The stories we tell ourselves are importants tool in deciding who we are. We try them on, keeping some, and casting others away. The decisions, and inevitable rebuffs, that create that image may, in fact, be central to the process of determining who we really are This is true for humans and all human endeavors. Whether it’s is a tribe, a country, or a company, the stories we tell each other, from Beowulf to Briar Rabbit, all speak to how we see ourselves and almost always have layered meanings.
Take, for instance, the tale of George Washington and the cherry tree. In the tale, George Washington ‘cannot tell a lie’ and that is central to the story. The idea is that the founding father of the United States was an honest man and, maybe, this integrity is central to the American character.
But equally important to note is that the Washington of the story doesn’t tell the truth until confronted by a father that (as any parent will attest) most likely already knew who damaged his property. Which brings us to the question, did Washington tell the truth because of innate righteousness? Or because he was practical enough to see that lying would only result in more trouble? Both interpretations are entirely valid. And perhaps both are true.
Like all things of human nature the stories we tell ourselves have a duality that are not always evident upon cursory examination.
To start at the beginning go here.To hear an audio reading of the chapter, hit the play button above.
Sophie smiled and nodded, excused herself from the other women as if she were leaving a dinner party and followed me into the other room. I got myself a glass of water out of the tap and leaned against the sink. Sophie examined my face, clearly trying to discern my emotional state. Good luck with that, considering I couldn’t get a fix on it myself. I sipped my water and then asked with a glance towards the den of women, “So what’s up?”
“We have been asking about the girl,” Sophie stated plainly. “I thought I would ask some of the locals.”
That wasn’t surprising considering the initiative Sophie had shown with the driver. But to confirm a suspicion I asked, “Prostitutes?”
She held her arms to herself tightly under the elbows, looking at the kitchen wall adjacent to the den as if she could see through it. “Si. These women seemed upset. I thought they might have a missing friend.”
“That would be a hell of a coincidence.”
She shrugged, returning a gaze that dared me to say what she could or couldn’t do. “They were missing someone. Jardin. They were very worried.”
Trying to keep any judgement out of my voice I asked, “What did you do?”
“They showed me where Jardin was. And I brought her back.”
“I thought you said she was missing.”
“Not missing.” Still keeping the elbow in her left hand she raised her right, trying to pinpoint the right phrase. “Taken,” she concluded, green eyes back on me.
Frustration caused me to rub my eyes, more out of an effort to conceal it than anything else. “So her pimp took her off the circuit to rough her up and you just…went and found her?” People who traded in the flesh of their fellow human beings are a particularly ruthless group, so I couldn’t imagine whoever this was just gave Jardin up. But Sophie nodded her head as if that’s exactly what happened.
“Did they mention a Corsican?”
“No.”
“Then why did you get involved in this? I thought we were looking for that particular girl.” I gestured towards the wall she had been staring at, “What do they have to do with it?”
Sophie’s eyes became as hard as flecked chlorite. “He was beating her with a wire hanger.”
“Jesus, please tell me you didn’t kill him.”
Sophie’s expression provided me with all of the clarity of a sphinx. After a moment I realized what that meant and I said it. “You don’t know.”
She shrugged. And didn’t care, it said.
I couldn’t help keep the anger out of my voice now. “Sophie, we can’t just go sticking our nose into everyone’s would-be problems. You remember the last time we got mixed up with a neighbor?”
“Si. You found me.” That stopped me short. I had been thinking of Verdicchio and his gang of thugs, the violence and fear and uncertainty that dealing with them had entailed, but Sophie was right. Somewhere in the discussion I had gotten Cheryl and her conflated and that realization burned brighter than any fear.
“OK,” I spoke, mostly to calm myself. “So now what?”
Sophie turned her head to examine me sidewise. “Eh?”
“You found their friend. You brought them here out of the rain. Presumably you have or will feed them.” My voice was getting quieter and smaller with each sentence. “Now what? Are they going to live here?”
“No,” she shook her head, “di certo.”
“Then what?” I could see whatever mixture of anger and compassion had fueled Sophie’s choices through the early morning hours hadn’t allowed for consideration beyond them. She clasped her arms across her chest again, returned to starting at the wall, seeking some kind of answer there. She started to speak a few times, but never got more than a few words out.
I couldn’t provide the answer for her anymore than I would take away the parts of her that had brought these women here. I sighed, then pulled out the wad of Euros. The past evening’s activities had only peeled away its outer most layer. Taking Sophie’s hand, I gave her the money. “Take this. It should help.”
