The Ethical Assassin

by David Liss

  “That’s a great idea,” the assassin said. “Running away is a reasonable strategy sometimes. There are some things that should be run away from. The only problem is, Lemuel, this one is going to come running after you. I understand that you want to be done with it all, and I want you to be done with it, but for that to happen, you’re going to have to see it through. You run away now, all eyes are going to be on you.”

  I didn’t want to accept it, but I knew it was true. “I can’t believe this.”

  “I don’t blame you,” the assassin said, “but denial is not going to get you through this. Lemuel, I’m going to get you through this.”

  He gazed at me, a beatific smile on his pale skin, and I believed it. Inexplicable as it was, I believed it. The rational thing would have been to run screaming, to barricade myself in the room and call the cops. That was the only way I might get out of it, but the assassin was so smooth, so crafty, I couldn’t quite believe that I would get the better of him. If I called the cops, I’d end up in jail, and if I rebuffed the assassin, I’d end up in jail. I didn’t want to go anywhere with him. He was a killer, and I didn’t want to be alone with a killer.

  “Okay,” I breathed.

  “Now, we have to go get that checkbook. The two of us, okay? You can do this.”

  I nodded, unable to summon any words.

  ***

  The assassin drove a slightly beat-up Datsun hatchback, charcoal or gray or something. It was hard to tell in the dark. I had vaguely imagined he would drive an Aston Martin or a Jaguar or something James Bond-ish, with ejector seats, retractable machine-gun turrets, a button that would instantly turn it into a speedboat. Mainly it had old magazines and empty orange juice cartons cramping the floor on the passenger side. There was a pile of paperback books on the backseat- books with odd titles like Animal Liberation and The History of Sexuality, Volume One. How many volumes did a history of sexuality require?

  I’d been nervous getting in. We weren’t allowed to leave the motel, and we weren’t allowed to go anywhere with friends who might live in town. If I had reported Ronny Neil and Scott’s harassment, I had no doubt that they would have thrown themselves into paroxysms of outrage at my tattling, acting like a baby. I also knew they would not hesitate to turn me in if they saw me leave. Still, so what if they did? Given the enormity of the crime I was covering up, slipping out at night didn’t seem all that terrible.

  The assassin kept his eyes straight ahead of him, hands at two and ten o’clock on the wheel. He looked calm and comfortable, just an ordinary evening of an ordinary life. I felt neither calm nor comfortable. My heart pounded, my stomach churned and the nausea returned, this time interlaced with glutinous chunks of fear. Leaving in pursuit of the checkbook had seemed like my only move, but now I had to wonder if I had just signed on to my own death.

  “Why are you going to such trouble to help me?” I asked, mostly just to break the horrific silence. The assassin had some kind of strange, hollow, thudding music playing softly from his tape deck. The singer groaned that love would tear him apart again. “You could just fuck me over if you wanted to.”

  “I could. You’re right. But I don’t want to.”

  “Why?”

  “To begin with, if the cops get you, there’s always a chance that you’ll lead them to me. It’s unlikely, but it could happen. Better they should get no one than get you. Besides, it would be wrong for you to go to jail for this. Even if you were arrested and acquitted, that would be monumentally unfair if I could prevent it. I did what I did to those people because it was the ethical thing to do. It hardly makes sense to let someone else suffer for my convenience. What’s the point of behaving ethically if it’s going to have unethical consequences?”

  “You want to tell me why it was ethical to kill them?”

  “Melford.”

  “What?”

  “Melford Kean. That’s my name. I figured, you know, now that we’re working together, you ought to know my name. So maybe you’ll trust me. And now you don’t have to think of me as ‘the killer’ or something.” He thrust out his right hand.

