Most of them didn’t get weird or friendly though, and didn’t seem to mind if I prowled around a little. A couple of times I was even supposed to prowl around and steal things. One woman, who told me she worked as a stockbroker in a medium-sized firm downtown as I taped her up, said I should smash what I didn’t want and take the rest: it was all insured. Unfortunately there was nothing there — the requisite knickknacks, etc. — excepted, so I knocked over a lacquer vase and a row of blue coffee mugs and took a pair of toy binoculars that, when I tried them the next day, proved not to be functional, and a book I subsequently read and liked a great deal by an Italian writer, which was about black holes and supernovas and the prospect of getting stuck forever on the moon. The other time I was supposed to steal something the verbal brief was explicit. I was to murder the subject (first by knocking him out with a strong dose of chloroform, then by taking a knife from the chest of drawers in his bedroom and “being especially brutal with it”) the moment he (a practicing accountant by the name of Leonard James Seligman, who worked out of his apartment by the looks of the beat-up diplomas on his wall, the big adding machine on his desk, the half-eaten sandwich, full ashtray, etc.) came home, steal his money, then bag up the entire contents of his desk’s file drawer (the key to which would be on his person) and (“in disgust because there is nothing there worth keeping”) toss the lot into the trash outside the building. I did this, not neglecting to “act disgusted” as I feigned going through the bag before I dropped it into the garbage. It occurred to me to wonder, as I did this, if he himself had requested the murder, or if someone else, perhaps a disgruntled client, had requested it, maybe without his knowledge, for him.
I had been under the impression that the jobs would be collaborative, that the contortionists would be involved, that the knockout would stop by once in a while to add a little spice to the business, that Cornelius would occasionally climb in through a window wearing his hunting cape, but after the test runs I was left to work alone.
We’re stretched too thin, Cornelius explained to me one night after I had asked him about it. Business is booming and everyone has to work.
Do you work?
I’m old, Henry. I organize — I oversee. I do other things.
Like speak French?
Cornelius raised an eyebrow.
Real murders?
No comment.
Tell me more about Mr. Kindt swimming the length of Lake Otsego on a bet.
Shut up, please.
Usually, I would get a scenario, delivered verbally — by Cornelius — a night or so before the murder, which gave me time to pick up props if they were called for and think things through a little. Sometimes, though, all I got beforehand was the time and address, with no on-site instructions waiting for me — those jobs, after I had gotten over my prework jitters, were probably my favorites, although the results could get a little messy, even painful.
Once, for example, the job involved a couple in a building over on Second Street, across from the old Marble Cemetery — a nice little lower-rung tenement with mosaic floors and freshly painted green stairs. I’d been buzzed in, so I figured they would open up when I knocked, but they didn’t, even when I leaned close to the door and said I could hear them in there and that the meter was running and they should let me in. After a few more minutes, I knocked again, louder this time. The door next to theirs opened and a heavy old lady with greasy hair in a dirty housedress looked out. From somewhere in the apartment behind her a man’s voice said, who is it, Lupe? But the old lady said nothing, just kept staring at me, with a premises-vacated-but-haunted look in her eyes. I had seen a lot of that look out in the streets and down in the subway in the eighties. Once I had woken up on one of the old plastic bucket seats in Penn Station and found someone with the look about six inches away, peering into my face.
I knocked on the couple’s door.
I asked the old woman, who was still standing in her doorway, if she had the time.
She blinked, her nostrils flared slightly, she scratched her right side.
I was getting ready to leave when the husband opened the door and invited me in.
Sorry, he said. We were just getting things together. Finishing up. Come on in.
Who’s the neighbor? I said.
Go back inside, Lupe, it’s all right, he said.
Get back in here now, Lupe, came the man’s voice from behind her.
Lupe didn’t move.
Don’t worry about it, she’s just got a short circuit somewhere, he said.
I’m not worried, I said.
He vanished back into his apartment and, after I had said good-bye to Lupe, who did not answer, I followed him in. He introduced me to his wife. We all shook hands. They had some dinner — chicken with wild rice, salad, and sweet potatoes — going and suggested I join them. I sat down. Not too long into dinner — which wasn’t bad, although the chicken was a little tough — we got to it. It was when the wife, who had just finished her glass of 2000 Long Island Blanc Fumé, said, so this is the guy that’s been writing me those letters, Billy. Here he is. I wanted you to see him face-to-face. See who your competition is.
What? the husband said.
Yeah, what? I said. I wondered what I was supposed to have written. Maybe the imagined letters had been vulgar, full of details about what I’d do to her if I got her alone, etc. Or maybe they had just been enthusiastic, full of exclamation points, exciting interrogations, curlicues of banal but nicely turned supposition. Who knows what the mind wants, what it needs to talk itself into waking up. She looked nice. Pretty in a quiet, self-contained way. Like a lamp turned on in the early evening, or a modest triangle of green space on a crowded street.
The husband, for his part, did not look all that nice, though he had been pleasant enough through dinner. A tattoo of a wildly burning pinecone on his forearm had figured in the conversation. He told me he had gotten it during a stint as a construction worker in Jersey City. While sometimes, now that he wasn’t working a jackhammer, he regretted having had it done, other times it filled him with a kind of pride. More than once, “on that day they got us,” when he was helping with the stretchers, he had looked at it through the smoke, gritted his teeth, and soldiered on. Also, his wife found it cute.
A pinecone, she had said, as if by way of confirmation.
Listen, asshole, he said, standing up.