Hit Man - Lawrence Block [86]
The sentence had a nice ring to it, but he wasn’t sure he knew what Johnson was getting at. Wasn’t a scoundrel the furthest thing from a patriot? In simplest terms, a patriot would seem unequivocally to be one of the good guys. At the very least he devoted himself to serving his nation and his fellow citizens, and often enough he wound up giving the last full measure of devotion, sacrificing himself, dying so that others might live in freedom.
Nathan Hale, say, regretting that he had but one life to give for his country. John Paul Jones, declaring that he had not yet begun to fight. David Farragut, damning the torpedoes, urging full speed ahead.
Good guys, Keller thought.
Whereas a scoundrel had to be a bad guy by definition. So how could he be a patriot, or take refuge in patriotism?
Keller thought about it, and decided the scoundrel might take refuge in the appearance of patriotism, wrapping selfish acts in the cloak of selflessness. A sort of false patriotism, to cloak his base motives.
But a true scoundrel couldn’t be a genuine patriot. Or could he?
If you looked at it objectively, he had to admit, then he was probably a scoundrel himself. He didn’t much feel like a scoundrel. He felt like your basic New York single guy, living alone, eating out or bringing home takeout, schlepping his wash to the laundromat, doing the Times crossword with his morning coffee. Working out at the gym, starting doomed relationships with women, going to the movies by himself. There were eight million stories in the naked city, most of them not very interesting, and his was one of them. call from a man in White Plains. And packed a bag and caught a plane and killed somebody.
Hard to argue the point. Man behaves like that, he’s a scoundrel. Case closed.
Now he had a chance to be a patriot.
Not to seem like one, because no one would know about this, not even Dot and the old man. Bascomb had made himself very clear on the point. “Not a word to anyone, and if anything goes wrong, it’s the same system as Mission: Impossible. We never heard of you. You’re on your own, and if you try to tell anybody you’re working for the government, they’ll just laugh in your face. If you give them my name, they’ll say they never heard of me. Because they never did.”
“Because it’s not your name.”
“And you might have trouble finding the National Security Resource in the phone book. Or anywhere else, like the Congressional Record, say. We keep a pretty low profile. You ever hear of us before? Well, neither did anybody else.”
There’d be no glory in it for Keller, and plenty of risk. That was how it worked when he did the old man’s bidding, but for those efforts he was well compensated. All he’d get working for NSR was an allowance for expenses, and not a very generous one at that.
So he wasn’t doing it for the glory, or for the cash. Bascomb had implied that he had no choice, but you always had a choice, and he’d chosen to go along. For what?
For his country, he thought.
“It’s peacetime,” Bascomb had said, “and the old Soviet threat dried up and blew away, but don’t let that fool you, Keller. Your country exists in a permanent state of war. She has enemies within and without her borders. And sometimes we have to do it to them before they can do it to us.”
Keller, knotting his necktie, buttoning his suit jacket, didn’t figure he looked much like a soldier. But he felt like one. A soldier in his own idiosyncratic uniform, off to serve his country.
Howard Ramsgate was a big man, broad-shouldered, with a ready smile on his guileless square-jawed face. He was wearing a white shirt and a striped tie, and the pleated trousers of a gray sharkskin suit. The jacket hung on a clothes tree in the corner of the office.
He looked up at Keller’s entrance. “Afternoon,” he said. “Gorgeous day, isn’t it? I’m Howard Ramsgate.”
Keller supplied a name, not his own. Not that Ramsgate would be around to repeat it, but suppose he had a tape recorder running? He wouldn’t be the