The Assassin Who Gave Up His Gun

by Howard Fast

  “Why fifteen hundred dollars? You said two days in Miami.”

  “And a third day in transit—remember the train. The Department is generous about such things.”

  The Department was also thorough. So thorough that you could bear not to ask questions—such as: Why the black man? Why this particular time and place? Why the involvement of Smith and Jones? Who were Smith and Jones? … and twenty other questions. I left that night and in the morning I was in Miami. The Amalfi had gone separately and would be waiting for me in the car with Mr. Smith and Mr. Jones.

  The extra day was for a girl, courtesy of Smith and Jones and whoever they worked for—a tall, red-haired girl who from her large mammary glands to her slender hips embodied the American dream, more for your money than you ever dreamed of. Her name was Zelda. She was a two-hundred-dollar call girl, free on the house, not even a bite out of my expense money.

  I took my wallet out—thinking that I ought to have the money in a metal clip, the way it was done in America and especially at a place like the Athena—and asked her how much.

  “That’s a hell of a note,” she said. “Do I look like a cheap whore? I come in here and the first thing you ask me is how much.”

  “Is a hundred dollars enough?” I asked, pushing two fifties at her.

  “Your friends paid me. Two yards.”

  “How much is that?”

  “Two hundred dollars,” she said.

  “Here’s a hundred more. Go find a male whore and become a customer. Or go open a bank account. Or play it the way you want to and get out of here.”

  She was very good and quiet with obscenity, and she told me what she thought of me. “Anyway,” she said, “your friends are not going to like this.”

  “How do you know what my friends are going to like?”

  She softened up and suggested a couple of drinks at the bar, or I could have drinks sent up or champagne. “Don’t you like champagne?”

  “Get out of here,” I said, and finally she went. I paced around the suite for a while and then I tried to watch television. I could not connect with American television. I watched and the pictures refused to have any meaningful form. They broke down and reassembled in some senseless part of my mind. Then I left the hotel and walked for a kilometer or two. It was very hot and it was a relief to get back to my air-conditioned room. I lay on my bed, fully clothed, and smoked half a pack of cigarettes. Then the maid came in to turn down the bed. She was black, too, and for some reason she fascinated me.

  I never took my eyes off her, and this either aroused her or annoyed her; because finally she turned to me and said softly, “You want something, captain?”

  I shook my head and smiled at her, and she smiled back and said, “Where you from, captain?”

  I didn’t reply to that, and then she shrugged and left the room, and I lay down on the bed again. I put my hand over the top of the bedside lamp and that made shadows on the ceiling. I made the form of a fox snapping, and that was something I had not done since I was a kid and I felt sort of good about it—and then I recalled that smiling at the black girl was the first time I had smiled in as long as I cared to remember; and I thought it would be nice to smile at the fox who was snapping his jaws on the ceiling. But all that happened was a grimace, and then I tried to make a bird in flight, but I had forgotten how. I had not eaten all day, but I was not hungry, and I tried to think about what I would buy with all the expense money. You can buy anything in America, but there was nothing that I wanted to buy.

  Then I fell asleep, and I woke up cold from the air conditioning at four in the morning. Shivering, I got out of my clothes and threw on a robe and went to the window, where I could see the full moon on the sea. I took three aspirin and went back to sleep under the covers; and I slept soundly until the phone awakened me in the morning.

  It was Jones of Jones and Smith. “We’re here now,” he said. “Time begins. You have twelve minutes. Schedule is important.”

  When I entered the lobby, they moved toward me, and there was no question about who they were. They looked like brothers. They both wore gray silk suits and soft straw hats. When they took off the hats, their hair was brush cut and graying. They had blue eyes and square faces and firm chins, and they nodded at me.

  “Knowland?”

  I nodded.

  “We are on schedule now. It would be best if you don’t ask any questions.”

  I nodded again.

  The car was a Fleetwood. One of them drove and the other sat in back with me. I didn’t even know which was Smith and which was Jones, not then or ever. The driver was efficient and skilled, not simply a good driver but a professional. We were all professionals.

  The one in the back seat with me opened a sort of trumpet case. “Here is the gun.” He never touched it but left the open case on the floor at his feet. The Amalfi broke down into four pieces, and I assembled it quickly. I was intrigued by the adjustment they had made in the Opel silencer. I had never heard of a silencer being used on a carbine before, and apparently neither had Jones or Smith, since he asked me what it was.

  “It’s an Opel silencer, restressed and opened for the compression.” Apparently he could ask questions and I could not. “There’s no magazine here,” I said.

  He had the magazine in his inside breast pocket, nineteen bits of precision-made death, and I locked it into the carbine. I don’t think he had ever seen an Amalfi before; it looks less like a gun than a beautifully made toy, and he watched it doubtfully.

  There was no incident. We drove to our parking place, about one hundred and ten meters from the door to the church. They were not using a public address system after all, and now there was only a small crowd in front of the church. It was a clear, bright day, but very warm, and the black men in front of the church were standing in the sun in their shirt sleeves and holding their jackets over their arms. The women were in bright dresses, and the children were neat and scrubbed and primped. There were half a dozen police around, and a few more spread on the approaching blocks, one of them no more than a long reach from the car. I pointed him out to my square-jawed companion.

