The Greatest Trick of All

THE GREATEST TRICK OF ALL

I could have shot you in one ear and out the other from a thousand yards. I could have brushed past you in a crowd and you wouldn’t have known your throat was cut until you went to nod your head and it rolled away down the street without you. I was the guy you were worrying about when you locked your doors and posted your guards and walked upstairs to bed, only to find me already up there before you, leaning on the dresser, just waiting in the dark.

I was the guy who always found a way.

I was the guy that couldn’t be stopped.

But that’s over now, I guess.

None of my stuff was original. I studied the best of the best, long ago. I learned from all of them. A move here, a move there, all stitched together. All the tricks. Including the greatest trick of all, which I learned from a man called Ryland. Back in the day Ryland worked all over, but mainly where there was oil, or white powder, or money, or girls, or high-stakes card games. Then he got old, and he slowly withdrew. Eventually he found the matrimonial market. Maybe he invented it, although I doubt that. But certainly he refined it. He turned it into a business. He was in the right place at the right time. Getting old and slowing down, just when all those California lawyers made divorce into a lottery win. Just when guys all over the hemisphere started to get nervous about it.

The theory was simple: A live wife goes to a lawyer, but a dead wife goes nowhere. Except the cemetery. Problem solved. A dead wife attracts a certain level of attention from the police, of course, but Ryland moved in a world where a guy would be a thousand times happier to get a call from a cop than a divorce lawyer. Cops would have to pussyfoot around the grief issue, and there was a general assumption that when it came to IQ, cops were not the sharpest chisels in the box. Whereas lawyers were like razors. And, of course, part of the appeal of a guy like Ryland was that evidence was going to be very thin on the ground. No question, a wife dead at Ryland’s hands was generally considered to be a lottery win in reverse.

He worked hard. Hit the microfilm and check it out. Check newspapers all over the States and Central and South America. Look at Europe, Germany, Italy, anyplace where there were substantial fortunes at stake. Look at how many women went missing. Look at how old they were, and how long they had been married. Then check the follow-up stories, the inside pages, the later paragraphs, and see how many hints there were about incipient marital strife. Check it out, and you’ll see a pattern.

The cops saw it too, of course. But Ryland was a ghost. He had survived oil and dope and moneylending and hookers and gambling. No way was he going to get brought down by greedy husbands and bored wives. He flourished, and I bet his name was never written down in any cop’s file. Not anywhere, not once. He was that good.

He was working back in the days when billionaires were rare. Back then, a hundred million was considered a threshold level. Below a hundred mil, you were poor. Above, you were respectable. People called a hundred mil a unit, and most of Ryland’s clients were worth three or four units. And Ryland noticed something: rich husband, rich wife. The wives weren’t rich in the sense their husbands were, of course. They didn’t have units of their own. But they had spending cash. It stands to reason, Ryland said to me. Guys set them up with bank accounts and credit cards. Guys worth three or four units don’t like to trouble themselves with trivia down at the six-figure level.

But the six-figure level was where Ryland worked.

And he noticed that the blood he was spilling was dripping all over minks and diamond chokers and Paris gowns and perforated leather seats in Mercedes Benzes. He started searching purses after a while. There were big checking balances in most of them, and platinum cards. He didn’t steal anything, of course. That would have been fatal, and stupid, and Ryland wasn’t stupid. Not stupid at all. But he was imaginative.

Or so he claimed.

Actually, I like to believe one of the women handed the idea to him. Maybe one a little feistier than normal. Maybe when it became clear what was about to transpire, she put in a counter-offer. That’s how I like to think it all started. Maybe she said: “That rat bastard. I should pay you to off him instead.” I know Ryland’s ears would have pricked up at that. Anything involving payment would have gotten him interested. He would have run the calculation at the same hyperspeed he used for any calculation, from a bullet’s trajectory to a risk assessment. He would have figured: This chick can afford a six-figure coat, so she can afford a six-figure hit.

Thus, the greatest trick of all.

Getting paid twice.