  Feeling fully the absurdity of it, I shook. He had a firm shake, but Melford Kean’s hand felt thin and precise, like a musical instrument. It wasn’t the hand of a killer- more like that of a surgeon or an artist. And the calm confidence of his shake helped to distract me from the notion that his giving me his name didn’t make me feel safer, it made me feel less safe. I knew his name. Didn’t that make me a danger to him? I didn’t point that out, however. Rather, I said, “I’ve been thinking of you as ‘the assassin.’ ”

  “That’s sort of cool. The assassin. Mysterious agent of unknown forces.” He laughed.

  I didn’t get why it was funny. I thought it was more or less true.

  “Since we’re friends and all,” I proposed, “maybe you can tell me why you killed them.”

  “I can’t, Lemuel. I’d like to, but I can’t because you’re not ready to hear it yet. If I tell you, you’ll say, ‘He’s crazy,’ and your opinion of me and what I do will be set in stone. But I’m not crazy. I just see things more clearly than most people.”

  “Isn’t that what crazy people say?”

  “Point taken. But it’s also what people who see more clearly say. The question is when to believe those who say it. You know about ideology?”

  “You mean like politics?”

  “I mean ideology in the Marxist sense. The way in which culture produces the illusion of normative reality. Social discourse tells us what’s real, and our perception of reality depends as much on that discourse as it does on our senses. Sometimes even more. You have to understand that we’re all peering at the world through a gauze, a haze, a filter- and that filter is ideology. We see not what’s there, but what we’re supposed to believe is there. Ideology makes some things invisible and makes some things that aren’t there seem like they’re visible. It’s true not just of political discourse, but of everything. Like stories. Why do stories always have to have a love component? It seems natural, right? But it’s only natural because we think it is. Or fashion. Ideology is why people in one era might think their clothes look normal and neutral, but twenty years later they’re absurd. One minute striped jeans are cool, the next they’re a joke.”

  “So, you’re above all that?” I asked.

  “The striped jeans? Yes. But for the most part, I’m bound up in ideology the same as everyone else. Yet knowing that it’s there grants us some small power over ideology, and if you squint, you can see a little more clearly than most. That’s really the best you can hope for. Because we’re all the products of ideology, none of us, even the smartest and the most aware, most revolutionary, can escape it- but we can try. We have to always try. And maybe you can try, too, so when I see you squinting, I’ll tell you.”

  “That sounds like an awful lot of crap to me.” I wished I could take it back the minute I said it.

  “Look, I know it’s bogus to just leave you in the dark, so let me ask you a question. I don’t think you’ll be able to answer it right now, but when you can, I’ll know that you are able to see past our cultural blinders. Then I’ll be able to tell you why I did what I did. Okay?… Good. Now, prisons have been around for many centuries, right?”

  “Is that your question?”

  “No, there’ll be a whole bunch of little questions. They’ll be leading up to the big question. I’ll tell you when we get there. So, prisons, right? Why do we send criminals to prisons?”

  I peered out the window into the darkness. Dark houses, dark streets rolling by in the middle of the night. People quietly sleeping, watching TV, having sex, eating late night snacks. I sat in a car talking about prisons with a crazy man. “For doing things like killing people in their mobile homes?” I ventured. It was like the grammar lesson in the convenience store. I needed to learn to shut up.

  “You’re a funny guy, Lemuel. We send them to prisons to punish them, right? But why? Why that punishment?”
<
br />   “What else do you want to do with them?”

  “Hell, you could do lots of stuff. Let’s say someone is a housebreaker, slips into homes, takes jewelry, money, whatever. Doesn’t hurt anyone, but just takes stuff. There are lots of ways to deal with him. You could kill him, you could cut off his hands, you could make him wear special clothes or give him a special tattoo, you could make him do community service, you could provide him with counseling or religious training. You could look at his background and decide he needs more education. You could exile him. You could send him to study with Tibetan monks. Why do we use prisons?”

  “I don’t know. That’s what we use.”

  Melford took a hand off the steering wheel for a moment so he could point at me. “Correct. Because that’s what we use. Ideology, my friend. From the moment of birth, we are trained to see things a certain way, and that way seems natural and inevitable, not worth questioning. We look at the world and we think we see the truth, but what we see is what we are supposed to see. We turn on the television and happy people are eating at Burger King or drinking Coke, and it makes perfect sense to us that burgers and Coke are the path to happiness.”

