Diary of a Hitman: Spring 2025

This story is from the spring 2025 edition of VICE magazine: THE ROCK BOTTOM ISSUE. To subscribe to receive 4 print issues of our newly relaunched magazine each year, click here.

I get given comprehensive dossiers on targets but I only really skim them. I don’t even like reading the placards in museums, let alone detailed personal information about someone I’ve been paid to eliminate.

I ask the service to just write in large letters, underneath each photo, if there’s anything I’d actually need to know—such as if they’re a very fast runner, or if they own a dog.

To feel better about my job, I used to tell myself that the targets must be bad people. Otherwise, why would anybody want them dead? Recently, I’ve found it easier to just think that I’m a bad person, and that’s why I’m in this line of work, and also why it shouldn’t bother me a great deal. And so, it doesn’t particularly matter if they deserved it or not, and in fact makes more sense if they didn’t. I mean, over the summer I RIP’d a baker. What could he have done that was so dreadful—burnt the cakes? He could have been a king in hiding. In retrospect, this may have been covered in the biography section.

I threw the manila folder pertaining to the baker into the canal down by the marina, but It wouldn’t go under. I tried to submerge it with pebbles but could only find really tiny ones on the path. I hunted around in the bushes for something more substantial. A brick, for example. A man from one of the houseboats emerged and asked me what the hell I thought I was doing.

“Looking for a brick,” I said. “There are no bricks in there,” he said. “Oh,” I said. “I suppose you maintain an inventory of everything in these bushes, do you?” I was trying to be annoying on purpose, so he would keep his focus on me and not the envelope. And also because I wanted to.

“What do you need a brick for, anyway?” asked the man. Who, I might add, was wearing pajamas.

“To kill a ladybird,” I said. “There’s this ladybird that’s been giving me a lot of trouble in the garden, and I’ve basically got him holed up in the corner, you know, and he’s tired, I can tell, he’s so tired, and so…” Over his shoulder, I saw the folder disappearing into the dark gray water. “…and so anyhow, I better get back to it, see you later. Enjoy living on a boat!” I said, with a disdain I hadn’t known I possessed.

I’m probably just jealous.

It isn’t true about the ladybird, mind you. I don’t have a garden. And even if I did, I don’t imagine I’d go in it very often.

Christmas is the worst time in my line of work. Condensation on bus windows, drunk people. Everything’s in the way. I should just have it all as a holiday—as it’s supposed to be!—but this would be financially imprudent. And the work doesn’t slow down, the opposite is true. Lots of people want jobs doing on Christmas Eve, for example. Why not wait till Boxing Day? This would seem more considerate, but I suppose consideration’s gone the way of the dodo once you’ve hired an assassin to kill someone for you.

And so, my Christmases are fairly unpleasant overall. This isn’t to say that I don’t like Christmas. I love it; more than anybody else, in fact. It’s my favorite thing in the world. In the mid morning, if the light is agreeable, I can walk along the road and think about Christmas as a defined activity. I am sustained by the very idea of it. But I don’t tend to enjoy my experience of it. How does that work, exactly? Well, I’ll tell you.

“Perhaps the baker had an evil secret.”

It’s like this. I like Cava. God only knows I do. God and the cashiers inside Sainsbury’s. And I know what Cava is supposed to taste like. And if, for years and years, I’d only had access to rotten Cava, flat and sour and lukewarm, I’d still know what it was supposed to taste like. I would still love it as it’s intended to be. I suppose, if I could only get horrible Cava, I would likely just avoid it in general. But Christmas is unavoidable. It’s unstoppable. This is one of the things I admire about it. There’s enough uncertainty in life.

Maybe I was destined for my profession, and so there’s no use in worrying one way or the other about what sort of person I am, or what sort of people they are, they were.

Although this is all so much white noise. The truth is: I killed a baker and I feel bad about it. I was paid handsomely for it, mind you. And anyhow, perhaps the baker had an evil secret. Some of them must. And not just the secret of how they manage to get up so early in the morning.

The other day I was sat on a bench on Muswell Hill Broadway, and I leant in, to hear what I was thinking about. I was imagining me and the baker, as we were in the alleyway, but instead of what I did, I’m telling him, “Listen, just get out of here, just get out of town. Move to Weymouth, or somewhere similar. Surely they need bakers in Weymouth. This could be a good thing for you. I’ll close my eyes and count to a hundred, and when I open them I want you to have gone to Weymouth. You’ll be safe in Weymouth.”

Anyhow, there’s no point dwelling on things. What’s done is done, as I once said after accidentally smashing a bottle of malt vinegar all over somebody’s carpet. They didn’t see it like that, however.

Also, I don’t know why I was imagining telling him he’d be safe. It’s not as if I don‘t know how to travel to Weymouth.

This story is from the spring 2025 edition of VICE magazine: THE ROCK BOTTOM ISSUE. To subscribe to receive 4 print issues of our newly relaunched magazine each year, click here.