“The sherry sounds fine.”
Colliard led his guest through rooms furnished as impeccably as he himself was dressed. He seated Michael Haig in one of a pair of green leather tub chairs on opposite sides of a small marble cocktail table. While he set about filling two glasses from a cutglass decanter, the younger man gazed out the window.
“Quite a view,” he said.
“Central Park does look best when you’re a good ways above it. But then so many things do. It’s a great pleasure for me, sitting at this window.”
“I can imagine.”
“You can see for miles on a clear day. Pity there aren’t more of them. When I was your age the air was clearer, but then at your age I could never have afforded an apartment anything like this one.” The older man took a chair for himself, placed the two glasses of sherry on the table. “Well, well,” he said. “So you’re Michael Haig. The most promising young assassin in a great many years.”
“You honor me.”
“I merely echo what I’ve been given to understand. Your reputation precedes you.”
“If I have a reputation, I’m sure it’s a modest one. But you, sir. You’re a legend.”
“That union leader was one of yours, wasn’t he? Head of the rubber workers or whatever he was? Nice bit of business the way you managed that decoy operation. And then you had to shoot downhill at a moving target. Very interesting the way you put all of that together.”
Haig bared his bright white teeth in a smile that gave his otherwise unremarkable face a foxlike cast. “I patterned that piece of work on a job that went down twenty years ago. An Ecuadorian minister of foreign affairs, I think it was.”
“Ah.”
“One of yours, I think.”
“Ah.”
“Imitation, I assure you, is definitely the sincerest form of flattery in this case. If I do have a reputation, sir, I owe not a little of it to you.”
“How kind of you to say so,” Colliard said. His fingers curled around the stem of his glass. “The occasion would seem to call for a toast, but what sort of toast? No point in honoring the memory of those we’ve put in the ground. They’re dead and gone. I never think about them. I’ve found it’s best not to.”
“I agree.”
“We could drink to reputations and to legends.”
“Fine.”
“Or we could just drink to the line of work we’re in. It’s a crazy business, Lord knows, but it has its points.”
They raised their glasses and drank.
“When I was young,” Colliard was saying, “I drank whiskey on occasion. A highball or two in the evening, say. And I often had a martini before dinner. Not when I was working, of course. I’ve never had alcohol in any form when I was on a job. But between jobs I’d have spirits now and then. But I stopped that altogether.”
“Why was that?”
“I decided that they are damaging. I’m not talking about what they might do to one’s liver so much as what they do to one’s brain. I think they dull one’s edge like a file drawn across a knife blade. Wine’s another matter entirely. In moderation, of course.”
“Of course.”
“But I’m rambling, Michael. You don’t want to hear all of this. I’ve been talking for an hour now.”
“And I’ve been hanging on every word, sir. This is the sort of thing I want to hear.”
“You’re just taking this all in and filing it all away, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I am,” Haig admitted. “Everything you can tell me about the way you operate and... and even the way you live, your whole style. If there were fan clubs in our profession I guess I’d be the president of yours.”
“You flatter me.”
“It’s not flattery, sir. And it’s not entirely unselfish, believe me.” Haig lowered his eyes. He had long lashes, the older man noted, and his hands, one of them now in repose upon the little marble table, were possessed of a certain sensitivity. The fellow had no flair, but then he was young, unfinished. He himself had been relatively undefined at that age.
“I know I can learn from you,” Michael Haig went on. “I’ve already learned a good deal from you, you know. Oh, it’s hard to separate hard fact from legend, but I’ve picked up a lot from what I’ve heard about your career. Even though we’ve never met before, what I’ve known about you has helped form my whole attitude toward our profession.”
“Really.”
“Yes. Some months ago I had a problem, or at least it seemed like a problem to me. The, uh, the target was a woman.”
“The client’s wife?”
“Yes. You don’t know the case?”
Colliard smiled, shook his head. “It’s almost always the client’s wife,” he said. “But do continue. I gather this was the first time you had a woman for a target?”
“Yes, it was.”
“And I gather further that it bothered you?”
Haig frowned at the question. “I think it bothered me,” he said. “The idea of it seemed to bother me. I certainly wasn’t afraid that I couldn’t do it. If you pull a trigger, why should it matter to you what’s standing in front of you? But, oh, I had difficulty with self-image, I guess you might say. It’s one thing putting the touch to some powerful man who ought to be able to look out for himself and another thing entirely doing the same to a defenseless woman.”
“The weaker sex,” Colliard murmured.
“But then I asked myself, ‘What about Wilson Colliard? How would he feel about a situation like this?’ And that straightened me out, because I knew you’d killed women in your career, and I suppose what I told myself was that if it was all right for you to do, well, it was all right for me.”
“And you went ahead and fulfilled the assignment.”
“Yes.”
“With no difficulty?”
“None.” Michael Haig smiled, and Colliard felt there was pride in the smile. Proud as a puppy, he thought, and every bit as eager. “I killed her with a knife,” he said. “Made it look like a burglary.”
“And it felt no different than if she had been a man?”
“No different at all. There was that thrilling moment when I did it, that sensation that’s always there, but it was no different from the way it always was.”
Then a shadow flickered on the younger’s man face, and Colliard, amused, left him wondering for a moment before rescuing him. “Yes,” he said, “that little shiver of delight and triumph and something more. It’s always there for me, too, Michael. In case you were wondering.”
“I was, sir.”
“The best people always get a thrill out of it, Michael. We don’t do it for the thrill, of course. We do it for the money. But there’s a touch of excitement in the act and it would be puerile to deny it. Don’t bother worrying about it.”
“I don’t know that I was worried, exactly. But thank you, sir.”
Colliard smiled. Now of whom did this young man remind him? The eagerness, the sincerity — God, the almost painful sincerity. It all held a sense of recognition, but recognition of whom? His own younger self? The son he had never sired? Those were the standard echoes one got, weren’t they?
Yet he didn’t really think he’d been very much like Michael Haig in his own younger days, not really. Had there been a veteran hand at the game whom he’d idolized? Certainly not. Could he ever, at his most callow, have been capable of playing the role Haig was playing in this conversation? No. God, no.
Nor would he have wanted a son like this youth, or indeed any sort of son at all. Women were a pleasure, certainly, like good food and good wine, like anything beautiful and luxurious and costly. But they were to be enjoyed and discarded. One didn’t want to own one, and one surely wouldn’t care to breed with them, to produce offspring, to litter the landscape with Xerox copies of oneself.