Hit Man

9 Keller's Last Refuge

K eller, reaching fora red carnation, paused to finger one of the green ones. Kelly green it was, and vivid. Maybe it was an autumnal phenomenon, he thought. The leaves turned red and gold, the flowers turned green.

“It’s dyed,” said the florist, reading his mind. “They started dyeing them for St. Patrick’s Day, and that’s when I sell the most of them, but they caught on in a small way year-round. Would you like to wear one?”

Would he? Keller found himself weighing the move, then reminded himself it wasn’t an option. “No,” he said. “It has to be red.”

“I quite agree,” the little man said, selecting one of the blood-red blooms. “I’m a traditionalist myself. Green flowers. Why, how could the bees tell the blooms from the foliage?”

Keller said it was a good question.

“And here’s another. Shall we lay itacross the buttonhole and pin it to the lapel, or shall we insert itinto the buttonhole?”

It was a poser, all right. Keller asked the man for his recommendation.

“It’s controversial,” the florist said. “But I look at it this way. Whyhave a buttonhole if you’re not going touse it?”

Keller, suit pressed and shoes shined and a red carnation in his lapel, boarded the Metroliner at Penn Station. He’d picked up a copy ofGQ at a newsstand in the station, and he made it last all the way to Washington. Now and then his eyes strayed from the page to his boutonniere.

It would have been nice to know where the magazine stood on the buttonhole issue, but they had nothing to say on the subject. According to the florist, who admittedly had a small stake in the matter, Keller had nothing to worry about.

“Not every man can wear a flower,” the man had told him. “On one it will look frivolous, on another foppish. But with you-”

“It looks okay?”

“More than okay,” the man said. “You wear it with a certain flair. Or dare I say panache?”

Panache, Keller thought.

Panache had not been the object. Keller was just following directions. Wear a particular flower, board a particular train, stand in front of the B. Dalton bookstore in Union Station with a particular magazine until the client-a particular man himself, from the sound of it-took the opportunity to make contact.

It struck Keller as a pretty Mickey Mouse way to do things, and in the old days the old man would have shot it down. But the old man wasn’t himself these days, and something like this, with props and recognition signals, was the least of it.

“Wear the flower,” Dot had told him in the kitchen of the big old house in White Plains. “Wear the flower, carry the magazine-”

“Tote the barge, lift the bale… ”

“-and do the job, Keller. At least he’s not turning everything down. What’s wrong with a flower, anyway? Don’t tell me you’ve got Thoreau on the brain.”

“Thoreau?”

“He said to beware of enterprises that require new clothes. He never said a thing about carnations.”

At ten past noon Keller was at his post, wearing the flower, brandishing the magazine. He stood there like a tin soldier for half an hour, then left his post to find a men’s room. He returned feeling like a deserter, but took a minute to scan the area, looking for someone who was looking for him. He didn’t find anybody, so he planted himself where he’d been standing earlier and just went on standing there.

At a quarter after one he went to a fast-food counter for a hamburger. At ten minutes of two he found a phone and called White Plains. Dot answered, and before he could get out a full sentence she told him to come home.

“Job’s been canceled,” she said. “The guy phoned up and called it off. But you must have been halfway to D.C. by then.”

“I’ve been standing around since noon,” Keller said. “I hate just standing around.”

“Everybody does, Keller. At least you’ll make a couple of dollars. It should have been half in advance…”

“Shouldhave been?”

“He wanted to meet you first and find out if you thought the job was doable.Then he’d pay the first half, with the balance due and payable upon execution.”

Execution was the word for it. He said, “But he aborted before he met me. Doesn’t he like panache?”

“Panache?”

“The flower. Maybe he didn’t like the way I was wearing it.”

“Keller,” she said, “he never even saw you. He called here around ten-thirty. You were still on the train. Anyway, how many ways are there to wear a flower?”

“Don’t get me started,” he said. “If he didn’t pay anything in advance-”

“He paid. But not half.”

“What did he pay?”

“It’s not a fortune. He sent us a thousand dollars. Your end of that’s nothing to retire on, but all you had to do besides stand around was sit around, and there are people in this world who work harder and get less for it.”

“And I’ll bet it makesthem happy,” he said, “to hear how much better off they are than the poor bastards starving in Somalia.”

“Poor Keller. What are you going to do now?”

“Get on a train and come home.”

“Keller,” she said, “you’re in our nation’s capital. Go to the Smithsonian. Take a citizen’s tour of the White House. Slow down and smell the flowers.”

He rang off and caught the next train.

He went home and hung up his suit, but not before discarding the touch of panache from his lapel. He’d already gotten rid of the magazine.

That was on a Wednesday. Monday morning he was in a booth at one of his usual breakfast places, a Greek coffee shop on Second Avenue. He was reading theTimes and eating a plate of salami and eggs when a fellow said, “Mind if I join you?” He didn’t wait for an answer, either, but slid unbidden into the seat across from Keller.

Keller eyed him. The guy was around forty, wearing a dark suit and an unassertive tie. He was clean-shaven and his hair was combed. He didn’t look like a nut.

