Killers of a Certain Age(48)

We didn’t say anything for a long minute, just stared up at the starry blue ceiling. Next to us was a statue of a woman dressed in white and purple, her dark hair crowned with roses. She carried a skull resting on a book and seemed to be making a beckoning gesture with her hand.

“What are you doing here, Nat?”

“I’m communing with my girl Mary,” she said, nodding towards the statue. “Two nice Jewish girls hanging out together. I like her skull.”

“Sure. I can see that,” I said. “Except that’s St. Rosalia of Palermo. Pretty sure she was Catholic.”

“Well, shit.” Natalie slumped in the pew. “I can’t even get that right.”

“What’s the matter with you?”

She seemed to be having some sort of argument with herself about whether to confide. She decided to trust me, I suppose, because she tucked her hands in between her thighs and took a deep breath. “I wanted to be with my people. Only the nearest synagogue is like an hour walk, so I came here. Catholics understand community, you know? And they get guilt too.”

“You’re sixty and you’re finally feeling guilty over something?” I asked. I was only half joking.

“I’m sixty and I never stopped,” she told me. “I’m a woman. Guilt is our birthright. Guilt if we want to be mothers, guilt if we take the Pill instead or choose to abort. Guilt if we stay home with our kids or guilt if we work. Guilt if we sleep with a man, guilt if we say no. Guilt if we’re lucky enough to survive for no good reason. I’m so damned sick of it. I’ve never been so tired of anything in my life. I just . . . I just want to go to sleep forever.”

“That won’t get you out of the guilt,” I said. “I’m pretty sure somewhere in the afterlife, some woman is feeling ashamed of herself because her cloud isn’t as silver as the angel next door’s.”

She almost smiled but didn’t quite manage it. “I suppose that’s part of the reason I’ve always hated you. You never seem to struggle with it.”

“You’ve always hated me? This is quite a time to find out, Natalie. We’ve known each other for four decades. I’ve literally trusted you with my life.”

“And you still can. That’s the job. I’d jump in front of a bullet for you and you know it. Besides, only a small part of me hates you. A tiny, tiny part of me.”

“What, like a mustard seed of hate?”

“Chia. I have a chia seed of hate. Get with the times,” she said, smiling a little.

“You have a chia seed of hate for me. Want to tell me about it?”

She picked at her fingernails. “I always wondered how you managed to just ease through without ever being touched by it all.”

“By what?”

“The job. What we do. Who we are. It should leave scars, don’t you think? I’ve got some. Helen does. Mary Alice does. But you don’t seem fazed by it.”

“Nat, that’s some mark of Cain shit and I don’t believe in it. What we do for a living doesn’t strip us of our souls or make us terrible people. We’re exterminators.”

“That’s really how you see it, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Do you sleep well at night?”

I thought about that. “Most of the time. Look, if you’d have asked me when I was seven years old and playing with a flea market Barbie knock-off what I wanted to be when I grew up, I’m pretty sure assassin wouldn’t have made the top ten list. But it’s what I do. And I do it well. And when I’m finished with a job, the world is that much safer,” I said, holding up my thumb and forefinger, a quarter of an inch apart. “Maybe at the end of a mission I’ve stopped a trafficker from getting his hands on some eleven-year-old who will get to sleep in her own bed that night. Maybe I’ve prevented an arms deal that would have wiped out a settlement of villagers who won’t have anything more to worry about than getting their crops in the ground. Or maybe I’ve broken up a cartel that terrorized people into leaving their homes so they could have free run of the farmland to grow their shitty crops. I think about the people we’ve saved before I sleep.”

She was quiet, looking at her new friend, St. Rosalia, for a while before she turned back to me. “I should have called him. Sweeney, I mean. I should have called him and maybe asked him out for dinner. I should have asked him to stay for breakfast. Hell, I should have at least slept with him again.”

“Really? Was he that good?”

She shrugged. “Average-sized dick but he really knew what to do with it. I just feel bad I dodged him. And now I won’t have the chance to let him know that he was pretty good.”

I leaned back and looked at the ceiling. “You know,” I told her, “most of the decorations here are trompe l’oeil. All those moldings and stars aren’t wood or plaster. They’re just paint. They’re not really there, but it looks like they are and that’s enough for people.”

She turned to me. “Really? Metaphors?”

“It’s all I’ve got.”

“Sweeney’s dead,” she said. “And it was a shitty way to go.”

“He made his choice. He chose wrong. Unless you think you’d have done any differently if he’d pointed a gun at you.”