“I knew it could happen,” the man said, taking the lid off his coffee and peering inside, as if gauging how long he had left. “I’m not surprised it’s you sitting there.”
“Why’s that?”
“Accepting a job for this evening? That’s cold. Takes a certain kind of person. Who else they going to call?”
“That supposed to be a compliment? You think if you butter me up then I won’t do it?”
The man looked calmly at me through the steam of what smelt like a gingerbread latte.
“Oh, you’ll do it. I have no doubt of that.”
I didn’t like his tone, and I felt the thing start to uncurl inside me. If you’ve ever tried to give up smoking, you’ll have felt something like it—the sudden, lurid desire to lay waste to the world and everything in it, starting right here, right now, and with the person physically closest to you.
I don’t know what this thing is. It doesn’t have a name. I just know it’s there, and I feel it when it wakes. It has always been a very light sleeper.
“No, really,” I said. “Just because I live in a big house these days, and I got a wife and a child, you think I can’t do what I do?”
“You’ve still got it. You’ll always have it.”
“Fucking right I will.”
“And that’s something to be proud of?” He shook his head. “Shame of it is, you were a good kid.”
“Isn’t everyone?”
“No. Some people come out of the womb broken. You can nurture all you want, sooner or later they’re going to pass the damage on. With you, it could have been different. That makes it worse, somehow.”
“I am who I chose to be.”
“Really? Everyone in the neighbourhood knows the kind of person your father was.”
My hands twitched, involuntarily.
“He had no faith in anything,” the man said. “He was a hater. And a hurter. I remember watching him when he was young, knowing how he’d grow up. Either dead inside, or affectionate in inappropriate ways. Maybe both. Am I right?”
“If you’d like this to play out in a civilised fashion,” I said, my voice tight, “you want to drop this line of discussion.”
“Forgive me. But you’ve come here to kill me, Kane. That’s pretty personal too, wouldn’t you say?”
I knew I should get on with it. But I was also aware that this was the biggest job of my career, and when it was done, it would be over.
I was also simply curious. “What the f**k makes you think you’re better than me?” I said. “What you do isn’t so different.”
“You really think so?”
“You put yourself in a position of power, made it so you get to choose who gets what. Who prospers, who gets nothing. And then you point the finger and lives get f**ked up forever. Same as me.”
“I don’t see it that way.” He looked into his cup again. The habit was beginning to get on my nerves.
“Yeah, drink up,” I said. “Time’s running out.”
“One question.”
“How’d I find you?”
He nodded.
“People talk.”
“My people?”
I shook my head, irritably. The truth was, his own soldiers had held the line. I’d tracked down a couple of them (one slurping pho in a noodle bar under a bridge in Queens, the other sleeping in a tree deep in Central Park) and leaned on them hard—to the point where one of them would not be working for him, or anyone else, ever again. Both had merely looked up at me with their cold, strange eyes and waited for whatever I was going to do. It was not they who’d told me to go and stand in Times Square at the end of any December afternoon, and wait there until this man appeared, arriving there from directions unknown.
“So, who, then?”
“It’s too late for you to be taking names,” I said, with some satisfaction. “That’s all over now.”
He smiled again, but more coldly, and I saw something in his face that had not been there before—not on the surface, at least. The steady calm of a man who was used to making judgment calls, decisions upon which the lives of others had hung. A man who had measured, assayed, and who was now about to pay the price, at the behest of people who had fallen on the wrong side of the line he had believed it was his God-given right to draw.
“You think you’re this big, bountiful guy,” I said. “Everybody’s old man. But some understand the real truth. They realise it’s all bullshit.”
“Have I not made my rules clear? Have I not looked out for the people who deserved it?”
“Only to make them do what you want.”
“And what do you want? Why are you really here tonight, Kane?”
“Someone paid me to be. More than one, in fact. A syndicate. People saying that enough is enough. Getting back for what you did to them.”
“I know about that,” he interrupted, as if bored. “I can even guess who these people are. But I asked why you’re here.”
“For the money.”
“No. Otherwise you’d have done it from ten yards away and be on your way home by now.”
“So you tell me why, if you’re so f**king wise.”
“It’s personal,” he said. “And that’s a mistake. You’ve made a good living out of what you do, and have something of a life. On your terms. That’s because you’ve merely been for hire. But you want this one for yourself. Admit it. You hate me on your own account.”
This man was smart enough to know a lie when he heard it, so I said nothing.
“Why, Kane? Did something happen, some night, when there was snow on the ground outside and everything should have been carols and fairy lights? Did your presents come with conditions, or costs? Payments that came due in the middle of the night, when Mom was asleep?”
“That’s enough.”
“How many people have you killed, Kane? Can you even remember?”
“I remember,” I said, though I could not.
“When you let it get personal, the cost becomes personal too. You’re opening your own heart here. You sure you want to do that?”
“I’d do it for free. For the bullshit you are, and have always been.”
“Disbelief is easy, Kane. It’s faith that takes courage, and character.”
“You’re out of time,” I said.
He sighed. Then he tipped the cup, drained the last of his coffee, and set it down on the table between us.