“What will I do with it?”
“I don’t know. Put them up for the night, buy them new clothes. Send them to finishing school.” I shrugged, using the motion to take off the peacoat. “I’m going to bed.”
I hung up the coat on the hat rack next to the door. Watching me from the kitchen, Sophie said, “We will be quiet.”
It didn’t matter. I was so exhausted I slept like it was my first night on Parris Island.
Callisto was a bear, her father a wolf, and her son a hunter. What kind of dreadful world can lead to such a travesty of events? The same kind of world that breeds a father that would murder his own son to lay his flesh upon the table to test a stranger’s knowledge. The same kind of world that would see a woman cast out by her religious order for having the misfortune to be raped. The kind of world that has gods who think turning you into a bear is fair, and who think doing the same to your son is avoiding a tragedy.
Uncertain and pained about her future, she said this to me over coffee, no sugar. The shop we were in was loud with all of the sounds of the modern world; cell phones twittered, doors chimed, laptops chattered. I thought about all of the time that stretched between Callisto’s epoch and now, and how none of that had made the world less random or cruel, only more exact in its explanations. This caused me to remember Callisto’s tale as an explanation of the circumpolar nature of two constellations. I reminded my companion that, after transforming them into bears, the gods had hung Callisto and her son in the stars.
That would complete their cruel fate, she said, to be hung forever in the firmament, as something they never were.
To start at the beginning go here.To hear an audio reading of the chapter, hit the play button above.
The walk home took me past featureless block buildings, warehouses that lined up in formation, once waiting by the river for some cargo to be unloaded. Now they waited for something like the Factory to come in and inhabit them again, to give them new life. Eventually I came to a space where the buildings had been demolished before they had reached their turn in that unemployment line. It left a huge flat space populated only with tarmac and the tall poles of parking lot lights. In the center rose the beginnings of a stadium, men already arriving at work to complete a modern Coliseum. I wondered for a time what it would be like to have a simple occupation like that for a living. I couldn’t really get my head around it.
It was too far to walk home but the trams were running again. After staring at the construction workers I felt more like the company of strangers than the close, enclosed silence of a taxi so I found a stop and hopped on the tram. I shouldn’t have bothered thinking about unknowns – it was still early enough that not most commuters were still at home with their breakfasts. I sat in the quiet emptiness of the tram, watching its rounded, polished plastic nose cut through town, moving from the abandoned warehouses to the medieval architecture of Old Town, like a spaceship traveling through time. I changed stations once to head north to Triaite, taking me forward in time again, away from the cobblestone streets and terracotta roofs to hard, flat pavement and high-rise tenements.
The elevator in the lobby remained unlit, the sandwich board still in front of it. I headed up the stairs. The walls were thin and the fellow tenants mostly quiet, but there was still the occasional family scuffle or love-making couple that produced enough muffled noise to fill the halls with something other than regret and poor choices. At this hour, though, the only sound was children up in the early morning playing and horsing around while their parents tried to get them ready for school. It was mostly happy sounds, because the children hadn’t known anything better than living here, I figured.
Letting myself into the apartment I was surprised to hear voices. I paused with the front door barely cracked, listening. Sophie spoke, clear and bright, without anything in her tone to indicate there might be trouble. To my surprise several voices followed hers, one sounding almost giddy another low and husky. They all were women.
I walked in, making enough noise that I wouldn’t take anyone by surprise. Down the short entry hall I passed the kitchen to find Sophie sitting on a chair she had placed catercorner to the sofa. She had pulled up another one in a similar position on the other end of the coffee table. There was another woman sitting in it and three more on the couch.
All attention was on the woman in the center on the couch. Bunched up with her legs tucked underneath her, she was shoeless and wearing a puffer jacket so big I couldn’t tell if he was wearing a skirt or just knickers underneath it. She appeared a little older than Sophie, perhaps in her mid-thirties, but dark haired. Her cheeks were stained as though she had cried through mascara or taken a beating. Possibly both.
The women next to her were obviously friends, leaning in for close support. The woman closest to me was a dirty blonde, wearing equally stained white jacket and skirt, her tan shoes promising to add several inches to her height when she rose from the couch. The woman on the far side of the couch wore a similar outfit of short skirt and jacket, these of mismatched color, her haired pulled back to emphasize the peculiarly angular and French beauty of her face. Her sympathy for the woman in the middle couldn’t hide her anger.
