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Tom has got used to living on his own lately, so that's probably why he doesn't expect any signs of someone being in his house and doesn't recognize them until he enters his living room and comes across the most obvious one: there is a woman standing next to the window. She is young and blonde and has her hair impeccably tied up. She is fully dressed in black and doesn't bat an eyelid when she sees him. She says nothing at first, either. He raises his eyebrows, leaves his phone and keys by the door and greets her, in an almost interrogative way.
"Hello."
"You must be Mr. Wambsgans" she answers. She has an Eastern european accent and she knows his name. Tom thinks she must be someone from the housekeeping service, although they rarely stay until this late.
"Yes." He walks toward the middle of the room, loosening his tie. The girl doesn't take her eyes from him. "It's a bit late, is something wrong? Is Mondale OK?"
"Who's Mondale?"
"My dog. He must be in the other room…"
"Shit."
It makes Tom annoyed. Not so much the interruption, but her despise to Mondale. He is about to tell her that, if she has a problem working in houses where there are pets, she should look for another job. But instead, he just says:
"What?"
"It's going to be harder to kill a man who cares about his dog."
The woman says that in complete seriousness, not moving a muscle in her face. Nevertheless, he decides it has to be a joke. Or he didn't understand well, or who knows. His smile freezes in the middle of his face.
"Excuse me, what?"
She then casually moves her hand towards her hip, when moves her hand towards her hip, where a suspicious bump can be seen, and at this point, if it’s a joke, Tom would rather not know. He turns around to run for his phone, to call the police or security in the building, but as quick as he tries to be, she is quicker. She tackles him to the ground and before he realizes, she has already tied his hands behind his back with a zip tie.
“There’s no point shouting, I’ve tried before. These apartments have the best sound insulation system I’ve ever seen. Damn rich people, right?” she goes on, seemingly very comfortable sitting on his lumbar area. “So you’re going to behave, right? Like a good boy.”
So this is the end, he thinks, and it seems false, as paranoid as he has been for the last year, not to ever have thought of this. He had been more focused on jail or social death, but he shouldn’t have discarded being found dead in strange circumstances in his apartment, especially now that things were starting to look up. No good deed goes unpunished. No bad ones, either, obviously.
“Listen” he tries, anyway. “I have nothing of value here. Almost nothing. A couple paintings. There is also a watch in the bedroom but I was planning to give it as a present and I’d prefer that…”
“I don’t want to steal from you” she cuts him off, as if she were offended by him even thinking about that. The weight on his back is lifted, and from the floor, Tom follows her boots walking along him, until she stops opposite him and squats to look at him. “I said it before. I’ve been sent to kill you.”
“By whom?” Tom ends up screaming, mostly out of disbelief and panic and not so much hope of being rescued.
“Can’t you really think of anyone? Think.”
With the index in her free hand, she taps his forehead twice. And of course he can think of someone, but he never thought he would cross those limits. He doesn’t know why he’s surprised. He hid documents about Waystar commiting all kinds of felonies himself, murder was just the next step. And Shiv has always been just like her father.
He never wanted to hurt her. Well, maybe yes, but not so much, not like this. Not until having to assume this kind of consequences. He understands the divorce hurt her, the betrayal, but she had done the same thing, putting him behind her own benefit, many times. As bad as that could have been, it seems surreal that it is the reason he’s ended up lying face down on the carpet in his new living room, with a contract killer aiming at his head. Maybe that is why he is not as scared as one could expect. He is too dumbfounded to have space for other feelings.
She is waiting for him to answer, apparently. The next thing that taps his face if the barrel of the gun, the same way a child pokes a dead animal with a stick to see if it reacts.
“I guess… I guess I might have an idea. But this seems a little over the top” he stutters.
He tries to meet her gaze, a bit of empathy, even if she is probably a psychopath and he is not going to get anything anyway. Then she frowns, and that sign of recognition makes him hopeful. Or terrified. Or both.
“I saw you on TV” she tells him. “In that congress thing. Pitiful.”
Tom doesn’t know if what she found pitiful was that circus or himself, but he is in no situation to get offended or at least doing anything about it. He does feel a wave of rage, unexpected even for him.
“I did that for her, for her family. I even offered to go to jail and the only thing she can think of doing is sending someone to kill me.”
Speaking of thinking, she never even thought of thanking him. Logan did, which is the most ironic of it all, but he already had time to digest that. He’s more or less at peace with himself and the decision he made.
He flinches when the girl picks him from under his arms and lifts him with a moan, but not so much effort, and then leaves him sitting on the floor, his back against the sofa, which makes him confused. She doesn’t untie him, but the idea of her putting a bullet in the back of his head fades a little.
