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The Madame did not grow quiet in her old age, but obstreperous, signaling her least dissatisfaction with a noisy defiance. Two marriages, three bouts of plague, and a humpback hadn’t weakened her, but forged her angry determination in the fire of life’s cruelties.
So fierce was she that even her adult children still came to her for help. They rarely had to ask, only to tell her of their troubles. She would then stand from her chair, ride from her castle, and challenge the most powerful duke, bargain with the fiercest dragon, send undead back to their graves.
All nine of her children felt like fools every time they asked anything from her. Truth be told, though, they feared if they stopped asking, having nothing to do might kill her before anything else.
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I moved to Mitnick. I heard him wheezing, laboring to breathe. His limbs spasmed as they failed, the commander of men no longer able to control his own body. His eyes moved, searched for a way out, landing on me instead.
“Why?” he asked. “I would have made us rich.”
I patted down his jacket, searching for any possible surprises. There weren’t any. “You were already rich, Mitnick. It would never be enough.”
“I could have made you rich. This city, this country, could have been ours.”
“I don’t want it.” I moved so Mitnick had a clear line of sight to Nika, could see the anguish on her tear-stained face. “I don’t want to be a part of it.”
Mitnick gurgled a bitter laugh. “I thought all Americans wanted to be rich.”
I thought about all of the reasons we did what we had done, the suffering Mitnick caused, Sophie’s vendetta against monsters like him, my own fiery desires. It didn’t resolve itself into any answer, so I said, “Maybe. But just because you can take something doesn’t mean you should. Didn’t anyone ever teach you that?”
Mitnick bubbled another chuckle. “We come from very different places, you and I.”
“Yeah.” I thought about it and added, “You should have left the kids alone.”
Mitnick held up a hand, staring at his own blood on it. “It seems in this you are right.” His eyes darted to Nika. “Oleg will continue searching for his daughter.”
“Oleg’s dead,” I said, quietly enough that Nika wouldn’t hear me.
Mitnick’s face relaxed. “Well, at least there is that.” Mitnick took his eyes from me and stared up at the ceiling. “Thank God my children are not here.”
I didn’t believe anymore, but I joined him in that prayer. It hadn’t occurred to me that his family might be in the house and I tried not to think about what that would have meant.
Over the sound of the flames I didn’t realize that Mitnick had stopped breathing. I left him to the fire.
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In the spiral city of Sheciab, there was no measure of guilt. An accused individual was either innocent or guilty, and if it was the latter, the punishment was always the same: To be cast down the Axis Well, to forever move away from the city and its center, until no possible return could be dreamt of.
To accuse someone wrongly was also a crime, though, and so any individual found innocent would see their counterpart thrown down the Axis Well. Rights and wrongs, broken hearts and misunderstandings, a theft of bread or a pile of gold, none of that mattered to the Judges. All that mattered was that upon verdict, someone went down the Well.
It was the only way the Judges could be certain their decrees would never be challenged. And the Judges craved their own safety nearly as much as they loved their power.
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Mitnick set down the case, rising up to his full height, squaring his feet and lifting his Soviet-trained fists. “You have caused me a great deal of trouble. I am going to enjoy this.”
“No, you won’t.” Lanzo was so quiet I almost didn’t realize someone else had spoken. Mitnick turned to the younger man. Lanzo stood at a seaside door, a pistol on Mitnick, close enough he couldn’t miss, but far enough away that no one could take the gun from him. I breathed a sigh of relief, glad that I wasn’t going to have to fight Mitnick and that Lanzo didn’t have a functional weapon. It had been a good idea to bring him, after all.
Except I realized he wasn’t holding the revolver anymore. Somewhere in whatever travails Lanzo had endured in the house of his tormentor, he had acquired a different pistol.
Mitnick’s smile shrank to a rueful grin barely visible behind the neatly trimmed beard. He kept his eyes on Lanzo and asked, “Who are you?”
I felt Nika tense next to me, wanting to go to Lanzo, but I held an arm up to prevent her from running into the line of fire. For a short eternity, no one said anything. In the depths of that silence, I think I heard Nika whisper Lanzo’s name, but that was washed away by the blood in the boy’s voice as he said something to Mitnick in a language no one but him understood.
Between the inferno and the pistol, Mitnick must have felt the end was close. “I do not speak your language.”
In clear English, Lanzo replied, “You killed my uncle.”
Mitnick raised his eyebrows and hands higher. “I don’t know what you are talking about.”
I think Lanzo wanted the man from Belarus to know, “His name was Moreau.”
I thought about the slavery and the murder and the drugs, the institutional corruption that Mitnick had climbed to his mansion by the sea. How, instead of seeking to contain that rot, he hoped to spread it beyond the borders of the old Soviet empire, to pour it over the world so he could eat of the bounty it stripped away from everything else. With all of that, I couldn’t think of a reason not to kill Mitnick.
But having watched one murder spill out and cascade into God knows how many more, I knew I didn’t want Lanzo to be the one to kill him. He could still walk away from this, possibly even with Nika, escape and start again. Killing Mitnick would destroy any possibility of that, as remote as it was. If I knew anything about organized crime, the Avoritet would never let it go.
“Lanzo,” I prayed, “We found Nika. Let’s go.”
Lanzo didn’t budge. I said to him, “Mitnick deserves to die. But you don’t want the consequences of killing him.”
Sweat beaded on Lanzo’s forehead, the muscles in his forearms flexed as he gripped the pistol. I don’t think he had ever killed a man before. I could only think to add, “Don’t do it.”
The pressure of the situation caused that final phrase to repeat in my head like a pulse. I could smell smoke in the air.
Mitnick opened his fists, demonstrating their emptiness. “Listen to your friend. Do you wish to end up like him? Blood on your hands, with no past or future?”
I could see Lanzo’s hand tremble and I think Mitnick could too. The future was bearing down on both of them, but only Lanzo had the choice in his hand. I could see the weight of it, his uncle’s blood calling to him, a future with Nika uncertain and unclear by comparison.
From behind me, Nika said Lanzo’s name, a pleading in her voice that set off the pistol in his hand. In a night of deafening sounds it was the loudest. Mitnick’s tall frame pushed away from the Corsican, his eyes round, mouth agape. Perhaps after surviving all that he had, he couldn’t believe that this was how it would end.
I swore, moving forward to grab Lanzo, trying to drag him away from the corpse he had just made. It wasn’t easy – the bullet unleashed the anger he had been carrying. He cursed and screamed at Mitnick, kicking at the body as I pulled him away. He struggled until I pushed him to Nika who raised her hands to him. In the rage and loss finally bursting out of him, he slapped her hands away and disappeared down the hall, the house’s storm of fire and fighting his only companions.
I knew exactly how he felt and that he’d regret treating Nika like that, but there was no talking to him now. He had killed a man and the world would answer him for it.
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Thales of Miletus, one of the Seven Sages, knew there was only one cure for the shortsightedness of mankind; The library. No one person could stand in a nexus of knowledge and remain blind to the many considerations of others and life. He pursued the idea of collecting all human knowledge in one place with such fervor, read and wrote so many books in his quest, that he went blind.
Years later, long after Caesar’s war had burned the Library of Alexandria to the ground, Nicholas of Cusa wept as he used the knowledge Thales’ had collected to construct a pair of spectacles to correct his near-sightedness.
