Chapter 34 The Hitman - About Keller the Killer

At the launch of the new book of Roden Barr, the Thief of New York, I once made a joke: "We have seen Matthew Scudder, a righteous, kind, intelligent, and sophisticated private eye. Next, we will It’s about an upright, kind, intelligent, and sophisticated thief.” I remember Hou Hsiao-hsien, sisters Zhu Tianwen and Zhu Tianxin, and police officer Xie Wenyuan, known as the number one lockpicking expert in Taiwan, were present that day. Yuan Qiongqiong married Yilian Ma Dai, a good prostitute in the book.In addition, there was a small fire at the same time on Yongkang Street where the presentation was held that day. Fortunately, no one was injured. It was less than 100 meters away from the small cafe we ​​used. .

Now, we have another straight, kind, smart, sophisticated hit man. This guy who earns food and clothing by killing people is named Keller, Keller, not far from his professional name killer. He lives alone in an apartment in New York and hardly interacts with others. His agent (should it be called that? ?) is an "old man" who has never appeared in Baiyuan Town and whose name is unknown, but it is the old man's secretary Taoer, a sweet and prudent old woman, who is really in charge of contacting Keller.Basically, Keller's business scope is all over the United States. He receives a job, gets on a plane, goes to a small town where the target is thousands of miles away, lives in a cheap motel, rents a local car, and eats in a local restaurant , and the assassination method was determined by the actual life and rest of the target, so the weapons and props for killing were purchased locally.The time he actually does it is not always the same, sometimes he goes out early and returns late, but sometimes he has to stay in this small town for ten days and a half months. Therefore, he occasionally has to sleep with local women and see the local street scene Human feelings, even imagine yourself growing up, living or dying here.Of course, Keller will leave as soon as he gets it, like a puff of smoke, or more like a trance shadow that seems to be there, flying, staying and talking with fake names, killing props are disposable Immediately dispose of that dangerous romance and take it back to New York as a souvenir. Therefore, he is not only a transparent person, but also a "negative number" person. One or two people, one or two life-and-death grievances, and the rest are wiped away like fingerprints.The places he has been to are always both the first and the last time, and it is impossible to come again in this life. The people he has met and talked with are both first met and destined to be farewell, and will never meet again in this life.His relationship with the outside world will always be "disposable" as it is called in mainland China. Disposable raincoats, disposable cameras, disposable women... Disposable really means discarding and destroying. The only thing that remains is Keller. In people's memory, and Keller is a killer with a very good memory.

What does it mean when the whole world forgets something and only one person remembers it?I personally read a book on language that says that when a tribe using a language keeps dying until there is only one person left, there is only one explanation, that is, the language has died at this moment before the extinction of the tribe ——I personally think that this only explanation is not enough to point out the truth of the matter. dies slowly, bit by bit; or in other words, when the last lonely man also dies, it is the non-existence of the language, and before that the brief countdown of the last man's tenacious life is The death of the language.Non-existence is a peaceful description of an objective state. Saying that there is no table in front of us or that it is not raining does not affect our minds; while death is a terrifying attack, which is a shocking period of time when we watch it go from survival to nothingness The process is a powerless one-way street that is difficult not to contain subjective feelings.

In the book, Keller once bought a cheap western novel that he could not read at the airport news stand on a business trip. He did not deny that what attracted him was only a line printed on the cover: "He rode thousands of miles to Get rid of someone you've never met." It didn't take long before he funnyly reassembled this sentence again, just because he had hooked up with a lonely woman at the bar on the night he arrived at the target town thousands of miles away, and the sun came back again. After Shengsheng woke up, he suddenly realized that he was actually: "He killed Qianlilu to ride a woman he had never met before."

Most of Keller's life looks like this, a strange life, the world keeps opening up to him, but it is stingy to close it tightly after only looking at it for the first time, his special practice and us law-abiding, There is an unimaginable gap between a good citizen who only kills animals and time does not kill people. Most of his troubles are not our troubles, but the strange thing is that we not only understand what he said, but also feel it substantively, that is Doesn't it mean that our occupations are different, but we still have a deep common part?In fact, our situation is still overlapping?Is there a certain part of the simple human language between us that still connects with each other and forms a dialogue?We just don’t live as well as we would like, after all, we’re not really the Bogon of Cameroon or the Aisan of the West Caucasus, the last speakers of Kasabei and Ubyk.

