INSIDIOUS ASSASSINS

by Jack Ketchum

  I learned how to kill from my father.

  He gave me a glass jar and a cotton ball soaked with ethyl alcohol; that summer, I collected butterflies and sent them to their deaths in the thin and toxic air of my Mason jar. I was not an angry child or a disaffected youth. It turns out you have to be taught compassion, and my father was not interested in those lessons.

  I moved on from butterfly collecting to stripping at a gentleman’s club in the outskirts of DC. I was giving a government spook from Langley a lap dance and writing out my mental grocery list when he leaned forward to whisper hotly in my ear:

  You look cold in the eyes, darlin’. That’s the kind of cold I look for and like. You wanna kill for the government?

  In those three seconds of fraught silence, I could smell nothing but ethyl alcohol before I said yes.

  They sent me to Paris through bleached streets and in designer shoes with my hourglass body drawing stares from a three-mile radius—but this is my magician’s trick. The big distraction so they don’t notice the abracadabra when I pull a snub-nosed gun out of my hat. I bleached my hair for the last kill, but it needs redoing. I started out as Marilyn Monroe and but now it looks like Elvira is trying to escape through my black roots.

  Now, I watched this man I was sent to kill, who had no name but Code Name Trine.

  Trine walked with the same jaguar ease of any predator. I ghosted him by not being invisible at all. The art of my camouflage relied on kitsch; my too-loud clothes and my carnival sway. I flirted with men and women alike. Bumped elbows with fruit sellers and ate an apple half moaning while people stared in my passage and the only one who did not stare was Trine. I tapped in my heels behind him, like a doe down a used game trail, following the jaguar ahead of me, with fruit juice dripping down my throat. A doe with wolf’s teeth.

  I tracked him the next day and the one after that. I would assume his habits and visit the stores he liked. I would stare through the glass of a bookshop and wonder what tome he chose among the many; pick out his discarded newspaper from the trash and discover the headlines were in Italian. Pick up his cigarette butts out of the trash and smoke what was left with my fingertips bright red at the ends as the talons of a hawk. Tasted his residual saliva from the cigarette like I could kiss him through the smoke, and count down the minutes to killing him.

  I loved him the way customers in a strip club used to love me, for just this moment in the throbbing dark they could be anyone or any fantasy affixed to the blank face.

  In passing he was handsome, but older; gray through the sides of his temples and wrinkles dusted around his eyes. A pleasing bone structure, a detachment in his eyes. I caught his reflection in a shop window.

  Between his eyes and set in the center of his forehead carved a deep vertical slash—some raw and half-healed scar like a seam in his face, stopped me dead on the concrete. Even in the summer heat, it made me cold from the beginning of my toes to the top of my spine. And though he walked on, I did not follow him farther.

  In the hotel room, I stayed swaddled in blankets. Sleepy in the summer heat from too much French champagne and smoking myself into oblivion, pouring smoke into the ceiling. I wondered if he had been tortured. If they had held him down and cut that seam into his forehead. Anointed him with the sharp end of a knife. Wondered if he was an escaped prisoner, or a POW from some distant war, a retired spook, a mob boss or a master thief.

  He’d escaped someone else’s Mason jar once before; he would not be so lucky once I closed the lid.

  I inhaled tobacco and stubbed out the smoke. I pulled my pants up and kicked away the clothes in the twilight dark. Then I grabbed the end of the sniper rifle where it swiveled on the tripod and aimed the telescopic sight across the blue atmosphere of the Paris dawn—the city giving herself to me unendingly. But I didn’t want the city. All I wanted was this thin millimeter of laser red, aimed at the bull’s-eye of Trine’s scar, turning the slit into a cross, the scar into a benediction.

  Trine stayed in the hotel across from my own, a strip of air space and glass separating us. Through the lens I had watched him for days now. Seen him traverse his apartment. He spent hours reading in the uncomfortable hotel chair. I was used to seeing man in his every undressed state and humble transition. Beating off, picking their noses, tweezing their pubic hair.

