Requiem for an Assassin

with Hilger and everything else afterward. In any event, there was nothing I could do to influence, let alone control, the eventuality. I knew how I would react if it happened and that was enough.
    I imagined what would come next: his mistress tries him on his cell phone, then checks downstairs when there’s no answer. Or some other resident finds him here. No sign of foul play—no gunshot, stab wounds, or blunt trauma—and therefore no justification to expend resources on an autopsy. There would be questions, of course, but he was a prominent man, and his family would be only too eager to close the matter quickly and obscure the details of where he died and what he might have been doing there. The cause would remain unknown, and would probably be treated as an embolism or some other such story that doctors proffer to families to help them find closure when death can’t otherwise be explained.
    After four minutes, I knew he was past any attempt at resuscitation. I eased him down on the floor and looked outside. Two women in wool coats and fur earmuffs walked by, laughing about something, maybe on their way to an early lunch. I watched them pass. No one else was coming. Okay.
    I picked up the box and stepped outside. I left the keys where they had fallen. Logical enough that Accinelli had been holding them when he was struck down by his mysterious embolic event, and that they would wind up on the floor beside him.
    I headed down the stairs, glancing south on Mott as I moved. All clear. I glanced north. Then, only by virtue of years of experience, I turned my head away and continued down the stairs as though I had noticed nothing of any relevance.
    What I had noticed, in fact, was the blond guy from Saigon. Hilger’s backup. And he was walking straight toward me.

24
    D OX WAS STANDING next to his cot, doing isometric exercises against his chains. He knew from the sounds on the boat that they were in a port somewhere; that, unusually, three of them were off the boat; that the one who’d stayed behind was Uncle Fester. Despite knowing it was a victory for the psycho, he couldn’t help feeling dread. Fester was going to give him the “surprise” now, he could feel it. That, or something worse.
    Things were quiet for a while, and then he heard Fester’s footsteps, coming down the stairs, heading his way. He sat up on the cot and pulled futilely against the chains, not for the first time. Goddamnit, if there had been just a little more slack. He’d thought a hundred times about improvising a weapon, something sharp, but there wasn’t a single thing in the cabin, not a doorstop or a window crank, the workings in the toilet tank, nothing. With a weapon, he might, just might, have had a chance. But as it was, he couldn’t stand straight, he could barely fucking move, he couldn’t even defend himself against Fester’s knees and elbows when the psycho paid him a visit, how the hell was he going to take the man out like he needed to?
    Fester looked in through the window, then opened the door. He was carrying a large canvas bag and smiling, and Dox thought, Nothing good can come of this.
    “I was just thinking about you, Uncle Fester,” Dox said.
    Fester smiled. “Yeah? I’m glad I didn’t find you touching yourself, then. It would have been embarrassing.”
    “Well, funny you should say that, ’cause that’s exactly the thing I was thinking about. I was wondering if you’d ever had any kind of psychosexual workup. I think you might be intrigued by the insights. Did you know that eighty-five percent of people with an inclination to torture were bed wetters and fire setters?”
    Fester’s eyes narrowed and his ears flattened against his scalp, and Dox was pleasantly surprised. He was making this shit up as he went along, but who could say what kind of fucked-up childhood might produce an adult specimen like Uncle Fester? Anyway, it seemed like he’d just hit a nerve.
    “No,” Fester said. “I didn’t know that.”
    “Oh, yeah. It’s all in the New England Journal of Medicine and the Harvard Psychiatric Review. You ought to read the articles, you could learn something about your nature.”
    “Yeah, cabrón ? I wonder why you enjoy reading those articles.”
    “Oh, psychos like you are a hobby of mine. For example, did you know that almost eighty percent of soldiers who volunteered for work as interrogators in World War Two were denied the necessary security clearances because the tests proved they