IntroductionIntroductionIN SEARCH OF THE ASSASSIN
Jay Hopler
It is easier to find a good hit man than it is to find a good hit man story. In Baltimore, you can have anyone killed for $25—more if you want finesse. I knew of a dozen street corners, all within five blocks of my one-bedroom apartment on Saint Paul Street, where an assassin could be hired; the only modern hit man story I knew of was Ernest Hemingway’s “The Killers.” But the existence of the one argues favorably for the existence of the other, so I began, one afternoon in a rainy November, what would turn out to be almost three years of research into the literature of professional murder.
I read hundreds of short stories, novels, plays, screenplays, songs, poems and essays all concerned with hired killers only to find that perhaps one in every twenty met the criteria I had devised. I was looking for an accurate and compelling literary representation of the assassin and the margins he so emphatically occupies. Though the modern hit man story is an independent literary subgenre that had its genesis with Hemingway in a lonely hotel room in Madrid on May 16, 1926, the psychological profile of the character predates its modern appearance by at least 320 years, with Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the last and darkest of his four great tragedies written most likely in the latter half of 1606. Take lines 91-113 of III.i, in which Macbeth secures the services of two assassins and arranges for Banquo’s murder:
MACBETH: Ay, in the catalogue ye go for men,
As hounds and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs
Shoughs, water-rugs, and demi-wolves are clept
All by the name of dogs. The valued file
Distinguishes the swift, the slow, the subtle,
The housekeeper, the hunter, every one,
According to the gift which bounteous nature
Hath in him closed: whereby he does receive
Particular addition, from the bill
That writes them alike; and so of men.
Now, if you have a station in the file,
Not i‘th’ worst rank of manhood, say’t;
And I will put that business in your bosoms
Whose execution takes your enemy off,
Grapples you to the heart and love of us,
Who wear our health but sickly in his life,
Which in his death were perfect.
2ND MURDERER: I am one, my liege,
Whom the vile blows and buffets of the world
Have so incensed that I am reckless what
I do to spite the world.
1ST MURDERER: And I another,
So weary with disasters, tugged with fortune,
That I would set my life on any chance
To mend it or be rid on’t.
(the italics are mine)
The specifics change with every author, poet and playwright who appropriates it—that’s to be expected—but the core of the character remains essentially the same, a singular feat when you consider it has been employed by authors as diverse as William Shakespeare and Elmore Leonard. Even more amazing is that the narrative structures of these stories have also remained fixed. While professional killers have fascinated writers for centuries, there are for the most part only two kinds of hit man story—each with its own set of variables, each with its own set of rules.
Type one, the “Metamorphosis tale,” is the less common of the two and has a scenario much like the sample which follows.
(1) The killer is introduced. Usually a male, blue collar, luckless though still pursuing acceptable means of improving his situation—he is not a killer when the story begins. He has few friends, none very close. If he is married, he is apathetically so. What is most important here is the killer’s relationship to his surroundings—there is no contrast between the two. Though he is aware of the banality of his situation, he is also perfectly suited to it. This is not to say that he is resigned, quite the contrary. In fiction, as in life, realization rarely connotes acceptance. Take this passage from “When This Man Dies,” by Lawrence Block:
He went on doing his work from one day to the next, working with the quiet desperation of a man who knows his income, while better than nothing, will never quite get around to equaling his expenditures. He went to the track twice, won thirty dollars one night, lost twenty-three the next.
The hero’s quiet desperation is suffused with the knowledge of his placement as it relates to the other—he merely survives while those around him thrive. His self-awareness is defined by his inability to act in any decisive way—the climax of a “Metamorphosis tale” is inaction brought to its highest power. In the beginning of all stories told in this mode, the hero embodies one of life’s most terrifying prospects (certainly one more terrifying than death!): he is exactly equal to the sum of his parts.
(2) The beginnings of initiation.
Murder is a negative creation, and every murderer is therefore the rebel who claims the right to be omnipotent. His pathos is his refusal to suffer.
