His office was a hotel room, and the location of this particular hotel room was of little importance. His office changed every week, and when he moved from one hotel to another, his phone number was placed in the classified section of the New York Times. A customer could always find him.
He was reading. He read a good deal, since there was nothing else to do while he waited for the phone to ring. Most days he spent morning and afternoon reading, and most afternoons and mornings were quite barren of phone calls. At $5000 a killing, he didn’t need too large a volume of business.
This afternoon, however, the phone rang.
He closed his book, walked to the edge of the bed, sat down, and lifted the receiver. “Hello,” he said, in a voice that was as unimpressive as his appearance.
“Hello.” The voice on the other end of the line was a woman’s.
He waited.
“I…” the woman began. “Who is this?”
“Whom do you want?”
The woman hesitated. “Are…are you the man?”
Harry Varden sighed to himself. He despised the hesitation and ineptness on the part of some clients, the clients who wouldn’t open their mouths, the ones who were so terribly unsure of themselves. Professionals were different. Some of his clients, the ones who used him three or four times a year, had no trouble coming to the point at once.
“What man do you want?” he asked.
“The man who…the man with the number in the paper.”
Coward, he thought. Come on and speak your piece. And aloud he said, “Yes, I’m the man.”
“Will you do a job for me?”
Suddenly he was angry. The fee became of little importance now; his whole mind was set on forcing this woman to talk, on opening her up and making her say the words she didn’t want to say.
“Don’t be coy,” he snapped. “What the hell do you want?”
After a long pause, the woman said, “I want you to murder my husband.”
“Why?”
“I…what do you mean?”
“Look,” he said, tiredly, “you want me to kill your husband. I want to know why.”
“But I thought I just told you what you should do and sent you the money and that was all. I mean…”
“I don’t care what you thought. You can open up or find another boy.”
And he hung up.
He waited for the phone to ring again, knowing for certain that it would ring and that this time she would talk. It occurred to him that this was the first time he had acted in such a manner, the first time he had even pretended to care any more about a job than the name and the location of the victim. But there was some familiar whine in the woman’s voice, some peculiar nagging quality that made him think he had heard it before. For some reason he disliked the owner of the voice intensely.
The phone rang, and the woman said at once, “I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”
“Okay. Give me the story.”
She paused for a second and began. “I don’t love my husband,” she said. “I don’t think I ever really loved him, and now there’s somebody else, if you know what I mean. That is, I’ve met this other man and he and I are in love with each other, so naturally…”
Once she got started she didn’t seem able to stop. Harry Varden listened half-heartedly, wondering why in the name of the Lord he had started her going. He couldn’t care less why he was earning his $5000 (which by this time only a strict sense of professionalism kept him from raising to $7500) and he cared even less about the woman’s married life.
But she kept right on. Her husband was dull and boring. He never talked to her, never paid any attention to her, never told her what was on his mind. She didn’t even know for certain where he worked or what he did for a living.
Oh, he was a good provider, but there were more important things in a woman’s life. She needed to feel that she was an important and distinctive woman with an equally important and distinctive man to love her. And her husband was dull and not the least bit important or distinctive or at all interesting, and…
The voice was one he had heard a million times in the past. For a moment it seemed that he had indeed heard this same voice before, but he decided that it was only the routine nature of the sentiments expressed which made the voice