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All people are, in the end, is sentient meat. The blood smeared across Oz’s face, on the apron, the axe—a butcher who had sent cattle to the slaughter would stand no different. And something gummy is stuck at Oz’s hairline. Maybe it really is, or was, the dead man’s gums.
It is that insignificant bit of gore that turns Figaro’s stomach.
“We need to pour the lye,” Oz says. He’s peeking out of the bathroom, where he has butchered the man into nice, easy, chemically digestible chunks, then chucked into an industrial-sized steel drum. The overhead lights fall on him white and somehow deader than the body Figaro can’t see, not anymore.
Figaro throws aside his phone, something past its safe usage he’ll have to dispose of, too, white-collar crime to Oz’s multiple life sentences—if he was careless enough to get caught. “You know my job is information brokering, right?” he says, but he’s following Oz into the dingy bathroom. They barely fit: Figaro’s elbow digs into Oz’s back as he pulls on a respirator and goggles, and Oz steps on Figaro’s foot as he reaches for a hand towel shelved beside him. It is embroidered with a duckling and initials not Figaro’s or Oz’s or the client’s, whose rural house they finish the job in.
“How disturbing,” Figaro says, watching Oz dab the blood from his face and unto the duckling.
“You pick me up from the airport,” Oz says. It is so belated an answer to Figaro’s question that Figaro laughs beneath the crack of Oz breaking the plastic sealing the drain cleaner’s cap. It is a sound not dissimilar to breaking the thinner of the body’s two hundred-ish bones.
“Because a taxi driver would immediately take you for a hitman and drive you to the nearest police station!” Figaro lugs a bottle of his own drain cleaner on the sink’s edge, wincing as he opens it, that crack ringing through his fingers and up his teeth.
“You,” Oz says, and it feels like an insult when the drain cleaner glugs over the body, “arrange for my weapons’ shipping.”
“Because you have to be well connected to ship your… things,” he says, gesturing to the holstered gun on the living room’s so-called coffee table, the silencer beside it, the rifle and its scope resting against a wall, “without raising any alarms!”
“And you do not have to do any of it.” The chunks in the drum are slowly submerged, the drain cleaner coloring pink.
“I do if I don’t want to serve a life sentence as accessory to murder, which I very much don’t! So I have to help you with those things. This, though!” He shakes the emptied bottle, every last caustic drop requisite to get it eaten faster. Already the meat looks tender where it has not sloughed off. “This is not my job!”
“If you stop complaining, we will be finished sooner.” Oz scowls. “You are only pouring lye…”
“Yeah, and because this is, I have to stress, not my job, I’m not used to seeing a guy melt. Or knowing I can get human goop using a product in most people’s houses. Or the stench! Are you braving it fresh-faced because you want to impress me?”
“Why would I want to.”
Figaro thuds down the empty bottle.
Oz packs it into a garbage bag, lumped in the bloody tub. It is filled with other things Figaro doesn’t want to know about. “We can drink afterward. I will pay.”
That’s Oz, careless in his conversations as he never would be behind the trigger.
Figaro pauses over the next bottle of drain cleaner. “If I have the appetite for it,” he grumbles.
The crack is softer, now.
Figaro finds it in him to go for drinks after all. The air in California’s wine country is crisper than the grapes growing in neat row after neat row, like God in His perfection and not money-loving drunkards had sowed them. Figaro breathes it in as mad as a man at sea would reach for a lifesaver, the chemicals—having fumed so intensely they cling to his palate—diluted after each inhale. There is no true breeze. What rifles his hair is the car, cutting through the hills.
“You need to take more jobs here,” he tells Oz over the tires’ rolling, the thrum of cars speeding in the opposite direction. “Beats trying to park in New York or drive in London.”
Oz is holding his hair in place, less appreciative of the breeze than Figaro. “Too hot.”
“What? I think it’s a nice evening, and you know I also prefer cold weather.”
“Not now. Come summer. Everything will be on fire.”
“Well,” Figaro says, drumming the steering wheel, “you got me there.”
The winery that had accepted their last-minute reservation sprawls past the curve in the road. There is no proper parking lot: barring the highway and its offshoot farm roads, everything between the hills is grass and dirt and plants, living, thriving things.
The evening is cool and blue, coaxing people—visitors and locals—to enjoy the fruits of others’ labor. At Figaro’s request, the winery’s bistro seats them outside. An unnecessary parasol drapes him and Oz, the shadows it casts darker than they should be in the encroaching night, staved off by the candles on the table. Inside, someone plays an acoustic guitar and croons into a microphone; outside, a few tables from Figaro and Oz, a couple holding hands toast to each other, and a wedding party dances on the deck above them.
Figaro settles into his chair, clearing his throat as Oz scrapes his chair on the floor, adjusting it away from Figaro.
He thanks the swift-to-arrive server a little too profusely: he has picked a Riesling for himself, something colored far removed from blood; Oz, insisting he can drive them even if he has half a glass, has chosen a dark Zinfandel.
“What,” Oz says at Figaro’s look.
He shakes his head. “Nothing. I’ll just never understand what goes on in that head of yours.” He thumbs his glass’s stem, smile thin. “I guess that’s why you’re good at what you do, though. Cheers!”
Oz is frowning. Is it displeasure at Figaro’s backhanded compliment? Confusion as he tries to discern what Figaro had meant?
Figaro sets his glass down, sighing. “Lighten up, Oz.” He grabs a chunk of cheese from the charcuterie board—blue cheese, pairing well with the wine’s fruitiness—but as it squelches between his fingers, the odor eking from this chunk of fermented food-stuff, disgust creeps in to dry out his mouth. He puts it down and wipes his fingers on the cloth napkin Oz offers him, and he eyes the slice of prosciutto, meat like him, like any of them huddled in the dark or the warm inside, gleefully scarfing it down their throats, black where the candlelight doesn’t reach and red, red, red where it does.
He snatches the entire sprig of grapes for himself.
The Riesling had been good enough Figaro had bought two bottles of it before leaving. That, and he’ll need something to do in the week it will take most of the meat in the drum to liquefy.
He knows it is a week because that’s how long it had taken last time.
“We really need to get you an assistant, Oz,” he says, drawing the hotel room’s curtains to a close, as if an enemy of their client might read his lips through the window. He turns around.
Oz—straight-backed on the settee, a book in hand—is glaring at him over its pages. “I am competent at killing people.”
“I never doubted you are.” He closes his eyes. The suite’s dim lamps glow behind his eyelids, pulsing with the alcohol he’d had, longing for more. “I meant an assistant to do what I do. I can’t stand the smell of meat for weeks afterward.”
Figaro does not need to glance at Oz to feel the refusal burning in his eyes. “So be vegetarian.”
He sighs so deeply his shoulders sag. “I’m going to have another glass of wine in another bath I’m running even hotter, and then I am going to sleep.” He makes for the mini fridge. “Call me in a week. I have another client to deal with in the next few days, so I can’t chauffeur you for whatever sightseeing you might, but probably don’t, want to do. You can text me, though, in case I happen to be free. Oh, your payment is in my suitcase. The manila envelope. You can go ahead and grab it.”
Any information broker worth their salt is trusted by their clients. Their service is then sought repeatedly; the clients become almost like friends, conversations about so-and-so’s spouse and what’s-her-name’s kids interspersed between the dirt he’s paid good money to dig up.
Figaro has not built a trust like this with anyone but Oz. He doesn’t even dismiss him from his suite; he’ll go when he wants and it’ll be fine. Or he might spend the night in Figaro’s suite, sharing more than a wine glass with him.
In the bathroom, door half-closed, Figaro huffs through his nose. The body in the drum would sooner rise up from the dead than Oz react to anything except violence.
When Figaro is as clean as he can be without scrubbing his flesh off, he sees Oz had fallen asleep where he sat, forefinger trapped between the pages he’d last been reading.