“Gossip says you’re doing her cousin. That’s dirty” she judges him.
“I’m not doing him. I…”
“I know, I know. I’m not doing him, it’s love.”
She rolls her eyes when saying it, and that stings Tom. He couldn’t say it is love, he has never called it that way so far, but it is definitely something. It is something more than the purely physical, more than the way he held onto him that first night in Italy, when he came back to the villa not knowing if he had made the best decision in his life or he was unknowingly walking towards a cliff. It is something more than the kisses and everything else that happens behind the doors of locked offices, more than going out with him, the confessions and the innuendo he did “as a joke”. It has to be, or else his first thought when the woman mentioned him, wouldn’t have been that fortunately, he wasn’t at the apartment that night. That he was safe.
“It’s not funny” he retorts, serious.
“Of course not. Love is very inconvenient.”
It sounds like she knows what she is talking about, which coming from a psychopath, it’s at least unexpected.
“I fell in love with the wrong person too. And I was almost killed because of that, too. Well, I don’t know if it was because of that, but it certainly didn’t help.” The girl shifts her position, sitting cross-legged on the rug opposite him. Tom feels a sting of horror. She reminds him of a cat. One that plays with its prey before eating it. “You remind me of her.”
“Ah.”
He makes that appreciative sound because he believes she is expecting an answer, but he really doesn’t know how to take it, if the story follows with that her being dead o where the fuck she wants to get to. The woman has stood up in the meantime, and is taking a look at the bookcase in the opposite wall.
“Yeah, you remind me of her. The denial. The Romans, the fables. She’s onto all that too”.
“The… fables?”
“Those stories with animals and a moral. The scorpion and the frog. All of that. This.” She triumphantly takes a book out of its shelf and shows it to him. “Aesop.”
“He was Greek” Tom corrects, and he instantly bites his tongue. Bad idea, replying someone who has you tied and at gunpoint.
“Yes, that’s just what she would say.”
She flips through the pages with interest, frowning. Tom gets again overwhelmed by the idea that this can’t be real. He will wake up in his bed any moment, and this will be the sign to start therapy. He also thinks it would be wise to find a way to escape, but he has no idea how to start.
“Did you tell these stories to her?” The woman looks up to ask, suddenly, and in the middle of the dead silence of the room, that scares him to death.
“To… Siobhan?” What in the world does this mean now, please. She nods, shrugs, and he doesn’t know why he tells her (maybe because it doesn’t feel right to ignore the woman who has come to kill him, even if it’s absurd. He doesn’t need to behave if she is going to kill him anyway) but he does. “No… she wasn’t usually keen on this kind of things.”
“And the cousin?
“Yes. Yes, I’ve done it a few times.” Disguising as metaphors what he couldn’t say any other way. Greg didn’t really seem to get it, but retrospectively, Tom doesn’t blame him.
“Does he like them?”
“I don’t know. I never asked.”
“You should.”
It’s difficult to say what upsets him the most, where the advice comes from or thinking that she is right after all. He doesn’t really ask Greg about things. He suggests them and Greg says yes, but he never really knows if he does them because he wants to or not. He wants to believe he does, of course. To make the biggest step until now, to sign that deal with the devil, he asked him. That must count for something.
“He always listens. It’s easy to talk to him” Tom finishes, in a way that even to him, sounds like an excuse.
But it feels good saying it, even as a last confession. It feels good being able to express out loud that he feels fine with Greg, that he feels better, how important Greg is to him. Even if it is Tom himself who insists on keeping it secret for the moment, because of different reasons (Logan finding out and taking away their privileges, to begin with), he starts to need not hiding all the time. And he understands that Greg is tired of that. Sometimes he feels bad when he thinks of the mess he has dragged him to, but what else could he do?
“I’ve seen you two together, these days. You know, while I researched” she intervenes. “You’re cute.”
Coming from someone who has come to off him for that reason among others, Tom finds that observation surprisingly tender.
“Thanks.”
And then the thought overcomes him, or comes back, and even if he knows it’s probably ridiculous to ask, he does it anyway.
“Whatever you’re going to do to me… you’re not going to do to him, right?”
At the beginning, he had considered Greg more like a collateral victim, but now something, the mention of research perhaps, has opened his eyes to the possibility and apart from terrifying (even if he hasn’t completely come to terms with the idea of his imminent death, the gun being real, the next tap being a bullet), it feels unfair. Because he may deserve it, OK, he has betrayed and crossed limits to get God knows what. But Greg? Greg has done nothing wrong, not intentionally, at least, and everything wrong he might have done came from Tom’s hand. He would hate being the one to get him killed. It would be such a cliché, the moral at the end of a fable, yes, but a bad one. Apart from unbearable.
