Hit Man

your pardon?”
    “I’m not interested,” Keller said. “If I ever did what you’re implying, well, I don’t do it anymore.”
    “You’ve retired.”
    “That’s right. And, even if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t go behind the old man’s back, not to work for someone who sent me off on a fool’s errand with a flower in my lapel.”
    “You wore that flower,” Bascomb said, “with the air of a man who never left home without one. I’ve got to tell you, Keller, you were born to wear a red carnation.”
    “That’s good to know,” Keller said, “but it doesn’t change anything.”
    “Well, the same thing goes for your reluctance.”
    “How’s that?”
    “It’s good to know how you feel,” Bascomb said. “Good to get it all out in the open. But it doesn’t change anything. We need you, and you’re in.”
    He smiled, waiting for Keller to voice an objection. Keller let him wait.
    “Think it through,” Bascomb suggested. “Think U.S. Attorney’s Office. Think Internal Revenue Service. Think of all the resources of a powerful—some say too powerful—federal government, lined up against one essentially defenseless citizen.”
    Keller, in spite of himself, found himself thinking it through.
    “And now forget all that,” said Bascomb, waving it all away like smoke. “And think of the opportunity you have to serve your nation. I don’t know if you’ve ever thought of yourself as a patriot, Keller, but if you look deep within yourself I suspect you’ll find wellsprings of patriotism you never knew existed. You’re an American, Keller, and here you are with a chance to do something for America and save your own ass in the process.”
    Keller’s words surprised him. “My father was a soldier,” he said.
Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land!
    Keller closed the book and set it aside. The lines of Sir Walter Scott’s were quoted in a short story Keller had read in high school. The titular man without a country was Philip Nolan, doomed to wander the world all his life because he’d passed up his own chance to be a patriot.
    Keller didn’t have the story on hand, but he’d found the poetry in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, and now he looked up patriotism in the index. The best thing he found was Samuel Johnson’s word on the subject. “Patriotism,” Dr. Johnson asserted, “is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”
    The sentence had a nice ring to it, but he wasn’t sure he knew what Johnson was getting at. Wasn’t a scoundrel the furthest thing from a patriot? In simplest terms, a patriot would seem unequivocally to be one of the good guys. At the very least he devoted himself to serving his nation and his fellow citizens, and often enough he wound up giving the last full measure of devotion, sacrificing himself, dying so that others might live in freedom.
    Nathan Hale, say, regretting that he had but one life to give for his country. John Paul Jones, declaring that he had not yet begun to fight. David Farragut, damning the torpedoes, urging full speed ahead.
    Good guys, Keller thought.
    Whereas a scoundrel had to be a bad guy by definition. So how could he be a patriot, or take refuge in patriotism?
    Keller thought about it, and decided the scoundrel might take refuge in the appearance of patriotism, wrapping selfish acts in the cloak of selflessness. A sort of false patriotism, to cloak his base motives.
    But a true scoundrel couldn’t be a genuine patriot. Or could he?
    If you looked at it objectively, he had to admit, then he was probably a scoundrel himself. He didn’t much feel like a scoundrel. He felt like your basic New York single guy, living alone, eating out or bringing home takeout, schlepping his wash to the laundromat, doing the Times crossword with his morning coffee. Working out at the gym, starting doomed relationships with women, going to the movies by himself. There were eight million stories in the naked city, most of them not very interesting, and his was one of them. call from a man in White Plains. And packed a bag and caught a plane and killed somebody.
    Hard to argue the point. Man behaves like that, he’s a scoundrel. Case closed.
    Now he had a chance to be a patriot.
    Not to seem like one, because no one would know about this, not even Dot and the old man. Bascomb had made himself very clear on the point. “Not a word to anyone, and if anything goes wrong, it’s the same system as Mission: