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Shere Khan kept his two favorite books on his nightstand.
The second most-read was Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. He’d had it since he was a young man, and he had read it through roughly a hundred times. Shere Khan treated it a bit like a prayer book, reading one maxim a day as a routine, more if his heart was in need of soothing.
The other was the 1922 Emily Post’s Etiquette. He owned more modern editions--he’d bought each one as it came out and read it cover to cover--but this was the heirloom his mother had given him as a boy, and it was quite special to him.
His mother had been a creature of fine furs and pearls, her perfect makeup and beautiful dresses belying the rather hard-scrabble existence he’d not known for much of his childhood that they’d been leading. His father had long-since run off, abandoning his very English wife and child in India and scarpering for parts unknown. Alone, penniless, and with a young boy to take care of, his mother had fallen back on her exquisite breeding and had done the best she could to employ herself in a way suited to the station of their blood. She had her trappings and clung to them, repaired them herself, when she couldn’t acquire new ones. She was a socialite at heart, and she attended an enormous number of parties.
He could imagine her now, all these years hence, as he had sat on her bed, watching her put on her makeup.
“Mother is going out for a little while, my son,” his mother had said, carefully tracing lipstick onto her pretty mouth. His mother had always been a little formal when addressing him. The other children had had mothers like Ms. Kala, who called her boy Bagheera ‘darling,’ or Mrs. Sangita, who had run through his six brothers’ names before settling on calling Baloo ‘you.’ “Play with the neighborhood boys, but not too familiarly. Do you understand?”
He had. She hadn’t wanted him to lack for entertainment while she was busy, but she had not wanted him consorting with the rabble more than he had to. It had been acceptable entertainment, but even at that age, he’d known he was of a superior breed.
He’d loved his mother dearly. As a boy, he’d craved nothing as much as the cool, smug smile of satisfaction on her face. She had not been a cuddly woman, but she had been loving in her way. She had been more preoccupied with teaching her child how to do very well for himself than she was with coddling him. She had been beautiful, she had been powerful, she had had every situation under control.
He had wanted those genes to carry over. He had wanted to be like her.
Shere Khan had practiced being like her with the other children. He’d always stood a little apart from them, and had kept himself standing tall, and he had never said anything he hadn’t carefully thought over. He had watched them and learned things about them, things that no one else noticed, because they hadn’t been looking. He hadn’t laughed or smiled like they did--instead, he had had his own cool, smug smile that he tried out in front of the mirror.
He hadn’t ever talked about what his mother did to make money. He’d been ten before he’d known for sure. He’d had his suspicions, but he’d been slightly off the mark. The truth had been a beautiful one.
One night, she’d come home with her ermine coat stained. He’d come down to the kitchen for a glass of water and had found his mother looking at it as it lay spread on the kitchen table.
In her long red dress, she had looked beautiful and glimmering. But the best part of the outfit had been the pistols strapped to her waist, and the dagger he had seen through the slit in the skirt. He’d stared and stared at the beautiful metal tools, transfixed.
He’d never wanted to touch something so much.
“Mother?”
“You should be in bed, my son,” she’d said, sighing as she’d pet the dark, brownish stain. He’d wandered over to take a look.
“I’m sorry about your coat. What happened to it?”
“It is a blood stain,” she’d replied. Shere Khan remembered the look in her eyes as she’d gazed down at him, contemplating whether or not she’d tell him. “Do you know what I do for money, my son?”
“No.”
She’d smiled thinly. “You should probably know, but you must never, ever tell. Do you understand?”
He had understood. They had been the only people they had in the world, and it had been only fair that they had their own, special, you-and-me secrets. No one would ever pull anything from him that he didn’t want to say.
“I promise.”
She’d killed people. People had contacted her through other people, and had set up a time and a place for a consultation. Then she had met her mark, usually at a party, or sometimes she’d just shadow them until she got a good, open shot. She had provided a unique service, and she was paid handsomely for it. That was how they had been surviving.
“Are you afraid?” she’d asked, although she must’ve seen in his face how he was not.
“No, Mother. Not at all.”
She’d graced him with her smile and touched him lightly on the head. She’d let him take one of the pistols and hold it.
It had been the perfect weight, the perfect fit, in his hand. He’d wanted to fire it, to feel death shooting from his hands.
He had known she would be cross if he pulled the trigger, but it had been so hard not to.