  “Don’t worry about him,” he said.

  Then the doors of the church opened and some kids came out, and three women and three or four men, and the regular pastor wearing his long gown, and then the black man. I had seen at least a dozen pictures of him and had watched him on film, and anyway, he had a face you remember. He stood there shaking hands with the pastor, and I crouched down on the floor of the car, took my sight, laying the Amalfi on the opening where the window was dropped, and gently touched the automatic release, holding the gun as near to motionless as I could while it threw out its nineteen tiny bullets. With immediate response, our car was in motion, and the only sound the Amalfi had made was like a handful of twigs breaking in the woods. I was a good marksman, yet the gun had sprayed; there was no way to prevent that, and the screams appeared to flow from the desolation in front of the church. That stopped as Smith-Jones touched a button and the window flowed up. Afterward, the papers said that aside from the black man and the pastor, only one other, a woman, had been fatally wounded; six others were wounded but not fatally.

  The man beside me put the Amalfi and the silencer back in the trumpet case, while we drove to Fort Lauderdale. The big Cadillac was air-conditioned, and the ride was smooth and comfortable and uneventful. We reached Fort Lauderdale about an hour before train time, and Smith and Jones left me at the station. No greeting and no farewell. There was time to kill and I bought a newspaper, but there was no news yet. A small black boy, about ten years old, sold me a shoeshine, and he grinned at me now and then as he polished my shoes to a gleaming surface. I gave him a dollar and told him to keep the change. He took the money, but he didn’t know how to thank me and tears welled up in his eyes. He walked off holding the dollar bill and rubbing his eyes.

  In New York, I read the story about the black man in The New York Times. It said that the police already had
several leads and every expectation of finding the killer in the next twenty-four hours; but that of course was nonsense. It was many years since I had been to New York and things had changed. It was a cool, fine day and I walked around the city for a while, then from the new Pennsylvania Station north and east to the Pan Am Building, where I took the helicopter to Kennedy. It was pleasant to look at the shopwindows and watch the girls in their short skirts, and when the helicopter lifted up from the platform and the people were the size of ants in the streets, I felt like a god and full of power and strength. I felt good, and I said to myself that if I sat down with the psychologists again, I would tell them that this was a moment when I felt really good.

  Chapter 3

  THERE were no more sessions with the psychologists, and after the black man I was left entirely alone for a full week. No congratulations or reprimands; I did not exist; they abandoned me, and each morning I came to The Department and went to my office and each evening I went home, but no one took any notice of me. If I saw one of them in the corridor, he was polite. Good morning, Breckner; good evening, Breckner. They had their reasons. I sat in my office and played solitaire. I had a game: you play against yourself and your life is forfeit. I play out in seven games or else I go to the executioner’s block. Sometimes I won, sometimes I lost. When I lost, it was like dying. The manner of my death varied. Once it was by guillotine. There is a rotten way to die, and I never died that way again.

  On a Monday morning Grupperman tapped on my door and then opened it, smiling. For a fat toad of a man, he had a very pleasant smile, and he said that since the day was so beautiful, why didn’t we take a stroll in the park?

  “In the park?”

  “Why not? Should only lovers have the park on a day like this?”

  I put on my topcoat and left the building with him. Grupperman had decided that he was my true love, which made my blood run a little cold. Someone told me once that Grupperman was convinced he resembled Winston Churchill; but that was a lonely conviction. Still, he affected Winston Churchill’s mannerisms, walking with his hands locked behind him and his head thrust forward. He saw himself as a person of peculiar wisdom. “Breckner,” he said to me now, “beauty is above morality. Read the flowers. Read the little children as they play in their innocence.” He nodded at a five-year-old with a head of sunny, filmy hair. “Look at her. In herself, her beauty is redemption. She redeems us. She apologizes for mankind. Breckner, we want you to kill Cleaver. You see, you are trusted.”

  I didn’t hear it at first. It moved in my mind, but I didn’t hear it.

  “Are you a reader of books, Breckner?”

  “Once,” I said almost absently. The park was very beautiful today, moving with children and lovers. “That was a long time ago.”

  “Good. A man who reads too much loses touch. I have a feeling you don’t lose touch, Breckner.”

  I heard it now, like an echo, and I asked him, almost absently, “You said Cleaver?”

  “You don’t like him?”

  I shrugged. “He doesn’t matter to me.”

  Grupperman was silent for a little while, then he asked me, “Do you enjoy your work, Breckner?”

  I didn’t answer. We stopped by the lake where the swans are, and across the water the white, columned government buildings shone in the sunshine like the backdrop to fairyland. We stood there for a while watching the swans, and then a little boy began to heave pebbles at them.

  “Now, now, young fellow,” said Grupperman. “We don’t inflict pain on animals, do we? It’s not very manly, is it?”

