CHAPTER NINE
THERE ARE MORE assignments after that. Slowly at first, then at a more consistent trickle. I figure it probably stems from their growing confidence in me as much as anything. And business, for them, is probably good. Apparently, there are a lot of people that need killing. Every day.
Of course, I do not do it every day. Not even close. But the work is lucrative, and I don’t have to do a lot of it. My natural camouflage—an average woman of early middle years, neither beautiful nor ugly—stands me in good stead and I get a lot of jobs.
Life has a pattern. There is a trip, culminating in a job, followed by a period of quiet—spiritually and actually—when I use the money gained to try and rebuild something that looks like a life. It ends up being both easier and more difficult than I’d thought it would be.
A life.
What is that made of? A family. Mine is gone. A job? Mine has no watercooler, no office parties. Friends? I cut all ties with them after the fire. Directly after, I couldn’t stand the pity I’d see in their faces. Later, I felt like an imposter when I’d see them. They would talk about things I found empty and inane. Or worse: meaningless. Not that my thoughts had so much meaning, but at least I did not pretend. I found I no longer had the capacity for it. Life. Death. Living. Dying. When your life is so basic, small talk doesn’t really have a place, that’s what I found.
And now? Well, now they don’t even know where or who I am.
In my half-hearted quest to build a new life, I buy a house. I pay cash. It is very different from the house I’d had when I was part of a family. No Pebble Tec pool. It is little more than a cottage, really, this new-to-me house. And it is far enough from the nearest small town to be quiet, while really not being very far out at all: less than twenty minutes in a car.
The house has a living room, a kitchen with a little dining area in it, two bedrooms. I outfit one of the bedrooms as a guest-room, though I anticipate no guests. And there is a single bathroom. I can’t imagine I would ever require more than one. The house is modest and old-fashioned, but with a sort of lost middle American charm. From the first moment, I feel very comfortable there. I feel like I am coming home.
It is private. A small acreage at the edge of a forest and no one around to see me come and go. I create a persona for myself, one with an indistinct name. Bland. Vanilla. I give the impression but do not actually say that I am a writer of some sort, likely of something uninteresting that nobody cares about anyway. Knitting in Hellenic times. Or the mating habits of baboons in captivity. Nothing anyone would ask about. Topics people would avoid asking about, for fear the answer would be lengthy. The profession goes along with the baggy housedresses I take to wearing out there alone and when I drive into town for supplies. The bulky sweaters. The outmoded glasses. The hair pulled back into a rough bun. I become an invisible resident in an already invisible demographic. I come and go, and nobody sees.
Invisible or no, I still need to fill my time. The time between. I take a stab at gardening, spending hours in the pale spring sun enriching a small, overgrown rectangle that looks as though it might have been a kitchen garden in the long-ago. A thick bunch of rhubarb starts sprouting of its own accord as soon as the weather begins to warm up. The enthusiasm of that volunteer rhubarb inspires me. If something can appear as though by magic with no effort on my part, what can happen if I add some muscle and intent?
And so, I set to work. But just as it looks like my new garden is about to flourish, I catch a job in the Far East that keeps me away for a number of weeks. By the time I get back, the poor baby plants I stuck in the ground before I left have withered and died. Even the rhubarb now looks as though it might pack it in. It ends gardening for me, and I don’t have the heart to try again. It seems cruel to plant something in order to watch it die. There’s been enough death in my life. There is enough death. I don’t want it at home. Not anymore.
So gardening is out before it even really begins. I let the weeds reclaim the little bits of brown I’d unearthed and feel a dull satisfaction at the resilient green that results. I leave the rhubarb alone though. I’d never really acquired a taste for the stuff, and, in any case, it seems to manage better without me.
The jobs start slowly, then come with increasing regularity. There is a pattern to this. A rhythm. The quiet weeks and sometimes months at home, passing time at my house and rambling in the forest and making occasional trips into the nearby small town for supplies. And then work, of course. An assignment generally involves a few days or a week of traveling, stalking followed by a hit, and then—sometimes by circuitous methods—home, where it all begins again.
I devise systems to keep everything sorted. Everything tidy. I keep a packed suitcase and an empty gym bag in the trunk of the car that replaced the minivan. The suitcase holds the tools of my trade, including a darker twin of the Bersa I have with me always. I keep the second gun under a false bottom in my trunk, under and around the spare tire of the elderly tank-like Volvo I pick up and have customized several hundred miles from my little
