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  Mr Wilson’s smile congeals on his face, where it will stay until he decides what to do with it. This is why he liked the little Irishman in the first place, because alongside a cold eye and a steady hand when it comes to a kill, he has a piss-and-vinegar spirit that Mr Wilson finds bracing to be around. And he’s stable, or at least as stable as his chosen profession will allow, the harem of tramps he scampers about with being his sole apparent vice. But Mr Wilson is not going to respond to any ultimatums or threats Charlie makes, partly because he makes them so often they are almost entirely meaningless, but also because he doesn’t want to betray a glimmer of the truth, which is simply that Charlie will not be permitted to walk away from his current employer under any circumstances. Even though each has enough on the other to guarantee Mutually Assured Destruction, and therefore in theory a cold-war degree of trust, the fact is Mr Wilson has no intention of letting Charlie outlive the business they do together.

  Not that this was the business he began with, or the name, for that matter. Mr Wilson isn’t Mr Wilson, and despite appearances, he has never been in the military, and he has tried his hand at a lot of things since he came out of juvie in Racine for that trumped-up rape charge (statutory rape, he’d only been fifteen himself so where was the justice in that?). Racine had confirmed a few things that, up to then, he had always been too drunk or stoned or otherwise distracted to understand about himself:

  That he had little or no empathy for other people;

  That sex was not a compelling impulse for him, except insofar as it could be used to get something;

  That he had the ability to pass for upper-middle class and, back then, the physique to make that count for something;

  That he could read and retain a good deal of information – history, literature, politics – and discuss it as if he knew what he was talking about, as if he were a cultivated, sophisticated man and not an ex-addict runaway without even a high-school diploma in his pocket.

  When he got out, he stayed sober and worked in retail, in a succession of upscale old-style menswear stores, and became acquainted with a handful of wealthy, successful men who were willing to pay for his company after hours, both in bed and out. (He didn’t particularly identify as gay, it was just that the only people who were willing to part with money for sex were men.) The threat of blackmail loomed heavy over these encounters, and Mr Wilson was careful never to appear as if he knew that, or had any intention of acting on it. So far so good, but limited, in its way. Then came the event which defined his life: his parents died unexpectedly, and there was a legacy to be split between him and his elder brother, John. Mr Wilson hadn’t seen his brother since leaving home. When he met him at the funeral, the first thing John did was ask Mr Wilson if he could front him ten grand – there were street guys from Cicero on his tail over gambling debts. Not alone was John a degenerate gambler, he was an alcoholic just like their dear old dad had been, and mom too, for that matter. John had made no legal provision for the future, had no dependents and barely any ties.

  It was clear to Mr Wilson that John was an entirely unsuitable person to be entrusted with the stewardship of so much money (although their parents had raised them in frugal neglect, they had left savings, investments and insurance policies amounting in value to close on nine hundred thousand dollars) and that it would be a better outcome by far if Mr Wilson were to be the sole beneficiary of the estate.

  Mr Wilson was happy to commission the hit. His lack of empathy did not extend to an ability to push a button himself, another lesson learned at his Racine alma mater: identify what those who can protect you, and who can act on your behalf, need, and find a way of supplying it. And the business and political connections he had developed, even if they did know of such an operative, were likely to view inquiries of that nature as impertinent in the extreme. He could always have shopped John to his Cicero creditors, and probably would have, had he not got talking to an arrogant ex-IRA volunteer with pretty-boy looks and the gift of the gab and ice water flowing through his veins one night in the Dark Rosaleen pub. Mr Wilson’s knowledge of military history extended to the war in Ireland, and Charlie T had been so impressed that he started to ignore the lit-up woman in the low-cut dress trying to attract his attention. One thing led to another, and Charlie’s vanity demanded that he allude to, and eventually boast about, the part he had played in the IRA’s glorious fight for Irish freedom. And Mr Wilson saw his opportunity.

  He told Charlie T he was acting for a client (he always told Charlie T that), and that he would be paid twenty thousand dollars if he could do it and make it look like an outfit hit. Charlie T said nothing, so Mr Wilson asked him if there was anything he had in the way of needs or conditions. And Charlie T looked Mr Wilson in the eye.

