Donald E. Westlake - The ax

NOVELS

The Ax Humans Sacred Monsters A Likely Story

Kahawa Brothers Keepers I Gave at the Office

Adios, Scheherazade Up Your Banners

COMIC CRIME NOVELS

Baby, Would I Lie? Trust Me on This High Adventure

Castle in the Air Enough Dancing Aztecs

Two Much! Help I Am Being Held Prisoner

Cops and Robbers Somebody Owes Me Money

Who Stole Sassi Manoon? God Save the Mark

The Spy in the Ointment The Busy Body

The Fugitive Pigion Smoke

THE DORTMUNDER SERIES

Whats the Worst That Could Happen?

Dont Ask Drowned Hopes Good Behavior

Why Me Nobodys Perfect

Jimmy the Kid Bank Shot The Hot Rock

CRIME NOVELS

Pity Him Afterwards Killy 361

Killing Time The Mercenaries

JUVENILE

Philip

WESTERN

Gangway (with Brian Garfield)

REPORTAGE

Under the English Heaven

SHORT STORIES

Tommorrows Crimes Levine

The Curious Facts Preceding My Execution and Other Fictions

ANTHOLOGY

Once Against the Law (coedited by William Tenn)

THE AX. Copyright 1997 by Donald E. Westlake. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Warner Books

Hachette Book Group

237 Park Avenue

New York, NY 10017

Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

ISBN: 978-0-7595-2295-4

First eBook Edition: April 2001

This is for my father, Albert Joseph Westlake, 18961953

Contents

The old superstition about fiction being wicked has doubtless died out in England, but the spirit of it lingers in a certain oblique regard directed toward any story which does not more or less admit that it is only a joke. Even the most jocular novel feels in some degree the weight of the proscription that was formerly directed against literary levity: the jocularity does not always succeed in passing for orthodoxy. It is still expected, though perhaps people are ashamed to say it, that a production which is after all only a make-believe (for what else is a story?) shall be in some degree apologeticshall renounce the pretension of attempting really to represent life. This, of course, any sensible, wide-awake story declines to do, for it quickly perceives that the tolerance granted to it on such a condition is only an attempt to stifle it disguised in the form of generosity. The old evangelical hostility to the novel, which was as explicit as it was narrow, and which regarded it as little less favourable to our immortal part than a stage-play, was in reality far less insulting. The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life.

Henry James, The Art of Fiction, 1888

If youre doing what you think is right for everyone involved, then youre fine. So Im fine.

Thomas G. Labrecque,
CEO Chase Manhattan Bank

Ive never actually killed anybody before, murdered another person, snuffed out another human being. In a way, oddly enough, I wish I could talk to my father about this, since he did have the experience, had what we in the corporate world call the background in that area of expertise, he having been an infantryman in the Second World War, having seen action in the final march across France into Germany in 4445, having shot at and certainly wounded and more than likely killed any number of men in dark gray wool, and having been quite calm about it all in retrospect. How do you know beforehand that you can do it? Thats the question.

Well, of course, I couldnt ask my father that, discuss it with him, not even if he were still alive, which he isnt, the cigarettes and the lung cancer having caught up with him in his sixty-third year, putting him down as surely if not as efficiently as if he had been a distant enemy in dark gray wool.

The question, in any case, will answer itself, wont it? I mean, this is the sticking point. Either I can do it, or I cant. If I cant, then all the preparation, all the planning, the files Ive maintained, the expense Ive put myself to (when God knows I cant afford it), have been in vain, and I might as well throw it all away, run no more ads, do no more scheming, simply allow myself to fall back into the herd of steer mindlessly lurching toward the big dark barn where the mooing stops.

Today decides it. Three days ago, Monday, I told Marjorie I had another appointment, this one at a small plant in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, that my appointment was for Friday morning, and that my plan was to drive to Albany Thursday, take a late afternoon flight to Harrisburg, stay over in a motel, taxi to the plant Friday morning, and then fly back to Albany Friday afternoon. Looking a bit worried, she said, Would that mean wed have to relocate? Move to Pennsylvania?

If thats the worst of our problems, I told her, Ill be grateful.

After all this time, Marjorie still doesnt understand just how severe our problems are. Of course, Ive done my best to hide the extent of the calamity from her, so I shouldnt blame Marjorie if Im successful in keeping her more or less worry-free. Still, I do feel alone sometimes.

This has to work. I have to get out of this morass, and soon. Which means Id better be capable of murder.

The Luger went into my overnight bag, in the same plastic bag as my black shoes. The Luger had been my fathers, his one souvenir from the war, a sidearm hed taken from a dead German officer that either he or someone else had shot, earlier that day, from the other side of the hedgerow. My father had removed the clip full of bullets from the Luger and transported it in a sock, with the gun itself traveling in a small dirty pillowcase hed taken from a half-wrecked house somewhere in muddy France.

My father never fired that gun, so far as I know. It was simply his trophy, his version of the scalp you take from your defeated enemy. Everybody shot at everybody and he was still standing at the end, so he took a gun from one of the fallen.

I too had never fired that gun, nor any other. It frightened me, in fact. For all I knew, if I were to pull the trigger with the clip in place in the butt, the thing would blow up in my hands. Still, it was a weapon, and the only one to which I had ready access. And there was certainly no record of its existence, at least not in America.

After my father died his old trunk was moved from his spare room to my basement, the trunk containing his army uniform and folded duffel bag and a sheaf of the orders that had moved him from place to place, way back then, in the unimaginable time before I was born. A time I like to think of as simpler and cleaner than ours. A time in which you knew with clarity who your enemies were, and they were who you killed.

The Luger, in its pillowcase, was at the bottom of the trunk, beneath the musty-smelling olive-drab uniform, its clip lying beside it, no longer concealed in that long-ago sock. I found it down there, the day I made my decision, and brought it out, and carried gun and clip up to my office, the small spare room we used to call the guest room before I was at home all the time and in need of an office. I closed the door, and sat at the small wood table I used as a deskbought last year at a lawn sale offered by some particularly desperate householder about ten miles from hereand studied the gun, and it seemed to me clean and efficient-looking, without rust or obvious injury. The clip, this small sharp metal machine, felt surprisingly heavy. There was a slit up the rear of it, through which could be seen the bases of the eight bullets it contained, each with its little round blind eye. Touch that eye with the firing mechanism of the gun, and the bullet leaps off on its only journey.