Noah's Turn by Ken Finkleman Page A

that in the ideal communist world, the state would wither away. The people would see the light in the soul of pure communism, and the rules and laws that had established it would no longer be necessary. And Noah thought that everything false about him, everything that had defined him in the past would, through his act, wither away and he would become only who he was, the killer, the assassin. He opened his eyes and remembered a quote he had written down years ago and taped to his wall of ideas. Hoping he hadn’t destroyed it in one of his attacks to eliminate his past, he got out of bed and flipped through the papers still tacked up, some of which had, over time, been buried under others. He found it. There was no attribution and he couldn’t remember where it came from: “Although your life is made up of thousands of days and incidents, they can all be reduced to one moment, the moment when you know who you are, when you see yourself face to face. When Judas kissed Jesus he felt at that moment that he was a traitor, that to be a traitor was his destiny, and that he was being loyal to that evil destiny.”
    Noah crawled back into bed and stared at the ceiling. He wondered whether these eloquent notions had any reality, or was he simply justifying a horrific crimewith a semantic slight of hand. Was all of it just intellectual gamesmanship? He had read Camus’
The Stranger
, and a significant amount of
Crime and Punishment
, and he wondered whether any criminal act could be justified with a talented play of words.
    He wanted to stop thinking. He wanted to go back to sleep and wake up fucking Andrea Scott, “the no fuss, no muss woman.”
    He gave her a call.

    The sexual fantasy Noah associated with Andrea Scott never came close to his obsession with the fifteen-year-old’s orange-half breasts but had taken on a more adult character. Here was, by any upper-middle-class standard, a happily married woman with three healthy children and a successful and wealthy husband, a membership in a golf and tennis club, a two-and-a-half-million-dollar home and an island with a cottage on it in the Eastern Townships, and she would risk it all to satisfy her hunger for sex with Noah Douglas. All of this supported his belief in the vacuity of the American way of life while it confirmed his own masculinity.After stepping through his door, Andrea seemed to know the right time to slip out of her expensive clothes and crawl into his bed. The right amount of chatter, the right amount of nervousness, the right amount of indecision, all of which added up to an exquisite sexual tension. The sex was better than the last time. When they were finished, she asked if she could smoke a cigarette in his place and he said he didn’t mind. She dug a new pack out of her purse and asked if she could leave it behind because she never smoked at home. He said again that he didn’t mind. While they lay in bed and she smoked, he thought of the movie
Belle de Jour
and wondered if she knew he was a killer would she become more sexually aroused. Would she react to him like Catherine Deneuve reacted to the thug with the gold tooth, to his brute criminal-class behaviour? It was clear what Andrea wanted from him: she wanted something illicit, something that denied the life she had, and it was embodied in sex and cigarettes. Was she locked in a struggle with herself, perhaps not unlike his before the killing? She put out her cigarette and rolled over next to him. “I must smell of cigarette smoke.”
    â€œI like that,” he said. What he didn’t say was that it reminded him of his mother, because that is the lastthing a woman wants to hear after an orgasm. He considered, for one crazy moment, telling her that he had killed McEwen. That might make this the sexual relationship it was meant to be. His confession would put them smack-dab in the middle of a real-life
Belle de Jour
, and his killing would realize its essence as