—W.H. AUDEN
As the banality of the situation verges on suffocating the hero, a way out is presented: murder as vocation. He immediately disregards the possibility, but his arguments against it (which are most often morality arguments used to strengthen the hero’s sympathetic bond with the audience) lack conviction. The real obstacle is his fear of the consequences naturally contingent upon the imposition of disorder in order—the wake that focused action inevitably leaves. There is always the possibility, as was the case with Macbeth and his wife, that the world of order will somehow reform and crush that which sought to alter it. Look at these lines from “The Assassins,” a brilliant—if almost completely unknown—prose riff done by Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1814:
To produce immediate pain or disorder for the sake of future benefit, is consonant, indeed, with the purest religion and philosophy, but never fails to excite invincible repugnance in the feelings of many. Against their predilections and distaste an Assassin, accidentally the inhabitant of a civilized community, would wage unremitting hostility from principle. He would find himself compelled to adopt means which they would abhor, for the sake of an object which they could not conceive that he should propose himself. Secure and self-enshrined in the magnificence and pre-eminence of his conceptions, spotless as the light of heaven, he would be the victim among men of calumny and persecution. Incapable of distinguishing his motives, they would rank him among the vilest and most atrocious criminals.
The professional killer is at ease with the possible consequences of his actions because his forays into the daily world are brief—he is not of that which he alters. The initiate’s ultimate success depends largely upon his ability to break from the society of men (Shelley’s “civilized community”) and survive in the margins. To do that, he must completely embrace what amounts to the nihilist’s call to personal responsibility: futile action is no viable means of confronting the world, only action which alters carries weight.
(3) The situation worsens. The hero adheres to his old methods of operation even though the hopelessness of his situation is steadily increasing. It is important to note that there is nothing in the hero’s life that can be of any assistance to him in the making of this decision. There is rarely any family and no faith in organized religion. Once the initiation is complete, this lack of faith is replaced by a fanatical belief in his own personal code of conduct. Every decision he makes thereafter is in keeping with his code and, while its strict observance is never enough to subdue the world, it makes his being in the world a gallant gesture.
(4) The killer acts—the murder is completed. The deed done, the killer is nervous and expects arrest (Note: once the transformation is complete, the moral question is never again raised. It is not, should I have done this thing? but rather, can I get away with it?, can I succeed?). Time passes and when it becomes obvious the job was a success, he relaxes and marvels at how easy it was, the implication being that if he had just acted in the first place, he could have saved a great deal of time and trouble. (Macbeth, again, this time from the soliloquy beginning I.vii: “If it were done, when t’is done, then t’were well/it were done quickly.”) Here as in the “Utopia tale” (the description of which follows) intellectual contemplation is portrayed as the cause of problems, a hindrance to personal progress. Professional killers are successful men freed from the moral seriousness which necessarily attends contemplative thought. They are pure action—they do. This is why so many of these stories are short, written in a sparse—if not exactly hard-boiled, certainly non-lyrical—style.
There is social criticism implicit in the “Metamorphosis tale.” The underlying questions in all of the stories written in this mode are these: what kind of society would so neglect its members that they would see murder as a viable means of self-support? How can the danger inherent in the life of a professional murderer pale in comparison to the unremitting banality in which a man lives? Given the desperate situations in which many people live, the evolution from non-entity to killer seems an almost natural progression. These lines from chapter 3 of Shelley’s “The Assassins” could well apply to the way in which the hero of the “Metamorphosis tale”—the successful transformation—engages the world by story’s end:
Thy createst—’tis mine to ruin and destroy.—I was thy slave—I am thy equal, and thy foe.
