*Fiction — November 15, 2018
Assassins
In this city there are four assassins. Nobody knows their identity except the Bureau. They board crowded elevators. They are sometimes late with their utility bills. They open up cartons of eggs in the dairy aisle to check for cracks. They are meant to be perfectly invisible.
The assassins have not met each other. Assassin A operates in the leafy northwest corner of the metropolis, where the river valley rolls upwards into foothills that are almost the suburbs. He is something of a homebody. He rarely leaves his quadrant.
Assassin B handles the patchwork neighborhoods in the southwest, the Irish and Polish and newfound Ecuadorians. He has no business in the southeastern part of the city that Assassin C patrols: the garment district, Little Italy, and Cedar Hill. What reason would he have to board an evening commuter train with Assassin A?
This is a city of neighborhoods, self-sufficient, Balkanized. Everyone keeps to their own corners. Consider the northeast: a mysterious place full of converted warehouses, Korean grocers, and elevated tracks that keep the sidewalks dark. Why would Assassin C stroll there on a summer evening, until the blue sky disappears behind metal and broken glass crunches beneath his feet? This is the home of the mysterious Assassin D.
The Bureau monitors the assassins. Every night they are required to place a phone call to an unlisted number and give a ten-digit access code. After the code is entered, each assassin hears a series of three low tones. Assassin C—a passionate amateur cellist—has identified them as an E major triad with the fifth in the bass and the third in the treble. Assassin A always feels extreme tension when he enters his code and a sense of relief when the chimes answer back. He fears making a mistake, although he never has.
If this call is not made, the assassin is considered Breached. A Breached assassin is subject to immediate assassination by the other assassins. For just such an emergency, each of the assassins is in possession of a dossier that contains the pictures of the other three assassins and a list of vital information: height, weight, hair and eye color.
If the assassins were to meet one another, however unlikely, they have been given strict orders to avoid interpersonal contact. For example, Assassin A is fairly sure he saw Assassin C on a downtown train one Friday night; he felt a rush of familiarity as the other man reached up to scratch his nose. He wanted to speak, but remembered his training. He turned to the window and watched the giant dome of the golden Greek Orthodox Church slip into the distance. He acted as if his fellow assassin were invisible.
As the assassins age, grow their hair, cut their hair, gain and lose weight, the other assassins receive periodic updates in the form of new photographs for their dossier. The assassins never receive their own photos.
Assassin A is uncomfortable with this. He stands at the station in a new suit and wonders who might be lurking nearby, taking his picture. Are they in the trees? Are they waiting in the far bushes with a high-powered lens?
When he receives his photographs he studies them intently. That’s an odd haircut you’ve got there, B, he thinks. He decides that C’s moustache is a good fit.
He notices, over the years, that Assassin D never changes. They’ve worked together—if one can use the term—for over a decade now, and yet D has never once varied his appearance. He wears the same sunglasses and the same black jacket in winter and summer. He is the perfect image of an assassin: alone and unknowable. Perhaps he is from some ruthless Russian satellite nation.
Every morning Assassin A rides the 8:23 train to the very edge of his quadrant, walks to a tall slate gray building, rides the elevator to the twentieth floor, and enters his small office. The pale yellow room is empty except for a Chagall print, a bookshelf full of books on the cinema, and a number of verdant potted plants.
Assassin A avoids making friends. He does not trust himself to keep enough space between his secret work and his desire to speak deeply to people. He is round and doughy, his voice sensitive. People trust him, but he cannot return the favor. Consequently, he prefers small talk. He speaks warmly to the train conductor.
Assassin A has learned to anticipate the schedules of certain businesswomen and secretaries. He smiles shyly in their direction, apologizes for stealing the cream. I would stay longer, he thinks, but my suit is a sham and the things I do are secret.
Once, when dining at the Il Grappa, a young waitress dropped a tray next to his table and began to cry.
“I’m so stupid,” she told him.
The management led her away.
Later, after dinner, he saw the waitress out in the alley, by the dumpster.
“Do you have a light?” she asked. A strand of hair fell out of her ponytail and hung lingeringly in front of her face as she shook the lighter. “I need this job.”
Only with great difficulty did he avoid taking her in his arms and confessing: “I understand. I am an assassin.”
