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Not that I should have been anything but grateful to Sophie regardless of how she secured my release from Capanne prison. A murder by an American on foreign soil was complicated business, only made more so by the fact the victim was a powerful man. Like all powerful men Verdicchio had enemies that were happy to see him go, but none so much that any of them would have been willing to intercede on my behalf. I had, after all, killed an old man. The police reports left out that he had tortured Sophie before my arrival; Verdicchio’s power was such that even after his death it protected him. The American consulate seemed to prefer to pretend that I didn’t exist, so I had spent months in Umbria being shuttled back and forth between the prison’s routine and the indecipherable proceedings of the courthouse.
I began those days sitting on cold rocks then moved to standing in front of jurists who spoke in tongues I didn’t understand, asking questions I wasn’t meant to answer. I just stood there, waiting for someone to point me in the direction I was meant to go next. After I became accustom to the routine, though, it just added an interlude where I could enjoy a car ride with some Italian sunshine and watch the golden hills of Umbria go by.
Capanne wasn’t so bad, either. Yes, the prison was an ancient cold, stone box, and there were cockroaches, but not so many as to be too bold. They at least had the decency to scatter when a light was turned on. The same couldn’t be said for my fellow inmates. Starved for sunlight they gravitated toward any illumination. Which I suppose explained the number of them that reconciled with their old religions, be that Catholicism or Islam. I didn’t.
Through those court proceedings and the inevitable corruption around them how I had ended up in Capanne began to leak back to the other prisoners. It resonated in a change of how I was viewed, a change I could feel even through barriers of language and culture.
Capanne was filled with would-be gangsters, bona fide mafioso, smugglers, small-time thieves and big time crazies, each marked with some kind of ritual tattoo, makeshift jewelry, or taqiyah. I kept waiting for one of Verdicchio’s buddies to send someone with a shiv my way, but days turned into weeks and it never happened. One day I learned why.
I was drying myself off after a shower when a man stepped around the corner and into the room’s doorway. I always faced the exit as being naked placed anyone in a vulnerable spot and I was expecting someone to eventually show up and take advantage of that. But the man who stepped in didn’t look like anything I expected. He was short, swarthy, with a trimmed beard of dark curls, wearing one of the wool caps the muslim prisoners seemed to preferred. Closer examination showed he was younger than first inspection might have estimated.
I read no hostility in him. His hands were clasped in front of him. Certain that he had my attention he said, “As-salamu alaykum.”
The walls are stripped bare, the cubicles emptied. No more potted plants or flowers, pictures of loved ones, or construction paper devotionals from children. Sharon is mildly surprised that the lights are still on. She has holed up in the 4th floor accounting department waiting for the end.
The entire corporate structure of NCADS had been moved to Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Iowa, for God’s sake. But Sharon isn’t going. She hasn’t eaten anything since they took out the vending machines, but the faucets in the bathrooms still work. She shakes her stainless steel water bottle as if it’s a tribal gourd, listening to the liquid inside to confirm her senses still work. The hunger had betrayed her of late, bringing out old ghosts in the office, faces in the fabric walls of cubicles, voices from the break room: The cackle of the too loud Joan, the quiet disagreements Karla refused to have in her office, the squeal of surprise when Janet had found a birthday card on her desk. So watching the moving crew begin to take a part the palisade of cubicles she had been hiding in, Sharon needs to be sure they’re real. As her labyrinthian fort slowly starts to disappear into flat stacks, it couldn’t be more real. Especially when she sees Dan Jones leading the group of men.
“This is all your fault,” she whispers into the cubicle wall, peering over it at the division head. Some small part of her points out that she sounds like a cartoon villain. It was the same part of her that insisted she go home and begin the work of putting her dead parents’ things away, emptying their home, and getting on with her life. It had gotten very small of late, with the hunger, but it was still there and tries speaking to her now. It persists and grows until she closes her eyes and turns away from the work crew, pressing her back against the cubicle wall and sliding down it as her knees buckled.
She stays like that until her world unhinges and she falls back to lie flat on the neutral gray of the corporate carpet. The florescent lights dazzled her eyes until a silhouette blocks the one above her, a voice asking, “Sharon? Sharon Julipine?”
Sharon bolts upright, eyes burning into the face of Dan Jones, and repeated, “This is all your fault.”
“Sharon, what are you doing here?”
“You said if we hit our sales targets, headquarters wouldn’t have to move, that the cost savings –”
“Would be immaterial.” Dan crouches down next to her, examining her with the kind of caution Sharon’s mother would have used on one of the lost animals she sheltered. He continues to speak softly, voice touched with regret. “I know what I said.”
“But they moved anyway. You lied.”
“I shouldn’t have made that promise,” he concedes. But then something hardens around his eyes and he asks, “Sharon, what are you doing here?”
Clutching the water bottle to her, Sharon replies, “I’m not leaving.”
“Sharon, you have to. You can’t stay here.”
“No.”