The last one I barely glanced at as I swept my eyes to Sophie. She was younger than everyone else in the room, too young for what I was beginning to suspect was everyone’s profession, which made me more uncomfortable than I already was. Someone had done a bad job of dyeing her hair red, staining her scalp. A cheap black vinyl skirt was stretched across her thighs.
I stepped into the doorway, feeling more like a roadblock than a man in his own home. All eyes turned to me. I nodded and said hello.
Sitting there Sophie smiled at me with a, “Buon giorno.” She gestured to the other women, hand held upright as if she were offering each of them a plate of hors d’oeuvre, saying their names as she went by each of them. I didn’t catch much of that but the bruised one in the middle whose name was Jardin. Eyes back on Sophie I noted she had been out, jeans and blouse slightly damp around their cuffs, a short rain slicker hanging next to the door.
I nodded and awkwardly said hello again. None of them said much or offered to shake my hand. The youngest waved and seemed very small and a little embarrassed. Jardin tucked her bare legs further underneath her and roller her shoulders in the puffer jacket trying her best to disappear into it.
Feeling weirdly parental I asked Sophie, “Could I speak to you in the kitchen for a moment?”
To start at the beginning go here. To hear an audio reading of the chapter, hit the play button above.
The same giant bouncer from before leaned by the Factory’s front door, his bald head tinted by the orange light of the club’s entrance. Maybe sullen from having been pushed around by Sarti’s boys, he stopped me as I tried to move passed him. I leveled a gaze of disbelief at him, layered with the slightest bit of menace. “You saw who I left here with? And you want to charge me again?”
Unhappy that he couldn’t double his fleecing, he stepped away from me, exuding disdain. As if I was the one who was trying to soak him. Rather than just letting this go, I took out the dead Russian’s passport and folded it in half, covering up most of the text with my hand so only the picture showed. I held it up for the bouncer and asked, “Have you seen this man?” As soon as the question left my mouth I groaned at how cop-like it sounded. I made a note to myself that if I wanted to increase my chances of getting answers I needed to phrase it differently.
This idea was given some credence when the bouncer barely glanced at the picture before replying, “Non.” All the restraint my situation had forced me to show recently boiled away and I gave him a quick wrap on his balls with my knuckles. A sharp exhalation of breath caused him to bend forward a little and I used that moment to grab him by the throat. I pulled him closer and showed him the photo again, making sure he got an eyeful. ‘Take a closer look. I’m asking for the gouverneur.” Certain that I had his attention I asked again, “Have you seen this man man?”
Unsurprisingly, he repeated the same answer. If he worked the door frequently he probably saw hundreds of party-goers every night. I let him go and he coughed, returning to his standing position. He glared at me, the hostility in his demeanor making it clear he was deciding if he wanted to make this a fight. I waited, staring back, half hoping he might. He chose discretion over valor, though, and went back to staring out into the night.
I went inside. The crowd in front of the stage was smaller, but more intense, frenetic in its motion. They didn’t move in any kind of synchronous dance, but each person to their own thing. Between the dark shadows and garish lights, the dancers agitated like some kind of monster that had been stapled together.
I’d rather take on Sarti and all of his men than deal with that. I headed back into the Abattoir, the Factory’s private section, hoping to catch the Corsican and his voyous, maybe to burn off some of the residuals left over from disappointing discussion with the bouncer.
None of them were there. Starting with the booth I had found them in I roamed between the cages, hands buried in pockets, increasingly bent forward with each successive disappointment. It must have been getting close to closing time – most people were gone or had left for the dance floor. Out of frustration I began asking the staff, which at that hour was only composed of a few scarlet-haired waitresses. One, so pale she might have been an actual redhead, surprised me by popping her gum and taking an earnest look at the photo, then replying with a, “Oui.”
I was so stunned by a useful and honest reply I only blurted out, “When?”
“Mardi.”
Tuesday. Shit, what day was it? Saturday? Before I could figure that I out I began to ask other questions. Who was he with? When did he arrive? When did he leave?
To the first question, she only gestured to the Abattoir. She listened to the rest, but only shrugged, then glided away as if she were on roller skates. I almost chased her down but my movement towards her caught the attention of several bouncers. The rising of that pack told me Sartre’s weight wouldn’t protect me if I kept harassing her.
I was suddenly exhausted. I found an emergency exit and stepped out into the pre-dawn light. I tucked the umbrella under an arm, shoved my hands in my pocket and pointed my feet home.