  But Trine’s life revolved around intellectual pursuits. He forgot to eat. He turned page after page and the five o’clock shadow became a ten o’clock beard. He undressed once and I watched with dispassionate curiosity as the shape of him emerged from his rumpled and unwashed suit. One evening, he returned with blood on his button down and he bleached it in the tub, fastidiously hung it to dry in the closet with the fan turned on high.

  Our time together had been short but interesting, and he unlike any other subject; I was sorry to see him go.

  I aimed the rifle and let the crosshairs descend. A flicker of red across his face trembled and then steadied.

  He snapped his book shut. I imagined the paper snap! Heard his footsteps as he got up and in one motion queered my whole shot. I could only track him with the lens, hoping to catch him at rest again.

  Trine opened a drawer and withdrew a length of rope.

  I considered secondary options. Other weapons, other sites for disposal, when I realized he was not leaving.

  He was staying in the room and unwinding the rope. He reached up into a ventilation grate in the ceiling above his bed. Fixing the rope through the rungs and tugging on it hard, testing it with his weight by leaning on it.

  Pleased with the effect, he pulled the bed away from the swinging rope, and then I saw it was not a rope at all, but a noose.

  My finger fell away from the trigger.

  He was going to kill himself.

  Trine examined his two hotel room chairs and considered which to aid him, testing the construction of one with his polished shoe. All thoughts cleared my head and left a wasteland of crumpled butterflies on the floor of memory. Ethyl alcohol rank in the air, wings beating against glass.

  I dropped my rifle, it clattered to the floor.

  I scooped up my shirt and slid into my heels and tapped down the hall, my footfalls like the second hand of a clock turning seconds faster than time should allow. Breath burning fast over my beating heart. Into the elevator and then out into the sun again. When I couldn’t go fast enough in my heels, I took them off and ran barefoot into the street into the broiling summer and didn’t give a damn. Crossed the street and slid into the hotel and past the screaming concierge.

  Up the stairs. Launching upward like I could rocket skyward into flight and counting the levels because I didn’t know the room number but I knew the layout, knew where he would be.

  Down the hall. I stopped at the room and rapped my knuckles like a garage band drummer. Nothing, no answer. I rapped the door beside it. An older woman answered with a brusque “no room service” and I pushed her aside. She yowled. Tinted hair in curlers, a billowing nightgown as big as a shower curtain.

  I ran for the back, to her balcony. Lifted my feet into empty space with my hands on the railing, and swung around to the room adjacent. I dangled several stories up and heard the honks of taxicabs desecrating the ancient city and, leg over leg like a dancer, landed into his suite.

  I found him.

  Too late.

  He dangled from the vent. The rope creaked and groaned over the old woman arguing with thin air and then she slammed her balcony window closed. His corpse cast a shadow over the plush carpeting. I took the other chair and cut him down, I hauled him over my shoulders like an oxen and tottered to the bathroom. I slid him into the tub. He looked tall but weighed nothing. All those days of reading and forgetting to eat had wasted him. Lying in the tub with his mouth half-open and his hair haphazard, he could have been sleeping. Lips tinged purple. I untethered him from the noose. A purple line around his throat and the skin striated with red lines and burst blood vessels.

  I closed his eyes. My fingers
passed over his skin, and his skin was still hot; his scar livid in the bathroom light. I inched my thumb to the center and the rest of my fingers followed and I touched the seam. It looked as a scar looks, but deeper.

  I rubbed it, pressing it apart like I could force a flower to open.

  It split open and bloomed.

  I cried out, jumped back and tripped into the toilet, fell upon the seat still staring at him in the tub. He was not alive, and he did not move. I listened for sounds. We were alone. If anyone knew I was in here or cared, they had forgotten; or they had better things to do.

  I leaned forward and touched the scar again. I pressed it and it peeled open.

  And when it did, I saw it was not a scar at all—but one gray eye in the center of his face.

