Hitgirl

 

"You're beautiful in the dark," he said after he'd gotten what he wanted.

One would expect I might be put off by that remark except for the fact that I knew I was more beautiful than he was handsome and I knew he knew and, by not objecting to the backhanded compliment, I let him know nothing he said could matter in the least. He, as a person, did not matter, and in bed I focussed on something beautiful I was going to buy with the money. Something beautiful and a scooter.

"In my way," he had said on the telephone, "I do love her."

This was what he told me over the phone when he called, and I didn't believe him. A conversation that begins with equivocation is a conversation out of the mouth of a coward. But then, all of my money comes out of the pockets of cowards. I find it sad the lies men tell about their wives are something these men feel obliged to devise and provide to someone like me who doesn't give a rat's ass.

"I do love her," he had said again.

Or maybe, I thought, he loves how he used to love her.

I don't know how people find me. I assume desperation gives a person the kind of nose with which to sniff me out like a truffle. It is a word of mouth profession, and I don't want to know any of the back story. I have imagined my name and number scratched onto the metal door of a public toilet next to the telephone numbers of snatch for hire. There may be scraps of paper with my information kicked up by dirty currents in unsavory alleys. Particulars penciled on a cocktail napkin tucked into the pocket of a despairing man. I don't know if I find it sad to be a word-of-mouth individual, a human piece of information that finds the right person through no effort on my part.

The clients suggest the meeting place. They are better at choosing an anonymous place not likely to be frequented by people in their circles. They seem, also, to choose places to throw me off, as if I am interested in gathering information. They would be offended to know how little I think about them at all. I associate the smells of the meetings with the particular assignments, which is interesting in that the smells in no way line up with either my client or my objective. The clients generally choose to meet in places that serve food, a corporate habit, as if transactions rely on ingesting something, and I wonder if the price of a drink goes on an expense account.

I ask the money be delivered to me in a box done up in festive paper and a ribbon I can receive with an expression of surprise and delight and a gracious thank you, which I work up in advance: "What a wonderful surprise. You shouldn't have, but I'm happy you did."

My clients are not willing to join me in the charade, but they have been warned ahead of time that I will be extremely bubbly and appreciative. Inside the sizable box, along with a nice chunk of change in small bills, there will be a photograph and an address. In the process of arranging a little photo and party paper, having decided someone's fate, does a person wear completely different clothes in an attempt not to be himself in those moments, to be the person who with sangfroid can make these arrangements, having first found my number and, subsequently, dialed it, possibly fumbling, making mistakes, and getting wrong numbers, and how would someone know if he had gotten a wrong number if, for example, the person who picked up the phone had the same name I use. Moira. A name I hand-picked and I can't remember why and not that unusual. There was a Moira in my grade school who was a gutless girl with almost no presence, whom my best friend nicknamed The Vapor.

I count the contents of the "gift" in private, and my clients have been warned if the amount is not correct, the deal is off and I will not return the money, such as it is. I have never cheated anyone, and I insist on full payment in advance because my clients are, after all, cowards and cheats. Nevertheless, they all have clean finger nails, as is expected of people who can afford the amount of money I require for my services. Almost all the faces in the photographs look innocent. I do not ask if they are.

The meetings end with the client's furtive lean across the table as if to obscure the passing of the money by the body's shadow. The packages are generally beautifully wrapped, as though these men—they are predominantly men—have found a female collaborator to fashion the bow.

I was once offered a package in brown paper and string, at which I got up and walked away from the job. I later saw a news piece on television. The man had been gunned down in his parking garage, and I knew I had gotten that man killed, all because he hadn't paid attention to the niceties of paper and ribbon. Our lives depend on such small details. The shooter was never found. He is someone like me: someone who is careful, anonymous, a glove wearer.

I like to think of myself like a surgeon who causes pain ripping into flesh because he has been paid to do this job. Like a physician, I wear gloves. I wear gloves in the various greasy spoons and bars where I meet my clients. From my mentor I learned a client might pocket a glass for the purposes of blackmail to get the money back. I discreetly wipe the lip with a napkin.

He chose a boilerplate motel with cottage cheese ceilings and dung brown carpeting. Morris didn't sit comfortably at the plastic woodgrain desk spread with dog-eared menus for fast food. The door was open when I arrived. Apparently he wanted to be found seated, looking like the broken manager of precisely this kind of motel. He asked me if I was Moira, and I lied and said I am that very person. I never give out my name. I am a person for whom an identity is a liability.

"Morris?" I said as if to make sure I had gotten the room number right, and maybe because he didn't look like a Morris. On the other hand, Morris is not the type of name a man chooses as a pseudonym.

