnapper came in here and shot you. I would have to take your weapon and defend us both. How could I do that, never having shot it before?” She