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  "You might be seeing a little more of me than you were expecting," he hinted confidently.

  "What do you mean?" Her tone seemed a little sharp.

  "I'm staying in New York for a few months. Not going right back to Lima this time."

  Silence for a few seconds. "Really. Why is that?" She sounded neutral, but he did not seem to notice the cautiousness of her tone.

  "I'm doing a series for a men's magazine on life there, but I can do it from here. And the editors want me around while they work on it. So I'm gonna be in town for a while." He snickered a little—in anticipation, I presume.

  "No way!"

  "Way. So what are you doing tomorrow night?"

  "Oohh. I'm booked."

  "Friday?"

  "I've got a thingy I've got to go to." Now she sounded legitimately regretful.

  "Saturday," he concluded, not asking. "I want to see you again… Please, please, please, please?"

  "That'll be lovely," she said warmly. "So where are you staying while you're here?"

  "At my mom's, for the time being. Then maybe… we'll see."

  "Oops, that's my call waiting. I've gotta go."

  "I'll check in with you Friday," he said quickly.

  "Okay. See ya."

  But there was no call waiting.

  What was she thinking? She had sounded unhappy at first, then perfectly friendly.

  Her face was rather impenetrable. She kept it turned away from the man at her side. He appeared to be babbling on regardless. Every so often, he would drape his arm across her shoulder, but then she would speed up a little or point to something and manage to slough it off. They were walking on the easternmost part of New York, by the river, downtown, not far from where she lived. It was only ten o'clock on a Saturday night, but the area was deserted. I was approximately 200 yards away, diagonally ahead of them. I had made the choice not to carry directional listening equipment; though useful for such distances, it tends to be bulky, and I was just supposed to be a solitary stroller, after all. As a consequence, I could not hear the conversation, one-sided as it appeared. I could only sneak looks at her face through my microbinox and watch as expressions flitted over it. Concern, then an unwilling smile, minor irritation, and then a closed look, her eyes moving around as if looking for something of which there was no sign.

  They were walking slowly; he was on the side of her next to the water. They meandered closer to the river. And then she suddenly reached her hands out—it seemed without thought, but with all her strength. Reached out and, just like that, pushed him over the low guardrail and into the water. It had happened too fast for him to even comprehend, let alone react. I thought I heard his head striking concrete or a rock on the way down. She simply continued walking, and on her face was a look that was one part anger and three parts relief. A murderer's cocktail. But the relief was so pure. After a couple of blocks, she turned west, returning to the street and a taxicab home. The site where he had gone under was smooth and undisturbed. There was no sign of him.

  I leaned against a bench, surprisingly shocked. For twenty-five years, I have been striving to attain what she seemed to be able to achieve effortlessly: the perfect murder. Perhaps I had never had the right motivation.

  7

  Grace

  Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Some people have no sensitivity at all. They just assume you're feeling what they're feeling. I mean, what do you have to use, a two-by-four? He'd had such a great time the other night. He really felt that we were bonding. We've known each other for so long, and now something seemed to be blooming. I just couldn't help myself. It was like sometimes when my dad calls, though he's not supposed to, and he says something so obnoxious that I can't stand it and I feel a physical imperative to hang up the phone. Physically, I had to do it. That's what this was. I know I said I wouldn't do this again. But I couldn't begin to think of what to say to him. I did not have a great time the other night. I did not bond with him. Nothing was blooming. He was looking at me with those big puppy-dog eyes, all brown and moist-looking. How could I say that? I'm really asking.

  It was a physical imperative.

  This is bad. I know this is bad. This is not good. It is not right to kill people. And killing him was too easy. But, oh, it felt so good just to reach out and push him right out of my life… and earshot. Just—push. And he was gone. You know what they need to give— instead of classes on how to meet people, or maybe in addition: an advanced class in how to blow them off. Because as far as I know, what people do is, they lie. And I just don't know how. And what if I did? What if I had told Pete that I'd just gotten a call from an old boyfriend—he wouldn't have known that I don't have any—and that he wanted to get back together and work things out. Pete would have been crushed. It would certainly have hurt him. I couldn't bear to look at his face. I would have hurt him. I would have caused him pain. I just don't know how. I can imagine all too well how I'd feel.

  And, anyway, the way he got it, he probably didn't feel a thing.

  8

  Sam

  How does she feel when she wakes up in the morning? I thought from the comfort of my king-sized bed. As I maneuvered a cigarette out of the pack on the night table and lit it, I could not shake a feeling. Professional curiosity. That is what I called it. That is what I would continue to call it, for as long as I could manage.

  Did she lie to herself? Did she tell herself that they made her do it? Or did she know? Had the man in the bar been the first? There was no reason to believe he was. But somebody had been. At some point, she had crossed a line. I had crossed that line myself, longer ago than I liked to remember. But I had never killed for personal convenience, for personal reasons. There had always been orders, and I had followed them. It was work. And I had grown used to it. A compartmentalization process had occurred early on. Strangely, it would never have struck me to apply my well-honed methods to a woman when I was tired of her. There are plenty of ways to get that message across.

