The Ethical Assassin_ A Novel Part 18

Melford shrugged. "Mostly I wanted to see if the woman following us would come in with us."

"What woman?"

"She was driving a Mercedes, and now she's at the table behind you. Don't turn around. Actually, no need to bother, since it looks like she's heading over here."

The woman came around and stood between us and looked us over as though deciding which of us she might choose to bring home. She was pretty and tall, dark blond shoulder-length hair, rounded features that would have once been considered hyperfeminine and now seemed girlish. As if to offset that effect, she dressed to draw attention, wearing tight pink jeans and a nearly translucent white blouse that exposed her black bra underneath. "You don't want to let him eat fish?" She was now looking over sungla.s.ses at Melford, her eyebrows knit together. "Why do you make him miserable about his lunch-boss your friend around like that?"

We were silent for a moment. Finally I ventured, "He's not really making me miserable."

"He's giving you a hard time, isn't he?" She then looked at Melford. "Are you a bully?"

"He's not a bully," I said, not sure why I should stand up for Melford or defend him to this woman, whoever she might be.

"Sometimes people are so bullied that they don't even know they're being bullied," she told me. Then she looked at Melford. "Isn't what people eat a matter for their own choice?"

"No," said Melford, nothing but kindness in his voice. When I said no it came out blunt and hostile and defensive. He made it sound like an invitation. "Whether or not to wear clothing that exposes our underwear is a matter of choice. Whether or not to apply lipstick or go to the movies or enter the goofy golf tournament are matters of choice. When you do something that inflicts suffering on another, then it becomes a moral question."

The woman looked at him in a way that seemed both sly and appraising. "You know what?" she said. "You just might be more interesting than I thought at first. Can I join you?"

"I'd be delighted," Melford said.

She sat down and angled her chair slightly toward Melford and put her sungla.s.ses in the breast pocket of her diaphanous blouse. "I'm Desiree," she said. And as they shook, Melford glanced at a series of lines drawn on the back of her hand. He gently kept hold of her fingers for a moment, almost as if he were getting ready to kiss her hand. "Hsieh?" "Hsieh?" he asked. he asked.

She nodded, not bothering to hide her surprise. "That's right."

He let go of her hand. "Are you considering making a break with the past?"

She tried to look neutral. "I guess so."

"Me too." He folded his hands. "So, you're interested in becoming a vegetarian?"

"I'm not," she told him. "I like eating what I eat. I'm interested in why you care so much."

"I care," Melford said, "because when we see something wrong, we ought to try to make it right. It's not enough to silently condemn evil, to congratulate ourselves for not partic.i.p.ating. I believe we all have an obligation to stand against it."

Something darkened in her face. At first I thought he'd made her angry, but then I realized I saw a pang of sadness, maybe even confusion and doubt. "How exactly is this a matter of ethics? Animals are here for our use, aren't they? So, why shouldn't we use them?"

Melford picked up an empty teacup. "This was put here for our use, right? It was designed to make our lives better and all. What if I were to hurl it across the room? That would be considered an impolite act at best, but also violent, antisocial, unkind, and wasteful. The cup is here for my use, but I'm not free to use it in any way I see fit."

She shrugged. "Sounds reasonable."

"But not so reasonable that you'll change how you eat?" Melford said.

"No, not that reasonable."

He turned to me. "It's interesting, isn't it. You convince someone that everything you say is right, make them understand that eating animals is wrong, but they still won't change."

"Ideology?" I asked.

"You got it."

"So, what are you fellows up to today?" she asked.

"Oh, you know. This and that," Melford said.

She leaned a little closer to him. "Can you be more specific?"

He leaned closer, too, and it looked for an instant as though they might kiss. "Can you maybe give me a reason why I ought to be more specific?"

"Because," she told him, "I'm a curious, curious woman."

"Are you curious enough to wonder what it would be like to stop eating animals?"

"Not that curious."

Melford leaned back a few inches and then reached out to her hand and touched the black marks she'd penned onto her flesh. "You can tell yourself that your actions, alone and weighed against the balance of the universe, don't matter, but I think you know better. How long can you wink at evil because it is easy and gratifying to do so? You're better than that."

She pulled her hand away, but not violently. It looked to me more like embarra.s.sment-or surprise. "You don't know me. You don't know anything about who I am."

Melford offered the ghost of a smile. "Maybe not. But I have a hunch."

She said nothing for a minute. She unwrapped a tube of disposable chopsticks, separated them, and tapped them together. "Does it make you happy to crusade for animals?"

He shook his head. "Does helping the sick, caring for the desperate, make someone happy? Would giving comfort to lepers in the Sudan make me happy? I don't think so. Happiness isn't the issue. These things make us feel balanced with the world around us, and that is something much more important than happiness."

