The Ethical Assassin

Chapter 13

DESIREE SAT ON HER BED, cross-legged, wearing only her panties and her bikini top, a gray copy of the I Ching in her lap. For the past three weeks, she’d been coming to the same symbol again and again. No matter how she asked the question, no matter how she sought her answer, she kept coming back to the hsieh.

She drew it on the back of her left hand with a Sharpie so she would think about it constantly. Meditate on it. When it finally faded away in the slow tide of flaking skin, she would redraw it. Last week, she had passed a tattoo parlor on Federal Highway, and she thought about having it placed on her hand permanently, but she decided there was no point being permanent with a symbol of change.

B.B. saw it on her hand and said it looked like a bunch of lines, and she guessed they all did, but this pictogram, she knew, derived from the image of two hands holding on to the horns of an ox. It signified transformation, addressing and fixing a problem. It was her symbol. She had to fix the problem, and the problem was her life with B.B.

She was now twenty-four, and she’d been with him for three years, fixing his meals and driving his car, organizing his calendar, reserving his tables in restaurants. She bought his groceries and paid his bills, answered his door, mixed his drinks. He needed her, and she knew that, she loved that. She felt grateful, too. She’d been about as lost as you could get when he’d taken her in. He’d done it for his own reasons, to exorcise his demons, but he’d still done it.

Those first few days, weeks, even months, she’d slept lightly, watching the door handle, waiting to see B.B. slink in under cover of darkness and claim his due. Maybe not that first day, when her stench had been so bad that even she had had to breathe through her mouth not to gag, but once she’d cleaned up, got off the crank, bought some new clothes- different story then. Her old face started to come back in the mirror. Flesh grew on bone, cheeks reddened and rounded, her nose became less narrow, less sharp, her hair less brittle. She had become herself.

B.B. had told her that no matter what happened, no matter how clean, how happy, she became, she’d never stop wanting to use. The crank would always call to her. It would be a shadow that would haunt her; it was a rope tethered to her neck that would never stop tugging.

He was wrong. He was wrong because Desiree already had a shadow, she already had a tether. The crank had obscured it, hidden it- and God help her, that was what she had loved about it at first. But when she was clean, as she lay in the bed in B.B.’s Coral Gables house, staring at the endless rotation of the ceiling fan, listening to the distant sound of lawn mowers and car alarms, she found her way back to her sister.

Aphrodite had died during the procedure that had separated them. The girls hadn’t reached their second birthday when they’d performed the operation, which her mother had known was complicated, which risked the lives of both girls. The doctor had urged her on, however, telling her that his university would cover the costs. It was a great opportunity for the children and for science.

They’d separated the girls, who were linked from shoulder to hip, in what the doctors referred to as a “minor” omphalopagus. Yes, the girls were joined, but mostly by muscle and vascular tissue. Of the organs, only the liver was shared, and they believed they could separate the livers with a chance that both girls would live. The doctor had been clear: It was possible that they would both live, likely one would die, and unlikely neither would make it.

Aphrodite died. During the operation, not afterward, which maybe, the doctors had said, was better since it spared her days of painful lingering. But the prognosis for Desiree was quite good. She would have a scar for the rest of her life, and quite a large scar at that, but she would have a normal life.

Desiree learned that it was all a matter of what you called normal. Jeering in school locker rooms, every year settling into the role of de facto freak, fear of wearing a bathing suit, for example? Were these things normal? They were not, of course, beyond-the-pale odd. Lots of fat, ugly, and misshapen children had similar experiences, and they weren’t ready for the sideshow, but the whole world knew about Aphrodite. They knew Desiree had been a Siamese twin. Kids at school, for as long as she could remember, would pull back their eyes with their index fingers and sing that cat song from Lady and the Tramp. Somehow, inevitably, they learned Aphrodite’s name and asked after her as though she were still alive, still joined to Desiree. Every single year of middle and high school there was always at least one pair of kids- and once as many as four- who came for Halloween as conjoined twins.

