Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions - By Neil Gaiman Page 0,71

or I have done before,

And whether I loved her or I killed her, her son was dead as

the gulf.

Rolling, pelt to scales,

her neck between my teeth,

my claws raking her back . . .

Lalalalalala. This is the oldest song.

Later I walked out of the surf.

Roth was waiting in the dawn.

I dropped Grand Al’s head down upon the beach,

fine white sand clung in clumps to the wet eyes.

This was your problem, I told him.

Yeah, he’s dead, I said.

And now? he asked.

Danegeld, I told him.

You think he was working for the Chinks? he asked.

Or the Eurisraeli Mafia? Or who?

He was a neighbor, I said. Wanted you to keep the noise down.

You think? he said.

I know, I told him, looking at the head.

Where did he come from? asked Roth.

I pulled my clothes on, tired from the change.

Meat and chemicals, I whispered.

He knew I lied, but wolves are born to lie.

I sat down on the beach to watch the bay,

stared at the sky as dawn turned into day,

and daydreamed of a day when I might die.

WE CAN GET THEM FOR YOU WHOLESALE

Peter Pinter had never heard of Aristippus of the Cyrenaics, a lesser-known follower of Socrates who maintained that the avoidance of trouble was the highest attainable good; however, he had lived his uneventful life according to this precept. In all respects except one (an inability to pass up a bargain, and which of us is entirely free from that?), he was a very moderate man. He did not go to extremes. His speech was proper and reserved; he rarely overate; he drank enough to be sociable and no more; he was far from rich and in no wise poor. He liked people and people liked him. Bearing all that in mind, would you expect to find him in a lowlife pub on the seamier side of London’s East End, taking out what is colloquially known as a “contract” on someone he hardly knew? You would not. You would not even expect to find him in the pub.

And until a certain Friday afternoon, you would have been right. But the love of a woman can do strange things to a man, even one so colorless as Peter Pinter, and the discovery that Miss Gwendolyn Thorpe, twenty-three years of age, of 9, Oaktree Terrace, Purley, was messing about (as the vulgar would put it) with a smooth young gentleman from the accounting department—after, mark you, she had consented to wear an engagement ring, composed of real ruby chips, nine-carat gold, and something that might well have been a diamond (£37.50) that it had taken Peter almost an entire lunch hour to choose—can do very strange things to a man indeed.

After he made this shocking discovery, Peter spent a sleepless Friday night, tossing and turning with visions of Gwendolyn and Archie Gibbons (the Don Juan of the Clamages accounting department) dancing and swimming before his eyes—performing acts that even Peter, if he were pressed, would have to admit were most improbable. But the bile of jealousy had risen up within him, and by the morning Peter had resolved that his rival should be done away with.

Saturday morning was spent wondering how one contacted an assassin, for, to the best of Peter’s knowledge, none were employed by Clamages (the department store that employed all three of the members of our eternal triangle and, incidentally, furnished the ring), and he was wary of asking anyone outright for fear of attracting attention to himself.

Thus it was that Saturday afternoon found him hunting through the Yellow Pages.

ASSASSINS, he found, was not between ASPHALT CONTRACTORS and ASSESSORS (QUANTITY); KILLERS was not between KENNELS and KINDERGARTENS; MURDERERS was not between MOWERS and MUSEUMS. PEST CONTROL looked promising; however closer investigation of the pest control advertisements showed them to be almost solely concerned with “rats, mice, fleas, cockroaches, rabbits, moles, and rats” (to quote from one that Peter felt was rather hard on rats) and not really what he had in mind. Even so, being of a careful nature, he dutifully inspected the entries in that category, and at the bottom of the second page, in small print, he found a firm that looked promising.

‘Complete discreet disposal of irksome and unwanted mammals, etc.’ went the entry, ‘Ketch, Hare, Burke and Ketch. The Old Firm.’ It went on to give no address, but only a telephone number.

Peter dialed the number, surprising himself by so doing. His heart pounded in his chest, and he tried to look nonchalant. The telephone rang once, twice, three times. Peter