Totally Killer

by Greg Olear

  (Lydia Murtomaki was spot-on about that; eighteen years later, the Queen is still alive and well, and Prince Charles is not getting any younger.)

  “Your generation, my dear, plays the same waiting game Prince Charles plays, on a much larger scale. Your parents and grandparents—my generation—hold the jobs you desire, the jobs that by all rights should be yours. And we are quite reluctant to pass along the torch. It’s not that you cannot find the good jobs. It’s that there are no good jobs to find—they’re all taken.”

  Lydia Murtomaki let that hang in the air with the cigarette smoke, until both drifted away. “Do you realize that in my day, college graduates were uniformly hopeful and idealistic? Cynicism, sarcasm, and bitterness are unique to your generation.”

  “I…I didn’t know that.” Taylor wanted to smoke another cigarette, but she didn’t have one. And her hands were trembling too much, anyway.

  “Now. These jobs that my contemporaries hold…what is the simplest way to make them available to you?”

  Taylor did not, could not, speak. By now, she’d figured out what was coming. She was a twisted enough cookie to get it. She didn’t want to believe it, but she knew.

  “What would Prince Charles do? If he were tired of waiting, and wanted to be king tomorrow?”

  “He’d lose that crazy wife of his, for one thing.”

  Charles and Diana were not separated until 1992, and did not divorce until four years later. In 1991, however, the apotheosis of Diana that her tragic death inspired was years away; the public perception of her was more crazed bitch-on-wheels than better-coifed Mother Teresa.

  But Lydia Murtomaki was not amused. “What would he do, Taylor?”

  “He would…you know…depose his mother.”

  “Yes. He would kill the Queen. And with your generation, as I said, it is no different, it is just on a larger scale. The simplest way—the only way—to make the baby boomers surrender their jobs is…”

  Both of them completed the sentence silently. Then Taylor completed it out loud: “To kill them?”

  “We call it ‘give them the pink slip.’ It’s much more pleasant, don’t you think?”

  In ninth grade, while climbing the rope in gym class, Taylor had had an accident. She was almost to the beam on which the rope was suspended, some twenty-five feet above the parquet floor, when the metal bolt snapped. Suddenly and without warning, she found herself falling, backward, toward the hardwood. She experienced the same sensation now, in the Director’s office—the lump in her throat seemed to fall, suddenly and without warning, dropping like a stone through her esophagus, her stomach, her intestines, down down down. So great was the sensation that she lost her balance, and almost fell backward in the chair.

  “Pink…slip?” Taylor’s heartbeat was as loud as the computer in her office, her fingernails imbedded in the armrests. Her voice came from far away, as if she were listening to someone else speak. “You’re talking about murder. C’mon, you can’t be serious.”

  Taylor waited for Lydia to crack a smile. For Asher to step out of the shadows in the corner of the office with Allen Funt and say she was on a remake of Candid Camera. For the fire alarm to go off. For the phone to ring, even. Anything to break the tense silence. But nothing did.

  Finally, Lydia Murtomaki spoke. “That’s absolutely what I’m talking about. Don’t be afraid, darling. We’ll take care of you. Asher will assist you in the operation.”

  The blood on his collar…could Asher have come from helping another recent college grad—Bryan, maybe—pull the trigger?

  “And I’m supposed to just smile and nod and play along?”

  “What interesting phraseology,” Lydia said. “Yes, my darling, you will smile and nod and play along—because you don’t have a choice.”

  “Sure I do. I could march to the police and tell them everything.”

  “Oh, I don’t think that’s a smart play. For one thing, they’d never believe you. For another, Asher would then kill you, your mother, your two half sisters, and the three people you’ve listed as references. I don’t think he’d enjoy that very much at all.”

  Personal rather than professional references. With names and addresses. What had she told Mae-Yuan? It was tough, but I managed to dig up three friends. The three friends being Kim Winter, Jason Hanson, and—gulp—me. Taylor imagined our corpses laid out in the hospital light of the Director’s office, under the grim watch of Man Ray’s crying eye. Meeting Lydia’s merciless gaze, it was not difficult to imagine.

