The Beauty of Bucharest Read online

  “Did it? Because it fucking sucked hearing it out loud from you!” Dan said, his voice still quiet but very strained.

  “If you’re just going to be crude, we can eat in silence,” she said, stabbing the fork into the salad with enough force to penetrate the leaves and clink on the bottom of the bowl.

  “How are you able to eat at all, silence or otherwise? Jesus Christ, Cole!”

  “Well, as new and unsettling as this probably is for you—”

  “Probably?”

  “—it’s more or less run of the mill to me.” Dan’s mouth fell open. Nicole looked up from her food. “At least put a bite of sandwich in there and chew. You’re halfway there. Lift the sandwich, put it in your mouth, then close it again.”

  He managed to shut his mouth and give her a bit of what he hoped was a stern frown. In fact, it came across as a prom-night-embarrassed face. She giggled.

  “I’ve never really been honest about Clean Up Crew,” she said after her laugh had caused him to move to another facial expression, which had also failed to convey the proper meaning. “We don’t just clean up after crime scenes.”

  “You cause them, don’t you?” he said, moving to the first phase of actually wrapping his mind around the situation.

  “Well, sort of, yes, though we also often come in to remove them. You know. After.”

  “It’s a pretty shitty way to drum up business for your workers. I would think there were plenty of them already without you adding more.”

  “Not just me.”

  “What?”

  “I’m not the only one ‘adding more.’”

  “Who else?”

  “Pretty much everyone you’ve ever met that I’ve introduced as being part of the company.”

  Dan’s mind exploded yet again. “Everybody?” He began to picture faces. “Brian?”

  Nicole nodded.

  “Dana?”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “Alessandro?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “Yeah, Alessandro, I can believe. He always came across a little murder-y to me. Wait, Gretchen?”

  “No, not Gretchen. She’s a Controller.”

  “A Controller? Like, financially?”

  “No, like making sure everyone gets where they need to be, and that nobody targets the wrong mark.”

  “‘Targets the wrong mark?’ Cole, these are not words that should be coming out of that perfect mouth!”

  Nicole used her perfect mouth to form a perfect smile, and Dan melted inside, though he wasn’t about to let her know. Who am I kidding? he thought. She knows I’m powerless against... that!

  “Not Gertrude!” he said, snapping back to the faces forming in his mind.

  “Gert too.”

  “She’s a hundred!”

  “She’s seventy-two.”

  Dan shook his head. “Never mind that. She’s too old to be... to be... to be what, Cole? A serial killer? Is that what the Crew is? A serial killer corporation?”

  “No, Dan. The Clean Up Crew is an organization of international operatives, working outside the constraints of government oversight, though often within their employ. We do generally clean up the scene, but that’s to remove evidence of our real purpose. The real kind of cleaning up we do involves removing individuals that have run afoul of those who pay the fee we charge them for that privilege.”

  “What, then? Assassins?”

  Nicole’s eyes met his. She said nothing.

  Dan had hoped some sort of rational explanation would help him to quell the typhoon swirling inside his skull, but the more Nicole told him, the harder the storm raged. He took a spoonful of soup without realizing he was doing it. It was cold.

  “Danny, I know this is a lot to take in.”

  The eyebrows flew upwards again.

  “If you keep doing that, they’re going to get stuck in the position, and you’ll be incredulous about everything for the rest of your life.”

  Dan’s anger flared. “This is not J.J. or Tony you’re talking to. Little ‘mom’ sayings aren’t going to make this situation any better... or any easier for me to work through. Cole, can you imagine what I’m thinking? Can you even begin to imagine what I’m going through right now? Was our whole marriage just a sham?”

  “What?” Now it was Nicole’s eyebrows’ turn to fly up. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Well, I mean, what you’re describing to me is a lifestyle that, in the movies at least, often involves some fairly fast and loose morality. Don’t you sometimes have to ‘get close’ to your... what did you call them? Marks?”