“You ought to wear a boutonniere,” the man said. “It adds, I don’t know, a certain something.”

“Panache,” Keller suggested.

“You know,” the man said, “that’s just what I was going for. It was on the tip of my tongue. Panache.”

Keller didn’t say anything.

“You’re probably wondering what this is all about.” Keller shook his head.

“You’re not?”

“I figure more will be revealed.”

That drew a smile. “A cool customer,” the fellow said. “Well, I’m not surprised.” His hand dipped into the front of his suit jacket, and Keller braced himself with both hands on the edge of the table, waiting to see the hand come out with a gun.

Instead the hand emerged clutching a flat leather wallet, which the man flipped open to disclose an ID. The photo matched the face across the table from Keller, and the accompanying card identified the face as that of one Roger Keith Bascomb, an operative of something called the National Security Resource.

Keller handed the ID back to its owner.

“Thanks,” Bascomb said. “You were all set to flip the table on me, weren’t you?”

“Why would I do that?”

“Never mind. You’re alert, which is all to the good. And I’m not surprised. I know who you are, and I knowwhat you are.”

“Just a man trying to eat his breakfast,” Keller said.

“And a man who’s evidently not put off by all that scary stuff about cholesterol. Salami and eggs! I have to say I admire you, Keller. I bet that’s real coffee, too, isn’t it?”

“It’s not great,” Keller said, “but it’s the genuine article.”

“My breakfast’s an oat bran muffin,” Bascomb said, “and I wash it down with decaf. But I didn’t come here to put in a bid for sympathy.”

Just as well, Keller thought.

“I don’t want to make this overly dramatic,” Bascomb said, “but it’s hard to avoid. Mr. Keller, your country has need of your services.”

“My country?”

“The United States of America.That country.”

“My services?”

“The very sort of services you rode down to Washington prepared to perform. I think we both know what sort of services I’m talking about.”

“I could argue the point,” Keller said.

“You could.”

“But I’ll let it go.”

“Good,” Bascomb said, “and I in turn will apologize for the wild goose chase. We needed to get a line on you and find out a few things about you.”

“So you picked me up in Union Station and tagged me back to New York.”

“I’m afraid we did, yes.”

“And learned who I was, and checked me out.”

“Like a book from a library,” Bascomb said. “Just what we did. You see, Keller, your uncle would prefer to cut out the cutout man.”

“My uncle?”

“Sam. We don’t want to run everything through What’s-his-name in White Plains. This is strictly need-to-know, and he doesn’t.”

“So you want to be able to work directly with me.”

“Right.”

“And you want me to… ”

“To do what you do best, Keller.”

Keller ate some salami, ate some eggs, drank some coffee.

“I don’t think so,” he said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I’m not interested,” Keller said. “If I ever did what you’re implying, well, I don’t do it anymore.”

“You’ve retired.”

“That’s right. And, even if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t go behind the old man’s back, not to work for someone who sent me off on a fool’s errand with a flower in my lapel.”

“You wore that flower,” Bascomb said, “with the air of a man who never left home without one. I’ve got to tell you, Keller, you were born to wear a red carnation.”

“That’s good to know,” Keller said, “but it doesn’t change anything.”

“Well, the same thing goes for your reluctance.”

“How’s that?”

“It’s good to know how you feel,” Bascomb said. “Good to get it all out in the open. But it doesn’t change anything. We need you, and you’re in.”

He smiled, waiting for Keller to voice an objection. Keller let him wait.

“Think it through,” Bascomb suggested. “Think U.S. Attorney’s Office. Think Internal Revenue Service. Think of all the resources of a powerful-some say too powerful-federal government, lined up against one essentially defenseless citizen.”

Keller, in spite of himself, found himself thinking it through.

“And now forget all that,” said Bascomb, waving it all away like smoke. “And think of the opportunity you have to serve your nation. I don’t know if you’ve ever thought of yourself as a patriot, Keller, but if you look deep within yourself I suspect you’ll find wellsprings of patriotism you never knew existed. You’re an American, Keller, and here you are with a chance to do something for America and save your own ass in the process.”

Keller’s words surprised him. “My father was a soldier,” he said.

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land!

Keller closed the book and set it aside. The lines of Sir Walter Scott’s were quoted in a short story Keller had read in high school. The titular man without a country was Philip Nolan, doomed to wander the world all his life because he’d passed up his own chance to be a patriot.

Keller didn’t have the story on hand, but he’d found the poetry inBartlett’s Familiar Quotations, and now he looked uppatriotism in the index. The best thing he found was Samuel Johnson’s word on the subject. “Patriotism,” Dr. Johnson asserted, “is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”

The sentence had a nice ring to it, but he wasn’t sure he knew what Johnson was getting at. Wasn’t a scoundrel the furthest thing from a patriot? In simplest terms, a patriot would seem unequivocally to be one of the good guys. At the very least he devoted himself to serving his nation and his fellow citizens, and often enough he wound up giving the last full measure of devotion, sacrificing himself, dying so that others might live in freedom.