  The mother came hurrying up and assured Grupperman that this was exactly what she kept telling him. “Now listen to what the gentleman says,” she told the boy severely, and then she fetched him a clout across the back of the neck. As we walked away, his wailing followed us, and Grupperman spelled out his low opinion of people who struck children. “I was raised with loving care,” he recollected. “Father never lifted a hand to me. Here’s this woman wants the little devil to be kind to animals and never spares the rod herself. You say you don’t enjoy your work?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Oh? Ambivalence—not uncommon. We all have good moments and bad. By the way, it makes a nice turn of phrase to think of Cleaver in that sense. He’s having a bad moment right now. He’s a moralist. Moralists are a very peculiar danger, don’t you agree, Breckner?”

  I nodded. Not that it made sense. Very little that Grupperman said made sense.

  “But he’s skillful. So be more skillful, Breckner.”

  The next day Cleaver telephoned and told me to meet him in the car park in a half hour. We were to go to Haverford, where the Foreign Policy Committee had their regular meetings, and according to the national table of organization, The Department was accountable to the Foreign Policy Committee—although from what I could see, The Department as often acted on its own. When I got to the car park, Cleaver was sitting at the wheel of his Porsche, and he motioned curtly for me to get in. The talk around The Department was that he loved the Porsche better than his wife, and it sparkled and gleamed like a car in the showroom of an auto store. As I got in, he reminded me not to slam the door.

  “Do you use the safety belt?” he demanded.

  “No. I don’t like to be tied down.”

  “I’d rather you’d use it.”

  “I’d rather not,” I said.

  “All right. As you wish. I am not surprised.”

  “That I don’t use the belt?”

  “You give me a pain in the ass, Breckner. Let me be blunt. I don’t like you, I don’t trust you—and some day—”

  “Some day?”

  He did not specify. He was angry and that confused him, and we were out driving along the shore cliffs when he glanced at me and realized suddenly that I was armed. He should have seen it when I got into the car, but he was too interested in his damn seat belt to notice the bulge under my arm.

  “Are you out of your mind?” he exclaimed. “We’re going up before the Committee and you’re wearing a gun!”

  “No.” I took out the gun, a flat, thirty-caliber Schmidt automatic.

  “What in hell do you mean?”

  He braked to a hard stop off on the shoulder of the road, and I shot him in the side, the gun flat on my lap. I shot him three more times, and I think the last two were in the heart. We were on a slight downhill grade, with only light traffic on the road, and when the road was clear I twisted the wheel and started the pretty Porsche downhill and toward the sea. It went off the opposite shoulder, over the cliff, bounced on the rock points, and then into the sea and out of sight. The bathing season was over, and Cleaver and his Porsche disappeared as if they had never been.

  I walked down the road to the bus station, where after ten minutes a bus stopped and took me back into the city. For days afterward I looked in the newspapers for some mention of the car; but it apparently was either never discovered or if found not publicized. If I had any doubts concerning the pervasive power of The Department, they disappeared.

  Grupperman wanted to know exactly how it happened, and he questioned me very carefully. He enjoyed the report.

  “Was he afraid?” he asked me.

  “The first shot didn’t kill him, you know. It was from the side, low down and up, because the gun was lying on my lap, and you know there is no great punch to a Schmidt.”

  “Then he was conscious after the first shot?”

  “Oh, yes—like a hard punch in the side, but no more than that.”

  A slight smile flickered over Grupperman’s lips. “He knew he was being destroyed.”

  “He knew.”

  “Did he by any chance manage to ask by whose decision?”

  “No. He never spoke.”

  “A pity.” The slight smile again. “And the second shot?”

  “Killed him, I think.”

  “Well, that was your job, wasn’t it? Do you like to ski?”

  “I haven’t skied since I was
a kid.”

  “Oh, good, good!” Grupperman nodded. “Then you will have a fine time. You will discover the new French way. Go to Switzerland for a few weeks. Altitude, fresh air, snow on the high slopes—very refreshing.”

  The Department had an office in Zurich, and a girl from this office met me at the airfield. She was about twenty-two years old and quite pretty, and she drove a Mercedes sports model, and she was all smiles and yellow hair and efficiency. You could go anywhere on earth and The Department would be there, and there were no barriers, no doors that could not or would not open—and it gave one a sense of being a part of an elite that was like no other elite. It was said that there were only ninety-two men in The Department who had the license to kill—ninety-one with Cleaver dead—and it meant something. I can’t put into words what it meant, but when you walked down the street you knew that you were different, and when a girl looked at you the way this kid looked at me, you felt that the difference showed and that she knew and even that in some way everyone who saw you knew. I was only her job, her assignment.

  “So you’re Breckner,” she said. “I am glad they picked me.”

  She drove well and fast, and on the ride up to the ski resort we said little to each other. Her name was Barbara; her father was a Swede; and that was all she said about herself. She had long legs and high breasts. Myself, I neither liked nor disliked her; she was part of The Department.

  She said to me along the way, “Are you married, Breckner?”

  “Why?”

  “One likes to know.”

  “No, I’m not married.”

  She was a ski expert. In one afternoon she taught me the French method. She was something to see, hatless, with her yellow hair bleeding into the wind behind her when she came down the slope. Afterward, in the dining room, we made a handsome couple. The entire dining room was aware of us; they watched and discussed and speculated about us.