The last time I saw Turner was five years ago, and he was on the floor, where I put him, and he was telling me he’d fix me someday.
Childish, the way he put it really: “I’ll fix you, fucker. I’ll fix you.”
And an hour or so earlier, we’d murdered a man. Or rather I had, with Turner giving me support, supposedly.
But it’s necessary to go back before I first met Turner, before the Broker, even, if you’re to understand any of this. It’s necessary to go back as far as Vietnam, or at least to when I came home from Vietnam.
I found my wife in bed with a guy. It happens. It happens to a lot of people. Some of them maybe even take it well. I didn’t. Not that I did anything rash. I just backed out of the room, apologizing, and returned the next day to the cozy clapboard in La Mirada where the guy, whose name was Williams, was in the driveway, under his sporty little car, the rear wheels jacked up, and he was so busy fixing the car he didn’t have time for me, except to call me a bunghole, so I kicked the jack out.
It killed him. Not immediately, but soon. And my wife divorced me, and I couldn’t have cared less, and lots of people were sympathetic-I wasn’t even brought to trial over it-but a fuck of a lot of good it did me. My life was at a standstill-no wife, nobody else to speak of, no home, no work either. I was qualified to work as a garage mechanic, a skill I picked up as a kid, and also had a two year degree from a junior college that should’ve paved the way for some kind of office work.
But the story had got some play in the papers, and adding that to the bad publicity Vietnam veterans were getting at the time anyway (we were all wild-eyed dopers, in case you forgot) prospective employers weren’t exactly lining up to hire me.
Except for the Broker. He had work for me. He looked me up, a month or more after my marital difficulty hit the papers, found me in a hotel in L.A., a fleabag with hot and cold running whores, one of whom gave me a dose of something worse than anything you could catch in Nam, excluding a bullet of course. Earlier my old man had looked me up, came from Ohio to tell me not, to come home. Said my stepmother had been uncomfortable around me even before I started killing people. I never did ask the old man which killing he meant: the one for revenge, or the dozen for democracy.
Which was part of what the Broker said to me that made so much sense, that night in my dreary paint-peeling hotel room, the glow of neon from outside providing the only light and giving everything a surreal look, including the Broker and his unlined face that could have belonged to a man of thirty, and his white hair/white mustache that could have belonged to a man of sixty. But even in the surreal glow he looked like the successful businessman he was, in his conservative yet stylish suit, and he talked like a politician, slick and eloquent and even seductive, and when he suggested I do in civilian life what I had done not so long ago as a soldier-that is, kill people-it seemed reasonable.
After all, I had killed people overseas for little money, and killed somebody since coming home for no money… why not do it for real money, for a change? And Broker was talking very real money-two thousand and up for a simple hit.
All of which stands as a gross simplification of what the Broker said to me. I have tried on several occasions to record the scene, but have always failed. I have good, almost uncanny recall; I’ve proven that, I think, in the three accounts I wrote previous to this one. But that first meeting with the Broker stays a blur in my mind; the sensations of it, the gist of what was said, that much I can tell you.
And I can tell you also I was an easy sale. Not that I was bloodthirsty or anything: I wasn’t. I’m still not.
But he approached me at a time in my life when I could have gone in about any direction. I had nothing left but the contradictory notion that while life and death are meaningless, survival remains essential. It doesn’t seem to make sense, I know, but it seemed to make sense in Vietnam, which is where I learned it. And it has stayed with me till this day.
The Broker was the middleman between client and killer. He used to describe himself as “sort of an agent,” and it’s a good description of his role. A client would come to him with a problem, and the Broker would come to somebody like me to see to it a means was provided for solving that problem.
Actually, I was part of a team, a two-man team breaking down to active (hitman) and passive (back-up man). I usually played the former role, but not always. For most of the five years I worked through the Broker, I was teamed with a guy named Boyd, who has since been killed. But then so has the Broker.
The first year and a half or so, I filled in here and there, never working with a steady partner. Until Broker teamed me with Turner.