by Alex Bell
I don’t think Anna was a woman naturally given to whining and complaining, but people like to talk about themselves and probably find something freeing in talking with a sympathetic stranger they are unlikely to see again after their holiday.
We met a couple of times down on the beach when she had stormed out after arguing with her husband. It did make it very easy for me, but I would have found another way if I’d had to. I always did.
I asked Anna to come back to my villa for a drink one day and she happily accepted, clearly hoping for an adulterous sexual relationship and finding the idea of a holiday fling appealing after the family problems she’d been having. And, of course, there was also the fact that I was younger than her husband, with none of his middle-aged fat since my body was well-toned from years and years of disciplined training. When we got back to my villa, I made her a drink and we sat down on the couch on the veranda.
The private white beach stretching out before us, the salty tang of the waves filling the air, and the muffled roar of the surf made it the perfect romantic spot. She’d only had a couple of drinks before she was kissing me. I laughed at her eagerness as her cocktail glass shattered on the floor and buttons were torn off my shirt. She sucked in her breath in pleased surprise as she ran her hands over the toned muscles of my chest and abdomen.
‘Aren’t you lean?’ she teased me. ‘You must work out all the time!’
‘Every day,’ I acknowledged with a smile, speaking softly in her ear.
She giggled as I drew her away from the cream couch, towards the beach . . . What are beaches there for anyway? She had asked me this bitterly one day while complaining of her husband’s inaction. I had never seen the attraction of beaches, myself. But this was for Anna, not for me. So we went down together in the sand, her eyes shining in excitement at the vile deliciousness of cheating on the person you’re supposed to love. I was aware of her hand caressing the back of my neck as, slowly, one by one, I teased the buttons of her shirt undone . . . Then, while her hands were busy fumbling with my belt, I reached for the knife that was concealed at my ankle, and stabbed her in the neck with it.
We lay there, still for a moment, while she bled out under me. I knew where to do it so that her death would be relatively painless, almost instantaneous. The hidden video camera set up on the veranda caught everything. It was quite easy to wrap up her body in the plastic sheeting, put her in a crate, put the crate on board the little fishing boat I had rented, row out a little way and then drop the crate overboard into the Mediterranean.
I had planned for it all to take place on the beach because the ocean would wash away the bloodstained sand without my having to take any action to clean it up. The villa was filled with cream furniture and white sheets that would not have been so easy to clean - and it would never do to have mess. Mess was inefficient and led to too many questions.
I scrubbed and scrubbed at my hands in the bathroom afterwards so that not a drop of Anna’s blood remained, not even traces beneath my fingernails. Then I took all my clothes off and dropped them into a bath full of hot water to soak. As the water slowly turned red in the tub, I showered and removed all traces from my hair and skin. I do this every time. I can’t stand to be covered in someone else’s blood and, as I said before, it just doesn’t do to have mess.
Why did I kill Anna Sovànak? Why did I do it? Had she wronged me at some point in the past? Was she responsible for the death of someone I cared about? Was I in love with her? Was it jealousy? Envy? Spite? Was it a crime of passion? I believe I could have almost lived with myself if it had been a crime of passion. A crime of passion was still inexcusable, still inherently wicked . . . but at least it was understandable. There was some human element in the act. But the truth was, I felt nothing for Anna. No like or dislike. Nothing. I killed her because somebody paid me to.
The government, to be more precise - as they had paid me to commit countless other murders. We were not like James Bond. It was made quite clear to all assassins from the very beginning that if we ever got into trouble we’d be on our own. The government would not formally acknowledge us in any way. The Queen was never going to pin medals on any of our chests . . . We were the ones who got our hands dirty, and our superiors were grateful for that because it took the pressure off them, but at the same time - of course - it meant that they did not want to touch us.
I didn’t dare to open any more of the video files, but as my eyes ran down the names, I remembered each and every one of them . . . The poison, the guns, the knives, the strangulation, the blood . . . My employers insisted on video cameras where possible to make sure we didn’t back out as a consequence of becoming too attached to our marks. It had been known to happen, although never to me.
I couldn’t prevent the memories cascading in with a force that dazzled me, blinded me. I am an assassin. Life and death within the same body. Truly, a person of the In Between. I stared at the computer screen for a moment, wishing I could doubt it. Wishing I could deny what I knew to be true. But I remembered this. There was no Nicky. There was no Luke. They were just stories created to placate me, and then elaborated upon by a demon trying to manipulate me. I’ve only ever lived in grotty little flats or motels by myself. I am an orphan, as he said. I never got the chance to have a real family. After the incident at the orphanage, I had been almost overcome with the horror of what I had done, so far as my childish mind could truly grasp what had happened. It was not my fault he’d fallen. I was not to blame. But still it marked my life for ever.
