The Assassin Who Gave Up His Gun

by Howard Fast

  “Gorivich,” I said, “I married a woman who was dying. That was fifteen years ago. She was dying of cancer and she pleaded with me to marry her, and I did it. I married her. It was a mistake. I didn’t do it out of kindness. I don’t know why I did it.”

  “Is that why she killed herself?”

  “No. She killed herself because of the pain. She asked me to kill her. People thought that I did, but the fact of it is that she killed herself, as you seem to know.”

  “We are well informed, Breckner. I must go now.”

  “You came here to find out whether I was in love with Mrs. Quigley?”

  His hand on the door, he explained, “You took her to lunch, and then at the Embankment she looked at you and addressed you as a woman looks at and addresses a man she loves.”

  “Why did you have me followed?”

  “You know the answer to that, Breckner.”

  “You couldn’t have followed me and come here before me.”

  “I was here, Breckner. The man who followed you called me. There is nothing mysterious about this. We are careful. We are thorough. We are also human, and therefore we question and expect human fallacy. I have heard comment that you are not human, but I reject that.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “May I ask you a question?”

  “A short one. I am late and I preserve a tight schedule.”

  “Why didn’t you send me to India to kill Quigley?”

  “Because we wanted him to die in London,” Gorivich answered, smiling.

  “Why?”

  “We have our reasons, Breckner—rest assured. And we wanted him to be with his wife.”

  “Why?”

  “Because, Breckner, it may be best, when he dies, not to leave her alive.”

  Then he smiled again and left, closing the door softly behind him.

  Chapter 10

  AS I walked toward the Embassy, I reflected that it was many years since I had been to this kind of a party—a place where there would be important and glamorous people of public distinction and reputation—and I contemplated it without enthusiasm. I imagined Grupperman saying that they were all equalized under the sights of a Doppler rifle or a Schmidt automatic, and then I realized that it was I who said that, not Grupperman, but myself; and myself putting up Grupperman, or Gorivich or Smith-Chandler, as a shield was pointless. It was the first moment in as long as I could remember that I had been able to look at anything that was myself, and it made me cringe. “Don’t let him call you an assassin, Breckner,” I said softly. Then I stood in the square, looking at the ugly edifice of the Embassy—stood like that for a while, wishing that I had killed Gorivich; and then I realized that kill was the companion of any wish or thought I had.

  I went into the Embassy. She was just inside the doorway, standing to one side and waiting for me, and when I had entered and had given my name to the efficient young man in dark spectacles who stood at the entrance and checked the list of guests, she moved over to me and took my arm and whispered, “Oh, Breck, I was so hoping you would come.”

  “You knew I would come.”

  “No—no, you’re a wild thing, Breck. You don’t move in any direction. You just wait.”

  “For what?”

  “Oh, I wish I knew, Breck,” she said. “How I wish I knew.” And then she drew me with her, along to where the party was. It was a very controlled affair, I suppose forty to fifty people, drinking cocktails and talking and very often huddling in a most discreet manner. The fact that it was a party for Patience Quigley apparently had nothing to do with Pat, and three-quarters of the people there ignored her; but she seemed indifferent to that, and if you can say it of a woman with sandy hair and freckles, she was radiant and outgoing. When I was introduced to Helen Adams, the ambassador’s wife—he himself had been there for a few minutes earlier but now was elsewhere with his work and particular needs, whatever they were—she said to me:

  “I don’t know what you’ve done to Pat, but it’s so very good.”

  She was a dark, handsome woman of forty or so, very possessed. “Breckner,” she acknowledged, looking me in the eyes in that peculiar privacy that one can have in a crowded room, “you are something for a lonely woman, aren’t you, tall, strong, good-looking. What are you going to do to my friend? I care for her, you know.”

  “Oh, I will not listen to serious nonsense,” Patience said, and drew me away. “Come have champagne.” And when I only toyed with the glass, she said thoughtfully, “You don’t really drink, do you? You don’t smoke. I keep feeling you’re some kind of priest—”

  A tall, thin, smart-looking woman came up and said, “Rest assured, Pat, that his kind are priests of no religion you ever knew.”

