by Tom Wood
He had been staying at the motel for two days so far. Just him. No partner and no fishing buddy either. He left early every morning, sometimes before the sun had fully risen, and tended not to be back until after dark. She hadn’t seen him with a catch but he had a big cooler, so either he kept the fish in there or he tossed them back, and the cooler was for beer. She’d never smelled alcohol on him so it was likely the former.
But what was he then doing with his catch? The motel was just a motel. There were no cooking facilities in the room and even if there had been, the place would stink of fish by now.
She tutted and shook her head, annoyed with herself for not realising the obvious: he cooked the fish before he returned to the motel. What did they say about the simplest explanation being the right one? Perhaps he was not as mysterious as she thought; she wanted to believe he was mysterious in her continued effort to avoid death by boredom. Confirmation bias in action – she’d read about that.
He was just a man on a fishing trip. Nothing more. Nothing less.
She gave monikers to all her guests in an extension of her attempts to liven up her job. Some were used a lot, recycled for multiple guests because folk aren’t as unique as they would like to believe. Popular monikers included the Sleazy Guy and the Annoying Woman and the Surly Teen and the Spoilt Brat. From time to time that was a whole family unit right there.
Michelle had struggled to come up with a suitable name for this particular guest. Aside from their brief exchange a moment ago when he’d wanted to change room and an equally brief conversation when he’d arrived he hadn’t spoken to her at all. That was unheard of when it came to lone travellers, particularly lone men. They got bored and they got lonely. They found excuses to flirt or just to chat, even if it was only to talk about the weather. This guy didn’t do that. She wondered if he would have said another word to her had he not wished to change his room. He was no talker. Not even close.
Therefore, she decided she would call him the Quiet Man.
FIVE
The boy watched Victor every morning. On that first morning the boy had watched from inside the motel’s office, two fat little palms and ten fat little fingers pressed against the glass. The second morning he had stood a little closer, out in the parking lot but as far from Victor’s truck as was possible. Now, on the third morning, he stood a few feet away as Victor put the fishing rod and tackle box into the truck’s load bed. What it was the boy found so fascinating, Victor didn’t yet know. The boy watched in silence, with little change in his posture or even expression, yet his eyes held an inquisitive gleam. Maybe the boy found all guests this intriguing. Maybe Victor was no different from anyone else.
The motel was a small establishment, which was one of the several reasons why Victor had chosen it but not the most important. Location was the primary appeal. It provided him with easy access to the lake and the highway.
Pre-summer meant a half-empty motel. Perhaps that was why the boy watched him. Fewer guests meant fewer distractions for the boy, fewer people to watch. In the absence of more interesting guests, Victor became worthy of the boy’s attention.
Except the lone man on a fishing trip Victor played was not at all interesting. He knew this as he did everything possible to seem uninteresting because attention was just about the last thing Victor ever sought. He wore boring jeans and a plaid shirt over a white undershirt. His outdoor shoes were muted and dull. A nylon trucker’s hat shadowed his face and he kept that face neither clean-shaven nor with a beard. He spoke little and made no jokes, no insightful comments when he opened his mouth. He did everything possible to avoid attention down to the way he walked because even gait could say a lot about a person. Victor made sure his said he was neither slow nor fast, that he was neither in a hurry nor lackadaisical, that he was neither arrogant nor timid, neither happy nor sad.
In no way was he interesting.
The boy thought otherwise.
He said nothing, so Victor said nothing to him in turn.
The boy stood four feet tall and weighed some eighty pounds, which were just about the only details Victor knew for sure. Victor didn’t know the age: maybe he was a big six-year-old or a small eight-year-old or an average boy of seven. Victor was good at reading people, at deciphering strengths and weaknesses, determining when there was a potential threat and when there was none. Children were a mystery to him because there had never been a need to understand them. He had been one, of course, but his had not been a typical childhood and he recalled so little of it – while trying to forget what he could remember – that it offered him no insights nor experience to draw upon.
The boy wore thick-rimmed glasses with thick lenses. Not merely near-sighted or far-sighted but poor eyesight overall. He had a squinting pinch to his expression that Victor presumed came from the magnification of the sun through those dense lenses. For the boy, it would always be bright outside.
Those glasses were skewed, arms stretched at an angle because the boy had a large head. Victor wasn’t sure if it was disproportionately so because he figured that children did not always grow in proportion. The boy wore baggy joggers and a T-shirt with horizontal stripes made curves by being pulled tight across a distended belly. A strip of skin was visible between the hem and the joggers. He wore shoes made entirely of some kind of rubbery plastic Victor didn’t recognise on sight. Circular holes were cut through the plastic at intervals for ventilation, which meant he could see a superhero motif on the boy’s socks. From a comic book or film or both, Victor didn’t know.
He knew the boy’s name because Michelle mentioned it when Victor had checked in.
‘My son Joshua spends a lot of time here,’ she told him. ‘Just let me know if he gets in your way and I’ll tell him not to. He gets … bored.’