Then there was her mother, who always claimed to have favored Aphrodite. Even before she was out of elementary school, Desiree had begun to wonder if it was true, if it was just something hurtful to say, but wondering that, even believing that, didn’t diminish the sting. Her mother loved to cry, to hold her head in her hands and say, “Oh, why wasn’t Aphrodite spared?”

And there was Aphrodite herself. Desiree started hearing her voice around her twelfth birthday. Her mother was out of town that week, gone to Key West with a new boyfriend, though the relationship- big surprise- never went anywhere but the emergency room. Even calling it a voice was suggesting too much, she supposed. Aphrodite was there, a presence, a sensation, a compulsion, even a stream of intuitive information. When she met someone and she took an instant like or dislike, she could feel her twin’s push or pull.

At first it had been welcome, a balm in the loneliness of her life, but by the time she was fifteen, things had begun to change. She met people who didn’t care about her scar, who wanted to hang out, listen to tunes, smoke cheeb. Aphrodite didn’t like these people, but they liked Desiree plenty. Then Desiree discovered that crank made Aphrodite’s voice quiet. It stung at first, made her nose burn with such incendiary pain that she snorted up water and blew it out like a whale. The next time it didn’t burn so much. The time after that, if it burned, she didn’t notice.

That was how it went until B.B. had found her. Or she had found him. He was driving on the Ft. Lauderdale strip, stopped in his Mercedes at a light with the top and windows down and Randy Newman blasting as if it were Led Zeppelin.

This guy had what she needed: cash. She needed cash because she needed to shoot up so fucking bad that it killed her. Once it had jolted her from the normal world to a place of power where she could do anything, say anything. She felt whole and finished, no longer subject to the whims of her mother or teachers or dead twin.

Now it was something else. The crank still lifted her up, no doubt about it, but not to such heights. And the lows- the lows were more than she could ever have imagined. Under the earth lows, buried under your grave so you were scratching the bottom of your own casket lows. She was dry and evacuated, a squeezed-out and tattered sponge, and she would do anything to get back up, if only she could begin the cycle again. Even go over to a stranger on the Ft. Lauderdale strip. Whatever restraints had once governed her routines had been eroded by endless fatigue and sleeplessness, as far back as she could remember, which wasn’t very far since her memory didn’t work so well in those days. A low level of panic hummed perpetually just under her consciousness. Her mouth felt dry no matter how much she drank, and she never felt hungry no matter how little she ate.

For all that, she’d never done anything quite like this before. She fucked and sucked for crank, but always guys she knew; but the more she thought about it, the more she saw that it didn’t matter. It was just a few minutes. Of what? Sex? Big deal. They tried to make a big deal of sex, but it was nothing. A few minutes, and she’d have some money and she could score.

Even then, with the pound of need and terror in her ears, she could hear her sister’s muffled voice. She couldn’t make it out, but she knew it was there, a distant pleading. But the guy, he seemed like he would go for it. He was nicely dressed, hair neatly combed, neatly dyed. He had a few pieces of tasteful but expensive jewelry- her time in the pawnshops had taught her to tell the difference. He didn’t look like just another rich Florida doctor or lawyer or real estate developer in a convertible. He was that other kind. He had the mark, the sign, the vibrating tone audible to crankheads and dogs. He lied on his tax return, cheated on his wife, fucked over his partners. Something. The guy in the Mercedes was crooked, and he had money.

She walked over, smiled at him. She used her best smile, which was radiant. At least it had been once. If she’d known how she looked- cancer thin, sunken eyes, thin lips, red welts on her face and hands- she never would have offered, never would have thought anyone would want her. But she didn’t know, so she smiled, and he turned to her.

“I’ll blow you for ten dollars, sweetie,” she said.

He started to roll up his window- a defense of minimum value with the convertible’s top down- and she pulled away from the rising glass, about to swear. Then he stopped. The window came back down.

“What are you using?”

“Fuck you,” she said, starting to turn away- but slowly. She knew they weren’t done.

He took out a twenty and showed it to her. “What are you using?”

She paused. She could hear Aphrodite, the voice that had been muffled and muted for years. She could hear it now, hollow and echoing, the trickle of distant water in a cave. A feeling so strong that she could almost sense the words: Don’t tell him. And that was why she told him. “Crank,” she said.