Riding the 6:41 train home, he found himself near tears. The grid of the city was cold and definite as it passed beyond the window.
At times like these, Assassin A takes refuge in the movies. He is especially fond of the sort of foreign film that takes a slow, naturalist perspective on other people’s lives. He likes the long, still shot of a knife cutting through a foreign fruit, the pan through the marketplace, the camera that follows a young woman as she crosses a cobblestone street.
Here is Assassin A in the final minutes of a spy thriller: it is a matinee; he is alone in the theater. The darkness swaddles him. The onscreen agent turns a corner with his gun held next to his ear. A string quartet scratches in the left channel as an engine starts in the background. The agent turns. Assassin A holds his breath.
Sixty feet, he thinks. Drop and roll.
He merges with the screen, and only when the lights come up does he remember once again where he is.
Assassin A struggles with insomnia. Once he hears the familiar three-note motif—the Bureau confirming the success of his mission—he hangs up the phone and begins writing a confession. All his confessions are contained in sixteen marble notebooks, titled “My Working Life.” He keeps them in his locked lower desk drawer. His dream is that someday—perhaps after he is dead—they will be discovered and published, and someone will buy the movie rights. Assassin A also keeps track of his movie-going in a separate series of marble notebooks, entitled “My Life at the Movies.”
Assassin B is a committed volunteer. He works at the Overbrook soup kitchen on Tuesdays and the Shady Grove shelter on Thursdays. He practically runs the Clean Streets Litter Removal campaign, and he has given hours of manpower to the renovation of a number of trash-infested lots in Lower Richmond. On Sundays he takes long walks through the flourishing gardens, waving to the other volunteers, and thinks, this is time well spent. He wears worn black jeans over his rangy body and a red handkerchief around his sunburned neck. He still looks twenty-five, ten or so years after the fact. His hands are calloused and he drinks a quart of water every hour.
He lives in a small brick rowhouse next to an abandoned flavoring factory. The lighting is magnificent and the rooms are spacious. He heats the apartment with a wood stove, and in the winter the warm air pools and swells the joists.
Assassin B shops responsibly. He enjoys local cherry tomatoes and organic sausages. He does his shift at the local co-op. Of the money he receives monthly he strives to donate half to charitable causes. He is concerned about the situation in Darfur, in Myanmar, in New Orleans.
He struggles to love his neighborhood, the corner stores and crumbling houses, but sometimes when he sits on his stoop, addicts accost him for money. If he gives it, they come back the next day and ask for more. If he doesn’t, they call him stingy. He reminds himself that addiction is a disease, that economics are a factor, that oppression is the root of all evil, but sometimes, after they leave, he sits and stares at the strangers that pass his door. Everyone is foul-mouthed and malformed, unworthy of grace.
On nights like this, Assassin B begins to drink. Sometimes he finds himself out on the streets, long past midnight, looking up at the moon. Sometimes he sees a young man walking alone and follows him, at a distance of roughly one hundred meters.
Assassin B has superb eyesight; he can see the strong muscles in the young man’s shoulders, the way his hips swing slightly as he walks. The young man meets up with other similar youths, standing on streetcorners, and Assassin B drops back; the danger of being seen is too great.
Some nights he is luckier. The young man meets no one he knows; he slips down a side street, then into the entryway of a tenement. The second floor window fills with light. Maybe the curtains are drawn, and Assassin B can only lean against a lamppost and imagine what goes on behind them. Or maybe they are open, and Assassin B can hide in the shadows and watch the young man stretching, doing pull-ups, preparing for bed.
Assassin B lines up the shot. It only takes a manner of seconds. He is not distracted by a passing car with booming subwoofers, by a woman screaming desperately for Anton, by a dog barking crazily behind razor-wire. But he would never pull the trigger, faced with the ripe target of the young man’s close-cropped head.
Not you, Assassin B thinks. You will be spared.
Assassin C is a patron of the arts and a member of the Cedar Hill Community Strings. There are so many places to be seen in the southeast corner of the city, so many poetry readings, rooftop cabarets, and progressive costume parties. Assassin C seems to be everywhere at once.
