Totally Killer

by Greg Olear

  “Delilah. I like that.”

  Lydia ignored the comment. “The Yale Club is located at 50 Vanderbilt Avenue. That’s between Forty-fourth and Forty-fifth Streets, across from Grand Central. At exactly eight o’clock this Friday evening, you’ll meet your handler at the club’s main bar, on the second floor. His name is Dan. Do what he says.”

  “Please tell me,” Taylor said, “that the pink slip went to Yale. You have no idea how tired I am of all things New Haven.” Then her heart went out like the cable during a thunderstorm. “You didn’t go there, did you?”

  “Edmund Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, Class of ’68,” Lydia said. “The Ivy League is for wankers.” She poked the Strand bag with her foot, to change the subject. “There’s a photograph of the pink slip in the dossier. His name is Jan, codename Little Check. Not the handsomest chap, but very charming. He has profligate tastes, which you’re to indulge.”

  “Understood.”

  “When you’re through with the dossier, burn it.”

  That sounded like something one did with a dossier when one was through with it.

  “You’re not to tell anyone where you’re going—especially Asher.”

  Taylor nodded. “What should I tell him? I have to tell him something.”

  “No you won’t. He’s leaving for Tenerife first thing in the morning. Special assignment.” Some pigeons approached the bench. Lydia fed them crumbs of bread from her coat pocket, fully realizing the crazy-old-lady-in-the-park persona. “Any questions?”

  Taylor did not ask where Tenerife was, although she had never heard of it, or what Asher might be doing there. She didn’t care. She had but one question. “If this goes well, will you hire me?”

  Lydia took off her dark glasses and turned to face Taylor. For the first and only time, their eyes met. “There are no permanent openings at this time.”

  “And if something were to open up?”

  It was at this moment, with the momentous question still unanswered, that Yours Truly, bounding across Union Square, noticed Taylor sitting on a park bench. I hadn’t seen her in almost a week, since we watched Heathers. The older woman in a Yankees cap and Jackie O shades sitting next to her on the bench—one of those New York stereotypes whose impression doesn’t even register—vanished as I drew near. Never in a million years would I have imagined that in two short hours, I would be sitting across a desk from her, fearing for my life.

  “Taylor? Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”

  “I’m playing hooky,” she said. “You busted me.”

  “The Strand,” I said, pointing to her bag. “What’d you buy? Anything good?”

  Taylor cradled the bag, so I couldn’t see the contents. “Stuff for work.” She seemed awfully keyed up.

  “Hey, are you free this weekend, by any chance? This chick from my acting class is in Prom Queens Unchained, over at the Village Gate, so I scored some comp tickets. She’s playing Carla Zlotz, the beatnik. It’s kind of a big part, if you wanna, you know, come with.”

  “I’d love to,” she said, “but I can’t. I’m actually going home this weekend.”

  “Home home?”

  “It’s Hayley’s birthday,” she said, Hayley being one of her half sisters.

  Before I could press—she hadn’t mentioned going home, which was odd; a Darla visit would usually come up in conversation—she said, “I gotta get back before somebody notices I’m gone.”

  “Have a safe trip.”

  Little did I know that Taylor was not going to Missouri to celebrate a birth, but to midtown, to orchestrate a death.

  CHAPTER 18

  W

  hile I trusted that Quid Pro Quo would make good on its commitment to me, I continued to seek employment elsewhere. Despite Asher’s claims to the contrary, I was no slacker, and with Taylor pretty much moved out, I had the rent to worry about. Not wanting to try my own hand at other employment agencies, I took a job catering—par for the struggling-actor course. I worked a handful of events, including what would be my last—Marla Maples’s birthday party (she turned twenty-eight on October 27). The catering company let me go after I spilled a gin-and-tonic on Tone-Lōc. On the early afternoon of my follow-up with Quid Pro Quo—an hour before I bumped into Taylor in Union Square—I ran into Trey Parrish, our meathead downstairs neighbor. He was at one of the outdoor tables at Veselka, working on a cup of coffee. He was wearing his Delaware Lacrosse cap, as usual—I don’t think I ever saw him take it off—and a Van Halen sweatshirt.

  “Hey, Hot Toddie,” he called. Trey and his nicknames.

