Seduction is also a big part of the job. I never seduce my own victims. I hate them too much for all that jazz. By the time I touch them, it’s already game over. But I do seduce other people in a variety of ways. Love makes you blind; love makes you stupid. Love lets you accept lies by denying untruths. Being suspicious is the root of suffering, and very few people actually want to suffer. When in doubt, I imagine that a little bit of mental gymnastics will keep everything afloat. No one wants to be betrayed. We look down on people who get duped. Like a magician, I focus people’s attention away from where the sleight of hand occurs.

Lying comes as naturally to me as breathing. Second nature. I’ve been building parallel worlds so long that my balancing act requires as little effort as digesting my lunch: it’s a reflex. It happens all on its own, without my having to think about it. The main factor motivating me to avoid getting caught, aside from preserving my liberty, is my parents. I just couldn’t put them through that. They wouldn’t understand. Or, worse still, they might.

My lovers have never suspected a thing. Wow, you’re really into it tonight. Yeah, must be the heat. You smell good, like summer. Take off your shorts, honey. Leave the curtains open. I want to see you. No one ever looks in that window. Just as you never look behind the dryer. That’s where I hide my gun, in a leftover length of aluminum exhaust piping that sort of looks like a flexible caterpillar full of spider webs. Perhaps one day a perspicacious scientist will find, at one of my crime scenes, eggs belonging to a rare species of spider whose last remaining habitat is my apartment. He’d then follow the trace all the way back to me. But real life isn’t an episode of CSI. Good thing, too! What are you thinking about? Nothing, kiss me.

I understand how athletes display heightened sexual appetite after a victory, at least the ones whose genitals haven’t been shrivelled to nothing by steroids. Despite my aching muscles and exhaustion, I’m always euphoric after I make a play.

Public life, private life, secret life.

Let’s take a quick break to lay two misconceptions to rest.

One: silencers. The movies have everyone thinking you can just pop one on the end of your gun and a bullet shot at one thousand metres per second will sound like a kitten landing on a pillow. Wrong. Best case, a silencer can diffuse the blast and create confusion as to the shooter’s point of origin.