by Chris Eaton
Unfortunately for all three partners of HVC, not to mention their client, despite using every trick in the book and a few others besides, Chi always came out clean. Even with what was going on in California, the official word from Health and Human Services was that, without the swift and concerted action on the part of the government and medical teams, things could have been much worse. With any kind of disease on such a large scale, there were bound to be a certain number of fatalities. And due to American determination and alertness, Chi was sure the economy would be back on track in no time. If anything, she was an American hero. Untouchable.
Chris Eaton, as Chapot had predicted, became even more distraught and confused than before. The thing he couldn’t figure out was this: If Chi knew he had spotted her that day at the Pentagon, why was he still alive? Clearly she felt he was important for something, needed him for something in the future, and had killed Julie and Brandon as a warning. It was the only thing that made sense to him. She also felt she had that much power over him that she could just leave him alone until he served her purpose, whatever that might be. And the worst thing was she was probably right.
A week after Chris Eaton dismissed his team and explained his new plan (I give up, he said. I am a lamb voting with two wolves on what to have for lunch. What else can I do?), Chapot returned and slipped him a business card with a name written on the reverse.
You didn’t hear it from me, he said.
***
The name on the card: Charriat deSavon, literally, transporter of soap, but from what Chapot told Chris Eaton, the name most people called him was Mr. Clean, a hitman who specialized in murders so creative no one would ever see it coming. He was, at once, the best- and worst-known man in France; every police inspector had heard of him but no one seemed to know any details about what he looked like, where he lived, where he’d come from. He was assumed to be involved with many of the country’s unsolved murders, as well as many of the deaths by natural causes, but no one had ever pinned him on anything. It had taken some work, Chapot claimed, just to get this card. But if Chris Eaton really intended to go through with his plan, this was the man he needed to pull it off. On the card’s reverse were careful instructions on how to find him, or rather, for him to find you, involving Internet searches, chat groups, aliases and an email Chris Eaton initially mistook for a Nigerian lottery scam and then realized the numbers (the strange windfall amount, the ticket number, the serial number and even the date: Feb 24, ‘85) were actually code, to be deciphered as the flight number, time, and longitude and latitude of their destination and meeting place. Two days later, he was in Paris, drinking a chocolat chaud at a small café on the fair banks of the Cabanne, wondering which of the passersby looked hard enough to be a killer. He ate a third croissant, and another half-hour passed. He wondered if he was being watched. And when the killer eventually did approach him, Chris Eaton said: I was beginning to think you’d never show. And deSavon replied: Well, I suppose I didn’t. By which he meant that he was not, in fact, deSavon, but an assistant of sorts, named Poisson, because it would not really do for someone like deSavon, whose job required him to be invisible, to just walk up to clients in broad daylight, particularly Americans, who were anything but subtle, especially when it came to assassinations. And Chris Eaton said: Why do they call you Poisson? And the man named Poisson said: Why did your mother call you Asshole? But then he said with a wink: I am slippery. And then, with a look over his shoulder: I am also deadly. By which, he explained, it was a name he’d been given by deSavon because the man liked games, and poisson was the French word for fish, while the similar poison was the word for poison, and then he said: It is a funny thing, that the word for fish in so many languages is so close to another forecasting danger. Like in Spanish, where the fish is pescado but pecado is a sin. And Italian, where pesce can become pece, meaning black as night. In Japanese, sushi can be transformed into tooth decay, or ushi. And Swahili, samaki becomes amaki: an artist. He chuckled at that, like ice cubes in an empty glass, then: And what we are left with in all cases is an ess, which he drawled out in such a mockery of a Southern American accent that it sounded like ass, staring straight at Chris Eaton. And Chris Eaton laughed, like an engine full of air, failing to start. And Poisson lit another cigarette and took a sip from his Belgian beer and stretched slowly across the table to Chris Eaton’s manila envelope and took a quick peek at the mark inside, looked back up at Chris Eaton, disapprovingly, back at the photo, back at Chris Eaton, tossed the envelope back down and said: C’est rien que de la merde, connard. And when he saw that Chris Eaton clearly did not understand, he smiled and translated: You want to kill your twin brother?
***
You should be a man about it, Poisson said, by which he was referring to Chris Eaton’s request for a safe word. The plan was for deSavon to wait one year, and then kill Chris Eaton however and whenever he saw fit. But there were two caveats: it had to be fast and it had to be completely by surprise. He did not want to feel fear or pain or even a stunned bewilderment. He did not want to shit his pants with a knife at his throat. Thus, if he so much as heard a turning latch or snapping twig, there would be a safe word that could call the whole thing off, with a reboot period of at least one week. Poisson spat over the railing and into the river. A safe word? Did he think this was some kind of joke? Did he not comprehend the sanctity of a profession like this? Why don’t you just commit suicide? Pick a fight with a wild bear. Or better yet, a train, I have a schedule.
