“Aaand we’re back! If you’re just joining
us, I have here on the show with me, Steven Pee-ri! I finally got it right,
didn’t I?”
“Hehe, yes, you did.”
“I mean, your name isn’t the easiest to
pronounce! Well, it is, but reading it you’d think it’s pronounced, Firi! Because, you know, it’s spelt,
P-H-I-R-I.”
“Don’t worry about it, Mike. I have been
getting that a lot since I started travelling around Europe and America,”
replied Steven in his Zambian accent.
Mike Stone turned to camera one and spoke
to the audience at home, “If you’ve been living under a rock for the last three
years or so, Steven is the bestselling author of, Assassin Rising. A page
turner of a book about a brutal freelance assassin, who in his spare time, is a
friggin’ aspiring author!”
Steven Smiled.
“How ever
did you come up with a concept like that, Stevie? Mind if I call you, Stevie?”
“Not at all,” said Steven shifting in the
couch next to the host’s desk, “I quite literally stumbled upon it. I think it
was the Italian artist, Michelangelo that said about his stone sculptures, ‘Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.’ I found
this unfortunate scene at the hotel and I saw a potential story in it.”
Steven Phiri had literally stumbled upon his
now world famous story. He had been a cleaner at a five star hotel in the
backyard of high society’s streets. It didn’t pay much, but it helped him fund
his education at a local college. He went about his work in the same half-assed
manner millennials at the older end of the scale carry out their mundane tasks.
But sometimes, on a good day, he would come across something valuable on the
floors or in the crevices of the overly priced hotel rooms.
The occasional hundred dollar bill, used
condoms, traces of cocaine or marijuana, gold chains and sometimes even semi-new clothes
were some of the items he would find. He and the other cleaners would fight regularly
to take on recently vacated plush hotel suites because they knew there could be
hidden treasures within them. You could say Steven found a diamond in the
rough.
“So you found this bloody scene in a hotel
room you were cleaning, and you were inspired to write a book based on it,”
Mike Stone asked, fingertips touching and elbows resting on his desk, “most
people would be horrified by such a
thing!”
“For a while I was truly horrified,”
replied Steven. This probably being the only true statement he would make on
the Stone Cold Show that night. “But
people deal with trauma in different ways. My process was through story
telling. I thought,” he said with his eyes looking up at the studio ceiling, as
if the perfect lie or quotable were written there in bold, “How can I turn this
tragedy...into triumph?”
“Admirable!” said Mike in that vaguely sarcastic
tone late night TV show hosts employ. “Isn’t that absolutely admirable, folks?”
The studio’s ‘APPLAUSE’ light box lit up
and the audience obliged enthusiastically.
On that fateful day at the hotel, Steven
had rolled in the hand trolley with his cleaning supplies like he always did. He
was playing soft music in his earphones like he always did, and he set out to
raid the room of misplaced valuables like he always did. Because Lost and Found
be damned, he figured. Once a suite was vacated, the area became his domain for
the duration of his cleaning process and whatever he found was rightly his. He
felt the universe owed him something for all the nasty messes he had to clean
and wipe up. But no pot pourri scented multi-surface cleaner would have been enough
to clean and wipe up the nasty mess he came across that day.
“I’m sure the people in the audience and
the folks at home are just dying to
hear you read an exciting excerpt from your book! Why don’t you grace us with a
little something, Stevie?”
“It would be my pleasure,” Steven smiled,
leafed through a copy of Assassin Rising
and cleared his throat:
Roman
was the type of mark I actually relished killing. I’d told myself long ago not
to derive pleasure from my work, but there was a certain satisfaction that came
with stopping the pulse of a fat parasite like him. I felt that I was doing
society a favour.
I’d
watched his place for weeks and knew his routine like the back of my glove. In
my profession, even though you always showed up unannounced, you still had to
set an appointment. And even though the party on the other end of that
appointment didn’t know you would be visiting, you wanted them there when you
arrived.
I could
have used a muzzled 9mm pistol, a knife or even poisoned the burley leach, but
I wanted to hear the saliva curdle in his throat while I choked the air out of
his clogged lungs with my wire. I wanted his end to come slow and painfully. I
wanted to rob him of his life the same way he robbed so many poor bastards just
trying to make an honest living.
Roman
didn’t see me coming. I was death in the flesh. He had collected millions in
racketeering and ‘protection’ dollars, and now I had collected from him too. I
had collected on his life.
Steven rummaged through the room
carefully and methodically, turning over each pillow and throw, patting down the
sheets of the queen-sized bed. He scanned the carpet for any tiny jewellery and
checked the room’s closet for anything remotely valuable. He picked up a thick
manuscript from the bedside table and tucked it under his trolley, naive to
the fact that what he had just tucked away would propel him to superstardom and
overrated bestseller lists.
He almost gagged when he walked
into the bathroom to find a very hairy man sprawled naked in a tub of blood.
