Anselmo majored in gym and learned that if he held the person down, Myron could work better. They became inseparable friends. Anselmo was known as the better-looking one. Anselmo was the one who looked like a Mongolian yak.
When they first met Perriweather, they were working as collectors for loan sharks in Brooklyn. Perriweather offered them more money and strangely asked them if they had strong stomachs. It would have been an even stranger question coming from this elegant dandy if they had not been meeting in a garbage dump where Anselmo and Myron could barely breathe. Perriweather kept talking away, as if he were on a beach somewhere. Anselmo and Myron stayed just long enough to get the name of their first assignment and then left, retching.
The hit was an elderly woman in an estate in Beverly, Massachusetts. They were to break her bones and make it look like a fall.
The way they were to do it made the pair shudder but it was nothing compared to what they found out later. They were not supposed to kill the woman, just break her bones. It was an October morning, the house was enormous and the furniture was all covered with sheets. The house was being closed for the season and the woman thought that they were movers.
Myron and Anselmo had never mugged an elderly woman before and they backed away at first. "I ain't doing it," they both assured each other. And then the old woman began ordering them around like servants and each found a little place in his heart that said, "Do it."
Her bones were brittle but that was not the hard part. The hard was was leaving her alive, writhing on the floor at the foot of the stairs, begging for help.
Perriweather arrived just as they were leaving. "Hey, you ain't supposed to be here," Anselmo said. "Whaddaya hire us for if you're gonna be here?"
Perriweather did not answer. He just peeled off the hundred-dollar bills which were their payment and went inside the house, sat down by the poor old woman and began reading a newspaper.
"Waldron," the woman groaned. "I am your mother."
"Are not," Waldron said. "My real mother will be here soon. Now please die so that she will come." Anselmo looked at Myron and they both shrugged as they left. Later they read that Perriweather had lived in the house for a full week with the body before reporting it to the hospital, which of course notified the police.
At the coroner's inquest, Perriweather testified that he lived in a different wing of the house and had not noticed his mother's body. Apparently she had fallen down the stairs and broken her bones. Servants had left that morning to prepare the family's Florida home and Perriweather thought his mother had gone with them and that he was in the house alone.
"Didn't you smell the body?" the prosecutor had asked. "You could smell that body a half-mile down the road. It was infested with flies. Didn't you wonder what the damned flies were doing in the mansion?"
"Please don't say 'damn,' " Perriweather had said. A butler and several other servants saved Waldron, however, by testifying that he had a peculiar sense of smell. None at all, they said.
"Why, Mr. Perriweather could be living with a pile of rotted fruit by the bed table for two weeks, smelling so bad you couldn't get a maid into the room with a noseclip."
And there was the recently-estranged Mrs. Perriweather who admitted that her husband had a fondness for garbage dumps.
There was also testimony that there was no one who could have smelled the rotting corpse because the last two in the house, other than Mr. Perriweather, were brutal-looking movers in a white Cadillac.
Accidental death was the verdict. The prosecutor said Perriweather should go and have his nose fixed. Anselmo and Myron had more work from Perriweather over the years. They also knew he hired others but they weren't sure who and sometimes he would complain about amateur help. Sometimes he would say strange things too. Anselmo couldn't remember how the topic of their first job for him came up but he did hear Perriweather mention that his true mother visited him a day after the first hit had been made.
A nut case, they both decided, but the money was good and none of the jobs were dangerous because Perriweather always had them well planned. So when he called and told them he wanted them to steal an atomic device, there was no complaint, especially since he had agreed to meet them out in the open, in the fresh air.
He was mumbling something about revenge and they had never seen him this angry.
But his plans were again good. He showed them pictures of the atomic installation and gave them the proper passwords to use and badges to wear.
"Ain't that stuff radio-whatever?" asked Anselmo. He had read about those things.
"Radioactive," Perriweather said. "You won't have to handle it long. You just give it to these two people." And he showed them a picture of a young woman with a blank expression and a young man with eyes that wimped out to-the world.
"Those are the Muswassers. They'll plant the device. Tell them not to worry about getting it inside the gate this time. It doesn't have to be inside the gate. That's the beauty of the atomic device, you only have to be within a mile or so of your target. The one thing I do want, though, and tell them to be sure to do this, is to get these two in the laboratory when they set off the device."
Waldron showed his hit men a picture of two men, one wearing a kimono, the other a thin white man with thick wrists.
"I want them dead," Perriweather said.
"How should these other two make sure they're inside?" asked Myron.
"I don't know. You do it. You tell them when you set it off. I am tired of dealing with amateurs."
"Mr. Peiriweather, can I ask a personal question?" asked Anselmo, venturing a familiarity that years of good business cooperation had granted him.
"What is it?"
"Why do you use amateurs in the first place anyway?"
"Sometimes, Anselmo, one has no choice. You are stuck with your allies, no matter how temporary."
"I see," said Anselmo.
"That's why I really like dealing with you, though," Perriweather said. "There's only one thing wrong with the two of you."
"What's that?"
"You both have nice hair. Why do you wash it so much?"
"You mean it takes the life out of it?"
"No. Removes the food," said Perriweather.
As always, Anselmo and Myron found Perriweather's plans were perfect. They were able to get into the nuclear storage facility with absolute ease and escape with the two packages, one containing the weapon and the other the timing detonator.
They met Nathan and Gloria Muswasser at a town house outside Washington. Nathan's father owned it. The fine plastered walls were covered with liberation posters. They called for freeing the oppressed, for saving animals. There was a special call for freeing blacks.
Apparently this had already been achieved because the entire neighborhood was free of blacks.
"Youse got to be careful of these things," Anselmo said. "And you shouldn't set it off until these two guys is in the lab."
"Which two guys?" Gloria asked.
Anselmo showed them the photograph of the Oriental and the white.
"How will we know they are in there?"
"We'll tell you."
"All right. Seems simple. Fair enough," Gloria said. "Now to the important part. Who gets the credit?"
"No credit. We don't deal in credit. But we already been paid."
"Wait a minute. We're going to be doing the lab, maybe two hundred people, the surrounding suburbs, add at least ten to fifteen thousand people there ... Nathan, remember we've got to try to figure out a way to get the pets out of the area if we can. We're really talking about fifteen thousand people. Maybe twenty. "
Anselmo shuddered at the potential death toll. Even Myron's dull brain registered a glimmer of horror. "So we want to know," Gloria said, "just where you stand on the credit."