by Glen Carter
Montello was eighteen years old when he soiled his hands with murder for the last time. He returned to find his payment: a gift. He gently removed the wrapping paper, but flung the card on the floor unread. It was a Picasso – a small one – signed but undated. Montello spent two hours alone in his room that day studying the confused human features, twisted in a fashion that reminded him comfortably of the chaos inside his own mind.
Montello never knew his birthday. He chose December 2. That was the day Pablo Escobar was killed, and it was not long after that Montello commanded others to murder. The victims were unimportant – a drunkard and a whore who hadn’t cared for the whereabouts of their son since he vanished to the streets when he was still a boy. Montello remembered neither of his parents’ faces. His father’s fists, his mother’s hands, he never forgot.
There was a soft knock at the door.
“Come.”
Hernan Suarez was late. When he walked into the room Montello’s security chief shrugged a set of powerful shoulders in apology and with one hand gently placed half a dozen newspapers on a coffee table.
Montello reached for a copy of The New York Times and nodded in the direction of his empty cup. He snapped open the paper and read. “Our friend does good work,” he said, while Suarez poured.
Suarez handed him fresh coffee and sat. Grim satisfaction on a face that reminded Montello of dried mud. “It was the Russian’s contact within the government who confirmed Amillo’s dinner plans. Their assets are second to none. Ears everywhere,” said Suarez.
Montello read for a moment. “Amillo’s death buys us some time but others will have to be taken care of in a similar fashion. Quickly. The message we send to Washington will be clear and unequivocal.”
Suarez nodded. “Misunderstandings won’t be an issue if the Russian can deliver what he’s offering.”
“The Russian,” Montello replied, lowering his newspaper, “will need to be paid for what he’s offering. Amillo was a taste, his way of proving he can deliver.”
Suarez appeared to be pondering this.
“So, Suarez. Where’s my money. Where are the bonds?”
Suarez wiped sweaty palms against the front of his khaki shirt. “A hundred men are looking, but the girl has simply vanished. It’s likely she had a team waiting for her.”
Montello pounded his fists. “What kind of fool do you think I am?”
Suarez flinched.
“She had no team!” Montello shouted, glaring. “I, on the other hand, had a small fucking army which she has so easily evaded.” Montello’s face darkened. “Bonito and Alvarez will try for my head when they find out some peasant girl has fucked them, eh, Suarez? Fucked me.” The jackals would sniff his weakness and join forces to move against him.
Suarez gritted his teeth, bones that formed the joints in his jaw popped in and out with the cadence of battle drums, but he remained silent.
“She makes me a fool,” Montello sneered, standing. He stiffly paced. He had invited her into his world, and she had betrayed him. In his mind, her beauty had blackened into wickedness and rot. She’d soiled both his reputation and honour, and Montello wanted the pleasure of killing her, himself. But first, she’d have to be found and the bonds retrieved.
Montello exhaled. Mendoza was a distraction from his brazen plans. The work was already begun with Amillo. Much more blood would be spilled, as much as it took to protect what was his. Raspov held the key and soon it would be his. Montello’s lip curled into what might have been a smile.
Suarez picked up his coffee and began his report. There was no sign of Mendoza at her apartment. No bonds. No surprise.
Montello remained silent, now and then simply nodding so that Suarez would keep talking.
They had taken the owner of DeMarco’s for a ride.
“Luigi…a good man,” Montello said.
“Clueless about her…now dead.”
“Go on,” Montello demanded, thinking Mendoza had been stupid to leave her acquaintances so vulnerable. Her mistake was his gain.
Hernan continued, “No parents. No family that we know of, but we’re still looking.”
Montello thought for a moment. There was that orphanage she sometimes talked about. Somewhere near Santa Marta. Trinity, it was called. Montello regretted he hadn’t asked her more about her past. Family and friends would have been easy conduits to her – her fleshy weak spots. Though he’d never had to think about such things before. The others were easily dealt with when he tired of them. They were simply made to disappear. This one had gotten lucky, like a wild sow bolting into the underbrush when she caught the scent of a predator.
