someplace. You staying here with somebody? Have I seen you down by the pool?”
“I’m staying here. You might have seen me.”
“But we haven’t met.”
“That’s right.”
“I’m Norm Morrow.”
“Burt Thompson.”
We didn’t shake hands, by the way.
“Okay, then. Okay, Burt. Now we’re introduced. Now maybe you don’t mind going into what you’re doing in here?”
“I’m waiting for Glenna.”
“Glenna’s gone.”
“She’ll be back.”
“Not for a while, bud.”
“I’ll wait a while. And it’s Burt.”
“I don’t give a fuck it’s Henry Kissinger. I’m starting to get the idea you’re fucking around with me, and I don’t like it.”
“If you hadn’t gone fucking around with some other piece of ass but Glenna, maybe she wouldn’t have asked me up here.”
“That’s horseshit, pal.”
“How so?”
“Glenna doesn’t give a damn what I do while she’s gone, she’s gone sometimes a month at a time, and she doesn’t expect me to be a fucking priest, you know? It’s an understanding we got. And I’m beginning to understand something else… I had about enough of you. Now what is this really about?”
“All I know is she asked me up, asked me to stay on, maybe she just figured I’d pass the word onto you your welcome was worn out.. ”
“Hey. You were just leaving, sport.”
“I don’t want any trouble. You’re a whole lot stronger than me, I can see that. No need to go proving it.”
“So get the fuck out of here, then.”
“Look, why don’t we just ask Glenna which of us she wants to hang around.”
“What? She split, she’s gone, hasn’t that sunk in yet, you jackass?”
“We’ll call her and ask her.”
“I don’t have a number to reach her, and neither do you.”
“I admit I don’t. I just thought maybe you did. You say you live here.”
“Well… sometimes she leaves a number.”
“Yeah?”
“I don’t know why I’m playing along with you on this, I really don’t…”
“We’ll call. Come on.”
“She won’t be there till tomorrow, at least. She’s driving, and it’s a long way where she’s headed.”
“Where’s that?”
“You’re her new boyfriend and you don’t know? Hey. That’s all. That’s all I can take. Just haul your ass off that couch and get outa here. Okay?”
I was admiring a metallic abstract sculpture on the glass coffee table between us. It was egg-shaped, the sculpture, with an indentation on either side, and about the size of a baseball, a little taller maybe. When I hit him with it, he went down without a sound. He missed the table, landed soft on the tufts of shag carpet. I hit him again, once, in the same spot, and made sure the skull was cracked open.
One good thing was he landed on his right side and it was his left side I’d hit, the left side of his head I mean, so there wasn’t any blood on the carpet, and wouldn’t be if I moved him quick and careful.
I left him in the bathtub, after pulling off his trunks, heaving him in, turning on the shower, and leaving him looking like he’d slipped and fallen in there, cracking his head open against the side of the tub.
The work of art I wrapped in a towel and took with me, for later disposal.
The telephone number she left him I found under the phone.
5
Killing people with blunt objects isn’t really my style, but then style is a luxury I can’t always indulge in. Carrying on a conversation with somebody I know I’m going to have to kill isn’t my style, either. Under ideal conditions I’d just walk in, without a word, use my gun, and go. Hello, goodbye.
But conditions aren’t always ideal. Sometimes conditions are pure shit. And being able to adapt to an unforeseen, shit situation is what separates the men from the boys, the living from the dead. Being able to adapt and survive.
That I learned in Vietnam. I learned a lot of things in Vietnam, not the least of which was the meaninglessness of life and death, and the importance of survival. Those may not seem compatible, but they are. Only when you realize how little your life means, and how slender a thread it hangs on, do you begin to know the meaning of the word survival.
There’s nobody easier to kill than a self-important man, a man who feels the world revolves around him, a man who finds it hard to imagine that maybe things would go on without him. For instance. Political assassinations. Every- body knows they happen every day, but there isn’t a world leader living who wouldn’t be shocked to be dying.
Of course that’s an easy example. Everybody knows it’s easier for a politician to grasp the possibility of a nuclear war ending the world than to understand that a bullet through his brain, say, could end a brilliant political career. And those of them that live through assassination attempts teach their crippled bodies to walk again so as to get back on the firing line as soon as possible.
I’ll tell you who else is an easy mark: anybody sitting on the board of any corporation. Wouldn’t have to be General Motors or U.S. Steel or anything. It could be the lowliest member of the board of the country’s least successful condom company. There isn’t a one of those assholes whose last words wouldn’t be, “There must be some mistake.”
But it’s also the guy who’s been smoking for twenty-five years and has a hacking cough and is short of wind but keeps on lighting up smoke after smoke, pack after pack, and when the doctor shows the guy the X-ray of what’s left of his lungs, well, nobody could be more surprised.
Religious people are easy marks, too. They all think the fix is in.
It isn’t. Not in this world, anyway.
For five years, more or less, I killed people for money. Good money, that is. Before that I’d done it for lousy money, for Uncle Sugar; and in one case, for free, when I got home from Nam and found my wife in bed with a guy named Williams, who I didn’t kill on the spot, waiting a day to cool down and then going over to his house where he was in the driveway under his sporty little car and kicked the jack out. Sometimes I wish it had been my wife under there instead of that poor bastard Williams. Ex-wife, now. Anyway, it got some attention in the papers, which is probably how the Broker heard about me.
He’d picked a good time to come look me up. I’d spent I don’t know how long, months maybe, looking for work, but between the publicity I’d got for murdering my wife’s boyfriend, despite my acquittal, and the general bad reputation of returning Vietnam vets, who were considered poor risks for employment since all of us were crazed glassy-eyed dope addicts, I’d found nothing, nothing but a fleabag hotel room, a dose of clap from some hooker, and a visit from my old man who dropped by to tell me not to come back to Ohio because his latest wife was scared of me.
At any rate, he looked me up, the Broker did, and made me a business proposition which I accepted without hesitation. The Broker was a middle man in the murder business; he provided insulation between client and killer. “Sort of an agent,” he’d said. I was to be part of a team, a two-man team breaking down to active and passive,
