by Huss, JA
“A little.” She shrugs. “I mean, not like they were yesterday. I was coming off the sedation drugs or something. Somebody sedated me, right?”
“I presume so,” Alec says, taking a right turn off the main road. If you can call this narrow path a main road, that is. “You did take a tumble. But we got you fixed up OK, yeah?”
I watch him squeeze her leg, fuming with anger.
“I don’t remember what happened. Where was I?”
Alec withdraws his hand and places it back on the steering wheel to navigate the even narrower, even less traveled mountain road.
I watch him formulate his answer in the rearview. His eyes dart to mine, then away just as fast. He’s about to lie, but what else is new?
“You know what?” I say. “I’m not in the mood for the fairy tale you’re about to spin. So save it. With any luck Christine and I will be on our way soon. Twenty-four hours from now you’ll just be a bad taste in our mouths.”
“What?” Christine says.
“You can’t leave,” Alec says. “Not until we’re all safe.”
“I can take care of Christine.”
Alec slams on the brakes, stopping in the middle of the road—pulling on the e-brake for effect—and then turns in his seat to look me in the eyes. “You can’t even take care of yourself, Fortnight. You’re the reason she’s in this mess, not me.”
I laugh so loud, Christine turns in her seat too. “No,” I say. “This has ‘evil Alec van den Berg plan’ written all over it. Who did you send her to kill? I want a name.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Then how the fuck did you know she needed help? How the fuck did you know to call me to go save her?”
“I didn’t need saving,” Christine protests. “Jesus Christ. Fucking men.”
“You didn’t need saving?” I blurt. “Are you fucking kidding me right now?”
“I was fine. I was safe. I was—”
“You didn’t even know who you were, Christine!”
“And my memory came back, OK? So drop it.”
“I’ll drop it when he fills in the missing pieces. Who did she kill, Alec?” And then I make a decision. I take a stand. Because the gun in my pocket is pressed up to Alec’s forehead. Right between his eyes. “Who. The fuck. Did you send her to kill?”
“Fucking Danny!” Christine screams.
But I just press the barrel of my gun into his skin harder. “Answer me. Or I’m gonna fuck up the interior of this Range Rover with your bloody brains and then bill your estate for the detailing job it’ll need afterward.”
“You were always so dramatic, Danny.”
“Answer me.”
“Fine,” he says, pushing the gun away from his head and looking at Christine. “It was an oke named Jimmy, OK? Jimmy Sotoro. He stole from me and—”
“Bullshit,” I snarl. “It was Brasil’s man David.”
“I already told you, I have no clue who this David oke is. Or this Brasil fokker. It was Jimmy Sotoro. He fokked me over and Christine volunteered. Tell him, Christine.”
But she can’t tell me. For two reasons that he’s well aware of now. She doesn’t remember and it wasn’t Jimmy fucking Sotoro.
“Oh, yeah,” Christine says, knocking her knuckles against the side of her head.
“What?”
“Yeah,” she says, smiling as she meets my gaze. “Jimmy. I remember now.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
“Danny, come on. You’re making a big deal out of nothing. Jimmy was an asshole. And he stole… from Alec. Right, Alec?”
Are they really teaming up against me?
But I only huff out a laugh at my own silent question.
Because of course they are. He always got her to take his side. I was always the unreasonable one. Because I was always the one talking sense. I was the one who put up a fight every time he roped Christine and me into yet another job to bolster his fortune. I, Danny fuck-up Fortnight, was the voice of reason. That right there should tell you something about how sick this guy is. How power-hungry and self-absorbed.
Christine gets out of the car, slamming the door behind her.
“What the fuck?” I say, already out and walking around the front of the Range Rover before I’m done saying the words. “What are you doing?” I ask, taking her by the arm.
But she shrugs me off and turns her back to me.
“What?” I ask again.
“Come on, Christine.” Alec is on the other side of her now. “We’ll work it out. This is just us finding our footing again.”
I shoot him a look. He sees it but ignores me.
“This is just Danny saying he loves you. He’s always so dramatic.”
But she bows her head and stares down at her feet. Silent.
It occurs to me that she looks very fucking cute in my clothes. Black sweatpants and boots that are at least two sizes too big. And seeing her wearing my old pea coat, well, it reminds me of better days. Simple days that felt so complicated back before we understood what complicated really means. She was always using it to cover herself back when we were young. The heat never worked right in that shitty motel down on Juniper Avenue. She was forever trying to climb into bed with me, claiming we needed to share body heat. But I always said no. Threw her my coat and told her to sleep in it.
My blood always ran hot so the cold didn’t affect me the way it did her.
She was so small back then too. So young. So… fragile. But then again, she was tough like steel. Hard like diamonds. Such an appropriate analogy.
“It wasn’t all bad,” she finally says in a low whisper. She turns then, looks at us individually for a moment. Then—somehow, I don’t really know how—she looks at both of us at once. “Those days we spent in the Cook Islands. It was pretty great, right?”
I sigh, my shoulders slumping a little in defeat.