  “That’s just advertising,” I said.

  “But advertising is part of the social discourse, and it shapes our minds, our identities, as much as- if not more so than- anything our parents or schools teach us. Ideology is more than a series of cultural assumptions. It makes us subjects, Lemuel. We are subject to it, so that we serve culture rather than culture serving us. We see ourselves as autonomous and free, but the limits of our freedom have always already been delineated by the ideology that provides the border of our tunnel vision.”

  “And who controls the ideology? The Freemasons?”

  He smirked at me. “I love conspiracy theories. The Freemasons, the Illuminati, the Jesuits, the Jews, the Bilderberg Group, and my personal favorite: the Council on Foreign Relations. Great stuff. But where these conspiracy theorists go wrong is that they see the result as evidence of schemers. To them, because there’s a conspiracy, there must be conspirators.”

  “And that’s wrong?”

  “Dead wrong. The machinery of cultural ideology is on autopilot, Lemuel. It is a force- like a boulder going down a hill. It is going somewhere, picking up speed, and damn close to unstoppable, but there is no intelligence behind the boulder. It is beholden to physical laws, not its own will.”

  “What about the rich guys in smoke-filled rooms who plot to make us eat more fast food and drink more sodas?”

  “They’re not driving the boulder. They’re being crushed by it, just like the rest of us.”

  I took a polite moment to consider this idea, and then I moved on. “This isn’t helping me with the prison question.”

  “It’s pretty basic, really. Because of our ideology, sending criminals to prison strikes us as inevitable. Not as a choice, one option of many, but as the thing. Now, let’s go back to our hypothetical housebreaker. What is supposed to happen to him in prison?”

  I shook my head and smiled at the absurdity of it all, playing this peripatetic game with a killer. And it was absurd, but the thing was, I enjoyed it. For the few seconds that I could forget who Melford Kean really was, what I had seen him do earlier that evening, I enjoyed talking to him. Melford held himself as if he were important, as if he knew things, really knew them, and this whole business with prisons might not make sense, but I felt sure it would lead to something, and to something interesting, too.

  “I guess he’s supposed to consider his crimes and feel miserable about his imprisonment so that when he gets out he won’t do it again.”

  “Okay, sure. Punishment. Go to your room for talking fresh. Next time you want to talk fresh, you won’t since you know what’ll happen to you. Punishment, yes, but also punishment as rehabilitation. Take a criminal and turn him into a productive citizen. So, when you take a housebreaker and you send him to jail, what do you think happens to him? What does he learn?”

  “Well, I guess in reality he doesn’t really rehabilitate. I mean, it’s pretty common knowledge that if you send a housebreaker to prison, he comes back an armed robber or a murderer or a rapist or something.”

  Melford nodded. “Okay, so criminals go to prison and learn how to become better criminals. Does that sound about right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You think President Reagan knows that?”

  “Probably.”

  “What about our senators and representatives and governors? They know?”

  “I guess. How could they not?”

  “Wardens? Prison guards? Policemen?”

  “They probably know better than most.”

  “Okay, are you ready for the big question? Everybody knows that prisons don’t work to rehabilitate. If, in fact, we know they do just the opposite, which is to say they turn minor criminals into major ones, why do we have them? Why do we send our social outcasts to criminal academies? There’s your question. When you can answer it, and you know the answer is right, I’ll tell you why I had to do what I did.”

  “What is this? Like a riddle?”

  “No, Lemuel. It’s not a riddle. It’s a test. I want to see what you can see. And if you can’t at least try to peer past the gauze, there’s no point in knowing what’s on the other side, because no matter what I say, you won’t be able to hear it.”

  Melford made a left onto Highland Street, where Bastard and Karen had made their home up until the time of their murder. We cruised about halfway down the block, and I wondered if he was planning on stopping right in front of the trailer. Probably not, I decided. Just casing the neighborhood first.