Suarez stood to leave. “She has a friend,” he said. “We paid her apartment a visit and found something that might be useful.”
“Find her, Suarez,” Montello said. “If you do not…” He allowed the words to trail off, his warning unmistakable.
Suarez nodded and quickly left.
Montello needed to calm himself. Fists clenched, he paced. The truce had been necessary to end years of war – on all sides hundreds of their men had died – a needless waste of resources. But now fresh bloodshed was leading to a growing protest and the government was under increasing pressure to do something about it. Ruiz had been careless – once too often. Besides, he was their soft spot. The fat man had been secretly negotiating surrender with the Americans. In return, there was to be a lesser prison sentence and an agreement that would have allowed him to keep a large measure of his cocaine fortune. Alvarez and Bonito hadn’t believed it at first, until Montello provided the surveillance photographs. He’d laid them on the table in dramatic fashion. The first shot was of the assistant deputy director of the Drug Enforcement Agency walking into the US embassy in Caracas. The second photograph – Ruiz, being escorted through the same gate by marine guards. One could only imagine the damage he would have caused.
Consensus came quickly. A truce. Agreement that Ruiz would be eliminated.
The truce had been shaky at best. Montello had no intention of being one of three. Alvarez and Bonito would also die, but only after the Russian made good on his delivery – and was paid for it. The muscles in Montello’s face twitched as he thought about her. His money. Her betrayal.
There was another knock at the door. Suarez, the fool, was testing his patience. Montello moved forward and was about to open the door when the teenaged maid stepped into the room, oblivious to her crime.
Montello looked at her in absolute disbelief. Speechless.
“Pardon, senor.” The maid lowered her eyes. “Your tray, por favor.”
Montello inspected her, his rage building. She had violated him. Like the other one had. It sickened him to think about it. They were whores. No different than the whores he beat and robbed when he was old enough to wield his fists.
Montello nodded in the direction of the silver tray with its croissants and fruit untouched. His appetite had vanished, replaced by a knot of rage that felt more natural to him than hunger.
When the maid moved towards the desk Montello was on her, a flurry of punches before her face could register shock, before she was able to protect herself, or even cry out. When she fell to the floor he dropped too, swinging his fists in wide arcs that connected with flesh and bone. Gobs of blood, mixed with snot and saliva flung onto the front of her uniform. It wasn’t her face, but another woman’s he saw. She would be punished too. Montello grunted softly, the earnest look of a man swinging heavy tools, a hard day’s work hefting a sledgehammer, or a pick axe.
After two minutes he was spent and she was still. Montello got up, walked slowly to his desk and dropped heavily into the chair. She was still breathing, and he was glad he hadn’t killed her, not in this room. She was suddenly conscious, weeping, and for a second he wanted to finish what he’d started. Instead he languidly poked at his uneaten breakfast. The sticky coffee ring. That had been her first unforgivable mistake. Entering his study without invitation was her second.
Montell
o lifted the phone and punched in a number. Suarez answered on the first ring. “I want you to fire the new maid,” he said, and hung up.
TWENTY-EIGHT
BARK ISLAND
“Into God’s arms we commit her,” Father Faustus Doherty exclaimed with the holy imperative of a Vatican prince. “In our hearts Kaitlin lives on,” he cried. “A rainbow forever brilliant.”
Doherty’s face glistened as he locked eyes with the half-blind Jimmy O’Connor and with Irvine Jones who was plagued since childhood with a dark disposition and never missed a chance for the company of grief. “Amen, Father. Amen,” they replied in unison.
There came a simple nod from the bug-eyed mute Aggie Dunn, who was impossibly good at ciphering the words that fell from other people’s lips and who synchronized her blinking with Father Doherty’s breathing and his syntax, so she wouldn’t miss even one syllable of the priest’s moving oratory.
Father Doherty continued, “Our Kaitlin was sunlight.”
