Hit Man

by Lawrence Block

  He rang off and caught the next train.

  He went home and hung up his suit, but not before discarding the touch of panache from his lapel. He’d already gotten rid of the magazine.

  That was on a Wednesday. Monday morning he was in a booth at one of his usual breakfast places, a Greek coffee shop on Second Avenue. He was reading the Times and eating a plate of salami and eggs when a fellow said, “Mind if I join you?” He didn’t wait for an answer, either, but slid unbidden into the seat across from Keller.

  Keller eyed him. The guy was around forty, wearing a dark suit and an unassertive tie. He was clean-shaven and his hair was combed. He didn’t look like a nut.

  “You ought to wear a boutonniere,” the man said. “It adds, I don’t know, a certain something.”

  “Panache,” Keller suggested.

  “You know,” the man said, “that’s just what I was going for. It was on the tip of my tongue. Panache.”

  Keller didn’t say anything.

  “You’re probably wondering what this is all about.” Keller shook his head.

  “You’re not?”

  “I figure more will be revealed.”

  That drew a smile. “A cool customer,” the fellow said. “Well, I’m not surprised.” His hand dipped into the front of his suit jacket, and Keller braced himself with both hands on the edge of the table, waiting to see the hand come out with a gun.

  Instead the hand emerged clutching a flat leather wallet, which the man flipped open to disclose an ID. The photo matched the face across the table from Keller, and the accompanying card identified the face as that of one Roger Keith Bascomb, an operative of something called the National Security Resource.

  Keller handed the ID back to its owner.

  “Thanks,” Bascomb said. “You were all set to flip the table on me, weren’t you?”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Never mind. You’re alert, which is all to the good. And I’m not surprised. I know who you are, and I know what you are.”

  “Just a man trying to eat his breakfast,” Keller said.

  “And a man who’s evidently not put off by all that scary stuff about cholesterol. Salami and eggs! I have to say I admire you, Keller. I bet that’s real coffee, too, isn’t it?”

  “It’s not great,” Keller said, “but it’s the genuine article.”

  “My breakfast’s an oat bran muffin,” Bascomb said, “and I wash it down with decaf. But I didn’t come here to put in a bid for sympathy.”

  Just as well, Keller thought.

  “I don’t want to make this overly dramatic,” Bascomb said, “but it’s hard to avoid. Mr. Keller, your country has need of your services.”

  “My country?”

  “The United States of America. That country.”

  “My services?”

  “The very sort of services you rode down to Washington prepared to perform. I think we both know what sort of services I’m talking about.”

  “I could argue the point,” Keller said.

  “You could.”

  “But I’ll let it go.”

  “Good,” Bascomb said, “and I in turn will apologize for the wild goose chase. We needed to get a line on you and find out a few things about you.”

  “So you picked me up in Union Station and tagged me back to New York.”

  “I’m afraid we did, yes.”

  “And learned who I was, and checked me out.”

  “Like a book from a library,” Bascomb said. “Just what we did. You see, Keller, your uncle would prefer to cut out the cutout man.”

  “My uncle?”

  “Sam. We don’t want to run everything through What’s-his-name in White Plains. This is strictly need-to-know, and he doesn’t.”

  “So you want to be able to work directly with me.”

  “Right.”

  “And you want me to. . . ”

  “To do what you do best, Keller.”

  Keller ate some salami, ate some eggs, drank some coffee.

  “I don’t think so,” he said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I’m not interested,” Keller said. “If I ever did what you’re implying, well, I don’t do it anymore.”

  “You’ve retired.”

  “That’s right. And, even if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t go behind the old man’s back, not to work for someone who sent me off on a fool’s errand with a flower in my lapel.”

  “You wore that flower,” Bascomb said, “with the air of a man who never left home without one. I’ve got to tell you, Keller, you were born to wear a red carnation.”

  “That’s good to know,” Keller said, “but it doesn’t change anything.”

  “Well, the same thing goes for your reluctance.”

  “How’s that?”

  “It’s good to know how you feel,” Bascomb said. “Good to get it all out in the open. But it doesn’t change anything. We need you, and you’re in.”

  He smiled, waiting for Keller to voice an objection. Keller let him wait.

  “Think it through,” Bascomb suggested. “Think U.S. Attorney’s Office. Think Internal Revenue Service. Think of all the resources of a powerful—some say too powerful—federal government, lined up against one essentially defenseless citizen.”

  Keller, in spite of himself, found himself thinking it through.

  “And now forget all that,” said Bascomb, waving it all away like smoke. “And think of the opportunity you have to serve your nation. I don’t know if you’ve ever thought of yourself as a patriot, Keller, but if you look deep within yourself I suspect you’ll find wellsprings of patriotism you never knew existed. You’re an American, Keller, and here you are with a chance to do something for America and save your own ass in the process.”

  Keller’s words surprised him. “My father was a soldier,” he said.

  Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land!

  Keller closed the book and set it aside. The lines of Sir Walter Scott’s were quoted in a short story Keller had read in high school. The titular man without a country was Philip Nolan, doomed to wander the world all his life because he’d passed up his own chance to be a patriot.

