The Assassin Who Gave Up His Gun

by Howard Fast

  The Swiss police assured the world that they had a number of clues pointing to the killer, who had been defined by leader after leader as a madman, the logic being that only a madman would wish the death of Dahu Sind. Before two in the morning the international program was interrupted for a personal announcement from the Chief of Police in Zurich, who told the world that the killer had been arrested and had confessed.

  The television showed a chaotic scene that took place when the accused killer was brought into police headquarters in Zurich. He was surrounded by Swiss police and plain-clothes men, and these in turn were surrounded by newspapermen, television and radio correspondents, curious citizens and angry citizens. All of this took place at night, lit by great flares and spotlights for the camera work, and one could see the cameras pointing from every direction. The magic of the zoom lens drove into the crowd and picked out the accused man. He was young, small, wild with fear the way an animal is when you trap it, and even in the brief flashes you could see that he was an Oriental. His motivation was said to come from the fact that he was a Vietnamese, fearful that the intercession of Dahu Sind would end the war and turn his people over to the Communists.

  I was not surprised at his confession. Quite often The Department produced both an assassin and a confession, since there is nothing more calculated to allay the fear of people than the sight of a killer caught, in the rather simplistic proposition that murder ends with the single act of a crazed killer.

  Curiously, the actual death of Dahu Sind was never discussed with me, although Grupperman did have me into his office to discuss my attitude toward Haberstrom.

  “You did threaten him?” Grupperman asked me.

  “Yes, I did.”

  “He said you put the gun to his neck and told him that you would put a bullet into his spine.”

  “Yes, I said that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he was a pig.”

  “And would you have killed him?” asked Grupperman.

  “I don’t know.”

  “It can be troublesome if the executioner should become the judge,” Grupperman said thoughtfully.

  “I live on the knife edge,” I answered, “and one day I’ll slip and it will cut me.” I shrugged.

  “You turn an interesting phrase sometimes, Breckner. Of course you may die in bed at a respectable age, but you are quite right to assume that your fate is at the disposal of The Department. We are pleased with your work, but the work is inseparable from the man. Remember that.”

  Chapter 5

  THE Department had arranged for me to sit next to her on the flight from Kennedy to London Airport. The Department was terribly good at details, and apparently there was nothing they could not manage in any country when it came down to the question of small details. I had come into Washington three days before and had talked to Cooney in The Department’s office there, and he had briefed me, pointing out that this was a most delicate matter and one of great trust.

  “I’ve carried out one or two matters of great trust.”

  “Oh, good heavens, Breckner—do you imagine that we don’t know that? Do you think that you would be here talking to me if we didn’t know that? Grupperman has the highest admiration for you, and Grupperman is one of the most brilliant minds in The Department.”

  Cooney was a short, plump man with red hair and long, delicate fingers that were in constant motion. The fingers brought things together and waved them away. He was obviously homosexual, and I wondered why The Department kept him in so delicate and sensitive a spot as Washington. But that was their business, not mine, and they had their reasons. He briefed me fully, and then I took the shuttle to New York City.

  Whenever I am in America, I am filled with admiration for their air transport, their splendid roads, and their gigantic structures of glass and metal. In that world I sometimes have a sense of meaning, a sense of who and what I am—a fleeting sense but at least something. But this time I had no sense of anything like that and it depressed me. Also, all over New York, flags were at half-mast for Dahu Sind. I had to fill a day and a half in the city, and the waiting seemed endless. Most of the time I sat in my hotel room and dozed and tried to remember.

  But I didn’t know what I was trying to remember or why.

  Then, at Kennedy, shortly before plane time, I saw her come up to the departure building and say good-by to her family. Their car was a big cream-colored Lincoln with Connecticut plates, and it was chauffeur driven, and it must have belonged to her mother, who had an estate in Connecticut. The mother was with her, one of those straight, tight, dry American women and probably in her late sixties. There was a boy of sixteen and a girl of about fourteen, and these must have been her children, and there was another middle-aged woman who could have been a sister—perhaps an older sister or simply a friend. Patience Quigley herself was forty-two years old, rather a slight figure, trim and—as I thought instantly—very attractive, much more so than in the pictures I had been shown. Some of it was her coloring. She had bright blue eyes, which she set off with a blue dress, and she was sunburned and her sand-colored hair was cut pageboy fashion. There was more emotion in her good-bys to her children than one would expect from an American of her background; she embraced them both and then embraced her mother, but only took the hand of the other woman, who, as I later learned, was her sister-in-law.

  At that point I left and went to the newsstand and bought a copy of Time, and then I began the process of boarding. I was already seated when she came on board. I rose to give her the window seat.

  “I believe hers is on the aisle,” said the stewardess.

  “Oh? Well, it makes no difference to me,” I said.

  “Do you prefer the aisle? I mean, you were sitting there. I would just as soon sit by the window,” Mrs. Quigley said.

  “Please do,” I told her.

  As she sat down and arranged her things, she said that she felt rather childish about it. She was one of those women who are without self-consciousness and who find it as easy to talk to a strange man as to another woman, and who do it without any sense of being seductive or improper. “Because when I was a child, I always demanded the window seat. It made me such a nuisance to the whole family.”

