The Ethical Assassin

Chapter 21

SO, WHO WAS SHE?”

“I don’t know. Someone who works for them. Whoever they are.”

I sat in the passenger side of Melford’s Datsun. I’d eaten the lo mein and put back five or six little cups of tea. Desiree’s little visit that afternoon had left me stunned, but Melford appeared unperturbed. He’d eaten his green-tinted dumplings with splintery chopsticks and talked for a while about a philosopher named Althusser and something called “the ideological state apparatus.” Only once we were back in the car did I try to talk about the woman.

“Doesn’t it bother you that a strange person in peekaboo clothing is shadowing us?”

“Peekaboo clothing isn’t without its pleasures. Don’t you think? I noticed you inspecting the lace of her bra. Maybe you were thinking about buying a gift for Chitra.”

I hated the feeling of being caught. “I do have to admit it. She seemed less scary and more…” I let my voice trail off.

“Sexy?”

“Sure,” I agreed cautiously. I didn’t know that Melford would be the world’s best judge of which women were sexy and which were not. “But, still. We’ve got someone following us. What are we going to do about it?”

“Nothing,” Melford said. “She’s not following us now, and to be honest, I don’t think she means us any harm.”

“There are dead people floating all over the place. I know you killed some of them, but isn’t it a bit naïve to assume they don’t mean us harm?”

“I can’t speak for they. I’m sure they do mean us a whole truckload of harm, but I don’t think Desiree does. You could see it in her eyes. She is straying from them. She doesn’t want to hurt us, or even report back about us. I have a feeling.”

“Great, you have a feeling. Fine.”

“It’s the best we have until we know who they are.”

I thought about telling him what I knew, that the Gambler was involved, but I hadn’t told him last night, and now it would look weird, as though I’d been holding out on him and that maybe he ought not to trust me. There would be a way, I decided, to steer him in that direction if it became necessary, or to discover something that would point to the Gambler. In the meantime, I felt safer with his not knowing, even if it meant keeping a huge secret from a guy who was known to resolve his grievances, from time to time, with a silenced pistol.

“So, where are we off to now?” I asked.

“You’ll recall that we have a task to do,” Melford said. “We have to figure out who that third person was, the body in the trailer.”

“What about the money? They’re looking for a ton of cash. Maybe we should find out about that.”

He shook his head. “Forget the money. It’s a dead end. Let’s think about finding the body.”

“And tell me again how we do that?”

“The first thing we want to do is look at the body. Who knows. Maybe they were dumb enough to leave identification on her. Long shot, I know, but it’s worth trying.”

“Sure,” I said. “That’s a great idea, poking around at a dead body, looking for a wallet. But, and I may be being dense here, shouldn’t we know where the bodies are first?”

“It so happens, smart guy, that I have a pretty good guess where they put the bodies. You catch that bad odor in the trailer park? You know what that was?”

“The smell of trailers? I don’t know.”

“It was a hog lot, Lemuel. The city of Meadowbrook Grove is mostly just that trailer park, which raises the bulk of its revenue through speeding tickets. Behind it is a small factory farm that raises hogs. Intensive hog farming produces a ton of waste, and that waste has to go somewhere. That bad smell in the trailer park comes from the waste lagoon, a nasty, environmentally hazardous seething pit of pig piss, pig shit, and pig remains. It also happens to be the single best place I can think of to hide bodies. So that’s where we’re off to.”

“And we just waltz onto this property and start digging around through pig crap and no one will mind? Is that it?”

“No one will be there. There’s no Old MacDonald. There’s no oink oink here and oink oink there. The evil brilliance of these things is that they require virtually no maintenance. Just someone to stop by once a day to make sure the animals are fed.”

“How do you know that the guy who feeds them won’t be there?”

Melford shrugged. “Because I killed him yesterday.”

I sucked in a breath. I felt the painful jolt of realization. “Is that why you killed Bastard? Because he worked at a pig farm?”

“Relax. I’m nowhere near that arbitrary. That had nothing to do with it. I feel sorry for most of the employees at these places- they’re exploited just like the animals are. They earn low wages and labor for employers who neglect their health and safety. They’re victims. The owners deserve to die, not the workers. No, this is a coincidence.” He paused thoughtfully. “Sort of.”

Melford pulled off the main road and drove behind the trailer park, then made a sharp right onto a dirt road that I might never have noticed even if I’d passed by a dozen or more times. It cut through a dense wood of scraggly pine and wayward Florida shrubs and white rock. We followed this path for a good mile or so, and all the while the thick stench of sulfur and ammonia became stronger until it felt as if someone had fashioned an ice pick out of bad smells and was shoving it into my sinuses.

We arrived at a fence and Melford stopped the car, hopped out, and removed a key from his pocket, which he used to open a padlock. When he got back in the car, he was still grinning.