  Taylor saw then that the giant eye was wide open because its owner had been surprised. Maybe it was an appropriate photograph, after all. Then she had another realization: in order for her job at Braithwaite Ross to have been listed—in order for her job to have been available—someone at BR must have contracted with Quid Pro Quo. And if so, someone had to be removed from the BR payroll to make room for Taylor. Which meant…

  “Oh my God,” Taylor said, putting two and two together. “You guys killed Walter Bledsoe!”

  “We didn’t kill him.” Lydia flicked her cigarette into a glass ashtray. “But the guy who did has one hell of a plum job, for a twenty-four-year-old.”

  “Holy shit. Holy…shit.”

  “Come on, Taylor. You think Walter Bledsoe deserved to make eighty grand a year, working three days a week, making passes at every cute girl who walked into his office? You really think so? The staff is happy, Nathan Ross is happy, Averell Ross is happy…and best of all, your pal Angie is the new editorial director. Who are we to deny the happiness of so many?”

  But Taylor missed most of Lydia’s speech. Fight-or-flight had kicked in, and she found herself, quite involuntarily, making a break for it. When she opened the heavy oak door, however, she found her escape route blocked by Asher Krug. Unable to get by him—he was seven or eight inches taller—she pounded her fists against his chiseled chest and began wailing uncontrollably, like a toddler denied a favorite toy.

  “Asher,” Lydia said over the sounds of her screams, “please escort Ms. Schmidt home.”

  Although the fall from the gym-class rope had been sudden and unexpected, Taylor was quick to accept her fate. Falling, she reasoned later, was a metaphor for her childhood. She was used to not being in control, and she knew from experience that it was better to surrender to the flow of things than to fight back. In the case of the fall from the rope, that acquiescence paid off. Somehow, she managed to land most of her body on a three-feet-thick gymnastics mat. The wind was knocked out of her, but that was all. She fell, but she picked herself up and kept going.

  Taylor was a survivor. She survived in high school, and she would survive now. She wouldn’t let a pesky little thing like morality get in the way.

  Whisking her into the Jaguar, Asher spoke in a kind, gentle voice that lacked its usual hubris—a phony, praticed voice. His business voice. Who knows how many Quid Pro Quo clients he’d spoken to in exactly the same tone? As they negotiated the traffic on the FDR (both hands on the wheel this time, no hanky-panky, no hint that they had hooked up two weeks ago), he explained the rationale behind making “civilians,” as he called them, do the pink slips—their complicity was necessary to ensure their silence. Who would dare blow the whistle on Quid Pro Quo with blood on his hands? Not that there would be blood, necessarily. He went over that, too, as he loosened and then tightened the knot on his Armani necktie. The hit would be as painless as possible, for assassin and victim. A traumatized client, he explained while passing a cab on Second Avenue, would be more likely to spill the beans. At most, she’d have to inject someone with something. Lethal injections were popular, because certain poisons caused heart attacks, and were undetectable even with an autopsy. The victims, he added, were the Walter Bledsoes of the world—assholes who were better off dead. As for the police, she had nothing to worry about. Taylor would not be caught—guaranteed. Quid Pro Quo operated under the auspices of the DIA. Whatever that was.

  “How are you?” he asked as they pulled in
front of the apartment—where a parking space magically awaited them, as usual. “I know it’s a lot to process.”

  Taylor, who had not said a word since they left the offices, replied with a shrug. It was a lot to process, and she hadn’t even begun. Nothing had really sunk in. The whole thing was so absurd it was funny. Kill someone to get a job? It was a plotline from a old noir movie, D.O.A. or Double Indemnity. And Asher? That was the funniest part of all. Since the day she met him, she’d been waiting for his fatal flaw to be exposed. And here it was. He didn’t live with his mother. He wasn’t a divorcé. He didn’t have hygiene problems. He wasn’t gay, wasn’t impotent, wasn’t HIV positive. No—the problem with him was that he was a professional hit man! That was absurd. It was beyond absurd. It was the sort of cruel twist of fate that could only happen to Taylor Schmidt (or so she wrote in her diary; I know firsthand that cruel twists of fate happen to other people, too). And so, in the passenger seat of Asher’s Jaguar outside our apartment, she had a laughing fit the likes of which she had never before experienced. It was like her body had been taken over by some cacodemonic hyena. She laughed and laughed and laughed, unable to stop herself, like a battery-powered toy on the blink.

