by Azhar Amien
Chapter 19: A Tale Of Two And One
The first thing that I felt was a numbness, my mind registering my body’s failure far too late for me to fight against it. The name of my daughter, coming from that monster, was a cursed melody. A swan song from a tainted soul. My mind fought to interpret the words, and to understand what he had said. But I could only drift. All of my systems had shut down. The blackout had been fast and merciless. And now I faced the men I needed to kill with nothing more than a rusty trap. A dull blade. The demon saw my weakness, my inability to make myself move, and it rose again with a terrifying violence that coursed through me like liquid fire. My body jolted to life, smitten by thunder, and my anger erupted with the wrath to strike down a God.
“What did you just say?”
The man’s grin remained, “Easy there, Godzilla. I think you heard me just fine.”
“Don’t fuck with me!” I screamed, and thrashed against the cuffs.
His partner finally stepped forward and lowered himself so that he was eye level with me.
“Jack. We want to have a calm discussion.”
I glared. The anger fought in agony to be unleashed. Yet I could not make any sense of what was going on. The man who had spoken was different to his partner. Why was he so silent? I could not read him. I could not figure out what he was thinking or anything about him at all.
“You heard the man. It’s time you learned the truth, Jack.”
The man’s childish smile vanished as he ran a hand through his hair.
“But where the hell to even begin...”
“Who are you?” I shouted.
“I guess our names are as good a place to start as any.”
I waited.
“I’m Desmond, and that’s Hale. No, those are not our real names. Our real ones would be ancient history.”
“What does that mean?”
Desmond’s smile instantly returned. It brought out my anger.
“Did you murder my daughter? Why did you mention her name? Give me an answer!” I roared.
“Enough,” Hale said, “You need to listen.”
Desmond sighed, “I agree with my partner here. Because what we’re going to tell you, is going to make you want to kill the both of us. Which is why you’re restrained by the way. So you can just listen until we’re done talking. Is that understood?”
“Who are you?” I growled.
Desmond and Hale exchanged looks.
“Jack, we’re not the murderers you’re looking for,” Desmond said.
Not that bullshit again. An endless circle of lies.
“But we were there,” Hale finished.
I stopped.
“What are you talking about?”
Desmond took over, “I know you think we are, but we’re not actually part of the mob. Well not exactly.”
Hale slipped his hands into his pockets. He stood tall and erect with a practiced discipline. As though he was army. Yet, he did not seem the type from what I could see. He stared at me without moving or giving away anything, as though he was silently studying me.
“Just give me a fucking answer!”
“Jack.”
I turned to Hale.
“We are with the police.”
“Well that’s one way to break the ice,” Desmond chimed in.
“You took too long,” Hale responded.
“I was figuring out the right way to tell him. Look at him! He doesn’t know what to think now. You knocked his brains out.”
“I got to the point. He is forced to deal with it.”
“Did I ever tell you that you’re just not a people’s person?”
“Yes.”
“Jesus, see what I have to work with here, Jack?”
“What do you mean you’re cops? What is this?”
“Five years,” Hale said, as if doing nothing more than stating a fact.
“What?”
“That is how long we have been undercover.”
My mind shut down.
“Five years ago, Jack, when this shithole was as bad as it’s ever been and you were doing nothing more than giving out fucking speeding tickets, we were chosen to go undercover. To get right into the heart of the mob. Technically we sort of volunteered due to a lack of choice.”
“You’re both full of shit!” I spat.
“Not the reaction I was expecting, I have to say. Here’s the deal. Either you can listen to me or keep this whole Angry Bob thing up, but it comes down to this. If you want to know what happened to your little girl, you better open your eyes and ears.”
I went silent. I knew that for the immediate future, they at least did not seem to want to harm me. If they wanted to talk I did not appear to have any choice but to let them.