“Where did you get the key?” I asked.

“I have my methods.”

Back in the car, and after a little more wood-lined road, we pulled out into a clearing and I could see in front of us a large, flimsy-looking building with no windows. It was maybe two stories high and made out of what appeared to be aluminum sheets. The thing vaguely resembled a warehouse, but a nightmarish one, all alone in the clearing like it was. Or maybe it resembled a prison. I figured Melford must be getting to me.

He parked behind some pines so it wouldn’t be visible if someone happened by- better safe than sorry, Melford explained- and we got out and began to walk toward the building. I thought it smelled bad in the car, thought I was getting used to it, but it grew stronger, harsher. The stench in front of us was like a physical weight in the air. Walking into it was like walking against the force of a wind tunnel. How could anyone work here? How could people stand to live nearby? And the pigs themselves- but I decided not to consider that. I had bigger things to worry about, and I was determined that Melford’s obsession would not become my own.

Around the back of the warehouse, the grass and brush faded into a thick black dirt from which sprigs of grass shot upward intermittently. This beach extended maybe thirty feet, and then the lagoon began abruptly- so abruptly that I thought it must not only be man-made, but concrete lined. It was smaller than I imagined, the word lagoon suggesting tropical excess, lush green, misting waterfalls, flocks of shrill tropical birds exploding into flight. Waste lagoon turned out to be a euphemism, and when your euphemism has the word waste in it, you’re starting from a pretty bad place. I found not a lagoon but a ditch, the worst, most horrible ditch I could ever have imagined, maybe three hundred feet in diameter. Nothing grew near except a scattering of the most ragged of weeds- and the strangely miraculous exception of a single black mangrove tree, whose gnarled roots looped in and out of the soil and into the lagoon.

I expected to get mud on my shoes as we approached, but the dirt was as dry and crumbly as a moonscape. With each step, however, the stench grew worse, impossibly and exponentially worse. The stink, to my surprise, seemed to possess mind-altering qualities. My head grew light, my steps unbalanced. I held out my hands to keep my balance.

I kept my eye on the lagoon, as though a monster might emerge to devour us. At first I had thought it was a trick of the sunlight, but the contents were not merely shaded, they were brown. It was a brown pond of viscous sludge that undulated its bloated waves against the slick shoreline. Pond is to waste lagoon, I thought, my mind lapsing into SAT analogy, as human being is to zombie. A seething nimbus of insects hovered above, buzzing with mutant menace.

Melford stopped outside the perimeter, marked by a series of metal rods around the pond, linked by string with Day-Glo plastic ribbons that fluttered sickly in the mild breeze. “They’re probably in there,” he said, gesturing toward the pond.

“So that’s a waste lagoon?”

Melford nodded.

“That is all pig shit and pig piss?”

Melford nodded again.

“They all this vile?”

“Probably. I’ve never seen one close up before.”

I stared at him. “You’ve never seen one?”

“Never. It’s worse than I thought it would be. Bigger. More impenetrable.”

“It looks like a good place to hide bodies,” I said. “So, how do we find them?”

Melford shrugged. “We don’t. This was a stupid idea.”

“I’m sorry about the waste lagoon business,” he said. “It seemed like a reasonable plan when I came up with it.”

I shrugged, not quite sure what to say when a thoughtful assassin apologizes for the fact that his scheme to exhume the one body he didn’t kill has ended up so badly.

Toward the far side of the warehouse, we approached a pair of large double doors, imposingly sturdy against the rest of the building, which close up looked as if it had been made from punched tin. A massive padlock held the doors together.

“Next stop,” Melford said. He took out a key chain and opened the lock.

“How do you get these keys?” I asked.

He shook his head without looking up from the lock. “Lemuel, Lemuel, Lemuel. Have you not yet learned that Melford is a man of wonders? All doors yield to Melford.”

He pulled open a door, hung the lock on the latch, and gestured for me to enter.

I didn’t want to go inside. It was dark- not pitch dark, but gloomy. The building had no windows, and the only lights came from four or five naked bulbs that dangled from the ceiling. They were interspersed with slow-moving fans, which created a disorienting strobe effect, turning the space into a nightmarish nightclub of the damned. It smelled far worse than anything outside, worse than the lagoon, worse than a hundred lagoons. It was a different smell- mustier and muskier, thicker and more alive. A blast of cool air wafted from inside- not cool, really, but cooler than the scorching temperature outside. And there was the noise.

It was a low chorus of moans and grunts. I had no idea how many pigs were in there, but it had to be a great deal- dozens, hundreds, I had no idea.

Then Melford took out his pocket flashlight and pointed it forward, looking suddenly like Virgil in a Gustave Doré illustration from The Inferno.

