The Devil His Due. Chapter Two: The Borrowed Man

They had communicated with a man they thought was called John Teak. But he was not. He looked like John Teak in as much as he had a blank, flat face on a square head sat atop a slender body, with broad shoulders. John Teak was slightly taller, but that was fixed by lifts in the shoes. John Teak had smaller hands, but you could trust that very few would ever pick up on this. John Teak had short salt and pepper hair, and though this man was born blonde, he was salt and pepper today, and had been for four weeks, parted to the left, the same way John Teak did. This man had narrower eyes, and one of them did not contain the slight smudge of pigment in the right eye that made John Teak’s look like a drop of milk in black coffee. This was regrettable, but not problematic, as none of his employers had even met the real John Teak.

John Teak, the real John Teak was sunk somewhere in Florida. His head and his hands apart from the rest of him, but deep in the black stink of swamp all the same. This new John Teak had his wallet and his car, and four of his suits. He also had John Teak’s pipe, though he did not use it.

In New York they shook hands with him. They took him at his name because they lacked imagination. He felt a flicker of disgust at this, behind a door he seldom ever opened. Then the flicker was gone. It was fine, he reasoned. If these people had imagination, they would not need him. If people did not disgust him, he would have to think differently about his work.

John Teak, the new John Teak, cut a length of electrical cord from a lamp and curled either end around either fist. He curled the rest around the neck of Antonio Ceres.

When Mr. Ceres had stopped kicking, and his hands dropped, John Teak let go. Then he took from an envelope in his pocket $1,000 in $20 bills - the same sum Ceres had allegedly taken just to write down the address of the now late Archie Vander. The money was curled into a short pipe of paper and, as per New York’s orders, pushed into the open mouth of the dead man.

When the police later questioned the hotel staff on duty that day, they did not remember the man in the blue suit who had crossed the lobby in full view of most of them.

After this, the man pretending to be John Teak would have to pretend to be someone else. A routine precaution. At the airport he would watch for a man, a dull man of a similar build, hopefully alone and hopefully close to his looks. John Teak had lasted for three assignments and would have to retire. The man that travelled back to Geneva was yet to be found.


He called New York, and they made him hang up so they could call him back. He listened to what they had to say, which was panicked, excitable, noisy. They forgot to even thank him for the service he had just performed. Now they wanted to bully him into something else. He called Geneva, which was out of the ordinary, but New York had insisted he did. Geneva spoke coolly, without rushing into things, but the message was the same. His contract with New York was to carry over into this new item. They would pay him the same rate again, and then once more on top.

If he could kill a man called Wheeler.