Savage Night by Jim Thompson - ending?

Cafe Society
1

Asking for a friend who is puzzled by the ending of this novel. (I have not read it, I’ve read a synopsis). I am putting it here for his benefit, in case anyone cares to elaborate on what happened at the end. Thx.

2

Five possibilities spring to mind:

[spoiler]1) Though he’s an unreliable narrator, you could pretty much take it at face value: his employer (a) tasks Underling A with killing Underling B, if Underling B bungles it; and (b) likes having an in-place Underling A who’ll provide low-key support to some out-of-town Underling B tasked with a tricky hit – and who’ll step in to handle it, if all else fails. The sickly narrator doesn’t conclude until late in the story that the woman with the crutch is his employer’s in-place Underling A – but she in fact is, just like he in fact is a pathetic bungler; the ending follows logically.

  1. She’s not an underling of his employer, but just so happens to do whatever such an underling would do anyway. So, like, he’s paranoid and wrong about why, but he’s not actually wrong about what, since, hey, some folks are just the killin’ type.

  2. He’s not only physically sickly, he’s mentally deteriorating; and, by the end, he’s basically dwindling away during some kind of hellish and dreamlike hallucination.

  3. He never got out of that icy locked room – and his impending-death scenario at the end appropriately tracks to that, as his cold-addled brain shuts down.

  4. He was literally in hell all along, as figuratively hinted at throughout.[/spoiler]

3

And what about Kendall? Why was he so friendly and what does He explain at the end. I didnt get it :slight_smile:

4

He flatly reveals, near the end, that he’s dying – which, the inept hitman realizes, would explain why Kendall was so generous as to be mistaken for an in-place asset providing ‘plausibly deniable’ support on behalf of the mob boss: any given bit of help could have been passed off as something a friendly guy might do – which is why the gag can be that, no, it isn’t the innocuous cover story of a sinister agent secretly playing co-conspirator; a guy who gives like there’s no tomorrow may just have no tomorrows; what it looks like on the surface might be what it is.

Seems blandly straightforward.