  That turned out to be a smart move, since when we drove past we saw that there was a cop car in the driveway. We almost missed it because the lights were off. No headlights, no blue and red flashes of strobing disaster. In the darkness, with no car lights and no porch lights, a policeman in a brown uniform and a wide hat stood talking to a woman, one hand on her shoulder. And she was crying.

  Chapter 9

  COME ON,” Melford said once we made it safely past the cop, who didn’t hop in his car and come chasing after us. He didn’t even notice us. “What did you expect? They had to find the bodies sooner or later. You can’t be surprised.”

  “I was hoping we could get the checkbook,” I said, my tone shrill and nearly hysterical.

  “Right. The checkbook. Well, the check wasn’t written out to you, was it? It was written out to a company?”

  “Educational Advantage Media. That’s who I work for.”

  “Holy cow. You’ve got to love their shamelessness. So, how will they know you were the one providing the educational advantage?”

  “I was the only one working that area. Plus my fingerprints are all over the trailer. If they sample everyone’s, they’ll come up with a match for me. Fuck,” I added. I pounded my knee with the palm of my hand.

  “Doesn’t prove anything. So, you went there, you tried to sell them some books, it didn’t work out. You have no motive. If you just sit tight, you’ll be fine.” Melford placed a hand gently on my shoulder.

  Great. Now the gay assassin is going to make a pass at me. “That isn’t my idea of a solution. Sitting tight and being acquitted.”

  The hand, mercifully, went back to the steering wheel. “It won’t get past the grand jury.”

  “Wow, that’s comforting. Next you’ll cheer me up by promising me a sentence of nothing more than time served. Just a few minutes ago, you were talking about how unfair it would be for me to even be arrested.”

  “Okay, okay.” He held up a hand as if I were his nagging wife. “I’ll think of something.”

  Melford parked the car, and for the first time since we saw the police cruiser outside Karen and Bastard’s trailer, I examined my surroundings. We were outside a bar or something like a bar- a run-down-looking shack of a building with peeling white paint and a couple of dozen vehicles, mostly pickups, parked out front. The parking lo
t was an empty patch of land, pounded down by the weight of tires and drunks.

  It wasn’t exactly like the music screeched to a halt when we walked in, but it might as well have. Men looked up from their beer. Men looked up from the pool table. The men at the bar craned their necks to look. No women that I could see. Not a single one.

  Part of me wanted to believe that Melford knew exactly what he was doing, but the bar seemed to me a very bad idea. The braggadocio of David Allan Coe blasted from the jukebox and did a fair job of drowning out the sound of blood thumping in my ears. The sight of the cop had so terrified me that a cold pain had ripped across my body, as though someone had stabbed me in the heart with an icicle.

  The place was a longish room with a concrete floor and cinder-block walls with a “Miller Time” clock, a flashing Budweiser sign, and a giant poster of buxom Coors girls. There were no chairs, just picnic tables and benches, and in the far corner stood a large, old-fashioned jukebox- the kind with the rounded top. Closer to the surprisingly ornate wooden bar were four well-kept pool tables, all of them occupied. As far as I was concerned, it meant that there were, at any given moment, eight rednecks with weapons at the ready.

  Melford led the way to the bar, where we took a seat while he waved over the bartender, a burly, ponytailed man who looked a hard-lived fifty- haggard, with multiple burns on his hands that suggested he’d been letting someone jab at him all night with a lit cigarette. Melford ordered two Rolling Rocks, which the bartender set down with a skeptical thud. I eyed the faded blue tattoos that crept up his forearm. He eyed my turquoise knit tie, which I wished I had remembered to take off. Behind us, pool balls cracked with sharp menace.

  “Four dollars,” the bartender said. “You boys want something to eat before the kitchen closes up? Got good burgers here, but Tommy, the cook, is about fifteen minutes away from being too drunk to man the grill.”