  “What up, big guy?”

  A mistake, asking him that. The guy had no sense of idiom. He monologued for a good ten minutes about The Orlando Conference: Part Deux. Then he asked me if I had seen the game.

  I hadn’t. I’d spent all night reading Taylor’s diaries.

  “I know Twins-Braves ain’t a sexy matchup here, but I’m from St. Paul, and let me tell you…”

  And tell me he did, every last detail of the 1–0 game—the 126-pitch, ten-inning Jack Morris shutout, the 3-for-5 evening for Dan Gladden, the bloop hit by Gene Larkin to win it in the bottom of the tenth. Only at the tail end, when I was about to spontaneously combust out of sheer boredom, did he ask, “So, you seen Taylor lately?”

  “Not since last week. She’s been at her boyfriend’s a lot.”

  “Asher Krug,” he said. “AK-47.”

  “Uh…right.” I was a bit surprised he knew Asher’s name, but I assumed—wrongly, as it turned out—that he’d heard it from Taylor.

  “I wouldn’t worry about him,” Trey said. “I have a hunch that won’t last.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  “I usually am,” he said, through a mouthful of eggs. “I’m good with hunches.”

  As I stepped off the elevator into the hallway outside the Quid Pro Quo offices, I was practically stampeded by a herd of buffalo-sized men in gray suits and mirrored aviator shades. One of them was on a cordless phone, issuing commands (this was before dime-bag-sized cell phones, when portable telephones were big as a shoe box). He noticed me, growled, and ordered the tallest of the well-tailored giants to shoo me away.

  As they passed, I saw, in their midst, a shorter, squatter, older man; his balding head was scaly, and he spoke out of one side of his mouth, like the Penguin on the old Batman show. By the time I placed him, though, they were already in the elevator, the doors sliding shut.

  “Holy shit,” I said out loud, although no one was there to hear me. “That was the Secretary of Defense.”

  For a moment I thought about submitting this unusual celebrity sighting to the Metropolitan Diary, but I couldn’t think of a good way to frame it. Nothing had happened, after all. Who cares if I saw the Secretary of Defense? Did anyone even know who the Secretary of Defense was? So, forgetting about my brush with greatness, I went inside, where Asher and the stony owl were waiting.

  Mae-Yuan took my coat and showed me to Asher’s office. Mr. Krug was in, rifling through some files on his desk. He peeked up from a stack of documents and glowered; I had disregarded his sartorial advice. “Still with the flannel, I see.”

  “I figure it’s not an office job, so…”

  “Forget it. Have a seat.”

  I sat, and he slid across his desk a manila folder marked VIACOM.

  Dispensing with small talk, Asher got right to the point. “MTV is working on a new show, Todd. Something completely different. Revolutionary, they think. They’ve rented this loft space in Soho, and for three months, they’re going to have seven complete strangers live there. Cameras will be rolling round-the-clock, to record all of the drama.”

  I thumbed through the pages in the folder. “What’s this, the script?”

  “There is no script.”

  “No script?”

  “The producers are betting that enough will happen in those three months to fill thirteen episodes. It’s all in the editing, is what they tell us
.”

  My first thought was, that’s the stupidest idea ever pitched. Who would watch a TV show that had no script? It would be incredibly dull. But I played along. “Sounds interesting.”

  I opened the folder. There was a picture of the industrial building where the show would take place, a list of six other cast members—Eric Nies, Heather Gardner, Julie Gentry, Kevin Powell, Becky Blasband, and Norman Korpi—and, finally, this:

  This is the true story of seven strangers, picked to live in a house, work together, and have their lives taped, to find out what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real. The Real World.

  “The Real World?”

  “That’s what they’re calling it. It’s the next thing in programming—‘reality’ television. Real people living real life, in real situations. No bullshit. You’ll be in on the ground floor. If you score with this show, Todd, you’ll be bigger than the Sheen brothers.”

  Such was the seductive power of Asher Krug that anything he proposed—even an idea as ridiculous as this one—seemed a sure thing. Visions of celebrity danced in my head. “You think so?”

  “You’re going to be famous, Todd. Above-the-title famous.”