Now, he wants a safe word, Poisson said out loud. And before? He wants a joke. You need a safe word that is a joke. Chris Eaton had not been aware of the precedent for his idea in film. Nor had he considered the problems that could arise for a man like deSavon, for whom creative murders had become a sort of calling card, if he were to, as Poisson put it, sink so low that he started stealing from Warren Beatty, or any of the other million films that had used such a boring premise, you should pick a fight with a woman on the rag. Poisson did not see many movies, he said, because he found them to be mostly a waste of time. (They did little to better his soul, he said. Often, he read The Bible. Or other books so long as they weren’t written in the first person.) But even he had seen a half dozen movies with this idea. It was a joke. (Leche moi et fait moi jouir. Do you understand that?) They had used such a device in a recent film about Esther Chan-Poirot, the imagined daughter of the legendary Charlie Chan and Hercule Poirot. It had bombed. This could make deSavon a laughing stock. A laughing stock! They should not do it. But then there was the money. Perhaps if there were more money. Chris Eaton said: How much would he need? And Poisson said: Va te faire enculer. But also: Much much. And: Much much much. And after pausing for a moment longer, he wrote something down on the napkin, snatched the envelope from the table and walked away, saying: The word is the man from the movie. It will help me remember.
Chris Eaton folded it without looking and placed it in his wallet, and by the time he’d boarded his plane back to Washington he’d decided that Poisson was right, and that he should be a man about it, and so he tossed the paper from the window of his taxi and elected never to look back.
***
Over the course of that year, Chris Eaton did all the things you might expect: he spent a few more days in Paris, took in some Andrew Lloyd Webber in London, bought a lot of train tickets, thought about climbing some mountains, and then got bored and went back home. He had actually hoped to send all seven summits, but he blamed his eventual inaction on the debates between the Messner and Bass lists, which featured different peaks in Australia depending on whether you wanted the highest altitude or the hardest send, not to mention getting mired in the political implications around the exclusion of Mont Blanc in Western Europe. Likewise he had planned to spend three weeks hiking the poorest parts of Africa, living with the locals, just for perspective on how good he had had it in America, but they lost his luggage on the way to Cairo and he spent at least half of that waiting at the hotel near the airport for
it to arrive. When he returned, he spent one last month trying to explore his own country, visiting every large amusement park he could remember before eventually deciding he rather preferred being at home.
Whereas the first six months might have been categorized as focusing almost solely on new experiences (aside from Cats, of course, which he had seen before on Broadway), the second half became much more introspective. He pulled out all the old documents and photo albums he’d collected over the years, including a shoebox full of ribbons from competitions he could no longer remember, a bag of stuffed animals completely faded on their backs from sitting on his windowsill, an embarrassing teenage attempt at a fantasy novel, a complete box of letters he’d received from all of his high school friends while he’d been in Scandinavia on an academic exchange, a bag of foreign currencies, a collection of joke books, action figures, old novelty ‘45s, and then, once he had categorized them by various time-periods, interests and endeavours, he began assigning one year of his prior life to each remaining week, lumping most of his infancy into the first seven days. He almost immediately found the exercise ridiculous, and he nearly stopped, but as he moved from his childhood to his teens and once he reached his twenties, he found reliving those years quite therapeutic. Events that had seemed catastrophic at the time now emerged as transformative, and he was grateful, some because they were actually fortuitous at the time (though he was not yet skilled enough in life to recognize it), and some because the catastrophe was, indeed, true and fierce, and he was able to navigate through it with something he recognized in retrospect as dignity, forcing him to dig deeper than he ever had before that, and to plumb the depths of his own strength, his resilience, his acceptance, and sometimes his own potential for compassion. All of the time we waste worrying about what might happen, pursuing things for the life we want to lead, without spending time to enjoy the life we have. Even an illness can remind us of who we are. Even pain can reassure and remind. He began to wonder, in fact, as he crept closer and closer to the present, if the most recent events in his life might one day, if his days weren’t already numbered, lead him to some equally life-affirming lessons. Was it worth his time, he wondered, to keep hating Senator Chi the way that he did? Was it worth it to focus so much concern on things he could not control? Falsehood, delusion, illusion, fantasy, lies, deceit, and other assorted facets of bullshit and fuckery were confusing to us, in the best case, causing us to chase our tails, waste time, and become disoriented. In the worst case, they resulted in wasted, unhappy, and perhaps harmful, toxic lives that brought only pain and suffering, to the one living the life and to everyone and everything with whom they come into contact.
And it only gets worse.
The truth was that we all share the same sacred underpinnings of life, and silence, and consciousness, and it was only through compassion, tolerance and kindness that he might be able to break through it all, to access his true self beneath all of the layers of pain, hurt, sadness, and other afflictive emotions that he’d built up as a result of living his inauthentic and delusive lifestyle. There was a moment, while celebrating the 30th anniversary of friends in Panama, watching them renew their vows and recalling his own wedding to Julie, when he nearly forgot the personal assassination he had arranged. His life, he realized, was now perfect, or at least nearly. He was free from worry, from greed, from hate, from aspirations. He saw now that, although their physical bodies were gone, the essences of Julie and their child would continue to be a part of him. The way he laughed at the MC’s jokes, snorting so slightly at the end, was something he had picked up from Julie with great resistance. Even Brandon, whose life had been so short, was still conjured whenever he stretched out of sleep. He was not a single force in the world, but a combination of every life that had ever made an impact on his. He was happy.
