Nightfall

Fifty-four floors up, the wind was strong enough to drown out the ice in his glass.

Senator Howard took a long pull of his whiskey. He hadn't noticed that his fingers were shaking. I had. For sixteen minutes he had been standing in this dim corner away from the noise of the party, and for sixteen minutes I had been counting his breaths. The artery in his neck was pulsing out of rhythm. He wiped his left hand on his trousers three times. He touched his tie twice and straightened it neither time — he was only making sure it was still there.

You can tell when a man is about to break ten minutes before he does. The body reports first. The mind surrenders after.

The colorless liquid I'd stirred into his drink would be in his blood by now. On its own, it wouldn't kill him. It only opened the doors and let out whatever was already inside. The rest was mine to do.

Twenty-two minutes ago he had set his glass down on the marble counter and gone to talk to a woman. After she walked away, I had four minutes for the mixture to take.

It takes twenty minutes to reach the blood. I was counting. Two of them were already gone.

The wind shifted, and I let it carry my voice.

"You can still hear her, can't you?"

The senator flinched and turned. His pupils had blown so wide he couldn't pick me out of the dark — which was the point. People can recognize another person's voice. They can't recognize the voice of their own conscience, because they've never heard it speak directly before.

"Who's there?"

His voice was cracking. Good.

I didn't take a single step out of the shadows.

"Three years ago," I said. "It was raining. You remember the sound she made when she hit your windshield. She was eight years old. Her name never appeared in a single paper, because you never let it."

The glass didn't fall out of his hand. I noted that. He was still holding on to something.

"I didn't do anything—"

"Every mouth you paid to shut, that sound comes out from under it. It doesn't matter how many people you silence, it will never go away. Because the sound isn't in them. It's in you."

He let the glass go. It burst on the concrete and the music inside didn't miss a beat. At a party on the fifty-fourth floor, nobody hears a glass break.

"Look," I said. "She's standing right behind you."

He turned.

Beyond the railing there was the city; two hundred meters down, a nothing floating in light. But when Howard looked out there, he didn't see the drop. I was only telling him what to look at.

His breathing stuttered. His pulse must have been a hundred and forty.

"I'm sorry," he sobbed, leaning toward the railing. "Go away. Please. I'm sorry."

For years I have watched people show me the ugliest parts of themselves, and all of it ends with the same two words. Nobody defends himself while he's dying. Everyone asks to be forgiven. That is the only thing about people worth knowing.

He was entirely mine. One more sentence and he would take that step of his own will. One of the most powerful men in the city, slipping over the edge under the weight of his own conscience. The autopsy would turn up nothing foreign. The morning papers would call it a tragedy. In a week nobody would remember.

Clean. Quiet. Mine.

"Walk to her," I said. "That's the only way it stops."

He set his left foot on the railing.

I didn't blink. I know the millisecond a person loses their balance; the shoulders go first, then the heel leaves the ground. I was waiting for it.

But Howard didn't fall.

His head snapped back.

I never heard the shot — I only saw what it did. Dead center of his forehead, between the brows, a hole drawn as if with a ruler. The body dropped to the concrete like a wet sack, and the smell of blood swallowed the perfume on the terrace all at once.

For three seconds I didn't move.

The wind was out of the northwest at better than twenty kilometers an hour. The opposite building was four hundred meters out and lower than we were; so it was upward, into the wind, at a moving target. I knew exactly how good a person would have to be to make that shot, because I do this work too.

And at the edge of that roof, for maybe half a second, a lens caught the light.

Then it was gone.

The moment one of the women behind the glass started screaming, the music inside lost its meaning. The doors flew open. People ran for the exits, for the elevators; champagne flutes shattered on the floor while the most expensive people in this city trampled one another. A woman pulled off her shoes and ran. A man shouldered the person beside him to the ground and didn't look back.

They were all running without understanding what had happened.

I understood perfectly.

I smoothed the skirt of my black evening dress. I moved against the crowd, slipping between the panicking bodies toward the service stairs. Nobody looked at me. In a place where everyone is running, the only thing you have to do is not look like you're running; fear blinds people, and a blind crowd is the best door there is.

The stairwell was cold. Concrete, fluorescent light, the sound of my own heels.

By the thirty-sixth floor I noticed that my hands weren't shaking, and it disturbed me. Anger should have taken me by then. But what I had inside me wasn't anger. It was something much colder: arithmetic.

I had spent three months on this man. I learned his drinking, his prescriptions, his sleep, which hour of the day he told which lie. Talking a man into killing himself takes far longer than shooting him. It is also far cleaner.

Tonight was supposed to be a suicide.

Now it was an execution.

In the morning the papers would say murder. The police would look for ballistics, go up to the roof across the street, collect the cameras. All one hundred and forty guests at this party would be questioned, and among those one hundred and forty, there was also me.

Three months of work, thrown away by a single bullet.

By the time I came out the service door the sirens had started in the street. The city was just finding out. I crossed to the other side and kept walking and never once looked back — looking back is the one thing anyone remembers.

I also forbade myself from looking up at the roof across the way. There was no one there anymore. Whoever he was, he'd have stayed forty seconds at most after firing; I would have been down in thirty.

I knew it hadn't been a mistake. At that range, in that wind, at that angle, a person who finds the exact center of a man's forehead does not make mistakes.

Which meant someone had taken my work from me on purpose.

And back at the compound, he was going to answer for it.