Pest Control

by Bill Fitzhugh

  These people worked for governments and, occasionally, for absurdly wealthy members of the private sector. They lived in a small world and were keenly aware of their rankings on the charts, not unlike professional tennis players. One’s fees was often negotiated based on one’s current standings.

  Klaus had been ranked number one for many years, handling even the most difficult assignments with aplomb. He had killed in twenty-seven countries, in both hemispheres, bypassing with minimal effort even the most elaborate security precautions. But Klaus was by no means a mercenary in the pure sense of the word. He did not accept every job he was offered; he was choosy, and he rigorously applied the same criterion to each offer. No amount of money could sway him from this.

  Klaus’ features leaned toward the Mediterranean. He was GQ handsome and somewhere in his fifties. His dove-grey eyes were warm and sad, not at all what people normally thought of as killer’s eyes. His dark hair was sifted with grey and neatly styled.

  Klaus’ current job had brought him to one of those volatile African nations that confounded cartographers by changing names several times every few years. He was about to execute another contract.

  The towering Nigerian had not been consulted on this matter for two reasons. One, assassins typically did not like to kill on the same continent on which they lived. The second, and more utilitarian reason was that the employers in this matter simply did not want to screw around with second best.

  Klaus passed unnoticed through a doorway into a tall building on a street just off the parade route. Once inside, he slipped unseen through another door which led to some stairs. He quickly climbed the steps of the cool, dark stairwell still carrying in his right hand the small well-worn suitcase covered in a nondescript brown fabric. At the top of the stairwell, sunlight outlined a doorway which opened onto a roof. Klaus stopped at the door’s sunlit perimeter, pulled a silenced handgun from his waistband, checked it, then calmly opened the door and eased into the damaging ultraviolet rays.

  He scanned the roof and spotted a lone member of the military police positioned near the roof’s edge smoking a cigarette, an old Soviet-made rifle slung uselessly on his shoulder. Troublesome, Klaus thought, but no problem. He slipped behind a bulky imported Eastern-Bloc air-conditioning duct, intentionally banging his suitcase on the dull metal to get the guard’s attention.

  The guard turned toward the sound and half-heartedly readied his old Soviet weapon. He figured some children had come onto the roof for a better view of the parade below. Just the same, he went to check it out.

  He rounded the corner to Klaus’ hiding place—Fwump! Fwump! Two silenced shots entered him from behind—one in the head, the other just right-of-center between the shoulder blades. Kill shots. Extremely professional.

  The guard wobbled for a moment, a look of “Shit, I should have looked behind me” in his eyes. As he wobbled, Klaus snatched the maroon beret from the guard’s head, then stepped aside as the guard crumpled limp to the ground, the burning cigarette still stuck to his dead lips.

  “Sorry,” Klaus said, and he meant it. Klaus didn’t like to kill anyone who did not, in his estimation, deserve to die. But in matters of self-preservation, he was willing to make exceptions. That’s the kind of guy Klaus was. “Besides,” he reasoned aloud, “the cigarettes would have killed you anyway.”

  Klaus adjusted the purloined beret on his head, then checked the solid gold Piaget on his wrist. “Three minutes,” he remarked to the demised guard. “At least the parades run on time.”

  He went to where the guard had been stationed and crouched behind the short wall at the roof’s edge. He opened the small brown suitcase revealing the disassembled components of a Steyr AUG .223, fitted snugly into the black foam rubber which had been tailored for the job.

  With practiced, almost mechanical, movements Klaus slipped the slender barrel into the action of the exotic rifle, then screwed a silencer onto the barrel and attached an Aimpoint telescopic laser sight on top. Next he snapped on the stock and slammed home an ammo clip.

  Then, without any warning, the depression hit again. These bouts of despair had been plaguing him more and more frequently, and lately Klaus had even considered turning the gun on himself. And why not? His life had become little more than an endless loop of bad Mission Impossible episodes, one hackneyed assassination scene following another. He half expected to come home one day to find Peter Graves waiting for him in the kitchen with one of those self-destructing mini-cassette tapes, Martin Landau in the bathroom putting on a silly disguise. Words failed to describe how much Klaus hated what his life had become.