  Was he selling me on the job? Perhaps. Then again, MTV was cutting-edge. Everything that little astronaut dude touched, it seemed, turned to gold. How could the network that spent months promoting a contest whose grand prize was a pink house in John Cougar Mellencamp’s Indiana hometown steer me wrong?

  “The only drawback is, it doesn’t start shooting until February.” Asher tossed a fat envelope into my lap. “That should keep you in the black till then.”

  I opened the envelope, where twenty Benjamin Franklins winked at me. Two grand. Holy shit.

  “Are you in?”

  “I’m in. I’m definitely in.”

  “Then let’s go see the Director.”

  And I followed him into the office next door, where Lydia Murtomaki—without her Yankees cap and Jackie O sunglasses I did not recognize her from Union Square—sat under her giant glass-teared eye, waiting for me.

  The Director chewed on her onyx cigarette holder, blowing smoke rings, and told me what she’d told Taylor: about the economy, about the baby boomers, about Prince Charles. She knew what to say, what buttons to push. She had it down to a science. Her job was intimidation, and she was damn good at her job. She was middle-aged and a twig—a few hours ago I ignored her on the park bench as if she were a homeless person—and I could have crushed her to death with my bare hands. But she scared me.

  “Your generation, Mr. Lander, 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 of so-called…slackers.”

  I didn’t say anything. I had no idea where this was heading—I was still clueless, believe it or not—but somehow I knew it wouldn’t end well.

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

  “The simplest way? Just fire everybody.”

  “Not fire. You’d glut the applicant pool, and they’d get hired elsewhere. No, they need to be removed from the workforce. Permanently.”

  For the first time, a sense of danger overwhelmed me. I remembered seeing the secretary of defense in the hallway, with his phalanx of guards. Was it possible that I might not leave 520 Madison alive? I glanced at the windows, to see if they were the kind that open—I considered rushing and jumping out—but they were sealed shut.

  “The simplest way to remove them,” Lydia said, “is to kill them off. Any questions?”

  But before I could ask one, she hit the intercom button, and Taylor’s boyfriend appeared in the door. “Mr. Krug will assist you in the operation.”

  Asher dropped a Spanish olive the size of a strawberry into a martini glass the size of a fishbowl. Gin and vermouth splashed onto the bar-stand. He dabbed the wet spots with a linen napkin, lifted the glass, and handed it to the other occupant of his office, who was quite in need of a drink.

  I had not said a word since leaving Lydia Murtomaki’s office—had, in fact, hardly moved. When I saw my reflection in the glass frame of the Lee Atwater photo, my face was sheet-white, my eyes pale. I looked like a prop from a horror movie.

  “After you sleep on it,” Asher was saying, “think about it a little, you’ll see. It’s not as awful as it sounds.”

  I made a fist around the linen. “Not as awful as it sounds? Not as…we are still talking about murder, aren’t we? Or did you change the subject on me?”

  Asher leaned against the desk, his face a study in tranquility. “No. I didn’t change the subject.”

  “Then let me make sure I have this right. The only way I can get an acting gig is by—and please correct me if I’m wrong—is by bumping somebody off? You’re so right, Asher. That’s not awful. That’s just fucking peachy.”

  “We didn’t create the game, Todd. We’re just playing the cards that were dealt to us.”

  “This is crazy. You’re crazy. You and Wednesday Fucking Addams in there.”

  “Keep your voice down.” Asher glanced at the wall that separated the two offices. He appeared genuinely concerned that Lydia Murtomaki might be listening.

  “Oh, and what if I don’t? What are you gonna do, kill me, too?” I tapped with napkined fist the invisible bull’s-eye over my heart. “Go right ahead. Saves you the trouble of pink-slipping me later, doesn’t it?”

  “We would never terminate someone who used our service,” he said, without a hint of irony. “It’s company policy.”

  “Oh, what a relief. Job security. But what if some competitor arrived on the scene? I could hardly imagine a price war.”

  “I don’t think we have to worry about that. We’ve pretty much cornered the market.”

  The wailing of sirens interrupted the conversation. An ambulance, a cop car, a fire engine, or some combination thereof was zooming down Madison Avenue. Asher glanced out the window, although from his vantage point he could not see the street.

