it well. I didn’t. Not that I did anything rash. I just backed out of the room, apologizing, and returned the next day to the cozy clapboard in La Mirada where the guy, whose name was Williams, was in the driveway, under his sporty little car, the rear wheels jacked up, and he was so busy fixing the car he didn’t have time for me, except to call me a bunghole, so I kicked the jack out.
It killed him. Not immediately, but soon. And my wife divorced me, and I couldn’t have cared less, and lots of people were sympathetic-I wasn’t even brought to trial over it-but a fuck of a lot of good it did me. My life was at a standstill-no wife, nobody else to speak of, no home, no work either. I was qualified to work as a garage mechanic, a skill I picked up as a kid, and also had a two year degree from a junior college that should’ve paved the way for some kind of office work.
But the story had got some play in the papers, and adding that to the bad publicity Vietnam veterans were getting at the time anyway (we were all wild-eyed dopers, in case you forgot) prospective employers weren’t exactly lining up to hire me.
Except for the Broker. He had work for me. He looked me up, a month or more after my marital difficulty hit the papers, found me in a hotel in L.A., a fleabag with hot and cold running whores, one of whom gave me a dose of something worse than anything you could catch in Nam, excluding a bullet of course. Earlier my old man had looked me up, came from Ohio to tell me not, to come home. Said my stepmother had been uncomfortable around me even before I started killing people. I never did ask the old man which killing he meant: the one for revenge, or the dozen for democracy.
Which was part of what the Broker said to me that made so much sense, that night in my dreary paint- peeling hotel room, the glow of neon from outside providing the only light and giving everything a surreal look, including the Broker and his unlined face that could have belonged to a man of thirty, and his white hair/white mustache that could have belonged to a man of sixty. But even in the surreal glow he looked like the successful businessman he was, in his conservative yet stylish suit, and he talked like a politician, slick and eloquent and even seductive, and when he suggested I do in civilian life what I had done not so long ago as a soldier-that is, kill people-it seemed reasonable.
After all, I had killed people overseas for little money, and killed somebody since coming home for no money… why not do it for real money, for a change? And Broker was talking very real money-two thousand and up for a simple hit.
All of which stands as a gross simplification of what the Broker said to me. I have tried on several occasions to record the scene, but have always failed. I have good, almost uncanny recall; I’ve proven that, I think, in the three accounts I wrote previous to this one. But that first meeting with the Broker stays a blur in my mind; the sensations of it, the gist of what was said, that much I can tell you.
And I can tell you also I was an easy sale. Not that I was bloodthirsty or anything: I wasn’t. I’m still not.
But he approached me at a time in my life when I could have gone in about any direction. I had nothing left but the contradictory notion that while life and death are meaningless, survival remains essential. It doesn’t seem to make sense, I know, but it seemed to make sense in Vietnam, which is where I learned it. And it has stayed with me till this day.
The Broker was the middleman between client and killer. He used to describe himself as “sort of an agent,” and it’s a good description of his role. A client would come to him with a problem, and the Broker would come to somebody like me to see to it a means was provided for solving that problem.
Actually, I was part of a team, a two-man team breaking down to active (hitman) and passive (back-up man). I usually played the former role, but not always. For most of the five years I worked through the Broker, I was teamed with a guy named Boyd, who has since been killed. But then so has the Broker.
The first year and a half or so, I filled in here and there, never working with a steady partner. Until Broker teamed me with Turner.
3
We did five jobs in six months, Turner and I, which is probably at least one too many. And maybe that had something to do with why Turner fucked up on number five. You can get sloppy, working too many jobs too close together. You can get careless. You can also get dead.
Which is why I resented what happened in Twin Cities, at the carnival.
It was the second week in June, cool, overcast, getting toward dusk; the carnival was on the fair grounds, which lay somewhat uneasily between Minneapolis and St. Paul, in the midst of residential and business areas. A big show, with a score of crazy rides: their bizarre, oversize metallic shapes-the Yo-Yo, the Loop, Zipper, Octopus, Tilt-a-Whirl, Doubledecker Ferris, Death-Wish Roller Coaster-rose out of the city of tents like lunatic skyscrapers. Along the wide, occasionally puke-strewn sawdust streets of this city, people strolled, particularly young people, sometimes couples, often-times packs of three or more of a single sex, middle-class kids in tight jeans and fresh faces, while skinny men with smoldering cigarettes behind ears and dark tee-shirts on and dark complexions or perhaps just in need of baths stood on platforms and spoke into loud, muffled mikes, extolling the desirability of viewing In Person the Fattest Boy In The World, the Smallest Living Man In The World, the Strangest Teenage Women In The World (one of whom had no face, thanks to the radiation color TVs emit) and a woman who before your very eyes turned into a gorilla, and no doubt was the only one of her kind In The World, and other men, not all of them skinny in black tee-shirts but many of them needing baths, coaxed passersby into throwing balls and throwing money away (sometimes literally, in the dime/quarter/dollar toss) in pursuit of prizes of no discernible worth, including stuffed animals of indeterminate species and cigarette lighters with the American flag on them.
The mark was a guy running a game tent, a red canvas cubby-hole where you threw baseballs at milk bottles. You could win anything from a tiny stuffed skunk to a pink stuffed dog the size of a Volkswagen. Odds are you’d win the skunk.
The guy was short, fat and dark, Jewish maybe, or Italian. Could be either one, if he was a mob guy hiding out, which I figured him to be.
Understand, I was never told why this or any mark was getting hit, other than somebody wanted them hit bad enough to pay good money. Much of what I did for Broker was tied to the mob but only in that clients were often referred through mob sources; relatively little of what I or any of us did for Broker was directly Family-related. They had their own people to do that kind of thing, and only in special instances would it prove useful to them to bring in somebody outside, like me…
However sometimes it was pretty obvious a hit was a Family contract, and this time was one of them: the way the guy looked, not just his ethnic look but his vaguely urban speech and his almost polished manner-none of it fit the carny image. Not that everybody connected with the carnival was some kind of lowlife or deadbeat: not at all. But the professional carny men have a look to them, as does the summer help, the kids (including pretty college girls, some of whom work game tents, others of whom work as strippers) who do the carny number as a money- making lark. A guy like our short, fat, dark, somewhat well-bred mark sticks out like a nun at a nightclub.
I went over to his tent and threw some balls.
“Cool day,” I said.
“Cool,” he agreed. His voice was high-pitched, like it hadn’t changed yet.
I seemed to be his first customer in some time, but he wasn’t particularly excited about the prospect.
“How much?” I said, pointing to the pile of baseballs on the counter.
He pointed to the sign that said “3 Balls — 35? Everybody Wins.” His features were bulges in his puffy face. His thinning gray-brown hair was cut short and neatly combed to the side. He was in his early fifties. He wore a Hawaiian print shirt and white pressed slacks. He looked like the host at a country club luau.
I threw three balls and won a skunk.
I threw three more and won another.
“What do I win,” I asked, “if I play again and keep missing?”
“A skunk,” he said.
“I figured. Well. Thanks.”