  “Code name Trine,” I whispered.

  Tiny eyelashes bent outward around his third eye and after staring at it like the jewel of a sacred crown, I closed his final eye at last. I would never know his story now. The job was done.

  I pulled the shower curtain around him and left the door cracked. I made a pass over his possessions. The book on the coffee table he used to read beside, face-down. I turned it over: The Tibetan Book of the Dead. I turned it back the way I’d found it, intending to leave it there.

  I took it at the last second, and left his body in that room in Paris.

  Back in the United States, I had to meet with the in-between man, because deals like this aren’t done face-to-face with the guy who wants it done, but with the middle guy. I came back through Russia, then Asia, then across the Bering to Alaska, and down through Canada.

  I can’t say why I took my time, because there was a payday waiting for me. I could have worked all my life as a stripper and never seen money like that. I could retire and do whatever spinsters like me do when they don’t bother with marriage and kids. And friends.

  I couldn’t forget his eye, his third eye. I wondered if he was born like that or if someone set it into his face, altered him like I’d altered my tits, set it there like a jeweler putting a diamond into a ring setting.

  In my dreams, he opens his eyes in the bathtub and our eyes meet. I can’t tell if he’s angry, if he’s dead, disappointed to see only me there, or looking at me the way johns in the strip joint look, hungry and electric. He’s a cross among all three.

  When I wasn’t dreaming him, I thought I saw him sometimes in passing traffic or riding in the driver’s seat of other cars. I googled “third eye” and only ever came up with new-age malarkey and crystal gazers trying to attain ultimate enlightenment.

  I searched the news for the day he died and the name of the hotel. Nothing hit a blip; if it did, it was in French and I couldn’t read it anyway. I never found his picture. All I had as proof of his existence was The Tibetan Book of the Dead in my back pocket, and the memory that left me sweating when I woke up from dreaming him. In one nightmare I was giving him a lap dance in the tub, but there was little sexual about it.

  Every time I moved my hips, explosions went off in the distance. When I snapped my fingers, civilizations rose and fell. The hotel windows were filled with fire in the outside world and mushroom clouds. I looked down and blood rained from between my legs, and turning his suit scarlet. He opened his eyes and wore a Buddha smile. Stole it right off Mona Lisa’s face. The blood became roses. He stuffed pages of The Tibetan Book of the Dead into my g-string and paid for my dance in philosophy. It was a nightmare, and I loved it.

  I wound my way down south into the States. Farther and farther until the land was tropical with humidity far beneath the Mason-Dixon line. And from there I took coordinates to a hotel in a southern city, where they still had plantations built on pain from centuries past; our rendezvous point.

  From there, I was invited to a room. I kept The Tibetan Book of the Dead in my back pocket. I listened to an ancient grandfather clock tick away the seconds; turned off my cell phone and tucked it into my interior pocket. When I received my payment, I was going to get a room in this hotel and take a shower. Clean the humid grime off me and sleep on silk sheets. Sigh and drink champagne and go to sleep and forget about Paris and Trine and all this mess. I’d close the lid on tight and never open it again.

  The in-between man entered. A scuzzy pale fellow with a cut from shaving on his face and a black eye. Strung out and nervous and his eyes ticking like the clock. He had a briefcase in his hand and I smiled and nodded.

  He set down the case on the table between us and thumbed in the key code. A click, and he opened it up and stared down at the contents. I smoothed out my skirt and stood to face him, waiting for him to turn the briefcase.

  He did. I stared.

  There was no money in the briefcase. There was only a coiled rope formed as a noose.

  “What the fuck is this?” I snarled through my red lipstick.

  “This,” In-Between said calmly, “is what happens when you don’t do the job and the target ain’t killed.”

  He pushed the briefcase with the noose inside in my direction and withdrew a gun. He rattled the case once and flicked the muzzle up and down to indicate that I should take the rope.

  “What am I supposed to do with a noose? Cash it in at the bank?”