  I was introduced. She was a designer. Then Pat introduced me to a diplomat and to a ballerina. The ballerina was blond, Swedish, inhumanly beautiful, and spoke excellent English. She decided that I was a dancer.

  “I’m afraid not,” Patience said.

  “Oh, but he is. The way he moves.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Then you were once?”

  “No, never.”

  “Then may I ask what is your profession, Mr. Breckner?”

  I looked at her and then at Patience, who was watching me with a slightly furrowed brow. A man came up, took the arm of the ballerina, and informed her that I was a film star, and then Helen Adams reappeared and drew both of us away.

  “But you’re not a film star,” she said. “That’s perfectly silly, isn’t it?”

  “He appeared in a sort of documentary once, ages ago,” Patience said.

  “Oh? Do I remember? But come now—I want you both to meet a most wonderful and extraordinary woman. She is the kind of person who reflects the very best in our country, Mr. Breckner, and of course I am apologizing for us. Any American of sensitivity does, these days; yet don’t judge us by our barbarians. One of them, you will remember, assassinated Alexander Hoppner in Miami not too long ago. This is Alexander Hoppner’s widow—Laura Hoppner.”

  We had crossed the room now, and I was facing an extraordinarily good-looking and strangely familiar black woman. She stood in an aura of very apparent melancholy, yet she was able to smile with vitality as she gave me her hand.

  “This is Mrs. Hoppner,” Helen Adams said to me, and then to her, “And this is Richard Breckner, friend of my dear friend, Pat Quigley. So he is a friend of ours and welcome to this little bit of our soil that England has been gracious enough to grant us. Mr. Breckner is a journalist—”

  So I had been given a profession—and Laura Hoppner as looking full into my eyes and said, “I am so happy to meet you, Mr. Breckner. Mrs. Adams tells me that you are one of the handful of Europeans who knew Africa very well—and of course Africa interests black people everywhere now.”

  “I was a hunter in Africa once,” I replied slowly, my eyes held in hers, “so perhaps I know a little bit of Africa—the little bit that a white hunter can know.”

  “But that could be such rare and important knowledge.”

  “No. It’s the knowledge of a killer.”

  She stared at me curiously, puzzled, waiting.

  “What an odd thing to say,” Helen Adams remarked.

  “But isn’t such knowledge important too?” Mrs. Hoppner said finally.

  “No. Such knowledge is worthless.”

  There was that inevitable break of silence, and then Mrs. Adams introduced someone else to Mrs. Hoppner, and Patience drew me away, remarking, “What a strange thing to say, Breck! Didn’t you know that her husband was murdered?”

  “I knew.”

  “But then to name yourself a killer.”

  “I’m not a journalist.”

  “Breck—Breck,” she said sadly. “Helen doesn’t know you—how can you be angry because she named you a journalist?”

  “But I am not angry.”

  “Do you know Mrs. Hoppner?”

  “Why do you ask that?”

  Patience shook her head
. We stood at one side of the room now—a bit apart from the increasing crush of the party. I saw Burton Adams talking to a dark stout man—and nodding in my direction.

  “Will you stay?” Patience asked me.

  “If you wish me to. And if I stay, will you be with me afterward?”

  “I’ll try, Breck. There’s the press here, and there is also that wretched little woman from the Call who does the gossip column and is a kind of unholy avenging angel, so I must be careful—”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Why? Oh, Breck, surely you’re not serious.”

  “Don’t you think that there’s a price for this—sooner or later?”

  “Breck, what are you saying? The plain fact of it is that we are almost strangers. I am a married woman, and my husband is an American diplomat.”