And I had had no choice when the secret services had come to take me away from the orphanage. I had been six years old; I’d had to comply with the training I received as I grew up. But then, somewhere along the way, I realised I did have a choice. It was mine and I had made it. I would never be able to have a normal life now. Any friendships I might have would be built on lies, because any normal person would shrink away from me in horror if they knew what I had done - even though none of it was my fault. The government told us these people were dangerous, potential terrorists, threats to the safety of Britain. I think most of my co-workers clung to those reassurances.
Anna Sovànak, for example - I was told during my briefing that she had been designing a new kind of biological weapon, and there was fear that this might find its way into the hands of certain religious extremists with whom Anna supposedly had sympathies. I don’t know if this was true, although I suppose if she really had been working on developing new weapons, then that might explain why the story of her discovered body had been quietly consigned to page six. Who’s to say whether there were genuine reasons for my victims’ deaths, or whether they were simply political murders? You can’t think like that when you have a job to do. And it really doesn’t matter to me, for I believe that all human life is sacred: that life, in any form, even the smallest, tiniest insect, is absolutely and inherently sacred. And I loathed myself for what I’d done. There could be no greater sin than taking a life. And I had done it again and again and again. But there had hardly seemed any point in quitting.
I killed my first person when I was six years old, although I did not mean to and no one paid me for that crime. It was at the orphanage; I remembered it now. The other children there had taken a dislike to me right from the beginning, for whatever arbitrarily childish reason. But there was one in particular who really hated me. Aaron Thomas. He was older, about nine, and would bully me whenever he got the chance - and the nuns who ran the orphanage never troubled to do anything much about it, for it was all character building, wasn’t it?
Then, one day, while playing, Aaron fell through a third-storey window and was left gripping the window ledge, screaming for help. I ran to assist him. I didn’t hesitate for a moment, didn’t even think about all those horrible things he had done to me. But as I ran towards the window, I tripped on a child’s toy left in the middle of the floor, stumbled, and instinctively tried to right myself by grabbing on to whatever I could. It was unfortunate that my hands la
nded on the drawn up window, my weight bringing the pane of glass down hard on Aaron’s fingers. The boy let go at once with a scream of pain and fell to his death. One of the nuns had come in to the room in time to see me ‘leaping’ for the window to pull it down onto my former tormenter’s fingers, causing him to fall three storeys to the stone courtyard below. And that was what the other children there saw too. The nuns believed that, after quietly taking the pain and humiliation of being bullied for so long, I had finally lost my mind and committed murder with a coldness shocking in a child.
I never told anyone that I had been trying to help the boy. I never cried. I never showed any remorse, although I too was appalled by what had happened. Why didn’t I speak out? How different would my life have been if only I had acted as a normal child and not convinced the secret service, with my cold stoniness, that I was an ideal candidate for their children’s training programme? Aaron Thomas - that childhood bully - had not only made me miserable as a child . . . he had ruined my whole life! I felt glad in that moment that he was dead! I hated him! I was glad I’d killed him; I was so glad! He was responsible for all of this! Look what he’d done to me! Look what he’d done! If he hadn’t bullied me so badly, the nuns wouldn’t have been so ready to see me deliberately murdering him. Instead, they would have seen the truth of what had happened. If Aaron had been a good-natured boy without an enemy in the world, then the nuns would have wanted to believe that I had been running to help him. So that’s what they would have seen.
I started off gentle, that’s the irony of it. I used to sneak round the girls’ empty dormitories during the day, catching spiders and putting them outside because I couldn’t stand to hear the girlish squeals and the accompanying slap, slap of slippers flattening any spider that was discovered there later.
‘Why don’t you like spiders anyway?’ I’d asked them. ‘What harm have they ever done you? What harm have they ever done anyone?’
It had seemed incredibly arrogant to me for those stupid, twittering girls to find the mere existence of these creatures offensive. Unfortunately, Aaron overheard me talking to the girls one day, and thereafter took great delight in killing spiders in front of me whenever he could. I hated him for that. I understood the importance of being kind to animals . . . of being kind to insects . . . of being kind to anything that was smaller than I was. I understood that all unnecessary deaths brought God pain. I didn’t wish suffering on anyone - not even on Aaron, who I hated. So I ran to help him when he was hanging from that window, and in doing so I condemned myself to a lifetime of violence and horror and bloodshed. I should have just stood back and done nothing - just watched him fall, for no one would have condemned me for that, even though it would have been just as blameworthy.
I could remember once, when I was little, wanting to grow up to be a fireman. It probably had something to do with the bright red fire engine toy I’d adored before Aaron took it from me. . . Assassin had certainly never been on my list . . .
What do you want to do when you grow up, Gabriel . . . ?
Kill people . . .