Nathan Hale, say, regretting that he had but one life to give for his country. John Paul Jones, declaring that he had not yet begun to fight. David Farragut, damning the torpedoes, urging full speed ahead.

Good guys, Keller thought.

Whereas a scoundrel had to be a bad guy by definition. So how could he be a patriot, or take refuge in patriotism?

Keller thought about it, and decided the scoundrel might take refuge in theappearance of patriotism, wrapping selfish acts in the cloak of selflessness. A sort of false patriotism, to cloak his base motives.

But a true scoundrel couldn’t be a genuine patriot. Or could he?

If you looked at it objectively, he had to admit, then he was probably a scoundrel himself. He didn’t much feel like a scoundrel. He felt like your basic New York single guy, living alone, eating out or bringing home takeout, schlepping his wash to the laundromat, doing theTimes crossword with his morning coffee. Working out at the gym, starting doomed relationships with women, going to the movies by himself. There were eight million stories in the naked city, most of them not very interesting, and his was one of them. call from a man in White Plains. And packed a bag and caught a plane and killed somebody.

Hard to argue the point. Man behaves like that, he’s a scoundrel. Case closed.

Now he had a chance to be a patriot.

Not to seem like one, because no one would know about this, not even Dot and the old man. Bascomb had made himself very clear on the point. “Not a word to anyone, and if anything goes wrong, it’s the same system asMission: Impossible. We never heard of you. You’re on your own, and if you try to tell anybody you’re working for the government, they’ll just laugh in your face. If you give them my name, they’ll say they never heard of me. Because they never did.”

“Because it’s not your name.”

“And you might have trouble finding the National Security Resource in the phone book. Or anywhere else, like theCongressional 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 theWashington 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 theNew York Times but five blocks away with theWashington Post?

He thought it over and decided he was being silly. But then was he being any less silly buying thePost each morning? He’d tossed a pebble into a pond days ago, and now he kept returning, trying to detect the shadow of a ripple on the pond’s smooth surface.

He got out of there and left the paper behind. Later, thinking about it, he realized what had him acting this way.

He was looking for closure, for some sense of completion. Whenever he did a job for the old man, he made a phone call, got a pat on the back, bantered a bit with Dot, and, in the ordinary course of things, collected his money. That last was the most important, of course, but the acknowledgment was important, too, along with the mutual recognition that the job was done and done satisfactorily.

With Ramsgate he got none of that. There was no report to make, nobody to banter with, no one to tell him how well he’d done. Tight-lipped men in Washington offices might be talking about him, but he didn’t get to hear what they were saying. Bascomb might be pleased with what he’d done, but he wasn’t getting in touch, wasn’t dispensing any pats on the back.

Well, Keller decided, that was okay.

Because, when all was said and done, wasn’t that the soldier’s lot? There would be no drums and bugles for him, no parades, no medals. He would get along without feedback or acknowledgment, and he would probably never know the real results of his actions, let alone the reason he’d drawn a particular assignment in the first place.

He could live with that. He could even take a special satisfaction in it. He didn’t need drums or bugles, parades or medals. He had been leading the life of a scoundrel, and his country had called on him. And he had served her.

No one had given him a pat on the back. No one had called to say well done. No one would, and that was fine. The deed he had done, the service he had performed, was its own reward.

He was a soldier.

Time passed, and Keller got used to the idea that he would never hear from Bascomb again. Then one afternoon he was standing on line at the half-price ticket booth in Times Square when someone tapped him on the shoulder. “Excuse me,” a fellow said, handing him an envelope. “Think you dropped this.”

Keller started to say he hadn’t, then stopped when he recognized the man. Bascomb! Before he could say anything the man was gone, disappearing into the crowd.

Just a plain white envelope, the flap glued down and taped shut. Nothing written on it. From the heft of it, you’d put two stamps on it before putting it in the mail. But there were no stamps, and Bascomb had not entrusted it to the mails.

Keller put it in his pocket. When he got to the front of the line he bought a ticket to that night’s performance of a fifties musical. He thought of buying two tickets and hiding one in a hollowed-out pumpkin. Then, when the curtain went up at eight o’clock, Bascomb would be in the seat beside him.

He went home and opened the envelope. There was a name, along with an address in Pompano Beach, Florida. There were two Polaroid shots, one of a man and woman, the other of the same man, alone this time, sitting down. There were nine hundred-dollar bills, used and out of sequence, and two fifties.

Keller looked at the photos. They’d evidently been taken several years apart. The fellow looked older in the photo that showed him unaccompanied, and was that a wheelchair he was sitting in? Keller thought it might be.

Poor bastard, Keller started to think, and then caught himself. The guy had no pity coming. The son of a bitch was a traitor.

The thousand in cash fell a ways short of covering Keller’s expenses. He had to pay full coach fare on the flight to West Palm Beach, had to rent a car, had to stay three nights in a hotel room before he could get the job done and another night afterward, before he could catch a morning flight home. The five hundred dollars he’d received as expenses for the Howard Ramsgate incident had paid for the Metroliner and his room and a good dinner, with a couple of dollars left over. But he had to dip into his own pocket to get the job done in Pompano Beach.

