The Ethical Assassin

Chapter 15

THE ALARM WENT OFF AT SEVEN A.M. Normally, after hanging out by the pool, people would begin to drift off to sleep between one and two, and hardly anyone was left by three. That meant you could get four hours of sleep easy, which Bobby said was all you needed. He ought to know. He was always among the last to leave the pool area, and he never once looked tired. I couldn’t remember ever having seen him yawn.

I had grown used to the fatigue in the way you might grow used to having a tumor on the side of your face- you never forgot about it, but not forgetting about it didn’t mean you were actually thinking about it. I woke up each morning exhausted, fuzzy, slightly dizzy, and the feeling never quite went away.

Bobby tended to breeze into our room about twenty after seven, swinging the door wide and bounding in like a character in a musical about to break into song. He would make sure everyone was awake and chitchat with whoever had been the first to shower and was by then usually dressed, since they had to rush if four people were going to get showered and have breakfast in time for the prep meeting at nine.

As it turned out, I was the first to hit the showers, though I was the last to go to bed- bed being a euphemism for a spot on the floor. I’d crawled into the room just before five in the morning, undressed quietly, and gone to sleep in the space between the television and the doorless closet, resting my head on a dirty undershirt. No one had left me a spare pillow.

I’d slept, I was almost certain of it, but it had been a fitful sleep in which I dreamed, mostly, of lying awake on the floor and trying to sleep. At least I hadn’t dreamed about selling books, and it was the first time in weeks that I could say that. And I hadn’t dreamed about Bastard’s and Karen’s bodies, which was some kind of mercy.

When the alarm went off, I jumped up as only someone who’s had chronically little sleep can, and headed for the bathroom. By the time I showered and put on my other pair of khaki pants, a light blue button-down and a narrow tie, noontime sun yellow, I was feeling almost like myself again. I could forget what happened in the trailer, the evening with Melford, and the events back at the trailer. I could almost forget that I had been involved in a double murder, a third murder implicating a crooked cop and the head of the company for which I worked.

I sat on the bed, staring at my vaguely trembling hands, trying to summon the desire for breakfast, when the door opened and Bobby came bobbing in.

“Up first, and I’m not surprised,” he said. “Glad to see it, Lemmy. I scoped out today’s area already, and I have a moochie spot for you. But you’ve got to promise me a double. You’re getting out there by eleven this morning. You’ll have twelve hours. You think you can promise me a double? At least, that is. A double at least.”

“I can try,” I said lamely.

“Hell, he’s too tired,” Scott said. He was lying on the bed, shirtless, and his pale gut and pale tits were hanging out at us. “I don’t know how much sleep he got last night. Maybe you should give that moochie area to someone else, Bobby. Someone who ain’t gonna let it go.”

Bobby grinned at him as though Scott had just told him that he liked his haircut. “Lemmy here has earned the mooch. You produce like Lemmy, you’ll share the spoils like Lemmy.”

“Now, how’s that gonna happen if you’re every time giving him the best areas?”

Bobby shook his head. “A good bookman can sell anywhere. And when Lemmy came up, he didn’t get the cream, just like none of the green guys get the cream. You didn’t get any special treatment when you came up.”

“And I still don’t,” he mumbled.

“That’s where Lemmy proved himself. You want a share of the mooch, you have to show me you deserve the mooch.”

“All he done was get lucky,” Scott said. “Ain’t nothing but a rich Jew that wants more money for hisself.”

“C’mon, Scottie,” Bobby said. “Lemmy’s a good guy.”

“Yeah, good at what? Butt fucking, I guess,” said Ronny Neil, lying still on the other bed, his arms and legs out as if he were making a snow angel. “You good at butt fucking?” he asked me.

“Define ‘good,’ ” I said.

“Holy bananas, you guys are cranky this morning,” Bobby said. “But I’m glad you’re dressed, Lemmy. The Gambler wants to see you.”

Ronny Neil, who had been sprawled out dreamily, suddenly shot upright. Like Scott, he slept shirtless, but unlike Scott, Ronny Neil had a tightly muscled body. He had small but hard pecs, and his back muscles shot out like wings. On his left shoulder he had a cross tattoo- it had been done by hand and in ink, the kind prisoners give each other.

“What’s the Gambler want with him?” Ronny Neil demanded.

Bobby shrugged. “I guess you’ll have to take that up with the boss yourself, Ron-o.”

Ronny Neil narrowed his gaze at Bobby. “He don’t have nothing to do with the Gambler. I ain’t gonna stand for the Gambler bringing him in.”

“Bringing him in to what?” Bobby demanded.

“I don’t want him talking to the Gambler,” Ronny Neil said. It wasn’t quite sulky, more like a growl.

The fact that I didn’t want to talk to the Gambler either didn’t seem to count for much. I felt a wave of dizzying panic. Had the Gambler somehow learned that Melford and I had been hiding in the closet? He had the checkbook, which meant they knew someone from the company had been there, and by now he’d probably figured out that the someone in question was me.

“Let’s go, Lemmy,” Bobby said. “Don’t want to keep the big boss man waiting.”

“He gets too cozy with the boss,” Ronny Neil said, “I’ll stick a knife up his ass.”

“Does that count as being good or bad at butt fucking?” I asked.

“Oh, don’t be that way, Ronster.” Bobby put a hand to my shoulder and led me out the door.

I couldn’t believe he was going to leave it at that. Maybe he thought that if he came down harsher on them, it would be worse for me. Maybe he thought that leaving it alone wouldn’t affect how many books were sold. Maybe he was off on Planet Bobby and didn’t understand that Ronny Neil was a scary asshole and Scott was a scary and pathetic asshole.

Was such a thing possible? Had Bobby skated so blithely through life with his salesman grin and good cheer that he didn’t know what it meant to be picked on, to be humiliated by bigger or meaner guys who got their rocks off by reminding you that you walked around unscathed at their pleasure? Was Bobby like Chitra, insulated from the cruelty of the world, not by his looks but by an impenetrable armor of optimism and generosity?

If that was the case, it meant that Bobby and I lived in entirely different places- the same to an outside viewer, but utterly unalike to our particular perspectives. Where I saw danger and menace, Bobby saw only innocent ribbing- a little on the harsh side, perhaps, but still innocent.

What if Bobby lived in this wondrous world precisely because he believed in it? I had seen how Melford had defused a certain whumping the night before in the bar, but he’d done it consciously. What if Bobby did that sort of thing all the time, only he didn’t know he was doing it? He assumed the best in people, and he got kindness and leeway in return.

If that was true, it meant that I was in some way responsible for Ronny Neil and Scott hating me so much. I assumed the worst about a couple of ignorant rednecks, they picked up on it, responded to it, acted on it. Did it work that way?

What troubled me about this idea, truly troubled me, was not so much that I had to shoulder the blame for Ronny Neil threatening to stick a knife up my ass- though that was undeniably distasteful- as that it seemed to be too much like what Melford had been talking about last night. We all see the world through a veil of ideology, he’d said. Melford thought that the veil came from outside of us, the system or something, but maybe it was more complicated. Maybe we made our own veils. Maybe the world made us, and we, in turn, made the world.

Surely Melford couldn’t be the only person thinking about this stuff. He’d mentioned Marx and Marxists, but there had to be others- philosophers and psychologists and who knew what. If I had been on my way to Columbia, instead of being on my way to see the Gambler, the dead-body-hiding and evidence-concealing Gambler, I might have a hope of finding out someday. But unless the sample volume of the Champion Encyclopedias I carried around with me took up the issue, I’d probably not find out anytime soon.