  I smiled slightly, nodded, and went back to my magazine. I was very much aware of my smile. I don’t smile often. I had thought to engage her in conversation, which was the reason for seating me next to her, but I had planned for it to be at my own good time and at my own instigation. There was no more said until we were airborne, and then as she unfastened her seat belt, she sighed and made some remark about never overcoming her fear of planes.

  “You don’t look very afraid.”

  “Well, that’s Mother and her proper breeding. One never looks the way one feels. You don’t mind it at all?”

  “I’ve flown a good deal.”

  “So have I, and it gets worse.”

  “Yes, I suppose it does with some.”

  I went back to the magazine, and for the next hour she sat relaxed, her lids dropped, moving now and then to glance out of the window.

  Then, when we were being served lunch, she looked at me sharply and cried, “Of course—you’re Richard Breckner. I knew the moment I saw you but not really.”

  “How did you know?” I asked her.

  “From that incredible film you made.”

  “Yes—but that was fifteen years ago.”

  “It’s not something you forget. Goodness, no.”

  “But I didn’t make the film. Berger made it.”

  “It was your film. I do remember it so well, even the title. It was a ghastly title.”

  “Why?” I asked her.

  “But really, you must know. The Kill. In its context it was a perfectly terrifying title. I mean as a documentary. I mean, it was not really a documentary film, was it? Do forgive me,” she added after a moment. “I am prying. But do you know how much I have been dying to ask you that question all these years? I suppose every
one has.”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Now you are angry, aren’t you?”

  “No, I’m not angry.”

  “You don’t even know my name. Well, it’s Patience Quigley. I am Mrs. Norton Glee Quigley, and I am on my way to join my husband in London. So you see I am perfectly frank and honest, and I am not a journalist in disguise, and if I ask questions, it is the result of bad manners and not professional duplicity. I know all about your reputation of never permitting an interview. I intend to respect it.”

  “How can you talk about my reputation?” I asked her. “Nothing has been written or said about me for twelve years. I am totally the forgotten man.”

  “But you see I have not forgotten you.”

  “No—you haven’t.”

  “Am I being a silly ass?” she asked suddenly. “Please tell me. I have intruded upon your privacy, waved my childhood in your face, and dug up heaven knows what memories. I know you’re not sentimental, and I am being wretchedly sentimental. So I am determined to be still and you don’t have to say another word to me.”

  “Are you punishing me or rewarding me?”

  “I think I am rewarding you,” she said tentatively. “Am I?”

  “No.”

  “Then you would rather have my foolish questions, Mr. Breckner?”

  “Why are you so eager to know whether it was a documentary?” I asked her.

  “Oh, that was a ridiculous question. Won’t you let me forget it?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because,” I answered slowly, trying to put it into the proper words and thinking of how long it had been since I had carried on a conversation with anyone like this, “I know why you asked it. You read that I had actually killed the man, and you want to ask me whether that was true. Whether I killed a human being or whether we staged it?”

  When she didn’t answer, I said to her, “Have you ever spoken to anyone who killed a human being?”

  “You mean a murderer?”

  “If you want to call it murder—”

  “Murder is murder.”

  “Then all killing is murder,” I said.

  “Oh, no—no,” she said. “I can’t accept that. My brother, Jobey, fought in World War Two. He was an infantryman—”

  “I’m sure he was a very patriotic American and did what any one of your patriotic countrymen would do.”

  “What a thing to say! He was a decent human being who was confronted with a monstrous indecency.”

  “And so he turned to murder.”

  “How dare you!”

  “Well, there you are,” I told her. “You were afraid that you had affronted me, and now apparently I have hurt your feelings. Shall we let it go at that?”

  “No, indeed,” she replied primly. “We have four more hours in this plane, and since you have decided that my brother is a murderer, I think I have the right to ask you. Was it a documentary?”

  “Yes, it was. We stated that.”

  “And you actually killed that man?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, you’re laughing at me!”

  “No,” I said. “We hardly know each other, Mrs. Quigley, but perhaps you have already sensed that I don’t lie and I don’t laugh at people. I do other things that you might condemn. If you wish me to, I will tell you exactly what happened.”

  “I don’t want to pry. I would just as soon forget the entire thing.”

  “But you have pried,” I said bluntly, “and I think you owe it to me to hear the whole story.”

  She set her lips and was silent for about a minute. Then she made a stab at drinking her coffee. It was cold and she made a face. Then she said, “Very well.”

  “Not that it’s so much of a story. You may have heard that I had been hunting in Kenya for years, and then the Mau Mau business began and they wanted no more of white hunters in Kenya after that. Miko Mikoyetta had been my gun-bearer for three years, and I trained him. I think I trained him well. He became very boastful after that, and he said that if any white hunter, especially myself, came into the reserve, he would find that he was hunting bigger game than lion—namely himself. In other words, Miko said that he would track down and kill any white hunter who went into the place and that he would do it himself.”