On Friday he goes to the City Opera production of Verdi’s Falstaff, where he sits with the Chairperson of the new Arts Avenue Development Initiative and discusses City Council funding and capital campaigns. The opera house is far from full. The tenor lead is a bit weak in the high notes. The conductor left San Francisco in disgrace. What a pity it is that there are so few artistically minded people in this city!
Assassin C is a large and gregarious man. He has a happy excess of comforting fat around his middle and his facial hair is thick and grandfatherly. Rumor goes around that he is the beneficiary of a large trust fund, that he is originally from Germany—is there a trace of an accent?—and that he is the mysterious restaurant reviewer whose identity is kept secret from the public.
His solo performance of Bach’s Third Cello Suite once reduced a room of Cedar Hill matrons to silent tears.
Assassin C does nothing to dispel these rumors. He is fully aware of the reciprocal relationship between public and private personas. He never stays longer than an hour at any party. Already Cedar Hill is full of taxicabs, roof lights winking like amorous insects.
Before he leaves, Assassin C goes to the bathroom to freshen up. If the reflection in the mirror seems empty, lacking in sincerity, Assassin C reminds himself that this world is not his home. Every party is the same: clean lines, black dresses, and the cool smell of expensive perfume.
If it weren’t for the processions of clothes, the delicate brushstrokes on the Old Masters, and the occasional intrusion of gentle music, Assassin C might find himself giving up on humanity.
The other assassins wonder how Assassin D spends his time. What is there to do in the Northeast? Who lives there? One finds nothing but miles upon miles of abandoned shipyards and weed-strewn brownfields, devoid of light. Assassin A imagines him sitting in an empty room, polishing his gun, shining his boots, sharpening his knives.
The assassins receive their orders only twenty-four hours in advance. In the beginning, they were inexperienced, and had to scramble. It took time to prepare sight-lines and survey mail routes. Their minds were laced with anxiety and occupied with floor plans and freight elevators. Jobs were done at the last possible second, with whatever tools were at hand. Luck was a factor.
Now the assassins are seasoned. They have time to prepare their personal rituals. Assassin A waters his lawn by twilight; the serenity of falling water soothes his disordered nerves. Assassin B makes himself a strong pot of tea, which he brews from ginger, lemon juice, agave nectar, and cayenne pepper. He re-reads The Wretched of the Earth. Assassin C drinks armagnac and plays Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto to steel his courage.
Moving in society circles, Assassin C prefers the subtle gambit. He has access to catered trays and private boxes. He has the opportunity to lean in and whisper. He is very good at laughing at just the right second to cover up other obtrusive sounds.
Assassin B has an aptitude for stealth and lives in an area where police response is poor. His neighbors do not know him. He has learned various ways of triggering explosives from remote locations. He knows where the roofs overlap.
As for Assassin A, who would suspect him? It is surprising that he is capable of even the smallest of crimes. He passes the checkpoints with ease. He seems to stumble into secret rooms. And yet he is capable of so much. He is used to seeing faces frozen in surprise, that accusatory panic: you?
Yet no matter their methods, all the assassins experience hesitation from time to time. There are questions, lingering doubts. Isn’t there some other way things could have turned out? When I was younger, may be: perhaps in college. If I had lived abroad. If my parents stayed together, or if they split up. If I experienced more or less heartbreak.
But when the gun sits cooling on the balcony, wiped of fingerprints; when the commotion is over and the police tape is wrapped around the telephone poles; when the door is closed to keep the painful whispers hidden from the lolling sound of chamber music and the assassin steps back out into the open air, passing strands of speech and gentle waves of street commotion, it seems like such a little thing. How many years have they lived in this city, and what percentage of it has been spent in the dark? One night a month, two hours a night, one minute in an otherwise normal hour. Already the memory is beginning to fade in the open air. They pass horse-drawn carriages, ceremonial dinners, children bending at impossible angles in their pale pink leotards and crowns.
One cannot let their job define their life.
All three assassins keep their guilt to themselves. They remember the steely expression of Assassin D, calm and untouchable, and they are ashamed.
One summer, a visiting Georgian dignitary spent the night in a newly built hotel on the edge of the northeast quadrant of the city. He was surrounded by bodyguards, ensconced in a secure room, monitored by cameras and ringed with complex security procedures. Yet he died in his sleep, somewhere around two in the morning. The official cause was sleep apnea.
