This piece was written
more than 40 years ago, the result of a pact with my good friend, the poet
Christopher Howell, to write about the same subject: hit men. This was the result. Watching too much news causes a cynical mood, leading
to the conclusion that life in this
society seems to be getting cheaper.
Sometimes you have to exaggerate things to see them clearer...
Hit Man
By Dick Morgan
Alphonse decided to become Raoul
immediately after completing the contract on the yachtsman. Times were getting leaner. Assassinations still occurred regularly,
almost nonchalantly, in the city. But
lately, more potential clients simply took care of business themselves. Only the cautious, the fearful, the nouveaux
riche, and highly placed bureaucrats still employed professionals. Like the skipper of the second-rated Intrepid hiring Alphonse to off the
skipper of the favored yacht, Courageous,
two days before the cup. Or the highly
acclaimed math teacher on that children’s television series, electrocuted for
Texas Instruments, Incorporated. Or the
Erewhon health food store king, poisoned for General Mills.
Alphonse had been a young, arrogant
Special Forces G. I.. turned mercenary,
and an excellent marksman. But his
employers had begun demanding more diversification—more freak accident
plausibility, less directness. Lately he
was humbly grateful when he retained a client now and then who simply wanted
someone blown away. A too stern traffic
judge. An overly surly supermarket bag
boy. Fifty bucks were fifty big ones no
matter where they came from. But most of
the long-term clients began demanding more finesse than a .380 dum-dum through
the parietal lobe. The National Council
of Churches always required their evangelist detractors be beaten to death with
chains—something about perpetuating the urban myth of good men martyred by
filthy hippy motorcycling atheists. But
they paid as much as two hundred bucks.
And the heart attacks Alphonse learned to induce with potassium
injections for Reader’s Digest. All
those poor suckers winning the grand prize of a thousand dollars a month for
life—it proved to be too much for each of them in a matter of weeks.
Alphonse kept a complete and current
directory of active clients in his memory—phone numbers, and contact info of
various enterprises which might require his services: Bell Telephone, American
Medical Association, General Motors, C.B.S., Microsoft. He still remembered the numbers for the
F.B.I. and the C.I.A., but he promised himself he would never work for them
again after he discovered a contract had been put out on him by one of
them. Or perhaps both of them. The rogue agent was not able to say before he
died in Alphonse’s arms. The event had
saddened him; assassins were getting younger, almost baby-faced.
Consequently, Alphonse preferred to
only work through an agent now. Only
referred people, people with good credit and no hidden agenda. That way, Alphonse could remain aloof, fluid,
invisible. Alphonse needed to become
inaccessible to repercussion, such as irate mourners putting a track on him—or
a colleague on his tail. Alphonse needed
to relax occasionally, go to the Blue Heron, drink Claret, order a
rib-eye. And so Alphonse became
Raoul.
Raoul was dark-browed, deliberate,
refined. His velour leisure suits were
cut to his waist, and his Baretta was silver plated. His laugh was quiet, observant, two fingers
lightly supporting the wineglass stem.
Raoul always searched the eyes of a woman first, and regarded as
revolting the gelatinous marrow inside his rib-eye. Reminded him of Alphonse, focusing the
black-widow crosshairs on the ear of the skipper as he leaned out over the
water with the jib-sheet in his hand.
Bang. A flowering of globby head
cheese; splash. Fifty bucks. Nothing personal, Alphonse had muttered. Raoul covered the rib-eye marrow with a sprig
of parsley as he checked the clip in his Baretta under the table.
“Sauterne, sir?” The head waiter stopped by to say with a
voice lower than usual. Raoul instantly
noticed the handlebar moustache, out of place in any self-respecting French restaurant. He fired from under the table, catching the
red-vested man in the groin. The waiter
dropped into a fetal position as his eyes rolled back. A .380 casing clumped quietly onto the rug.
“Nobody drinks such foul swill on
purpose,” Raoul said. “The regular
waiter would have said, Claret.”
His meal disgusted him. He dotted his lips with his napkin, then
entered the Blue Heron lounge. “A
Claret,” he said to the bartender.