  “Sometimes, but I never...”

  “Oh my God! The guy!”

  “What guy?”

  “The guy you were with the first night I saw you. With the wavy black hair and the muscles.”

  Nicole looked down at her salad. “Guillermo,” she said quietly.

  “The night we first talked you told me I wouldn’t have to worry about seeing him again. That was because you...?”

  She continued to look down, but she nodded.

  “Cole! You were doing this when you were 21?”

  “Eighteen,” she said quietly.

  “What?”

  “I started when I was eighteen,” she said, with only marginally more volume.

  “And you’ve been doing it ever since.”

  “No! Not at all. When the kids came along, I stopped.”

  “And when they were teenagers, you asked me for my blessing on you returning to work.”

  “Right.”

  “I gave you my permission to return to killing people.”

  “I didn’t need your permission,” she said coolly.

  “Semantics. The point is you stopped killing when you got pregnant for Jennifer June. And...”

  “A little after.”

  Dan wondered how many times in the course of a single conversation it was possible to have one’s mind completely and utterly destroyed. “What?”

  “I had a couple of jobs that needed completing after I knew I was pregnant for our daughter. But once they were done, yes. Absolutely.”

  “Then when our children were teenagers, you started back. Back to work. At killing.”

  “That’s pretty much right.”

  “And while they were little, you were on the phone with the company a lot too, now that I’m thinking back. Were you... Controlling?”

  “Now and then. Not full-time or anything.”

  “Just a side-line, then?”

  “I needed to keep at least slightly connected.”

  Dan’s mind shifted back to an earlier thought. “So in the three years you did this before we met, and in the last six or so since you went back, you’ve never been with anyone else? I mean, I’m guessing you could say no regardless, because there’s no one alive to contradict you.”

  “Dan, I fell in love with you the night you walked over to my table. If I’m being honest, maybe the week before, when I saw you conducting your meeting.”

  “I never thought you noticed me that night. You seemed pretty enraptured with... Guillermo, was it?”

  “One of the things you have to learn to succeed in this line is the ability to appear focused on one thing while noticing everything else around you. To be frank, you jeopardized that assignment, as I was so not enraptured that I almost missed a hint that he was onto me. He actually almost killed me that night.”

  “I’m glad he didn’t,” Dan said. None of what he was hearing was even remotely all right with him, but he realized that this was still the woman with whom he’d fallen in love. She was still the mother of his children. It was just that now she was those things and a paid killer. With a body still in the trunk of her car.

  “You know, if we’d have put those paint cans in the Mercedes instead of the Lexus, like I’d wanted to, none of this would have happened.”

  She smiled and reached for his hands again. This time, he felt no urge to draw back. “I should have listened to you.”


  “You never do!” he said, surprising himself by laughing.

  They sat quietly for a moment, looking into each other’s eyes. Most of the people who’d been eating when they arrived had been replaced by a new group of diners, who, if they’d been looking in their direction, would have been struck, just as the others had been, by how obviously these two people loved one another.

  “So what do we do now?” Dan asked at length.

  “We go see a friend of mine who owns a wood-chipper.”

  “Oh! Oh, Cole. Gross. That is gross!”

  “I know. But my contact at the crematorium is in Bali this week.”

  “Bali? The money in cremation is that good?”

  Nicole laughed. “He earns a lot of tips on the side.”

  “That’s pretty gross too, Cole,” Dan said. Then he took a bite of his sandwich. The soup was a lost cause, but once he was sure that the roasted turkey, apple, and cheddar was going to stay in his stomach, he managed to eat about half. “I guess we should get going. Your trunk’s going to start to stink pretty soon.”