  Helen Adams joined us now and wanted to know whether she had interrupted an important discussion, the two of us appeared so serious. She said that Mrs. Hoppner was fascinated with me, and could she talk to me again? And as for Patience, she must meet the Duke of Canbarra, because the Duke of Canbarra was convinced that her husband, Norton Glee Quigley, was a man of destiny. The Duke of Canbarra joined us then, a skinny wisp of a man with blond hair and a monocle straight out of the 1930s. He was exalted—as he put it—to meet the wife of one of the great men of our time. “I mean,” he said, “that your privilege is extraordinary, you know, utterly extraordinary—it’s almost beyond privilege, if you know what I mean?”

  Helen Adams drew me away then. “You’re leaving her with him?” I asked her.

  “You’re very engaging when you smile,” she said, “but Pat is quite safe and entirely able to cope with the Duke, who is a very mild and sweet little man. You are something else entirely, aren’t you, Mr. Breckner?”

  “I am not mild and sweet—no.”

  “And may I call you Breck? I heard Pat call you that. You know, Pat is dear to me. She is the only real friend I have in the world. One friend—I am quite fortunate, don’t you think? So many people have none. Do you have a friend, Breck?”

  “No.”

  “Oh?” Her brows went up. “You didn’t even have to think about it.” She drew me after her, avoiding some people, nodding to others, dropping a word of greeting here and there with the ease and manner of a professional hostess. “I had despaired of having you to myself for even a minute,” she said, the two of us detached for a moment. “I was sure Pat was your friend.”

  “I don’t like games,” I said to her, “not word games, not any other kind. You know that Mrs. Quigley is in love with me. Are you asking me whether I return her feeling?”

  “I’m sorry about the games. I suppose I am asking that.”

  “Why?”

  “You mean why do I ask?”

  I nodded.

  “Pat has been very sad. She has been hurt. I can’t tell you how much. Now the pain is gone.”

  “And isn’t that good?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know, Breck. Tell me.”

  “Whatever you are to her,” I said, “my feelings for her are very much a thing in myself.”

  “And I have no right to ask?”

  I shrugged.

  “Maybe it’s not good,” she said. “Pat Quigley is no ordinary woman. She’s married to an American diplomat whose name is a household word. He’s currently engaged in most delicate discussions, and the kind of scandal that this could become would be disastrous.”

  “Is this your husband talking now?”

  “Who the hell are you, Breck?” she asked coldly, angry suddenly. “What gives you the right to be an upstanding son of a bitch?”

  “I like that better,” I said. “I like it better than word games. I think now we both know each other a little.”

  Her husband joined us to catch the last of this, and he was pleased that we knew each other. As with so many lifelong, trained and professional diplomats, his essence was long gone and hidden and possibly dead. The overlay was smiling and gracious. He was a handsome American man with small, regular features, smooth skin, and modest superiority.

  “I remember your film,” he said to me. “Brilliant.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Are you in London for a holiday?”

  “Business.”

  “What is your business, Mr. Breckner?” his wife inquired smilingly.

  “I am an exalted errand boy.”

  “As most of us are,” Burton Adams said. “As most of us are. Of course, Breckner, you can never dispel my own romantic view. To me, the white hunter is the symbol of an age—Rider Haggard and Kitchener and Stanley … oh hell, boyhood is a lackluster thing today, isn’t it? Come have a drink and tell me what it feels like to face a charging lion.”

  He was a bore. He didn’t want me to tell him anything, but went on with his pointless, meaningless, and inoffensive chatter—doing me only the favor of removing me from his wife, until Patience came to my rescue, found some excuse to take me aside, and whispered to me, “Across the square—ten minutes. Yes?”

  “Yes,” I agreed.

  She moved away, and I pushed through the press of people and found myself suddenly facing Mrs. Hoppner.

  “Mr. Breckner,” she said.

  I would have excused myself, but there-was no way. She was an extraordinary woman—extraordinary in her intensity and the manner in which her deep eyes examined and found me.

  “Are you sensitive?” she asked me. “Please don’t regard that as an impertinence.”

  “Sensitive? How do you mean?”