  He closed his eyes and cursed. Sometimes he wished he had simply gone into law or accounting.

  Then, just like other such moments before, the moment passed as quickly as it had come. Klaus sighed and resumed his task.

  In the streets below, thousands of natives lined the parade route chanting in Bantu while waving photos of their despotic leader alongside placards painted with catchy Bantu phrases produced by the despot’s P.R. department.

  His name was Ooganda Namidii and it was rumored that he was suffering from a deluxe case of tertiary syphilis—once considered the Rolls Royce of venereal diseases. The infection was gnawing away at his brain stem and frequently led to bouts of irritability. Recently, for example, Namidii had enacted an ethnic cleansing policy that was particularly undiscriminating—most likely because he didn’t really know what ethnic cleansing meant. He had heard the phrase on a CNN story about the Bosnian Serbs and thought it sounded like a good idea. The next day, in a fit of pique caused by a searing pain in his urinary tract, Namidii had executed several hundred of his wretched countrymen.

  The majority of the population lived in abject poverty due to Namidii’s fiscal policies, which in the 1980’s had consisted primarily of looting the treasury and investing with American financial wizards like Michael Milken and Charles Keating. Most of those who had gathered for this parade earned the equivalent of about 63 U.S. dollars each year, and that didn’t go far in a country whose annual rate of inflation had recently reached 82 percent. The citizens had been reduced to eating grasshoppers, beetle grubs, and termites in order to maintain adequate protein levels in their diets.

  An uninformed observer might have asked why these people were lined up four deep to cheer for this corrupt madman. The answer was simple. They were here because although they despised this tyrant, by god, he was their tyrant and he was the only thing they could call their own.

  That, plus they were giving away falafel.

  But all that was about to come to an abrupt end. While Namidii sat comfortably in the back seat of the shiny black Lincoln Continental convertible, waving like a fat high-school homecoming queen, he was also sitting squarely in Klaus’ crosshairs, about to become another bloody splotch in history. There was no doubt in Klaus’ mind that this avaricious psychopath deserved to die. That was Klaus’ only criterion—that his victim deserved to die.

  His finger tensed on the trigger, waiting for the perfect moment. The red dot from the laser sight found a home on Namidii’s ear. And then, cloaked by the noise of the zealous crowd, the gun fired and the tyrant’s reign ended amid blood and confusion.

  Chapter Three

  As he waited on the Union Street platform, Bob’s mood alternated between euphoria and dread. On the one hand, he felt an exhilarating rush now that he had begun to pursue his dream. On the other hand, he had started to worry about how Mary would take the news, especially in light of their fiscal situation.

  The grimy silver train slouched into the station and threw open its doors like a giant drooling idiot, spilling chewed-up New Yorkers onto the platform. Bob climbed aboard and plopped into the open seat at the front of the car.

  He glanced up at the various advertisements overhead which seemed invariably aimed at the city’s less fortunate. The ad for a Multi-Cultural
Torn Earlobe Repair Clinic immediately seized his attention. But just as a grim image of what that waiting room must look like began to form in his mind, the train lurched into the darkness that lay ahead and jolted Bob’s mind back to his current predicament.

  Mary had recently lost her job as a senior loan officer after the Savings and Loan where she worked for three years was found belly-up on the fouled shores of the Hudson River. The current job market being what it was, Mary had been reduced to waiting tables in a coffee shop. Understandably, she was not always in a good mood these days. The fact that they were falling behind on rent and a few of the utilities didn’t help matters. Given that, Bob was going to need every minute of the long train ride home to figure out to how he was going to make Mary see that the timing was just right for him to make his move.