“None of this was his idea” he argues. If he had been able to do this before the congress, the girl wouldn’t have called him pitiful a while ago. “In Italy… he didn’t even know what I was doing. I didn’t even tell him… until later.”
That surprises the woman, which surprises Tom more still. She raises her eyebrows in admiration and says:
“He followed you blindly.”
“Yes.”
“So he loves you too.”
Tom doesn’t know what to say to that. He would like to be able to say for sure that Greg does, but first, he’s had enough disappointment so far to know better than to take love for granted, and second, he doesn’t believe he is the one to say that. They have never said those words to each other yet. Not that Tom made it easy, anyway.
“You know?” Bored of waiting for an answer, the woman changes the topic. “I also dragged my wife to do things she didn’t want to.”
“Oh.” Tom replies in a panic reflex. Irony, too. Even killers for hire have a more successful married life than him.
“I wanted to see how it was taking her to the dark side. And then it was me who wanted out of the dark side, but that’s another story. And in my defense, she stabbed me first” she goes on, and Tom tries not to look too scandalised in case she gets offended. “Although I tried to kill her then. Anyway, the thing is… Tom Wambsgans, I may not like guys like you, but I get where you’re coming from.”
And before he can get his hopes up, but not so soon that he can’t get the idea of being spared, she goes up to him and puts her gun against his forehead.
“Such a pity I have to kill you all the same.”
As he feels the cold metal against his skin, Tom believes his heart has stopped, and for a moment he thinks it would be much more dignified dying of a heart attack than with his brains scattered through the carpet. It would be like leaving in time, a you don’t fire me, I quit. He thinks of the farce the Roys will have to make before the press when they ask them about his death in strange circumstances. Of his parents, who don’t know half the story and will definitely freak out, but who will get used to his absence pretty quickly since he hardly saw them anymore. Of Greg, the time stolen from them and his chance of doing things better. Will he miss him? For a while yes, he imagines, and then he will probably start over. He never made any promises, they never dated properly, and now it’s a bit late. He hopes Greg takes care of Mondale, at least. They get on well.
He had never thought of dying young. There is not even a history of bad illness in his family. When he first arrived in New York he feared assault in bad neighbourhoods for a while, but that ended when he started moving in places where no one walked anywhere or even drove. He has never taken enough drugs to overdose. He has always been careful, he wanted to live. And when he finally got the life he wanted, this happens. The kind of ridiculous thing that would only happen to him.
“Do you have any last words, Tom Wambsgans?” she presses.
“I… I don’t know!”
“Why, are you nervous?”
“What do you think?” he says back, in the same tone, close to shouting. That seems to encourage her, because she keeps screaming.
“Are you afraid?”
“Yes!”
“Then my job here is done.”
Her voice is completely calm, for the last sentence, and as Tom has his eyes closed, he doesn’t feel that she is moving back until he stops feeling the gun on his face. He manages to crack them open at the same time as her, with incredible ease, turns him around and unties his hands. Had he been a little more lucid, he would have taken advantage of that to take her gun or something, to call the police. But he is so confused (and relieved) he only says:
“What?”
“I told you. I wanted out of the dark side. I don’t kill anymore.”
She puts her gun back slowly, like someone picking their things up after work. Tom is sweating under his shirt and about to cry, and he doesn’t know whether to strangle the girl or thank her.
“I have to go. My wife is waiting” she announces. “But I want you to promise me something, Tom Wambsgans.”
Tom could refuse now that she is not going to kill him, but in spite of that, he nods.
“Stop telling the cousin those stories, all right? And tell him you love him.”
They glance at each other, and he says nothing (his voice wouldn’t come out if he wanted), but that is enough for her. The woman leaves and closes the door behind her. Tom blinks, and if he couldn’t see the broken zip tie on the floor and the mark of her boots on the rug, he would believe he hallucinated it.
The noise of the door closing seems to alert Mondale, or the fact that there are no more strangers in the house (he was never much of a watchdog, poor thing), because he trots into the living room, gets to Tom, understands that the fact that he is sitting on the floor must be they are going to play, and licks his hand. Tom pets him, distracted, his eyes still wide open. Then he stands slowly and walks to the door to get his phone. There are several messages he ignores, opens the app to make a call and taps the last one right away.
He waits for two tones. At the third, he hears Greg’s voice at the other side.
“Tom? Hey. I’ve been trying to reach you for a while, I’ve left you like, two hundred messages. I just finished that pain in the ass for Mattson and I was going to bring you dinner, but I wanted to know if you want pizza or something from that sushi place…”
Tom doesn’t listen to the end of the sentence. Instead, he takes a deep breath and savours those three words, preparing them.
He has a promise to keep.