Noah's Turn by Ken Finkleman

be right and that he had been beaten at this semantic game by a cop.
    â€œMaybe it does. Good call,” Noah said as if they had been in competition and Hopwood had won. This was exactly the relationship Noah didn’t want. He didn’t want to start a cat-and-mouse game and have Hopwood thinking about him.
    â€œHere’s my card.” Hopwood handed him a business card and Noah thought how things have changed, how everyone now wanted to be in business. Noah could imagine Hopwood saying, “I’m in the murder business.”
    â€œCall that number if anything else comes to mind or you hear anything we might be interested in.”
    â€œFor sure,” Noah said. “It was nice meeting you.”
    Hopwood didn’t reply. They each went their own way.

    By the time he was on the street, Noah was convinced that the worst Hopwood could think of him was thathe was intellectually competitive and slightly insecure, which was a much better impression than that of a machete-wielding madman.
    The day was bright and warm, and Noah felt like walking. He wanted to see how his new relationship with the world felt. The people he used to envy—the businessmen with their attaché cases, the businesswomen in their heels, all of whom before had moved with a purpose that he couldn’t understand—now appeared different to Noah. Now they appeared like robots moving on defined tracks, repeating their plotted routes day after day for no other reason than that they had done it the day before. None of them would change the world. All were what used to be called Spear Carriers in his drama club at college. Noah had been a Spear Carrier in
Julius Caesar.
He had had no lines. He had watched from his background mark on the stage as Ian Frazer played Brutus and then, in the years after, read in the business section of his newspaper how Frazer moved up the corporate ladder to head one of the top four banks in the country. Now, walking the streets, Noah felt he was no longer a Spear Carrier. He was different from every person he passed. He was a Brutus in a real drama. He had, in his mind, taken on Shakespearianproportions. He was a warrior in his own war. Why did he have to go by other people’s definition of war? After all, one person’s warrior is another person’s terrorist, he thought. Everyone defines war to suit his or her own needs. Fighter pilots who dropped their bombs on Iraq were “heroes.” Iraqis who blew up transports with roadside bombs were “terrorists.” It had been this way since the beginning of human history. Why couldn’t he be an “assassin” rather than a “murderer”? Why couldn’t he define
his
war? His war wasn’t with one of the tyrants of the twenty-first century, but with the century’s false gods. His was a war over their degradation of the culture. And why was culture any less important or less coveted than land or gold or oil? Why did war have to be a world war, or a war between countries or a civil war? Noah had decided to go to war alone and with his act define his place in the world.

11
The Path of Duty
    E very morning now when he woke up and before opening his eyes, Noah’s first thought was “I am a killer, I am an assassin. There is no turning back, no denying it.” His old life paled in the face of what he now was. His petty vanities, his useless competitiveness, his deluded ambition to make it in a world he held in contempt, his exaggerations about what he knew, his lies about what he had read, his failure to give attribution for ideas he had read but spouted as if they were his own, and for every one of these weaknesses, his guilt—
that most corrupt and corrosive method of payment for our transgressions
—all of it had been left so far behind it was hardly visible in the killer’s rearview mirror. All of it had withered away. The word
wither
reminded him of Marx andEngels and their idea