  At Court Street, transfers from the 3, 5, and M trains clambered into the car for the ride over to Manhattan. Among the crowd were five identical dark suits, obviously headed for a fun-filled afternoon of arbitrage and self-actualization in the happy streets of the financial district.

  Then there was the young woman who sat down directly across from Bob and buried her pierced nose in a biology textbook. He imagined she was headed for NYU.

  Except for the pierced nose, the tattoo, and the perky breasts, the young student reminded Bob of himself and his days at Brooklyn College where he met Mary.

  Bob was majoring in entomology and was still trying to find a hair style that worked for him. Mary was working on a business degree with a hopeful eye on a career in finance. Her long auburn hair framed the round-cheeked face of the former high school cheerleader and Sophomore Maid of Honor runner-up that she was.

  On the day they met, Bob had attended a lecture by Bernice Lifton on the History of Pesticides. The way Ms. Lifton told it, modern pesticide use began in 1867 when a mixture of copper and arsenic was used to halt the Colorado Potato Beetle’s (Leptinotarsa decemlineata) destruction of the U.S. potato crop.

  Bob hung on every word as Ms. Lifton noted with no small hint of dread that as early as 1912, scientists had begun seeing insect resistance to chemical pesticides. Bob nodded in solemn recognition of a fact he already knew, a fact that eventually was to form one of the cornerstones of his idea.

  As Bob saw it, the remainder of Ms. Lifton’s oration was a brilliantly organized argument chronicling the truth, and the truth was that since 1912 mankind had been hurtling pell-mell downhill toward its own gruesome, inorganic death in a vain attempt to control insects chemically.

  After the lecture, Bob had been crossing the quad when he heard the screams.

  “Cortlandt Street!” The train’s disembodied voice again intruded into Bob’s reverie. He looked around and noticed the five suits had been replaced with SoHo and Village types migrating up Broadway as they did each day at this time.

  As the train pitched forward, Bob returned to that moment many years ago when he was crossing campus, unaware that he was about to meet his future wife.

  At about the same time Bob had left Ms. Lifton’s lecture, Mary had left the Business Administration Building. She was wearing a conservative, navy blue business suit, attempting, as many women did in the 1980’s, to look more manly.

  Mary had just finished making a presentation to her marketing class and her arms were loaded with the materials she had used—graphs, charts, and a mock-up point-of-purchase display for the laxative she had been assigned as her product.

  She was hurrying to catch the Lexington Avenue Express when several Apis mellifera apparently mistook her perfume for a sex attractant pheromone and began to swarm. Her arms loaded with cargo she felt was too precious to drop, Mary began to run in a panicked and irregular circle.

  Seeing the woman in distress, Bob dashed to the rescue and swatted two bees out of mid-air where they quickly died under his feet. The others fled the scene. Unstung and grateful, Mary accepted his invitation for coffee.

  She was married when they first met, soon to be divorced, or so she said as she sipped her espresso. None of that was true though, it was just something Mary told guys to keep them in line while they hit on her. At the same time it made her unavailable, which, paradoxically, made her more attractive to would-be suitors. Bob would later compare this odd principle of human courtship to some of the more bizarre insect mating rituals.

  From the moment Bob saw Mary, he was smitten—perhaps her perfume had worked on him as it had on the bees. Regardless, Bob believed it was more than mere coincidence that he was at the right place at the right time to deliver this beautiful woman from the evil stinging insects. And although he didn’t put any stock in predestination, Bob felt this beautiful woman was destined to be his wife. Or at least destined to go to bed with him.

  He pursued Mary rigorously for months. Asking her out, phoning regularly, and sometimes writing lengthy letters, full of longing, professing his love. He even wrote her the occasional poem—poems which were what really helped cinch Mary’s heart.

  Mary could still remember the first poem Bob sent her. He had written it on the back of an exam from a class he was taking on moths (Heterocera 101). Bob, with his 3.8 GPA, had aced the test, missing only one question, hence the poem:

  It was just a test, a test was all it was,

  I studied so hard to prepare.