“Look, think about it, Jack. The mob had taken over. Men like Cornero owned this horrible city. The police were too damn scared to do anything, the useless pricks. The only card the cops could play in our division was to get someone in on the inside. Not a damn rat. Not some douche bag on a wire who’d get killed on his first night out. Not some wannabe double-oh-seven who wouldn’t have a clue how to get close to these guys. No. They needed to get someone in so deep that they actually became a core part of the mob.”
Hale added, “It took years to build the necessary trust.”
“We’ve been undercover so damn long that we even lost touch with our handlers. After a while we cut them off. We had to assume they were compromised or dead. We were on our own then.”
“I don’t understand! What does this have to do with anything?”
“You are not seeing the complete picture,” Hale said.
He reached into his pocket and I recoiled, but when his hand withdrew he was only holding a miniature notebook and a pen. He began to write, ignoring me.
“What are you doing?”
Hale looked up.
“Recording.”
“Why?”
“Remembrance.”
“For what?”
“How much of your life do you remember?” Hale responded. It was not really a question.
“You said you’d tell me the truth!”
“He will answer your questions,” Hale said as he turned his attention back to his notes.
“Don’t mind him, Jack. He’s a strange guy. He does shit like this all the time.”
“Well?” I pressed.
Desmond suddenly grinned, “I know something that will get through to you.”
I narrowed my eyes.
“Remember that surveillance room, Jack? In that broken down old warehouse?”
I stared. It couldn’t be true.
“Well, hello to you too! To get ourselves trusted, to really become buddies with the old boys, we had to use our skills to give them something they wanted. And to a man like Cornero, knowledge was a massive part of his power. That’s where we came in.”
“It was not that simple,” Hale muttered.
“Yeah, it definitely wasn’t. We had to do a lot of terrible things to get their trust. And I’m not talking about some retarded high school initiation bullshit. I’m talking about the harsh sorts of things you want to keep hidden for the rest of your life. We probably broke about a hundred laws in that first year. We ruined lives. Ended them. That shit does things to you, Jack. It makes the line between right and wrong become damn near impossible to see.”
“You controlled that surveillance room? You’re the reason my family was killed!” I yelled.
“Incorrect,” Hale countered.
“Listen, that room was our baby. You would have caught us had that mole in your team not sung to us like a bird. We had to get out. If we lost what he had, we’d have given up everything we built over five goddamn years! Do you think a man like Cornero would have tolerated such a failure? We’d have been dead and all of this, everything we did, would have meant nothing!”
I spat at Desmond’s feet.
“Fuck you!”
“Man, t
hat’s just childish.”
“I did not expect that,” Hale said.
Desmond wiped his smile off.
“Jack, for the love of the big guy upstairs, can you just listen? Think about it. Who else could have given your friend Sarah information on Gregory Donovan, Paul Castellano and Luis Kane? It had to be someone on the inside. Someone trusted. Someone in a position to get that information in a way that wasn’t exactly legal. We had everything, Jack. We only needed an opening to wade in.”
“You’re the anonymous source?”
“What a dull name for us!” Desmond laughed.
“It does sound undesirable,” Hale added.
I didn’t know what the hell to make of it. It did not make sense.
“Oh man we’re losing him again,” Desmond said.
Hale snapped his notebook shut.
“Start at the beginning.”
“That would make all kinds of sense. Jesus, there’s so much to say.”
“You do not read a book back to front.”
“Yeah, well, who reads these days anyway?”
Desmond pulled up a rusty table close to my chair and sat down on the edge of it. He faced me.
“After we moved away from that warehouse we found out what Cornero was going to do. He had that damn maniac Nathan Kenway all jacked up and ready for it.”
My hands tightened on the arms of the chair.
“So we kind of got in the way of that.”
“How?”
“You were a good cop. Reminded us of what we once stood for,” Hale said.
My grip loosened. My strength left me.
“We got to Kenway first. We told him that Cornero had ordered the two of us to make sure the job got done right.”