Bullock writes from private eye to thief to hitman (of course, he also wrote a little earlier about an intelligence agent, a weird intelligence agent who never sleeps; Detective"), from the genre or directly from the career choice of the protagonist of the novel, we can only say that he is really a creative writer, but it is not surprising at all, because in the vast and long-cultivated realm of general reasoning Among them, thieves, professional killers, and even intelligence agents have all been experienced before, and even developed into subtypes one by one—of course, the more troublesome and marginal one is the professional killer, because this special industry and the overall The social relationship, especially the basic principle of "crime/justice" roughly set by mystery novels inevitably conflicts, which makes writing professional killers much more difficult. After all, many mystery novels have been successfully developed and are easy to reproduce. The genre writing method is not suitable so far, and to a certain extent, another method has to be found, and it also has to bear a higher risk of writing.

Let's explain a few more words about this.We know that the murderer of mystery novels, as SS Van Dyne said, must appear in the first third of the novel, and must be one of the main characters in the book, which means that mystery novels basically It is a murder case of an "acquaintance", and the degree of suspicion of the suspect involved in the case is often like the Confucian saying "benevolent to the people, benevolent to the people, and love things" in a concentric circle that ripples outward; while a professional killer is a "stranger" The execution of the murder case, the irrelevant nature of the "victim/murderer", there are only technical problems in the execution of the murder, and there is no reasoning - the so-called reasoning is to find out the connection hidden under the appearance, there is no connection, how can reasoning ?In direct terms, professional killers don't need to arrange alibi, blame innocent people, create smoke screens to mislead the direction of investigation, buy huge insurance for victims, change wills secretly, and pretend to be mourning after a murder. Ghostly, almost all kinds of tricks in mystery novels are not used, all he wants is to kill successfully and leave smoothly.

The murder of such a stranger must also form a non-resident, non-closed murder case——There is a myth in mystery novels that has been passed down from generation to generation for some reason, which seems to have become an inviolable obligation for the murderer: "The murderer Sooner or later, I will return to the scene of the crime." This is a big joke for professional killers. If there is a corresponding iron rule for professional killers, it must be: "Professional killers must never go back to the crime scene." Therefore, if you want to hunt down a professional killer, you can't use the quiet reasoning that you just sit and talk, but the Hot Wheels hunting; Negative people from other places.

In fact, professional killers do still have to be caught.Mystery novels quite reasonably believe that their readers are good citizens with basic moral awareness, demanding retribution, justice, and the complete victory of the good people. This is not absolutely unoffensive, but I plan to give it a try. It is best for the reader to think clearly first, and take out a pen and paper to calculate the risks and possible costs. Therefore, the protagonist thief in the reasoning world can only be a chivalrous thief. On the matter of solving the case and arresting the murderer, including Brock's own thief Rodden Barr.

It is necessary to write a professional killer pretending to be shocking, and to return to basic morality conservatively. These two things are added together. In a novel named after a professional killer, the professional killer in it can usually only play the role of the prey rather than the pursuer. God is so pitiful that at the end of the book, the evil is full of evil and obedience, so as to comfort our fragile and juicy hearts.This fateful ending then brings another inescapable result, that is, it is difficult for professional killer novels to develop into a continuous series like normal mystery novels, for us to follow and invest emotions in them for a long time.The creation and reading of a professional killer is also a one-time use. Judging from the Chinese version of the novel we can see in Taiwan, like Green’s betrayed rabbit-lip killer "The Crow" "Professional Killer", an adaptation may be broadcast on Channel 4 every once in a while. The movie "The End of the Jackal" is all in one volume like this, and it ends abruptly.