Assassin A read about it in the paper. Assassin B overheard rumors while pulling weeds. Assassin C was privy to the whispers over tea at Space 36. But they all knew immediately that Assassin D had struck.
Even as they age and worry, fighting away remorse, Assassin D seems only to grow in skill. He is a master of poisons. He changes shape at will. He can climb sheer vertical walls like a spider.
Assassin D seems to exist in the territory of their dreams and nightmares. His powers are not limited by physical laws.
It is the second weekend in September. For weeks the city has been experiencing the kind of heat wave that always comes with the Indian summer. Everyone complains. How could we have been so stupid to settle in such a stolid, swampy place? The gray clouds never lift, and we are troubled by swarms of mosquitoes.
Then, on Saturday, a cool breeze sweeps in from the West. A thunderstorm catches Assassin B at the Lower Richmond Community Center. He is waiting for the bus in the new air when his phone blinks, indicating a message.
Assassin C is at an impromptu gathering in Mrs. Q’s loft. Mrs. Q says she would have gotten away more often to the house in Maine but her activities on the Waterfront Planning Committee have occupied so much of her time. Assassin C is eyeing the bottle of Bookers on the far table in quiet desperation when the message arrives.
“I am so sorry,” he tells Mrs. Q. “Someone’s dragging me to Queen Street.”
The tip of his mustache quivers imperceptibly.
Assassin A has fallen asleep watching three episodes of a popular cable crime drama. One of the characters has a slight scar on her lip, and Assassin A dreams briefly of touching it, of asking where she received it, of sharing sad stories of childhood. The phone in his pocket vibrates, and his dreams take a strange turn; he is walking on a long tightrope stretched between two large towers, and a brass band is waiting to strike up a Souza march. Someone is creeping along the wire beneath him, silently, hand over hand.
As soon as Assassin B returns home he begins to drink and rearrange his furniture. He drags tables across the floor and upends couches. He grows tired, but the room is still wrong. There is no place comfortable to sit anymore.
Assassin C admits to a certain agitation, but he tells himself he is not surprised. It was inevitable that this day would come. He climbs to the roof of his condo complex with his cello and plays Bach under the stars. It gives him temporary confidence.
Assassin A receives the message much later than the others. He wakes up in the morning feeling displaced, his face pressed into the couch cushions. His phone blinks. He reads the message, stumbles out on the lawn and collapses beneath the cheerful morning sun.
When he wakes, he is surprised and frightened to find that he is still alive. He brightens up: maybe it was only a dream! But there it is, the message, still on his phone: Assassin D is Breached.
The directives in this situation are clear and unambiguous. All other activities are to be suspended until the Breached Assassin has been dealt with. Each Assassin must act alone. Their identities cannot be compromised. So each makes his own plans, fully aware of the undeniable fact that Assassin D is working too, planning their deaths down to the last detail.
Assassin C is not afraid. He knows that grappling with Assassin D on his terms is a pointless exercise. He finds himself looking forward to meeting the mystery man. It has been a long time since there was a test of his abilities.
He decides not to cancel any social obligations. He attends a party at Madam P’s, at the western penthouse of Cedar Hill Towers. He will not be detained.
Madam P’s party is somewhat dreary. There are not enough young people to incite libelous talk. Assassin C is about to leave when an unknown hand slips a note into his pocket. Startled, Assassin C turns around, but finds no one. The note reads: Leaving so soon?
Someone is playing a practical joke on him. Only slightly shaken, Assassin C partakes of the tapenade. He rehangs his coat, embarrassed. People note his lingering presence with approval. He is bumped near the coat closet.
“Excuse me.”
He turns around to meet the speaker, but no one is there. A lady in a black mini-dress watches him from the corner. Laughing, she covers her face with her mouth. There is another note in his pocket. Stay a while.
Assassin C takes a shot of Bookers. People begin to leer at him. He snarls at a man in a tweed coat who is taking up more than his fair share of floor space.
“Give me some room, for chrissake. Don’t crowd me.”
“No one’s crowding you, darling,” Madam P replies, in a thin voice.
He apologizes, but to his great embarrassment he slurs his words. The Madam is displeased. He would like to go to the bathroom to freshen up, but such actions are suicidal. Avoid closed spaces. Survey the exits.
