Just a Face in the Crowd

    

     It is my mother's fault that I kill for a living.

    She was a gun for hire, and she taught me to shoot at the age when other girls were learning to groom their Barbies. My Barbies were used for target practice.

Mother was a cool drink of water, fair-skinned and regal in posture. She could wear a Balenciaga gown to an embassy party and have every man-jack falling all over himself to pull out her chair. The night she assassinated the German deputy chancellor, she was wearing Dior (the gown and the perfume), and no one had the first inkling that there was a silencer and pistol with .22 hollow points in her beaded evening bag.

     I think she decided to train me when she realized that one child was all she would ever have. But what cinched it was that, at age seven, I was already destined to be an unremarkable-looking person.

     With average coloring, height, weight and disposition, I was someone who would always go unnoticed in a crowd. I was the perfect contract killer by age 16. I could blend in with people of several nationalities: the Brits, of course, and other colorless groups such as Canadians, Serbs, Netherlanders, Belgians, and New Zealanders. With a few hours in a tanning salon and a little hair dye, I could pass as anyone of Mediterranean heritage.

     My mother schooled me to notice those small details that make the difference between blending and standing out, such as the volume at which women speak in different cultures: loud in Australia and England’s Yorkshire district, but soft in Qatar and Dubai.
      I learned to mimic hand gestures and table manners in order to go unnoticed in public: the upper classes of Europe spoon their soup away from the body while Americans spoon soup toward themselves.

     The assassinations themselves were not particularly unpleasant – no more so than grading term papers is unpleasant for a teacher or filing income taxes is onerous for an accountant. The killing was best accomplished quickly. One got close to the target, one aimed at the head and one pulled the trigger of a small, silenced gun.

     Occasionally there were witnesses, but later on, they could not describe me to police. I was medium this, that and the other. I had been wearing the brand of coat sold by the thousands by a popular international retailer. I drove away in the most commonly sold, two year-old car: a Toyota Corolla or Honda Civic in white or silver.

      Do I have regrets? No, because the money we earned over the past two decades provided me with a lifetime of luxury. Even now, as I write, I am sitting at an escritoire that belonged to King Henry V, auctioned at Sotheby's for $1.4 million. I am drinking a lovely Petrus Pomerol that sells for approximately $80 a glass. And the car I will drive to the Met tonight, to hear Don Pasquale, will be a vintage Jaguar. I certainly don't feel pity for the targets I disposed of. They were nothing to me.       No, if I have any regret at all it is that I never knew my father, nor what he would have wanted me to be because, unfortunately, like a praying mantis, my mother killed, right after mating.