Hit Man

showed a man winking, his mouth a thin line. The caption read, “What I know I keep to myself,” evidently the English equivalent of “Loose lips sink ships.” Keller had thought about the poster for hours and returned the following day to price it. The price had been reasonable enough, but he’d realized during the negotiations that the sight of that canny face, winking forever across the room at him, would soon become oppressive. The man on the poster, advising privacy, would himself constitute an invasion of it. How could you kiss a girl with that face looking on? How could you pick your nose?
    The sentiment, though, stayed with him. On the train to and from White Plains, on a flight to some distant city where his services were required, on the flight home with his mission accomplished, the Englishman’s motto would sound in his mind like a mantra. What he knew he kept to himself.
    In therapy he’d felt conflicted. The process wouldn’t work unless he was willing to open up. But how could he tell a West Side psychologist what he wouldn’t let slip to a stranger on a train, or a woman in bed? He’d wound up talking mostly of dreams and childhood memories, hoping all the while that what Dr. Jerrold Breen knew he’d keep to himself. In the end, of course, Breen had taken his knowledge to the grave, leaving Keller to resume his lifelong habit of silence.
    But he’d broken that habit with Nelson.
    Perhaps the best thing about dogs, it seemed to Keller, was that you could talk to them. They made much better listeners than human beings did. You didn’t have to worry that you were boring them, or that they’d heard a particular story before, or that they’d think less of you for what you were revealing about yourself. You could tell them anything, secure in the knowledge that the matter would end right there. They wouldn’t pass it on to somebody else, nor would they throw it back in your face in the course of an argument.
    Which was not to say that they didn’t listen. It was quite clear to Keller that Nelson listened. When you talked to him you didn’t have the feeling that you were talking to a wall, or to a gerbil or a goldfish. Nelson didn’t necessarily understand what you told him, but he damn well listened.
    And Keller told him everything. The longings that had begun to stir during therapy—to open up, to divulge old secrets, to reveal oneself to oneself—now found full expression on the long walks he took with Nelson and the long evenings they spent at home.
    “I never set out to do this for a living,” he told Nelson one afternoon in the park. “And for a while, you know, it was just something I’d done a couple of times. It wasn’t who I was.
    “Except it got so it was who I was, and I didn’t realize it. How I found out, see, I’d meet somebody who’d heard of me, and he’d show something that would surprise me, whether it was fear or respect, whatever it was. He’d be reacting to a killer, and that would puzzle me, because I didn’t know that’s what I was.
    “I remember in high school how they did all this career counseling, showing you how to figure out what you wanted to do in life and then take steps in that direction. I think I told you how those years were sort of a blur for me. I went through them like somebody with a light concussion, I saw everything through a veil. But when they got on this career stuff I just didn’t have a clue. There was this test, questions like would you rather pull weeds or sell cabbages or teach needlepoint, and I couldn’t finish the test. Every question was utterly baffling.
    “And then I woke up one day and realized I had a career, and it consisted of taking people out. I never had any interest in it or any aptitude for it, but it turns out you don’t need any. All you need is to be able to do it. I did it once because somebody told me to, and I did it a second time because somebody told me to, and before I knew it it was what I did. Then, once I’d defined myself, I started to learn the technical aspects. Guns, other tools, unarmed techniques. How to get around people. Stuff you ought to know.
    “The thing is, there’s not all that much you have to know. It’s not like the careers they told you about in high school. You don’t prepare for it. Maybe there are things that happen to you along the way that prepare you for it, but that’s not something you choose.
    “What do you think? Do you want to split a hot-dog? Or should we