Not that it really mattered. What did he care about a few dollars one way or the other?

He might have cut corners by getting in and out faster, but the operation turned out to be a tricky one. The traitor-his name was Drucker, Louis Drucker, but it was simpler for Keller to think of him as “the traitor”-lived in a beachfront condo on Briny Avenue, right in the middle of Pompano Beach. The residents, predictably enough, had a median age well into the golden years, and the traitor was by no means the only one there with wheels on his chair. There were others who got around with aluminum walkers, while the more athletic codgers strutted around with canes.

This was the first time Keller’s work had taken him to such a venue, so he didn’t know if security was as much of a priority at every senior citizens’ residence, but this one was harder to sneak into than the Pentagon. There was an attendant posted in the lobby at all hours, and there was closed-circuit surveillance of the elevators and stairwells.

The traitor left the building twice a day, morning and evening, for a turn along the beach. He was always accompanied by a woman half his age who pushed his chair on the hard-packed sand, then read a Spanish magazine and smoked a cigarette or two while he took the sun.

Keller considered and rejected elaborate schemes for getting into the building. They’d work, but then what? The woman lived in the traitor’s apartment, so he’d have to take her out, too. He had no compunctions about this, recognizing that civilian casualties were inevitable in modern warfare, and who was to say she was an entirely unwitting pawn? No, if the only way to nullify the traitor led through her, Keller would take her out without a second thought.

But a double homicide made for a high-profile incident, and why draw unnecessary attention? With an aged and infirm quarry, it was so much simpler to make it look like natural causes.

Could he lure the woman off the premises? Could he gain access during her absence? And could he get out unobtrusively, his work completed, before she got back?

He was working it out, fumbling with a plan, when Fate dropped it all in his lap. It was mid-morning, with the sun climbing the eastern sky, and he’d dutifully dogged their footsteps (well,her footsteps, since the traitor’s feet never touched the ground) a mile or so up the beach. Now the traitor sat in his chair facing the ocean, his head back, his eyes closed, his leathery skin soaking up the rays. A few yards away the woman lay on her side on a beach towel, smoking a cigarette, reading a magazine.

She put out the cigarette, burying it in the sand. And, moments later, the magazine slipped from her fingers as she dozed off.

Keller gave her a minute. He looked left, then right. There was nobody close by, and he was willing to take his chances with those who were fifty yards or more from the scene. Even if they were looking right at him, they’d never realize what was happening right before their eyes. Especially given the age of most of those eyes.

He came up behind the traitor, clapped a hand over his treacherous mouth, used the thumb and forefinger of his other hand to pinch the man’s nostrils closed, and kept his air shut off while he counted, slowly, to a number that seemed high enough.

When he let go, the traitor’s hand fell to one side. Keller propped it up and left him looking as though asleep, basking like a lizard in the warm embrace of the sun.

“Where’ve you been, Keller? I’ve been calling you for days.”

“I was out of town,” he said.

“Out of town?”

“ Florida, actually.”

“ Florida? Disney World, by any chance? Do I get to shake the hand that shook the hand of Mickey Mouse?”

“I just wanted a little sun and sand,” he said. “I went to the Gulf Coast. Sanibel Island.”

“Did you bring me a seashell, Keller?”

“A seashell?”

“The shelling is supposed to be spectacular there,” Dot said. “The island sticks out into the Gulf instead of stretching out parallel to the land, the way they’re supposed to.” “ ‘The way they’re supposed to’?”

“Well, the way they usually do. So the tides bring in shells by the carload and people come from all over the world to walk the beach and pick them up. But why am I telling you all this? You’re the one who just got back from the damn place. You didn’t bring me a shell, did you?”

“You have to get up early in the morning for the serious shelling,” Keller said, wondering if it was true. “The shellers are out there at the crack of dawn, like locusts on a field of barley.”

“Barley, huh?”

“Amber waves of grain,” he said. “Anyway, what do I care about shells? I just wanted a break.”

“You missed some work.”

“Oh,” he said.

“It couldn’t wait, and who knew where you were or when you’d be back? You should really call in when you leave town.”

“I didn’t think of it.”

“Well, why would you? You never leave town.

When’s the last time you had a vacation?”

“I’m on vacation most of my life,” he said. “Right here in New York.”

“Then I guess it was about time you went away for something besides work. I suppose you had company.”

“Well…”

“Good for you, Keller. It’s just as well I couldn’t reach you. But next time…”

“Next time I’ll keep you posted,” he said. “Better than that, next time I’ll bring home a seashell.”

This time he didn’t try to track the story in the papers. Even if Pompano Beach had a newspaper of its own, you couldn’t expect to find it at the UN newsstand. They’d have theMiami Herald there, but somehow he didn’t figure theHerald ran a story every time an old fellow drifted off in the sunshine. If they did, there’d be no room left in the paper for hurricanes and carjackings.