“Are you joking?” Alec says. “It was wonderful.” He smiles at her. Hand still on her arm, squeezing just hard enough to let her know he commiserates with her frustration.
I know I don’t hate him, not the way I do other people who I really fucking hate. But I fucking hate him. He always comes off so reasonable. So calm. And I’m the irrational one. The unpredictable one. The one who causes shit and he’s the one who cleans things up when I’m done.
But that’s not how it is. I’m the voice of reason. I’m the one who tried to do the right thing. I’m the rational, patient, calm one in this little triangle. Not him. Not her. Me.
And yet somehow I play right into his hands. I perpetuate the myth.
I look down at the gun, still in my hand, and tuck it back into my pocket.
“Remember when we spent a whole week on that private island near Aitutaki?” Christine says.
I smile, catch Alec smiling too, but not for the same reason. Not entirely, anyway. If she remembers Aitutaki that’s a good sign. And it was fun. It was a fuckin’ blast, if I’m being honest.
The Cook Islands were something to behold. White sand and turquoise water. Scuba diving and sleeping on the beach, or the deck of the yacht, or not sleeping at all because we were having too much fun and didn’t want to miss a single moment of it.
“I think back on that time and wonder… will it ever be as good again? Will we ever love each other the way we did then?” She allows a small laugh to sneak through her sudden sadness. “Remember that yellow dress I wore like every day?” She guffaws despite herself.
And we laugh with her. Because she did love that stupid dress. And she looked amazing in it. It was right around her sixteenth birthday. And she wasn’t the little girl I once knew. She was almost somebody else entirely. And when she put that dress on for the first time, well, that was when I noticed she’d grown up.
I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Her body was still very slim, but well-muscled from the hard life we lived. And it was difficult to remember that hard life at the time. Paradise has a way of doing that, ya know?
Erasing all the bad things and replacing them with bright sunshine days.
Dinners under the moonlight. Swimming under the stars. Laughing with the only two people who matter.
She was tan, and beautiful, and happy.
What happened to us?
“I want that again,” she says. Looking at me, not Alec.
I nod. “Yeah,” I say. “I know.” And I almost say ‘me too’ but I just can’t do it. I can’t say it because I don’t think it’s true.
I don’t want us. I don’t want the triangle.
I want her. Just her.
CHAPTER NINETEEN - ALEC
BEFORE
Sydney Harbour glimmers outside the window of the suite. Inside, Christine and Danny glimmer in a different way. Christine shines like the diamonds around her neck. And Danny like the ones in the cufflinks I’ve convinced him to wear.
He claims to hate wearing a tuxedo, but once he’s in it, he really shows it off to its best effect. Christine has never had such reservations about donning an evening gown. If I had her particular genetic endowments, I wouldn’t either.
A boozy effervescence suffuses the suite. It is, I imagine, equal parts champagne and endorphins. We came to Australia to visit an old friend of mine. Someone who used to come round and visit, back before my parents died. Someone who, I always suspected, was well aware that the accident that killed my parents two years ago was only an accident by the broadest definition of the word. But I don’t know what one calls an automobile accident when there was nothing accidental about it. “An automobile intentional” sounds right stupid.
In any case, my father’s old business acquaintance, Roderick, is someone with whom I’d been meaning to have a bit of a Q&A about my parents’ death for a while. But life got in the way. And Danny got in the way. Danny’s more thorough. More cautious. The voice of reason. I do a fair job of feigning control, but Danny actually possesses the ability to maintain his self-control. And so Danny convinced me that we needed to wait to confront Roderick until all the facts were in.
But once the facts did come in and it was confirmed that dear old Roderick had knowledge of the circumstances that led to my parents’ passing before the ‘accident’ happened, and chose to keep that information to himself… Well. Cautious though Danny may be, once he has his arms around the particulars of a situation, his call to action is loud and swift.
I had almost moved past my need for retribution. Almost. One never really lets go of something like that, I suppose. Anger that is born of pain and betrayal can take root and fester for a lifetime. When one least expects it, the demon can rear its head. I was just-turned-twenty-one when Zander and Yolandi van den Berg were set upon by thieves and run off the N2 Highway just outside Durban, causing their vehicle to crash through a police barricade and careen down the side of a ravine.
The number of things about that story that are fundamentally shit are too numerous to consider, but the resulting effect is that having just turned twenty-one, I was in both the position and of the need to take over my father’s business. Gone were the days of flitting about the globe making mischief for mischief’s sake. The mischief we got into following my parents’ death had to be about maintaining control and power of a highly-tiered, complicatedly-structured organization that is at once obscenely visible and yet necessarily cloaked in shadow.
In other words, it’s a fokken balancing act, man.
So, after my initial need to hold Roderick to account for his betrayal had passed, my attention turned to other affairs. But Danny didn’t forget. Behind the scenes, he went about confirming Roderick’s role in the deaths of the van den Bergs and—after two years—presented me with the opportunity to ‘make it right.’ As he said.