“We underestimated the unpredictable nature of a chaotic system,” Hale intervened.
“Whatever he just said. Look we were trying to stall, alright? We were trying to save your family.”
“You’re lying!”
“Jesus Christ how the hell do I say this?”
“Speak. Force him to accept the truth.”
“Right because it’s only our funeral.”
For the first time Desmond turned serious.
“Jack, I’m really sorry. We tried but we couldn’t save your wife. That psychopath Kenway spoke of the importance of the time for a soul to pass out of this world, and all kinds of crazy shit. He went ahead. But the two of us, we’d been listening in and we knew that your daughter...your wife had dropped her off at her friend’s house for a play date and babysitting. She had not yet been picked up. Your wife was running late. And we knew that Kenway would see that she wasn’t there the minute he went inside your home. We honestly had no choice.”
Pure, relentless horror swept under my skin. My hands were shaking, rattling against the hard metal of the cuffs. And I knew that I could no longer handle it. The demon was nowhere in the depths of my mind, and I was truly alone to face what was to come.
“We had to tell Kenway that we’d get the girl. We had to leave that son of a bitch there even though we knew what he was going to do.”
I felt a tear drop down my face. Desmond breathed out heavily and swept his hands over his hair.
“Go on. It is what it is,” Hale ordered.
“Yeah. Look, Jack, the only thing we could do was get your daughter. We were panicked. We didn’t know what was going to happen! We picked up your girl - Jesus that little one can put up a fight and a fucking half let me tell you - and then we sat there with no idea of what to do next. Your girl had to die. If we didn’t show a body it was over for us!”
“You killed my little girl...”
Hale looked at me. It was impossible to read what his face was trying to tell me.
“No.”
I struggled to draw breath. The air went thick. Noise sounded out in my head. It was all lies. Desmond put a hand on my shoulder, “Easy, Jack. Just take a breather, nice and slow...”
“That would be advisable.”
My skin was cold. I faded.
“Hale was right when he said that it was all unpredictable. How were we to know that your wife’s psychopathic killer would have a change of heart, and say he’s not going to off your girl anymore because of some poetic garbage?”
“We could not have anticipated that. But it worked in our favour.”
“What we did was fucked up. It was Hale’s idea. He’s always been the messed up bastard. But let me tell you that it was all so grim that I couldn’t even find a way to make it funny!”
“What did you do?” I whispered.
“We went to the morgue,” Hale answered.
What the hell was going on?
“That’s the short version. I tell you we looked high and low to find the right body. Lucky for us, thanks to this city, we found a little dead girl more or less your daughter’s age. After that, well, I’m sure you saw what was left of that girl’s body after we were done giving it a makeover.”
“But the police identified the body,” my mouth instinctively formed the words.
“We made sure of that. How else could it be a closed deal?”
“No alternative. Too many variables. Had to close the case.”
“Exactly. So we laid low. We waited for the heat to die down and the shock to fade. We didn’t know what to do. We’d gone rogue, and not a soul could know anything about what had happened at your house that night. We tried to reach you, but after that we were being worked overtime. We couldn’t act. We couldn’t get to you. The police and the mob were damn near close to war.”
“You were in the public eye. It was an impossibility.”
“I’m telling you, Jack, we tried. We did everything we could. We couldn’t figure out how the hell we were supposed to bring your little girl back from the dead. We were just waiting-”
“Jess called me three weeks after...”
Desmond and Hale caught each other’s eyes.
“Your little girl is a smart one. She got behind our backs to a payphone. Seriously that day I realised what it must feel like to be a dad. They’re like goddamn rodents, these kids. Clever ones too. I thought I’d have a heart attack that day. We only just stopped her in time.”
“That was an unfortunate error.”
Desmond continued before I could even understand.
“But the point is, Jack, we were trying to get to you. And when we finally got a chance to reach out, just before we could you went and put a bullet in the head of that sick bastard Hal Edwards - and then saved another for that two-faced inbred Will Harding!”
