Outside, on Brickell Avenue, Tom waited in his car for HA1/4ber Lanz to emerge from the guesthouse. The Company seemed to have no shortage of premises. So far, with Sorges, he'd seen a suite of rooms in the Dupont Hotel, another apartment on Riviera Drive in Coral Gables, and the headquarters of the Democratic Revolutionary Front - more like a convention centre than a clandestine recruiting station - on campus at Miami University. Then there were the CIA/ Cuban-exile watering holes, such as the Waverly Inn, the ill's Three Ambassadors' Lounge, the 27 Birds, the University Inn, and the Stuft Shirt Lounge at the Holiday Inn right there on Brickell Avenue. He was going to have a lot of information with which to tickle Alex Goldman when he returned from his trip to Mexico City.
It was another twenty minutes before Lanz emerged from the guesthouse and climbed into a 1956 De Soto. Tom followed him. At first he thought Lanz was heading to the Holiday Inn himself, but when, after a while, they did stop, they were on Ponce de Leon in Coral Gables. Lanz collected some dry cleaning, went into Boyd's Florist Shop and bought something in Engel's Men's Shop before heading back to the car. Then they were driving again, only east this time, back the way they had come, and then across the MacArthur Causeway. Just south of Collins Avenue, Lanz drove into a Burger King, picked up some lunch, and headed north up to Lincoln Avenue where he parked his car and took his thirty-nine-cent burger and his nineteen-cent shake into a movie theatre.
Tom got out of his car and walked up and down outside the movie theatre, thinking. A gun, even the .22 Harrington & Richardson in the trunk, would be too noisy in there. A knife was too messy. Finally, seeing a music shop a couple of blocks down the street, Tom had an idea. He went in and bought a guitar string. And having collected his driving gloves from the car, he followed Lanz into the movie theatre.
He had already seen the feature, a Hitchcock jolter called Psycho, the previous week and thought the movie was appropriate for what he was planning as it was certain to cover the sounds of a struggle. The time Tom had seen it, several women had nearly screamed the place down when Janet Leigh got her just desserts in the shower. She was a thief, after all. And he had enjoyed the movie, especially the glimpse of Janet Leigh's naked body when it was stabbed thirty times by Anthony Perkins. That part was useful, too. Lanz would be too busy concentrating on trying to see her tits and her bare ass to notice Tom behind him. He bought a ticket and went inside.
It was cool in the theatre. Cool and dark. And lonely, too. As only a matinee can be. How many afternoons had he spent alone in such places with just the movie for company? Tom sat down in the nearest seat and waited for his eyes to adjust to the black and white shades of Hitchcock's Gothic world. The movie was just starting, and seeing the opening shot again - a half-open window with the blind three-quarters drawn, in a room on the upper storey of a cheap hotel - Tom recalled how, the previous week, he'd half expected to see a sniper at work. It was just the way Tom preferred to work himself. Instead of which it was just a couple conducting an illicit affair, although just quite why it was illicit, since neither of them was married, was still lost on Tom.
By now he had seen HA1/4ber Lanz, although it would have been truer to say that he had smelt him and his hamburger. Lanz was seated about ten rows in front of Tom, right in the centre of the near-empty auditorium. There was no one seated anywhere close to him, which was one of the reasons Tom preferred matinees himself: he disliked other people. Which was an advantage for a contract killer.
Tom started to unravel his guitar string. When he'd been a kid, his father had taught him a few basic chords. He thought he probably could still play The Peanut Vendor' or Guantanamera' if someone had stuck a guitar in his hands. But most of the time he just pitied people who played the guitar. As if you didn't have enough baggage in life without a guitar as well. Even a rifle was easier to carry around than a fucking guitar.
Janet Leigh got in her car with the forty thousand dollars she'd stolen and left Phoenix, Arizona for California, which was about the time that Tom decided to move a few rows nearer to Lanz. He pulled on the gloves and tugged the G string experimentally between his fists. Guantanamera' was sung in G, he thought. And it was something to do with JosE Marti, the dead Cuban revolutionary. A nice song, but kind of miserable, too, like all guajiras. Tom preferred movie music. Like the movie music he was listening to now. That really touched a chord in him. Especially the slashing violins when Janet Leigh got knifed. Now that was music. Not exactly garrotting music, but then what was? He considered his own record collection, all of them LPs mail-ordered from the RCA Victor best-seller club (any five for $3.98) and came up with Mario Lanza and the soundtrack recording of his last film, For the First Time. Some kind of big tenor anyway. You had to have someone singing his heart out, fit to bust, to properly juxtapose a truly cinematic strangulation.