  I have got to pull back, I told myself. This girl is bad news. Dangerous. What in the hell is she doing? What kind of person is this? These questions were not at all based on any criticism of her actions. They were purely pragmatic. I cannot tolerate a loose cannon in my life. Of course, there was no reason to believe she would be in my life, no reason to believe she should be. After all, this was simply an exercise.

  The streets just above SoHo were always crowded at lunchtime. I did not stay very far behind the group of editors as they strolled to a nearby restaurant from their office. She was among them. No day off from work this time. She seemed to be behaving perfectly normally, judging from her companions.

  A man in a high castle. I could not stop thinking of that phrase. A large house, set up on a hill, surrounded by an acre of grassy land, broken only by a few handsome trees. An old oak had stood guard, clearly, for many, many years in the front yard. A white birch demarcated the end of the property along one side. There were three lilac bushes in the back. But mostly the grounds offered open space. Thinking back to my own youth, I noticed that there were very few places for a child playing to hide from watching eyes in the house. It was a typical American suburb, clean and apparently exposed to the world.

  The drive had not been an unpleasant one. I have driven these highways many times before—in Czechoslovakia, in Hungary, throughout Europe, in fact. The roads are not simply the same from one end of the United States to the other but all around the world. Endless highways, looking almost exactly alike but for the letters on the overhanging signs. The highways of New York and Massachusetts are no different, only a little more granite along the sides.

  Four and a half hours from the city to this small New England town. A pretty village, in fact. The man lived alone. He was divorced, though his former wife lived not far away.

  Inside, the house was piled high with books and old newspapers and magazines, the master bedroom particularly. There were three smaller bedrooms, once clearly occupied by children, to judge from
the artifacts left behind—now abandoned except for some scattered piles of reading matter that seemed to have crept in from the man's bedroom down the hall.

  The house was also filled with antiques, mostly Asian; good, if not great, paintings; and thick Oriental rugs. There were no doors separating the rooms on the first floor. On the second level, only the master bedroom had a lock on the door.

  I surveilled the site for three days. No one visited. Occasionally, the man went out on brief errands. Nobody called him. The man was seventy, but he looked much older. Skinny, a hunched-over shell of a man with a balding head. He had a strange kind of energy to him. As I watched him wrestle with various tasks around the yard, I could see he was stronger than he appeared at first glance. He looked grim and distracted. At least one TV set in the house was on at all times.

  I found pictures of her as a child packed away in several shoe boxes high up in the walk-in closet attached to the master bedroom. There were many photos of two older children playing, often in the snow, which there seemed to be so much more of twenty years ago. There were fewer of her. She was a beautiful child, honey-colored hair, pale skin, and large blue-gray eyes. She was significantly younger than the others. Were they protective of her? Or did they tease her? I was an only child.

  Her mother, his ex-wife, lived in a nearby town, in a fairly modern condominium development. Fewer objects of art, many pictures of relatives scattered more prominently around. She worked, belonged to a local singing group, had no love life. But she had friends and grandchildren. They seemed to keep her busy. Her youngest daughter resembled her slightly, but only in appearance. The mother lacked a certain force of personality that I sensed in the girl.

  The houses on the street where the children had grown up, where the father still lived, were set wide apart from one another. There seemed to be little neighborly contact.

  What had his daughter been like when she lived here?

  I drove back to the city. Back to her. She seemed nothing like him.

  9

  Grace

  I had lain awake for hours again last night. Worrying. One article was still late coming in, and I was going to have to explain to Audrey, my boss. I kept going over and over in my head exactly what I would say to her. Ever since her appointment as executive editor over me, shortly before I met Clay, life at the magazine had gotten worse. I spent hours at night reviewing in my head what irritating comments she had made that day and what I hadn't said in response. To this day, if you want to make me livid, just say to me, in a snotty little voice, "Well, did you ask him?" That was Audrey's line, and there was never a final answer. "Well, what did he say?" My response then to be followed up by the inevitable "Well, did you ask him?" Nothing I did ever suited her, though my previous exec had been ecstatic with my work. Audrey was constantly critical, and I never was able to say anything back to her that would deflect it.

  I don't get into fights with people; there's nearly always a way around that. Being conciliatory, framing comments as questions, agreeing on the little things, surrounding a criticism with compliments, turning it into a joke: "It seems…"

  "I think…"

  "Wouldn't it be better if…"

  "Don't you think…"

  "Why don't we try…"

  "I'm not sure but…"

  "That's one possibility, but…" Palliatives, modifiers. But, no matter how carefully couched, basically saying, It's okay, I'm cool, swallowing it.

  So I end up constantly defending myself to myself in my head afterward. Life with my father was like that. Never a moment's rest, always having to shore myself up, remind myself I was okay. And I hate having the same thoughts go around and around in my head, over and over for hours. Reliving the latest insult and my lack of any decent response.