Dan Jones clucks then, reaching to take the bottle away from Sharon, but she holds tight. The tug-of-war quickly becomes a wrestling match, the three strong men who accompanied Jones looking at each other questioningly, uncertain of what to do. Despite days of hunger, Sharon holds onto the bottle until Jones uses all of his greater weight and leverage to rip it out of her arms, but it’s slick with condensation and flips out of his grasp, hurtling towards a window. The cacophonous sound of broken glass fills the room, opening a portal to the outside world through which street noise and traffic can be heard.
The former division head of NCADS Dan Jones stares down at Sharon with all the disapproval he can muster in this strange situation. “Now look what you’ve done.”
And the people four floors down can hear the screaming and one of the strong men shouting for someone to call the police.
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I stared at the oncoming lights. “I’ve been fine Atwell. How are you?”
“I’m an American in France. Does it get any better?” He made it sound like he owned the place.
Given the treatment I sometimes received as an expatriate in France I wasn’t sure I agreed, but I didn’t want to prolong our conversation. So I replied, “I suppose not.”
I could feel Atwell trying to gauge my temperature. His efforts at being subtle equalled his attempts at conversation. He abandoned both with, “So I heard it was an interesting evening at the casino.”
“Yeah.” I didn’t see a reason mention the Corsican’s voyous or the fact that Mitnick was likely the one who sicced them on me. It didn’t make any sense to me, so I didn’t want to explain it to Atwell.
Atwell’s impatience hardened his words. Exiting the motorway towards the city’s interior he said, “Tell me about it.”
I knew that this was the reason Atwell had shown, so I laid out the bare bones. “Marek Mitnick was gambling at the casino this evening. I became aware of his presence around 11:00 p.m. At 11:30 Carlu Sartre arrived and proceeded to threaten Mitnick with a pistol, physically assaulting him and evicting him from the premises.”
I detached from the conversation with, “I suspect they may have been in the midst of a dispute.”
I felt Atwell’s impatience slowly roasting into anger over my dry listlessness. He pulled into an alley, streetlights blocked by the segmented columns of two neo-classic buildings. “Police?”
“No. Casino staff kept it under control. Smartphones are on lockdown on the premise so there were no calls out or digital evidence.”
“And you didn’t think I needed to know about this?”
“You seem to have heard about it all on your own.”
“Both Sartre and Mitnick work for us.” ‘Us’ meaning ‘U.S.’ meaning government. The idea that men that powerful were pawns of whatever obscure anti-terrorist department Atwell was a part of struck me as unlikely. I said so.
“Believe it,” he replied. “There’s a lot of shipping that comes through this part of the world. And they tell us if anything is coming our way that we need to know about.”
“In exchange you let them operate without interference from law enforcement. I wouldn’t call that ‘working for you.’”
“That sounds kind of like what me and you got going on. You saying you don’t work for me?” Atwell very much resembled Jasper in that moment.
Thinking about how I got here and Atwell’s cheap manipulation, I felt my fingers flex. Instead of wrapping them around his throat I replied, “I don’t see a W-2 with my name on it.”
It was Atwell’s turn to grin. “You’re a funny guy.”
“Yeah, that’s what all my co-workers say. ‘That American, he’s a funny guy.’ I mean, I think it’s hilarious that you let guys like Sartre and Mitnick get away with bloody murder just in case they might be able to tell you something.” In controlling my anger I couldn’t help but let my disapproval slip out.
Atwell switched gears into pedantic. “Let me ask you something. If you were given the chance to go back in time and kill baby Hitler, would you do it?”
I hoped my expression communicated how stupid a question I thought that was. “If I could time travel, I’d probably just buy some of his art.”
Not surprisingly, this only confused Atwell. “What?”
“He wanted to be an artist. If someone had supported that ambition he probably would have lived his life out in Vienna hocking postcards.”
That there might be a solution to his question other than the one he possessed only deepened Atwell’s confusion. He shook it off and got to the conclusion he wanted. “The point is, sometimes you need to do bad things to get good results.”
I had seen that kind of logic get manipulated by desert nomads as ignorant as any redneck and I had seen the piles of corpses that resulted. But rather than try to explain that I replied, “Or you could just mollify his ambitions a bit and prevent him from turning into a monster.”
“Mollify? Fancy words like that, no wonder you think you’re so smart.”
“I had a lot of time to read in Capanne.”
“And unless you want to go back you’ll help me figure out what the beef is between Mitnick and Sartre. I can’t have them fighting each other right now.”
Tired of trying to be subtle, I reach for the obvious conclusion. “If Mitnick’s Russian mob –“
“Belarusian.”
That was the first useful thing Atwell said in the conversation and it gave me pause. After a moment I continued, “If he’s not Corsican and Sartre treated him like that, it means he thinks Mitnick is moving in on this territory.” I stared out the windshield. “There. Mystery solved.” A part of me wondered if Mitnick knew about my reporting to Atwell and my relationship with Sartre. It might explain why he had pointed the voyous in my direction.