He told me about it after he got sick with cancer, and I took it as a kind of anointment. The nomination of an heir. The passing of the baton. He wanted me to be the new Ryland. That was okay with me. I also took it as a mute appeal not to let him linger and suffer. That was okay with me too. He was frail by then. He resisted the pillow like crazy, but the lights went out soon enough. And there it was. The old Ryland gone, and the new Ryland starting out with new energy.

First up was a stout forty-something from Essen in Germany. Married to a steel baron who had recently found her to be boring. A hundred grand in my pocket would save him a hundred million in hers. Classically, of course, you would hunt and strike before she ever knew you were on the planet. Previously, that would have been the hallmark of a job well done.

But not anymore.

I went with her to Gstaad. I didn’t travel with her. I just showed up there the next day. Got to know her a little. She was a cow. I would have gladly killed her for free. But I didn’t. I talked to her. I worked her around to the point where she said, “My husband thinks I’m too old.” Then she looked up at me from under her lashes. It was the usual reassurance-seeking crap. She wanted me to say. “You? Too old? How could he think that about such a beautiful woman?”

But I didn’t say that.

Instead, I said, “He wants to get rid of you.”

She took it as a question. She answered, “Yes, I think he does.”

I said, “No, I know he does. He offered me money to kill you.”

Think about it. How was she going to react? No screaming. No running to the Swiss cops. Just utter stunned silence, under the weight of the biggest single surprise she could have heard. First, of course, the conceptual question: “You’re an assassin?” She knew people like me existed. She had moved in her husband’s world for a long time. Too long, according to him. Then eventually, of course, the inevitable inquiry: “How much did he offer you?”

Ryland had told me to exaggerate a little. In his opinion it gave the victims a little perverse pleasure to hear a big number. It gave them a last shot at feeling needed, in a backhanded way. They weren’t wanted any more, but at least it was costing a lot to get rid of them. Status, of a sort.

“Two hundred thousand US dollars,” I said.

The fat Essen bitch took that in and then started down the wrong road.

She said, “I could give you that not to.”

“Wouldn’t work for me,” I said. “I can’t leave a job undone. He would tell people, and my reputation would be shot. A guy like me, his reputation is all he’s got.”

Gstaad was a good place to be having the conversation. It was isolated and otherworldly. It was like there was just her and me on the planet. I sat beside her and tried to radiate sympathy. Like a dentist, maybe. When he has to drill a tooth. I’m sorry … but it’s got to be done. Her anger built, a little slow, but it came. Eventually she got on the right road.

“You work for money,” she said.

I nodded.

“You work for anyone who can pay the freight,” she said.

“Like a taxicab,” I said.

She said, “I’ll pay you to kill him.”

There was anger there, of course, but there were also financial considerations. They were forming slowly in her mind, a little vaguely, but basically they were the exact obverse of the considerations I had seen in the husband’s mind a week previously. People like that, it comes down to just four words: all the money, mine.

She asked, “How much?”

“The same,” I said. “Two hundred grand.”

We were in Switzerland, which made the banking part easy. I stuck with her, supportive, and watched her get her fat pink paws on two hundred thousand US dollars, crisp new bills from some European country’s central reserve. She gave them to me and started to explain where her husband would be, and when.

“I know where he is,” I said. “I have a rendezvous set up. For me to get paid.”

She giggled at the irony. Guaranteed access to the victim. She wasn’t dumb. That was the single greatest strength of Ryland’s idea.

We went for a walk, alone, on a snow-covered track rarely frequented by skiers. I killed her there by breaking her fat neck and leaving her in a position that suggested a slip and a fall. Then I took the train back to Essen and kept my rendezvous with the husband. Obviously he had gone to great lengths to keep our meetings secret. He was in a place he wouldn’t normally go, alone and unobserved. I collected my fee and killed him too. A silenced .22, in the head. It was an article of faith for people like Ryland and me. If you get paid, you have to deliver.

So, two fees, and all those steel units cascading down to fractious heirs that would be calling me themselves, soon enough. All the money, mine.