Eventually, she’d taken it away, and it had felt like he’d had a limb amputated. Shere Khan had never known how perfectly it made sense, that the end of his arm had needed something deadly, and now that it had been taken, he couldn’t imagine how he’d ever been so confused as to think he was whole.
“When you are older, and if you show me you will be ready, I will teach you how to use it,” she had promised. “I will teach you how to do what I do.”
The next years of his life he had devoted to proving that he would be ready. He’d wanted the gun. He’d wanted to be like her.
She had told him something, once, that he firmly believed was true. She had given him Etiquette and had sat with him on the bed, the night before he went to boarding school. It was the best boarding school he could possibly attend, and would gain him a baccalaureate at a much younger age than most other people. It would free up his later years to learn from her. He had not wanted to leave her, but he had known that she wouldn’t be sending him away if it weren’t to make him better, more ready for learning about the guns.
“There are two things in this world that you need, my son,” she’d said. “Two things that will give you an advantage and ensure that you keep it. You need charm and a good education. I have endowed you with one, and we will acquire the other.”
It had turned out that education, in particular, covered a broad range.
Boarding school had been like another reality. He had been a little sorry to lose the friends he’d had at home, but the need for academic perfection had obliterated his finer concerns rather quickly. He’d always been smarter than other children, certainly, but his professors had seemed to take that as a challenge to try to make him lose his footing, to expose his ignorance. Shere Khan had never liked losing, so he had consistently risen to the occasion and slammed their expectations into the wall. He had maintained a wide margin above the other students as head of his class, and by his own merits. He hadn’t needed to use other people to be superior--he had always considered cheaters to be the worst kind of weaklings.
He had read the classics and debated them, he had ordered his mind to excel in mathematics and the sciences, and he had developed a passable ability to wield pencil and pastel. He had exercised his body, playing cricket and rugby and showing a certain ability in boxing. He had discovered Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, Hobbes.
In addition to scholastics, he’d been rigorously trained in etiquette. His book had proved indispensable in that regard. Day in and day out, his walk, his dress, his voice, his table manners, his gestures, his diction, his pronunciation, his tact, his expressions, every single sensible thing about him had been ruthlessly critiqued. He had learned, very quickly, how to be perfect. He had loved his etiquette classes. It taught people to love him, or at least how he presented himself, and that made them want to obey him. He loved it when people obeyed. One of his truest talents had shown there, and during his tenure at school, he had even served as an etiquette tutor.
He also discovered young men.
Women had just...lacked a certain appeal. His boarding school had been entirely male, but every now and then there had been mixers with the local girls’ school. On very rare occasion, he had found someone with whom he could hold a conversation, and after a fashion, whose company he could enjoy, but there had just been something about their figures that just did not pique his interest.
Young men, however. Now, there had been something particularly interesting about them. Not all of them, of course--they had been very like most young women in that way, subject to the same particular failings. But he’d liked the body and the general disposition so much more. He had entertained himself in his rather limited spare time with the thinner, sneakier specimens. He had had a feeling that he would’ve liked them more if they were smarter, or if they’d been more amusing in conversation.
Conversation had been his chief delight. He’d exercised his mind and his body constantly, but had experienced a distinct and unpleasant detachment from all that he was doing. His heart hadn’t been in it. It had only been when he was engaged in debate, or even in a truly superb casual conversation, that he’d felt wholly engaged.
Shere Khan had not had many truly superb conversations. He’d been lucky if he got one decent conversation a month. He’d learned how to say all the little, boring, meaningless, appropriate things and focus his attention on worthier pursuits.
So he’d passed through school and received his degree. He had more or less acquired a bachelor of arts degree by the time he was eighteen. He had returned home much improved than how he’d left, reconnected with a few old friends, considered his next move.
His mother had been well-pleased with his transformation. Over tea, she’d given him an approving look. “Do you know why you learned all that?”
“I confess that I am not entirely sure, although I have certainly found it to be very useful indeed,” he’d admitted.
“It laid a solid foundation. Now, I will teach you the finer points of getting what you want. It is an interesting fact that people do not want to keep secrets from you,” his mother had said. “They want to tell you things, to help you, to obey you. You only need to know how to ask.”
His mother had been the very best at asking. He had been old enough and had at last proved himself ready. The first thing she’d taught him to do was to interrogate: with smiles, and courtesy, and gentility, and a knife pointed at the juicier veins in the neck. She’d taken him out and given him a pistol and taught him to shoot to wound, and to shoot to kill. She’d taught him how to charm a room and terrify an enemy with the same words, same gestures.