He studied her for a minute longer and then unlocked the doors with a flick of his finger. “Get in,” he said.

She got in. Why not? He was okay looking for an older guy. Probably clean, certainly rich. That other thing- the vibrating something that told her she might die, might end up dumped in a vacant lot, tossed off an airboat into the Everglades- that didn’t matter right now. The need called to her, the need. The need. Ripping her in half, pulling her, crushing her, knocking her off her feet and dragging her through the dirt. So she got in.

But the man in the Mercedes didn’t want a blow job. He wanted to clean her up.

B.B. never came for sex. After a couple of months, by which time Desiree had become a kind of live-in maid, it was clear that he wasn’t going to. He didn’t like women. He didn’t look at them when they passed on the street or in the mall, not the charming or the cute or the beautiful. The slutty and the sexy he looked at, but not with desire. It was more like a vague hostility, or maybe amusement.

At first she assumed he was gay, which was okay by her. She’d known plenty of queens on the street, and even if she hadn’t, she’d spent too much time as the object of derision to judge anyone for being in any way different or out of step with the idea of normal you got on TV. Still, it never rang true. B.B. didn’t much look at men, either. Not even those who were both beautiful and obviously gay.

It was entirely possible that he was asexual, but Desiree’s gut and Aphrodite’s voice doubted it. He was maybe asexual and maybe not, but he was something else, too. Something the twins could not put their respectively fleshly and ephemeral fingers on. There was a blankness to him. He seemed in a daze half the time. He’d rescued her, but he never acted like the sort of person who would rescue a drug addict. Only when he was doing charity work with one of his kids did he come fully alive. Or sometimes when he was watching a boy. They’d be in a restaurant or walking on the beach or shopping, and his pupils would dilate and his posture would grow straighter without getting stiff, and he would flush a healthy pink, as if he were in love. Each time he seemed to fall in love.

Once she brought it up. Only once. Because the thing of it was, there was something almost admirable about B.B.’s desire for boys. He wanted to be with them- she could see that. On the street, she’d seen men who went for boys, for girls, for children so young that they didn’t know what sex was. They were predators, monsters, and she regretted not having killed them all. B.B. was like them, but also not. He turned his desire into charity; he hid from the world, maybe even from himself. Instead, he helped them. If there was a way to be admirable in such a desire, surely this was it.

She’d been with him more than a year, made herself as much a part of his life as his limbs, when over dinner she decided it was time. It was B.B.’s birthday, and he’d taken a little too much of a few bottles of red he’d been saving. Maybe she’d had a little too much, too.

“About you and your boys,” she’d said.

“Yeah?” He chewed at a piece of perfectly rare choice triple-trimmed filet mignon that she’d grilled for him. On his plate, along with a pile of asparagus, were two pools of dipping sauce- a delicate au poivre and a garlic cream.

“I just wanted to let you know that I understand, okay? I know why you do what you do, B.B., and I think it’s very brave. If you need anything, any help, you can be honest with me.”

He set down his fork and stared at her. His face reddened and veins bulged in his neck, and for a moment she thought he was going to burst, explode, throw his plate at her, order her out. Instead he let out a thick, throaty laugh. “Not you, too,” he said. “Oh, Desiree. I know that people love to imagine the worst, but I thought for sure you would understand.”

“I do understand,” she said.

“I just want to help them. I had a rough time when I was a boy, and now that I can, I want to help other boys. That’s it. I’m not a pervert. If you don’t understand that I might want to help someone without wanting to fuck them, then no one will.”

He wasn’t angry, not even sad. Mostly he seemed weary.

“Okay, B.B.,” she said. She knew better, but she nodded. He could hide his impulses from the world as long as he hid them from himself, too.