Besides, why did he want to read about it? He had carried out his mission and the traitor was dead. That was all he had to know.

It was almost two months before Bascomb got in touch again. This time there was no face-to-face contact, however fleeting.

Instead, Keller got a phone call. The voice was presumably Bascomb’s, but he couldn’t have sworn to it. The call was brief, and the voice never rose much above a low murmur.

“Stay home tomorrow,” the voice said. “There’ll be something delivered to you.”

And in fact the FedEx guy came around the following morning, bringing a flat cardboard envelope that held a photograph, an index card with a name and address printed on it, and a sheaf of used hundreds.

There were ten of the bills, a thousand dollars again, although the address this time was in Aurora, Colorado, which involved quite a few more air miles than Pompano Beach. That rankled at first, but when he thought about it he decided there was something to be said for the low payment. If you lost money every time you did this sort of thing, it underscored your commitment to your role as a patriot. You never had to question your motives, because it was clear you weren’t in it for the money.

He squared up the bills and put them in his wallet, then took a good long look at the photo of the latest traitor.

And the phone rang.

Dot said, “Keller, I’m lonesome and there’s nothing on TV but Sally Jessy Raphae ël. Come on out here and keep me company.”

Keller took a train out to White Plains and another one back to New York. He packed a bag, called an airline, and took a cab to JFK. That night his plane landed in Seattle, where he was met by a lean young man in a double-breasted brown suit. The fellow wore a hat, too, a fedora that gave him a sort of retro look.

The young man-Jason, his name was-dropped Keller at a hotel. In the morning they met in the lobby, and Jason drove him around and pointed out various points of interest, including the Kingdome and the Space Needle and the home and office of the man Keller was supposed to kill. And, barely visible in the distance, the snow-capped peak of Mount Rainier.

They ate lunch at a good downtown restaurant, and Jason put away an astonishing amount of food. Keller wondered where he put it. There wasn’t a spare ounce on him.

The waitress was refilling the coffee when Jason said, “Well, I was starting to wonder if we missed him today. Just coming through the door? Gray suit, blue tie? Big red face on him? That’s Cully Wilcox.”

He looked just like his photo. It never hurt, though, to have somebody ID the guy in the flesh.

“He’s a big man in this town,” Jason said, his lips barely moving. “Harder they fall, right?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Isn’t that the expression? ‘The bigger they are, the harder they fall’?”

“Oh, right,” Keller said.

“I guess you don’t feel like talking right now,” Jason said. “I guess you got things to think about, details to work out.”

“I guess so,” Keller said.

“This may take a while,” he told Dot. “The subject is locally prominent.”

“Locally prominent, is he?”

“So they tell me. That means more security on the way in and more heat on the way out.”

“Always the way when it’s somebody big.”

“On the other hand, the bigger they are, the harder they fall.”

“Whatever that means,” she said. “Well, take your time, Keller. Smell the flowers. Just don’t let the grass grow under your feet.”

Hell of a thing, Keller thought.

He muted the TV just in time to stop a cute young couple from advising him that Certs was two, two, two mints in one. He closed his eyes and adapted the dialogue to his own circumstances.“Keller is a contract killer.” “No, Keller is a traitor killer.” “He’s two, two, two killers in one… ”

It was tough enough, he thought, to lead one life at a time. It was a lot trickier when they overlapped. He couldn’t stall the old man, couldn’t put off the trip to Seattle while he did his Uncle Sam’s business in Colorado. But how long could he delay the mission? How urgent was it?

He couldn’t call Bascomb to ask him. So he had to assume a high degree of urgency.

Which meant he had to find a way to do two, two, two jobs in one.

Just what he needed.

It was a Saturday morning, a week and a half after he’d flown to Seattle, when Keller flew home. This time he had to change planes in Chicago, and it was late by the time he got to his apartment. He’d already called White Plains the night before to tell them the job was done. He unpacked his bag, shucked his clothes, took a hot shower, and fell into bed.

The following afternoon the phone rang.

“No names, no pack drill,” said Bascomb. “I just wanted to sayWell done. ”

“Oh,” Keller said.

“Not our usual thing,” Bascomb went on, “but even a seasoned professional can use the occasional pat on the back. You’ve done fine work, and you ought to know it’s appreciated.”

“That’s nice to hear,” Keller admitted.

“And I’m not just speaking for myself. Your efforts are appreciated on a much higher level.”

“Really?”

“On the highest level, actually.”

“The highest level?”

“No names, no pack drill,” Bascomb said again, “but let’s just say you’ve earned the profound gratitude of a man who never inhaled.”

He called White Plains and told Dot he was bushed. “I’ll come out tomorrow around lunchtime,” he said. “How’s that?”

“Oh, goody,” she said. “I’ll make sandwiches, Keller. We’ll have a picnic.”

He got off the phone and couldn’t think what to do with himself. On a whim he took the subway to the Bronx and spent a few hours at the zoo. He hadn’t been to a zoo in years, long enough for him to have forgotten that they always made him sad.