Steven froze at the entrance in disbelief, staring at the blood smeared hand
prints on the tiled wall and little puddles of blood-water on the floor. He’d
seen dead bodies before, but they hadn’t been ragdoll contorted and this
gruesome. Before he knew what he was doing, he was lifting the furry dead man’s
hands and checking for rings. The thud from the lifeless arm dropping on the side
of the bathtub sent him flying toward the toilet bowl and heaving his noodle
breakfast.
The police questioned him for
weeks and he was in therapy for about the same period. Every so often he would
have a nightmare about the dead man coming alive and pulling him into the
bloody abyss of the tub. He had almost forgotten about the manuscript he had
found at the crime scene. Handing it to the police was out of the question. Unless he wanted to be grilled further and raise his prospects of being a murder
suspect.
“That made the hairs on the back
of my neck stand! You can actually FEEL the assassin’s emotion!” shouted Mike
Stone. One could never tell if he was genuinely excited or he was just faking
his enthusiasm.
“That is what I was going for,”
said Steven, “I wanted to convey the same depth of emotion that I had felt when
I found that body, except repackaged in a different form.”
The manuscript was filled with
post-its and annotations on almost all its pages. Little notes were made by its
author to remind him to change some bits to make his ties to the gruesome tales
inside less obvious. How a world class professional assassin had left this gem lying around at a crime scene was unfathomable. This book was no work of fiction, it read like a chapter
by chapter confession of a hired assassin. Fake passports, disguises and
stakeouts had never seemed so real. The world had to see this.
Steven read it cover to cover
multiple times before finally pitching it to a few publishing houses. Of course
a number of them turned him down, but one of them was bound to take the book
on. He worked with several editors and made various changes and grammatical
corrections, but essentially it remained the same. As soon as Assassin Rising hit the book shelves,
Steven feared for his life.
He didn’t make any public
appearances when the book was propelled to the New York Times bestseller list for months on end. He instead went into a paranoid
spiral and surrounded himself with a security team and even food tasters. For a
whole year, his dread of the author whose original story he had stolen added to
his mystique and the book only sold more copies. People were intrigued by this
man from Africa that had written a literally heart stopping book and chose to
remain out of the public eye. He only began to feel safe after roughly two years
had gone by.
He still suspected it would all
come crashing down on him. He thought maybe the assassin would come forward and
confess his murders, telling the world what a fraud Steven Phiri was and that
the balance of the universe would finally teeter against him. So he occasionally
made large donations to charities, giving him a false sense of the universe
starting to totter in his favour.
“The big question now is: what’s
next for Stevie Pee-ri?” Mike Stone said excitedly.
Steven smiled and crossed his
legs, “I can’t speak on it just yet, but I have a new book in the works. People
will just have to wait and see.”
“I can hardly wait! Well ladies
and gentlemen, that’s all from us today! Look up Assassin Rising on Amazon, do yourself a favour and buy yourself a
friggin’ copy! It’s to die for! Good night!”
The audience applauded and the
studio lights dimmed as the credits rolled on the screens of the viewers at
home. Steven made some small talk with Mike Stone and then made his way to
his dressing room with no bodyguard or security in tow. He’d began to feel a
lot safer after three years.
“I guess I really should be
thanking you. You got my book to number one and that’s really something.”
Steven wished he still had an
army of bodyguards standing outside the dressing room. He had never heard that
voice before, but he knew without a shred of doubt that the universe was
cashing its cheque.
“I’d tried for ages to get my
work to a willing publisher, but they all thought my story wasn’t real enough. Ironic, isn’t it?”
“...I—listen –I – I’m terribly
sorry... things just got out of control,” Steven wept.
“You stole from me,” the
assassin said.
“....”
“I suppose there was nothing you
could do. It’s not like I had left a number that you could reach me on, ‘Hey! I
made millions of dollars off your work, I just thought you might like to share
some of this money!’ My fault really, I shouldn't have been carrying my manuscript with me.”
“I cou—I could write you a
cheque right now!” Steven sobbed.
“I don’t want your money,” the
assassin said tearing a few pages from what originally was his book. He wore a
black suit and tie that were so dark they absorbed any light in the room and complimented the emotionless look he had on his face.
“I’ve been waiting for the right
moment,” the assassin said stuffing a page down Steven’s throat, “Patiently
stalking the shadows and waiting for you to let your guard down. Patience is
such a virtue,” another page. And another page. And another. Soon Steven had
half-swallowed a whole chapter and his eyes had rolled back in his head, tears
and mucus streaming down his face.
The assassin turned and left the
room. He still had a page in one hand and he let it fall to the floor. It read:
As dark
as the contents of this book are, it is still my wish that they should see the
light of day. Death and murder are not matters that should be taken lightly, nor
matters that the world would receive with open arms. But it is my twisted, and
yet sincere hope that people will read about the good I have done; that they
will look upon my work not as evil, but as a service to humanity. I hope that
they will see that even though I am death in the flesh, I am an agent of the
universe, restoring order and balance.
THE END
Benny Blow is a retired assassin with a penchant for fiction and offing publishers that reject his work. Follow him on Twitter, @Benny_blow.