Because Danny Fortnight believes, above all else, in loyalty. He believes in doing what is right by the people he cares for. One must note that in our world, ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are morally relative terms, but moral relativism aside, Danny lives by a set of ethics by which I have not felt burdened, historically. I’ve always admired that about him. It’s what I suppose has kept him alive. Whereas what has kept me alive is pure luck. And a lot of fokken money. Money is a wondrous thing.
In any event, to celebrate the conclusion of a burdensome chapter in our lives, what with the dismissal of one Mr. Roderick whose services as a human were no longer needed, I thought we should do something special to celebrate.
“Who wants to go to the opera?” I asked.
Neither of them showed much enthusiasm.
But. A production of Salomé happened to be having a premiere at the Sydney Opera House, and taking them to see the story of King Herod’s feral desire toward his own stepdaughter—a virgin temptress with a taste for blood—just seemed too deliciously on the nose to pass up…
When Christine discovered that it meant getting to dress up in evening wear, her tune changed. She’s very likely the toughest person I’ve ever known, but she is also very much a creature of feminine urges like none other I’ve met. She’d deny it, probably. Somewhere along the twisted path that led us all to each other, something or someone taught her that feminine equates to fragile. I suppose it was just survival. This world is a cruel place. Frequently more so for women. And Christine is a survivor.
But for about the last year, since she turned eighteen, I’ve been working diligently to show her that she can be both tough and delicate. An iron fist inside a velvet glove. It suits her, and she’s taken to it beautifully, but there are years of conditioning I’ll still have to work past to get her to fully embrace both sides.
I would have liked to start earlier, but while I have a loosely calibrated moral compass, I fear that attempting to pluck some petals off Christine’s rose before she turned eighteen would have driven Danny past the point of his tolerance. So for the last year, I’ve been working diligently to strip Christine of a handful of her thorns. Not all. But just enough that it leaves the proper amount of pain when we’re together.
Danny hasn’t had much to say about it. Which is not because, I don’t believe, he doesn’t have much to say. I rather more think Danny Fortnight is calculating what his role in our future might be. Deciding if there will be a place for him in our arrangements, long term. If he would simply ask, he would know that the answer will always be ‘yes.’ But he won’t ask. And I’m not inclined to volunteer.
But tonight. Tonight is a special night. Tonight is a celebration of who we are and what we’ve done. Tonight, I feel, for maybe the first time, like the claim my father made when I was a boy is true.
This world—all of it—is mine.
NOW
“Did you fuckin’ hear me?” Danny’s voice, next to me in the car. Christine climbed into the back seat when we started driving again. She fell promptly asleep. I’m concerned about letting her sleep knowing now that she’s suffered memory loss as a result of her fall, but I suppose, all being equal, that should be the least of my worries.
“I did not. Sorry. What?” He no longer has a gun out and/or pointed at me. Which is what, I imagine, is making it possible for me to reminisce so casually.
“You need to tell me what’s going on.”
“Bru, I wish I could. I do not know. I got word that Christine was hurt, I did a swift inventory of who was available that I knew I could trust to watch over her, I came up with an incredibly short list, and I called you. That’s what I know.” And it has the added benefit of being true, so that’s kif.
“Who was the target?” he asks.
“I told you. Jim—”
“Yeah, Jimmy fuckin’ Sotoro. Fine.” He looks out the window. After a moment he says, “What kind of shit are you into these days?”
“What do you mean?”
“What I said. Diamond business still holding up?”
“I mean… Yeah. They’re diamonds.”
“You’re not into anything else?”
“Such as?” He’s obviously leading me somewhere, but I’m not altogether certain where.
“Nothing. Forget it.” And he’s looking out the window again. And yet again, after another moment, “How long have you two been back together?” He nods to a sleeping Christine in the back seat.
“Back together how?”
“Fuckin’… whatever. How long has it been since you’ve been doing… whatever together again?”
I can feel my brow furrow a small amount before I glance at him and say, “Bru, we’ve never been apart.”
I put my eyes back on the narrow road ahead of us. We drive in silence for thirty seconds. There’s a great lot for us to discuss. But until we can get a better grasp on what exactly it is that’s bearing down upon us, it don’t matter much.
My mobile rings. I look. It’s Lars.
“Hey, man,” I answer the call.
“Are you with Christine?” He sounds worried.
“Yeah, bru. I’m with her right now. Why?”
“Because I went by the apartment to check on her and she was gone.”
“Fok are you doing going anywhere, man? I told you to leave her there and I’d handle it.”
“I know, I just—”
“When I tell you to fokken do something, do it the way I tell you, man. Is that fokken hard for you to process?”
There is a pause on the other end of the line that might compel some in my situation to repeat themselves. For emphasis or the like.
I don’t.
Finally, after a healthy, long set of beats, Lars says, “I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right, man. Don’t worry about it. Just… don’t worry about it.”
I can feel Danny glancing at me. I don’t turn my head.
After another beat, Lars says, “So fine. Where are you now?”
“I’m taking Christine somewhere safe.”
“Yeah. Where?”
“Hey, did you hire this new laaitie? Solomon?” I don’t feel like it’s a prudent notion to tell anyone where we’re going. Even Lars.
“Did I? No. Who’s Solomon?”