It still worked that way, and he couldn’t say why. It’s not that it bothered him to see animals caged. From what he understood, they led a better life in captivity than they did in the wild. They lived longer and stayed healthier. They didn’t have to spend half their time trying to get enough food and the other half trying to keep from being food for somebody else. It was tempting to look at them and conclude that they were bored, but he didn’t believe it. They didn’t look bored to him.

He left unaccountably sad as always and returned to Manhattan. He ate at a new Afghan restaurant and went to a movie. It was a western, but not the sort of Hollywood classic he would have preferred. Even after the movie was over, you couldn’t really tell which ones were the good guys.

Next day Keller caught an early train to White Plains and spent forty minutes upstairs with the old man. When he came downstairs Dot told him there was fresh coffee made, or iced tea.

He went for the coffee. She already had a tall glass of iced tea poured for herself. They sat at the kitchen table and she asked him how it had gone in Seattle. He said it went okay.

“And how’d you like Seattle, Keller? From what I hear it’s everybody’s city du jour these days. Used to be San Francisco and now it’s Seattle.”

“It was fine,” he said.

“Get the urge to move there?”

He had found himself wondering what it might be like, living in one of those converted industrial buildings around Pioneer Square, say, and shopping for groceries at Pike Market, and judging the quality of the weather by the relative visibility of Mount Rainier. But he never went anywhere without having thoughts along those lines. That didn’t mean he was ready to pull up stakes and move.

“Not really,” he said.

“I understand it’s a great place for a cup of coffee.”

“They’re serious about their coffee,” he allowed. “Maybe too serious. Wine snobs are bad enough, but when all it is is coffee… ”

“How’s that coffee, by the way?”

“It’s fine.”

“I bet it can’t hold a candle to the stuff in Seattle,” she said. “But the weather’s lousy there. Rains all the time, the way I hear it.”

“There’s a lot of rain,” he said. “But it’s gentle. It doesn’t bowl you over.”

“It rains but it never pours?”

“Something like that.”

“I guess the rain got to you, huh?”

“How’s that?”

“Rain, day after day. And all that coffee snobbery. You couldn’t stand it.”

Huh? “It didn’t bother me,” he said.

“No?”

“Not really. Why?”

“Well, I was wondering,” she said, looking at him over the brim of her glass. “I was wondering what the hell you were doing in Denver.”

The TV was on with the sound off, tuned to one of the home shopping channels. A woman with unconvincing red hair was modeling a dress. Keller thought it looked dowdy, but the number in the lower right corner kept advancing, indicating that viewers were calling in a steady stream to order the item.

“Of course I could probablyguess what you were doing in Denver,” Dot was saying, “and I could probably come up with the name of the person you were doing it to. I got somebody to send me a couple of issues of theDenver Post, and what did I find but a story about a woman in someplace called Aurora who came to a bad end, and I swear the whole thing had your fingerprints all over it. Don’t look so alarmed, Keller. Not your actual fingerprints. I was speaking figuratively.”

“Figuratively,” he said.

“It did look like your work,” she said, “and the timing was right. I’d say it might have lacked a little of your usual subtlety, but I figure that’s because you were in a big hurry to get back to Seattle.” He pointed at the television set. He said, “Do you believe how many of those dresses they’ve sold?”

“Tons.”

“Would you buy a dress like that?”

“Not in a million years. I’d look like a sack of potatoes in something cut like that.”

“I mean any dress. Over the phone, without trying it on.”

“I buy from catalogs all the time, Keller. It amounts to the same thing. If it doesn’t look right you can always send it back.”

“Do you ever do that? Send stuff back?”

“Sure.”

“He doesn’t know, does he, Dot? About Denver?”

“No.”

He nodded, hesitated, then leaned forward. “Dot,” he said, “can you keep a secret?”

She listened while he told her the whole thing, from Bascomb’s first appearance in the coffee shop to the most recent phone call, relaying the good wishes of the man who never inhaled. When he was done he got up and poured himself more coffee. He came back and sat down and Dot said, “You know what gets me? ‘Dot, can you keep a secret?’ CanI keep a secret?”

“Well, I-”

“If I can’t,” she said, “then we’re all in big trouble. Keller, I’ve been keepingyour secrets just about as long as you’ve had secrets to keep. And you’re asking me-”

“I wasn’t exactly asking you. What do they call it when you don’t really expect an answer?”

“Prayer,” she said.

“Rhetorical,” he said. “It was a rhetorical question. For God’s sake, I know you can keep a secret.”

“That’s why you kept this one from me,” she said. “For lo these many months.”

“Well, I figured this was different.”

“Because it was a state secret.”

“That’s right.”

“Hush-hush, your eyes only, need-to-know basis. Matters of national security.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And what if I turned out to be a Commie rat?”

“Dot-”

“So how come I all of a sudden got a top-secret clearance? Or is it need-to-know? In other words, if I hadn’t brought up Denver… ”

“No,” he said. “I was planning on telling you anyway.”

“Sooner or later, you mean.”

“Sooner. When I called yesterday and said I wanted to wait until today to come up, I was buying a little time to think it over.”

