David Liss - The Ethical Assassin

She nodded, not bothering to hide her surprise. “That’s right.”

He let go of her hand. “Are you considering making a break with the past?”

She tried to look neutral. “I guess so.”

“Me too.” He folded his hands. “So, you’re interested in becoming a vegetarian?”

“I’m not,” she told him. “I like eating what I eat. I’m interested in why you care so much.”

“I care,” Melford said, “because when we see something wrong, we ought to try to make it right. It’s not enough to silently condemn evil, to congratulate ourselves for not participating. I believe we all have an obligation to stand against it.”

Something darkened in her face. At first I thought he’d made her angry, but then I realized I saw a pang of sadness, maybe even confusion and doubt. “How exactly is this a matter of ethics? Animals are here for our use, aren’t they? So, why shouldn’t we use them?”

Melford picked up an empty teacup. “This was put here for our use, right? It was designed to make our lives better and all. What if I were to hurl it across the room? That would be considered an impolite act at best, but also violent, antisocial, unkind, and wasteful. The cup is here for my use, but I’m not free to use it in any way I see fit.”

She shrugged. “Sounds reasonable.”

“But not so reasonable that you’ll change how you eat?” Melford said.

“No, not that reasonable.”

He turned to me. “It’s interesting, isn’t it. You convince someone that everything you say is right, make them understand that eating animals is wrong, but they still won’t change.”

“Ideology?” I asked.

“You got it.”

“So, what are you fellows up to today?” she asked.

“Oh, you know. This and that,” Melford said.

She leaned a little closer to him. “Can you be more specific?”

He leaned closer, too, and it looked for an instant as though they might kiss. “Can you maybe give me a reason why I ought to be more specific?”

“Because,” she told him, “I’m a curious, curious woman.”

“Are you curious enough to wonder what it would be like to stop eating animals?”

“Not that curious.”

Melford leaned back a few inches and then reached out to her hand and touched the black marks she’d penned onto her flesh. “You can tell yourself that your actions, alone and weighed against the balance of the universe, don’t matter, but I think you know better. How long can you wink at evil because it is easy and gratifying to do so? You’re better than that.”

She pulled her hand away, but not violently. It looked to me more like embarrassment- or surprise. “You don’t know me. You don’t know anything about who I am.”

Melford offered the ghost of a smile. “Maybe not. But I have a hunch.”

She said nothing for a minute. She unwrapped a tube of disposable chopsticks, separated them, and tapped them together. “Does it make you happy to crusade for animals?”

He shook his head. “Does helping the sick, caring for the desperate, make someone happy? Would giving comfort to lepers in the Sudan make me happy? I don’t think so. Happiness isn’t the issue. These things make us feel balanced with the world around us, and that is something much more important than happiness.”

She nodded for a long time, still tapping her chopsticks together. Then she dropped them, as though they’d suddenly grown uncomfortably warm. She stood up. “I have to go.”

Melford held out his hand for her to shake. She looked surprised, but she took it anyway.

“You want to tell me who you’re working for?” he asked. “Why you’re following us?”

“I can’t right now.” She looked genuinely sad about it, too.

“Okay.” He let go and she turned away, but he wasn’t entirely done with her. “You know,” he said, “you’re much too smart to be working for them. You’re not like them.”

She reddened slightly. “I know that.”

“Hsieh,” Melford said.

She looked at her hand and nodded.

SO, WHO WAS SHE?”

“I don’t know. Someone who works for them. Whoever they are.”

I sat in the passenger side of Melford’s Datsun. I’d eaten the lo mein and put back five or six little cups of tea. Desiree’s little visit that afternoon had left me stunned, but Melford appeared unperturbed. He’d eaten his green-tinted dumplings with splintery chopsticks and talked for a while about a philosopher named Althusser and something called “the ideological state apparatus.” Only once we were back in the car did I try to talk about the woman.

“Doesn’t it bother you that a strange person in peekaboo clothing is shadowing us?”

“Peekaboo clothing isn’t without its pleasures. Don’t you think? I noticed you inspecting the lace of her bra. Maybe you were thinking about buying a gift for Chitra.”

I hated the feeling of being caught. “I do have to admit it. She seemed less scary and more…” I let my voice trail off.

“Sexy?”

“Sure,” I agreed cautiously. I didn’t know that Melford would be the world’s best judge of which women were sexy and which were not. “But, still. We’ve got someone following us. What are we going to do about it?”

“Nothing,” Melford said. “She’s not following us now, and to be honest, I don’t think she means us any harm.”

“There are dead people floating all over the place. I know you killed some of them, but isn’t it a bit naïve to assume they don’t mean us harm?”

“I can’t speak for they. I’m sure they do mean us a whole truckload of harm, but I don’t think Desiree does. You could see it in her eyes. She is straying from them. She doesn’t want to hurt us, or even report back about us. I have a feeling.”

“Great, you have a feeling. Fine.”

“It’s the best we have until we know who they are.”

I thought about telling him what I knew, that the Gambler was involved, but I hadn’t told him last night, and now it would look weird, as though I’d been holding out on him and that maybe he ought not to trust me. There would be a way, I decided, to steer him in that direction if it became necessary, or to discover something that would point to the Gambler. In the meantime, I felt safer with his not knowing, even if it meant keeping a huge secret from a guy who was known to resolve his grievances, from time to time, with a silenced pistol.

“So, where are we off to now?” I asked.

“You’ll recall that we have a task to do,” Melford said. “We have to figure out who that third person was, the body in the trailer.”

“What about the money? They’re looking for a ton of cash. Maybe we should find out about that.”

He shook his head. “Forget the money. It’s a dead end. Let’s think about finding the body.”

“And tell me again how we do that?”

“The first thing we want to do is look at the body. Who knows. Maybe they were dumb enough to leave identification on her. Long shot, I know, but it’s worth trying.”

“Sure,” I said. “That’s a great idea, poking around at a dead body, looking for a wallet. But, and I may be being dense here, shouldn’t we know where the bodies are first?”

“It so happens, smart guy, that I have a pretty good guess where they put the bodies. You catch that bad odor in the trailer park? You know what that was?”

“The smell of trailers? I don’t know.”

“It was a hog lot, Lemuel. The city of Meadowbrook Grove is mostly just that trailer park, which raises the bulk of its revenue through speeding tickets. Behind it is a small factory farm that raises hogs. Intensive hog farming produces a ton of waste, and that waste has to go somewhere. That bad smell in the trailer park comes from the waste lagoon, a nasty, environmentally hazardous seething pit of pig piss, pig shit, and pig remains. It also happens to be the single best place I can think of to hide bodies. So that’s where we’re off to.”