The guests are all leaving. Madam P is giving him his coat. “Time waits for no one,” she says, and laughs.
He is laughing too, a little too loudly. Can’t he stay a little longer? He is dead on his feet.
No one else is laughing.
“Let me call you a cab,” Madam P says, but does not dial a number. He can see her pretense, but he cannot protest. He is being shuffled out the door. Can it be possible that he is the last person at the party?
There is the hall, and the elevator. Its mouth opens. Like a true drunk, he stumbles into the metal box. He looks for the cameras, stupidly. Anyone with any intelligence would already have cut the video cable.
He tries to think of some way he could have prevented all of this. He could have stayed home, he could have locked the door, he could have sat on the couch with his Luger pointed a little above the knob. His throat dries out. One minute he is breathing, and the next his trachea is dry as sandpaper. The lights in the elevator go out, and there is a small sound like a pencil breaking through paper.
Assassin B has not slept more than an hour for almost a week now. His days and nights are taking on a gapped quality. Minutes will go by in total blankness. Small sounds—the settling of the house, his own heartbeat— seem unnaturally enlarged, as if everything were being amplified by hidden microphones.
He is following a boy again. He has seen him during the day from his window as he sits, cleaning his gun. The boy is a little over six foot and past the edge of seventeen. He loiters on the stoop with his friends, joking, sometimes fighting each other. Sometimes mothers come along and scream at them and they scatter like rain. He wants to scatter along with them.
One night, Assassin B dropped down the fire escape and followed the boy to where he lives, a small apartment near the tracks where the Citrus Express runs, bearing oranges. Once the train came and rattled the tracks, rattled the house, rattled the window where the boy was standing, watching it.
His behavior is reckless. Something attracts him to the boy. He talks less than his friends. He watches the Citrus Express as it flies by his window. There is some magic in the relation of his long lean body to the machine howling under him.
Why did he ever give his life to the Bureau? Maybe in the beginning he believed in justice, but it didn’t take long for its hypocrisy to become apparent. What sort of noble system could put a gun into the hands of Assassin D, as if its ends justified all means? He belongs with the boy, with the people.
Assassin B is drunk all the time now, is drunk every time he slips down the drainpipe like a criminal and crosses alleys towards the dark spot where this boy’s window is visible.
Again he goes to McLaughlin’s. The bartender is the owner’s niece. She pours long and purrs endearments. Somebody is playing jazz on a jukebox that has never played jazz before; the music sings in a minor key on the verge of collapse. Just as he is losing consciousness he becomes aware of the boy against his right shoulder.
“Would you like a cigarette?” he asks.
The man from the Bureau is watching him, feeding the jukebox, waiting for him to make a mistake.
Out in the street, Assassin B is afraid again.
“I have some money,” he says.
The boy leads him down a back alley. “I know a place.”
His jaw is outlined by the periodic streetlights. Assassin B feels like an old man in the hospital with a terminal illness, watching a young nurse cutting bandages. How did he grow so old?
Lying in bed in the top room of the boy’s house, Assassin B is completely vulnerable. His gun is in the corner, discarded with his clothes. He stands there watching the boy as the boy looks upward at the moon in the middle of the sky. His body is outlined by the window. Maybe the world is less cruel than he thought.
The Citrus Express rattles. The moon is gibbous and yellow. Late crickets stutter in the grass.
The shot is muffled by the silencer. Glass shatters; the boy is hit.
Now Assassin B is on his feet. He can’t look at the boy lying on the floor. He looks at the end car of the Citrus Express trailing away under a far railway bridge. Everything is my fault, he thinks. My conscience has caught me.
Across the street, in the abandoned building that was once the Crawford Ball Bearing factory, a barrel glints in the moonlight.
Assassin A is not sure if he has gone insane or if the world is simply full of light. He spends most days in his garden. The sun burns his skin, and he sweats beneath his bathrobe. The Beretta is cool against his flesh.
At night he dreams the same dream he had as a child: a monster behind a door, breathing heavily. But when he flings open the door, the monster has vanished. There is nothing but a stone walk, a red lamppost, and waving sycamores. His phone blinks a message. Assassin C is down. Assassin B is down. Commence operations.