  “I can’t do it,” I said. “I’m sorry, but I can’t.”

  “That’s too bad.” He was by the window now, peering onto the street. “You do realize that if you refuse, we’ll pink-slip your mother, your father, and the three people you listed as references? I want to make sure we’re clear on that.”

  The magnitude of this threat stunned me speechless. The papers I turned in: three references—personal, not professional. They had me, all right…except…

  “But, Asher…Taylor is one of my references.”

  “And you’re one of hers. And you’re still alive. She killed for your sake, Todd. Won’t you kill for hers?”

  I launched the oversized martini against the wall. Glass shattered, and gin splattered on the clean white paint. “How could you put me in this position? How could you ask me to make that choice?”

  “We’re here to help you,” Asher said calmly, changing tack, ignoring my infantile gesture, “not hurt you. Politicians are always flapping their yaps about creating jobs, but what jobs have they created? Who do they help employ? They’re about double-talk and bullshit statistics. We’re about results. We create hundreds of new jobs a year, terminating baby boomers who are—let’s face it—better off terminated.”

  Asher placed the glass on the coffee table, sat in the chair nearest mine, and crossed his legs casually, as if he were on a cruise or something. “You don’t have to read Nietzsche and Ayn Rand to know that some people just don’t deserve to live.”

  �
��Who, Asher? Riddle me that. Who doesn’t deserve to live?”

  Without missing a beat: “Charles Manson. Richard Speck. Saddam Hussein. Yasser Arafat. Fidel Castro. Idi Amin. I could go on all day. Mike Tyson.” The former heavyweight champion had recently been booked for raping Desiree Washington. “The Lockerbie terrorists. Muammar…”

  “Dictators and psychopaths don’t count. Ordinary people.”

  “I suppose CEOs who lay off their factory workers because it’s cheaper to use foreign slave labor, I suppose they don’t count as ordinary? What about lawyers who make a living chasing ambulances? How about drug dealers? Rapists? Slumlords? Can you honestly tell me you want every real estate broker in this town to live to a ripe old age?”

  I didn’t say anything. I was still in shock. My body started to tremble. I was on the verge of having a seizure.

  “No? Well, how about someone you know? Someone like, say, Donna Green? Surely you wouldn’t mind seeing her fat ass six feet under.”

  This knocked the wind from my proverbial sails, if there was any wind left there in the Doldrums. I remembered the features editor Doug Schiffer, his brutal, and heretofore unexplained, murder. Had someone in my former place of employ had him taken out?

  “Are you going to murder Donna Green?”

  “No. You are.” Asher tossed another manila folder at me. “She’s your pink slip.”

  CHAPTER 19

  T

  he Yale Club has not made much of a dent in the popular culture, because there’s nothing popular, in the strict sense of the word, about it. It is twenty-two gray-stone stories of understated elegance and Ivy League elitism. In order to walk through the door, you have to have, first, a degree from Yale, and second, enough disposable income to cough up the membership fee. A BA from Trenton State was not enough to get me past security—I wanted to tour the joint before I wrote this—so my knowledge of the Yale Club is limited to Taylor’s diary entry, which wasn’t terribly descriptive (she didn’t even mention the paintings of Presidents Taft, Ford, and Bush père above the numerous fireplaces in the main lounge), the low-res pictures on yaleclubnyc.org, and the Yale Club Wikipedia entry (which is how I know about the paintings of Presidents Taft, Ford, and Bush père above the numerous fireplaces in the main lounge). From what I can glean, the Yale Club is similar in look and feel, if not in size, to the Quid Pro Quo offices: the stuffy sort of place to which well-heeled gentlemen repair after dinner to drink brandy and smoke Cuban cigars. At quarter to eight that Saturday, the second of November, Taylor Schmidt, in a slinky black cocktail dress, choker necklace, and stiletto heels, waited under the royal-blue flag with the white Y that hung atop the Yale Club entrance. The stretch of East Fortieth Street where most of the city’s employment agencies were headquartered—the Employment District, if you will—was four short blocks from where she now stood, finishing the last of her Parliament Light. Just two months earlier she’d been smoking outside the offices of Fraulein Staffing, without a job or a hope. It seemed a lifetime ago.