“There’s no guarantee you’ll give me the right name, either, so we just have to trust each other, I guess.”
“You could look at it that way. I don’t. I think we got what you call your typical Mexican standoff here, and seems to me we ought to look for some alternate route around this, what you call, impasse we’re at.”
“I’m listening.”
“I’m glad… ’cause I just happen to have an alternate route in mind.”
“I’m still listening.”
“I’m still glad. I’m glad we’re getting along so good, too, ’cause my alternate route is this: throw in together.”
“And do what?”
“Hey, you’re supposed to be listening. Just keep listening, and when you hear what I got to say, you’ll understand what I mean. And, Quarry, I’m going to prove to you just how sincere I really am, man. I’m going to give you your fuckin’ name. That’s the main thing you’re after, right? I’ll give you the fucker, no strings attached, and then I’ll explain how we’re going to throw in together and make us a pile. Interested?”
This time I laughed.
“Okay,” I said. “So what’s the name?”
4
Vietnam taught me a lot of things, but coming home taught me more. The beginning of my education was finding my wife in bed with a guy named Williams. The only reason I didn’t shoot Williams on the spot was I didn’t have a gun on me, and he was too big to slug it out with, so I ended up backing out of there, feeling embarrassed, somehow, for having interrupted.
The next morning, after I’d cooled down and thought the situation over in the rational light of day, I went out to Williams’s bungalow in La Mirada, where I found him on his back in his driveway, working on the rear end of his little sportscar, which was jacked up with the back wheels off. He looked up at me and said, “I got nothing to say to you, bunghole,” and I said fine and kicked out the jack.
I didn’t kill my wife. Had she been under the car at the time, I would have dropped it on her just as fast as Williams. But she wasn’t, and any feeling I had for her died with her boyfriend. She divorced me, of course. I couldn’t have cared less.
They gave it a lot of play in the papers, but there was no trial. No district attorney in his right mind would bother trying a case like that. Even in an unpopular war, the returning warrior has the right to get upset when he finds his wife fucking somebody. In fact, those two situations seem to be the socially sanctioned situations for killing people: war, and when you find your wife fucking somebody.
On the other hand, I couldn’t find work. Everybody sympathized with me, didn’t blame me a bit for what I’d done, and told me so in no uncertain terms. I got more sympathy than a terminal cancer patient. And about as many job offers.
Before I went in the service, I worked in a garage, but everywhere I went I was told there were no openings for a mechanic, which I knew wasn’t entirely accurate, as Williams had been a mechanic, too, so the job market was short at least one. The publicity about my homecoming was obviously working against me, but there was also a general negative attitude toward hiring Vietnam veterans, since a lot of employers assumed we were all dope addicts.
I spent a lonely month in L.A., feeling sorry for myself, drinking, and trying to catch V.D. California itself was enough to bring me down. The place was full of bad memories, or rather good memories that had gone bad, as this was where I’d been stationed before going over, where I’d met my California girl, my bride with the sun-bleached brown hair and golden tan and lush figure just made for a bikini, an image in my memory that had turned dark and brittle, like newspaper left out in the sun.
The first week my old man came out to see me and tell me not to come home. Home was Ohio, and a stepmother who thought me strange even before I started dropping cars on people. My old man hadn’t needed bother to come tell me not to go home, but his doing so didn’t particularly help my mental state.
Neither did his insistence that my “murder” of Williams didn’t bother him, because it was offset by all the good things I’d done in the service of my country. By good things he meant all those yellow people I killed.
After a while I began getting tired of counting the cockroaches on the walls of my “apartment,” two rooms, one of which was the toilet. Besides, I was broke. I knew I’d have to get off my butt and find something to keep myself going. And while I had learned in Vietnam about the meaninglessness of life and death-a view that had only been reinforced since my return to the states-I’d also had instilled in me the importance of survival. Those two views should be incompatible, I suppose, but they aren’t. Anyone who’s been in a war can tell you it’s quite possible to believe in survival while placing no value in life and death.
I never asked the Broker how he got my name, although it seems obvious enough to me now that he’d seen about me in the papers, and saw some potential in me, perhaps even was able to anticipate my weeks of unsuccessful job-hunting, and my month of cheap booze and cheaper hookers. Anyway, he knew where to find me. He came right to my two-room suite at the Fleabag Hilton and made his pitch.
Funny thing, I can’t remember the conversation. I can remember my surprise, answering the knock at the door, expecting the landlord come to bitch about next week’s rent, and finding instead the dignified-looking, white- haired gentleman, with the neatly trimmed mustache, conservative but well-cut gray suit, and general demeanor of a successful lawyer or politician. He also had that ambiguity of age his type often has: he appeared to be around forty, though I later learned he was nearer fifty than forty; as long as I knew him, he looked a good ten years younger than he really was despite the stark white hair. I think it was the lack of lines in that long face of his.
I remember my surprise at seeing this distinguished apparition at the door of the trash can I was living in, but the conversation that followed I can’t summon up. I remember it in substance, but not detail.
I know he didn’t come right out and ask me if I wanted to kill people for money. He was much more subtle than that. He did it all with implication, in that eloquently long- winded politician’s way of his, telling me without really saying it that I could make a lot of money doing what I had done overseas for very little money. I had already shown, in the case of the late Mr. Williams, my willingness to kill for free. Now I was being tested to find if I had any aversion to doing the same for a fee.
I was at a point in my life where I could have gone in any direction; all I needed was a push. If somebody religious had got hold of me, he could’ve made a missionary out of me.
But somebody religious didn’t come around.
The Broker did.
5
“Ash,” he said.
“What?”
“That’s the name. Mean anything to you?”
“No.”
“Good. Because I just happen to have an address that goes with it. That, you can have later on.”
“Later on.”
“Right. Soon as we get some trust built up in each other. You can understand that, can’t you?”
“I can understand that. You want to tell me about Ash?”
“He worked through the Broker. Like you. Like me. Like that dead kid in bed in the other room.”
“So he worked through the Broker. So what?”
“So three and a half months ago, the Broker was killed. Or, should I say, hit.”
“No kidding.”
“And I think we both know who hit him.”
“Do we?”
“Come on, Quarry. You killed the Broker. Don’t fuck around.”
“What if I didn’t?”
“Kill the Broker, you mean? Wouldn’t matter. Ash thinks you did.”
“Don’t stop now. You’re rolling.”
“I kind of thought you’d find this interesting. Anyway, Ash, or somebody behind him, wants to take over where the Broker left off. And figures doing away with the guy that killed the broker is a necessary safety precaution for anybody planning to step in the Broker’s shoes.”