She’d even taken him out into her world, a glittering whirlwind of scandal and hatred covered with a shallow sprinkling of decency. There had been an interesting underbelly to that world. Shere Khan had found out, though it had never occurred to him before, that she didn’t always have a fête to attend. Some nights, she had watched her mark in his or her home from the rooftops adjacent, waiting with binoculars and a long-distance rifle for her clear chance, her furs around her shoulders to keep warm.
One night, she had kept the party busy as he lured off their mark. Killing a man had been so...boring, really. He’d taken the man--an adulterer, whom his angry, wealthy wife had hired them to dispose of--off to the side, in the gardens to discuss the man’s business interests.
He’d shot him through the heart, watched dispassionately as he fell. He’d undone the silencer and put the gun into his holster, shoving the man behind a hedge.
He’d been so quick and the man had died like a puppy. For some reason, he’d always expected rather more out of this.
His mother had been pleased, though. As a first-blood present, she’d bought him a very nice rifle. Together, they cut a swath, a mother-and-son team devoted to assassination and excellent manners.
He had shone.
And he had been unsatisfied. Killing rich people in genteel settings had been so tedious, when they were all dressed in suits and exercising their ability to be pettily vile. There had been no challenge, really. He had been rather disappointed.
There had been something missing, and he had found it when his mother suggested that he refine his shooting skills by going on a hunt. It had been decent recreation for a young man of means--he would find it educational.
He’d waited in the jungle, a dangerous task for a man as unversed in hunting as he was. There he’d been, crouched in the underbrush, suffocated by sweltering, humid greenery. He had heard the birds around him--every now and then he caught the outlines of monkeys in the trees. Shooting them had held no appeal.
He’d sat there, silent, wrapped up in thoughts of blood and the disappointing prospect of spending the rest of his life killing boring, weak people, when a tiger had strolled by.
He had not been anticipating a tiger. It had been the most beautiful creature he’d ever seen--once before he’d seen a tiger coat wrapped around a woman, but it had been flashy and ostentatious and tasteless. This creature, with its bones and muscles shifting underneath its gorgeous skin, had been perfection incarnate.
It had let out a low growl, scenting the air. It had to have smelled him. If he didn’t shoot it right, he would be dead. He had imagined that big, beautiful cat feasting on his entrails. If it had spotted him, he wouldn’t have much of a chance.
He had cocked the gun as silently as he could and took aim.
There had been a moment’s indecision. He could have shot it through the head, made it quick, displayed his markman’s talent. He had spent enough time on the range and on rooftops to perfect his sniping skills. It would be the time to demonstrate them.
The tiger had turned its head and looked where he crouched. The growl had grown louder as the cat leapt at him.
He had shot it in the stomach, rolling out of the path of the body and claws in the same instant. The tiger had hit the ground heavily, letting out its characteristic scream--he had leapt to his feet and shot it in the back, paralyzing it. He had been a little surprised at himself--it had been deliberate, for by then he was too well-trained not to be in complete control of his movements. The initial headshot would’ve been so much cleaner.
He had come over to watch the tiger as it panted out its life. Its eyes had rolled wildly in its head, unable even to scream now.
He’d crouched down, getting closer. The smell of blood had been thick in the air. He had breathed deeply, feeling a tingle race down his spine. It had been delicious.
The tiger had almost seemed to focus on him as it breathed its last. He had thought its gaze was angry, thought he could see the despairing need for vengeance in its eyes.
Probably he’d imagined it.
It hadn’t really mattered. He’d sat there, staring at the body and relishing the moment. He’d dipped his fingers in the blood that pooled on the jungle floor, raising it to his lips to taste.
Sublime. The perfect moment. The perfect experience.
He’d got out his knife and skinned the beast. The part of the pelt necessarily had bullet-holes, but he’d brought home a scrap as a trophy.
“You know,” Shere Khan had told his mother later, as she petted the fur, “I don’t really think assassination is really quite the line of work for me. Perhaps a career in hunting would be something to look into.”
His mother had shrugged. “You always were fond of the outdoors,” she’d agreed.
The next day he’d begun offering hunting expeditions into the interior. Ostensibly it had been a little illegal, but so was arranging to murder people. He had had experience in the illegal line of work.