  “I mean do you feel people as well as see them? Sometimes I do. Certain people—as I feel you?”

  I shook my head.

  “Why did you score yourself as a killer before? You’re not a killer, Mr. Breckner.”

  “How do you know?” I wondered, asking myself as much as the black woman before me. “You look around this room—and how do you know? It’s an in thing, as you Americans say, in the manner of our time, isn’t it? Who is guilty and who isn’t?”

  “I’ve had to suffer, Mr. Breckner, but I don’t indict the human race.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because my husband’s master said, ‘Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.’”

  “Your husband was a Christian saint,” I found myself saying.

  “And you’re not a Christian, Mr. Breckner?”

  “No.”

  “Then what are you?”

  “Do you forgive them?” I asked, almost harshly.

  “Who?”

  “Your husband’s murderers?”

  “I try to.”

  “Why?” I demanded. “Why?”

  “So that I can live whatever time is left to me without hate. So that I can love and know love. You understand that, don’t you, Mr. Breckner?”

  “No, I don’t,” I said.

  Chapter 11

  SHE stood across the square, under a tree, small and slender, wrapped in a black silk coat with her sandy hair showing almost white and her blue eyes shining darkly in just a trickle of light from a street lamp, and worried that I would not have come.

  “Because of what I said, Breck.”

  “What did you say that would keep me away?”

  “That we were strangers. Oh, I was so hostile.”

  “We meet as strangers, don’t we?” I said gently. “I am a stranger on earth. As you are.”

  “What a curious thing to say!”

  We walked away from there, down the hill toward Piccadilly, through the old, deserted streets of the West End slope, and then through the little arch and down the flight of stairs behind the Hilton Hotel, and finally she said to me, “Breck—what has happened to you since we met?”

  “What has happened to you?”

  “I have fallen in love. Oh, my God, how I love you, Breck!”

  “Even if I don’t love you?”

  “I don’t even care when you say that, Breck.”

  “No?”

  “I
couldn’t love you if you didn’t love me, Breck.”

  “I have never loved anyone,” I said.

  “Isn’t there a beginning for everything, Breck? Who is born before he is born? You know, when my first baby began, he didn’t smile. Did you know that only man smiles? But then you wait for the baby to smile, and you have a feeling that God touched him at that moment—I mean with a soul.”

  “You believe in God?” I asked her.

  “Yes. Do you, Breck?”

  “No.”

  “Not at all, never?”

  “No. Not at all.”

  “How strange,” she said. “When you’re that way, Breck, it’s hard to live, isn’t it?”

  “I think it’s harder for you.”

  “For me? Oh, no, Breck—no.”

  “To live with a man you hate and despise.”

  “I don’t live with him. I live with myself.”

  I made no comment to that, and we walked along in silence in the cool, gentle London evening, with the lights of Piccadilly Circus in the distance reflected against the cloudy sky. We came there finally, not hurrying, and there was a crowd of the beautiful kids, the long-legged girls in their miniskirts and the boys in their Carnaby Street clothes and their youthful mustaches and their great heads of hair—and they eddied all around us, looking for someone or waiting for someone or just being; and we were invisible people for all they knew of us or saw of us, and one of the bobbies standing near them said, “There, there—don’t go shoving like that. All in good time, all in good time.” But what all was we never knew, and we walked on into Soho where the strippers sell a cheap excursion into voyeurism. We walked enclosed, and when I tried to understand that, I could only come to a feeling that we were invisible; we had come from elsewhere; we were alone in the whole world. It was like an agony where the pain is compounded out of an equal measure of grief and joy, and I tried to explain it to Patience.

  She said, “What a strange man you are, Breck. You’re in love and you don’t know what to make of it.”

  “I am not in love.”

  “I make no claims, no demands, Breck. I don’t ask you for marriage, and if you want to go away to the other end of the world tomorrow, that is all right, too, but it will break my heart. But that is my responsibility and my heart, not yours. So why does it disturb you so?”