  I guess I should kill her would be the obvious thought, but, in fact, it never occurred to me. That sort of thing is worlds apart from what I had been doing. I never meant to kill anybody. And there was too much motive and too little opportunity. But mainly, you can't just murder someone who's making you miserable on a daily basis. A grown-up person finds some reasonable way of dealing with it. If only I could just stand up to her. That would be enough. Instead of standing silent, stunned, hurt, and helpless.

  10

  Sam

  Every person carries the seeds of his own murder in him.

  The first step is identification. My target is presented to me (formerly by my superiors, currently by the select few independent clients I have cultivated): photo, name, residence, any background documentation available. Then I begin the research, the most exacting and revealing phase. There are a thousand ways to eliminate someone. The method chosen simply depends on his personal habits and weaknesses and whether the event is to be structured as an accident or a crime. For a message to be sent, the act must be seen to be intentional. To merely remove an obstacle, an accident will suffice.

  Home, transportation, lovers—these are the key openings. Medical conditions, hobbies, job—all hold within them life-threatening actions. All I have to do at first is watch. What does he eat? How does he drive? With whom does he have sexual relations? What are his habits and how can they be used against him? It is rarely necessary to crouch atop a roof and fire a long-range weapon. Life is rife with opportunities for death. Most people refuse to think about that. If they did, they could not live. I do. If I did not, I could not kill.

  There are a wide variety of ways to watch them, to listen to them, and hence, to analyze them. From the outside, I can know them.

  Then I decide what steps to take, how to remove them. I choose the time, the place, the method. They may suspect, some of them, that they are in danger, in a general sense. But they have no idea about me. They may fear the man in the dark with a gun. But not the next mouthful of food. There is nothing I would not be willing to do. I try to keep innocent parties out of it, but, I must confess, occasionally I am not completely successful in that regard. For the most part, however, that reflects a lack of temporal leeway. Given the necessary time, I can accomplish my goal without ancillary damage.

  I never worry. I simply watch and act. I have faced particularly challenging cases, but they just require a little more observation and thought. I always know what the ultimate result will be. His death or mine. Most likely, his. It is a liberating sort of knowledge. Little problems seldom trouble me. Methodical and final—both at work and at play—that is my personal philosophy. But it is not one I can ordinarily share.

  11

  Grace

  The man sitting to my right was beginning to get on my nerves. I couldn't help noticing him. His gaze seemed to be fixed on me. Fixated, as a matter of fact. Head tilted toward mine, his face showed expressions that seemed to reflect the conversation in which I was participating. My friends and I were engaged in the typical premovie banter, although, I humbly suggest, more objectively amusing than other people's.

  The repertory theater was crowded, as it always is, first because there are so few of them left in town and second because it's so badly managed. "Is that just a coat?" asked a near-desperate person in the aisle, clearly hoping against hope that the seat was miraculously free. "No, it's Elvis Presley's coat," muttered my friend Marie, who is at her least patient in movie theaters (which is saying a lot). Her years in New York have not been kind to her once-midwestern spirit. She doesn't even escalate anymore. The vilest curses jump off her tongue at the first hint of confrontation, and an ugly leap over the seats is very close behind. This movie theater is always a disaster, from the mob of people in the line outside (queue, as the Brit friend also with us would put it, though both words were inaccurate) to the masses fumbling for the few decent seats with any sort of reasonable view.

  "We could do it better," I opined to Marie, Clare (the Brit), and Connor, her husband, closest to me on my left side. "Bigger screen, more organized, arrange the seats better."

  "And we will decide who will live and who will die," burst out Marie.

  It
was natural enough upon hearing this either to laugh along with us or, just as naturally, to despise our twisted attitude. But the man on my right just kept on looking and attending to our conversation, and what I had noticed subliminally from the first second it began now hit the forefront of my mind.

  It made me very uncomfortable. So I told myself that he was just waiting for a friend, and after the seat on the other side of him was taken, that it was filled by someone he knew. But that simply wasn't the case. He didn't look like a pervert. I know what movie theater perverts look like. My best friend at college and I had a run-in with one when we were attempting to see some French comedy once. That time, shortly after sitting down, we identified the source of a shared general sense of unease. The man sitting in the row in front of us had his head apparently permanently swiveled around, staring at us. We rose together and moved. He started to follow, so we slipped out of the theater, told one of the people who worked there about the guy—as if an usher were going to do anything—got our money refunded (first things first), and ran back to our dorm, where we hunkered down fearfully.

  This guy wasn't like the swivel-headed guy. He looked pretty normal. He was on the early side of middle age. He just wouldn't shift his attention away from me and onto the screen. I sat throughout that whole movie, part of my brain ruminating on the weirdo next to me, body at the ready—to do what, I don't quite know—to defend or attack should the need arise. But outwardly, I ignored it. As if it just wasn't happening.