Page 141 of Hanging and Burning

“That’s right. The barrel’s what they call an integrated silencer, and it’s a very old make. It was created by the English during the Second World War.”

“For their soldiers?” Leaf asked.

“No. The Welrod was designed for irregular forces and resistance groups behind enemy lines.”

“How’d they get them if they were, you know, underground?”

“The Americans and British would drop them from planes and tell the resistance where they’d be.”

“And what’s with the name?”

“During World War II, the British had a secret factory that built weapons like this one in a town called Welwyn.”

Leaf grinned and said, “So the first part of the name is for the town and then they added rod to mean gun.”

“Yeah.”

“So, this is like seventy-five years old?” she asked.

“I doubt it. I mean, the Brits didn’t order that many assassinations.”

Our fun dried up then.

“So this is purely a killing gun,” she said, handing the Welrod back to me, butt first.

I nodded while biting my lower lip.

“That’s why you have to go alone? Because if I was there you might hesitate?”

I nodded again and we spent some time closely considering each other’s eyes.

Then she said softly, “Okay.”

On my way to West Los Angeles, I was trying to put into words why it was so hard to say goodbye to Leaf. When I was a child, between nine years old and puberty, some days it was impossible to leave my mother when it was time to go to school. Those reticent days had two things in common. The first was that my father would have already been gone for at least a day. He would be out in the world somewhere, making money, languishing in jail, or spending time with one of his girlfriends. The second instigating circumstance causing me to play hooky was that my mom hadn’t gotten up to make my breakfast. She always made me something hot, except when she was heartbroken and couldn’t keep her eyes open. On those days I treated myself to cartoons and comic books, and if my mother staggered into the living room and asked me why I was still home, I’d tell her that I had a fever and it hurt.

Me thinking about my mother was never a good sign. Before my fourteenth birthday she’d had a nervous breakdown, was sent to a sanitorium, and then reported dead. But thirty years later I found out that she was still alive and living a solitary life thirty miles away from Brooklyn.

My phone sounded, and the voice of my electronic phone attendant said, “You have a call from a New York area code. Answer it?”