David Liss: The Ethical Assassin

“Wow.” Melford studied me with wonder. “You got it exactly right.”

“How do you know?”

Melford looked at him. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, you are enveloped by ideology, too, right? So how come you’re right and everyone else is wrong? How can you know it?”

He nodded. “I can’t. Which makes you doubly right. But I have confidence in me. You too, now. So you get to hear everything.”

With Desiree still somewhere in the barn, Melford started up the car and turned on some raucous music, which he played at low volume. He stared at the warehouse, and I could see he worried about Desiree the way I worried about Chitra, and that made me like him more, feel I understood him better. Whatever insane things he’d done, whatever unspeakable principles by which he ran his life, he seemed to me just then gentle and familiar.

He had done terrible things, things I could never condone- yet despite the moral gulf that lay between us, we were linked by this emotion, this love we felt for someone special and bold. In that, we were not so different: bookman and assassin. Maybe, he would argue, it linked us as clearly as I’d been linked with those pigs who had been in the warehouse, who had known torment and imprisonment and terror and then known freedom and revenge.

“It was the dogs and cats,” I said by way of getting him started. “You came here to investigate a story about missing pets. You found out Bastard and Karen were abducting them and selling them to Oldham Health Services for medical research.”

“That’s right,” Melford said. “Very good. You know, I grew up with a cat- a big tabby named Bruce. My best friend then, maybe the best friend I’d ever had. When I was sixteen, he was in a neighbor’s yard, and this guy, who was a big, drunk ex-high school football player, beat him to death with a football helmet- just for the hell of it. He didn’t like me, thought I was weird, so he killed my cat. Bruce was as much of a person as anyone. If there’s such a thing as a soul, he had one. He had desires and preferences and people he loved and disliked and things he liked to do and things that bored him. He might not have been able to balance a checkbook or understand how electric lights work, but he was still a sentient being.”

“That’s awful,” I said, not sure what else to say.

“I was about as devastated as I’ve ever been. My relatives and friends kept saying, ‘It was just a cat,’ as though somehow his being a cat diminished how I should feel about this living, feeling creature being murdered. I went to the cops and I got a lot of ‘It’s terrible, but it’s your word against his; his parents will swear the cat leapt at him, tried to claw his eyes out.’ That sort of thing. I kept pushing, but people started getting angry. The parents of the kid who killed my cat complained to my parents about my being a pest, and my parents never pushed back. Instead, they scolded me and then finally offered to buy me a new cat, like he was a typewriter- one works just as well as another. Maybe a new one works even better.”

“Is that when you became interested in being a vegetarian?”

“No, I’d been one for years. I’d made the connection long before that. If Bruce was like a person, then so was the animal that my steak came from- it’s just that I’d never met that person. But when Bruce was killed it made me determined to stop being quiet about it. My mother always told me that I shouldn’t tell people not to eat meat. That it was rude. But how is it rude to ask people to stop their immoral behavior? It’s like saying that the police are rude for arresting criminals.”

“So, when you found out about Bastard and Karen, you went after them?”

“More complicated than that. I’ve been engaged in guerrilla actions for years now.”

“The drunk football player?”

Melford shook his head. “Died tragically, actually. Had too much to drink one night and fell into a pond and drowned. Very sad business.”

“So you go around killing people who kill animals? That’s crazy.”

“It’s justice, Lem. I don’t hurt people who raise animals for food. They don’t believe they’re doing anything wrong. I agree with the movement that our job is to reeducate. But sometimes people hurt animals when they know they are doing something wrong. So, when I got the story over the wire, just a throwaway paragraph, about all the missing animals here, I came to look into it. Not really thinking about resolving the problem myself, but thinking to expose it. Then I got the same problems here that I had with Bruce. The cops didn’t want to know about it. They gave me a lot of bullshit about no proof. You know what they didn’t tell me- that Oldham Health Services buys stray animals, no questions asked. You show up with an animal, say it’s a stray, you get fifty bucks. And Oldham is a big employer for this area. A lot of jobs and a lot of revenue are tied up in its well-being. So, maybe they don’t have evidence that pets are being abducted for animal research, but maybe they don’t want to have that evidence, either.”

“So you decided to kill Bastard and Karen.”

“There was no other way, Lem. Just like today with Doe. It was him or you. With Bastard and Karen- I tried to do the right thing, but if I had left without acting and even more animals had been tortured and killed, how could I have lived with that?”

I paused for a minute. “The thing is, Melford, we’re talking about animals, not people. You may have a bond with an animal, but that doesn’t make it the same as a person.”

“We’ve been at this long enough for me to get the sense that you’re coming over to my side,” Melford said. “So, do you think it’s wrong for them to take animals away from the people who love them, to visit torture and death on the pets and sadness and pain on their owners? You think that doing that simply to make money is acceptable?”

“Of course I don’t, but-”

“No buts. It’s wrong to abduct animals and ship them off to be the subject of unnecessary torture. We’ve established that. Okay, so if I knew they were killing cats and I went to the authorities and the authorities weren’t interested, what should I do then?”

“I don’t know. You’re a reporter. You could have written a story.”

“That’s true, I could have. I even did, but my editor didn’t want to run it. Said I hadn’t proved anything. I even got my father to lean on them, but no deal. So, ultimately what we’re talking about is the choice between stopping them or simply shrugging it off with a feeling that I gave it my best.”

“But this can’t be the right way to do things. There has to be a better way than assassinating the people who don’t share your values.”

“A lot of people would agree with you, even virtually everyone involved in the underground animal rights movement. They won’t so much as consider my methods even though their enemies perpetrate cruelties on a scale never before imagined in human history. I respect the principles of the pacifists. I even envy them. But someone has to pick up the sword, and that someone is me. And it’s not as though what I’m doing is wrong- it is simply outside the margins of what ideology will allow. Look at the great heroes of the Civil War for the South. Robert E. Lee. There’s a guy who led thousands upon thousands of men to their deaths, led them to kill thousands upon thousands of men, for what? So that people whose ancestors came from Africa could remain slaves. And they name high schools after this guy.”

“It’s not the same thing. I understand, Melford. I really do. I just can’t get past the idea that it is wrong to kill a person for the sake of an animal. It doesn’t ring true to me.”