David Liss - The Ethical Assassin

Ronny Neil, who had been sprawled out dreamily, suddenly shot upright. Like Scott, he slept shirtless, but unlike Scott, Ronny Neil had a tightly muscled body. He had small but hard pecs, and his back muscles shot out like wings. On his left shoulder he had a cross tattoo- it had been done by hand and in ink, the kind prisoners give each other.

“What’s the Gambler want with him?” Ronny Neil demanded.

Bobby shrugged. “I guess you’ll have to take that up with the boss yourself, Ron-o.”

Ronny Neil narrowed his gaze at Bobby. “He don’t have nothing to do with the Gambler. I ain’t gonna stand for the Gambler bringing him in.”

“Bringing him in to what ?” Bobby demanded.

“I don’t want him talking to the Gambler,” Ronny Neil said. It wasn’t quite sulky, more like a growl.

The fact that I didn’t want to talk to the Gambler either didn’t seem to count for much. I felt a wave of dizzying panic. Had the Gambler somehow learned that Melford and I had been hiding in the closet? He had the checkbook, which meant they knew someone from the company had been there, and by now he’d probably figured out that the someone in question was me.

“Let’s go, Lemmy,” Bobby said. “Don’t want to keep the big boss man waiting.”

“He gets too cozy with the boss,” Ronny Neil said, “I’ll stick a knife up his ass.”

“Does that count as being good or bad at butt fucking?” I asked.

“Oh, don’t be that way, Ronster.” Bobby put a hand to my shoulder and led me out the door.

I couldn’t believe he was going to leave it at that. Maybe he thought that if he came down harsher on them, it would be worse for me. Maybe he thought that leaving it alone wouldn’t affect how many books were sold. Maybe he was off on Planet Bobby and didn’t understand that Ronny Neil was a scary asshole and Scott was a scary and pathetic asshole.

Was such a thing possible? Had Bobby skated so blithely through life with his salesman grin and good cheer that he didn’t know what it meant to be picked on, to be humiliated by bigger or meaner guys who got their rocks off by reminding you that you walked around unscathed at their pleasure? Was Bobby like Chitra, insulated from the cruelty of the world, not by his looks but by an impenetrable armor of optimism and generosity?

If that was the case, it meant that Bobby and I lived in entirely different places- the same to an outside viewer, but utterly unalike to our particular perspectives. Where I saw danger and menace, Bobby saw only innocent ribbing- a little on the harsh side, perhaps, but still innocent.

What if Bobby lived in this wondrous world precisely because he believed in it? I had seen how Melford had defused a certain whumping the night before in the bar, but he’d done it consciously. What if Bobby did that sort of thing all the time, only he didn’t know he was doing it? He assumed the best in people, and he got kindness and leeway in return.

If that was true, it meant that I was in some way responsible for Ronny Neil and Scott hating me so much. I assumed the worst about a couple of ignorant rednecks, they picked up on it, responded to it, acted on it. Did it work that way?

What troubled me about this idea, truly troubled me, was not so much that I had to shoulder the blame for Ronny Neil threatening to stick a knife up my ass- though that was undeniably distasteful- as that it seemed to be too much like what Melford had been talking about last night. We all see the world through a veil of ideology, he’d said. Melford thought that the veil came from outside of us, the system or something, but maybe it was more complicated. Maybe we made our own veils. Maybe the world made us, and we, in turn, made the world.

Surely Melford couldn’t be the only person thinking about this stuff. He’d mentioned Marx and Marxists, but there had to be others- philosophers and psychologists and who knew what. If I had been on my way to Columbia, instead of being on my way to see the Gambler, the dead-body-hiding and evidence-concealing Gambler, I might have a hope of finding out someday. But unless the sample volume of the Champion Encyclopedias I carried around with me took up the issue, I’d probably not find out anytime soon.

WE WALKED ALONG the motel balcony as if it were the corridor to the electric chair. At least I did. The morning was bright and sunny, with only a few wispy streaks of white in the sky, and the extreme, mind-numbing heat hadn’t started to get going yet, so Bobby appeared to be in a good mood. He had his hands thrust into the pockets of his khaki chinos and his lips pursed in a soft whistle. Maybe something by Air Supply.

“So, what does the Gambler want with me?” I ventured.

“I guess you’ll find out soon enough,” Bobby said. “I sort of figured you’d know.”

Fat chance. I was about to ask something paranoid and foolish: Did he seem angry when he asked you to get me? Did he say that he found something, perhaps? Something in a checkbook he took from a dead person’s trailer? I choked back all those questions. What would Melford do? I wondered. Melford, I decided, would tell himself that the Gambler was not about to kill me, not when there were half a dozen people who knew I was going into his room. Melford would figure that the Gambler was looking for information. Melford would see this as an opportunity to get some information for himself.

We were only about four doors down from the Gambler’s room, so I stopped. “What’s the Gambler’s deal, anyhow?”

Bobby stopped, too, but reluctantly. He looked at me and looked at the Gambler’s door, as though he couldn’t believe I was in one place and not the other. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, he works for this company Educational Advantage Media, right? But they’re not part of Champion Encyclopedias. How does all of this work?”

“There’s no time for a civics lesson, Lemmy. The boss man is waiting.”

“Come on,” I said, trying to sound relaxed. “I just want to know how all of this works.”

“You want to know now ?” But he must have decided it would be more expedient to answer than argue, so he pursed his lips and emptied his lungs. “Educational Advantage Media contracts with Champion, okay? They contract for various cities and their surrounding areas, and in Florida, they contract for Fort Lauderdale, Miami, Tampa, Jacksonville, and Gainesville. That’s why we go to those places over and over again.”

“Who owns Educational Advantage Media? The Gambler?”

Bobby shook his head. “No, but he’s high up, maybe even the number two guy. The boss is a guy named Gunn, who I’ve never met. The Gambler talks to him all the time, and he’s been out to visit us on the road a few times, but he never bothers to meet with us little people.”

“So is this guy, you know, okay?”

Bobby shrugged. “Probably. I guess. I’ll tell you one thing, though.” He looked around conspiratorially. “He’s got this woman who works for him. She’s kind of hot, and she always wears a bikini top, but she’s got this nasty scar down her side, like she was in a motorcycle wipe-out or something. It’s really pretty ugly, but she loves to show it off. I don’t want to judge someone for being unfortunate or anything, but ouch. Don’t show the world. You know?”

I said I knew, though I didn’t know at all.

“Okay, enough piddling.” Bobby clapped his hands together with cheerful finality. “Let’s go see the boss.”

The Gambler sat at the peeling particleboard desk in his room, looking over some credit apps. He wore greenish-tinted chinos, a white oxford with no tie, and brown loafers. He had perched on his nose a pair of glasses that made him look like a nineteenth-century accounting clerk, an effect only increased by his hair, straight and thick and just a tad long. All he needed was a high collar and some muttonchops.