So at least she didn’t have to worry that her friend and boss and companion might go around fucking boys. He might do a lot of bad things, be a lot of bad things, but he had this in check. Even so, Aphrodite would not be appeased. Yet dead twins can rant only so much before even they give up, and her objections quieted down after the first few months. Yes, it was probably wrong to work for a man who made his money, his loads and loads of money, the way B.B. did, but someone was going to, and if she stopped working for B.B., there would be just as much trouble in the world, but no food and shelter for poor Desiree. She could hardly get a job with no high school diploma and her only prior experience being personal assistant to a criminal.

Besides, B.B. wanted her around, valued her, deferred to her opinions. She owed him her life, so she could turn a blind eye to the pleasure he took from setting his hand on a boy’s shoulder, from the way his eyes lit up when he saw one of his charity cases in a bathing suit. She could live with being his beard, his disguise to the world.

Then things took a sharp turn. Last month, they’d been driving back from a dinner meeting with a guy who ran an encyclopedia operation in Georgia. B.B. was thinking- more like half thinking- of expanding, and maybe that would have bothered Desiree if he’d been serious, but he would never expand. He made all the money he needed now, and he hated hassles; why risk new territory and cross state lines?

The meeting went badly, and both he and Desiree didn’t like the Georgia guy, didn’t feel they could trust him. Desiree felt relieved, and she suspected B.B. did as well. It was almost as though he were looking for a way to celebrate, and when they saw a kid walking along the beach, something shifted visibly in B.B.’s face.

The boy looked maybe eleven, cute, clean-cut but staggering. As if he were drunk- maybe for the first time. He had a stupid, happy grin on his face, and he sang something boisterous to himself, occasionally breaking into air guitar as he walked.

“Why don’t you stop the car,” B.B. said. “Let’s give that boy a lift.”

Desiree didn’t want to stop, but the light turned red and there was no choice. “Where do you want to give him a lift to?”

B.B. grinned at her, like whatever had broken in him must have broken in her. “Our house.”

Desiree kept her eyes straight ahead. “No.”

“No?”

“No. I’m not going to let it happen.”

B.B. bit on his lip. “What exactly are you not going to let happen?”

“B.B., let’s just forget it. Go home.”

“If I say we give the kid a lift, then that’s what we do.” His voice had turned loud. “You don’t tell me no, and he doesn’t tell me no. No one tells me no. Stop the car and sweet-talk that kid into the car, or you’ll be on the street tomorrow and whoring for crank in a week.”

“All right,” she said softly. She chose her words deliberately, because his cruelty demanded treatment in kind, and she wanted him to think, if only for a second, that he had won. “Okay, fine.” The light turned green, and she sped past the boy.

The next morning, her packed suitcase and gym bag were met with flowers and chocolates and an envelope with cash. He didn’t apologize, didn’t say he was sorry he’d tried to turn her into a pimp, but she knew he was sorry. For all it mattered. She knew she would stay, but as she unpacked, Aphrodite made it clear that this was a reprieve, not a stay. Desiree didn’t resist or disagree or shrug it off, because it wasn’t a suggestion. It was fact.

They both saw it. The urge inside B.B. was coming out, and sooner or later bad things were going to be happening under her roof. Maybe she could keep him in check, but for how long? Forever? It seemed unlikely. What frightened her, however, was not the thought that B.B. would give in to his worst self, that he would become the monster he had resisted; it was that she would lack the strength to fight him. She would convince herself that it would be worse if she wasn’t around, that she helped him from hurting even more boys. She would help him with this, like she helped him with his business. How long could a person participate in evil without becoming evil herself? Or had she been guilty the moment she’d accepted B.B.’s charity, the moment she’d chosen to stay after learning who and what he was?

She had to get out. She had to move on. Aphrodite whispered it to her in a mantra so perpetual, it was like the sound of breath. Even the I Ching couldn’t stop telling her so.

That B.B. would panic if she left hardly mattered. That she had nowhere to go hardly mattered. She had what she needed. She had money she’d saved- enough money that she could live for a year or two while she figured things out. And she had information on B.B.’s trade. Not that she wanted to extort him or threaten him, but she had a feeling that once he realized she wasn’t coming back, once he realized she was gone for good, B.B. was going to be very, very angry.

And when a man is very angry, and he has a bunch of people like Jim Doe and the Gambler working for him, things can get tricky.