Hit Man

useful, and every now and then one of them comes along and adds to the quality of life in this wonderful country of ours.”
    Solid American common sense, Keller thought. This great country of ours. The man was a traitor and he had the gall to sound like a politician on the stump.
    “So I get stirred up every time somebody walks in here,” Ramsgate said. “What have you brought for me?”
    “Well, let me just show you,” Keller said, and came around the desk. He opened his briefcase and placed a yellow legal pad on the desktop.
    “ ‘Please forgive me,’ ” Ramsgate read aloud. “Forgive you for what?”
    Keller answered him with a choke hold, maintaining it long enough to guarantee unconsciousness. Then he let go and tore the top sheet from the legal pad, crumpled it into a ball, dropped it into the wastebasket. The sheet beneath it, the new top sheet, already held a similar message: “I’m sorry. Please forgive me.”
    It wouldn’t stand up to a detailed forensic investigation, but Keller figured it would make it easy for them to call it suicide if they wanted to.
    He went to the window, opened it. He rolled Ramsgate’s desk chair over to the window, took hold of the man under the arms, hauled him to his feet, then heaved him out the window.
    He put the chair back, tore the second sheet off the pad, crumpled it, tossed it at the basket. That was better, he decided—no note, just a pad on the desk, and then, when they look in the basket, they can come up with two drafts of a note he decided not to leave after all.
    Nice touch. They’d pay more attention to a note if they had to hunt for it.
    Janeane was back at her desk when he left, chatting on the phone. She didn’t even look up.
    Keller, back in New York, started each of the next five days with a copy of the Washington Post from a newsstand across the street from the UN building. There was nothing in it the first morning, but the next day he found a story on the obituary page about an established Washington patent attorney, an apparent suicide. Keller learned where Howard Ramsgate had gone to college and law school and read about a couple of inventions he’d helped steer through the patent process. The names of his survivors were given as well—a wife, two children, a brother in Lake Forest, Illinois.
    What it didn’t say was that he was a spy, a traitor. Didn’t say he’d had help getting out the window. Keller, perched on a stool in a coffee shop, wondered how much more they knew than they were letting on.
    The next three days he didn’t find one more word about Ramsgate. This wasn’t suspicious in and of itself—how often was there a follow-up to the suicide of a not-too-prominent attorney?—but Keller found himself trying to read between the lines of other stories, trying to find some subtle connection to Ramsgate’s death. This lobbyist charged with illegal campaign contributions, that Japanese tourist caught in the crossfire of a drug-related shootout, a key vote on a close bill in Congress—any such item might somehow link up to the defenestration of Howard Ramsgate. And he, the man who’d made it happen, would never know.
    On the fifth morning, as he found himself frowning over a minor scandal in the mayor’s office, it occurred to Keller to wonder if he was being watched. Had anyone observed him in the days since Ramsgate’s death? Had it been noted that he was starting each day, not around the corner from his apartment with the New York Times but five blocks away with the Washington Post ?
    He thought it over and decided he was being silly. But then was he being any less silly buying the Post each morning? He’d tossed a pebble into a pond days ago, and now he kept returning, trying to detect the shadow of a ripple on the pond’s smooth surface.
    He got out of there and left the paper behind. Later, thinking about it, he realized what had him acting this way.
    He was looking for closure, for some sense of completion. Whenever he did a job for the old man, he made a phone call, got a pat on the back, bantered a bit with Dot, and, in the ordinary course of things, collected his money. That last was the most important, of course, but the acknowledgment was important, too, along with the mutual recognition that the job was done and done satisfactorily.
    With Ramsgate he got none of that. There was no report to make, nobody to banter with, no one to tell him how well he’d done. Tight-lipped men in Washington offices might