I couldn’t deal with it. I just couldn’t. I was going to have an attack. My mind was black.
“But I have to say, I laughed my ass off when you killed Harding.”
“It was unexpected. But necessary.”
“We like a guy who can tie up loose ends, don’t we?”
“Indeed.”
“Anyway, before we even knew what the hell was going on, you ran along and killed Victor fucking Salvatore! I’m telling you the entire mob went crazy. It was a damn circus! Tell him Hale. We were never going to be able to meet with you then. We had to stay put.”
“It was chaos. We had never seen anything like it.”
“And you didn’t stop there, Jack. No you were far from done. You started cleaning up house. Gregory Donovan, man that shit you pulled with his kid was fucking A! But that’s when we started to realise, after you got Donovan...”
“You were cutting the heads off the Hydra.”
Desmond nodded, “Unintentionally you were actually saving this dump of a city.”
“We let you go on. Watched you. Helped you.”
It was nothing but madness. It was sick. A grand delusion. A stage play. It was too much. The anger inside of me finally burst free from its slumber, and the demon regained control.
“You two are insane!”
Desmond reached forward and I recoiled, but he did nothing other than tap my forehead hard. T
hen, as if realising something, he pulled his hand back swiftly.
“Come on, Jack. Just put your anger to bed and think about it. Who do you think has been there the entire time? When you were cornered at Paul Castellano’s mansion, who do you think got you out of that? Who do you think distracted the men who were onto you? It certainly wasn’t the police. And what about after? Who the hell do you think called you to warn you of those assassins?”
“We needed you alive. We had invested too much in you.”
“We were scared out of our minds when those killers came for you. We knew them. They were some of the best damn murderers we’d ever seen. We thought you were done. But you, you crazy motherfucker, you blew them up! You literally blew them up! What was that, a pipe bomb? And you still went back in there with your damn gun and finished it with a personal touch. Jesus, you are one messed up guy! I’d shake your hand now if you didn’t want to bite it off.”
All of it couldn’t be true. It was bullshit. They were liars.
“Tell him about the toy.”
“Oh yeah! That’s a good one. I think we deserve a medal for that! It was my idea actually, so I’m quite proud of it.”
“Do not oversell it. It was little more than luck.”
“You’re just sour grapes.”
“It also got him caught.”
“Semantics. It all worked out didn’t it?”
“It did. Get on with it then.”
“You distracted me,” Desmond’s grin returned in full, “Anyway, remember you found that little white teddy bear at old Kane’s house?”
No. It was manipulation. They were screwing with my head.
“Kane’s daughter was pregnant, right? Her baby was coming any day. So I thought you could use a little motivation, you know, something to hold onto other than that one shitty phone call. I gave your girl’s favourite teddy as a little baby present. I didn’t expect it to work. I had no clue you’d even see it. I just knew you were going to Kane’s house so there might have been a small chance that you would. If you didn’t, I’m sure we could have lynched it and tried again some other time. I was worried that if we just dropped it off at your motel room, you’d think someone was toying with you. It would have distracted you away from Kane and Cornero.”
“Fortunately you saw it. Though we did not anticipate your capture.”
“I suppose that was a really bad one. Sorry about that, Jack. But we fixed that. We just gave your old friend Sarah a call and she came running. For me that tugged at the heartstrings. We made sure she got there in time and you didn’t die. No harm done.”
“Keeping you alive was imperative. You were close.”
I forced myself to block out the senseless words. I stared at the two men in front of me. Hale was unlike any other man I had ever encountered. He seemed to elicit perfect control over his emotions, or maybe his were just no longer there. He appeared to glean no enjoyment from any of it. However, Desmond was an entirely different man. He appeared to have remnants of compassion when he spoke of my wife, yet it was a faint glimmer that I suspected was forced. He undeniably enjoyed what I had done. He laughed at all the death and the bloodshed. I saw him. And I knew what he was. He was the embodiment of chaos; a man without fear or regard for human life. An anarchist. He was unlike anyone I had ever faced before. Hale as well. I only had one certainty at my fingertips. Both of them were impossible to understand. From where I was, they were far more complex than even Cornero or Kenway. I did not know anything. None of it made sense. Why had they done all of it? What was there to gain? They were no cops.