As I am careful to do, I informed Morris I could not offer a precise date. Finding the right place and time, up to a point, involves fate. I saw this terrified Morris, who was likely the sort of man to tell himself he was in control of his life, and this, presumably, included his schedule. Although, it worried me if he was in control of his awful shirt.

I don't often sleep with my clients, but this guy, Morris (maybe Morris) carried something close to despair folded into his general expression. Perhaps he thought if he slept with me, I would be gentler. I didn't ask how gentleness might be introduced into this project. He may have wanted her gone but didn't want her damaged.

I don't normally ask if someone is sure, the way a plastics man might hesitate before rearranging a perfectly acceptable nose.

"You're absolutely sure about this?" At which he pulled me toward him by the shoulders and wept into my neck. Beyond his ear I spotted my birthday present displayed on a bed pillow.

"I'm saving my life," he said. Under the layers of mucus and emotion, I heard the echo from an empty man who believed it was going to be possible to have a new life inside the old skin.

How did I get into that bed? One leg at a time. And despite what I thought of Morris, I admitted to myself how skillful he was and surprised myself by wondering who the lucky girl was for whom he was willing to pay an immodest amount of money for an atrocity. And so the night inched into morning with occasional scraps of conversation and interrogations larded with pleasure. He rolled over, dreamed very quickly, and I considered Edgar who had been a second-thoughts man and may have been reliving a particular affectionate interlude while he padded back and forth outside of a doughnut business in deep snow. He broke the heart, Edgar, when he was finally seated, having taken an enormous amount of time deciding on a cream-filled, handing the package across the table without the furtive lurch, apologizing for the photo that did not do justice to the person who was, in real life, much prettier. I said, "You're sure?" and he jumped up and literally fled with a smear of custard at the corner of his mouth. There was a pool of water from snow that had fallen off his hat and melted on the table. I wiped it up with a paper napkin in place of wiping his face and considered how cleaning food off of another human being was one of the most intimate acts imaginable.

She was prettier than the little head shot.

I had followed Edgar's wife on remarkably ordinary errands for several weeks. She bought bagels, leggings, easy reads, a teddy bear, hair clips, men's underwear. She seemed to float around the city as if she were waiting for me. She stopped in front of store windows marking time, it seemed, for me to catch up. I am not someone with much of a sense of humor, nevertheless, it occurred to me how funny it would be to get a hold of her shopping list and slot bulletproof vest in between hand cream and insoles. She led me (I thought) to an edge of the city, where it frayed and lost its luster. She leaned against an abandoned industrial building where I shot her in her green tweed coat, regretting the ruin I was inflicting on that beautiful garment. I should, perhaps, have been less concerned with a hole in a coat than a hole in a woman. As I backed into a shadow I saw the man, Edgar's rival, emerge from the building and fall on the woman.

I associate the Edgar job with the smell of fryer oil and sugar.

I remember all of them. I keep a record of my work so between assignments I am reminded what it is I do for a living, in case it feels convenient to pretend otherwise. To pretend what I do is to occasionally shop for a painting or spend hours in empty movie theaters, pretend I am a person of leisure looking at sculpture and choosing shoes and reading material. My assignments are few and far between. I have the freedom to turn down people who feel dodgy. There is the occasional businessman who hasn't gotten the details right. A very good suit with a polyester tie. I trust no one carrying a gym bag. If I have questions about a client, I excuse myself and leave without a single word exchanged. I don't stay if there appears to be a listener nearby. I do worry I might be walking away from a desperate person. I realize good training renders a great deal of my life inflexible. I take care of myself first.

Lying next to Morris, I seem to have had one of my two recurring dreams or, possibly, both of them. In the shorter dream the aural landscape is full of soft thuds. I can't be sure if I can hear the bodies drop as a thud or if the rustle of garments is the predominant sound. The moment of concentrating on exactitude doesn't leave room for accurate listening.

In the second dream I move interminably, following my prey in a trance panic, unable to determine where the cameras are positioned. It is an unfamiliar city, labyrinthine, murky, with sinuous streets I can't pull into focus. My prey moves confidently, knowing I will not be able to avoid the cameras and I will walk for centuries without pressing the trigger. I will walk until I die. At which point I wake up because I am on the side of life.

I spent a moment trying to remember if I ever hear the thud, or anything at all, and think I make it up in the dream like a foley artist putting in the sounds so what I do feels more like a movie than life. And then I rolled over, probably hoping to find Morris gone, and I did. He had the good taste to slip away and avoid self-conscious morning exchanges through a fug of stale breath. I hadn't noticed his shoes hadn't left with him.