And any information broker worth their salt knows how much distance to put between themselves and the client, because you need trust, but you do not need criminal liability when you risk personal attachment. You should not mourn a hitman, gone to prison or six feet under six decades too soon. Those are the only ends they ever meet.
Figaro sees Oz on the settee—red, wouldn’t you know it, the paragon of luxury in imported European wood—and he wants to carve red out of himself. He runs a hand through his damp hair, holding back a curse, or maybe a laugh, but he grabs the comforter from the bed and gently tucks it over Oz, who doesn’t stir. It is not a hitman’s bated-breath stillness before he pulls the trigger. It’s nothing more than his own damned trust.
“Don’t complain to me about your neck hurting tomorrow,” Figaro mumbles, but it’s through a smile.
Oz wears a respirator: week-old meat marinating in drain cleaner, it seems, has that effect on everyone. He picks the bones from the sludge with stainless steel tongs, placing them in the tub to dry, aided by a floor fan buzzing outside the bathroom. Figaro uses his own tongs to put the dried bones in a burlap bag. Like last time. And like last time, it’ll get weighed down with something that will sink, before being tossed into the depths of a body of water too large to be feasibly searched. It had been the Atlantic Ocean last time. Here, the San Francisco Bay is an hour’s drive.
The volume in the drum decreases in removing the bones, not dissolved but fragile; the burlap bag fattens up, misshapen. Figaro sets it on the floor. Oz—who, where it counts, works alone—has no problem carrying it or pushing the drum outside, the hole that will pass for the dead man’s grave already dug.
“It’s a—shame,” Figaro says, helping Oz shovel dirt over the drum, the effort panting out his words. “This is beautiful land—even if it’s—not been tended—for a long while.”
“What is a shame?”
“Hold on—I’m—getting there.” He leans on the shovel, catching his breath, glaring at an unbothered, diligent Oz. “It’s a shame to be buried somewhere this beautiful inside a steel drum swishing with drain cleaner. More importantly, how are you not tired? You’ve done more work than me.”
Oz pauses, his brow furrowed. “This is tiring to you?”
“Do I have to remind you again my job is technically just being an information broker?” He picks the shovel back up. “The worst pain I should have is my thumbs hurting from texting my clients all day. Actually, that happened to me once and it had me out of commission for a day. It was embarrassing, having to lie about my delayed replies…”
“You will not help in the bones’ disposal, then?”
Figaro runs his tongue over his teeth. The clients set the rules: some are laxer in how the hits are to be made; some are so specific they can only be years of obsession on the verge of fetishism. This client had had one request: to make it like the dead man had never existed. Figaro would report on the details when the job was complete. In that, it helped to be on the scene. Disposal of the body, its physical annihilation, could have ended in burying the sludge and the bones. But Oz, despite his reticence, likes his job and is too proud—has a dramatic flourish he would deny—to finish it so dully. The bones would be dropped in the cold, fast currents of the bay. Its waters are no stranger to bones. How many men had fled from Alcatraz only to be drowned before its austere window-eyes?
“Figaro?”
He blinks. Almost rubs his eye before remembering his garden gloves, coated with dirt and who knows what else. He uses his shoulder, instead. “Obviously I’ll help.”
His shovel arcs opposite of Oz’s, their movements in complementary synchronization, their conversation ended. The drum is buried, the earth packed flat. The sun itself is low on the horizon, and there is not a spot on the gently rolling land that would reveal, to either uniformed pig nor wandering crow, someone is beyond rotted far beneath their feet.
“You know, Oz,” Figaro says, sliding into the rental car, “if you’d been born decades earlier, you might have been in Alcatraz yourself. If you’d been caught, anyway.”
“I would not have been.”
Figaro quirks a smile. “You wouldn’t have.”
The car’s headlights bisect the rural night and earth, never to be nourished by a body so poisoned and a death so wanted.
This late, the only things golden about the bridge are the lights flaring at its perimeter, suffused by the fog. Cars rumble past, unseen, heard—felt—from the metal-wrought suspension separating them from Figaro and Oz, heading for the pier.