Joshua seemed uncomfortable whenever Victor looked directly at him so Victor did his best to avoid it. Not always possible because the boy, more confident now than he had been the previous days, kept changing his position to keep track of Victor as he packed his fishing gear.
Which gave Victor the answer that had previously escaped him: it was not he that was interesting to the boy but what he was doing.
The fishing rod might as well have been a laser sword.
The boy looked at it with the same wonderment Victor had once had as he gazed at trains passing by the orphanage. Commercial trains that went on for ever had been his favourite. So much so that he learned the timetables off by heart – had scribbled the times in a notebook whenever he saw one pass so he didn’t miss it – and would race to the window to watch whenever chance allowed. He had always planned to escape by train, jumping on to the siding of a carriage like a cowboy in one of the old black-and-white movies that were sometimes played if the boys had behaved well. The projector made so much noise it was possible to have entire conversations in secret, unheard and unpunished by the stern nuns who tolerated no disobedience.
When Victor had first tried, when he had finally found courage through desperation, he had realised to his dismay he was too small, too weak, too slow to jump up on to the train. He had tried several times, repeatedly failing and falling to the sharp gravel surrounding the sleepers. He shredded his trousers, cut his hands and knees and elbows. He had sat on the track with his nose streaming and his cheeks soaked as he watched the last carriage grew smaller in the distance and quieter as a result. In that quietness he could hear a cruel sound echoing in the night, coming from the open windows of his dormitory as the other boys laughed and jeered at his failure.
The fishing rod felt heavy in Victor’s hand. He realised he was squeezing it with such force his knuckles were white and his palm stung from the pressure of his grip.
He swivelled his head to check his flanks, not knowing quite how long he had been lost to memory and weakness, gaze scanning the parking lot, the vehicles, the entrance to the highway, the windows of the rooms, the trees on the far side of the highway. Even a few seconds of idle introspection could mean an enemy sne
aking into position unnoticed.
No threats. Only a little boy frightened by Victor’s sudden transformation from fisherman to professional.
Victor tried a smile to reassure Joshua there was nothing to worry about, but the attempt failed as Victor had failed to jump on to the train all those years ago.
He opened up his tackle box and took out a bright lure that he tossed the boy’s way in a slow underhand throw. Joshua didn’t try to catch it and it bounced off his chest and landed before his feet. He waited a moment then leaned over to retrieve it. He examined it with a detective’s scrutiny, finding so much to see, so many secrets to unravel in the tiny piece of fibreglass, that he didn’t look up at Victor again.
Joshua had gone in the time it took Victor to return to his room for his cool box and backpack. As he placed them into the truck’s load bed he realised it wasn’t only Joshua that had gone.
The tackle box wasn’t quite where Victor had put it. He opened the lid to see there were six hooks in their little compartment instead of seven.
Victor found Joshua at the shoreline nearest the motel. There was no path but the trees and foliage were not dense and made for a short, pleasant walk. The boy did not notice Victor’s arrival. Few people were ever aware of Victor’s presence unless he allowed them that rare privilege. He didn’t want to scare Joshua, however, so he made sure the boy could hear him once there was nowhere for the boy to run to.
Even with Victor no longer lightening his step, Joshua wasn’t aware and Victor realised the boy had hearing issues as well as poor eyesight. He didn’t know if these were common side effects of his condition or additional ailments.
Joshua was standing on the very edge of the narrow beach, water sloshing around the soles of his rubbery shoes. He faced the lake, so his back was to Victor. Given the hearing problem, Victor opted to walk up alongside him.
Only when he encroached on Joshua’s peripheral vision did the boy stop what he was doing.
Which meant he tensed and inhaled air in a sharp moment of surprise, of panic, and dropped his stick.
It was a thin piece of wood no doubt scooped off the forest floor and stripped of any shrivelled leaves and protrusions during his walk. About two feet in length, end to end.
Victor retrieved it from the water.
A piece of twine was tied to the narrowest end of the branch with a crude knot. The twine was thick and old and frayed and might have been from the trash. Certainly, it hadn’t been cut for this purpose.
The end of the twine held Victor’s seventh hook. It hadn’t been tied to the twine: the hole was far too small for the twine to thread through so the hook itself had pierced the twine and pushed all the way through until the wider loop kept it in place.
‘I think that’s mine,’ Victor said.
The boy just stared in response.
‘May I take it back?’
Joshua was statue still, so unresponsive Victor wasn’t sure if he hadn’t triggered some kind of paralysing seizure.
Victor shook water from the stick and gathered up the twine into his palm.
Joshua didn’t move.
Careful to keep his actions slow and obvious, Victor fed the hook back through the twine until it was free.
The boy didn’t protest or try and stop him. He still hadn’t moved an inch. If he had blinked, Victor had missed it.
He slipped the hook into an outer pocket of his plaid work shirt. ‘May I give you a piece of advice?’
Joshua didn’t answer.
Victor continued: ‘It’s something I learned when I was a little older than you are now. I took things that didn’t belong to me, just like you do. I don’t think I was greedy for that which wasn’t mine so I guess the concept of ownership must have been lost on me back then. Between you and me let’s just say it was something of an unconventional upbringing and the rules of polite society did not fully apply. But what I learned is that theft is never tolerated except among fellow thieves. So, if you’re going to steal, make sure you steal something that no one knows you want.’