Under the inappropriate big signboard of reasoning, the novels of professional killers who don’t reason, don’t stay, and spend their eternity wandering on foreign lands and roads have always been aliens with a small number of people, forming a small cave by themselves. The proper classification is the so-called "thriller novel", with political and international conspiracies on the other end. After all, it is like asking Michael Jordan to turn his back on ordinary people in the city by tempering such a professional master who has honed his skills. It's just as inappropriate and unfair to come to our high school basketball league. Isn't it appropriate to kill those high-ranking political figures who almost everyone does evil things? Therefore, the novels of professional killers can’t get rid of a certain cursed and desolate background—the wandering soul of its protagonist is floating outside our social order and stable life routine, and its novel writing is difficult to follow and has become frank. Dao’s standard reasoning writing, but this sad fate of being abandoned must also carry a certain kind of freedom, a certain kind of freedom that is more or less forced to find another way and go one’s own way. This kind of freedom is actually not very popular, usually only Very few people with conviction and a strong mind are happy to keep it and use it effectively. As we said, going from unlicensed spies to thieves and straight up professional killers isn't something unique to Brock, and what's really weird is that it looks like he's actually planning to develop it into a regular as well. The continuous killer series (as of now, in addition to the Hit Man in our hands, he has completed the second volume of the Hit List), which means that this upright, smart, kind, sophisticated cold-blooded Keller He didn't even intend to catch him without a fight, but he wanted to "help people exterminate rats as a career" as he himself said, and continue to kill without looking back in the years to come. This weird attempt is bound to be more difficult than the "normal" professional killer novels we just talked about, twice as difficult, because most of the standard writing in the reasoning world is not suitable, and even some of them can be traced It can't rely on the writing rules of professional killers in the past-how can Bullock make us calmly believe that this murderous Keller has a reason to live at the end of each novel?Let's agree unobtrusively that he does deserve to be living happily ever after in his New York apartment? Two novels have been written that illustrate Bloch's intentions, but frankly not enough to convince us that things are all right, and we still have to give to this venerable novelist, now sixty-four and still fighting, Keep an eye out for how he plays next. The protagonists in Bullock’s novels are all modern urbanites, unlike the protagonists in early novels who are not as happy to explain their birthplaces, and even like the characters in Chinese dramas, the first thing they do every morning is to detail their ancestral home Location, who are the parents, marital and family members and how they get along with each other, and what kind of business they do for a living, plus today's ups and downs of mood, etc.It seems that the people in the novel are changing like real life, and they have more and more concept of privacy. The unlicensed private detective Scudder talked about his father’s faint memories on the way to handle the case on the subway line 11, because His father fell to his death on the train on this line, probably in order to hide between the two carriages and steal a cigarette (cigarettes are indeed a bad thing that harms people, I would like to dedicate this case to the hysterical enemy of cigarettes, the Dong Foundation ), and perhaps unsteady on his feet after drinking alcohol; the phrase "Dear Mrs. We don’t know whether it’s round or flat; speaking of it, Keller, who is a murderer, is more willing to talk about his parents, but his mother is just a typical winged boy with nothing to say, the father is unknown and even the photos are False, so saying it is almost the same as not saying it. As a reader, sometimes I would jokingly think, in fact, could the true identities of the three of them be the three brothers?Born of compatriots but scattered in their own lives, chose different industries, and drifted alone in the sea of ​​people in New York City? Such jokes come to mind because these three people have different personalities, and their ways of dealing with harsh life are also very different, but Bullock did not write these three people as three typical characters "externally" so that they cannot understand each other Sound, in fact, people who read novels will naturally feel it very substantively. Putting aside the names, industries, and current life realities, the three of them overlap deeply at the most fundamental part of life, like different buds. The twists and turns are actually rooted in the same root buried deep in the soil, so that the writer Bullock himself becomes a kind of curious but ruthless scientist who throws the three brothers of the same origin into different families who grew up in different places. Encounters in life and continue to track their changes, through such experiments to ask the truth of life. People who believe in the art of destiny such as Ziwei Doushu, Bazi, and the study of constellations have probably asked a question that is asking for trouble, and