He walked with a brisk pace, beads of sweat appearing on his forehead. He wore a brown overcoat, which covered every inch of his hands – hiding the .39 that lied inside. He was on a mission, his last, after which he would be retired by the company that hired him. He had never felt so nervous.
Exactly 3 hours ago, he had received an envelope. It was of the same make as all the envelopes he had got earlier – 9 by 4, with a red border and the company initials embossed in gold on the bottom left corner, “R S F”. The first few times, he had tried to find out what the initials stood for. He gave up eventually. It was now a fortnightly event, as ordinary as paying the rent. He had emptied the contents of the envelope on his coffee table, bringing out a note, a cheque and a photograph. The note had all the details of his next mission, the cheque had a six-digit figure printed on it and this time, the photograph was of a middle-aged man.
All his targets were ordinary people, or at least they seemed to be. This man did not. He had a look about him, a certain restraint in his eyes as if they held back a reservoir of secrets. He had an athletic build and a lean face, and a long but faded scratch on his left forearm. His eyes were trained to spot such nuances in the human body, as more often than not these nuances actually helped in distinguishing an innocent man from a purposeful target.
He had quickly memorized the details of his target and threw the note into the fireplace, where he had already started a fire. It was always the instruction. The cheque went into a drawer inside his cabinet. He slid the photograph into his pocket. He had opened the refrigerator and drank a bottle of orange juice, as he always did before every mission of his. He had locked his apartment behind him and hailed a cab to two and a half blocks from the memorized location.
He walked with a brisk pace, beads of sweat appearing on his forehead. He wore a brown overcoat, which covered every inch of his hands – hiding the .39 that lied inside. On the left side of the road ran a line of bushes and on the right stood a row of beaten down houses. He walked on the left side, where the light from the houses did not reach. A couple of hooligans passed by but he did not pay heed to them. He was on a mission, his last, after which he would be retired by the company that hired him. He had never felt so nervous.
It was a warm night, so most windows were open to let the breeze in. He saw a couple of kids watching a cartoon on the television in the living room of a house, with their mother watching on. He stopped walking for a second, but quickly turned his eyes toward the road and resumed at his previous pace. The breeze suddenly blew his coat about, revealing the shiny object he was carrying. Luckily, for him, there was not a soul around to notice it. He walked on.
After some time he came to a fork in the road. He paused there for a moment, remembering the directions he had seen in the map of the southern part of the city. Leaving the right, he walked into the left side of the fork. It was darker and narrower. It looked like a place where he, himself, could reside – given his job profile. However, he decided he was comfortable with the neighbourhood he already lived in, as he was used to this lifestyle much before he began this work. He was a civil engineer by education and for four years, by profession. Now he was jobless, but a certain group of people had decided to pay him handsomely for small services every now and then.
He found the house he was looking for. A single room was dimly lit in a shade of yellow and he could see a faint shadow on the wall to his right. On peeking through the window, he saw him. His victim was watching a cartoon – it was not the same one as the one that the kids were watching. A mouse was about to blow a hole through a cat’s head in this one.
He stood there, watching, for a while. He examined the room for other openings. There was an open door on the opposite corner from where he was standing. There was another door, closed, to his right. He went around the house from the right to find the whereabouts of the room the closed door led to. On looking in through another window, he realized it was the victim’s bedroom. He was careless enough to leave the window unlatched. He gave the window a gentle push and jumped over the sill with a soft thud on the floor of his bedroom. His job had just gotten much easier.
There weren’t too many personal things in the room. One might think that it was a hotel room, instead of a bedroom. However, he did find a couple of photo frames. In them were his pictures with a woman and a new-born. They looked like they had been taken not too many years ago; at least his facial features said so. He faced them downward and slid under the bed, deciding it was the best place to wait for his target. Before he did so, he gently pushed back the window to where it had been.
He waited for what seemed like an hour, maybe more. Impatience had started creeping in and he was getting distracted by thoughts of his wife and child and what had happened to them. He had never thought about marriage himself, believing it would be impossible to hold one together with his main profession being killing random people for sustenance. No woman deserved such a life, he thought. That very moment, he reinforced his decision. This would be his last assignment. He would quit the company the moment his final job was over, his final cheque encashed. A normal life is what he wanted and a normal life is what he would choose from then on. He crossed his chest, taking the name of his God.
Suddenly, the sound of the television stopped and a soft ‘clank’ came from the living room. He became alert. There was a noise of slippers shuffling across the carpet and a refrigerator door being slammed shut. The door to the bedroom opened a moment later and he walked in. The next, he was on the floor, with a bullet embedded in the middle of his skull and blood oozing out onto the bedroom floor. Even the most trained ear couldn’t have heard more than a soft ‘pop’. He emerged out from under the bed. He broke into tears – something he had not done since the time he had started on this job.
He managed to compose himself and realized that he had to clean up any signs of his presence. He grabbed a cloth lying on the floor, beside his desk, and wiped clean every surface he thought he might have touched. There were two surfaces he forgot. Maybe it wouldn’t matter. He thought he had thoroughly taken care of his target and decided he would let himself out of the front door. On the way out, a gleam of red and gold caught his eye. He bent down and realized that it was the remains of an envelope from the company, with its initials embossed on the bottom left corner, “R S F”.
He could picture the headlines in all the daily’s the next morning – ‘Crime Running Rampant – Another Murder Questions the Authorities’, with the dead man’s body, or his bungalow at least, occupying a major portion of the front pages. The article would read:
Kolkata, Monday, 21st: Last night, yet another murder took place in the dark back alleys of Jodhpur Park. The victim was Anant Desai, a civil engineer working in a reputed construction company. He had been divorced for two years and had been living alone, after the death of his one year old daughter...
He started laughing wildly.
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