“It was great that we won that one, and Cornero didn’t even know. It was like Christmas. He thought you were comfortably sleeping with the fish, which boded well for subtlety. But then we had a bit of a problem on our hands. You were with the police, which was not ideal.”
“Cornero still drew breath. Your work was not done.”
Desmond burst out laughing, “We were going to bust you out of captivity, do you know that? We had this whole elaborate plan in our heads of how we were going to do it, and you, you sadistic, heartless, cold, asshole! You attacked your would-be girlfriend? That’s messed up. You hit a damn girl! We had to settle for that loud, improvised distraction instead. You remember the guys with the machine guns and the big ugly bullet-proof SUV? Come on, we had to make sure you got out. But you know something, Jack? We really thought she’d let you go.”
“You thought,” Hale corrected.
“Whatever. I thought it would be all romantic, you know, like in the movies? I bet on it too, and I lost fifty dollars to this prick over here.”
“Serves you right. Know-it-all.”
“I think I earned that right. I’ve been spot on about a lot of things.”
“You make too many assumptions.”
“No I take educated guesses, my friend.”
“If that gets you to sleep.”
“It does most nights actually.”
“Smart ass.”
“The key word is smart.”
Hale turned to me.
“Are you beginning to see it?”
“Wait a second. I also just have to say that we did not expect you to go after Cornero’s little kid though. That was fucking well played!” Desmond said while struggling to contain his laughter.
“It was the ideal strategy.”
They were both out of their minds.
“You see, Jack? We were always there. You didn’t do this alone. But I have to say. You, my friend, have the luck of the devil.”
I finally forced myself to awaken and speak. It had felt as though I never would again.
“Why did you do all of this? None of it makes any sense at all.”
Desmond and Hale glanced at each other once again.
“Jack, it’s been five years since we started this. Do you have any idea how long that is? You know, I was a bit like you all those years ago. Hopeful and naive; thinking I was all it and we could take these guys down the right way. But like you I learned the hard lesson. We lost a hell of a lot more than our ordinary lives. And in the end we were abandoned out there. We’re not cops anymore, Jack. I don’t even have the first idea how to be one these days. What we’ve done...well there’s a special place six feet under that’s laying out a welcome mat for us.”
“We lived the lies enough that they became truth.”
I grit my teeth.
“The two of you, you’re nothing but killers. Psychopaths.”
“Incorrect. You fail to understand. Again.”
Desmond folded his arms and his smile diminished.
“Really, Jack? I think I can safely say that the three of us in this room - we’re all monsters. Brother, have you forgot about the kid you put under the ground? Do you see us jumping you for that one? Fuck the kid! None of us here think we’re monsters, do we?”
“Sometimes evil only stops when you force it to.”
I raised my eyes to meet Hale’s. He had used my exact words.
Desmond smiled and nodded, “Let me tell you now, Jack. There’s a sad story behind all of us here. Boohoo cry us a river. Cry one for all of us. But after five long years of this hell, we wanted to watch them all fucking die. Why? Because we understand. To hell with the law, the police, the politicians and the good intentions. You know this city as well as we do. And some men can’t be reasoned with. They can’t change. They can’t stop the killing, the stealing and the whoring. It’s what they are. The only way they can stop is when they’re dead. You know this, Jack. Just like we do.”
“You are like us. We helped you as we did ourselves.”
I looked down at the ground, unable to do anything but listen.
“So who’s the bigger monster in this room? Do you want to trade horror stories until we’re even? All three of us here, we did what was necessary. You want to cry about the fact that we used you? Go right ahead. But you know the truth. You did it all yourself. We just helped you along. We didn’t make you do a g
oddamn thing.”