He was lying naked on the bathroom floor in the process of putting on the shirt in its color I dislike, the color occupying the bridge between green and brown. Only one arm was through a sleeve. In the middle of the night, he had concluded, "In the final analysis, you are really just a murderer." To which, not wanting to disturb an embrace, I did not state the obvious: my clients, Morris included, are like the generals who send the grunts into harm's way and keep their hands clean. Furthermore, I routinely remind mind myself I am not a murderer. I am an assassin. After a flank stroke he asked, "Why do you do this work?"

I said, "Why not?"

That is when he said I was beautiful in the dark and he fell asleep and I thought at length about Edgar.

I watched Morris' body for the extent of time appropriate to honor a death, the amount of time individuals stop before a casket and do whatever it is they do. I can't take the time to honor my dead. Nor even stop to look at them. I like to think that when he called me a murderer, it was the heart attack talking.

It surprised and pleased me that despite the sordid nature of this nocturnal transaction in cheap sheets, the birds appeared in the morning. On this particular morning I had hoped Morris would find the world, as it is, wonderful enough not to want to besmirch it with a terrible decision for violence. And to my delight I found him on the bathroom floor.

I dressed, wiped down anything I had touched, checked for hairs, called a taxi, picked up the package, and left the motel by a side door. I had the cab drop me off in front of a convenience store, where I bought a magazine and a chocolate bar, took stock of the off brand cans of beans, and disappeared out the back door and walked home. My routes home often smell like garbage.

My doorman, Jerry, asked me if I had a nice evening. I said thank you yes a very nice evening. Jerry thinks I'm a call girl. A call girl who wears flat shoes to a job and comes home with what appears to be a birthday present. One day I am going to remove the photo and address, rewrap the box and give it to Jerry, and he will wonder what kind of client will pay so much for a woman in flat shoes.

I like to tell myself I stretched out for Morris because he was soft and had nice hands. At the same time I am capable of admitting that on that particular evening, I knew myself to be unnecessary in the general scheme of things, looking forward to nothing better than shifting around my apartment, arguing with my pillow, restless, rootless, listening to traffic and the occasional battery of insults in the street. Listening to the leaves of a flip clock mark the passing of time. And because he had hired somebody else to do the dirty work, me, there was a good chance he was not an abuser, unlike the messy men who murder their wives blow by blow. I couldn't promise him it wouldn't hurt. It's part of my pitch to remind these men no death is painless. That nobody actually wants to go. That regret is an integral part of death. It is what death is mostly made out of. Nevertheless, I am swift, sure, and do not add a prologue of terror to the proceedings.

 

I waited across the street from Morris' townhouse. Eyeing the package in my hands, she invited me in without asking me who I was. She, too, was prettier than her head shot. She also deserved better paintings on her walls. They made sense, considering the shirt Morris died wearing, and to a certain extent, the beige rooms he chose to die in.

"Heart attack?" I asked. He had, for a long time, been someone with an unreliable heart.

I think because I didn't remove my gloves, she didn't offer anything to eat or drink. I set the box on a coffee table next to a neat stack of legal papers and an ashtray with a mountain of partially smoked cigarettes. In the voice of someone delivering a tiresome old fact, she said, "I wrapped that package, you know."

I smiled a slot of a smile to acknowledged it, indeed, had the woman's touch.

"You were hired to kill me," she said.

I saw that long line of women who didn't see me coming but who, feeling the swoosh of air driven by the bullet, must have told themselves I was there, and I was lethal.

She said, "I know because Morris told me. We told each other everything. Everything."

On a sideboard there were tulips in a vase, bent toward the light. I reminded myself that nature by habit leans toward life.

As if it were the most obvious thing imaginable, she said, "I gave him the money."

She picked up the box and fondled the bow. Surely she noticed it had been undone and done up again less expertly.

"You slept with him, didn't you," she said. "He was lovely to sleep with. He slept with everyone. Finally I couldn't stand the infidelity. I didn't want to be the murderer, so I told him he had to get rid of me. Put me out of my misery, the misery of living with a thoroughly wonderful man incapable of fidelity."

Unlike myself, I had the urge to put my arms around her, but it wasn't my place the same way it wasn't my place to remove the custard filling from Edgar's face. With gloves on, an embrace might not have seemed intimate enough. On the other hand, if I removed my gloves, it might have looked like I was getting down to business. Although, my business always involves keeping the gloves on. At moments like this, a person feels the full weight of the impossibility of negotiating human interactions. So I offered the best thing I could come up with in the moment.

"He never wanted you damaged."

And I was relieved to have skirted this job that would have attached to itself the smell of motel plastic, desperation, and desire.