Lawrence Block - Hit Man

“Because it’s not your name.”

“And you might have trouble finding the National Security Resource in the phone book. Or anywhere else, like the Congressional Record, say. We keep a pretty low profile. You ever hear of us before? Well, neither did anybody else.”

There’d be no glory in it for Keller, and plenty of risk. That was how it worked when he did the old man’s bidding, but for those efforts he was well compensated. All he’d get working for NSR was an allowance for expenses, and not a very generous one at that.

So he wasn’t doing it for the glory, or for the cash. Bascomb had implied that he had no choice, but you always had a choice, and he’d chosen to go along. For what?

For his country, he thought.

“It’s peacetime,” Bascomb had said, “and the old Soviet threat dried up and blew away, but don’t let that fool you, Keller. Your country exists in a permanent state of war. She has enemies within and without her borders. And sometimes we have to do it to them before they can do it to us.”

Keller, knotting his necktie, buttoning his suit jacket, didn’t figure he looked much like a soldier. But he felt like one. A soldier in his own idiosyncratic uniform, off to serve his country.

Howard Ramsgate was a big man, broad-shouldered, with a ready smile on his guileless square-jawed face. He was wearing a white shirt and a striped tie, and the pleated trousers of a gray sharkskin suit. The jacket hung on a clothes tree in the corner of the office.

He looked up at Keller’s entrance. “Afternoon,” he said. “Gorgeous day, isn’t it? I’m Howard Ramsgate.”

Keller supplied a name, not his own. Not that Ramsgate would be around to repeat it, but suppose he had a tape recorder running? He wouldn’t be the first man in Washington to bug his own office.

“Good to met you,” Ramsgate said, and stood up to shake hands. He was wearing suspenders, and Keller noticed that they had cats on them, different breeds of cats.

When you pictured a traitor, he thought, you pictured a furtive little man in a soiled raincoat, skulking around a basement or lurking in a shabby café. The last thing you expected to run into was a pair of suspenders with cats on them.

“Well, now,” Ramsgate was saying. “Did we have an appointment? I don’t see it on my calendar.”

“I just took a chance and dropped by.”

“Fair enough. How’d you manage to get past Janeane?”

The secretary. Keller had timed her break, slipping in when she ducked out for a quick cigarette.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I didn’t notice anybody out there.”

“Well, you’re here,” Ramsgate said. “That’s what counts, right?”

“Right.”

“So,” he said. “Let’s see your mousetrap.”

Keller stared at him. Once, during a brief spate of psychotherapy, he had had a particularly vivid dream about mice. He could still remember it. But what on earth did this spy, this traitor-

“That’s more or less a generic term for me,” Ramsgate said. “That old saw-create a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door. Emerson, wasn’t it?”

Keller had no idea. “Emerson,” he agreed.

“With that sort of line,” Ramsgate said, “it was almost always Emerson, except when it was Benjamin Franklin. Solid American common sense, that’s what you could count on from both of them.”

“Right.”

“As it happens,” Ramsgate said, “Americans have registered more patents for mousetraps than for any other single device. You wouldn’t believe the variety of schemes men have come up with for snaring and slaughtering the little rodents. Of course”-he plucked his suspenders-“the best mousetrap of all’s not patentable. It’s got four legs and it says meow.”

Keller managed a chuckle.

“I’ve seen my share of mousetraps,” Ramsgate went on. “Like every other patent attorney. And every single day I see something new. A lot of the inventions brought to this office aren’t any more patentable than a cat is. Some have already been invented by somebody else. Not all of them do what they’re supposed to do, and not all of the things they’re supposed to do are worth doing. But some of them work, and some of them are useful, and every now and then one of them comes along and adds to the quality of life in this wonderful country of ours.”

Solid American common sense, Keller thought. This great country of ours. The man was a traitor and he had the gall to sound like a politician on the stump.

“So I get stirred up every time somebody walks in here,” Ramsgate said. “What have you brought for me?”

“Well, let me just show you,” Keller said, and came around the desk. He opened his briefcase and placed a yellow legal pad on the desktop.

“ ‘Please forgive me,’ ” Ramsgate read aloud. “Forgive you for what?”

Keller answered him with a choke hold, maintaining it long enough to guarantee unconsciousness. Then he let go and tore the top sheet from the legal pad, crumpled it into a ball, dropped it into the wastebasket. The sheet beneath it, the new top sheet, already held a similar message: “I’m sorry. Please forgive me.”

It wouldn’t stand up to a detailed forensic investigation, but Keller figured it would make it easy for them to call it suicide if they wanted to.

He went to the window, opened it. He rolled Ramsgate’s desk chair over to the window, took hold of the man under the arms, hauled him to his feet, then heaved him out the window.

He put the chair back, tore the second sheet off the pad, crumpled it, tossed it at the basket. That was better, he decided-no note, just a pad on the desk, and then, when they look in the basket, they can come up with two drafts of a note he decided not to leave after all.

Nice touch. They’d pay more attention to a note if they had to hunt for it.

Janeane was back at her desk when he left, chatting on the phone. She didn’t even look up.

Keller, back in New York, started each of the next five days with a copy of the Washington Post from a newsstand across the street from the UN building. There was nothing in it the first morning, but the next day he found a story on the obituary page about an established Washington patent attorney, an apparent suicide. Keller learned where Howard Ramsgate had gone to college and law school and read about a couple of inventions he’d helped steer through the patent process. The names of his survivors were given as well-a wife, two children, a brother in Lake Forest, Illinois.

What it didn’t say was that he was a spy, a traitor. Didn’t say he’d had help getting out the window. Keller, perched on a stool in a coffee shop, wondered how much more they knew than they were letting on.

The next three days he didn’t find one more word about Ramsgate. This wasn’t suspicious in and of itself-how often was there a follow-up to the suicide of a not-too-prominent attorney?-but Keller found himself trying to read between the lines of other stories, trying to find some subtle connection to Ramsgate’s death. This lobbyist charged with illegal campaign contributions, that Japanese tourist caught in the crossfire of a drug-related shootout, a key vote on a close bill in Congress-any such item might somehow link up to the defenestration of Howard Ramsgate. And he, the man who’d made it happen, would never know.

On the fifth morning, as he found himself frowning over a minor scandal in the mayor’s office, it occurred to Keller to wonder if he was being watched. Had anyone observed him in the days since Ramsgate’s death? Had it been noted that he was starting each day, not around the corner from his apartment with the New York Times but five blocks away with the Washington Post?