By Donald E. Westlake
NOVELS
The Ax Humans Sacred Monsters A Likely Story
Kahawa Brothers Keepers I Gave at the Office
Adios, Scheherazade Up Your Banners
COMIC CRIME NOVELS
Baby, Would I Lie? Trust Me on This High Adventure
Castle in the Air Enough Dancing Aztecs
Two Much! Help I Am Being Held Prisoner
Cops and Robbers Somebody Owes Me Money
Who Stole Sassi Manoon? God Save the Mark
The Spy in the Ointment The Busy Body
The Fugitive Pigion Smoke
THE DORTMUNDER SERIES
What’s the Worst That Could Happen?
Don’t Ask Drowned Hopes Good Behavior
Why Me Nobody’s Perfect
Jimmy the Kid Bank Shot The Hot Rock
CRIME NOVELS
Pity Him Afterwards Killy 361
Killing Time The Mercenaries
JUVENILE
Philip
WESTERN
Gangway (with Brian Garfield)
REPORTAGE
Under the English Heaven
SHORT STORIES
Tommorrow’s Crimes Levine
The Curious Facts Preceding My Execution and Other Fictions
ANTHOLOGY
Once Against the Law (coedited by William Tenn)
Copyright
THE AX. Copyright © 1997 by Donald E. Westlake. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
Warner Books
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10017
Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.
ISBN: 978-0-7595-2295-4
First eBook Edition: April 2001
This is for my father, Albert Joseph Westlake, 1896–1953
Contents
By Donald E. Westlake
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
The old superstition about fiction being “wicked” has doubtless died out in England, but the spirit of it lingers in a certain oblique regard directed toward any story which does not more or less admit that it is only a joke. Even the most jocular novel feels in some degree the weight of the proscription that was formerly directed against literary levity: the jocularity does not always succeed in passing for orthodoxy. It is still expected, though perhaps people are ashamed to say it, that a production which is after all only a ‘make-believe’ (for what else is a ‘story’?) shall be in some degree apologetic—shall renounce the pretension of attempting really to represent life. This, of course, any sensible, wide-awake story declines to do, for it quickly perceives that the tolerance granted to it on such a condition is only an attempt to stifle it disguised in the form of generosity. The old evangelical hostility to the novel, which was as explicit as it was narrow, and which regarded it as little less favourable to our immortal part than a stage-play, was in reality far less insulting. The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.
Henry James, The Art of Fiction, 1888
If you’re doing what you think is right for everyone involved, then you’re fine. So I’m fine.
Thomas G. Labrecque,
CEO Chase Manhattan Bank
1
I’ve never actually killed anybody before, murdered another person, snuffed out another human being. In a way, oddly enough, I wish I could talk to my father about this, since he did have the experience, had what we in the corporate world call the background in that area of expertise, he having been an infantryman in the Second World War, having seen “action” in the final march across France into Germany in ’44–’45, having shot at and certainly wounded and more than likely killed any number of men in dark gray wool, and having been quite calm about it all in retrospect. How do you know beforehand that you can do it? That’s the question.
Well, of course, I couldn’t ask my father that, discuss it with him, not even if he were still alive, which he isn’t, the cigarettes and the lung cancer having caught up with him in his sixty-third year, putting him down as surely if not as efficiently as if he had been a distant enemy in dark gray wool.
The question, in any case, will answer itself, won’t it? I mean, this is the sticking point. Either I can do it, or I can’t. If I can’t, then all the preparation, all the planning, the files I’ve maintained, the expense I’ve put myself to (when God knows I can’t afford it), have been in vain, and I might as well throw it all away, run no more ads, do no more scheming, simply allow myself to fall back into the herd of steer mindlessly lurching toward the big dark barn where the mooing stops.
Today decides it. Three days ago, Monday, I told Marjorie I had another appointment, this one at a small plant in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, that my appointment was for Friday morning, and that my plan was to drive to Albany Thursday, take a late afternoon flight to Harrisburg, stay over in a motel, taxi to the plant Friday morning, and then fly back to Albany Friday afternoon. Looking a bit worried, she said, “Would that mean we’d have to relocate? Move to Pennsylvania?”
“If that’s the worst of our problems,” I told her, “I’ll be grateful.”
After all this time, Marjorie still doesn’t understand just how severe our problems are. Of course, I’ve done my best to hide the extent of the calamity from her, so I shouldn’t blame Marjorie if I’m successful in keeping her more or less worry-free. Still, I do feel alone sometimes.