  ‘Three things,’ he said. ‘No children – I won’t kill them, I won’t hurt them, I won’t have anything to do with them. I’ll kill women, but no sexual assault, no torture, no cruelty. And I won’t kill anyone one in front of a family member: no husbands shot in front of their wives and children, had a belly-full of that. I do a clean job, and I don’t like mess. Right?’

  ‘Do you want to know why you are to kill this man?’

  ‘Twenty grand. That’s why.’

  ‘Really?’ Mr Wilson said. ‘It wouldn’t help to know the guy had it coming?’ (He had fabricated a story in which his brother was a serial child abuser, in case Charlie T had principles.)

  Charlie T shook his head.

  ‘I fight for a cause,’ he said. ‘Once, it was my country’s freedom. Now, it’s my own. All I need to know is that I’m getting paid.’

  Mr Wilson couldn’t help but be impressed. It was as cynical a statement of intent as he’d ever heard, but it was delivered with guts, passion and a kind of idealism Mr Wilson considered utterly American.

  ‘Ten now, ten when the job is done,’ Mr Wilson said.

  Six days later, Mr Wilson took a call from a detective with the Cicero police department to tell him that the body of a man had been found in the street outside Hawthorne Race Course on the south side of town, and that the man had Mr Wilson’s card in his pocket. Mr Wilson drove out to identify the body. As per the contract, he had been shot twice behind the left ear. And on the seventh day, Charlie T arrived to claim the balance of the money.

  ‘Is your client happy?’ Charlie T said.

  ‘He is,’ Mr Wilson said, wondering if Charlie T knew who John was, but somehow understanding that it didn’t matter even if he did. And that was that, as far as Mr Wilson was concerned. He had enough money to buy the apartment on Randolph Street and to deck it out to his satisfaction. He had become who he had decided to be. But the menswear business wasn’t enough any more. None of what had gone before could continue. He needed a change.

  Then one night he was at dinner with Carl Brenner, who ran his own private security firm, Centurion, active in Iraq and Afghanistan, and who had become a friend. Carl ran weekend-long re-enactments of famous military engagements in a dedicated war-games room in his house on North Astor; Mr Wilson had helped to re-fight the battles of Waterloo, Crecy and Gettysburg in recent months.

  With them were a couple of friends, one of whom had recently lost his daughter in a DUI incident. The driver had walked free, and the bereaved father was still reeling, visibly raw with grief and anger and set on revenge. Leaving the restaurant, Mr Wilson made a point of falling into step with the man, and tentatively suggested that something could be done about the situation, for a price. A deal was struck, and Charlie T was hired, and the business was concluded, the drunk driver losing control of his car and crashing into a wall, while drunk. Charlie T was artful, of that there was no doubt. Word filtered back to Carl Brenner, who was at first astonished, then intrigued, and then happy to act as a conduit for business of that kind which his firms couldn’t touch. Soon they had a slow but steady stream of orders.

  Mr Wilson tried to avoid any further work that smacked of organized crime because of the nature of the company they’d b
e keeping, although, as Charlie T said, they were the easiest, because you didn’t have to stage them: two behind the ear was exactly the way you expected those guys to die. And they had handled three killings commissioned by a guy Carl introduced him to who reeked of spook, some murky government agency or other, Mr Wilson was pretty sure of it, and Carl didn’t go to any great lengths to deny it.

  The first thing he had done was increase the price: their going rate now was 100k a hit. That was way over the market odds, but it actually worked as an attraction to high-end clients who were used to getting what they paid for. It was clear what Charlie T got out of it: money, plus a way of using his God-given ability to kill without feeling a thing. But Mr Wilson wondered sometimes what on earth was happening to him. He found the entire experience absolutely exhilarating and all-absorbing. He grew obsessed with murder and violence, albeit at one remove: the timing, the planning, the methods. He liked to hear all about it. He didn’t consider himself a cruel or a sadistic person, but he would like it if Charlie T was willing to employ a broader palate in his work: more frequent use of blades, for example, torture, mutilation, trophy saving and so on. It wasn’t just that higher premiums could be charged for the employment of more inventive methods, there would simply be something more organically, more aesthetically pleasing about it. The work would be better if it was more various, that was how Mr Wilson had expressed it to Charlie T.

  ‘Fine so, do it yourself,’ Charlie had said.

