Killers of a Certain Age(71)

Whenever a hit was ordered, a packet would come with the preliminary information put together by Provenance. The packet always looked like something your great-aunt would send, a chatty letter on personalized stationery and a selection of newspaper and magazine clippings, recipe cards, knitting patterns. Every squad of Museum recruits had their own theme devised during training. All communication with us came on notepaper headed with an illustration of a young girl looking over a flock of sheep. It was a play on Constance’s code name of Shepherdess, and the letters were always signed “Aunt Constance” although the actual writing was done by some grunt in Provenance. We ignored the text of the letter and paid attention to the picture at the top. It varied subtly depending on the information it was supposed to convey. The number of sheep told us how many weeks until the hit needed to happen; the direction the shepherdess was facing, the color of the ribbon on her crook—all of them gave us another piece of the puzzle. And every page in the packet added more detail until we knew exactly who we were supposed to kill, complete with suggestions on locations, the subject’s patterns of behavior, personal interests, and obvious vulnerabilities.

Once the packet was decoded, it was up to us to devise the actual plan. We coordinated with Acquisitions for supplies and logistics of carrying it out, and a team from that department was always tasked with getting whatever we needed as well as monitoring for further developments. Initially, our plans had to be approved by the head of the Exhibitions department, but once we’d proven ourselves, we were left on our own to develop our plans, and I had a routine for mine.

The day a packet came, I cleared my schedule. I canceled appointments, rescheduled deadlines for my freelance translating work. Then I settled in with a pack of Eves and the silver lighter my mother had accidentally left behind the day she walked out. Next to the lighter and cigarettes, I would arrange a fresh notebook and a new Ticonderoga, sharpened to a needle point. Then I would pour a glass bottle of Big Red over ice and settle in. The ideas didn’t come until I had sat for a while, smoking and listening to the ice crack, the air smelling of burnt tobacco and the cotton candy tang of the soda. I turned the lighter over in my hand as I thought, wearing down the chunks of turquoise like worry beads.

After the first glass was half-drunk and a couple of butts had been ground into the Bakelite saucer I used for an ashtray, I’d start jotting ideas. Random words at first, questions, possibilities. I didn’t censor this part, just wrote whatever came to me. I would keep at it, smoking and writing and drinking until I had a headache from the Eves and a stomachache from the soda. And the plan would be there, rough, but with all the major parts working. It usually took several more days to finish it off, smoothing out the ragged ends and tucking them in until I had a neat little scheme. It had been my method for forty years and it had never failed me.

But now I didn’t have a Ticonderoga or a pack of Eves, and I sure as hell didn’t have any Big Red. I had a notebook from the pound store with a picture of a basket of puppies on it and a marker that smelled like bubble gum. And I had my lighter. I pulled it out of my pocket and lit one of the god-awful cigarettes left from the brew we’d made for Günther. It was cheap and rough and I coughed until my eyes streamed before stubbing it out on the sole of my boot. I rubbed my thumb over the lighter, noting every lump of turquoise, rubbed smooth from years of handling. It was heavy and not particularly pretty, and I was sure my mother had stolen it from one of the men she referred to as her “boyfriends.” There had been so many of them, all vaguely the same, with flashy cars and unsuspecting wives. She would take up with them for a weekend or a year, however long they managed to convince her that this time she’d met a good man who would really take care of her. She never saw the clues, or maybe she just didn’t want to. She would shake out her blond hair and put on another coat of frosted lipstick and get into yet another Camaro, thinking this time it would be different.

But it never was. She got older but never any smarter, and with age came desperation. She just wanted so badly to be loved, but the love of a child wasn’t enough, wasn’t the right kind of love. So I learned to keep it back, not to burden her with it. She loved me best when I didn’t ask anything of her, so I carried that love alone until the day she up and walked away for good. She left with a man, of course, this one heading for California. He had a paunch and a shirt open to his navel, but he drove a Cadillac and had a plan to make money. The fact that a kid was a dealbreaker didn’t stop her; it probably didn’t even slow her down. She took whatever she could carry that would pawn easily, which is how I know she forgot the lighter. It would have gotten her a few bucks for gas money or a Stuckey’s pecan log.

At first, I hoped she might send for me. I used that lighter on a birthday candle. I didn’t have a cake—Meemaw’s budget didn’t stretch that far and she hadn’t even remembered my birthday. But I found a broken candle from a faded box in the pantry and I lit it with my mother’s lighter, making the same wish I’d made when I’d stolen a rabbit’s foot keychain from the five-and-dime just so I could rub it.

The wish never came true. I used the lighter to burn the postcard she sent from Venice Beach telling me how wonderful it was but how she just couldn’t afford the bus ticket for me to visit. After that I stopped checking the mail and I stopped looking backwards. But I kept the lighter. I used it when I wanted to burn my bridges, torching report cards and disciplinary notes, rejection letters and pink slips. I glued back the turquoises when they fell out and refilled the fluid and kept it polished. I moved a lot during my first years with the Museum. I preferred furnished rentals and kept my possessions light—just a single box of things I could ship easily from place to place. Over the years, the things in the box changed, but the lighter was the constant, the one item I always carried in my pocket. I used it to burn intel and light signal fires and flaming shots when the occasion called for it. It lay on the nightstand the first time I spent the night with Taverner, and I used it to light a cigarette the last time I said good-bye to him, my hand shaking so badly I could hardly get it to catch. It was a talisman of sorts, and it never failed me.