He was a professional killer.
His office was a hotel room, and the location of this particular hotel room was of little importance. His office changed every week, and when he moved from one hotel to another, his phone number was placed in the classified section of the New York Times. A customer could always find him.
He was reading. He read a good deal, since there was nothing else to do while he waited for the phone to ring. Most days he spent morning and afternoon reading, and most afternoons and mornings were quite barren of phone calls. At $5000 a killing, he didn’t need too large a volume of business.
This afternoon, however, the phone rang.
He closed his book, walked to the edge of the bed, sat down, and lifted the receiver. “Hello,” he said, in a voice that was as unimpressive as his appearance.
“Hello.” The voice on the other end of the line was a woman’s.
He waited.
“I…” the woman began. “Who is this?”
“Whom do you want?”
The woman hesitated. “Are…are you the man?”
Harry Varden sighed to himself. He despised the hesitation and ineptness on the part of some clients, the clients who wouldn’t open their mouths, the ones who were so terribly unsure of themselves. Professionals were different. Some of his clients, the ones who used him three or four times a year, had no trouble coming to the point at once.
“What man do you want?” he asked.
“The man who…the man with the number in the paper.”
Coward, he thought. Come on and speak your piece. And aloud he said, “Yes, I’m the man.”
“Will you do a job for me?”
Suddenly he was angry. The fee became of little importance now; his whole mind was set on forcing this woman to talk, on opening her up and making her say the words she didn’t want to say.
“Don’t be coy,” he snapped. “What the hell do you want?”
After a long pause, the woman said, “I want you to murder my husband.”
“Why?”
“I…what do you mean?”
“Look,” he said, tiredly, “you want me to kill your husband. I want to know why.”
“But I thought I just told you what you should do and sent you the money and that was all. I mean…”
“I don’t care what you thought. You can open up or find another boy.”
And he hung up.
He waited for the phone to ring again, knowing for certain that it would ring and that this time she would talk. It occurred to him that this was the first time he had acted in such a manner, the first time he had even pretended to care any more about a job than the name and the location of the victim. But there was some familiar whine in the woman’s voice, some peculiar nagging quality that made him think he had heard it before. For some reason he disliked the owner of the voice intensely.
The phone rang, and the woman said at once, “I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”
“Okay. Give me the story.”
She paused for a second and began. “I don’t love my husband,” she said. “I don’t think I ever really loved him, and now there’s somebody else, if you know what I mean. That is, I’ve met this other man and he and I are in love with each other, so naturally…”
Once she got started she didn’t seem able to stop. Harry Varden listened half-heartedly, wondering why in the name of the Lord he had started her going. He couldn’t care less why he was earning his $5000 (which by this time only a strict sense of professionalism kept him from raising to $7500) and he cared even less about the woman’s married life.
But she kept right on. Her husband was dull and boring. He never talked to her, never paid any attention to her, never told her what was on his mind. She didn’t even know for certain where he worked or what he did for a living.
Oh, he was a good provider, but there were more important things in a woman’s life. She needed to feel that she was an important and distinctive woman with an equally important and distinctive man to love her. And her husband was dull and not the least bit important or distinctive or at all interesting, and…
The voice was one he had heard a million times in the past. For a moment it seemed that he had indeed heard this same voice before, but he decided that it was only the routine nature of the sentiments expressed which made the voice seem familiar.
Besides, Harry Varden never remembered a voice and rarely recalled a face. He himself was neither noticed nor remembered, and he retaliated unconsciously by means of a poor memory.
And she had met a man, a dashing, romantic man who sold brushes from door to door, and if her husband were dead she would have all his money, because he did seem to have a great deal of money although she wasn’t quite sure how he came by it, and with the money she could marry the brush salesman, and they could live happily, albeit not forever, and besides there was the insurance if he had insurance and she supposed again that he did although again she wasn’t sure, and for all she knew he sold insurance, but at any rate for all these reasons she wanted to pay Harry Varden $5000, in return for which payment he was to shoot her husband in his own home, some evening at eight o’clock or thereabouts, at which time she would be home and would be most willing to swear that Harry Varden was not the murderer, in the event that Harry Varden was ever caught, which was improbable from what she had heard.
By the time she had finished, Harry Varden was almost as tired as she was. The woman was a colossal bore, and he felt a considerable amount of sympathy for her uninteresting and opaque husband. He could easily understand why such a man didn’t spend much time talking to such a woman.
In fact he felt that it was a shame he had to shoot the man, with whom he felt some sympathy, rather than the woman, whom it would be a genuine pleasure to shoot. But business, sadly, was business.