He had taken commissions alone to bring back animals and furs, and had even led people on treks through the jungle, occasionally bringing down entire elephants. Sure, he did have a high body count that way...he’d had his share of fat, stupid tourists who’d been on English foxhunts and had thought themselves equally to an Indian hunt.
They had soon learned that they were wrong. He had done nothing in particular to warn them of their fatal follies.
He had also been hired out as a hunter of men. He had found himself halfway in his old job, but he had rather liked it more, now that he thought of men as prey and not simply obstacles. It had taken him out of the country rather a lot, however--he’d needed to travel for work, to track down his quarry. Shere Khan had liked it best when he could kill on his home soil, especially killing wild things. But people had been willing to pay a great deal to take life away from each other, and it had been good for a young man of twenty to see the world a bit.
He had become rapidly enamored of his occupation. With his mother, it had been business. On his own, it had been practically an avocation. He would’ve offered to do it for free, if he hadn’t thought that would display unbecoming eagerness.
Unfortunately, his recent success had not extended to his mother. She had been as successful as she was for so many years because no one knew her--she’d had a rare gift, and he’d seen her use it. She could be the center of attention when she wanted to be, and have people forget she’d ever existed an instant later. She had been unentangled, disinterested with the lives of others. She had moved on another level. No one had looked at her directly.
When she’d brought her son, who lacked that power, into her world, people had noticed. And when he disappeared quite suddenly, they’d looked rather more closely at her than they had before.
It had boded ill.
They had not been living together for some time. It had long since been time for the bird to leave the nest, but he had visited her weekly to chat.
He’d arrived at the usual time, and she had been nowhere to be found. Nothing had been disturbed. She’d never left any indication of where she was going--that would be stupid--so Shere Khan had waited.
He’d waited three days.
She had never returned.
He had done what he could, which was not a small amount. He had worked hard and gained a good reputation in the sorts of communities that knew about people like him. Those communities had also known about his mother, and about many other things pertaining to their movements.
She’d been killed, which was nothing really surprising--it was only the poignancy of the blow that had struck him.. According to the position and condition of the bodies, one of her marks had gotten wise to the beautiful woman in jewels and furs, and had tried to put a knife through her throat. She’d fought him and fought hard, as the defensive wounds attested, killing him at last, but he’d managed to cut her femoral artery.
He had procured her body from the local morgue, exposing himself in the process to the records of civilization. He had been sure she would be appalled by that, but there had been no way he was going to let her simply rot. He’d loved her far more than he’d thought he could love anyone, and to putrefy on a slab would not be her fate.
He’d given her a burial and turned back to work, but the damage had been done. His face had been known, and his pseudonym had been found to be false. It couldn’t possibly have lasted, his privacy and his success, now that a man of his particular features had been connected to an infamous assassin.
Shere Khan had done the best he could for some time, but somehow someone had linked the dead tourists, poached animals, and numerous murders together, and presently he had found himself wanted. India had become at last simply too hot--he had had to be careful about when he was seen and who by.
It had become time to consider a new career move. One of the few tourists he’d ever liked had been a man named Clayton, who had left him a business card, if he should ever want to hunt in different climes. He had given the man a call.
Getting out of the country had been rather tricky, but certainly nothing more difficult than he might’ve expected. He’d taken his rifle, his scrap of tiger hide, his cigars, one of his mother’s strings of pearls (a rather sentimental keepsake, but he might have use for it later), the account information for his Swiss bank account, The Art of War, and Etiquette.
He had bounced around a bit for those years, scarcely above twenty-four. He had spent time in Brazil, in the Congo region, in Australia. Big game had remained his passion, but killing man had never been far down on his list of skills. He had been the handyman of death. He could kill anything.
Which was part of why he had been rather surprised to find himself as a teacher. Certainly he had a great appreciation for education, but he’d never really anticipated it as a career move.
It had been a temporary position. His last real job had been in a city, an unusual location for him--but the money had been right. The assassination had left him in a strange city with a bullet in his leg, and he needed something to do while he recovered. Traveling had been out of the equation--Interpol had gotten updated information and his best bet at the moment had been to lie low in a strange place and wait it all out.
In a newspaper, he’d seen an advertisement for a teacher of etiquette at a local private school. To be quite honest, if he couldn’t kill things, making other people more polite had been a tolerable thing to be doing. He had known the business of politeness very well, after all.
He had gone in for a interview without any real expectation of taking the job. He had had his papers, but he’d had a devil of a time producing anything like a reasonable thirty nine year-old’s C.V. In the end he’d put down a few men he could trust to give discreet recommendations.