This has to work. I have to get out of this morass, and soon. Which means I’d better be capable of murder.
The Luger went into my overnight bag, in the same plastic bag as my black shoes. The Luger had been my father’s, his one souvenir from the war, a sidearm he’d taken from a dead German officer that either he or someone else had shot, earlier that day, from the other side of the hedgerow. My father had removed the clip full of bullets from the Luger and transported it in a sock, with the gun itself traveling in a small dirty pillowcase he’d taken from a half-wrecked house somewhere in muddy France.
My father never fired that gun, so far as I know. It was simply his trophy, his version of the scalp you take from your defeated enemy. Everybody shot at everybody and he was still standing at the end, so he took a gun from one of the fallen.
I too had never fired that gun, nor any other. It frightened me, in fa
ct. For all I knew, if I were to pull the trigger with the clip in place in the butt, the thing would blow up in my hands. Still, it was a weapon, and the only one to which I had ready access. And there was certainly no record of its existence, at least not in America.
After my father died his old trunk was moved from his spare room to my basement, the trunk containing his army uniform and folded duffel bag and a sheaf of the orders that had moved him from place to place, way back then, in the unimaginable time before I was born. A time I like to think of as simpler and cleaner than ours. A time in which you knew with clarity who your enemies were, and they were who you killed.
The Luger, in its pillowcase, was at the bottom of the trunk, beneath the musty-smelling olive-drab uniform, its clip lying beside it, no longer concealed in that long-ago sock. I found it down there, the day I made my decision, and brought it out, and carried gun and clip up to my “office,” the small spare room we used to call the guest room before I was at home all the time and in need of an office. I closed the door, and sat at the small wood table I used as a desk—bought last year at a lawn sale offered by some particularly desperate householder about ten miles from here—and studied the gun, and it seemed to me clean and efficient-looking, without rust or obvious injury. The clip, this small sharp metal machine, felt surprisingly heavy. There was a slit up the rear of it, through which could be seen the bases of the eight bullets it contained, each with its little round blind eye. Touch that eye with the firing mechanism of the gun, and the bullet leaps off on its only journey.
Could I just insert clip into gun, point, and pull the trigger? Was there risk involved? Afraid of the unknown, I drove to the nearest bookstore, one of the chains, in a mall, and found a little manual on hand guns, and bought it (another expense!). This book suggested I oil various parts, and so I did, with Three-in-One oil. The book suggested I try dry-firing the gun—pull the trigger without the clip or any bullets in place—and I did, and the click sounded authoritative and efficient. It seemed that I did have a weapon.
The book also suggested that fifty-year-old bullets might not be entirely trustworthy, and told me how to empty and reload the clip, so I went to a sporting goods store across the state line in Massachusetts and with no trouble at all bought a little heavy box of 9-millimeter bullets and brought them home, where I thumbed eight of them into the clip, pressing each sleek torpedo down against the force of the spring, then sliding the clip up into the open butt of the gun: click.
Fifty years this tool had lain in darkness, under brown wool, wrapped in a French pillowcase, waiting for its moment. Its moment is now.
I practiced with the Luger, driving away from home one sunny midweek day last month, April, driving thirty-some miles westward, across the state line into New York, until I found a deserted field next to a minor winding two-lane blacktop road. Hilly woods stretched upward, dark and tangled, beyond the field. There I parked the car on the weedy verge and walked out across the field with the gun a heavy weight in the inside pocket of my windbreaker.
When I was very close to the trees, I looked back and saw no one driving past on the road. So I took out the Luger and pointed it at a nearby tree and—moving quickly so as not to give myself time to be afraid—I squeezed the trigger the way the little book had told me, and it shot.
What an experience. Not expecting the recoil, or not remembering having read about the recoil, I wasn’t prepared for how violently the Luger jumped upward and back, taking my hand with it, so that I almost hit myself in the face with the thing.
On the other hand, the noise wasn’t as loud as I’d expected, not a great bang at all, but flatter, like an automobile tire blowout.
I did not, of course, hit the tree I was pointing at, but I did hit the tree next to it, making a tiny puff of dust as though the tree had exhaled. So the second time, now at least knowing the Luger was operational and wouldn’t explode on me, I took more careful aim, with the standing stance the book had recommended, knees bent, body angled forward, both hands gripping the gun at arms’ length as I sighted down the top of its barrel, and that time I hit exactly the spot on the tree I was aiming at.