Atwell’s growing impatience translated into a jackal’s grin. “If that’s the case, I want details so we can make this go away.”
“You’re such good friends with these guys, why don’t you ask them?”
“Because I’m telling you.”
I faced Atwell to let him know I was taking him seriously. “OK.” Satisfied, Atwell gestured towards the passenger door, letting me know I was dismissed.
As I moved to exit the car, Atwell added something as if it were meant to be an afterthought. “Sophie has been around asking questions. Any idea what that’s about?”
“None.” My tone was flat enough that I doubted he could detect the lie.
But he might have, ‘cause he chose to bait me with, “Well, she’s been sucking cock down at ANTS.” Still turned away from him I could feel more than see his smile. “I thought you might want to know about that.”
Before Europe, before Sophie, when Cheryl was alive and we had medical bills to pay, I had worked for a man named Castardi, doing collections and learning an entirely different kind of violence than the Marine Corp had taught me. That experience, its most intense moments often held in spaces like this one, allowed me to do some quick and angry math in the dark, narrow alley. At this time of night, in this part of town, chances were good no one had seen me in the car with Atwell. In the contained space of the Citroen I could kill him without too much noise and disappear. Anyone who did see me probably wouldn’t be the type to go to the cops.
Either way, though, without Atwell, I’d be a fugitive, and Sophie could end up on her own. So instead of murdering the opportunistic weasel I just said, “Now who’s a funny guy?”
Atwell guffawed and banged on the steering wheel. “I just love fucking with you.”
Feeling the first light of the coming day begin to glow around the city I smiled and told him, “Glad to be of service.” Then I stepped out and closed the car door.
Watching the sedan trundle down the alley I wondered about how Sophie had become acquainted with Atwell. And even though I tried to keep my mind away from it I wondered how she had convinced him to spring me from prison. On a rational level I knew that these questions were what his comment was designed to provoke. The fact that I was letting it work only made me angrier.
Before Jesus became the Christ, he was just Jesus of Nazareth, a carpenter who people thought it slightly odd hadn’t gotten married by the time he was in this thirties. So it probably raised a few eyebrows when he and his mother attended a wedding and Jesus brought twelve men with him. The additional guests may have been one of the reasons that the family hosting the ceremony didn’t have enough wine on hand. The primary social beverage of the day, this made for tremendous embarrassment, as providing a sufficient amount was an important obligation. Plus, who likes to be at a dry wedding?
Mary, being a kind and empathetic woman, didn’t want to see the hosts embarrassed or the guests angered. She also knew the reason her Son hadn’t married yet. With that in mind she implored him to help the bride and groom. To which Jesus replied, “Woman, it is not yet my time.”
Ignoring this rather haughty reply, Mary spoke not another word to her Son, but told the servants to do whatever Jesus instructed. And despite his previous rebuff of Mary, Jesus told the servants to fill six stone jars with water, which he dutifully turned into wine.
What’s the moral of the story? Even the Son of God does what his mother tells him to do.
To see all chapters, go here. To hear an audio reading, select the play button above.
During one of my breaks I checked on Thibalt to make sure he was OK after getting slugged by the Brick. While his paunch and receding hairline didn’t suggest it, the middle-aged Frenchman was a sturdy sort. He just smiled around the chipped tooth and broken nose like the professional he was and said it was nothing.
I finished up my shift. Checking out at the security station a sullen Jasper ignored me, upset that Sartre’s arrival had overshadowed anyone possibly caring about me leaving my sector. I would have thought the excitement surrounding the crime boss’ arrival would have given him something to focus on other than petty blackmail, but he barely glanced my way as I signed out. Nobody does haughty quite like the French.
In the pre-dawn dark of the city I paid more attention to the reflection of the streetlamps in the sidewalk puddles than I did to what was going on around me. Mitnick and Sartre occupied most of my brain, so I didn’t see the old Citroën BX pull up, riding along the bollards beside me. I only noticed it when another car honked its horn, urging the Citroën to speed up. Knowing who it was, I pretended not to notice.
I was a few blocks from the casino but not quite to the tram station when the BX’s tinny horn made it impossible to ignore. With the hook of the umbrella’s handle resting on the crook of my arm I stuffed my hands into the peacoat and turned, trying very much to appear as if I might have picked up Sartre’s Tokarev. With cars whipping past in the outside lane the BX idled there.
I walked over and bent down as the driver finished cranking down the passenger side window. His black hair, thin face, and aquiline nose were lit by the headlights of passing cars. He leaned back into the driver’s seat and smiled at me as if inviting me into a limousine instead of a beat-up old hatchback. “Get in.”
With the regret of a tired streetwalker I gave him a doleful smirk and reached for the car door handle. I thought about making some excuse, but I decided it would only delay the inevitable. I climbed in as another automobile blared its horn.
Ignoring the anger of the other car, the driver waited until I got in before pulling away from the Promenade’s pedestrian walkway and getting up to speed. “How have ya been?”
I stared at the oncoming lights. “I’ve been fine Atwell. How are you?”