A murmuring of agreement swept through the crowd, a consensus punctuated by the nod of heads and the flash of white linen to red soggy eyes.
Father Doherty paused to savour his own words, sweet and thick as sap from the Cedars of Lebanon. “Sunlight forever warm,” he said smoothly.
Jack stared vacantly at the polished granite that bore Kaitlin’s name and the dates of her birth and death. A plaque.
Shanks offered Jack an umbrella which he waved away. Mulligan lingered uncomfortably nearby, watching them both.
A snapping Atlantic wind whipped freezing drizzle across a landscape of marble and alabaster crosses, making Jack and the others shiver. His family was sunk into this earth. His mother and father and now the memory of his friend, Kaitlin.
All around him looks shot at Jack, stinging like lead pellets. Even the old priest. “A person’s life can touch us in many ways,” Father Doherty continued, his ruddy face and quivering jowls punctuating his every word. Tiny glasslike beads of water shimmered on the fine strands of grey hair that disappeared against his colourless scalp. He held an umbrella in one hand, a bible in the other, as he towered over the stone that held the name of Kaitlin O’Rourke.
Jack wiped a hand across his face, sweeping the rain onto the lapel of his drenched jacket, and bent his head towards sodden feet. The priest’s solemn words were well meant, but flat, a faint echo. Jack stole a glance at Argus O’Rourke, who had yet to make eye contact. Watery eyes sunken into a face that had taken on the pallor of sour dough bread. Argus. Who had sobbed angrily into the telephone. “Bring her back. You bastard, bring my daughter home.”
Jack told him then there was no body to bring home. That’s when her father had made that pitiful noise. Like the bleat of a lamb about to be sacrificed.
The service was finally over.
Father Doherty stood before Jack, smelling of sweet wine. He squeezed Jack’s hand too hard and shook it roughly. Jack looked into his eyes and saw the pity. “We all loved Kaitlin,” Doherty said quietly, then leaning in, “Don’t blame yourself, Jack.” It should have felt like ointment instead of a scab being torn from his skin. “He’s going to need some time,” the priest added, turning toward Argus O’Rourke who was being led from the cemetery by a group of men, their wives in lockstep at the rear. “With God’s help, he’ll come around.”
Jack nodded. “Thanks, Father.”
Father Doherty walked away.
Jack watched as the mourners dispersed toward warm dry homes nestled in unbroken forest and on wide rocky ledges below. After a moment, he trudged to a narrow stone pathway, leaving behind the polished marble that bore Kaitlin O’Rourke’s name. So little evidence of an existence, Jack thought, as he left the cemetery.
TWENTY-NINE
Jack didn’t know how long he’d been standing there, dripping water from his ruined suit onto the concrete, where it pooled around his fine Italian shoes. He rested his forehead against the front door and could faintly smell the coat of blue paint he’d applied on a sunny warm morning only four weeks before.
Turn the knob and open the door. Just one more minute, he told himself. That minute became two and when it edged closer to three, he shouldered his way into the small front foyer of his childhood home.
He stood there listening to himself breathe while water accumulated on gleaming hardwood. The slow laboured respiration of a man in a coma. Jack deflected the stillness that shouted for recognition and stomped into the house, shedding his soaked jacket and shoes. There was a box at the front door: the contents of Kaitlin’s desk at the network which Jack had volunteered to return to her father. Beneath the notepads and books and assorted knick-knacks Jack had found a photo. They were wrapping up an assignment in Rome. He remembered how she didn’t trust him with the settings as she thrust the Nikon at him and found her place among a herd of tourists at the Spanish Steps. “Don’t adjust anything. Everything’s set.”
He took the shot.
“Let me get one of you, Jack,” she had said.
“Gotta go. Cab’s waiting.”