Which was nice, but was somewhat spoiled by the fact that my concentration on aiming had made me again pay too little attention to recoil. This time, the Luger jumped out of my hands entirely and fell onto the ground. I retrieved it, wiped it carefully, and decided I had to conquer this matter of recoil if I were going to make use of the damn machine. For instance, what if I ever had to fire twice in a row? Not so good, if the gun is on the ground or, worse, up in my own face.
So once again I took the standing stance, this time aiming at a tree farther off. I clenched the grip of the Luger hard, and when I fired I let the recoil move my arm and then my whole body, so that I never really lost control of the gun. Its power trembled and shivered through my body, like a wave, and made me feel stronger. I liked it.
Of course, I was well aware that in giving all this attention to the physical details, I was not only providing proper weight to the preparation but was also avoiding, for as long as possible, any thought of the actual object of the exercise, the end result of all this groundwork. The death of a man. Though that would be faced soon enough. I knew it then, and I know it now.
Three shots; that was all. I drove back home, and cleaned the Luger, and oiled it again, and replaced the three missing bullets in the clip, and stored gun and clip separately in the bottom drawer of my filing cabinet, and didn’t touch them again until I was ready to go out and see if I were actually capable of killing one Herbert Coleman Everly. Then I brought it out and put it into my overnight bag. And the other thing I packed, in addition to the usual clothing and toiletries, was Mr. Everly’s resumé.
Herbert C. Everly
835 Churchwarden Lane
Fall City, CT 06198
(203) 240-3677
MAJOR WORK EXPERIENCE Management
Responsible for in-flow of pulp paper from Canadian subsidiary. Coordinated functions of polymer manufacturing arm, Oak Crest Paper Mills, with Laurentian Resources (Can). Maintained delivery schedules for finished product to aerospace, auto, lighting and other industries. Oversaw 82-person manufacturing department, coordinated with 23-person delivery department.
Administration and Personnel
Interviewed and hired for department. Wrote employee analyses, recommended raises and bonuses, counseled employees where necessary.
Industrial
23 years’ experience, paper mills, paper products sales, with two corporations.
EDUCATION BBA, Housatonic Business College, 1969
REFERENCE Human Resources Division Kriegel-Ontario Paper Products PO Box 9000 Don Mills, Ontario Canada
There’s an entire new occupation these days in our land, a growth industry of “specialists” whose function is to train the freshly unemployed in job-hunting, and specifically how to prepare that all-important resumé how to put that best foot forward in the increasingly competitive struggle to get a new job, another job, the next job, a job.
HCE has taken such an expert’s advice, his resumé reeks of it. For instance, no photo. For those applicants over forty, one popular theory holds that it is best not to include a photo of oneself, in fact not to include anything at all that points specifically to the applicant’s age. HCE doesn’t even give the years of his employment, limiting himself only to two unavoidable clues: “23 years” and his college graduation in 1969.
Also, HCE is, or at least he wants to appear to be, impersonal and efficient and businesslike. He says nothing of his marital status, or his children, or his outside interests (fishing, bowling, what you will). He limits himself to the issues at hand.
It is not the best resumé I’ve seen, but it’s far from the worst; about middling, I would say. About good enough to get him an interview, if some paper manufacturer should be interested in hiring a manager-level employee with an intense history in the production and sales of specialized polymer paper products. Good
enough to get him in the door, I would say. Which is why he must die.
The point in all this is to be absolutely anonymous. Never to be suspected, not for a second. That’s why I’m being so very cautious, why in fact I’m driving a good twenty-five miles toward Albany, actually crossing into New York State, before turning south to make my way circuitously back into Connecticut.
Why? Why such extreme care? My gray Plymouth Voyager is not after all particularly noticeable. I’d say it looks rather like one vehicle in five on the road these days. But what if, by some remote chance, some friend of ours, some neighbor of ours, some parent of a schoolmate of Betsy or Bill, happened to see me, this morning, eastbound in Connecticut, when Marjorie has been told I’ll be westbound in New York or even airborne by now, toward Pennsylvania? How would I explain it?
Marjorie would think at first I was having an affair. Although—except for that one time eleven years ago that she knows about—I have always been a faithful husband, and she knows that, too. But if she thought I were seeing another woman, if she had any reason to question my movements and my explanations, wouldn’t I eventually have to tell her the truth? If only to relieve her mind?
The Ax Page 1