He held the image of the cave in his mind with a perfect crystalline awareness, its rocky lips and jagged edges parting out into the blue, blue sea of the Mediterranean. It was the last time he could recall being truly happy, wading out of the darkness of the cave’s belly to the impossible beauty of the grotto’s quartz filtered light. Shannon had been there and they had held hands and hadn’t even needed to look at each other to know the other one was smiling.
He put that image into the blackness of the pistol’s muzzle, using it to bury the darkness at the other end, using it to hold down the failed business, bad investments, foreclosure. Therapy and medication had held those things in place for a time, but insurance became unaffordable and alcohol and a firearm were so much cheaper.
The trigger wasn’t sending something to him, though, not a bullet from the barrel, it was taking him somewhere. It was going to transport him from the failed wreckage of his life and out to that cobalt sea. Shannon would be there again and just like with the cave, they’d be able to see the light and step out into the sunshine once he had passed through the short, cold dark.
To see all chapters, go here. To hear an audio reading, select the play button above.
His words were quiet and soft with no implied menace or threat. “You will pardon me interrupting your ablutions, but privacy is so difficult to come by here.”
I felt threatened anyway so asked, “Should I bother asking where the guard went?”
He declined his head slightly, a small bow to the realities of Capanne. “He was assured I meant you no harm, so only a small bribe was necessary to provide us a few moments alone.”
“OK.” I wrapped my towel around myself and straightened up so I towered over him. “Why don’t we start with why I’m talking to you instead of being knifed by one of the gangster wannabes running around this place? Could give you quite the reputation if somebody made their bones with me.”
He smiled as if this hadn’t escaped him and it pleased him that I knew it. “The men you speak of were aware of your deed before your arrival. Or, at least, the important ones were.”
“However, the death of Verdicchio has caused a power vacuum. There are,” he paused as if searching for the right word, which surprised me. His English was excellent. “Factions. Your fate, as it were, has become a bit of a bargaining chip between them. Each side has promised retributions should another steal the honor of killing you.”
While I chewed on that he continued with, “As to the former, you served in the U.S. army?”
“Marine Corps.”
“Ah. Even better.” I wasn’t sure what he meant by that but he continued before I could ask. “There are many of my brethren here who arrived after fleeing the wars in Iraq and Syria. Some of them fought there.”
I was beginning to get the idea, but I just said, “Ah-ha.”
His smile became brittle, barely big enough to see through his beard. “Indeed. Some of them see your arrival here as the Prophet’s providence, an enemy delivered into our hands.”
That made sense, but I found myself stifling a laugh. “So how many different groups in this place want me dead?”
His smile became earnest then, seeming to enjoy that I understood and found a bitter humor in the situation. “It’s hard to say.” His smile fell away. “But if one of my fellows were to injure you it would greatly anger the others. The result would be much bloodshed.”
I nodded. “And you don’t want that?”
He returned my nod. “And I do not want that.”
I suddenly wished that we could sit down and have some tea, face each other and discuss this like men. But such luxuries were a long way off, so I just held my towel in place and asked, “So what are you suggesting?”
Again, my visitor pursed his lips, deliberating on his next words. “If you were to convert it would prevent my fellow supplicants from harming you. ‘But whoever kills a believer intentionally – his recompense is Hell, wherein he will abide eternally, and Allah has become angry with him.’”
“It will also provide you with our protection.” He must have correctly interpreted my skepticism because he continued with, “Your conversion would be seen as a victory for us.”
I couldn’t help but but give another short, bitter laugh at that. My visitor’s eyes narrowed, the closest thing I had seen to anger from him. Not caring if that’s how things went I said, “You know my name. What’s yours?”
“Here? I am called Tariq.” He paused, then went on to say, “Everyone in Capanne knows your name. But they simply refer to you as the American.”
The drainage pipe had the smell of offal coming out of it as if it had been stuffed with the intestines of dead pigs. Light from street level didn’t penetrate far enough for Edward to see what blocked the duct, but the smell certainly provided a clue. Some creature, most likely seeking shelter from the rain, had crawled down in and become stuck, leading to a long, slow death. Edward sighed as he pulled on the heavy Water & Power gloves, wondering how best to avoid getting any mess on his work coveralls. He reached into the pipe slowly, hoping to encounter whatever was producing the smell at a shallow depth.
Those hopes evaporated as he found no resistance all the way up to his shoulder. Stretching out his fingers, he still felt nothing, which produced a sigh from him. Now, he thought, he’d have to disassemble the entire pipe. But as he curled his fingers back and prepared to withdraw something snagged. A barb into his sleeve kept him hooked there, then became a pressure surrounding his wrist. Discomfort became pain which became panic. Unable to get free he felt that force travel up his trapped arm, to his shoulder, forcing itself out of his eyes. There was a crack and pop and an incomprehensible tearing, and then Edward knew where that smell was coming from.
To see all chapters, go here. To hear an audio reading, select the play button above.
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.