He wakes before dawn and prepares his escape. He showers and applies a new face. He dresses himself in a button-down Hawaiian shirt. He conceals the gun. He selects a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses and sport sandals. By the time he is done it is almost dawn, and he looks like a completely different person. The sprinklers are chittering in the gray air.
Assassin A steps onto the commuter train. It switches at Foxboro Junction and makes a circuit of the city. In the southwest the traditional Abdication Day is gearing up; the Ecuadorians are hoisting tent poles and assembling a giant snake puppet to disgorge the souls of the iniquitous. As the train lingers in Callowhill Station, Assassin A imagines the ghost of Assassin B boarding the train, lingering in a frontward seat, shimmering and fading.
Brother, he thinks—I hardly knew you.
In the southeast, all is sedate. From the occasional open window he hears the placid lull of public radio. Jade plants and dogs appear in the windows. A mother leans cooing over a baby. Assassin C no longer lives here.
A long brick wall shunts everything into silence: Willard Station. So far Assassin A has not seen any agents. Still, he tries as best he can to mix with the crowd. One never knows who might be in the employ of The Bureau. He buys a business-class ticket for the southbound train to Atlanta, using one of his many doctored government IDs.
He sits down in one of the spacious chairs and leans backward. The train begins to pull out of the station, and Assassin A feels a sense of elation like nothing he has experienced before. He pulls out the seventeenth volume of “My Working Life”—the other sixteen volumes are stowed in his suitcase—and prepares to write the last entry of his masterpiece.
A man sits down across from him just as he opens the marble notebook. Assassin A looks up and is shocked. The man is wearing the same gray suit he wears on Tuesdays and a blue striped Brooks Brothers shirt, much like a similar one that he himself owns. Even the man’s hairstyle is similar; a left-side sideways part that hangs a bit over the forehead. Only the eyes and the hard prominent nose betray the newcomer: Assassin D.
The resemblance is uncanny. Assassin D has even lightened his skin to imitate Assassin A’s own unpleasant, doughy complexion. Assassin A cannot help admiring the thorough workmanship.
Without pause, the two men reach for their guns, concealing the barrels beneath unfolded copies of Amtrak’s Trailways magazine. The conductor comes by to check their tickets, nods, and moves onward.
The car is quiet. Assassin A is the first to speak, gun still trained on his companion.
“Look. I don’t want to kill you. I don’t want to be man who shoots man who shoots man. I want out.”
Assassin A is talking too quickly. He keeps his voice lowered. He has roughly thirty minutes until the next stop.
Assassin D does not even seem to register that someone else is speaking. He barely blinks. He keeps the gun level, whereas Assassin A’s shakes, ever so slightly.
“It’s like the game with the two men in a room who can’t talk to each other, with the finger on the button. That’s why the Bureau never wanted us to meet. Two men in two separate rooms; each of them has their finger on a button that can blow up the other one. Kill or be killed!”
Assassin D blinks a few times in rapid succession. Have Assassin A’s words had some small effect on him? Or was it simply dust?
“But if you can talk to each other—if you can communicate!—then things are different. You don’t have to go running for the button. We’re both already Breached. The old directives don’t apply.”
Assassin D seems to be smiling. Assassin A can’t quite tell, but his upper lip is curling the slightest bit at the edge of his mouth. Assassin A studies the other man’s parody of his own appearance. The pallid makeup makes Assassin D resemble a corpse. The whole picture is of a pathetic, sedentary person, but Assassin A can’t say that it isn’t a good likeness. His Beretta feels unnaturally heavy.
“What’s the point of killing me?”
Assassin A points to his chest. His shirt is garish; his thumb touches a yellow palm tree. The lights flicker as the train clatters over a gleaming river.
“I’m a joke of an assassin. I get sweats. Everything I do is pretty much luck. I don’t want to kill you! I don’t want to kill anyone.”
By now Assassin A is pleading. His voice makes inappropriate leaps in register.
“We don’t have to push the button, like the Bureau tells us to. Even with a silencer, someone might hear. I’ll be bleeding everywhere. Too many variables!”
Assassin D makes a small motion with his head. It could be a nod. It could be a twitch, a creak in a stiff neck. The conductor comes by again, laughing to himself. When he is gone, Assassin A leans in an inch and whispers.