  Keller didn’t have the story on hand, but he’d found the poetry in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, and now he looked up patriotism in the index. The best thing he found was Samuel Johnson’s word on the subject. “Patriotism,” Dr. Johnson asserted, “is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”

  The sentence had a nice ring to it, but he wasn’t sure he knew what Johnson was getting at. Wasn’t a scoundrel the furthest thing from a patriot? In simplest terms, a patriot would seem unequivocally to be one of the good guys. At the very least he devoted himself to serving his nation and his fellow citizens, and often enough he wound up giving the last full measure of devotion, sacrificing himself, dying so that others might live in freedom.

  Nathan Hale, say, regretting that he had but one life to give for his country. John Paul Jones, declaring that he had not yet begun to fight. David Farragut, damning the torpedoes, urging full speed ahead.

  Good guys, Keller thought.

  Whereas a scoundrel had to be a bad guy by definition. So how could he be a patriot, or take refuge in patriotism?

  Keller thought about it, and decided the scoundrel might take refuge in the appearance of patriotism, wrapping selfish acts in the cloak of selflessness. A sort of false patriotism, to cloak his base motives.

  But a true scoundrel couldn’t be a genuine patriot. Or could he?

  If you looked at it objectively, he had to admit, then he was probably a scoundrel himself. He didn’t much feel like a scoundrel. He felt like your basic New York single guy, living alone, eating out or bringing home takeout, schlepping his wash to the laundromat, doing the Times crossword with his morning coffee. Working out at the gym, starting doomed relationships with women, going to the movies by himself. There were eight million stories in th
e naked city, most of them not very interesting, and his was one of them. call from a man in White Plains. And packed a bag and caught a plane and killed somebody.

  Hard to argue the point. Man behaves like that, he’s a scoundrel. Case closed.

  Now he had a chance to be a patriot.

  Not to seem like one, because no one would know about this, not even Dot and the old man. Bascomb had made himself very clear on the point. “Not a word to anyone, and if anything goes wrong, it’s the same system as Mission: Impossible. We never heard of you. You’re on your own, and if you try to tell anybody you’re working for the government, they’ll just laugh in your face. If you give them my name, they’ll say they never heard of me. Because they never did.”

  “Because it’s not your name.”

  “And you might have trouble finding the National Security Resource in the phone book. Or anywhere else, like the Congressional Record, say. We keep a pretty low profile. You ever hear of us before? Well, neither did anybody else.”

  There’d be no glory in it for Keller, and plenty of risk. That was how it worked when he did the old man’s bidding, but for those efforts he was well compensated. All he’d get working for NSR was an allowance for expenses, and not a very generous one at that.

  So he wasn’t doing it for the glory, or for the cash. Bascomb had implied that he had no choice, but you always had a choice, and he’d chosen to go along. For what?

  For his country, he thought.

  “It’s peacetime,” Bascomb had said, “and the old Soviet threat dried up and blew away, but don’t let that fool you, Keller. Your country exists in a permanent state of war. She has enemies within and without her borders. And sometimes we have to do it to them before they can do it to us.”

  Keller, knotting his necktie, buttoning his suit jacket, didn’t figure he looked much like a soldier. But he felt like one. A soldier in his own idiosyncratic uniform, off to serve his country.

  Howard Ramsgate was a big man, broad-shouldered, with a ready smile on his guileless square-jawed face. He was wearing a white shirt and a striped tie, and the pleated trousers of a gray sharkskin suit. The jacket hung on a clothes tree in the corner of the office.

  He looked up at Keller’s entrance. “Afternoon,” he said. “Gorgeous day, isn’t it? I’m Howard Ramsgate.”

  Keller supplied a name, not his own. Not that Ramsgate would be around to repeat it, but suppose he had a tape recorder running? He wouldn’t be the first man in Washington to bug his own office.

  “Good to met you,” Ramsgate said, and stood up to shake hands. He was wearing suspenders, and Keller noticed that they had cats on them, different breeds of cats.

  When you pictured a traitor, he thought, you pictured a furtive little man in a soiled raincoat, skulking around a basement or lurking in a shabby café. The last thing you expected to run into was a pair of suspenders with cats on them.

  “Well, now,” Ramsgate was saying. “Did we have an appointment? I don’t see it on my calendar.”

  “I just took a chance and dropped by.”

  “Fair enough. How’d you manage to get past Janeane?”

  The secretary. Keller had timed her break, slipping in when she ducked out for a quick cigarette.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I didn’t notice anybody out there.”

  “Well, you’re here,” Ramsgate said. “That’s what counts, right?”

  “Right.”

  “So,” he said. “Let’s see your mousetrap.”

  Keller stared at him. Once, during a brief spate of psychotherapy, he had had a particularly vivid dream about mice. He could still remember it. But what on earth did this spy, this traitor—

  “That’s more or less a generic term for me,” Ramsgate said. “That old saw—create a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door. Emerson, wasn’t it?”

  Keller had no idea. “Emerson,” he agreed.

  “With that sort of line,” Ramsgate said, “it was almost always Emerson, except when it was Benjamin Franklin. Solid American common sense, that’s what you could count on from both of them.”

  “Right.”

