The Philosophical Strangler by Eric Flint

I bestowed on him my best glare. (And it’s a hell of a glare, too, if I say so myself. Though I’ll admit it was a bit like a minnow glaring at a shark.)

“Scares off customers, don’t you know, us maybe being mixed up in politics? Not to mention heresy—Joe business, no less! Especially with things the way they are in New Sfinctr—you know Queen Belladonna’s tight with the Ozarines. She always has been, and since this Prygg business—how many times do I have to tell you, you big gorilla?—politics! Sure, and it’s good for the trade, but you’ve got to know how to finesse the thing! But no! Not the great philosopher Greyboar! No! He’s got to—”

“All right, all right, I’ll do the job!” He waved his hands. “Anything to shut you up! But I trust that you explained to this—what’s his name? Baron de Butin?—that I won’t choke the girl. It’s one of my rules, you know that. I don’t choke girls.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” I grumbled. “I told him. Cost us, too—as usual.”

The Baron had offered to double the fee if Greyboar’d burke the girl along with the Baron’s “rival,” as he put it. But once I explained Greyboar’s rules he finally agreed to settle for having my client wave “the rival’s” pop-eyes and purple tongue in front of the girl’s face. They’re really a cruddy lot, your “jilted suitors,” Greyboar was right about that. Still and all, fine for him to wax philosophical, I was the agent. I was the poor slob who had to go out there and get his hands dirty rounding up the business—while he lounged around worrying about philosophy, mind you! And the fact is there was a lot of business in your aristocracy’s “alienated affections.” Steady, steady, steady work. I think they must be inbred or something, all the trouble they seem to have.

Actually, this whole problem with choking girls wasn’t so much Greyboar’s philosophical obsession. It was really on account of his sister Gwendolyn. She was purely furious when he and I told her, years before, that we were quitting our jobs in the packing plant to move on to more lucrative work. Right nasty she got: “cold-blooded killer,” “murdering bastard,” “nothing but a cheap thug with a fancy label”—those were the terms she used that weren’t just plain obscene. Anybody else’d said stuff like that they’d be pushing up daisies, but the truth is Greyboar was afraid of his sister.

Couldn’t say I blamed him. Woman terrified me. She wasn’t as strong as he was, but when she was in the mood she was the meanest person who ever lived. Anyway, Greyboar and she went back and forth about it for hours. I kept my mouth shut. I’m normally on the talkative side, but around Gwendolyn in the mood I kept my mouth shut, shut, shut, shut.

Finally, Gwendolyn gave up. But she made Greyboar swear two things: One, he’d never work for a boss as a strikebreaker. Two, he’d never choke a woman except in self-defense—and then the way she defined “self-defense” he’d have to have some harpy drive three stakes into his heart before he could lift a finger!

The strikebreaking stuff was no problem. Greyboar and I wouldn’t have done it, anyway. I mean, it’s not like both of us hadn’t been good union men since we were kids.

The woman question, now—that was a little stickier. Lots of money in choking women. Truth to tell, it was the bread and butter of the trade. So Greyboar tried to make a compromise—he’d only choke purely evil women, she-devil types. But Gwendolyn wouldn’t budge. Said that, first, she’d trust him to tell a good woman from a bad one about as far as she’d trust a wolf to pick between saint and sinner rabbits. Second—she’d always been unreasonable when it came to women!—she said: “Besides, I don’t care if the woman’s as foul as a demon. There’s just something about men hiring other men to kill women that makes me cross. Really, really, really cross.” Then she’d looked him straight in the eye and said if she ever heard he’d choked a woman, she’d track him down and kill him. Yeah, just like that. Cold as ice.