More fiction.

I don't like this as much as my previous story "Red." This took me a great deal longer to write as well--the characters would not say things the way I wanted them to for awhile. But I finally got it down.

The Exterminator


Pfeiffer was good at only two things his whole life: music and exterminating vermin. As a child, he had dreamed of growing up to be a famous musician. Not one of those cigarette-rolling, sweaty, disheveled young men who thumbed upright basses or threw nicotine-stained fingers over the ivories, not even one of those sex gods who lipped-and-tongued brazen saxophones shamelessly in the smoky jazz clubs of his adolescence. He wanted to be another Liszt, another Mozart. He could play anything, but the only instrument he ever had the money to buy was a nondescript, battered old flute.

He still clearly remembered the day his father had crushed his dreams.
"You want to go to university to study music?" his father had shouted. "Always, you are a dreamer! Better to go and study medicine, law, something useful, but not music. I forbid it."

So he had gone to university to study medicine and had lasted nearly two years before leaving with all the knowledge he would ever need. From then on, Pfeiffer traveled. He rarely stayed anywhere more than a few months, and he always chose towns with high vermin populations, usually mice or rats. He would stay long enough to get rid of the pests, maybe seduce a young lady or two (the younger the better, but he wasn't too picky), and get rewarded handsomely for his trouble. Then he'd be off again.

They paid him well, whether it was a big city like Berlin, or a tiny flyspeck village. They whispered that he entranced the beasts, or sometimes insects, with the music of his flute. He never confirmed nor denied the rumors; he merely smiled his blinding, trickster smile that made him so popular with the fraüleins.

And then he came to Hameln. They were plagued with a particularly prolific and ferocious race of rats. So bold were these rats that the local cats had become their prey instead of the other way around. Pfeiffer took care of the problem with a swift, deadly efficiency. It took him less than week; one morning, the citizens of Hameln woke up to find dead rats lining their streets.

They were afraid, and so they made a terrible mistake; they refused to pay him. He entreated to their better natures and found them missing, perhaps due to the enormous amount of money he had demanded, perhaps due to their overwhelming terror of him. So he punished the people of Hameln. It hurt him to do it, because he had always liked children, but some insults were unforgivable. He was gone without a trace well before the children began dying, but the more superstitious townsfolk said they could hear the sound of his flute on the wind ever after.

He traveled light and quick after that. He did not take extermination jobs; he merely played his flute, alone or with other traveling musicians, in exchange for a hard pallet at an inn. Sometimes he slept in the bushes or deep forest, if he was far from civilization. He froze. He starved. When they found him in Munich, it was a much thinner, subdued man. His trickster smile was gone.

"Herr Pfeiffer?" The man who found him in that nearly-empty pub had been almost as thin as Pfeiffer was himself, but it was a sleek, well-made thinness. The man was holding a cigar that looked like a bludgeon. Pfeiffer made as if to get up from his chair, but the man's two hulking bully-boys grabbed his arms and forced him back down.

Räuchermann (that was how Pfeiffer always thought of him, and he had never learned the man's real name) had smiled. It looked as if he had not had much practice smiling. Pfeiffer had stiffened in his chair, blood pounding in his ears.

"Do not be afraid," said Räuchermann, with a wink calculated to do nothing but terrify. "I'm not here about Hameln."

Pfeiffer didn't relax. He didn't say a word.

Räuchermann lit his cigar, and took the chair across from Pfeiffer. He puffed away contentedly. The cigar smelled of creosote.

"We're here about a job opportunity."

Pfeiffer still said nothing.

Räuchermann chuckled. "I told you to relax. You are not going to be arrested. You're going to be hired." Silence descended once more. Pfeiffer did not take his eyes off Räuchermann.

The minutes lengthened, and he finally spoke. "I killed all those children."

"Yes," Räuchermann said, exhaling smoke. He made it sound as if Pfeiffer had said "The sky is blue."

Pfeiffer felt astounded. "And you don't want me executed? You want to give me a job? Who are you?"

"We," Räuchermann replied, taking another drag of his cigar, "are the future. And we want you in it, doing something you're already good at."

"Doing what?" Pfeiffer demanded.

Räuchermann smiled again. It was worse this time. "Exterminating. Of course."

So Pfeiffer let them ship him off to Poland. He had three meals a day, good meals, all with meat. He had a collection of well-made uniforms, and a laundress who looked after them for him. They had even reworked his flute into a masterpiece of an instrument; a bonus, they called it, for signing on for the Fatherland. His job was easy if not always pleasant, and played to his strengths.

He escorted them every time, the vermin, always playing his flute. It calmed them, made them docile, as it had the other vermin before them. He took them, and delivered them to their deaths, as he always had.

Räuchermann and the rest had it right. He could see the truth of it. It was one of the first things you learned as an exterminator, and a lesson he had taught to Hameln as well: kill the young, and you end the infestation. Now Warsaw and Krakow, Munich and Berlin, all the cities, all the towns and hamlets, would be clean.

He watched them, every time. As they flailed violently against their fate, gasping for air, their hands twisting in panic or supplication, they reminded him of nothing so much as a nest of baby mice. And when he walked among their bodies afterward, their glassy-eyed stares recalled nothing so much as the eyes of drowned rats.

They were nothing like the children of Hameln at all. They were truly vermin.