  “Is something funny?” Asher asked. He seemed confused—he’d obviously never seen that kind of reaction before.

  “You are,” she said, as the peals of laughter finally died down.

  And when they did, all thought of Quid Pro Quo and Lydia Murtomaki and pink slips vanished from her mind. It was like the laughter had cleansed her system. All she cared about afterwards, with Asher so deliciously close and so predisposed to making her happy—it was practically in his job description to fuck her, if it meant getting her to do the pink slip—was that she was in a terrible dry spell, and Asher Krug was like a cold front blowing in. Let it rain, baby! This was her MO, always had been. When things got out of control, Taylor defaulted to sex.

  “If you say so.”

  “Whatever.” She wanted the full Asher Krug treatment. The hard sell. And she smelled opportunity in his Drakkar Noir. “Just take me inside.”

  Asher, unaware that Taylor had moved past the pink slip business, kept up the chatter. “It’s right there in the Bible: thou shalt not kill. Exodus 20:13. It’s the Sixth Fucking Commandment, etched in stone, no ifs-ands-or-buts about it.”

  They were in the living room/kitchen of our apartment now. Asher leaned against the sink, twirling his car keys around his index finger. He looked out of place there, like a hippopotamus would have; he filled the space too completely.

  “You know what else it says in the Bible? That women who wear men’s clothes—and vice versa—should be stoned to death. Now, if Lady Bunny were strolling through Williamsburg, would the Hasidim be throwing rocks? Of course not. No one believes in the cross-dressing law anymore; it’s outdated.”

  He opened the refrigerator and grabbed a bottle of Rolling Rock. Of my Rolling Rock. In all likelihood, the first domestic beer he’d ever tasted.

  “You mind?”

  Without waiting for a reply, he popped the top, took a big gulp, made a face, and went on.

  “The Bible also says thou shalt not commit adultery. And by adultery, they don’t mean a married man boffing his secretary, or a married woman boffing hers. According to Exodus, any sexual contact prior to marriage is adultery. You could hook up with a guy, go on to marry him, and it’d still be adultery.”

  Taylor thought of her list, and the seventy-plus men it contained, and, in spite of herself, suppressed a smile. Old-fashioned Asher would have been aghast if he knew how experienced she was. I sometimes wonder if he ever found out.

  “According to the Bible,” he went on, “it’s the same crime—adultery—punishable by death. And yet, no one is demanding your life because you gave your high school sweetheart a hand job. How come? The definition of adultery has changed, and along with it, the punishment. The Biblical version is outmoded.”

  As Asher took a few steps toward Taylor, the cat darted across the floor and hid under the sofa. He watched Bo run, wrinkled his brow, shook his head, and rested his beer on the table. “It also says in the Bible—and it says this right at the beginning, so it must be important—that women are inferior to men and are put on earth to serve them. Come on, now. Even macho guys don’t believe that anymore. They might like the idea, but they don’t believe a word of it. The concept of male superiority is outmoded.”

  Asher pulled out the other chair and sat across from Taylor.

  “It’s the same thing with murder, with thou shalt not kill. The concept has run its course. It’s just that people have a harder time violating that rule, because we’ve been conditioned to believe that killing someone is immoral. And it’s a question of morality, really—of personal morality. Because Quid Pro Quo operates above the law. The question is, what do you believe? Talk to inmates doing time for murder; they’ll tell you. They don’t feel guilty about doing the crime. They feel regret about doing the time. About getting caught. Big difference. Guilt is a conditioned response, a way we’re taught to react to quote-unquote bad behavior. It’s the province of the unenlightened. The meek. Who, the Bible also tells us, shall inherit the earth. Yeah, right.”