  He smiled thin. It curved an ‘S’ beneath his black eye.

  “Wear it.”

  He leveled the muzzle at me.

  I looked down at the noose.

  So this is what the inside of the Mason jar looks like.

  A cold calculation of facts. Which held my greatest chance of survival? Getting shot wasn’t like in the movies. And this close to me, he’d pulverize my heart. Even if he had bad aim. Even if a mountain lion severed his gun arm while he rode a Ferris wheel in hyperspeed, he’d hit me at this distance. Do you know what a bullet does to flesh at this proximity?

  Strangling to death is no great send-off, but my odds of survival were greater.

  I unlooped the rope, and taking his direction, began to sullenly set up the knot around the ceiling fan connection. If I was lucky, the ceiling fan wasn’t anchored to a beam, and would yank right out. But I wasn’t born lucky. I’d hang to death the way Trine had.

  No one would close my eyes for me. No one would cut me down and lay me in a bathtub.

  I climbed up on the table and waited. In-Between was packing up his briefcase and making for the door. The implication was clear. If I didn’t do this on my own, he’d come back and finish the job.

  It occurred to me this outcome would have been the same, no matter what I did. That there had never been a payday in my future.

  I reached for the noose.

  I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. I pulled it over my head so I could feel the rough and fraying edges and smell blood and dried saliva. Someone had used this noose before. A blast of cold air washed over me as though I had donned a hood instead. And taking another breath, I stepped off the edge and straight into the undiscovered country.

  The rope cut into my neck. My windpipe folded over like a rolled newspaper and my eyes bulged open. I thought this was how I would be remembered. Purple eyes. Red face. Broken blood vessels as I swung on the empty air and kicked out even when I swore I wouldn’t.

  But when I opened my eyes, I realized I was not in that hotel room in the humid and sticky south.

  I was in Paris.

  I recognized this room. Someone swapped the Mason jar. Confusion married to my terror, my breath incendiary in my lungs.

  This was the room Trine had died in, hanged himself in from the grate.

  If I arched my spine with this fading strength, bucking like a bronco in a ring, I could see the grate above me, and this, this wasn’t my rope, this was Trine’s. The Tibetan Book of the Dead sat on the end table as though I had never been here, never cut Trine down and swiped it off the table.

  I had heard that when people die and the oxygen cuts off from the brain, we swirl in a miasma of memory and illusion. We remember things that never happened and experience a future that may be wholly i
maginary. Our dreams and reality merge and break apart. Our life flashes before our eyes. That old chestnut.

  It gave me sudden peace to know I was dying, then—and in my last moments, dying through someone else. Dying by proxy. Going back to the past to be in Trine’s shoes, even if only for a moment. The noose become a magic portal, a time machine.

  Shouts outside. Through the raging blood rush in my ears, I heard to a tray knocked over with a clatter. The hotel room door slamming open and coming undone from the hinges.

  My vision turned gray at the edges. My heart beat slammed my rib cage side to side like a wrecking ball. A figure appeared from fathoms away, a gray silhouette and three circles of light in his head, blazing fire from his skull, and then I was dead, and I didn’t know anything anymore.

  I woke up on a hotel bed.

  A book set on the end table: The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

  A voice spoke French and then shifted into Italian. “No molto lira. Dollaro, por favore.” I opened my mouth. Nothing came out but a dry husk of air. I looked away to feel a ring of fire around my throat, tearing and pulling at every muscle and vocal cord, it silenced me.

  Trine turned away from the window, and closed off the cell phone. He set it on the table, took the chair and turned it backward to sit on it, facing me. Laced his hands over the back and set his chin on the end, staring.

  Two eyes open. The third sealed shut.

  Above us, the noose swung emptily. The rope creaked.

  Through the opening in the noose, I believe I saw flashes of a hotel room in the south. Men arguing. In-Between man shouting. A portal shimmering, revealing the place I had come tumbling through like Alice in Wonderland.