There are certain elements all hit man stories share, for example, the killer is always a disinterested third party—something that sets hit man fiction apart from standard crime and detective fiction which focuses on the full realization of the bleaker human emotions: hate, fear, jealousy, et al. Hit men represent the perfect rupture of the relationship between cause and effect, something regular fiction (and certainly crime and mystery fiction!) cannot tolerate. As Auden makes clear in his essay, “The Guilty Vicarage,” the first requirement for a successful detective story is a closed society in a state of grace. Mystery and detective fiction depend upon the society’s original (apparent) innocence being altered by the unimaginable act: the murder; and then restored by the apprehension of the fallen member. It falls apart unless every member of the given society is a likely suspect—take the novel, And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie (also published as Ten Little Indians). The best example of the kind of closed society that is so crucial to mystery fiction, it features a cast of ten characters stranded on Indian Island, a small, privately-owned rock completely isolated from the Devon coast. All ten have been asked to the island for the weekend by a mysterious host whose motives are completely unknown and who never makes an appearance. Shortly after dinner on the first night, a gruesome phonograph recording is played in which the sins of each member of the party (the perfectly closed society) are detailed. At this point, the apparent innocence of the society is called into question, but not yet altered—accusations of past transgressions, whether true or false, are simply hearsay. The necessary alteration is not achieved until the first confirmed murder occurs—that of young Anthony Marston at the end of chapter four, a victim of poison in his after-dinner drink. As the story progresses, suspicion falls on each one of the surviving characters in turn because it is obvious the murders are being committed by one of them, the breakdown is internal. As a consequence—and this is especially true of And Then There Were None though it could be said with equal certainty about almost any decent example of the genre—no one is innocent.
But in the hit man story, the innocence of the affected society is never altered. There is a victim—a body—so it follows by obvious logic that someone is responsible for its appearance, that at least one member of the society has fallen from grace; but, because of the rupture of cause and effect, it is impossible to determine which one, and resolution in the classic sense is impossible. This, of course, is the crux of the most interesting paradox: because hit men are employed as experts in endings, hit man stories are not about conflict—their focus is entirely on resolution.
The issue of open and closed societies—the profound effect a marginalized other can have on the mainstream—raises the question of open and closed space, the moral implication of distance. The mastery of time-as-space (duration), as has been mentioned in the outline of the “Metamorphosis tale,” is a crucial factor in the making of a professional killer—as Lafcadio exclaims near the end of Andre Gide’s novel Lafcadio’s Adventures (first published as The Vatican Swindle in November, 1925), “What a gulf between the imagination and the deed!” In these stories, professional killers are able to eliminate that gulf easily, precisely because of their own marginalization—as Shelley points out, “[t]ime was measured and created by the vices and miseries of men, between whom and the happy nation of the Assassins, there was no analogy nor comparison.” But there remains a tension between the hit man and his moral relationship to physical distance. The same situation which allows for such a complete mastery of time—the fact that he is not of that which alters—interferes with his mastery of the deed. The distance between the killer and the victim must be closed completely if the act is to have merit. Take these lines from chapter 21 of the novel, The Assignment, by Friedrich Durrenmatt, in which the post-engagement feelings of Achilles, a bomber pilot who flew missions from The Kitty Hawk during Vietnam, are described:
… and after the attack he did not feel himself a hero but a coward, there was a dark suspicion in him sometimes that an SS henchman at Auschwitz had behaved more morally than he, because he had been confronted with his victims, even though he regarded them as subhuman trash, while between himself and his victims no confrontation took place, the victims weren’t even subhuman, just an unspecified something, it wasn’t very different from exterminating insects, the pilot spraying the vines from his plane couldn’t see the mosquitoes either, and no matter what you called it, bombing, destroying, liquidating, pacifying, it was abstract, mechanical, and could only be understood as a sum, probably a financial sum …
The more skilled the assassin—the more professionally honest—the closer he can get to the target. This issue was dealt with beautifully by Luc Besson in The Professional, his first American film since La Femme Nikita. The hit man, Leon (Jean Reno in a role very similar to the one he played in La Femme Nikita), against his better judgment, takes in a young girl, Matilda, (played by Natalie Portman) whose family is killed by a gang of rogue DEA agents. To his surprise she is not shocked or repulsed when she finds out what he does for a living. On the contrary, she asks him to teach her how to become an assassin so she can find the men responsible for her four-year-old brother’s death (he was the only member of the family she cared for) and right the wrong. After much argument and discussion, he agrees to teach her the theory behind the profession and goes to his middleman (Danny Aiello) to collect the rifle he used as a beginner. The middleman is surprised that such a highly skilled professional would ask for a rifle and, when questioned about it, Leon explains (with no small amount of embarrassment) that he just wants to keep in shape, that the rifle is only for practice. What follows is one of the best scenes in this, or any other movie in this genre. On a roof top in New York City, Leon explains to Matilda the exact meaning of distance and the necessary progression from amateur to professional:
The rifle is the first weapon you learn how to use because it lets you keep your distance from the client. The closer you get to being a pro, the closer you can get to the client. The knife, for example, is the last thing you learn.