Joshua didn’t respond.
‘Or even simpler,’ Victor added with a wry smile, ‘make sure you don’t get caught.’
SIX
The lake wasn’t far from the motel – a few hundred yards – but it took ten minutes to drive his truck along the highway and then negotiate the back roads until Victor could park it near the shore where his boat was moored.
An inexpensive, practical vessel. Lightweight and durable but too modern, too plastic for Victor’s aesthetic tastes. He would have preferred something made of wood, something timeless, but a salesman from Nevada on a fishing trip far from home wouldn’t overreach. He was here to fish, to catch northern pike, smallmouth bass and sturgeon in the cold freshwater of the Great Lakes. He wasn’t rowing for pleasure, for exercise. The only difference between wood and plastic for that man from Nevada was cost.
Expenses were rarely something that Victor considered. He was wealthy by any standard, made even wealthier courtesy of considerable overcompensation for a recent assignment. Yet he had so few opportunities to exploit that affluence beyond the inevitable and significant overheads of his trade he sometimes wondered what the point was of charging such a high fee. He would never be poor, never go hungry, and maybe that was why. Perhaps it was from all those nights praying for sleep to come and save him from the pain of an empty belly, maybe from the days he could run fingers over his ribs and imagine his ribcage was a xylophone. He had little to spend his money on, but it could be that having it helped him forget a part of his past. Of all his impulses, that was the strongest after the will to survive: he strove to forget who he had been when he was a boy, as a young man, who he had been even yesterday. He longed to live only in the present, with no distractions of unnecessary thought, no memories at all, his mind empty of anything but instinct.
He wondered why he was so self-reflective when he tried to be anything but that, despite the inherent irony of wondering at all.
Change was slow. Evolution took time. Victor was not immune to experience, to nurture. He sought it. He embraced it.
He survived through change. Adaptation was growth. Experiences he had recently lived through unscathed would have killed him ten years ago. Danger he faced back then, that he would not now consider danger, would have killed the twenty-year-younger kid before he’d even understood he was in any danger at all.
His biggest threat was not a younger, faster opponent but an older, slower one who had survived dangers Victor had yet even to face.
Victor loaded in his things and pushed the boat from the beach, which required a little application of strength, then vaulted on board once it was free from the sucking pull of sand and mud. He turned around and sat on the little bench and took an oar in each hand.
Behind him, south, the border cut the lake in half. Boats crossed daily, sailing vessels and fishing boats and the occasional small commercial ship. It would take Victor a couple of hours’ rowing to cross and he would be tired and sweating by the time he reached the US. But he would deal with no scrutinising agents and none of his documents would be checked. He could circumvent the security of one of the most fiercely protected borders in the world for the simple price of time and physical exertion.
Then, invisible, he could enter Chicago and do his job.
SEVEN
Victor had once read that all children were close facsimiles to psychopaths because empathy was only developed in the final stages of brain growth, and that didn’t occur until a person was well into their twenties. But people also spoke about psychopaths as having personality disorders when in Victor’s opinion such a personality was an evolutionary advantage that complemented, rather than competed with, the empathy of others. In the pre-civilised world the psychopath was the warrior first into battle; he protected the tribe from enemies and had no mercy for those that would do harm to his kin. In that context empathy was instead selfish: Homo sapiens could not survive the trials of the wild alone.
The individual needed the protection of others, so all had to care so as to be cared about in return. Only the psychopath, without empathy, could be truly selfless and that selflessness would have been an invaluable resource.
In the civilised world the psychopath had helped create, however, the psychopath received no thanks.
Which meant Victor would never be out of work.
Client or target, it mattered not to him.
He judged others as he judged himself and he had ceased doing the latter so long ago he might as well have been another person.
His motel room was basic and functional, and the bed offered little comfort. He looked forward to it regardless. The creaky springs, the thin mattress, the lumpy pillows all called to him with the promise of much-needed rest.
Before rest, however, he had to dispose of the rifle. A civilian-grade hunting weapon bought at a gun show for cash and a flash of a fake ID. He had shot it a total of seven times: six at a range to zero the scope and once in Chicago.
At a quiet part of the lake he loaded the stripped-down components into a porous sack weighted with rocks. It sank fast when he dropped it over the side, would reach the bottom by the time Victor had begun rowing away. Scattering the parts across the lake had been another option, but not all components were heavy enough to resist the currents. He didn’t want one showing up on the end of a fisherman’s line either tomorrow or a year from now.
Victor was exhausted by the time he returned to the motel. He had rowed over forty miles in the course of a single day and completed his job in between.
A simple assignment, but only because he had planned it to perfection and executed it just as perfectly.
Sometimes his job was like that. Sometimes he was paid for what boiled down to mere seconds of actual work. On other occasions things were far more complicated and more taxing. Sometimes the fallout from an assignment could take years to resolve. Some had never been resolved.