  Not to interrupt Asher’s argument, but personally, I’m down with the Sixth Commandment—but I’m in the minority. Killing is an expression of raw power, and raw power, ugly through it may be, is of primary societal value. In classical literature, mighty warriors win laurels and, thus, girls. Achilles had no problems getting laid. In these so-called enlightened times, the act of killing is subtler, more sublimated—metaphorical, sometimes—but killing just the same. Who are the most esteemed men nowadays? Athletes, who excel in games that simulate killing, and actors, who star in movies that glamorize killing. In 1991, the three biggest box office stars were Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, and Bruce Willis—action heroes all, tough guys brandishing heavy weapons. Clearly killing resonates with people.

  But athletes and actors are just symbols. Asher traded in real power. What act is more powerful than taking someone’s life? At that moment, Taylor’s attraction to Asher Krug was at its peak. She saw him as power personified. He was like Zeus, revealing himself to Semele. And like Semele, Taylor burned for him.

  Her eyes drifted from his to the beer, which she raised to her lips and chugged. Then she stood up and walked in the direction the cat had gone. “So it’s a matter of refining my definition of morality?”

  Asher looked up, startled. These were the first words she’d said in almost half an hour, since her laughing fit in the car. She seemed more relaxed now, composed—maybe a bit intrigued by his deranged ethics lesson.

  “Exactly.” He followed her. When he neared, Bo scurried from under the sofa back into the kitchen area. Smart cat, Bo.

  The backs of Taylor’s knees were now touching the sofa. Asher was next-person-in-line-at-the-ATM distance away, facing her.

  She took a step forward. He did not move. “You know what I think?” she said.

  “Tell me.”

  Her eyelids fluttered, her tongue artfully gliding along her upper lip. “I think if you’re going to make me a killer, you’d better start by making me an adulteress.”

  Taylor snatched his tie, pulling him closer. She made a fist around the Windsor knot, for leverage, and pounced. Her tongue tickled his teeth, her fingers fondled his ass. Asher recoiled, but could not break free. She sucked his lower lip into her mouth and bit down hard. It was just like what he had done to her in the Rainbow Room elevator—except that she drew blood. He cried out, her hands tightened their respective hold on necktie and buttock, she lurched backward, and the two of them toppled onto the sofa.

  “Wait,” he said, breaking away from her. His stare was intense, mad.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Birth control.”

  “I’m on the pill,” she said. “Relax.”

  And relax he did, even though she’d had more sexual partners o
ver the years than Menudo had members, and in 1991, people still thought AIDS could be transmitted by teardrops. (Later that year, Magic Johnson would come down with HIV, and Freddie Mercury would die from its complications.)

  “Are you going to talk all day, Mr. Krug, or are you gonna fuck me?”

  Traditionalist or not, Asher opted for the latter. They fucked, right there on my torn red vinyl sofa. And how was it?

  “Best X ever,” Taylor wrote in her diary the next day.

  It wasn’t like Asher did anything out of the ordinary; on the contrary, he wasn’t remotely kinky, never deviating from the missionary position. And the length and breadth of his manhood, while porn-worthy, is not what made her feel shiny and new. It was how he made love that was unprecedented. When Taylor was in high school, she was having sex with gawky high school kids. By the time she got to college, she was so experienced that her subsequent lovers generally succumbed to her way of doing things. She was almost always on top, the better to impose her will on her partner. When a guy did attempt to assume control, it usually came off like Frankenstein trying to lead Ginger Rogers on the dance floor. Asher, alone among her seventy-some-odd lovers, took her, in the bodice-ripping romance-novel style. He made her feel touched for the very first time. That he was able to go back-to-back-to-back—and that he lasted a good half hour each time—didn’t hurt. Suffice it to say, after exactly forty days—apropos, given Asher’s Old Testament lecture—Taylor’s dry spell was no more.

  As for the pink slip, she would treat it just as she had the fall from the rope back in high school—she’d deal with it when it happened, and she’d do whatever she had to do to survive.

  PART II

  Cold Ethyl