It went on like that for two years. Check the microfilm. Check the papers. North America, Central, South, all over Europe. Cops in a lather about anarchists targeting rich couples. That was another strength of Ryland’s idea. It rendered the motive inexplicable.

Then I got an offer from Brazil. I was kind of surprised. For some reason I imagined their divorce laws to be old-fashioned and traditional. I didn’t think any Brazilian guy would need my kind of help. But someone reached out to me and I ended up face to face with a man who had big units from mineral deposits and an actress wife who was sleeping around. The guy was wounded about it. Maybe that’s why he called me. He didn’t strictly need to. But he wanted to.

He was rich and he was angry, so I doubled my usual fee. That was no problem. I explained how it would work. Payment after the event at a discreet location, satisfaction guaranteed. Then he told me his wife was going to be on a train, some kind of a long private club-car journey through the mountains. That was a problem. There are no banks on trains. So I decided to pass on Ryland’s trick, just this one time. I would go the traditional single-ended route. The old way. I checked a map and saw that I could get on the train late and get off early. The wife would be dead in her sleeper when it rolled into Rio. I would be long gone by then.

It was comforting to think about working the old way, just for once.

I spotted her on the train and kept well back. But even from a distance I saw the ring on her finger. It was a gigantic rock. A diamond so big they probably ran out of carat numbers to measure it with.

That was a bank right there, on her finger.

Traceable, theoretically, but not through certain parts of Amsterdam or Johannesburg or Freetown, Sierra Leone. Potentially a problem at customs posts, but I could swallow it.

I moved up the train.

She was a very beautiful woman. Skin like lavender honey, long black hair that shone, eyes like pools. Long legs, a tiny waist, a rack that was popping out of her shirt. I took the armchair opposite her and said, “Hello.” I figured a woman who sleeps around would at least give me a look. I have certain rough qualities. A few scars, the kind of unkempt appearance that suggests adventure. She didn’t need money. She was married to it. Maybe all she needed was diversion.

It went well at first and I found a reason to move around the table and slide into the chair next to her. Then within an hour we were well into that train-journey thing where she was leaning left and I was leaning right and we were sharing intimacies over the rush of the wind and the clatter of the wheels. She talked about her marriage briefly and then changed the subject. I brought it back. I pointed to her ring and asked her about it. She spread her hand like a starfish and let me take a look.

“My husband gave it to me,” she said.

“So he should,” I said. “He’s a lucky man.”

“He’s an angry man,” she said. “I don’t behave myself very well, I’m afraid.”

I said nothing.

She said, “I think he wants to have me killed.”

So there it was, the opening that was often so hard to work around to. I should have said, “He does,” and opened negotiations. But I didn’t.

She said, “I look at the men I meet and I wonder, is this the one?”

So then I got my mouth working and said, “This is the one.”

“Really?” she said.

I nodded. “I’m afraid so.”

“But I have insurance,” she said.

She raised her hand again and all I saw was the diamond. Hard to blame myself, because the diamond was so big and the stiletto’s blade was so slender. I really didn’t see it at all. Wasn’t aware of its existence until its tip went through my shirt and pierced my skin. Then she leaned on it with surprising strength and weight. It was cold. And long. A custom piece. It went right through me and pinned me to the chair. She used the heel of her hand and butted it firmly into place. Then she used my tie to wipe the handle clean of prints.

“Goodbye,” she said.

She got up and left me there. I was unable to move. An inch left or right would tear my insides out. I just sat and felt the spreading stain of blood reach my lap. I’m still sitting there, ten minutes later. Once I could have shot you in one ear and out the other from a thousand yards. Or I could have brushed past you in a crowd and you wouldn’t have known your throat was cut until you went to nod your head and it rolled away down the street without you. I was the guy you were worrying about when you locked your doors and posted your guards and walked upstairs to bed, only to find me already up there before you, leaning on the dresser, just waiting in the dark.

I was the guy who always found a way.

I was the guy that couldn’t be stopped.

But then I met Ryland.

And all that’s over now.