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“It started… it started when I got my first client from the federal witness protection program. Vale came to talk with me before the surgery.”

Vale? I must have looked at him questioningly, because he explained.

“My boss. He’s the liaison between the government and the people who do the government’s dirty work. If you think I’m bad… well, he’s been doing this longer than I have. He sent me this client. I didn’t know it at the time, but he was feeling me out for this job. He asked me if I’d be willing to do plastic surgery on a criminal, if I could keep my mouth shut.”

“The client, he was a mob guy. He needed multiple plastic surgeries before leaving for Canada. I met him the first time, and he was a horrible person. Just horrible. He talked about all of the crimes he’d committed. He talked to me about killing a rival’s family, the wife, the children. One of them a baby. He laughed when he said he would get away with them all.

“I guess Vale told him that he could talk freely around me. Looking back on it, Vale probably goaded him to brag about his crimes in order to make me sick about it. Then, before his last appointment, Vale came to me and told me that he wanted me to kill the mob guy. To make him disappear, was how he put it. He said that if I didn’t want to do it, he could get someone else to do it. Then he told me what he’d pay.”

“He offered you a lot of money, I bet.”

Rien laughed a cold laugh.

“Sure. You see where I live, don’t you? You see the view from out there. The U.S. government pays its people well. But that wasn’t why I did it.”

“It wasn’t?”

“I did it because after talking with him, I hated him. I hated that he was going to be able to run away and start over. I hated that this man, this killer, would be out there free and living well, while good people starved on the streets. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. I wanted to do it, you see? I wanted to kill him. And not just kill. I wanted to torture him, to make him pay.”

His eyes were bright and animated as he spoke. The irises shone like tiger’s eye.

“And once I’d killed him, I didn’t want to stop. I asked Vale, I remember…” he trailed off, staring blankly into the air. “I asked him in a roundabout kind of way. I remember being nervous that he would say no. But of course he wanted me to work for him. He set me up with all of his clients from then on. And it was beautiful. I felt like it was what I was meant to do.Man’s main concern is not to gain pleasure or to avoid painbut rather to see a meaning in his life. And that was my meaning.”

He closed his eyes, breathing deeply. I didn’t know what to say to him. I didn’t know what he wanted me to say. Here, sitting next to him in a room full of broken glass and mirrors, I was lost in his confusion. So instead, I wrapped my arms around him. I hugged him, this monster, this killer. I hugged him tightly, knowing that he might kill me next. I hugged him because there was nothing else I could do to help and I needed to help him, God only knows why. Because there was something in him that kindled a strange desire, and I had spent my life suppressing my desires. Here, though, there was no reason to hold back.

Rien was better than me, because he knew what he wanted. His life was real, full of real actions and real consequences. I had spent all of my life pretending. I envied him, in a strange, dark way. I wanted to know what it was like to have that kind of power. To have that kind of meaning.

A moment passed, and he sat back, trembling.

“What happened, then?” I said.

He looked at me, tilting his head. Not understanding.

“You said you had found your meaning.” I looked around the room, at the broken mirrors, the shards of glass. “What happened? What happened here?”

“Oh, Sara,” he said. His hands moved to my face, caressing my cheeks. “My dear, my dear.”

In a thousand different reflections, tears fell from his eyes, twinkling in the low light. He cupped my cheeks and leaned in to me, pressing his forehead against mine in such an intimate pose that I forgot where we were for a moment. His voice was so low that it was almost inaudible.

“Youhappened.”

Rien

“Me?”

The girl was beautiful, beautiful and lost at the same time. I could see it in her face, in the slight tremble of her hands. How did she get here? I looked around my waiting room. The walls were spiderwebs of cracks. The mirrors reflecting our sad faces. Scattered at our feet were all the plastic pieces, the reminders of my other victims.

“You’re not real,” I said. “You’re beautiful and perfect and not real. I don’t know what to do now that I’ve had a taste of you.”

“I’m real,” she said. Her lip quivered.

“You are an actress. It’s what you do. You pretend, and you pretend beautifully. But nothing you’ve done here is real.”

“No,” she said. Her voice was firmer. “No, that’s not true.”

“No? Would you have done all this, if I hadn’t asked you to? If a killer hadn’t ordered you to kiss him, would you have done it?”

“I flirted with you before I knew you were a killer,” she said. She was unsteady.

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