The Ethical Assassin

Bastard and Karen. He irritating and vaguely sinister. She jagged and beaten down. Dead. The two of them dead. Their kids, off somewhere, were now orphans and had no idea. Their young lives, as they had lived them, were finished. And I had been a party to it. I had witnessed the unspeakable horror of their deaths and then sat with their killer and, I realized, found him strangely charming. It wasn’t as though I could have saved Bastard and Karen, but I told myself I could do something now. I could go to the police, and go fast, maybe in time for them to catch the assassin while he was still in the trailer. And even if they didn’t get there in time, no one would believe that I had killed them.

Then again, they might.

The assassin, when not assassinating, acted like a reasonable guy. It could be that he believed, really believed, that Bastard and Karen deserved it. But did anyone deserve it? Did I live in a world in which bad people were killed by righteous assassins? Nothing in my life told me it was so, but then again, this night had been in my life.

The first two trailers I passed were dark, though I heard an angry dog’s sonorous barking in the middle distance. I came out onto a street, though not the one on which Bastard and Karen lived, which somehow made me feel better. It was a little less than a mile to the Kwick Stop, and only a couple of cars passed me, speeding by in automotive oblivion. I told myself over and over again that I just might get away with this, I just might get my life back.

Chapter 5

THE CUTTING BOARD lacked music. It was a large restaurant, with a moderately unfortunate name, composed of a series of interlinked wood-paneled rooms filled out with white-clothed tables and heavy wooden chairs. Yet it lacked music, and that disappointed B.B. He liked music, soft music, trickling in so quietly that he could hardly hear it. Ambient as a distant highway, but still evanescently there, adding texture to the meal, a little heft if the conversation lagged, a touch of the cinematic sound track. Classical was fine, the soft sort of classical, not the loud stuff with horns and kettledrums, but the truth was that B.B. liked elevator music. He knew everyone got a kick out of trashing elevator music, and let them have their laugh, but in the end they had to agree there was something reassuring about these songs everyone already knew, maybe in a more raucous form, handed back all soft and powdery, prechewed, going down so smooth that you didn’t even know there was something in your throat.

This restaurant skipped the music. And no fish tank. He liked a fish tank. B.B. wasn’t one of those guys who took cruel pleasure picking which fish gets to die- he had to make cruel decisions enough for work- but he liked to look at fish. He liked to watch them swim, especially the big goldfish with the bulging eyes, and he liked the bubbling in the tank.

The Cutting Board had palm trees, though- a few small groves of plastic palms stuck here and there to give the place a touch of class. Palm trees were important for obscuring views. He didn’t want to be seen, and he didn’t want to see. The glory of a fine restaurant was its semiprivacy. Pillars could work, too, but he liked the palm trees since the fronds added extra cover. The restaurant was also into low, ambient lighting, so in the end, the dark and the plastic trees made it acceptable despite its other drawbacks. B.B. would return at some point. It would never be on his A-list, but he would put it on rotation. In any case, he didn’t like to visit a place more than once every six months. The last thing you want is for the waiters to start to recognize you, recognizing that the last time you were in it was a different boy, and the time before that, too.

It was a little steak-and-seafood place near the Ft. Lauderdale airport, far enough away from Miami that he wouldn’t just happen to bump into anyone he knew, and catering largely to the old and retired set, so that his sort of people- the nonwithered, the surgically nonwithered, the power-golf players, the Rolex wearers, and the convertible drivers- would never be caught dead in a place like this. B.B. believed firmly in picking places that drew the old and the retired. A man could be a prince in the eyes of a waiter simply by not sending back the drinking water for being the wrong temperature.

On the other side of B.B.’s candlelit table, Chuck Fi

He’d taken only one sip, and then somehow the glass was covered with greasy boy-fingerprints. B.B. understood that’s what it was to be a boy. Boys made messes. They almost knocked over wine. Sometimes they did knock over wine, and unless you were eager to keep from drawing attention to yourself, you didn’t much care because you didn’t keep boys from being boys. That wasn’t a mentor’s job. A mentor turned a boy in the right direction so that at some future date, when the time was right, he’d become a man. That’s how you mentored.

“Be graceful, Chuck,” B.B. said in what he hoped was his most mentorly tone. “Grace is poise, and poise is power. Look at me. You want to be like me when you grow up.”

B.B. pointed at himself when he spoke, as if he were exhibit A. If you pointed at yourself, people looked, and he had no reason to mind that. He had turned fifty-five this year- a bit on the mature side, though still in his prime- but people mistook him for forty, forty-five max. Partly it was the Grecian Formula, the use of which he had elevated to an art, and partly it was the lifestyle. An hour with the Nautilus machines three times a week wasn’t much of an investment for youth. Then there were the clothes.

He dressed, and there was no other term for it, Miami Vice. He’d been considering linen suits and T-shirts before the show came on the air, but once he saw those guys strutting around in those clothes, B.B. knew it was the look for him. It was the right look for a man of hidden but smoldering power. And that show- God bless it- was single-handedly transforming Miami from a necropolis of retirees, marbled with pockets of black or Cuban poverty, into someplace almost hip, almost fabulous, almost glamorous. The smell of mothballs and Ben-Gay drifted off, replaced by the scent of suntan lotion and titillating aftershave.

B.B. watched as Chuck continued to work the butter, and the breadstick was now glossy and slick and, though it might have been a trick of the light, even starting to sag a little.

“I think that’s enough butter.” He said it in a mentorly tone- sympathetic but firm.

“I like a lot of butter,” Chuck said with naïve cheer.

“I understand you want it, but there’s such a thing as discipline, Chuck. Discipline will make you a man.”