“We’re out,” said the young man , who
reached into his pocket. Raoul
knuckle-punched him in the solar plexus, rabbit-punched the back of his neck as
he hunched forward, then lifted him off the hardwood bar-top with a hammerlock,
forcing him to drop the stiletto.
“How about a little Chablis, then?”
Raoul asked politely as the elbow snapped.
The young man gurgled in pain, handed him a bottle, then crawled out the
back door. That was when Raoul saw her;
she was enchanting.
She was tall, six-four at least, with
light brown hair on her arms. Her
floor-length leathers were bordered with black ermine at the neck, wrists, and
ankles. With her hair coiffed into a
French bun, she resmbled a seven-foot French poodle with ruby lips. Raoul instantly found he had difficulty
breathing, and his chest pounded with his yearning. He straightened his back, threw out his
sunken sternum, and strolled over to her.
She smiled, and let her purse strap fall from her correct
shoulders. As she grabbed for her
falling purse, Raoul punched her in the ribs and floored her with a hip
throw. He stepped on her French bun and
whispered as much like Bogart as he could, “Spread ‘em, beautiful.”
Except for a blackjack and mace, she
was unarmed. To make amends, Raoul
allowed her to search him while he held his Baretta against her throat. She held his gunless hand, rubbing the back
of it against her erect nipples.
“Can’t find professionals anymore,”
he said after they had barricaded the door and opened the Chablis.
“You are probably a very gentle
lover,” she murmured, holding her rib.
“A good clean kill is rare, these
days.” Raoul sighed. “Like the Hoffa case. Or Yablonski, or George Meany. Now, those guys got the best,” he said toward
her cleavage, which was eye level.
“You don’t mind if I’m tall?” she
asked, her toes working up his leg.
“None of this triple-shot Kennedy
business in the old days,” Raoul said.
“I’d like to suck your toes,” she
said.
“Now days, everyone is a
do-it-yourselfer. The paper this morning
headlined twins who shot-gunned their father.
How messy. And now they’ll be put
in reform school. A pro would have cost
a month’s allowance, sure; but a pro would have at least made it look like a
home invasion. But no. Agh! Kids in a hurry.”
“I hope there’s toe-jam,” she said,
baring her ample tits and crawling under the table.
“There’s a few regulars, you
understand. I’m not starving. There’s the Kodak Xerox feud, and of course
Reader’s Digest is having another contest soon,” he said.
“Ummph,” she said around his big
toe. Her silky moustache was tickling
the second toe; it drove him mad. He
drew his Baretta and nailed her through the top of her bun. She convulsed in her fall and bit his big toe
to the bone.
“Damn,” he said, his brief erection
immediately gone. “Had to be assertive,
didn’t you?” he shouted at her misshapen face as though she were still
listening. “We could have hit it off.”
Raoul wrapped his toe, unbarred the
door and exited into the early morning shadows of the street, buttoning his
velour vest to the cool breeze.
He decided after his unpleasant meal
to become Mario again.
Mario was a deeply troubled searcher,
a lonely soul in the back-court of life.
Mario was timorous, yet obstinate in his quiet quest for meaning in his
life. Mario was capable of intense
concentration on a variety of metaphysical subjects; but he was sometimes
dense.
That was why Mario didn’t hear the
truck, the shouts of alarm. The
newspaper van hit him square in the right kidney. As the rear tire bumped up over his crushed
chest, a bundle of newsprint bounced off his groin. “SPECIAL EDITION. SKIPPER SLAIN,” it read.
“Oh my God, mister!” A boyish voice he couldn’t see screamed in his
ear.
“It’s okay,” Mario gurgled. “You didn’t mean to.” Raoul exhaled for the last time as his face
went slack.
The boy peered down at him as he
checked Raoul’s pupils and his pulseless wrist.
“Yes I did,” he said to Raoul’s body.
“I need the practice. Nothing
personal.” He frisked the coat, removed
the wallet and Baretta, then disappeared into the truck and drove off into the
morning.
* *
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