  But ‘twas not about beetles or bees that go buzz,

  Thus, not so well did I fare.

  I confused a small moth with one pair of wings

  with another small moth which has two.

  I’m not always sure about these things,

  but I am sure I love you.

  Bob later admitted to borrowing some of the structure from a verse about camels written by his favorite poet, Ogden Nash.

  Mary had kept every letter and poem Bob wrote her; they were locked in a trunk in the attic of her mother’s house upstate.

  During all of their subsequent dates, Bob would somehow turn the conversation to insects. He spoke with great enthusiasm and conviction about his plan to create a new, environmentally sensitive way to control pests. Mary was charmed by this guy with the nutty-professor hairdo and the matching dream, even if he did plagiarize his poem structure. They dated through their remaining year in college before getting married. A year later they had Katy.

  At Canal Street, transfers from the Four, Six, and J trains squeezed onto Bob’s car. Several Chinese immigrants cast wary eyes at a pair of turbaned Pakistani businessmen while an Iranian couple reluctantly shared their stretch of bench with a black man, his white girlfriend, and a young Vietnamese boy. With the United Nations thusly seated, the train plunged forward carrying Bob up Broadway and down memory lane simultaneously.

  In the decade after Katy was born, Mary began working her way up the ladder toward the glass ceiling while Bob toiled off and on as a high school biology teacher as well as for various pest control outfits, all the while pursuing his dream of creating an all-natural pest control method.

  As for Mary, the closest thing she had to a dream was a desire to maintain a good credit rating. That wasn’t to say she didn’t appreciate the beauty and intensity of Bob’s aspirations, but she was practical.

  At Eighth Street the NYU student bounded off the train and was replaced by a bearded lunatic wearing a fatigue jacket. It was an unkept secret that this guy was twisted as a door knob.

  The man fixed Bob with a stare and shouted, “Don’t ya tell Henry! I’m going to Acapulco!” He then dashed into the next car. The madman’s frightening glare had unsettled Bob, so he kept a vigilant eye on the door as the train wormed its way toward midtown, past Union Square, Twenty-Third, Twenty-Eighth, and Thirty-Fourth Streets. Bob was relieved when the lunatic finally got off at Times Square and begin menacing someone on the platform.

  Only five more stops to figure out how to convince Mary that, despite appearances to the contrary
, this was the perfect time to start his business. Perhaps telling her about his newly acquired batch of Thread-Legged Bugs (Emesa brevicoxa) would do the trick.

  The Thread-Legged Bugs had a body-type unlike all the other Assassin Bugs that were part of Bob’s experiment. They had long slender bodies with a prothorax that was not distinctly separated from their mesothorax. To the untrained eye they looked exactly like harmless stick insects, but in fact they were just as deadly as anything Bob was working with.

  The Thread-legged Bug crept along like the Grim Reaper, its long, bony, but surprisingly strong legs extracted cringing victims from the crevices where they hid, thereby collecting, as Laurence Sterne put it, the tribute due unto nature. With its greatly elongated coxa and macabre spined femur, the Thread-Legged Bug fearlessly assaulted and consumed other insects in addition to several species of spiders.

  Bob hoped this would impress Mary. But even if it did, it seemed unlikely she would see it as the critical piece of evidence needed to convince her the time was right for Bob to start his All-Natural Pest Control business. But what could he tell her that she didn’t already know?

  “Lexington Avenue!”

  She knew Bob’s idea had tremendous potential. This made the score one-to-nothing in Bob’s favor.

  But Mary knew Bob hadn’t perfected his method, so that mitigated against. Score tied at one.

  “Queensboro Plaza, transfer to the Seven!”

  Still, she had sworn eternal support, for better or worse, richer or poorer, ‘til death do you part, and all that. Two-to-one, Bob’s favor.

  “Beebe Avenue!”

  But Bob knew it was easier to support an abstract notion than to get behind the thing when it came time to implement it. That tied things up at two.