In the hierarchy of murder and its practitioners, hit men are revered as artists. They (and their employers) think of the sniper, the psychopath and the passion killer as unskilled labor, their deeds as the uncouth graffiti slung roughly on an alley wall. Any coward can kill from a distance—it requires no special skill or understanding. Though murder is any form is morally reprehensible, there is something thrilling about the assassin who sneaks unnoticed through ranks of heavily-armed guards and dispatches his mark quickly, quietly, without any wasted motion or fanfare—just as there is something peculiarly pathetic and ugly about the cuckold who disengages the breaks on his wife’s car so that it will crash sometime later, miles from home. Regarding this crisis of distance and its effect on the aesthetics of the deed, Thomas De Quincey exclaimed in the first paper on his treatise, “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” which originally appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine in February 1827, “Fie on these dealers in poison, say I: can they not keep to the old honest way of cutting throats…”
The second type of hit man story is the “Utopia tale.” The hit men of the “Utopia tale” are the modern take on the ideal suggested by Sir Thomas More in 1516—they represent the possibility of regimentation and efficiency without subservience. As Peter, in Book I of Utopia exclaims: “Service not servitude …” Heroes here are professionals from the start. They can be, but most likely are not, freelance operators. They are usually affiliated with a crime family or other sub-legal organization. Because the initiations are already complete, this type of story has a simpler narrative than that of the “Metamorphosis tale” and is consistent with the outline below.
(1) The killer is introduced. He is usually well-dressed, educated (not necessarily in the traditional sense), with a striking self-awareness and self-assuredness which has its basis in the deed; after all, he is the man who controls life and death. He is usually unmarried and his friends are those he works with, if he works with anyone. As with the “Metamorphosis tale,” what is happening on the periphery is of the utmost importance, but for very different reasons. Here, the contrast between the killers and what is going on around them is what provides the punch—the point being that there is a contrast. In these stories, normalcy exists in complete ignorance of the irony it provides. The sinister is run gently up against the every-day. In the “Utopia tale” there is no detectable disturbance of the atmosphere one naturally assumes accompanies the presence of those who deal in human destruction, there is nothing to suggest that all is not well with one’s small corner of the world. But this sense of rightness and security is based on the false assumption that there are no killers lurking in the peripheries of the sit-corns. Take these lines from Mark Rudman’s book-length poem Rider and note the devastating effect the last line, when the margins cozy up to the mainstream:
the tuna casseroles and macaroni and cheese
making the rounds, apple sauce
passing from high chair to bib, the Wonder Bread on a calcified plate,
children eating, heads down in silence,
communicating through eye movements,
the mother wiping her lips, the father
grinning stupidly and drooling;
the television quacking in the background,
the perfect suburban night unfolding
in bedroom and drive-in and den,
the sprinkler system ticking.
The snipers in the tower—.
