Killers of a Certain Age

“‘I’m surprised neither of you is chasing Helen,’ she says. ‘She’s the prettiest of us.’ They both shrug. ‘Pretty, yes,’ Vance admits. ‘Beautiful even. But she’s what we Canadians call a Winnipeg winter.’ ‘A Winnipeg winter?’ ‘Great natural beauty but capable of freezing your dick off if you’re stupid enough to get naked,’ Sweeney explains.”

The younger Billie takes it as a given that her male coworkers think of her and her squad not as colleagues, but as sex objects and possible conquests. Billie even evaluates which of the four women is the most conventionally attractive. The men see Helen as threatening to their masculinity and feel no compunction about using profanity and sexualizing her in the workplace. Raybourn includes this detail early, underscoring the importance of misogyny as a theme in the text

“Helen touches Billie’s hand while she clips herself into the seat. ‘Keep it together,’ she whispers. Billie nods once, taking in a deep breath. It is all part of the job and she knows it. Nobody has pretended they won’t be harassed or groped or propositioned with ugly words and uglier intentions. In fact, they’ve been assured of it. ‘We knew what we were signing up for,” she answers shortly.’”

Helen does not offer Billie sympathy but reminds her of her need to maintain her professionalism. The women are expected to remain objective in a world where they are devalued. Sexual harassment is presented as an occupational hazard, something from which the women cannot be protected and must accept. The Bulgarian and Billie’s colleagues exist on the same spectrum—though Billie does not realize this, Raybourn puts the two conversations in the same scene so that this is clear to the reader.

“I shook my head. Forty years on one of the most elite assassin squads on earth and it finished like this, with a free cruise and a bouncy letter from a girl who signed her letters with hashtags. If you expect me to tell you the name of the organization I work for, stop reading right now. It’s a secret—so secret, in fact, that those of us who work there never use the official title. We always refer to it as ‘the Museum’ and we use museum nomenclature to make it a little less obvious to anybody listening in that our job is to eliminate people who need killing.”

In this introduction to an older Billie, we see that she has become even more cynical and dismayed at her place in the world. If younger women are sexualized, older women are consigned to obscurity. Raybourn plays up the contrast between an “elite assassin” and a “bouncy letter”—Billie’s serious work has been replaced by frivolities.