Hardboiled Torpedo

The job was on Tuesday. He took it on Monday. He did not ask whose father, whose brother, whose problem.

He went to the bar that night and drank three. The bartender knew not to talk to him. The bartender knew not to remember him. The bar was on a street nobody in the papers had ever bothered to learn the name of, and that was why he drank there, and why the bartender worked there, and why the man two stools down had been coming in every night for a week and watching the door.

He had noticed the man on the third night. He had not let the man know.

On Tuesday he did the job. The job was in a room above a tailor’s on the east side and it took eleven minutes from the door opening to the door closing, and nine of those eleven minutes were spent waiting, and the other two were the kind of two minutes nobody puts in a story.

On Wednesday he went back to the bar.

“Same,” he said.

The bartender poured. The drink came warm tonight, the way the bartender made it when it was cold outside, with the wine heated low and the bourbon poured in after, and the orange peel torn rather than cut.

“Same as Monday?”

“Same.”

Nothing else was said. Nothing else needed to be.

The man two stools down was there again. He was drinking a beer and reading a paper. The paper was yesterday’s. He knew because he had glanced at the headline on his way in, and the headline was a name he had been paid not to ask about, and the man two stools down was reading the headline very slowly, the way men read when they are not reading.

He drank his drink.

“Cold out,” the man said.

He did not answer.

“They’re saying snow.”

He did not answer.

The bartender put a second drink in front of him without being asked. The bartender put it down between him and the man two stools down, like a man putting a small fence between two dogs.

“You from around here.”

“No.”

“Visiting?”

“Working.”

“What line.”

“The quiet kind.”

The man folded the paper. He folded it carefully, the way a cop folds a paper, or a priest folds a vestment, or a man folds a thing he is going to use later.

“I knew a man in your line.”

“All right.”

“He drank what you’re drinking.”

“A lot of men do.”

“Not the way he did.”

He turned, then. He turned slowly, and he looked at the man, and the man looked back, and for a long second the bar was very quiet, the kind of quiet that gets into the wood and stays there for years after.

“Are you him,” he said, “or are you looking for him.”

“Looking.”

“Why.”

“His daughter. She’s twelve. She wants to know what he was like.”

He looked at the man for a long time. The bourbon was warm in him and the wine was warmer and the orange was somewhere underneath turning, and he thought about the eleven minutes on Tuesday and the nine minutes of waiting and the two minutes that were not in any story.

“He was quiet,” he said. “He drank this. He didn’t talk. Tell her that.”

“That’s all.”

“That’s all there is.”

The man nodded. The man put money on the bar and stood up and put on his coat, and on his way out he laid his hand on the back of the stool, lightly, once, like a man touching the shoulder of someone he is forgiving and not forgiving at once.

He finished his drink. He ordered another.

“Same as Monday,” the bartender said, and it was not a question this time, and he did not answer, and that was the end of it.