Notice Rudman’s last line is not given any more emphasis than any of the lines that precede it—for all its power, it is their syntactic equal. There is (as yet) no intersection—though complete opposites, the suburban world and the marginal world are pacing each other, each progressing in the same direction, at the same rate, by means of an identical linear framework. The result of this parallelism, which is present in nearly all hit man stories of the “Utopia” variety, is the amplification of presence and credibility of that which is necessarily viewed by the assimilated individual as unreal. Part of the reason hit men are so fascinating is that their actions are continually substantiated by their incredible, rational proximity to our own.
Look at Hemingway’s short story, “The Killers.” After Nick warns Ole Anderson that there are two men looking to kill him, he talks to Anderson’s landlady, a woman whose stubborn normalcy remains unshaken in the face of events. Keep in mind, while this conversation is taking place, a marked man is lying on a cot upstairs waiting for two professional killers to find him.
“He’s been in his room all day,” The landlady said down-stairs. “I guess he don’t feel well. I said to him: ‘Mr. Anderson, you ought to go out and take a walk on a nice fall day like this,’ but he didn’t feel like it.”
“He doesn’t want to go out.”
“I’m sorry he don’t feel well,” the woman said. “He’s an awfully nice man …”
Likewise the dinner scene in Shelter: Mrs. Downey, a suburban housewife and mother of three hears a commotion in the den across the hall from where her family is enjoying Christmas dinner (and note that Auden in his essay specifically mentions the Christmas dinner in the country house as one of the perfect examples of a closed society—here, because of the hit man, it is allowed to maintain its state of grace.) She goes to investigate, thinking her daughter’s high school boyfriend and his business associate (both of whom have dropped by unexpectedly) might need assistance. What she’s hearing: two hit men fighting to the death in her front room.
BOOM!, Sal connects with a sharp blow to Bennie’s rib cage, and follows instantaneously with a two-handed uppercut that sends Bennie up and back flattening a Christmas present as he lands. Sal pauses to pick his cigarette back up off the carpet. Bennie crawls toward the fireplace grabbing the Yule log and swinging back with it—connecting hard with Sal’s ankle. Sal falls to his knees. Bennie swings again, but Sal grabs the log, using it to throw himself into a sweeping round-house. Sal’s loaded fist (loaded with a pewter figurine of the Christ Child— my aside) catches Bennie’s jaw, knocking him out cold.
MRS. DOWNEY
(through the door)
Is everything okay in there?
Sal grabs his cigarette from the floor again and limps to the door. He opens it a crack, and speaks quietly to Mrs. Downey.
SAL
He’s not taking it very well I’m afraid. Give him a minute.
Mrs. Downey nods, and Sal closes the door.
MRS. DOWNEY
(to Bobby)
What a sweet man!
Sal throws the poinsettias from a vase, and splashes the water on Bernie’s face. Grabbing him by the collar, he presses a sharp table knife to the groggy man’s neck.
Of course, it is possible for the opposite to occur—the mainstream, by some accident, entering the outskirts—but it’s rare. Those tales are most closely akin to “Metamorphosis tales” in that they feature an uninitiated other entering the foreign territory. The difference is that the other, in these cases, is able to return to the world he left—changed, to be sure, but not transformed. Of this variety, Robert Lowell’s poem “Memories of West Street and Lepke,” (and particularly the story behind how it came to be written) is the best example.
The Story: America entered the Second World War (officially) at 4:10 pm Eastern Standard Time on December 8, 1941—one day after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. Robert Lowell registered for the draft and spent the remainder of that year, as well as the whole of 1942, trying to enlist. He was repeatedly deferred (as Ian Hamilton noted in his biography of Lowell published in 1982, there was even some talk of Lowell being permanently deferred because of poor eyesight). During the summer of 1943, however, he was examined by the draft board for the seventh time and given a date on which to report for induction: September 8, 1943. Lowell spent the remainder of that summer rethinking the prospect of his, now inevitable, military service and in the first week of September he came to the decision that, since the war was essentially over and the position of the allies was no longer a defensive one, he could not serve in good conscience. He wrote a letter to President Roosevelt, along with a statement detailing his position, in which he expressed his deep regret at not being able to accept his country’s call to duty. On October 13, 1943, Robert Lowell was arraigned in New York City on the charge of draft evasion and sentenced to one year and one day to be served in the Federal Correctional Center at Danbury, Connecticut. While waiting to be transferred, he was confined at New York’s West Street Jail where he met the man who would later become the center of one of his greatest poems. The following is an excerpt from an interview conducted by Ian Hamilton with one of Lowell’s fellow inmates at West Street. It ends chapter 6 of Hamilton’s biography:
Lowell was in a cell nest to Lepke, you know, Murder Incorporated, and Lepke says to him: “I’m in for killing. What are you in for?” [And Lowell says] “Oh, I’m in for refusing to kill.” And Lepke burst out laughing. It was kind of ironic.