Jack needed a drink. He pulled himself down the hall and lumbered into the kitchen. He grabbed a beer from the refrigerator and cracked it open. The cap skittered across hardwood into a corner. Jack took a swallow, then a second, and then moved to the window above the sink. A wall of fog was closing in from the bay. It was as thick as the day they brought his father back. Only his father. Jack gulped his beer and remembered that day. The others were lost and Jack’s mother had cried just as hard as the three widows. Jack didn’t understand why until the start of school when Whopsie Jones beat the crap out of him and called his old man a “stupid drunk” and a murderer for cracking his boat up like he did.
That was the day Jack knew he’d be leaving Bark Island for good when he was old enough to find his way through the soup. There weren’t many Doyles left to leave, although they’d clung like barnacles to slate, and built stout little ships from the dark wood rooted in three hundred acres of the family’s land. They were boats fashioned from sweat and curses, and the pride of Jack’s father and grandfather until the inshore fishery began to disappoint and many came ashore to find other ways to make a living. Jack’s grandfather retired his tools and his spirit, but his father had one more boat to build – his own. Jack still remembered the crowd that gathered the day she was launched. He was mesmerized when the little ship rolled down her slip, snapping logs and splashing into the still waters of Ragged Hole Bay. “You’re in charge, Jack, while I’m gone.” Jack didn’t like it one bit, his father leaving, but he knew his old man had to go – things had gotten hard. He’d never eaten so much homemade jam and hard tack. Besides, other fathers went up to Nova Scotia to fish. Shanks and Mulligan didn’t seem to care. Their fathers were gone for weeks at a time. Jack remembered the both of them the day of the launch, crouched behind a dogberry tree trying to light a cigarette, Mulligan slapping Shanks on the back so hard he coughed up his breakfast.
Caleb Doyle’s last schooner was a fine sight. Her carvel hull glistened rich amber, her wheelhouse was stained mahogany red. “She’ll be yours someday, Jack,” his father had said proudly.
Jack stood at his kitchen window and remembered how he’d lit up that day, lit up so wide he thought his face would split. He rubbed at the scar on his hand, an ache that drifted in and out like the tide of his memories.
“Reminiscing, Jack?”
When he heard the voice, Jack spun around. Argus O’Rourke. Slouched in the doorway, dripping wet in the threadbare suit he’d worn to his daughter’s funeral. He swigged from a half-empty bottle and clenched his teeth like a man bracing for battlefield surgery. “Thinking about your old man?”
Jack gritted his teeth, tried to decipher the intent in his ruddy face, though instinctively he knew what Argus had come for and he wasn’t surprised at the sight of him in his kitchen. Still, Jack was dreading this visit, not because Argus was a violent man, which he was not unless pushed to the brink. Years at sea had given him a sailor’s wit
s, and fists, both of which had saved his ass on more than one occasion in deadly waterfront hangouts from Hong Kong to Athens, places where merchant seamen became legends and corpses.
Argus was a squat man, made mostly of shoulders and neck. A broad face swung up, then down. “You don’t look too bad for the wear and tear.”
Jack ignored the remark, but the man’s disdain jabbed at him. “How’d you get in?” he said.
“The door. The door was left wide open.” Argus took another swallow, reminding Jack of his impressive capacity for liquor when he opted to drink, which was not frequently. When he did, and when he was thirsty for it, the rum exposed an ancient deep brogue like wood grain glistening beneath a coat of Murphy’s oil. In a good mood, Jack couldn’t say whether Argus liked or hated him. Indifference the best he could hope for. He was not a man prone to pleasantries, and certainly not affection, except when it came to Kaitlin, who was his admission to humanity, the rose-coloured glasses through which even a diseased hairless mongrel appears healthy and huggable. Glassy eyes glared at Jack from beneath thick fiery brows. He hiccupped, puffing air beneath a wide and wellmanicured mustache, his strongest feature and some would have said his only vanity – except for his daughter.
It was from her Colombian mother that Kaitlin had gotten her delicate cheeks, ripe lips and earthy colouring. Certainly not from the fire hydrant of a man swaying in front of him, dripping on the lino from a twenty-year-old suit that looked like he’d had to kill it before forcing his thick limbs through all of its available openings.