probably have not gotten a convincing answer, so they can only put this question aside. That is, twins with the same birth year, birth month, birthday, and birth time, or even children from different families who are arranged together in the baby room in the delivery room of the same hospital, why do they have such different lives?Why do some people fall like a sparrow into a third-level poor family, while others climb up like a phoenix and become a lawyer for a large consortium or even elected president? Here, we have neither the ability nor the intention to discuss the mystical theory of destiny, but instead think back to a sentence of Levi-Strauss that is actually far more profound than it sounds at first glance: "Technology is the place that man finds for himself in the world. " The skill mentioned by Levi Strauss does not only refer to our superficial career choice, although it is often closely intertwined with our career, we can say that it is an unchangeable life skill behind our changeable career ; It is not so-called career, not so lofty and so literary, its elements are more simple, more craftsman and more technical, not so much self-expectation as it should be, but what we really know how to do that matter.Here, we have cast our unique character, small, accidental but irreversible unique life experiences and encounters, and the most essential thing, we have devoted ten, twenty or even more years to it And the skill of repeated operation, as a major league baseball pitcher said: "For thirty years, all I have done is throw this ball hard. What will I do?" And the pitcher who wrote "My Aspirations" in elementary school is likely to grow up to be an astronaut. The skill cultivated over such a long time is unlikely to be just a professional means of some external object. It is conceivable how deep, dense and long its secretly growing roots are, and how firmly nailed to the reality. In a specific soil, this is what Levi-Strauss called "man's position".This position also means this person's special way of getting along with the whole world, this person's basic way of looking at the whole world. In the language I personally like to use recently, this position is also a special map that reveals a certain aspect of this world. A part of physiognomy provides some paths for this person to enter the world.Different maps of different skills are different in refinement and roughness, and may be isolated from each other and difficult to be used together. What is certain is that no single map of a single skill may reveal the whole world alone and open all the secrets of this world. As Umberto Eco said, it is impossible to make a map that is exactly the same as the real world, exactly the same size. Speaking of this, it is easy for us to think with pity that when people lose their jobs, as we can see all over the streets today, what they lose is often not only a job, but also the biological food and life continuation obtained by the work. , but most likely your only place in the world will be uprooted at the same time.Your skills are invalid or even outdated forever. The paths you are familiar with and use every day and every day suddenly become a dead end. The whole world is closed in front of your eyes in an instant, becoming a completely strange existence. Recognition, this requires great courage and perseverance, and you may not have enough time, so you often need someone to help. So, try to be nicer to such people, and don’t hesitate to give a certain degree of help if possible. What they lose at once is usually more than we can see, and the road to recovery is more difficult than we think Much harder. In the Hit Man book, we will see a lot of deja vu things, such as Keller accepting murder orders from Taoer or the dialogue of reinstatement, instead of handing in a mysterious tape and automatically destroying it after listening to it for ten seconds, like Like the fixed titles of the early "Dare to Do" series (that is, the original TV version of "Mission: Impossible" today), it is like a dialogue between Matthew Scudder and Elaine Maddie, and the old man Joe Durken's dialogue; also like the dialogue between the thief Rodden Barr and the dog-washing lesbian Caroline, and the dialogue with Police Officer Ray, homely, funny and extremely boring nonsense. In addition, the confession between Keller and the psychiatrist in the book also reminds us of Scudder's AA meeting, as well as his relationship with counselor Jim Farber and butcher boss Mickey Ballou. In addition, in the book, Keller finds a dog-walking nanny for his shepherd dog named soldier, and Andrea, the homeless little girl who is full of spiritual knowledge, also vaguely overlaps with Ajie and Caroline. figure. All these kinds of things are too late to prepare. However, Bullock does not intend to plagiarize and copy himself. These familiar old stories always turn around suddenly after two or three pages of text. Therefore, the warmth of Scudder and Roddenbaud Memory, on the contrary, becomes a trap for reading, and it suddenly falls down with one foot in the air, creating a shocking effect of an unexpected drop. This old Bullock reader-only appalling development comes back to Keller, but we have to say that it actually makes sense. After all, he is a murderer who has to remain transparent to survive. He lives in New York, but he cannot really regard New York as a home that can be cultivated and planted like Scudder or Rodden Barr. He takes root