She nodded for a long time, still tapping her chopsticks together. Then she dropped them, as though they'd suddenly grown uncomfortably warm. She stood up. "I have to go."

Melford held out his hand for her to shake. She looked surprised, but she took it anyway.

"You want to tell me who you're working for?" he asked. "Why you're following us?"

"I can't right now." She looked genuinely sad about it, too.

"Okay." He let go and she turned away, but he wasn't entirely done with her. "You know," he said, "you're much too smart to be working for them. You're not like them."

She reddened slightly. "I know that."

"Hsieh," Melford said. Melford said.

She looked at her hand and nodded.

Chapter 21.

SO, WHO WAS SHE?"

"I don't know. Someone who works for them. Whoever they are."

I sat in the pa.s.senger side of Melford's Datsun. I'd eaten the lo mein and put back five or six little cups of tea. Desiree's little visit that afternoon had left me stunned, but Melford appeared unperturbed. He'd eaten his green-tinted dumplings with splintery chopsticks and talked for a while about a philosopher named Althusser and something called "the ideological state apparatus." Only once we were back in the car did I try to talk about the woman.

"Doesn't it bother you that a strange person in peekaboo clothing is shadowing us?"

"Peekaboo clothing isn't without its pleasures. Don't you think? I noticed you inspecting the lace of her bra. Maybe you were thinking about buying a gift for Chitra."

I hated the feeling of being caught. "I do have to admit it. She seemed less scary and more . . ." I let my voice trail off.

"s.e.xy?"

"Sure," I agreed cautiously. I didn't know that Melford would be the world's best judge of which women were s.e.xy and which were not. "But, still. We've got someone following us. What are we going to do about it?"

"Nothing," Melford said. "She's not following us now, and to be honest, I don't think she means us any harm."

"There are dead people floating all over the place. I know you killed some some of them, but isn't it a bit naive to a.s.sume they don't mean us harm?" of them, but isn't it a bit naive to a.s.sume they don't mean us harm?"

"I can't speak for they. they. I'm sure I'm sure they they do mean us a whole truckload of harm, but I don't think Desiree does. You could see it in her eyes. She is straying from them. She doesn't want to hurt us, or even report back about us. I have a feeling." do mean us a whole truckload of harm, but I don't think Desiree does. You could see it in her eyes. She is straying from them. She doesn't want to hurt us, or even report back about us. I have a feeling."

"Great, you have a feeling. Fine."

"It's the best we have until we know who they they are." are."

I thought about telling him what I knew, that the Gambler was involved, but I hadn't told him last night, and now it would look weird, as though I'd been holding out on him and that maybe he ought not to trust me. There would be a way, I decided, to steer him in that direction if it became necessary, or to discover discover something that would point to the Gambler. In the meantime, I felt safer with his not knowing, even if it meant keeping a huge secret from a guy who was known to resolve his grievances, from time to time, with a silenced pistol. something that would point to the Gambler. In the meantime, I felt safer with his not knowing, even if it meant keeping a huge secret from a guy who was known to resolve his grievances, from time to time, with a silenced pistol.

"So, where are we off to now?" I asked.

"You'll recall that we have a task to do," Melford said. "We have to figure out who that third person was, the body in the trailer."

"What about the money? They're looking for a ton of cash. Maybe we should find out about that."

He shook his head. "Forget the money. It's a dead end. Let's think about finding the body."

"And tell me again how we do that?"

"The first thing we want to do is look at the body. Who knows. Maybe they were dumb enough to leave identification on her. Long shot, I know, but it's worth trying."

"Sure," I said. "That's a great idea, poking around at a dead body, looking for a wallet. But, and I may be being dense here, shouldn't we know where the bodies are first?"

"It so happens, smart guy, that I have a pretty good guess where they put the bodies. You catch that bad odor in the trailer park? You know what that was?"

"The smell of trailers? I don't know."

"It was a hog lot, Lemuel. The city of Meadowbrook Grove is mostly just that trailer park, which raises the bulk of its revenue through speeding tickets. Behind it is a small factory farm that raises hogs. Intensive hog farming produces a ton of waste, and that waste has to go somewhere. That bad smell in the trailer park comes from the waste lagoon, a nasty, environmentally hazardous seething pit of pig p.i.s.s, pig s.h.i.+t, and pig remains. It also happens to be the single best place I can think of to hide bodies. So that's where we're off to."

"And we just waltz onto this property and start digging around through pig c.r.a.p and no one will mind? Is that it?"

"No one will be there. There's no Old MacDonald. There's no oink oink here and oink oink there. The evil brilliance of these things is that they require virtually no maintenance. Just someone to stop by once a day to make sure the animals are fed."

"How do you know that the guy who feeds them won't be there?"