  Mr Wilson nods at Charlie now, neither agreeing nor disagreeing with the rights and wrongs of the evisceration of a dog. Personally, Mr Wilson doesn’t like cruelty to animals, but their client has a lot of money and wants to spend it and was most insistent about the dog, and business has been quiet for a while.

  ‘We can’t terminate an operation in the middle, you know that. We’ve got to play this one through. And we could do with the money. At least, you could. I had to advance you a substantial loan last month, remember?’

  Charlie T grimaces, nods, takes the point. Fucking Mr Wilson, maybe he should never have got himself involved in this, but there’s no drawing back now. Mr Wilson passes four photographs across the table. The first is of a dark-haired man in a gray suit and a long-haired cowboy-looking dude getting into a red Ford Mustang.

  ‘We should have coordinates for these guys shortly. They’re on their way to Chicago. You’ll know as soon as we know.’

  Charlie T doesn’t have to ask how Mr Wilson would know. Between police departments and highway patrols, Mr Wilson has a network of paid informers ever vigilant whenever information on a targetted vehicle is needed.

  The next photo is of two kids, girls of about seven and nine, standing underneath apple trees in what looks like the Brogans’ back garden. Before Charlie can say a word, Mr Wilson piles in.

  ‘It’s just for identification purposes, the picture of the kids. No harm is to come to them. It’s the woman we’re after.’

  Charlie T looks then at a picture of a woman with tattoos, jet black hair and a few leather straps and bands placed at strategic angles in a biker bar, or a strip club, or both, and a second photograph of a blonde woman in heels and a sharply cut business suit.

  ‘It’s the same woman. Donna Brogan. She may not look like that any more. But the children probably do,’ Mr Wilson says.

  Mountain Greenery

  Architecturally it’s not the same kind of house, and there are no apple trees in her backyard, and Lake Wingra was further away than Lake Ripley is, but the essentials are the same: here they are, Donna and Barbara and Irene, having changed into their wetsuits and tramped their way down the hill through the stands of blue beech and sycamore and hung their towels on a hackberry tree. Here they are, squealing with the cold, and splashing to stave it off and, in Barbara’s case, swimming fluently along the shore on a bright October morning with more than a touch of frost in the air, just like Donna used to do when she was their age. And the question she asks herself, not for the first time, is: why do we so often reassemble the elements of our childhoods in our adult lives, even when that childhood was not remotely happy? Why did she choose this house by a lake, isolated on a lonely road, surrounded by trees, as near as dammit a reincarnation of her family home off Arboretum Avenue, when Brad would have bought whatever kind of place, wherever she’d wanted?

  Unfinished business. Not that she hasn’t had enough therapy to last three lifetimes, but there is always more to be dealt with, isn’t there? The past is always waiting for you. Maybe her childhood wasn’t as bad as she thinks. Nothing actually happened. Technically. But maybe it would have, if Danny hadn’t stood up for her. Her little brother, her hero, and how she can never thank him for it. Because they were all pretending it wasn’t happening in the first place, her father staring at her, at her body, buying her clothes, asking her to sit beside him while they watched TV. He even brought his drinking back to a, she was going to say to a normal level, she likes that exotic word, but to a level where he didn’t pass out unconscious on the couch, or stagger when he stood up. Little gifts, little jokes, little ‘don’t tell your mother this’ secrets. At first, she loved it. Because it was normal, she thought. At last, after years of his being this menace in the house, either drunk and belligerent, slapping the shit out of Danny whenever he felt like it, rowing with Mother and making her weep (Jesus, the constant weeping) or hungover and seething with bitterness and disappointment, at them, at himself, at the Way Things Were, here he was at last, when she was fourteen, bit of a Late Developer, a Plain Jane who’d begun to blossom, here he was, snapping his fingers and stroking her cheek, like a Fun Dad on a TV sitcom, corny, sure, but she didn’t care. She had longed for that, the attention, the sense at last that she was special. All she had got from their mom was, well, tenderness, sure, gentleness, but a sense of passivity, of sympathy almost, for her as a girl, but more for herself as a suffering mother, married to this broken-down heap of a man. And however true that was, it shouldn’t be the daughter’s job to commiserate with the mother.