Figaro shivers, pulling his jacket on tighter with the hand not holding the flashlight. The bay’s perpetual chill worsens at night. Worse yet when the fog curls between the bridge’s wires and under its scaffolding, kissing the water as if it does not churn in knowledge primordial.
The howl that comes-and-goes in their ears is the wind’s, just as ancient. Figaro complains, unafraid of eavesdroppers, “Why couldn’t we do this from the bridge? Hot air rises and I’m freezing down here! And it would have had a way better view!”
“People and cameras.”
He looks around: the pier is as empty and ramshackle as the client’s house had been. “Oh. Okay, yeah, that makes sense.”
“And—” Oz lifts the burlap bag suddenly and Figaro startles, the flashlight skittering over Oz’s squint. “Figaro, why…”
“I’m sorry! You scared me.” He aims the flashlight past the rotting railing, where something in the water has dove into its depths. “What were you saying?”
“And,” Oz says, “there are less witnesses here.” He cups the bottom of the bag and extends his arm.
Figaro sets the flashlight down, balanced precariously between uneven wood floor boards, and grabs the other half of the bag’s bottom, not needing to be told to help. Not saying anything about how his fingertips, exposed to the cold, brush against Oz’s, gloved and unfeeling.
They’ve done this before. Oz doesn’t lack the arm strength to heave the bag by himself—you just get better range having someone to help, the weight divided, the angle steadier, the force doubled, the bag flying far, far into the water. It sinks, silently.
And that is that. The currents will sweep it to the ocean; the weights will ensure it settles. Someone is dead and utterly gone from the world. In Figaro’s phone, four people from different corners of the globe await his information, and four other people amble on their boring little lives, unaware someone is willing to pay to kill them. That someone else is willing to do it.
The wind picks up, as if furious at the violation of the water. Oz’s hair whips across Figaro’s face, and for all he has done—in the last week; in the years Figaro has known him—it’s soft, faintly perfumed. The man has dripped gore, not a bit of it his own, and he sweeps his hair to the side with custom gloves, the fallen flashlight gliding its light over his Italian suit, cut as sharp as his eyes flicking to Figaro.
Who hastily picks up the flashlight, mindful to shine it just on their path to the sandy parking lot. “Are you going on a break? You’d mentioned it a few months ago.” He kicks a rock out of the way. “With what the client paid, you could afford to go on break in Monaco for a full year. You could even,” he says, ribbing Oz, “take me with you!”
“And do what.”
“Drink and gamble, what else is there to do in Monaco? Oh, the beaches. Though I guess you’ve always liked the mountains more. Honestly, so do I.”
A whisper: wool-and-silk slightly disturbed. Oz has turned to look at him. And it must be that the flashlight, aimed away from him, renders the shadows on his face into something contemplative.
“I wasn’t being serious,” Figaro is quick to say. He’s been witness to bodies mutilated beyond recognition, has been at fault for it, and never has his pulse been so erratic. He kicks at another rock. “I can’t take a break. Our clients will go to other brokers, and then they’ll become their go-tos. I’ll lose my income. And,” he says, beeping the car doors open, “so will you.”
“Request they wait.”
“That’s not how it works in our business.” The car’s interior lights are as golden as those dotting the bridge. He switches off the flashlight and throws it on the backseat like the car is his to sully. “Are you hungry? There’s this great sushi place on the other side of the bay. It has a Michelin star, if you don’t trust me.”
Under these lights, there is no mistaking Oz’s confusion.
Figaro fidgets with the car keys. “What?”
“You help me with body disposal.”
“Well, yeah.”
“Do you think,” Oz says, “that is not trust?”
Figaro jams the key in the ignition, the interior lights shuttering off, anything either of them might see on each other smothered in the dark. He had made a reservation at the restaurant in advance, but that he keeps to himself. “We’re going to have to cross the bridge,” he says, backing up, throwing a grin to the window as he checks his mirrors. “Don’t wave to its cameras!”