(2) The job is outlined. The victim is mentioned, his location, sometimes his background and, occasionally, the reason he is to be killed—though the last, it should be said, is a rarity. Look at this exchange in Bukowski’s “Hit Man” and note the necessary rupture of cause and effect:
“Can I ask you one thing?” [Ronnie, the hit man]
“Sure”
“Why?”
“Why?”
“Yes, why?”
“Do you care?”
“No.”
“Then why ask?”
The fee is negotiated if it has not been already and a time is decided upon. This is the only contact the hit man has with the person who is contracting the job. His presence is distasteful to his employers—a constant reminder of their own mortality, the fact that their own lives are probably worth no more than their intended victim’s, what they are paying the killer for the contract. In a world where success and stability depend—in large part—on who you know and the safe, predictable exchange of favors, the man successful on his own (and because of his dedication and skill) is a terrific threat, an unknown quantity. One of the most interesting aspects of the professional killer is how at ease he is with his own marginalization; he has no desire to establish anything more that the briefest of working relationships with those in the center of the activity—in short, the feeling is mutual. In Thomas Perry’s novel, The Butcher’s Boy, the hit man flies to Las Vegas after the completion of the contract to await payment and recuperate from wounds sustained in an attempted mugging in Denver. He’s not in Las Vegas four hours before the powers-that-be send someone to find out exactly what he’s doing there—whether or not he’s working. But look as these lines from chapter 29:
It had never occurred to him [the hit man] to wonder where Orloff lived until he’d hired the Cruiser to watch him. He had little interest in the brokers and middlemen. He knew and accepted the fact that he wasn’t the sort of man they’d want to spend time with, even if he hadn’t been dangerous. And if Orloff had invited him there he would have been insulted. He did the work and took the money, but he would have resented any presumption that he cared who gave it to him, or took any interest in the problems and personalities that provided him with a market for his services.
(3) The murder is completed. The victim is eliminated and the killer falls back into the regularity of his life while he waits for another job. There is never any philosophical self-recrimination on the part of the hit man, there is never any moral doubt. And it should be noted that here, as in the “Metamorphosis tale,” the hit man’s code of conduct assumes the role otherwise played by organized religion—with one difference: in the “Utopia tale,” religion is more than just a regrettable absence. It is portrayed as either a nebulous waymaker to sloppiness and imprecision, or a random malevolent force, something that, quite literally in some cases (don’t forget—Sal, in Shelter, is using a pewter figurine of the Christ Child as a punching block!), dulls the senses. Look at “In the Beginning,” by Ian McEwan, an excerpt from a novel in progress (originally published in The New Yorker, June 26, 1995) which is told from the point of view of the intended victim, a man who has been targeted because of lectures he has given regarding the possible genetic basis for religious practice. Notice how he describes the hit men, just before they shoot the wrong person:
Both men wore black coats that gave them a priestly look. There was ceremony in their stillness.
It is also worth noting that “In the Beginning” is loosely based on historical fact—specifically, the controversy which erupted following the publication of the Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology: the New Synthesis, in the summer of 1975.
