I never asked the Broker how he got my name, although it seems obvious enough to me now that he’d seen about me in the papers, and saw some potential in me, perhaps even was able to anticipate my weeks of unsuccessful job-hunting, and my month of cheap booze and cheaper hookers. Anyway, he knew where to find me. He came right to my two-room suite at the Fleabag Hilton and made his pitch.

Funny thing, I can’t remember the conversation. I can remember my surprise, answering the knock at the door, expecting the landlord come to bitch about next week’s rent, and finding instead the dignified-looking, white- haired gentleman, with the neatly trimmed mustache, conservative but well-cut gray suit, and general demeanor of a successful lawyer or politician. He also had that ambiguity of age his type often has: he appeared to be around forty, though I later learned he was nearer fifty than forty; as long as I knew him, he looked a good ten years younger than he really was despite the stark white hair. I think it was the lack of lines in that long face of his.

I remember my surprise at seeing this distinguished apparition at the door of the trash can I was living in, but the conversation that followed I can’t summon up. I remember it in substance, but not detail.

I know he didn’t come right out and ask me if I wanted to kill people for money. He was much more subtle than that. He did it all with implication, in that eloquently long- winded politician’s way of his, telling me without really saying it that I could make a lot of money doing what I had done overseas for very little money. I had already shown, in the case of the late Mr. Williams, my willingness to kill for free. Now I was being tested to find if I had any aversion to doing the same for a fee.