But for the whole of my adult career, I was a merciful killer. Obsessively merciful. I went to great lengths to kill in the most painless way possible, and I would always pray for the victim’s soul afterwards. I discreetly attended their funeral every time, out of respect, and left flowers at the grave in acknowledgement of the life they’d led. I went to Anna’s funeral and watched her children - Max and Jessica, about whom I had heard so much - crying for their mother, and I wished that I could feel something for them . . . pity, sadness, shame . . . but there was nothing. It was as if my profession had burned out all emotions inside me so that I couldn’t feel anything at all. It was this kind of behaviour that led my co-workers to mockingly bestow the name of Gabriel on me. Angel of Mercy, they’d said. Angel of Death. The assassin who sat and prayed for his victims’ souls after coldly murdering them . . .Gabriel . . . what a logical choice . . .
But these people were marked for death anyway, and if they were not assigned to me then they would be assigned to some other assassin within the programme. If I left, the government would pick someone else to fill my place and, in that way, another man’s soul would be lost for ever. The way I saw it, I was doing the right thing by staying in the programme. There is logic in that, isn’t there?
But now the true horror of what I had been crashed through me dizzyingly, and pain twisted inside as I fully realised how terribly isolated I would always be from everyone around me, by the very nature of my past. I could never have friends or a family. My profession had lost me that right. I had seen parents, lovers, siblings, spouses and children weeping at the funerals of my victims. I could never have people in my life when I had spent so much of it taking loved ones away from their families. Besides, I didn’t know how to love people. Love was dangerous - it set you up for the worst kind of agony. I had seen it. So I was going to remain alone and I had always known that. Accepted it right from when I’d been six and the people at the orphanage had stared at me with unconcealed horror; loathed me for what I was . . . a killer . . . something you can’t take back . . .
But for the last four months, for the first time in my life, there had been hope that I might somehow manage to belong to other people. Because that’s what we all want, isn’t it? That’s what we are all constantly striving for. I know what love is now, because I love Casey - but I shouldn’t. Assassins can’t have loved ones - can’t have anyone at all - because you have to be able to kill anyone you might be assigned to. I’d learned that the hard way some years ago. How can you let yourself love someone when you know how easily they might be taken away from you? And now I’d found out that, not only were Nicky and Luke not real, but they never would be either.
To have all my illusions ripped away from me like that . . . I think I actually tasted madness for a second there. I am Wladyslaw Szpilman, hiding in my self-imposed attic, wishing, longing for human company but knowing that if anyone comes my way, I must distance myself from them, for their safety, for my safety, and for the sake of what is right. I’m so dirty now that anyone who gets too close to me will surely be tainted as well. I hurt people just by being near them. I couldn’t stop the images of all those people from going through my mind - laughing, happy, relaxed - as I had seen them all at some point or other before murdering them. Now they were all lying in graves because of me.
I staggered into the bathroom . . . threw up again and again until my vomit became tainted with blood, and it felt like I had torn something inside. When I at last got unsteadily to my feet and turned around, I could see him there behind my mirror. If anything, his image scared me even more now that I knew what he was. Michael’s face was turned towards me, though I could hardly make out his features for the light from his flames was so bright, blinding me, scorching my skin, suddenly choking the whole room with heat and smoke and the smell of burning flesh.
‘Am I . . . am I going to Hell?’ I asked, raising my voice above the noise of the spitting fire.
For a minute the angel didn’t answer, but when he did, it confirmed everything I had tried so hard not to believe:
‘One day.’
There was this horrible, helpless dry sob, which I suppose must have come from me for the angel had spoken without any emotion whatsoever.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said desperately, taking a step back, trying to find some relief from the immense heat. ‘I’m sorry for what I did.’
‘Too late.’
Too late . . . yes . . . it was too late, wasn’t it? . . . I might have started off gentle, but there must have been something wrong with me even then. Few men had it in them to kill again and again and again as I had done . . .
I couldn’t breathe any more. The flames were roaring now - pounding in my head, blistering my skin, stinging my eyes. I tried to look at Michael, but he blurred in the wavering heat haze. I staggered, clutched at the door handle, tried to get out . . . but the heat took the air right out of my bu
rning lungs so that I sank to the floor, blinking sweat out of my eyes and choking on the smoke. And then - at last . . . at long, long last - my eyes rolled back in my head and I fell into this silent, cool, beautiful darkness.
I opened my eyes some time later, staring at the bathroom tiles, listening to the steady drip, drip from the leaky tap, wishing I could get my amnesia back. At last, I dragged myself upright, turned around and saw Michael standing in the doorway, watching me. There was a bright aura about him but he no longer dripped with flames. He was clearer, more sharply defined than I had ever seen him before. He had bright blue eyes, glossy blond hair, and was wearing plain, simply cut white clothes. Although physically he looked like a man, he still seemed incredibly bright . . . illuminated - as if he was close to something so blinding that it lit him up as well.
‘Can you see me now?’ he asked in a deep and resonant voice, looking straight at me.