“I’ll want the money in advance, of course,” he said.
“I see,” she said. “But why does the money have to be in advance?”
“That’s the way I do business.”
“I see. But then…I mean, you could just take the money and then never do the job for me, I mean…”
And, of course, he hung up for the second time.
When he answered the phone the third time she began talking quickly even before he had time to put the receiver to his ear, saying that she was very sorry and would he please forgive her since of course he was honest and she should have known better than to say such a thing, or even to think such a thing, but $5000 was a large sum of money, wasn’t it?
He agreed that it was.
“Look,” he said, tiring of the game, “I want you to put $5000 in tens and twenties in a bag or something. Lock it in a Grand Central locker and mail the key to PO Box 412. In the envelope with the key put the time you want the job done, the name of the party, and the address. Get that key in the mail today and the job will be done tomorrow night. Okay?”
“I guess so.”
“You got the box number?”
“Box 412,” she said.
“Excellent,” he murmured, and he replaced the receiver on the cradle. He waited for a moment, wondering whether she might call back for some strange reason. Then, after a moment had passed without the phone ringing, he picked up his book and began reading once again.
It took him a moment to recapture the line of thought in the book, but he reread a paragraph and immersed himself once again in the text and read for the remainder of the afternoon without interruption.
The following day was routine. Lesser men than Harry Varden might have considered it a rut, but he was content with his lot. Out of the “office” at five, a quick walk to Grand Central, the 5:17 to Mamaroneck, a slightly longer walk to his home, dinner, and a good book in his hands while Mary washed the dishes and turned on the television set.
It was a good life—well-ordered, intelligently planned, more money in the bank than either he or Mary could ever spend, and all the comforts that anyone could want in a home.
When he bedded down for the night at a few minutes after eleven, he went to sleep easily. There was a time, long ago when he was new in the trade, when sleeping had been a problem. Time, however, healed all wounds, and routine removed whatever scruples might once have been involved in his profession.
He did his job, and when his job was done he slept. It was simple enough, certainly nothing to lose any sleep over.
In fact, it was a rare occasion when he took any interest in his work greater than the interest in doing a clean and workmanlike job. Today, for example, he had become far too involved with that woman. A client should never even begin to become a person. A client should be no more than a voice on a telephone, just as a victim should be merely a name scrawled (more often, for some obscure reason, typewritten or hand-printed) on a piece of paper. When either became a real person, the job became several times as difficult.
An ideal job was totally impersonal. It was much easier to erase a scrap of paper than to obliterate a human life. One time he had followed a potential victim long enough to gain some insight into the other’s personality. It was infinitely more difficult to pull the trigger, and he had almost bunged that particular job.
For one moment he found himself almost dreading tomorrow’s job, almost hoping that the money would not be at the locker, that the key would not arrive at his post office box.
Then he told himself that he was being foolish, and a moment later he was asleep.
His breakfast, on the table when he descended the staircase in the morning, was the same breakfast he’d eaten for a good many years—orange juice, cinnamon toast, and black coffee. As usual, he was out the door by 7:53 and on the 8:02 to Grand Central. He permitted himself the luxury of a taxi to the post office, leaning back in the backseat of the cab and enjoying the first cigarette of the day.
He studied the cabdriver’s face in the mirror, wondering idly whether he had taken this cab before, whether he had met this very driver somewhere else. At times his lack of memory for people disturbed him; at other times, he recognized it as a double blessing.
For one thing, if his memory were good he would be constantly hailing people whom he had met and who, since he himself was so inconspicuous, would not remember him at all.
And, of course, there was the matter of conscience. While he didn’t consciously feel any remorse over a murder, he was intelligent enough to realize that he was unconsciously beset with periodic visitations of guilt.
When the faces and voices of clients and victims were reduced by time to a vague blur, the guilt was diminished through his own removal from a vivid recollection of the entire affair.
The envelope was in his box. He removed it, closed the box, and took another cab back to Grand Central. He removed the key from the envelope without troubling to glance at the slip of paper, only noticing that the name and address were typewritten.
He located the locker, opened it, and removed $5000, which he pocketed at once. Then he took a room at another hotel in the area.
Once in the hotel, his whole mind and body slipped into the role of the killer, the comfortable and familiar role of the hired murderer.
He had become a machine. The money was in his pocket; in a short while it would be in his bank account. He would now have to purchase a fresh gun from the pawnbroker on Third Avenue, pick up a silencer for the gun, place an ad in the Times announcing the change of address, and prepare himself for the job.