Then he realized it could all end at any second.
***
The part that made it so horrible was that he didn’t know when it would happen. And while he briefly considered that this was the same for everyone, for all deaths, the main difference was that he knew that he didn’t know, and most other people just live their lives believing death is somewhere in the distance, so it either hits them before they know it or they become so sick that they can adequately prepare for it mentally. Also, with his new revelations about Julie and the baby, if he were to die now, would there be anything left of them in the world? He tried to pass those pieces of them on to others. He visited his parents much more frequently. He made special trips to visit friends in far-off places. He began to enjoy his life again. He felt much more present, more real, more himself. And wouldn’t it be tragic at this point of self-realization to lose it all, to re-enter his prior stage of nothingness, where he wasn’t dead but might as well have been, and by which have his life defined by loss rather than gain. His only hope, he now saw, was to catch the assassin in the act, to implement the safe word. It wouldn’t guarantee that he could reach deSavon again to cancel the hit, but at least it might buy him some time.
If only he could remember it.
All he had to go on was Poisson’s assertion that the word was “the guy in the movie,” and the only one he could really remember was the Warren Beatty project from 1999 called Bulworth, because Poisson had mentioned him specifically. But a quick scan of cast and characters provided nothing that seemed like it could be a safe word, which he assumed had to be a noun or adjective, so he kept searching. In an interview with Beatty he found in an old issue of Teknoföhn, the actor claimed he’d been inspired by an old silent film called Flirting with Fate (1919), but once again the list of actors and their roles produced nothing of use, except perhaps Jewel Carmen, but Poisson had definitely said “guy.” He despaired. Time was running out. There was no reason to expect that the Frenchman had been referring to something from Hollywood, so he broadened his search to specialty film stores, querying the clerks about foreign works. Was it not possible that he had seen something in French, such as Les tribulations d’un chinois en Chine, whose main character, Lempereur, provided the first possibility. Mickey Rooney, he discovered, had starred in a Spanish film in the seventies called Juego sucio en Panamá, which otherwise featured mostly Spanish names. In Canada in the early-eighties, Gabe Kaplan had made a film called Tulips, which produced both his character’s name and also the name of a revered Canadian actor. A German film from the thirties contained the potential Kitty. He also found a recent novel from Russia, by a man named Andrei Raschatov, which had even more recently been made into a film, also Russian but translated loosely into The Orphan Riot’s Cadaver, about a man running an orphanage who makes a deal with two of his boys to off him during a staged children’s uprising. One of the boys in that was nicknamed Sloth. In John Woo’s Qian Zuo Guai, there was a character named Fatso.
Of course, he’d never be sure if his research had been exhaustive enough, so he tried to make sure he was never alone, treating friends to dinner in popular restaurants, or sometimes, when no one was available, approaching women he saw on the public transit, or in the grocery store, where he would also frequently hang out for hours on end, because it was very crowded and well lit. He installed security cameras, eyebeams, infrared detectors, hired a company to stand guard around his new fence. And even then, he felt unsafe. Could he trust all the men in his hire? Might one of them be employed, simultaneously, by deSavon? There were times, when he was alone at night, dozing off in his armchair, pipe smoke circling his head, that he would whisper the mantra over and over until he fell asleep.
Fatso. Wax man. Emperor. Sloth. Avocado. Tulips. Kitty.
Fatso. Wax man. Emperor. Sloth. Avocado. Tulips. Kitty.
Fatso. Wax man. Emperor. Sloth. Avocado. Tulips. Kitty.
Perhaps, on one or more of these occasions, it actually worked.
The second book Julie found on his desk was Johann Scheuchzer’s Lithographia Helvetica, originally published in 1728 but reissued towards the end of the nineteenth century as part of a larger textbo
ok, in combination with several later works by Cuvier, Collini, Brongniart and Gessner, among others, all of which attempted to put the history of paleontology in context, compiled in 1854 by one of Cuvier’s students and used in the early paleontology program at the nascent University of Montana by the Irish professor and geologist Nigel Neill. It is not Scheuchzer’s most famous work – that title would belong to his Beschreibung der Naturgeschichte des Schweitzerlandes, an exhaustive nine-volume study of the whole of Switzerland, which begins with the original trio of texts summing up all there is, or was, to know about: (1) the Swiss mountains; (2) the Swiss rivers, lakes and mineral baths; and (3) a more general text about geology and meteorology; before moving on to (4) the Swiss flora; (5) fauna; (6) the shortest volume, about the Swiss glaciers, which should probably have been included in Volume 2 anyway; and petering out in the last three, when it seemed he had little better to write about than (7) knives; (8) chocolate; and (9) fondue – but it is perhaps his most infamous, if not certainly the most scandalous.