  “As it happens,” Ramsgate said, “Americans have registered more patents for mousetraps than for any other single device. You wouldn’t believe the variety of schemes men have come up with for snaring and slaughtering the little rodents. Of course”—he plucked his suspenders—“the best mousetrap of all’s not patentable. It’s got four legs and it says meow.”

  Keller managed a chuckle.

  “I’ve seen my share of mousetraps,” Ramsgate went on. “Like every other patent attorney. And every single day I see something new. A lot of the inventions brought to this office aren’t any more patentable than a cat is. Some have already been invented by somebody else. Not all of them do what they’re supposed to do, and not all of the things they’re supposed to do are worth doing. But some of them work, and some of them are useful, and every now and then one of them comes along and adds to the quality of life in this wonderful country of ours.”

  Solid American common sense, Keller thought. This great country of ours. The man was a traitor and he had the gall to sound like a politician on the stump.

  “So I get stirred up every time somebody walks in here,” Ramsgate said. “What have you brought for me?”

  “Well, let me just show you,” Keller said, and came around the desk. He opened his briefcase and placed a yellow legal pad on the desktop.

  “ ‘Please forgive me,’ ” Ramsgate read aloud. “Forgive you for what?”

  Keller answered him with a choke hold, maintaining it long enough to guarantee unconsciousness. Then he let go and tore the top sheet from the legal pad, crumpled it into a ball, dropped it into the wastebasket. The sheet beneath it, the new top sheet, already held a similar message: “I’m sorry. Please forgive me.”

  It wouldn’t stand up to a detailed forensic investigation, but Keller figured it would make it easy for them to call it suicide if they wanted to.

  He went to the window, opened it. He rolled Ramsgate’s desk chair over to the window, took hold of the man under the arms, hauled him to his feet, then heaved him out the window.

  He put the chair back, tore the second sheet off the pad, crumpled it, tossed it at the basket. That was better, he decided—no note, just a pad on the desk, and then, when they look in the basket, they can come up with two drafts of a note he decided not to leave after all.

  Nice touch. They’d pay more attention to a note if they had to hunt for it.

  Janeane was back at her desk when he left, chatting on the phone. She didn’t even look up.

  Keller, back in New York, started each of the next five days with a copy of the Washington Post from a newsstand across the street from the UN building. There was nothing in it the first morning, but the next day he found a story on the obituary page about an established Washington patent attorney, an apparent suicide. Keller learned where Howard Ramsgate had gone to college and law school and read about a couple of inventions he’d helped steer through the patent process. The names of his survivors were given as well—a wife, two children, a brother in Lake Forest, Illinois.

  What it didn’t say was that he was a spy, a traitor. Didn’t say he’d had help getting out the window. Keller, perched on a stool in a coffee shop, wondered how much more they knew than they were letting on.

  The next three days he didn’t find one more word about Ramsgate. This wasn’t suspicious in and of itself—how often was there a follow-up to the suicide of a not-too-prominent attorney?—but Keller found himself trying to read between the lines of other stories, trying to find some subtle connection to Ramsgate’s death. This lobbyist charged with illegal campaign contributions, that Japanese tourist caught in the crossfire of a drug-related shootout, a key vote on a close bill in Congress—any such item might somehow link up to the defenestration of Howard Ramsgate. And he, the man who’d made it happen, would never know.

  On the f
ifth morning, as he found himself frowning over a minor scandal in the mayor’s office, it occurred to Keller to wonder if he was being watched. Had anyone observed him in the days since Ramsgate’s death? Had it been noted that he was starting each day, not around the corner from his apartment with the New York Times but five blocks away with the Washington Post?

  He thought it over and decided he was being silly. But then was he being any less silly buying the Post each morning? He’d tossed a pebble into a pond days ago, and now he kept returning, trying to detect the shadow of a ripple on the pond’s smooth surface.

  He got out of there and left the paper behind. Later, thinking about it, he realized what had him acting this way.

  He was looking for closure, for some sense of completion. Whenever he did a job for the old man, he made a phone call, got a pat on the back, bantered a bit with Dot, and, in the ordinary course of things, collected his money. That last was the most important, of course, but the acknowledgment was important, too, along with the mutual recognition that the job was done and done satisfactorily.

  With Ramsgate he got none of that. There was no report to make, nobody to banter with, no one to tell him how well he’d done. Tight-lipped men in Washington offices might be talking about him, but he didn’t get to hear what they were saying. Bascomb might be pleased with what he’d done, but he wasn’t getting in touch, wasn’t dispensing any pats on the back.

  Well, Keller decided, that was okay.

  Because, when all was said and done, wasn’t that the soldier’s lot? There would be no drums and bugles for him, no parades, no medals. He would get along without feedback or acknowledgment, and he would probably never know the real results of his actions, let alone the reason he’d drawn a particular assignment in the first place.

  He could live with that. He could even take a special satisfaction in it. He didn’t need drums or bugles, parades or medals. He had been leading the life of a scoundrel, and his country had called on him. And he had served her.

  No one had given him a pat on the back. No one had called to say well done. No one would, and that was fine. The deed he had done, the service he had performed, was its own reward.