The theory behind sociobiology, that human social behavior is genetically based, encountered furious opposition, not the least of which from Wilson’s own friends and colleagues. Shortly after Sociobiology was published, a number of scientists (including Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin) formed The Sociobiology Study Group, a group designed to provide a forum for their feelings of outrage. Though they, of course, never thought of hiring hit men, they did publish a letter in The New York Review of Books on November 13, 1975, which—perilously close to character assassination as it was—might have done even more damage. In that letter, they stated that Sociobiology was not only bad science but also politically dangerous, going so far as to link Wilson and his theories with racist eugenics and Nazi policies. One of the more notable results of this opposition was that—as Wilson comments in his autobiography, Naturalist—it marked perhaps “ …the only occasion in recent American history on which a scientist was physically attacked, however mildly simply for the expression of an idea.” (The episode to which Wilson is referring occurred in January 1978 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Demonstrators seized the stage just as he was about to give a speech, dumped a bucket of ice water on his head and chanted “Wilson, you’re all wet!”) McEwan makes quick reference to the actual scandal as the story moves away from the beginning:
But anger rose against my assertion that, since religious practice was universal to all known societies, it must have a genetic base and therefore be the product of evolutionary pressure. I invoked E.O. Wilson: “Religions, like all other human institutions, evolve so as to enhance the persistence and influence of their practitioners.”
As mentioned above, the hit men of the “Utopia tale” represent More’s “service, not servitude” ideal; the triumph of reason over emotion. Take, for example, the brief explanation of what it is to be a hit man, delivered by Max Von Sydow to Robert Redford at the end of Three Days of the Condor:
No need to believe in either side—or any side. There is no cause.
There is only yourself. The belief is in your own precision.
Here, too, is an underlying social criticism, but of a different variety than that of the “Metamorphosis tale”—here there is no attempt at laying blame. That the hit men in these tales are victims of societal neglect is, perhaps in some cases, implied but never clear—nor is it important. All transformations are complete before the story begins. The crucial thing to note here is that the hired killers are portrayed as members of cultures in upheaval who have adapted successfully. It is no accident that Jiri Kajanë, an author whose work has never been formally published in his native Albania because of his precarious standing before the revolution and the industrial paralysis which followed, finds the character of the hit man a relevant trope.
Despite Albania’s fanatical isolationism (as late as 1984, official business was the only reason Albanian citizens were allowed out of the country) they were not exempt from the economic and political problems which plagued and continue to plague, the former communist countries. Though “The Same, Only Different!” was written after the anti-climactic Albanian revolution of the early 1990s (and Kajanë’s view of his native country is constantly touched with anti-climax—notice that the hit woman, the character whose job it is to act decisively, is brought in from Romania), the troubles which lead to it began 12 years earlier, when China withdrew all economic support. This devastating withdrawal was followed three years later—on December 18, 1981—by the mysterious suicide of the Albanian Prime Minister, Mehmet Shehu, which gave rise to an intense clandestine campaign of purges of party leaders which continued through all 1982. Many of those who were close to the former prime minister were murdered or imprisoned. Kajane, as early as the mid-1980s, was witness to what the article, “The Thrill of the Kill,” (Psychology Today, January/February 1993) reports as new information, that contractual murder is the “fastest growing profession in the East.”
In a letter written to his American translators shortly after the revolution, Kajanë describes how “The Same Only Different!” came to be written as a means to an answer. During a visit to Vlorë (a small town on the coast of the Adriatic Sea, 100km South/Southwest of the capital, Tiranë), his niece grilled him with questions of the strange spring days which have become synonymous with the onset of the revolution. Her parents, Kajanë’s brother and sister-in-law, like so many Albanians, refuse to speak of it. In the final paragraph of the letter, he writes:
That following week, still trying to formulate some sort of response, I wrote “The Same Only Different!” Of course I never came up with a definite answer—Was it [the revolution] a beginning? Yes, for some. Was it an end? I suppose. Mostly though, it just felt like a welcome respite from my otherwise monotonous struggle to survive.
JAY HOPLER
Baltimore/Iowa City-1995