He moved a little closer as Janet Leigh pulled up at the Bates Motel. By the time she had eaten her sandwich and drunk her milk, Tom was only two rows behind Lanz, who was nervously smoking his third and probably his last cigarette.
Tom's cue to move again was when Janet Leigh removed her blouse. Lanz threw away his cigarette, too busy watching her undress to smoke now or to pay any attention to what was happening in the row behind. How much else would she show? Tom was certain that this was what Lanz would be thinking. It was what he had thought himself.
Stepping demurely into the bathtub, Janet drew the curtain and began to shower. How like Mary she looked, thought Tom as he recalled her in the shower that morning. Different hair colour of course, and Mary's skin was a little darker, but the body was the same.
Tom tightened the string and waited for the bathroom door to open, and the blurred outline of Norman Bates to appear on the other side of the shower curtain, as through a glass darkly (his favourite text in the Bible). Like a conductor steadying his orchestra, Leonard Bernstein taking on the New York Philly, Tom raised both his gloved hands in the air, and then struck the second that Bates tore the curtain aside, collaring Lanz's neck with the all but invisible string that connected them.
Gritting his teeth, Tom pulled the guitar string in two opposite directions with all his wiry strength. Lanz's cry of surprise and then pain was hardly audible under the dramatic music and Janet Leigh's piercing scream. He tried to twist around in his seat but Tom, concentrating on squeezing the blood vessels on the right-hand side of Lanz's neck rather than pressuring the airway, held him firmly with the makeshift ligature. Death from cerebral anoxia was always much swifter than by vagal inhibition. Desperately, Lanz kicked out in front of him and clawed at the wire around his neck, but to no avail. He might have somersaulted backwards over the seat and on top of his assailant except for the fact that one leg of his pants got hooked on the ashtray in front of him.
Still keeping the pressure on, Tom leaned back in his seat, putting his whole weight on to the ligature, and tried to watch what was happening on the screen: Norman Bates disappearing back up to the house and Janet Leigh slipping down the tiled bathroom wall, breathing her last few breaths. Reaching for the shower curtain there was a faint glimpse of her nipples before the curtain gave way under her dead weight and she collapsed on to the floor. Then the camera closing in on that dead eye. And the emptiness that now lay behind it. Almost as if nothing had ever been there. How fleeting life was.
Tom stayed where he was until long after Norman Bates had returned with a bucket and a mop and started to clear up, before relaxing a little and finally releasing the string that was now embedded deep in Lanz's constriction-burned neck. Then he looked around, saw that no one was paying him any attention, and checked for a pulse. Lanz was dead all right. As dead as if he'd been stabbed thirty times in a shower. Tom waited for a few minutes and then left through the fire exit. After the air-conditioned chill of the movie theatre it felt good to be back in the warmth of the afternoon sunshine. It felt good to be alive.
Back home, Tom took a bath and ate some dinner while reading through some of the instruction books that Genevieve had given him. The Church's Seven Special Sacraments. What Every Catholic Should Know about the Catechism. And, Growing Up Catholic: The Seeker's Catechism. He had been a fairly conscientious Catholic up to about the time he went into the army. But it wasn't true that his mother had wished him to be a priest. She had encouraged him to be a doctor. Anyway, after he went to Guadalcanal and Okinawa nothing religious ever made sense to him again. And saving lives looked like harder work than taking them. Tom thought if there was a God he wasn't the kind of God who looked after his friends, and that was pretty much all you needed to know. Praying a lot, living the faith, observing all the high holy days, and confessing your sins - none of it ever prevented you from stopping a Jap .25-calibre bullet in the throat at four hundred yards and taking two hours to drown in your own blood.
But the thing that really annoyed Tom was the idea of confession. Was an act of contrition really all it took to obtain absolution of sins? Because if it was then someone like him saying sorry and meaning it made a mug out of all the people who'd spent years living a decent life. It couldn't be that simple.
Tom threw the handbook he was reading aside in disgust and turned the TV on. It was nearly eight thirty and