  3

  The Idea Settles In

  The first five minutes of the drive out of the suburbs and into the country were quiet. Dan felt that he had enough of the details to start attempting to actually process everything he’d just heard, and Nicole felt like letting him do what was the best course of action. She’d lived with the man for twenty years and she knew the way his mind worked. It was a programmer’s mind, first and foremost. Although Dan had eventually grown into the role as boss, his coder’s mind had never been supplanted by that of a business tycoon. So inside his head, it was still a jumble of flowcharts, spreadsheets, and drawings of warrior women with big boobs.

  There was a good deal of this whole scenario that Dan realized he might never be able to work through. The most basic of these was the fact that his wife was even capable of taking another human’s life. She was the kindest, gentlest person he’d ever known. She lost her shit every time she saw a cute baby or a frisky puppy. How did a person like that put a bullet into someone’s head?

  It was in the middle of that thought that Nicole switched on the car’s stereo. As the display screen moved into music mode, she touched an icon marked “Happy Playlist.” True to its name, a second later, the Lexus’ eight concert-hall-quality speakers came alive with the sound of Bobby McFerrin singing “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.”

  Dan felt some sort of comment was required. Clearly his wife had maxed out her ironic twist card for the day. But McFerrin’s sweet voice was soothing, at first, then positively intoxicating. The song was thirty years old now, and Bobby refused to sing it anymore, but Dan still loved it, and before he even realized what was happening, he was singing, “Ain’t got no place to lay your head, somebody came and took your bed. Don’t worry. Be happy.”

  “The clouds look like they might break up, don’t you think?” Nicole asked as they moved further into the rural landscape. He turned to look at her and was captured by the way her large gold hoop earrings lay against the side of her head. He noticed how blue her top was, and how perfectly it matched her eyes. God, he loved her.

  But then he remembered why they were enjoying a pleasant drive through the country. “Yes, a little. Next time they come they’ll bring snow, not rain,” was all he managed by way of reply.

  “They grow good corn out here. We should get some in the summer. Will you grill us a few ears?”

  Dan said yes, but as he was speaking the word, the image of ears no longer connected to heads popped unbidden into his mind. He shook his head to attempt to pry loose the picture.

  Nicole looked at him. “So what is it? Yes or no?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You said yes when I asked about corn, but then shook your head no.”

  “That wasn’t a no. That was me trying to get the image of severed ears out of my head.”

  “Severed ears? Jesus. Why would you be picturing severed ears? That’s a little disturbing, Danny.”

  A single ironic laugh escaped him, then Dan said, “You’re serious. I just can’t reconcile how cavalier you are about this.”

  “Cavalier? I wouldn’t classify being concerned about your envisioning lopped-off ears as cavalier.”

  “No, no, no. That’s just it. You’re so cavalier about being a killer that you don’t even realize that’s what I’m talking about. That’s why I’m picturing ear mutilation. I’m picturing you doing it!”

  “You’re sick.”

  “I’m sick? Cole, for Christ sake!”

  “Listen, first of all, if I have to use a knife, I use it to kill quickly, and, if at all possible, painlessly. I do not torture my marks. I do not cut off their fucking ears, or anything else for that matter... before you even go there.”

  “Well, that’s decent of you.”

  “Save the sarcasm. Here is a reality. The sooner you accept it, the sooner you’re going to be able to begin to deal with this. There are people in the world that need killing. I think you know this, though some false sense of perceived civilization might cause you to deny it.”

  “Different worlds, I guess, Cole. Different views.”

  “Really? You lived in a pretty cutthroat universe yourself for thirty years. The business world is filled with horrible people.”

  Dan wanted to reject this notion outright, but he knew almost instantly he could not. Although he’d run his business with his heart as much as his head, he had encountered plenty of people who, to all appearances, not only didn’t consider heart, but had lacked the organ altogether. He’d seen men ruin lives and laugh about it. More than once, he’d come across people who were genuinely evil. The difference, and he supposed now it was a difference in terms of degree only, was that they used hostile takeovers and offshore outsourcing to do their killing. He’d heard of more than one instance where a former colleague had been ruined by one of these marauders and had taken to the bottle, or even committed suicide. Were the men (and women) who had driven them to do so any different? Charlie Manson wasn’t even in Sharon Tate’s house, but everybody knows he killed her. And more than once, he realized with a chill, he’d thought about the people whose quest for money and power and influence had stolen the life of someone he cared about, that he’d formed, completely and succinctly in his mind, the following thought: “I’d like to kill that bastard.”

