Lawrence Block - Hit Man

The next day he went to a museum and a movie, arriving at the bookstore at ten minutes after six. The young clerk was gone, presumably having a plate of curry somewhere. The jowly man was behind the counter, and there were three customers in the store, two checking the video selections, one looking at magazines.

Keller browsed, hoping they would decide to clear out. At one point he was standing in front of a whole wall of videocassettes and it turned into a wall of caged puppies. It was momentary, and he couldn’t tell if it was a genuine hallucination or just some sort of mental flashback. Whatever it was, he didn’t like it.

One customer left, but the other two lingered, and then someone new came in off the street. And in half an hour the Indian kid was due back, and who knew if he would take his full hour, anyway?

He approached the counter, trying to look a little more nervous than he felt. Shifty eyes, furtive glances. Pitching his voice low, he said, “Talk to you in private?”

“About what?”

Eyes down, shoulders drawn in, he said, “Something special.”

“If it’s got to do with little kids,” the man said, “no disrespect intended, but I don’t know nothing about it, I don’t want to know nothing about it, and I wouldn’t even know where to steer you.”

“Nothing like that,” Keller said.

They went into a room in back. The jowly man closed the door, and as he was turning around Keller hit him with the edge of his hand at the juncture of neck and shoulder. The man’s knees buckled, and in an instant Keller had a loop of wire around his neck. In another minute he was out the door, and within the hour he was on the northbound Metroliner.

When he got home he realized he still had the magazines in his bag. That was sloppy, he should have discarded them the previous night, but he’d simply forgotten them altogether and never even unsealed the package.

Nor could he find a reason to unseal it now. He carried it down the hall, dropped it unopened into the incinerator. Back in his apartment, he fixed himself a weak scotch and water and watched a documentary on the Discovery Channel. The vanishing rain forest, one more goddam thing to worry about.

“Oedipus,” Jerrold Breen said, holding his hands in front of his chest, his fingertips pressed together. “I presume you know the story. Unwittingly, he killed his father and married his mother.”

“Two pitfalls I’ve thus far managed to avoid.”

“Indeed,” Breen said. “But have you? When you fly off somewhere in your official capacity as corporate expediter, when you shoot trouble, as it were, what exactly are you doing? You fire people, you cashier entire divisions, close plants, rearrange human lives. Is that a fair description?”

“I suppose so.”

“There’s an implied violence. Firing a man, terminating his career, is the symbolic equivalent of killing him. And he’s a stranger, and I shouldn’t doubt that the more important of these men are more often than not older than you, isn’t that so?”

“What’s the point?”

“When you do what you do, it’s as if you are seeking out and killing your unknown father.”

“I don’t know,” Keller said. “Isn’t that a little far-fetched?”

“And your relationships with women,” Breen went on, “have a strong Oedipal component. Your mother was a vague and unfocused woman, incompletely present in her own life, incapable of connection with others. Your own relationships with women are likewise blurred and out of focus. Your problems with impotence-”

“Once!”

“-are a natural consequence of this confusion. Your mother herself is dead now, isn’t that so?”

“Yes.”

“And your father is not to be found, and almost certainly deceased. What’s called for, Peter, is an act specifically designed to reverse this entire pattern on a symbolic level.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“It’s a subtle point,” Breen admitted. He crossed his legs, propped an elbow on a knee, extended his thumb and rested his bony chin on it. Keller thought, not for the first time, that Breen must have been a stork in a prior life. “If there were a male figure in your life,” Breen went on, “preferably at least a few years your senior, someone playing a faintly paternal role vis-à-vis yourself, someone to whom you turn for advice and direction.”

Keller thought of the man in White Plains.

“Instead of killing this man,” Breen said, “symbolically, I need hardly say-I am speaking symbolically throughout-but instead of killing him as you have done with father figures in the past, it seems to me that you might do something to nourish this man.”

Cook a meal for the man in White Plains? Buy him a hamburger? Toss him a salad?

“Perhaps you could think of a way to use your particular talents to this man’s benefit instead of his detriment,” Breen went on. He drew a handkerchief from his breast pocket and mopped his forehead. “Perhaps there is a woman in his life-your mother, symbolically-and perhaps she is a source of great pain to your father. So, instead of making love to her and slaying him, like Oedipus, you might reverse the usual course of things by, uh, showing love to him and, uh, slaying her.”

“Oh,” Keller said.

“Symbolically, that is to say.”

“Symbolically,” Keller said.

A week later Breen handed him a photograph. “This is called the Thematic Apperception Test,” Breen said. “You look at the photograph and make up a story about it.”

“What kind of story?”

“Any kind at all,” Breen said. “This is an exercise in imagination. You look at the subject of the photograph and imagine what sort of woman she is and what she is doing.”

The photo was in color, and showed a rather elegant brunette dressed in tailored clothing. She had a dog on a leash. The dog was medium size, with a chunky body and an alert expression in its eyes. It was that color which dog people call blue, and which everyone else calls gray.

“It’s a woman and a dog,” Keller said.

“Very good.”

Keller took a breath. “The dog can talk,” he said, “but he won’t do it in front of other people. The woman made a fool of herself once when she tried to show him off. Now she knows better. When they’re alone he talks a blue streak, and the son of a bitch has an opinion on everything. He tells her everything from the real cause of the Thirty Years’ War to the best recipe for lasagna.”

“He’s quite a dog,” Breen said.

“Yes, and now the woman doesn’t want other people to know he can talk, because she’s afraid they might take him away from her. In this picture they’re in the park. It looks like Central Park.”

“Or perhaps Washington Square.”

“It could be Washington Square,” Keller agreed. “The woman is crazy about the dog. The dog’s not so sure about the woman.”

“And what do you think about the woman?”

“She’s attractive,” Keller said.

“On the surface,” Breen said. “Underneath it’s another story, believe me. Where do you suppose she lives?”

Keller gave it some thought. “ Cleveland,” he said.

“ Cleveland? Why Cleveland, for God’s sake?”

“Everybody’s got to be someplace.”

“If I were taking this test,” Breen said, “I’d probably imagine the woman living at the foot of Fifth Avenue, at Washington Square. I’d have her living at number one Fifth Avenue, perhaps because I’m familiar with that particular building. You see, I once lived there.”

“Oh?”

“In a spacious apartment on a high floor. And once a month,” he continued, “I write out an enormous check and mail it to that address, which used to be mine. So it’s only natural that I would have this particular building in mind, especially when I look at this particular photograph.” His eyes met Keller’s. “You have a question, don’t you? Go ahead and ask it.”