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“Do you know why I chose the name Günter Grass? Because my father was born in Danzig, as Grass was, and Grass wrote The Tin Drum, the story about where, and what, I came from. His Oskar’s world crumbled, and he built a life for himself with what skills he had, as I did. The Nazis literally sacked my parents’ home, destroying everything. Near the end of the war, it was a Polish judge who condemned my father to death. To save herself and me, still in her womb, my mother degraded herself, and slept with that judge, and so I am here. After my father’s death in front of a firing squad, my mother moved in with that judge. And then she married him, married the man who’d killed my father. She betrayed my father and slept with that monster. I never forgot. When I was seventeen, I became the judge and the executioner and avenged my father. I garroted both of them, just as I did that whore Eliza Vickers and her confidant Daniel O’Malley.

“I called myself Günter in a long-ago life. Let me tell you about that Günter. For a very long time he killed to earn his bread. It was the only thing at which he was truly skilled, the only thing he had a taste for. All of his targets deserved to die—they were evil people, drug dealers, revolutionaries, fanatics, terrorists, or just simply criminals who’d corrupted those around them. And of course there were the dishonest judges who accepted payoffs, who kept mistresses. But he tired of cleaning up society’s mess and being hunted for it all the while. And so Günter ceased to exist, and I came here and became an American.

“I thought it an act of fate—the complete turning of the wheel, if you will—when I saw Justice Califano kissing a young woman in the middle of the day in a small park, the two of them standing in the shade of an oak tree. There was no one else around. Except for me. She was laughing, kissing that old man’s mouth, her hands pressed against him, between them. This man was not just any corrupt judge like my stepfather—he was a Justice of the Supreme Court!

“I watched them, and felt my rage build until I wanted to kill both of them right there in the park, but I knew that would be foolish and dangerous for me, and because I must be sure. And so I followed them to a condominium. I found out the young woman he was taking advantage of was one of his law clerks. I saw soon enough that he had obviously turned this young woman into a whore, just like my mother. I loved killing her, loved her futile struggles, knowing you were hearing it all. And I saw my mother’s face when the life went out of her. Killing her was almost as gratifying as choking the life out of that corrupt justice. He disgusted me. He was a filthy, common little man, as bad as any of the garbage I killed in Europe. I savored the instant when Califano realized he was dying, realized he was paying the ultimate price. It was my destiny to end his life, or die trying.

“You want a bit more truth, Agent Savich? It surprised me that I actually succeeded, both at the Supreme Court and at Quantico. You really did a very poor job of damage control, don’t you think?”

Savich said, “And so you killed three people because two of them were having an affair?”

“You know as well as I do that evil is always banal and common, if you look at it closely, and it must find other evil, and feed. And so I will go down in history as the man who killed a Justice of the Supreme Court and two of his law clerks—those young acolytes who supped and slept with him, and drank in his words, and knew what he was, and reveled in it.”

Savich said, “You garroted Danny O’Malley and tried to kill Elaine LaFleurette because you believed they sanctioned Califano’s affair with Eliza Vickers?”

“They all knew what he was doing, and they did nothing. Just as no one did anything when my mother slept with that judge. They enjoyed his power, lusted after such power for themselves. They deserved to die.”

He was breathing hard, the gun jerking slightly in his hand. He was near the edge. Savich said quickly,