I still couldn’t see very well, but I could see enough. Dozens and dozens of small pens were staggered from the entrance to the far end of the warehouse. Each pen could hold four or five animals comfortably, contained fifteen, possibly twenty. I couldn’t be certain because of how tightly they were packed. I watched the pen where Melford pointed his light. One pig was trying to move from one end of the pen to the other. As it pushed its way forward, it created a space that another pig had to fill. It was like a Rubik’s Cube. Nothing went in or out, and if one was going to move, it had to trade spaces with another animal. The floor was slotted to let their urine and feces pass through to a drainage system that would flush it to the lagoon, but the slots were too big, and the pig’s hooves kept getting caught. I saw one animal squeal as it yanked its leg free, and then it squealed again. Even in the gloom the blood on its hoof was clearly visible.

I took the light from Melford’s hand and approached the nearest pen. The pigs, which had stood in a kind of trance of labored breathing, woke at my approach and squealed. They tried to push back, away from me, but there was nowhere for them go to, so they squealed more fervently, more shrilly. I hated to frighten them, but I needed to see.

What I thought I’d observed in the sporadic flashes of the strobing fans was now all too clear. Many of the pigs- most, perhaps- had heavy red growths erupting from under their short hair. Ugly, knotted, red tumorish things that jutted with malevolent force like misshapen rock formations. Some of the growths were along their backs or sides, and the pigs appeared to more or less ignore them. Others had them on their legs or near their hooves and so had trouble moving. Some had them on their faces, near their eyes or on their snouts, so they couldn’t close their mouths or open them fully.

I backed off. “What’s wrong with them?” I asked Melford. “I mean, holy shit. It looks like a medical experiment or something.”

“It is, in a way,” Melford said with the clinical calm I was coming to expect of him. “But they’re not the test subjects. We are. No animals, except maybe social insects, were meant to live in such close quarters, but the hog farmers pack them in because the closer you can get them, the more hogs you have to raise in a single space. It’s a matter of being cost-effective. But the pigs- and let’s forget about their pain and misery. Most of them are probably insane by this point anyhow. But on a purely physiological level, the pigs can’t stand it, their bodies can’t take the physical stress, and that makes them vulnerable to disease. So they get pumped full of medicines, not to make them healthy, you understand, but to allow them to survive their confinement and reach slaughter weight. I’m talking about mammoth quantities of antibiotics.”

“I don’t get it. Isn’t there like an inspector or something who will say they’re too diseased for human consumption?”

“That would be the USDA- the same agency that’s in charge of making sure that we don’t eat diseased animals is also in charge of promoting the consumption of American meat. It’s bad business to make meat safe and treat the animals humanely, because that costs money. If the meat costs too much, well, that makes voters unhappy. So if an inspector actually gets it in his head to try to stop this craziness, the farmers- the guys they are supposed to regulate- file complaints, and next thing you know, that inspector is reassigned or out of a job. The result: No one opens his mouth, and sick animals get sent to the slaughterhouse, where they are often dismembered while still alive, the visibly diseased bits are cut off, and their flesh, steeped in antibiotics and growth hormones, arrives on the dinner table.”

“So, what are you saying? That our food supply is tainted and no one knows but you?”

“Lots of people know, but people don’t worry about it because they are told everything is fine. But the statistics are staggering. Seventy percent of the antibiotics we use go into livestock- meat and dairy animals that people end up consuming. Most of the population is walking around with low dosages of antibiotics in them, allowing bacteria to evolve into antibiotic-resistant strains. Even if I didn’t care how the animals are treated, I would still have to worry about the plague that’s coming to wipe us all out.”

“I don’t believe it,” I said. “If it were really that dangerous, then wouldn’t someone do something about it?”

“Things don’t work that way. Money greases the wheels. If there were a plague and it were linked back to factory farming, then someone would do something about it. Until that happens, too many people are making too much money. Our senators and representatives from farm states say that there’s no evidence that intensive farming hurts anyone. Meanwhile, they’re taking zillions of dollars of campaign contributions from these giant agribusinesses that destroy family farms and replace them with Nazi monstrosities.”

“It can’t be that bad,” I said.

“It’s amazing. You’re like a walking poster child for ideology. How can it not be that bad? You are looking right at it. It is that bad. And if your own eyes don’t convince you, how can you ever be convinced of anything ever except what you already believe?”

I had no answer.

“Look,” he continued, “even if you have no sympathy for the suffering of the animals, even if you’re too shortsighted to care about the long-term health risks of tainted meat, then think about this: There are consequences, terrible, human consequences, soul-crushing consequences, from being asked to not think about something as basic as our own survival because big corporations need to keep up their bottom lines.”

It was a good point, and I didn’t have a response. “Let’s get out of here.”