  He’d encourage her to dress up in the clothes he’d bought her, and then he’d take her out, to the movies, for ice cream, and the clothes were kind of grown-up, skirts and blouses like maybe a secretary might wear. She could see her mother looking on in dismay, but she never said anything, never intervened. Her dad took her to Brogan’s, and that was the best, all the bar staff smiling and Daddy winking and everyone saying, ‘Look at you! All grown up! A real little lady!’

  And that’s how she felt, like everyone was watching her, every song was about her. She felt special. But she wasn’t all grown up. She wasn’t a real little lady. And it wasn’t normal. And just as she was starting to figure this out for herself, her little brother stepped in and, well, it wouldn’t be stretching it to say, saved her life. Not that she saw it that way then, or for a long time afterwards: her rage was so unfocused, so scattershot that Danny had to take his unfair share, same as anyone else who came her way.

  It was a weird time for him back then as well. Something had happened with Danny a couple of years before, around the time of the Bradberry fire. He’d been getting bullied, she thinks by one of the Bradberrys, she was in another class and anyway they didn’t hang out together, God forbid, but there was a time at home when Daddy would tell Danny he had to stand up and be a man, no Brogan was raised to be a crybaby, and Danny would tell Daddy he didn’t know what he was talking about, and Daddy would roar, actually roar like a bull, and hit Danny, knock him down. That happened more than once, and Mom intervened then, she heard it a few times but only saw it once, the old man attempting to hit Danny and Mother getting in between them and shielding her son and crying, ‘No! No!’ Pathetic and hilarious, it was like something from a silent movie. All Donna thought, really thought, was She’ll step in for him but not for me.

  Then the Bradberry fire happened and everything seemed to go numb for a while. It was like, after the deaths of the Bradberry children, all the kids in town had a sort of amnesty for
six months or so, you could basically do what you liked and your folks would just shrug and let it go. Not that Donna had the confidence to do anything out of line except pout and sulk and feel sorry for herself. She looks at Barbara now, Donna and Irene on the shore, shivering into their towels, Barbara still in the water, her crawl a thing of beauty to behold, eleven and already a prey to adolescent mood swings, girls mature earlier these days, physically at any rate. Everything Donna suggests, Barbara’s first reaction is ‘No!’ She’s a sweet kid at heart, and can always be talked around, but it sure feels like work. It’s good, though, that she feels entitled to say it. A tribute to her mother, who Donna likes a lot more than she feels comfortably able to express, even if she is a precious princess pain in the ass. Who’s done an amazing job with these two little girls.

  So, what didn’t actually happen was, after weeks of … flirting, Donna thinks it would be correct to call it, one night they are home alone together, Mother is out at the movies, Danny is over at a friend’s house, Donna and Dad, just the two. She gets dressed up in a new dress he bought for her. She puts on make-up. He cooks her dinner, steak, salad, baked potato, the old Brogan’s grillmeister magic, she hadn’t seen that for a long time. He lights candles. He gives her a beer, her first. He talks to her about … well, she doesn’t really remember what he talks to her about, only that he seems very sincere, and a little cross, and he keeps saying, ‘I hope you understand,’ and how one of the finest arts in the world is the art of keeping a secret. What she remembers is how it makes her feel: excited, and special, and scared, because she knows it isn’t quite right. When he gives her a second beer, she says no, because she hasn’t finished the first one, and anyway it’s made her head feel all swirly, and he laughs and says that’s the whole point of beer, to make you feel swirly, don’t lose that swirly feeling, and he kisses her on the lips, a Daddy kiss, except he lingers just a little too long for Daddy, and when he moves his face away, Danny is standing in the doorway, headphones around his neck. Turns out he wasn’t over at a friend’s, he was in his room listening to Pink Floyd. Danny looks at her, and she sees him take in the dress, the make-up, the beer. She wants to explain, but she doesn’t know how. She wants to apologize, but Danny has turned his attention away from her. Daddy is still smiling, the gracious host at whose table everyone is welcome. He offers Danny a beer, invites him to sit and join them. But Donna knows that isn’t going to happen. Donna knows this is all over now. Danny walks up to his father – he’s an inch taller, and filling out to be broader of chest, though he’s not there yet – and he jabs his right index finger in the old man’s face.