“It is time you faced the truth. We have all sacrificed too much.”
Desmond smiled and spread his hands, “And that’s the beautiful thing. We can all go off and have a beer because we’re the damn saviours! We just earned our retirement. Hooray for us.”
“Yes. It is over at last.”
The talking stopped. The seconds of silence allowed my mind to faintly glimmer back to life. So many thoughts and questions drifted inside my head. I had never felt so lost. I had never felt so confused. How were Desmond and Hale dealing with it? Were they telling the truth? It was impossible to believe. Yet everything they had said made it seem as though there were no alternative explanations. They knew everything. They knew all that I had done. They knew every detail. From the beginning they had been there. The pieces fit. The puzzle aligned. But I could hardly even bring myself to accept any of it.
And then, in that moment of strife, the true realisation of what they had done dawned upon me.
They had used me to destroy the mob. They had manipulated and played me. They had kept the truth about my family from me all those weeks. I had thought that Anthony Cornero was the most dangerous man in the city. How wrong I truly had been.
The two men in front of me were without equals.
And one of them still found the time to laugh about it all. The other displayed perfect control over himself, as though he’d perfected the art. Impossibly, my mind sought to rationalise it all. It was the only way that I could hope to make sense of it, or bring myself any closer to acceptance. I considered one thing. Were they any greater an evil than I was? I could no longer say that everything I had done had only been for Jess. It had been for me as well. And all that they had done had been for the city. On some level maybe there had been a selfish motive too. All three of us were selfish men in a way. All three of us had done terrifying things for the right reasons. All three of us were monsters. I shook my head. Had the reasons even been good ones? Had they even been justified? I did not know. I did not know anything.
I looked at the two men before me. I may have understood their truth, but my mind could not comprehend Desmond and Hale; it could not even begin to fit the pieces about them as people. Men like them couldn’t possibly exist. And yet, at the same time, was it any surprise that they were the product of a city so tainted that it was unfit for even Hell itself? Was it truly a surprise that to destroy the evils that dwelled within the city, there had to be a greater evil at work? In that moment I knew that I could answer my own question. I had a feeling in the depths of my mind. Deep down I understood. I felt myself slowly becoming aware of a single fact. I knew the truth that I was finally ready to face. I looked at Desmond and Hale once again, and I saw what was really there. I saw what the demon had prevented me from seeing. Now, while it was at last banished, I could see the truth.
They were too big to judge.
I could not even fathom a way to explain, praise or condemn what they had done. I could only force my rational, emotionless mind to accept it. If I even began to think about the implications, the sheer magnitude of the evil committed, it became impossible to understand or deal with it. And maybe that was how Desmond and Hale were able to do it. They detached all emotion and all humanity. And then they were able to do only what was truly necessary.
It was too big. They were too big.
“Jack,” I heard Hale’s cold, empty voice.
The anger was gone. The demon was gone. Nothing remained.
“Do you want to see your daughter?”
Agony, like nothing I had ever felt before, erupted inside of me. The pain of hope, in the absence of anything to destroy it.
“I can’t believe it, I completely forgot about her!” Desmond said, smacking his leg.
Could I trust them?
“I thought he’d be happier than this.”
“It is a lot to accept.”
“True. And here I thought you weren’t a people’s person, Hale. I think he still has trust issues too if you ask me. Look, let me give it to you straight.”
I looked at Desmond and Hale.
“There’s only one way you’re going to know for sure.”
Desmond reached behind his back.
He pulled out a silver and black Beretta.
I recoiled.
He flipped the gun over and dropped it onto my lap.
I stared at it; a long forgotten relic.
“You can even have your gun back if it makes you feel any better.”
Desmond took out the key to my handcuffs and held it out.
“Come with us, Jack. We’ll take you to your little girl.”