Outside, even in the midst of all that stench, I didn’t feel like moving. We stood in the clearing while I stared at the building in numb disbelief.

“Imagine what you’ve just seen,” Melford said, “only multiply it by millions. Billions. It makes you wonder, doesn’t it.”

“Makes me wonder what?” I asked. My voice sounded hollow.

“If it is ever ethical to sacrifice human life for the sake of animal life.”

Even in the face of what I’d witnessed, I didn’t hesitate. “No,” I said.

“Are you sure? Let me ask you something. Say you come upon a woman being raped. The only way to save her from rape is to kill her attacker. Is killing him the right thing to do?”

“If I had no other choice, of course.”

“Why? Why is that morally acceptable?”

“Because I value the right of a woman to escape rape over the right of a rapist to live.”

“Good answer. But what about the right of an animal to escape torture? You don’t value that right over the right of a torturer to achieve pleasure or profit?”

“No. Look, what goes on in there is terrible, Melford. I would never say otherwise. But there is still a basic divide between people and animals.”

“Because animals have a lesser sense of themselves?”

“That’s right.”

“And what about a severely retarded person- one who, as far as we know, is not any more aware than a monkey? Does he only have the rights of a monkey?”

“Of course not. He’s still a human being.”

“And receives the rights thereof, yes? The umbrella that includes the imagined or the typical person must also include the lowest of us. Is that it?”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s it.”

“But is that umbrella natural and right and just, or is it just what we tell ourselves for our ethical and economic and sensual convenience? Why shouldn’t that umbrella include all creatures who are capable of feelings and emotions? If it’s wrong to torture a pig, then it’s wrong. To say that it is no longer wrong when it’s lucrative- because we want valuable exports and cheap meat at the supermarket- is insane. Ethics cannot be bound up with profit. It’s like permitting contract killing while making murders of passion illegal. Is cruelty motivated by capital less evil than other kinds of cruelty?”

“I understand what you’re saying, but you can’t convince me that there’s no hierarchy. Animals might feel emotions, but they don’t write books or compose music. We have imagination and creativity, and that means human life is always more valuable than animal life.”

“Always? Let’s say there’s a dog, a heroic dog. A dog who has saved the lives of countless people through acts of bravery. Maybe a firehouse dog who rescues babies from a fire. And let’s say there is a convict on death row, one you know is guilty of horrible murders. He’s escaped on the eve of his execution and he’s taken the dog hostage. The next morning, the authorities discover his hideout. They know they can recapture him, but in doing so, the dog will surely be killed. Or they can have a sniper take out the convict and save the dog’s life. What’s more important, the convict who has killed numerous people and who would already be dead had he not escaped, or the dog, who has only done good?”

“Come on. It’s an extreme case,” I said.

“Agreed. It’s the most extreme case I could devise on short notice. Now answer the question.”

“You save the man,” I told him, not entirely convinced I believe it. “Once you go down the road you’re talking about, it’s a slippery slope.”

“So human life, no matter how evil, must always take precedence over animal life, no matter how exalted?”

I shrugged, playing at an apathy I didn’t feel, didn’t come close to feeling. The truth was, I had no answer to his line of questioning, and it bothered me. If Melford was right, then there were no absolutes, not like I’d always believed, and it put me in an ethical free fall. The example was extreme, and I understood that was Melford’s point. I wasn’t willing to admit that you probably save the dog, however, since that meant that the question was no longer black and white, but a matter of degree. It wasn’t if you value human life over animal, but when and under what conditions. “I don’t know. Can we go now?”

“Yeah, head over to the car. I haven’t quite figured out how I’m going to save these pigs, but in the meantime, I need to feed and water them. It will only take a few minutes.”

“You want help?”

“Nah, don’t worry about it.”

I did worry about it, but I obeyed, because with Melford it was my lot to obey. So I put my head down and shuffled toward the car, trying to blank my mind, trying to think of nothing at all rather than think about those pigs with their ugly red tumors and the hollow looks in their eyes. I couldn’t make my mind go blank, though. Instead, I thought of Karen and Bastard, cold and dead and wide-eyed.

When I was halfway to the car, I looked up from my miserable reverie. Something must have attracted my attention, and when I peered in the glaring afternoon, with everything hazy from the sun blasting the land with oven-hot intensity, I saw something that made me freeze with terror. A cop car was pulling onto the grounds and pivoting right at me, as if it were lining me up to run me over. There could be no doubt. Whoever was behind the wheel had seen me.

I craned my neck in search of Melford, but there was no sign of him. The cop probably hadn’t seen him, either. As far as he knew, I was there all alone.

I recognized the cop at once. It was the guy from the dark Ford outside Bastard and Karen’s trailer, the guy who had helped the Gambler move the body. The police chief of Meadowbrook Grove.