David Liss: The Ethical Assassin

I followed her inside, the fear of the redneck now almost forgotten in the excitement of a looming commission. I had not been doing this long, not compared with Bobby’s five years, but I knew getting inside the house was the hardest part. I might go days without anyone letting me in, but I’d never once made it in without making the sale. Not once. Bobby said that was the sign of a real bookman, and that’s what I was turning out to be. A real bookman.

I stood in the trailer. Me, this desiccated woman, and her still unseen husband. Only one of us was going to walk out of there alive.

INSIDE, THE SMELL OF OLD CIGARETTES replaced the stench of garbage and filth. Everyone in my family smoked cigarettes, every last relative with the exception of my stepfather, who smoked cigars and pipes. I’d always hated the odor, hated the way it seeped into my clothes, my books, my food. When I was young enough to still bring a lunch to school, my turkey sandwich would smell like Lucky Strikes- my mother’s improbable brand.

The woman, who also smelled of cigarettes and had nicotine stains on her fingers, told me her name was Karen. The husband looked younger than she did, but also like he was aging faster, and I could see his balloon would be out of air before hers. Like Karen, he was unusually thin, with a hollowed-out look to him. He wore a sleeveless Ronnie James Dio shirt that showed bony arms insulated with layers of wiry muscles. Straight reddish hair fell to his shoulders in a southern-fried rock cut. He was good-looking in the same way as Karen, which was to say he might have been more appealing if he didn’t give the impression of someone who hadn’t eaten, slept, or washed in the better part of a week.

He came in from the trailer’s kitchen, holding a bottle of Killian’s Red by its neck as though he were trying to strangle it. “Bastard,” he said. Then he switched the bottle to his left hand and held out his right for shaking.

I wasn’t sure why he would call me a bastard, so I held back.

“Bastard,” he repeated. “It’s my name. It’s a nickname, really. It ain’t my real name, but it’s my real nickname.”

I shook with what I considered an appropriate amount of skepticism.

“So, where’d you find this guy?” Bastard asked his wife. It came out just a little too fast, a little too loud, to be good-natured. With a tic of the neck, he flung back his longish hair.

“He wants to ask us some questions about the girls.” Karen had wandered into the kitchen, separated from the living room by a short bar. She gestured with her head toward me, or maybe toward the door. The two of them were jerking their heads around as if they were in a Devo video.

Bastard stared. “The girls, huh? You look too young to be a lawyer. Or a cop.”

I attempted a smile to mask the kudzu creep of alarm working over me. “It’s nothing like that. I’m here to talk about education.”

Bastard put his arm around my shoulder. “Education, huh?”

“That’s right.”

The arm came off almost right away, but the inside of the trailer was beginning to feel more dangerous than outside. I’d seen some weird stuff inside people’s homes- Faces of Death videocassettes mixed in with the Mickey Mouse cartoons, a jar of used condoms on a coffee table, even a collection of shrunken heads once- but this weirdly intimate moment put me on my guard. I didn’t leave, though, because the redneck was surely still out there, and that made it a lose-lose deal. Might as well stay where there was a chance of closing a deal.

Not much of a chance, though. I took a guarded look at the trailer; it was the kind of place that warded off salesmen the way garlic warded off vampires. They had no toys scattered around, no empty cases from kids’ videos or coloring books or haphazard Lego towers. They had no toys of any kind. And there wasn’t much in the way of adult crap, either. There were no plastic hanging plants or not-available-in-stores garish cuckoo clocks or oil paintings of clowns.

Instead, they had a beige couch and a phenomenally not matching blue easy chair and a cracked glass coffee table full of beer bottles and beer bottle rings and coffee cup stains. A single coffee mug- white with OLDHAM HEALTH SERVICES printed in bold black letters- rested against the glass in such a way that I felt sure it would take both hands to pry it off. The coffee inside had condensed into tar.

In the kitchen, the linoleum floor, the kind of tan that looked dirty when clean and extra dirty when dirty, was chipped and peeling and in places curling up. In one spot it had rolled up over a white towel and looked like a Yodels.

Yet despite it all, there was some small reason to hope. Yes, their stuff was absolutely awful, and yes, they clearly had no money, except- Except. A chipped Lladró, a ballerina in midtwirl, sat on top of the television. Maybe it had been a gift or inherited from a grandparent or found by the trash. It didn’t matter. It was a Lladró, and Lladrós were gold. Lladrós were moochie. The spirit of mooch, no matter how diminished and repressed, dwelled within.

Bastard now put a hand on my back. “So, you’re like, asking parents questions about their thoughts on education? Something like that?”

Had he heard me at the door? “That’s right. About education and your kids.” The kids who, I noticed, left no hint that they’d ever passed through their own home.

“So, what you selling?” A spark of amusement flashed in his dull eyes.

“I’m just here to ask questions about education. I’m not here to sell.”

“Okay, see you later, jerk-off. There’s the door. Get out.”

I was about to open my mouth, to observe politely that his wife had said she wanted to take the survey, and after all, it would only be a few minutes. But I didn’t get that far. Karen pulled him aside to the bedroom, where they exchanged some heated and hushed words. In a minute or two they came out, and Bastard had a plastic grin on his face.

“Sorry about that,” he told me. “I guess I didn’t realize how much Karen wanted to talk about, you know, education.” He slapped my back. “You want a beer?”

“Just water or soda or something, if you don’t mind.”

“No problem, buddy,” Bastard said with an enthusiasm that frightened me more than the shoulder squeezing.

Karen led me to the kitchen card table, where she directed me to sit with my back to the door in a metal folding chair, the kind they brought out for ad hoc municipal gatherings in school gymnasiums. She made some uneasy small talk and handed me lemonade in another OLDHAM HEALTH SERVICES coffee cup. I still felt a phantom tingling on my shoulder where Bastard had grabbed me, but the anxiety was beginning to dissipate. They were strange- strange and unhappy- but almost certainly harmless.

I tried not to drink the lemonade in a single gulp. “This who you work for?” I asked, gesturing toward the coffee cup. I didn’t direct the question toward either of them in particular.

Bastard shook his head, let out a little noise, something short of a laugh. “Nah. We just have them.”

“They’re nice,” I said. “Nice and thick. Keep the coffee warm.” I waited a moment to let the idiocy of my words dissipate. “What do you folks do?”

“Karen used to waitress some,” Bastard told me, “till her back started to bother her. I’m the site manager for a hog farm.”

Site manager sounded impressive enough, as though they’d be able to make the payments, at least, which was all I needed. I unfastened the strap of my bag, and took out one of the photocopied survey sheets.

I set my papers on the kitchen table next to the basket of plastic fruit- another faint hint of moochiness there- and asked Bastard and Karen the questions. When I’d been in training, I’d balked at first seeing them, sure anyone with a pulse would smell the bullshit a mile off. But Bobby had laughed, assured me that this sales pitch had been designed by experts. It was one of the most successful pitches ever devised. Having sold for three months now, I had no problem believing it.