“And?”

“And I decided I wanted to run the whole thing by you, and see what you think.”

“What I think.”

“Right.”

“Well, you know what that tells me, Keller? It tells me whatyou think.”

“And?”

“And I think it’s about the same thing that I think.”

“Spell it out, okay?”

“C-O-N,” she said. “J-O-B. Total B-U-L-L-S-H-am I getting through?”

“Loud and clear.”

“He must be pretty slick,” she said, “to have a guy like you jumping through hoops. But I can see how it would work. First place, you want to believe it. ‘Young man, your country has need of you.’ Next thing you know, you’re knocking off strangers for chump change.”

“Expense money. It never covered the expenses, except the first time.”

“The patent lawyer, caught in his own mousetrap. What do you figure he did to piss Bascomb off?”

“No idea.”

“And the old fart in the wheelchair. It’s a good thing you iced the son of a bitch, Keller, or our children and our children’s children would grow up speaking Russian.”

“Don’t rub it in.”

“I’m just making you pay for that rhetorical question. All said and done, do you think there’s a chance in a million Bascomb’s on the level?”

He made himself think it over, but the answer wasn’t going to change. “No,” he said.

“What was the tip-off? The approval from on high?”

“I guess so. You know, I got a hell of a rush.”

“I can imagine.”

“I mean, the man at the top. The big guy.”

“Chomping doughnuts and thinking of you.”

“But then you think about it afterward, and there’s just no way. Even if he said something like that, would Bascomb pass it on? And then when I started to look at the whole picture… ”

“Tilt.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well,” she said. “What kind of a line have we got on Bascomb? We don’t know his name or his address or how to get hold of him. What does that leave us?”

“Damn little.”

“Oh, I don’t know. We don’t need a whole hell of a lot, Keller. And we do know something.”

“What?”

“We know three people he wanted killed,” she said. “That’s a start.”

Keller, dressed in a suit and tie and sporting a red carnation in his buttonhole, sat in what he supposed you would call the den of a sprawling ranch house in Glen Burnie, Maryland. He had the TV on with the sound off, and he was beginning to think that was the best way to watch it. The silence lent a welcome air of mystery to everything, even the commercials.

He perked up at the sound of a car in the driveway, and, as soon as he heard a key in the lock, he triggered the remote to shut off the TV altogether. Then he sat and waited patiently while Paul Ernest Farrar hung his topcoat in the hall closet, carried a sack of groceries to the kitchen, and moved through the rooms of his house.

When he finally got to the den, Keller said, “Well, hello, Bascomb. Nice place you got here.” Keller, leading a scoundrel’s life, had ended the lives of others in a great variety of ways. As far as he knew, though, he had never actually frightened anyone to death. For a moment, however, it looked as though Bascomb (né Farrar) might be the first. The man turned white as Wonder Bread, took an involuntary step backward, and clasped a hand to his chest. Keller hoped he wasn’t going to need CPR.

“Easy,” he said. “Grab a seat, why don’t you?

Sorry to startle you, but it seemed the best way. No names, no pack drill, right?”

“What do you think you’re doing in my house?”

“The crossword puzzle, originally. Then when the light failed I had the TV on, and it’s a lot better when you don’t know what they’re saying. Makes it more of an exercise for the imagination.” He leaned back in his chair. “I’d have joined you for breakfast,” he said, “but who knows if you even go out for it? Who’s to say you don’t have your oat bran muffin and decaf at the pine table in the kitchen? So I figured I’d come here.”

“You’re not supposed to get in touch with me at all,” Farrar said sternly. “Under any circumstances.”

“Give it up,” Keller said. “It’s not working.”

Farrar didn’t seem to hear him. “Since you’re here,” he said, “of course we’ll talk. And there happens to be something I need to talk to you about, as a matter of fact. Just let me get my notes.”

He slipped past Keller and was reaching into one of the desk drawers when Keller took him by the shoulders and turned him around. “Sit down,” he said, “before you embarrass yourself. I already found the gun and took the bullets out. Wouldn’t you feel silly, pulling the trigger and all it does is goclick?”

“I wasn’t reaching for a gun.”

“Maybe you wanted this, then,” Keller said, dipping into his breast pocket. “A passport in the name of Roger Keith Bascomb, issued by authority of the government of British Honduras. You know something? I looked on the map, and I couldn’tfind British Honduras.”

“It’s Belize now.”

“But they kept the old name for the passports?” He whistled soundlessly. “I found the firm’s literature in the same drawer with the passport. An outfit in the Caymans, and they offer what they call fantasy passports. To protect yourself, in case you’re abducted by terrorists who don’t like Americans. Would you believe it-the same folks offer other kinds of fake ID as well. Send them a check and a photo and they’ll set you up as an agent of the National Security Resource. Wouldn’t that be handy?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Keller sighed. “All right,” he said. “Then I’ll tell you. Your name isn’t Roger Bascomb, it’s Paul Farrar. You’re not a government agent, you’re some kind of paper-pusher in the Social Security Administration.”

“That’s just a cover.”

