THE ASSASSIN WHO READ ROMANCE

On the night he was sent to kill a child, Kit Vance was on page 412 of a romance novel, and he was angry about it for the eleventh time.

He was parked on a side street off Milwaukee Avenue in Jefferson Park with the engine off and the heater dead, in a gray Camry that belonged to nobody, and he was reading by the light of a streetlamp that buzzed. It was a quarter to one in the morning in the second week of November. Frost had started to lace the corners of the windshield. Forty yards up the block, in the detached garage behind a yellow-brick bungalow, a man named Lenny Faraci had been dead for nineteen minutes, and Kit was waiting the twenty-five minutes he always waited before he drove away, because people who left at once were people who were remembered leaving, and Kit had been taught very carefully, by people who had since died, never to be remembered.

So he read. It was what he did with waiting.

The Regent’s Crimson Ruin, by Delphine Marchbanks. Lovelight Romance, 1994. The cover showed a man in a white shirt open to the navel, a sword in one hand, a lady with a great deal of bosom fainting against the other, and behind them a cathedral, a moon, and a sky the color of a bruised plum. The spine was cracked white in six places. The sticker on the back said $4.99, crossed out, and under it, in the pencil of the used bookstore on Clark Street where he had bought it three years ago, $1.

Page 412. Chapter Forty-Seven. The Axe in the Snow.

He knew it by heart. He read it anyway, the way you press a bruise.

Lucien Varre, Duke of Hollen, once Lord Protector of Wendmark, mounted the Cathedral steps for the last time with the snow falling on his unpowdered hair. He did not look for Rosalind in the crowd. He had stopped looking for anyone.

“Because nobody ever showed up,” Kit said aloud, to the windshield. “Because you wrote four hundred pages where nobody ever showed up.”

The windshield did not argue.

He read the rest. The crowd jeered. The boy king, whom Lucien had kept alive through three poisonings, two riots and a winter fever, watched from a balcony and did not know the truth until Chapter Fifty. Rosalind wept prettily on Felix’s shoulder. The headsman was clumsy. Delphine Marchbanks had a gift for clumsy headsmen. Then the chapter ended, and the book went on for eleven more cheerful pages of wedding and spring and coronation, and Lucien Varre was not in any of them, because Lucien Varre was in a pine box behind the Garrison Church with no name on it, and the only person who had ever loved him enough to show up was a dog in Chapter Thirty who had been dead since Chapter Thirty-One.

Kit closed the book and put it inside his jacket, against the left side of his chest, where it had ridden for three years.

Twenty-five minutes. He started the car.

He was twenty-seven years old. He had been doing this kind of work for eight of them, and training for it since he was nine, and if anyone had asked him how he felt about Lenny Faraci, who had been skimming from the Lusk organization’s sports book for two years and had cried at the end and offered Kit his car, Kit would have said, truthfully, that he did not feel anything. He was not proud of it and he was not ashamed of it. It was a fact about him, like his height, which was five-eleven, or his eyes, which were a gray so pale that a bartender in Bridgeport had once told him they looked like dishwater, and then apologized for an entire evening.

He drove the Camry to a lot under the Kennedy and left it with the keys on the tire. He walked four blocks in the cold and picked up his own car, a ten-year-old Civic with nothing in the glove box but the registration and a packet of tissues. He did not turn on the radio. He drove south through a city that was almost empty, wet streets throwing back the stoplights, the towers of the Loop standing up out of the dark like a row of lit candles somebody had forgotten to blow out.

Halfway down Halsted his phone buzzed.

Not the phone he carried for himself. The other one.

Come by.

Two words, no punctuation. It was ten after two in the morning. Declan Lusk did not sleep much and did not care if other people did.

Kit turned around.

Lusk Restaurant Supply occupied a long brick warehouse on a stretch of Fulton Market that had not yet been turned into a hotel with a rooftop bar, though every year the hotels crept closer, like a tide. In the daytime it sold commercial fryers and steam tables and forty-gallon stockpots to half the restaurants in Chicago, and it did that honestly and well, and Declan Lusk was proud of it the way a man is proud of a good suit. At night it did other things.