Melford shrugged. "Because I killed him yesterday."

I sucked in a breath. I felt the painful jolt of realization. "Is that why you killed b.a.s.t.a.r.d? Because he worked at a pig farm?"

"Relax. I'm nowhere near that arbitrary. That had nothing to do with it. I feel sorry for most of the employees at these places-they're exploited just like the animals are. They earn low wages and labor for employers who neglect their health and safety. They're victims. The owners deserve to die, not the workers. No, this is a coincidence." He paused thoughtfully. "Sort of."

Melford pulled off the main road and drove behind the trailer park, then made a sharp right onto a dirt road that I might never have noticed even if I'd pa.s.sed by a dozen or more times. It cut through a dense wood of scraggly pine and wayward Florida shrubs and white rock. We followed this path for a good mile or so, and all the while the thick stench of sulfur and ammonia became stronger until it felt as if someone had fas.h.i.+oned an ice pick out of bad smells and was shoving it into my sinuses.

We arrived at a fence and Melford stopped the car, hopped out, and removed a key from his pocket, which he used to open a padlock. When he got back in the car, he was still grinning.

"Where did you get the key?" I asked.

"I have my methods."

Back in the car, and after a little more wood-lined road, we pulled out into a clearing and I could see in front of us a large, flimsy-looking building with no windows. It was maybe two stories high and made out of what appeared to be aluminum sheets. The thing vaguely resembled a warehouse, but a nightmarish one, all alone in the clearing like it was. Or maybe it resembled a prison. I figured Melford must be getting to me.

He parked behind some pines so it wouldn't be visible if someone happened by-better safe than sorry, Melford explained-and we got out and began to walk toward the building. I thought it smelled bad in the car, thought I was getting used to it, but it grew stronger, harsher. The stench in front of us was like a physical weight in the air. Walking into it was like walking against the force of a wind tunnel. How could anyone work here? How could people stand to live nearby? And the pigs themselves-but I decided not to consider that. I had bigger things to worry about, and I was determined that Melford's obsession would not become my own.

Around the back of the warehouse, the gra.s.s and brush faded into a thick black dirt from which sprigs of gra.s.s shot upward intermittently. This beach extended maybe thirty feet, and then the lagoon began abruptly-so abruptly that I thought it must not only be man-made, but concrete lined. It was smaller than I imagined, the word lagoon lagoon suggesting tropical excess, lush green, misting waterfalls, flocks of shrill tropical birds exploding into flight. Waste lagoon turned out to be a euphemism, and when your euphemism has the word suggesting tropical excess, lush green, misting waterfalls, flocks of shrill tropical birds exploding into flight. Waste lagoon turned out to be a euphemism, and when your euphemism has the word waste waste in it, you're starting from a pretty bad place. I found not a lagoon but a ditch, the worst, most horrible ditch I could ever have imagined, maybe three hundred feet in diameter. Nothing grew near except a scattering of the most ragged of weeds-and the strangely miraculous exception of a single black mangrove tree, whose gnarled roots looped in and out of the soil and into the lagoon. in it, you're starting from a pretty bad place. I found not a lagoon but a ditch, the worst, most horrible ditch I could ever have imagined, maybe three hundred feet in diameter. Nothing grew near except a scattering of the most ragged of weeds-and the strangely miraculous exception of a single black mangrove tree, whose gnarled roots looped in and out of the soil and into the lagoon.

I expected to get mud on my shoes as we approached, but the dirt was as dry and crumbly as a moonscape. With each step, however, the stench grew worse, impossibly and exponentially worse. The stink, to my surprise, seemed to possess mind-altering qualities. My head grew light, my steps unbalanced. I held out my hands to keep my balance.

I kept my eye on the lagoon, as though a monster might emerge to devour us. At first I had thought it was a trick of the sunlight, but the contents were not merely shaded, they were brown. It was a brown pond of viscous sludge that undulated its bloated waves against the slick sh.o.r.eline. Pond is to waste lagoon, I thought, my mind lapsing into SAT a.n.a.logy, as human being is to zombie. A seething nimbus of insects hovered above, buzzing with mutant menace.

Melford stopped outside the perimeter, marked by a series of metal rods around the pond, linked by string with Day-Glo plastic ribbons that fluttered sickly in the mild breeze. "They're probably in there," he said, gesturing toward the pond.

"So that's a waste lagoon?"

Melford nodded.

"That is all pig s.h.i.+t and pig p.i.s.s?"

Melford nodded again.

"They all this vile?"

"Probably. I've never seen one close up before."

I stared at him. "You've never seen one?"

"Never. It's worse than I thought it would be. Bigger. More impenetrable."

"It looks like a good place to hide bodies," I said. "So, how do we find them?"

Melford shrugged. "We don't. This was a stupid idea."