“You used to be married,” Keller went on, “until your wife left you for another man. His name was Howard Ramsgate.”

“Well,” Farrar said.

“That was six years ago. So much for the heat of the moment.”

“I wanted to find the right way to do it.”

“You found me,” Keller said, “and got me to do it for you. And it worked, and if you’d left it like that you’d have been in the clear. But instead you sent me to Florida to kill an old man in a wheelchair.”

“Louis Drucker,” Farrar said.

“Your uncle, your mother’s brother. He didn’t have any children of his own, and who do you think he left his money to?”

“What kind of a life did Uncle Lou have? Crippled, immobile, living on painkillers… ”

“I guess we did him a favor,” Keller said. “The woman in Colorado used to live two doors down the street from you. I don’t know what she did to get on your list. Maybe she jilted you or insulted you, or maybe her dog pooped on your lawn. But what’s the difference? The point is you used me. You got me to chase around the country killing people.”

“Isn’t that what you do?”

“Right,” Keller said, “and that’s the part I don’t understand. I don’t know how you knew to call a certain number in White Plains, but you did, and that got me on the train with a flower in my lapel. Why the charade? Why not just pay the money and let out the contract?”

“I couldn’t afford it.”

Keller nodded. “I thought that might be it. Theft of services, that’s what we’re looking at here. You had me do all this for nickels and dimes.”

“Look,” Farrar said, “I want to apologize.”

“You do?”

“I do, I honestly do. The first time, with that bastard Ramsgate, well, it was the only way to do it. The other two times I could have afforded to pay you a suitable sum, but we’d already established a relationship. You were working, you know, out of patriotism, and it seemed safer and simpler to leave it at that.”

“Safer.”

“And simpler.”

“And cheaper,” Keller said. “At the time, but where are you in the long run?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” Keller said, “what do you figure happens now?”

“You’re not going to kill me.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“You’d have done it,” Farrar said. “We wouldn’t be having this conversation. You want something, and I think I know what it is.”

“A pat on the back,” Keller said, “from the man who never inhaled.”

“Money,” Farrar said. “You want what’s rightfully yours, the money you would have been paid if I hadn’t misrepresented myself. That’s it, isn’t it?”

“It’s close.”

“Close?”

“What I want,” Keller said, “is that and a little more. If I were the IRS, I’d call the difference penalties and interest.”

“How much?”

Keller named a figure, one large enough to make Farrar blink. He said it seemed high, and they kicked it around, and Keller found himself reducing the sum by a third.

“I can raise most of that,” Farrar told him. “Not overnight. I’ll have to sell some securities. I can have some cash by the end of the week, or the beginning of next week at the latest.”

“That’s good,” Keller said.

“And I’ll have some more work for you.”

“More work?”

“That woman in Colorado,” Farrar said. “You wondered what I had against her. There was something, a remark she made once, but that’s not the point. I found a way to make myself a secondary beneficiary in an individual’s government insurance policy. It’s too complicated to explain but it ought to work like a charm.”

“That’s pretty slick,” Keller said, getting to his feet. “I’ll tell you, Farrar, I’m prepared to wait a week or so for the money, especially with the prospect of future work. But I’d like some cash tonight as a binder. You must have some money around the house.”

“Let me see what I’ve got in the safe,” Farrar said.

“Twenty-two thousand dollars,” Keller said, slipping a rubber band around the bills and tucking them away. “That’s what, fifty-five hundred dollars a pop?”

“You’ll get the balance next week,” Farrar assured him. “Or a substantial portion of it, at the very least.”

“Great.”

“Anyway, where do you get fifty-five hundred? There were three of them, and three into twenty-two is seven and a third. That makes it”-he frowned, calculating-“seven thousand, three hundred thirty-three dollars a head.”

“Is that right?”

“And thirty-three cents,” Farrar said.

Keller scratched his head. “Am I counting wrong? I make it four people.”

“Who’s the fourth?”

“You are,” Keller told him.

“If I’d wanted to wait,” he told Dot the next day, “I think he probably would have handed over a decent chunk of cash. But there was no way I was going to let him see the sun come up.”

“Because who knows what the little shit is going to do next.”

“That’s it,” Keller said. “He’s an amateur and a nut case, and he already fooled me once.”

“And once is enough.”

“Once is plenty,” Keller agreed. “He had it all worked out, you know. He’d manipulate Social Security records and get me to kill total strangers so that he could collect their benefits. Total strangers!”

“You generally kill total strangers, Keller.”

“They’re strangers to me,” he said, “but not to the client. Anyway, I decided to take a bird in the hand, and the bird comes to twenty-two thousand. I guess that’s better than nothing.”

“It was,” Dot said, “last time I checked. And none of it was work, anyway. You did it for love.”

“Love?”

“Love of country. You’re a patriot, Keller. After all, it’s the thought that counts.”

“If you say so.”

“I say so. And I like the flower, Keller. I wouldn’t think you’d be the type to wear one, but I have to say you can carry it off. It looks good. Adds a certain something.”

“Panache,” he said. “What else?”