The side door was open. Kit went up the iron stairs to the office over the loading dock, where the lights were on and the blinds were down and the space heater ticked. Royce Kell was sitting on the arm of the leather couch with his coat on, eating sunflower seeds out of a paper bag and spitting the shells into his palm. He was forty-one and built like a vending machine and he had never liked Kit, which Kit did not mind, because liking was not part of the job.

Declan Lusk sat behind the desk in his shirtsleeves, reading glasses on, a ledger open in front of him. He was sixty-one and silver-haired and pleasant-faced, a man who looked like he might coach a Little League team, and in fact he did, in Elmhurst, every spring.

“There he is,” Lusk said warmly. “How’d it go?”

“It’s done.”

“He say anything?”

“He offered me his car.”

Royce laughed. Lusk smiled and shook his head as if at a nephew’s prank. “Lenny. God rest him. Sit down, Kit.”

Kit did not sit. He never sat in this office, and Lusk knew it, and Lusk always asked anyway, and Kit had understood for a long time that the asking was the point. You offered the dog the chair so everyone in the room could watch the dog not take it.

Lusk took off his reading glasses and folded them. “I got something delicate,” he said. “I want you on it because you’re careful, and because I don’t need to tell you why careful matters. You remember Ana Moreno.”

Kit did. Ana Moreno had kept the books for four laundromats on the Southwest Side that washed a good deal more than shirts. Three weeks ago she had stopped answering Lusk’s calls. Two weeks ago she had been found on the floor of the office behind the Coin-O-Matic on Cermak with a bullet in her. Kit had not been asked to do it. He had assumed Royce. He had not thought about it again.

“Ana was talking to the feds,” Lusk said. “We took care of that. Problem is, Ana had a kid, and the kid was in the back room doing her homework, and the kid saw. Which I did not know until yesterday, because the kid didn’t talk for ten days. Now she’s talking. She’s talking to a detective named Abernathy, and in a couple weeks she’ll be talking to a grand jury. And she’s going to say my name.”

He said it the way he said everything, mildly, as if describing a scheduling conflict.

“Dale Brophy says they’ve got her stashed with family in Pilsen. One uniform on the front. Nobody on the back. They’re moving her to a hotel in the suburbs Friday, after which it gets complicated.” Lusk slid a folded square of paper across the desk, and a photograph on top of it. “Tomorrow night. Quiet. You know how.”

Kit picked up the photograph.

It was a school picture, the kind with the mottled blue backdrop. A girl with two dark braids and a gap where a front tooth had been, grinning so hard her eyes had nearly closed. Somebody had cut it out of a frame. One corner was bent.

Kit looked at it for exactly as long as he looked at any photograph, which was long enough to know her in the dark.

“She’s eight,” Royce said, through sunflower seeds, watching him. “In case you were wondering. Hazel.”

“I wasn’t,” Kit said.

He folded the address into his pocket and slid the photograph in after it, next to the book, against his chest.

He did not sleep. He had not expected to, and it did not trouble him; he had learned young that sleep was a thing other people needed more than he did.

His apartment was on the second floor of a frame house on Lowe Avenue in Bridgeport, three rooms with radiators that clanked like someone in the walls was trying to get out. There was a mattress on a frame, a kitchen table with one chair, a weight bench, a coffee maker. There were no pictures. The landlady, Mrs. Kowalczyk, who was eighty and lived downstairs with a television she kept at the volume of a jet engine, thought he worked nights at a hospital, and every few weeks she left a foil plate of kolaczki on the top step for him because, she said, nobody fed boys anymore.

He ate one standing at the counter. Apricot.

Then he did the thing he did when there was nothing else to do. He took the screwdriver from the drawer, knelt in the bedroom closet, and took down the panel at the back.

Behind it, on three shel