“Last month I was standing in the station at Southwark. I’d just finished a mission. I was waiting to go home. And all of those people were just walking around, totally unaware. They didn’t know I had a gun. I could have pulled it out and popped their heads off, one by one. I knew the exits.”
Assassin D doesn’t seem to be listening. He scratches his exceptionally well-defined nose.
“But these people were going home to their families. Sitting ducks. I felt sick; so lonely I could have puked. I thought about putting the barrel to my head and blowing my brains out.”
Now Assassin D seems intrigued. He is still sitting very straight in his chair, but his head is cocked to the left side. He is staring right at Assassin A. Assassin A measures the level of emotion in Assassin D’s implacable gray eyes.
“We’re on a train. We’re going somewhere, for the first time in forever. Just two people, taking a train to visit the relatives. Just talking, like the rest of humanity.”
Assassin A feels extraordinarily tired. All the words have left him. Assassin D is truly smiling now. As Assassin A watches, he reaches his other hand—the one not holding the gun—all the way up to his hair, and runs his fingers across his scalp. Set against Assassin D’s practiced stillness, it seems a languid and extravagant gesture.
“Do you understand what I’m saying?”
Assassin D laughs a little. It’s not an actual laugh, exactly, but the suggestion of a laugh, caught in his throat. And when the laugh is done, Assassin A notices a small tremor float across Assassin D’s entire face, starting at his mouth and traveling up his left cheek to his eye. The tremor seems to confuse Assassin D’s two faces, as if, for a brief second, Assassin D and his Assassin A disguise are merging, and the sallow skin and flabby paunch are not a matter of mockery, but something trapped inside Assassin D himself. Assassin D opens his mouth, still trembling, and speaks.
“Yes.”
The word hangs there between them. It dangles like a confession. In a small, subtle motion, the paper over Assassin D’s Glock 17-9mm rustles.
The barrel moves, barely an inch, but the implications for a bullet’s trajectory are vast. It’s a tiny mistake, but Assassin A sees it. He takes advantage.
First he lets out a giant, theatrical cough. Then he empties the barrel directly into Assassin D’s heart. The silenced shot sounds like a quick burst of air.
Assassin D jerks in his seat, goes limp. Assassin A takes the gun from his fingers and puts it in his luggage. He puts the Amtrak Trailways magazine over the bullet hole. He leans back in his seat.
Assassin D’s face stares at him accusingly. The eyes bulge in shock. The makeup, along with the steely gray eyes—now frozen—have a grotesque effect: Assassin D’s dead face is staring out from inside his Assassin A disguise like a man in a bear costume. Assassin A places his Panama hat over the other man’s eyes.
The conductor comes by, whistling. He notices the two of them— the magazine, and the hat.
“Is your friend sleeping?”
The conductor looks over Assassin D with unmistakable tenderness. The warmth in his eyes makes Assassin A so lonely that he can’t speak.
He didn’t lie to Assassin D. The train story, the two men in the room—he believed it. He tells himself that he had no choice. He takes out volume seventeen of “My Working Life.” I killed Assassin D, he writes. Seeing the words on the page, he has to look away, out the window. A small trickle of blood creeps below the lower margin of the Amtrak Trailways magazine.
The train passes a billboard of a popular movie actress. Assassin A is heartbroken. He didn’t want to kill Assassin D. Now that he is dead, he imagines the sort of conversations the two of them would have had. He imagines the two of them in a smoky café in some European city. The band plays a lovely and anachronistic brand of jazz. They clink glasses, sip their Pernod. Together they bear the darkness.
The train conductor calls the next stop. In the ensuing commotion, Assassin A slips off of the train, wipes Assassin D’s gun clean of fingerprints, and drops it in the division between train and platform. The sound as the gun hits the gravel is too small to be noticed, but to Assassin A it has a hollow ring, as if it has been falling a long time in a soundless place. He puts his own gun—still warm—back in its holster. No one notices. Nobody looks at him. He has the strange sensation of merging into himself, like paper folding inward to form a picture that had previously been hidden. An air horn sounds. He would like for there to be violins. I killed Assassin D, he thinks. He walks down the platform to the central stairs, mindful of his gun, on the run from the Bureau.
Originally published in No Tokens Issue No. 3. View full issue & more.