  That realization caused him to let out a long, slow sigh.

  “I can’t argue with your basic premise. But what right do you...”

  “Stop. Stop right there. Don’t you dare talk to me about rights. Because I can guarantee you that every single person we’ve cleaned never once gave a single thought to anyone’s rights.”

  “‘Cleaned?’”

  “Sorry, that was probably a little unpalatable for you. If you need me to say ‘killed,’ I’ll say ‘killed.’ We tend to use other terms, and ‘cleaned’ is the most common. But my point is the discussion of rights basically has to be tossed out the window. The people with whom we deal have forfeited their rights.”

  “I don’t know that the judicial system would agree.”

  “Well, our operatives work across several judicial systems, some of which still behead people for stealing a loaf of bread. What about the rights of the starving father who just wanted to feed his wife and children?”

  “Are you telling me that the things you do are in defense of people like that? Faceless, poverty-stricken petty thieves?”

  “The work we do is in defense of anyone, anywhere, at any given time who has no one else to defend them. So yes, that’s pretty much exactly what I’m saying, Daniel.”

  Dan jerked his head toward her. Her use of his full first name indicated annoyance, at best, or full blown anger at worst. Was she pissed at him? Seriously?

  “Gotta tell ya, I’m a little off-put by your tone right now.”

  “I’m getting a little frustrated, Dan. I am not so naive as to believe that the shock of finding out that
your wife kills people has worn off already, but by now, you must be at least beginning to understand that this is not murder most foul. It’s not senseless killing. It’s... well, it’s cleaning. There’s a reason we use that word, and it’s not just so we don’t have to say ‘kill.’ Every time I pull the trigger or insert the blade or whatever, I’ve made the world a little cleaner. I’ve removed a stain.”

  Dan was a long way from believing any of the justifications and rationalizations Nicole was employing, but one thing was certain. She believed every word of it. She honestly felt that what she and the rest of the Clean Up Crew were doing was not only not wrong, it was necessary.

  “That’s Wally’s place up ahead,” Nicole said, pointing to an innocent-looking farm on the left side of the road. Dan could make out a large red barn and a windmill, and, as they got closer, a two-story farmhouse, painted a pleasant shade of what the Crayola box called “cornflower.” As they pulled through the opening in the fence and down the long driveway, he also saw a large commercial wood-chipper, and he swallowed hard. Nicole drove the car toward it, and Dan could see that it was butted up against the perimeter fence of a pigpen, and that the exit chute was pointed toward a feed trough. A milling group of pigs seemed to become excited as the Lexus neared. She turned the car so that the trunk faced the business end of the chipper and put it in park.

  From the front door of the farmhouse, a man emerged. He had a massive full beard, wearing the mandatory uniform of bib overalls and a flannel shirt, as well as a well-caked pair of work boots, and he waved and smiled warmly at Nicole. Dan was impressed both by the beard and the overall density of the fellow. He stood about six-three and might have been that thick as well.

  “Hello, ma’am!” he said.

  “Polite fellow, isn’t he?” Dan whispered, coming alongside his wife.

  “Wally, this is my husband, Dan.”

  Wally’s face looked surprised for an instant and then reverted to genial and welcoming. “Hey there, Dan. I’ve heard a lot about you, sir!”

  Wally offered his hand and Dan shook it. It was rough and calloused. Nicole tossed Wally the Lexus keys. “Darlene just pulled a tray of cherry tarts from the oven, and I made coffee ‘fore I came out. Go on ahead in. I’ll be there presently.”