through the mist of clouds to the blue sky. I fussed with the flowers. I loved the fragrance of them. I breathed it in and some faint memory came back to me, of some quiet and lovely place where the scent of flowers had been the very air. Where was that? Does it matter?
And all the while the door to the veranda stood gaping and there came the fresh breeze. Anybody walking by could see the bed and the dome, but not him, and not me.
I moved swiftly behind his chair, and I pumped thirty units of the deadly stuff into his neck.
Without looking up, he reached for the spot, as if batting away an insect, which is almost always what they all do, and then I said, slipping the syringe in my pocket:
"Sir, you wouldn't have a tip for a poor delivery boy, would you?"
He turned. I was looming over him, smelling of peat moss and cigarettes.
His ice-cold eyes fixed me with fury. And then suddenly his face began to change. His left hand fell away from the computer keyboard, and with the right he groped for the earpiece. It fell out. He let that hand drop too. The phone slipped off the desk, as his left hand slipped to his leg. His face was slack and soft and all the belligerence went out of him. He sucked in his breath and tried to steady himself with his right hand but couldn't find the edge of the desk. Then he managed to raise his hand towards me.
Quickly I took off the garden gloves. He didn't notice. He couldn't be noticing much of anything.
He tried to stand but couldn't.
"Help me," he whispered.
"Yes, sir," I said. "You just sit right here till it passes."
Then with my plastic-gloved hands, I shut his computer, and I turned him back in the chair so that he fell silently forward on the desk.
"Yes," he said in English. "Yes."
"You aren't well, sir," I said. "You want me to call for a doctor?"
I looked up and out at the empty veranda. We were right opposite the black iron table, and I noticed for the first time that the Tuscan pots overflowing with lavender geraniums had tall hibiscus trees in them as well. The sun was beautiful there.
He was trying to catch his breath.
As I said, I detest cruelty. I picked up the landline phone beside him, and without punching for a dial tone I spoke to the empty receiver. We needed a doctor right away.
His head was to the side. I saw his eyes close. I think he tried to speak again but he couldn't manage a word.
"They're coming, sir," I told him.
I might have left then, but as I said, I detest cruelty in any form.
By this time, he wasn't seeing anything too clearly. Perhaps he was seeing nothing at all. But I remembered that bit of information they always give you in the hospital that "the hearing is the last thing to go."
They'd told me that when my grandmother was dying, and I'd wanted to watch the television in the room, and my mother had been sobbing.
Finally he closed his eyes. I was surprised he was able to do it. First they were half shut, then shut altogether. His neck was a mass of wrinkles. I couldn't see any breath coming from him, or see the slightest rise or fall to his frame. I looked beyond him, through the white curtains, at the veranda again. At the black table, among the Tuscan potted flowers, a man had taken his place and appeared to be staring at us.
I knew that he couldn't penetrate the curtains from that distance. All he could see was the whiteness, and perhaps a veiled shape. I didn't care.
I needed only a few more moments, and then I could safely leave with the knowledge that the job was complete.
I didn't touch the phones or the computers, but I made a mental inventory of what was there. Two cell phones on the desk just as The Boss had indicated. One dead phone on the floor. There had been phones in the bathroom. And there was another computer, the lady's perhaps, unopened on the table before the fireplace, between the wing chairs.
I was merely giving the man time to die as I noted this, but the longer I remained in the room, the worse I began to feel. I wasn't shaky, merely miserable.
The stranger on the veranda didn't bother me. Let him stare. Let