Or so he believed, perhaps foolishly.
After all, Unruh had for so long existed as someone the world saw as possessing a singular useful purpose—to negate—that the idea that any other aspect of his self would be of interest to anyone seemed ludicrous to him.
So when an outraged employer—a man of great vanity and legendary stupidity, but also of high ranking within the criminal enterprise with which Unruh had long been embroiled—berated Unruh at length and with great righteousness over the telephone in sputtering, profane terms about this scandalous moral abomination to which he was privy, Unruh was simply surprised. There was nothing to take offense to, really, since the reaction seemed wholly irrational.
Unruh would admit, however, that he did take something like pleasure in dispatching the two incompetent lackeys that the employer subsequently unleashed in an effort to wipe the moral stain of Unruh and Sung from this earth. Those two unruly, workaday thugs, armed with pistols, who were no doubt tickled to get the assignment to go off and ice some faggots, but who instead met their own end in a motel parking lot in an almost comically brief exchange of gunfire.
Unruh further took some pleasure—a strange and prickly and alien sensation he might even recklessly classify as delight—at his subsequent visit, with John Sung in tow, to the obscenely decadent seaside home of that same profanity-prattling employer. A fortress where several overly muscled bodyguards wandered the grounds with facial expressions of great serious purpose. In all his years in this vocation, which now numbered over fifty, years that had seen his hair winter to silver white, Unruh had never understood the apparent instinctual connection drawn by criminals between beefiness and safety. Muscular men have evinced one skill in this world, Unruh thought: the ability to accumulate muscles. And muscles have never been bulletproof.
A frontal assault with firearms was the simple and effective prescription here. The bodyguards proved, as bodyguards often do, to be primarily ornamental.
After the bodyguards, once Esau and John were inside the house itself and had found the loudmouthed criminal and a few rash functionaries besides, the mansion became a notorious and fabled scene of dispassionate slaughter.
Later, back at Unruh’s home, it was Sung who suggested the police.
Fear was not part of the discussion. But Unruh understood the likelihood that death awaited them and, furthermore, that between now and death, they faced a lot of running. The nature of criminal enterprises is such that insubordination can never go unpunished. Also, Unruh and Sung imagined that between them they held enough valuable knowledge about the workings of several national criminal enterprises that they might bargain for some sort of clemency.
Some new anonymous exile, together.
Hawaii, maybe.
That seemed like a noble goal.
So they went to the police.
Where, instead of clemency and exile, they were immediately separated, and Unruh never saw John Sung again, save once.
As it turned out, perhaps not entirely surprisingly—a fact that Unruh should have foreseen, and for which he’s upbraided himself mercilessly in the long, muddied years since their separation that day—the federal agents they encountered, while flabbergasted to find two such infamous fugitives appearing unbidden at their doorstep, were not entirely sympathetic to the contingencies of their unlikely love story. These agents were, in their way, as aghast at this romance as were Unruh’s former employers. And they were certainly not inclined to proffer mercy.
Unruh saw Sung one final time. Sung was hooded. Unruh glanced at him briefly, through bars. Sung was slumped, on a bench, his wrists in manacles, a white cloth hood over his head. Then Unruh was led away.
Their collective testimony, being quite valuable, did earn them a deal of sorts. The deal was this: Sung was relocated alone to Hawaii, his identity changed, his record expunged, to live out the rest of his natural days at an undisclosed location with an ankle bracelet under permanent house arrest. The two of them may yet have been allowed to live out their days together, in exile, but for the intercession of an ambitious scientist in the midst of a new experiment, seeking criminals of extraordinary circumstance.
Dr. Judy Holliday.
A specialist in memory.
Unruh was redirected to her care.
It was later explained to him that, given his sordid past and quite legendary exploits, he’d been chosen for a pilot program. The program involved amnesty, of a sort. His memories of criminality would be erased, with one exception. It had been determined that his crimes were of such singular remorselessness and brutality that the only effective deterrent, should he be allowed into this new program, would be the promise of safety and continued freedom, such as it was, for his friend John Sung. That was the deal. He would remember Sung, barely, but never see him again. He would be allowed to remember that there is a John Sung. And if Unruh misbehaved, even slightly, his friend Sung would be executed. That was how the agents insisted on referring to Sung: as Unruh’s “friend.” Unruh never protested this—he said very little during his interviews, beyond revealing the identities and histories and crimes of everyone he’d ever worked for—but he could sense the agents’ barely modulated disgust, embedded in that euphemism “friend.”
In order for this deterrent to be effective, the scientists assured Unruh that they would arrange for him to retain his memories of Sung. They’d erase his early life, his criminal exploits, all that would be gone, but he’d keep his memories of these last few years, the years blessed by something like happiness. The years with Sung.
This promise was all he had ever hoped for in his incarceration, and when they explained this to him, Unruh cried.
This decision—to indefinitely shelter two notorious killers in separate and relatively benign lodging, rather than lock them up forever in the isolation ward of a supermax facility or hang them both until dead—was not universally applauded among those few law enforcement officials who were privy to its arrangement. One such disgruntled official leaked news of it to the press. Unruh, who’d existed outside the public consciousness for the entire span of his career, suddenly became a kind of celebrity. His exploits were recounted in detail with outsized horror during nightly cable news debates. None of this he was aware of, locked up in solitary. Plus, he found the initial treatments at the hands of the memory specialists had left his mind a bit . . . muddied.