and stands up to defend it. Scudder faces death Still refusing to move out under the threat of violence, Roddenbal spent a lot of money to buy the property rights of the entire building where his second-hand bookstore is located; Keller couldn't develop a close and distant relationship with a regular person, so he chose a lonely job , he is doomed to walk the lonely road, and everyone in his life has to walk away from him, except for Taoer. Personality never determines destiny alone, our life is not so idealistic, and it is never so simple and predictable.We joke that Scudder, Rodenbaud, and Keller are three separated children, and their personalities are indeed made of similar materials (the same integrity, kindness, intelligence, and so on), but the world map in their hands is not. The same picture, the basic image of the world and the corresponding way are also very different. It is a bit like a kaleidoscope, the same colored scraps of paper, but it looks different when turned. If I could guess, of course I would say that Scudder's novels are most representative of Bullock's own words and ambitions; His damn industry, cut off too many ties with the world, has become a bit ghostly. But at this stage, the killer Keller who appeared brazenly at this stage, I guess, has its own considerable weight, and even has the opportunity to replace part of Scudder, helping the writer Brock to inquire about the world. Today, Scudder’s problems are not entirely due to the aging of the hero. The real trouble lies in the major problems of life he revealed.He no longer recalls the incident of manslaughtering a little girl and resigning, no longer feels guilty about his failed marriage, no longer needs to face the church's offering box or light a candle to redeem himself, no longer bothers about whether he has a license or not Affirming my identity in such a world, Elaine Maddie is long gone, AA meetings are a thing of the past instead of an imminent life crisis, and even greater New York City is becoming softer and more livable—it's true Recently, the survey report on major cities in the United States has only been released. Los Angeles on the west coast has been the most heinous city in the United States for two consecutive years. Major crimes have soared twice as much as a few years ago. Back to the scene of Raymond Chandler's novel half a century ago. A book in the Scudder series was translated by myself. I always thought that Scudder in that book was completely out of trouble. That book, as written on the title page, was the story of Mickey Ballou, dealing with Question for Mickey Ballou.Scudder drew his sword to help.The only thing he does for himself is to defend his home, his connection to New York, and this is his ultimate battle, and if he wins this battle, no one can shake his life.At the same time, his cheating little girl Lisa and spiritual counselor Jim Farber both fell and left him in this battle. Cruelly speaking, this is the withering of fallen leaves, which makes the sky of his life cold but clean net. Solving the problems of the characters in his works does not mean that all the questions in the writer's life are solved. The writer is always far more complicated and troublesome than the single character in his works—or should we say that Bullock through Scudder's " position", he has almost seen all he should see and asked all he should ask, and he may need to find another person and a different position. While Scudder was living a happy life, the big questions of Keller's life began to erupt one by one along with his footprints, especially the ultimate polarity and the most inescapable one—he really Can you continue to kill like this?Is the exchange for food and clothing a reasonable reason to kill someone?If there is no need to worry about food and clothing, what does it mean to continue to accept cases?Besides the art of killing, what other alternative positions does he have in his life? Bullock has always been a patient writer. He never wanted to be fast, so he just conceptualized the nice-sounding and useless answers. Instead, he let Keller and Taoer approach the task step by step, soaking in it time and time again. Scudder was the same way back then. Come on.With such an answer, no one may be able to sort out one or two words that understand and warn the world, but such an answer is true, and it is the real reconstruction of a broken person. The slightly different thing is that Scudder pieced himself back together piece by piece in the pursuit of the truth of death again and again, while Keller, the maker of death, seems to be subverting himself every step of the way—through manslaughter, Killing people by buying one, getting one free or getting two free, killing people by being cheated, and killing people out of a sense of justice, redemption, and compassion that shouldn't be there, is the first book, Keller The highly professional and razor-sharp practice has already stepped out of the edge, clearly showing the appearance of a self-subversive one-way street, and pointing far away to the final violent question and its answer. Take your time, only when you are slow can you be dense and solid, and then you can look good.At the end of the book, we see that Keller playfully resolved the first crisis of doubt, and found a reason to be energetic for killing people and making money, but this is only a temporary delay. Life itself will not let us go so easily, if you don’t believe it Let us all wait and see.