  “I think he could justify that—after all the years of mistreatment—”

  “I am not discussing the right and wrong of it, Mrs. Quigley. I am simply telling you what Miko said. No one took up his challenge. White hunters are not a romantic lot, and no one wants to get himself killed for dubious glory. Miko was not throwing out empty boasts. He was good, and he could stalk better than any white man, and he was born to the place. He was big and strong and he had tremendous endurance. Then Berger came to me. I never met Hans Berger before—and when I inquired about him, some of the people I spoke to seemed to think that he had been tied in with the SS in the making of certain documentaries that Hitler wanted made. But nobody knew for certain, and he was a colorful character and a flashy promoter. He found me and offered me twenty-five thousand dollars if I would take up Miko’s challenge and allow him to photograph the hunt. At first I told him to shove off and take his lunacy elsewhere, but when he persisted, I decided that the way to get rid of him was to ask for more money. I did. I told him that for fifty thousand dollars I would do it, and I wanted the money paid in advance.”

  “Oh, no!” she exclaimed.

  “Why not?”

  “For money? Just for money?”

  “For what else, Mrs. Quigley? Is anything in this world we live in done for any other reason than money?”

  “Yes—for honor and decency and for mankind! Yes!”

  “Oh? Well, I would just like you to name one of them.”

  “Dahu Sind. Did he die for money?”

  “He lived for money, didn’t he?” I said. “Or at least he had to have money to live—I heard that the United Nations paid him twenty-five thousand a year. And expenses. That’s not much money, but it’s still money, isn’t it?”

  “You amaze me,” she said. “I’ve never met anyone like you.”

  “Perhaps not. But would I be more worthy of your admiration if I had killed Miko Mikoyetta for a lark? Would that please you?”

  “Oh, you’re impossible.”

  “Perhaps—but fifty thousand dollars buys a lot, and I needed the money.”

  “Why?” she demanded hostilely. “For your wife? Your family?”

  “I have no family, Mrs. Quigley. I grew up in an orphanage. And two months before this, my wife had killed herself.”

  “Oh—oh, I am sorry.”

  “That was long ago. But as far as the money was concerned, I needed it for myself and I accepted Berger’s offer. Just let me make one thing plain, Mrs. Quigley. When you asked your question, you had a very good notion that the film you saw was the record of a manhunt. And you asked the question. Why?”

  “Why do you try to make everything so simple?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Then you killed him—a human being, and with no provocation.”

  “If you see it that way. On the other hand, he was hunting me.”

  “Because you came into his land. Don’t you see the difference?”

  She was very sincere, very earnest, and also to my way of thinking something of a fool.

  “I see the difference,” I agreed. “I was trying to earn fifty thousand dollars, and he was trying to take a scalp and be a big man with the homefolk.”

  “And that’s all you see?”

  “All. I had a gun and he had a gun. I didn’t ambush him. It had to be in daylight on the open veld, so that Berger could get his pictures, and it came down to who was the better shot and who had the steadier nerves. Wasn’t that the case with your brother?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “You mean, it was not him or the Germans?”

  “He was fighting for a cause—in the name of democracy against as vile a tyra
nny as ever existed.”

  “But that’s a judgment. I’m no judge.”

  “Perhaps you should be, Mr. Breckner.”

  “Was your brother a judge? If he killed some kid on the other side, did he have any way of judging the kid’s right to life or death?”

  “That’s just sophistry and you know it.”

  “He didn’t even do it for money.”

  “Of course he didn’t.”

  “Because then he might have had a justification.”

  “Justification?”

  “He could have said, I was paid and I did my job. That’s what a killer should say. That’s the only honest thing a killer can say.”

  “How wretched of you! I don’t want to talk about it any more.”

  “As you wish.”

  “Do you know, when I recognized you I thought to myself, What an amusing trip this will be, with Richard Breckner sitting next to me, but I don’t find it amusing. Not at all.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She made no reply to that, but turned and occupied herself looking out of the window. There was a ship underneath, and the captain informed us that it was the Queen Elizabeth. I studied Mrs. Quigley with interest. You are told that you will be seated next to a woman, and thereby you form an attitude toward her; but my attitude was woefully far from the fact. Physically, she was very attractive, outgoing and not hiding behind ego; I knew that she was forty-two years old, but she had the quality and elastic motion of a much younger woman. She was convinced; she had deeply formed and certain ideas; and more than anything else—so far as I was concerned—she sat there as a woman. I saw her as a woman. I had not seen a woman as a woman for a long time.

  The stewardess came by with a menu for drinks, and I said to her back, “Mrs. Quigley, may I buy you a drink?”

  She straightened up suddenly, turned to me, and said, “Yes. Please. I’ll have a sherry. Harvey’s Bristol Cream, if you have it.”

  “Strictly speaking,” I amended it, as the stewardess moved on, “I am not paying for this drink because in First Class it’s free. Buying it for you was simply a manner of speech.”

  “You are the strangest man with the strangest kind of honesty that I have ever encountered. Well, I said yes because I have been thinking about everything you said and everything I said, and I have come to the conclusion that I behaved abominably. I have no right to question you and certainly no right to judge you. You were frank and forthright and I was not. I am sorry.”