“Not very much in the way of work experience,” the headmistress had said, as she perused his account of his professional life. Oh, she had no idea.
“I’m afraid not. All of my activities have been rather avocational,” he’d said with a thin smile.
“I see that you have traveled extensively,” she’d remarked. “And I know Mr. Clayton personally. I shall...carefully weigh his opinion.”
He’d gotten the call a week later. A job was a job, no matter how ignominious, and it would serve him well should he ever need to gain alternative occupation elsewhere.
He’d never liked children, and he despised the ones he’d been given, but he had managed to instill the fear of God in them and they’d learned to obey quickly. He had no troubles with discipline.
Far more amusing than the little brats were his coworkers. They had their little quirks, of course: the headmistress was peculiarly fond of smoking, the deputy headmaster was a skirt-chaser, the religion teacher and the physical education coach were nearly pedophiles. Within days, he’d had all their dirty little secrets laid out before him--they didn’t know they were even revealing them, truth be told.
There was one who was a little more difficult to get at. The business teacher, aptly named Scar, was a slim, suave man whose fiery intellect was the only thing about him that didn’t carry the faint sheen of having been rehearsed. As much as he watched the man, he’d never seen him do anything from instinct--every word out of his mouth had the faint tone of having been carefully considered. He was immaculate, intentional, graceful. Down to his merest details, he was perfectly presented as decent and upstanding, in poise and manner and gesture, in word and deed and certainly not thought.
There was one thing he couldn’t quite hide, though. It took him a little while to work out what was wrong with the man, but eventually he got it. Scar was starving.
The man had something of the grandeur of a dispossessed king about him--something ravenous and resentful and angry, yet noble. Shere Khan decided that this was the one to look out for.
He remembered the first time he’d known for a fact that they would get along.
Scar had been reading the newspaper in the teacher’s lounge. Splashed on the cover was a headline about a string of child murders.
“Ghastly business,” he’d remarked, as he’d gone in to procure a fresh cup of tea.
“Isn’t it just. Child murder. How repulsive,” the business teacher had said. He’d lifted his eyebrows significantly, his mouth a dry, sarcastic line.
Shere Khan had started paying closer attention. “You have strong feelings about it?”
“I can’t imagine how one could not feel strongly about it. It’s utterly monstrous, messy and despicable. I’d never do it myself.”
He had almost heard the thing unsaid. ‘I’d hire someone else.’
He’d sat down to chat a little, and had left two hours later, when absolute necessity dictated it.
That long-sought, long-craved, brilliant conversation, at last.
Since then, they’d been pretty well attached at the hip--occasionally in the most literal possible terms. They’d become what he estimated could be called ‘friends,’ for certainly they seemed drawn to each other more often than to anyone else. They liked each other a damn sight more, too, or at least hated each other less. They had their language, their jokes, their games. They understood each other perfectly, needed no clarification to communicate, and expected nothing of each other. When he’d been having his little fling with Bagheera, Scar had smirked, rolled his eyes, called him--in affectionate tones, he’d almost suspected--a whore, and invited him to bed.
Shere Khan did the same when Scar slept around. Somehow they just gravitated back together. He certainly never spent an entire night in anyone but Scar’s bed, excluding his own.
Scar was more or less no longer a mystery to him now--he knew about his back and his brother, his disowning, the gray strands that came naturally with his black hair that he dyed out. Every now and then the man would surprise him, but surprise was largely irrelevant. He still had that gift of language, that brilliant intellect, that easy, ever-burning hatred, and that marvelous sense of humor.
His manners were superb, besides which.
Shere Khan did not intend to stay here. The one year of waiting had somehow become two, and now he was in the middle of the third year in this job and with this man. It paid terribly, but money wasn’t really the object at this point. He’d stayed because it was a cerebral kind of adventure, one that tested his patience and his ability to deceive much more than he was accustomed to. He hadn’t realized how far he’d fallen from his younger days until he was thrust back into civilization.
Many days, he truly missed his old occupation. Now and then the need was almost unbearable, and he found it so hard not to take one of his guns and go and hunt something down. Recreational hunting could only sooth him so much--sooner or later, he will want real, wild blood too much to bear the stagnation any further.
For now, however, he was content. He would not be here forever, he was certain. But it was still a good sabbatical, this city and this job and the man in his bed. He was almost fond of it all, would in all likelihood be very nearly sad to see it go.