Black Scorpion

by Jon Land

  Men Dracu came to call “Watchers” oversaw life in the groapă and transported him to the men all around Ankara who paid for their time with him. Often the men lived in the kind of beautiful homes Dracu dreamed of having someday, the kind of palatial residences his mother had described for him while he snuggled against her in the cold. These Watchers could be alternately kind and cruel on a whim, as prone to offering a comforting touch as unleashing a small whip-like weapon at the slightest provocation.

  One of them was coming at him with whip in hand the night Vlad had the chain binding his legs to a heavy wooden post already lashed around his wrist. So when the man drew close enough, Vlad looped it around his throat and pulled tight, strangling the life out of him. He kept pulling even as the man gurgled and thrashed and writhed.

  Vlad could never remember a time where he felt more alive, letting the hatred spill out of him at long last. He wasn’t powerless; he would never be a victim again. The feeling was almost euphoric, so much so that he longed to kill again almost immediately because nothing had made him feel more vital; he could feel the power it imbued and wanted more. Even as he realized what he’d been thinking of, picturing, as he nearly severed the Watcher’s head from his body: His father, the man he’d never met, the man who was no more than a blurry shape in a newspaper photo tacked to a wall that was lost the night they came for him.

  After his escape, Vlad walked for what felt like days straight, afraid at every turn others would find and punish him for what he’d done. He found himself in the center of Ankara, begging for food and drinking water out of a hose used to clean the sidewalks.

  One night he tucked himself into an alley to sleep only to be awoken with a start by a hand jostling his shoulder.

  “Hey, you lost or something?”

  Vlad’s eyes sharpened to the sight of a ravishingly beautiful Slavic girl, sixteen or maybe seventeen, standing over him wearing ill-fitting clothes that looked like a boy’s.

  “Something,” Vlad told her.

  “You a gypsy?”

  “No.”

  “I am a gypsy. You have a place to go?”

  She spoke a different dialect of Romanian, but Vlad understood it well enough. Hearing it made him think of home, before he and his mother had embarked on their ill-fated journey through Albania to reach Sicily and somehow find his father.

  “No,” he told her.

  “Then why you come here?”

  “Because this is where I ended up.”

  “Me, too.”

  Their eyes met and Vlad saw a warmth lurking in hers he hadn’t recognized in a very long time. He watched her reaching down to take his hand, almost jerking it away at the last from being detached for so long from anything resembling genuine emotion.

  “Come,” the girl said, “I show you something.”

  Her name was Dorina but she asked Vlad to call her Dori. For the next few hours, he watched her flash her smile, looking beautiful and innocent, as she asked a series of men for directions while picking their pockets. Her smile, friendliness, and looks kept the men’s eyes upon her, distracting them from the fact that their wallets were now missing. Strength in subtlety, something Vlad had never considered before. It made him smile until he remembered the way other men’s eyes had looked upon him.

  “How old are you?” he asked her. “I’m fifteen.”

  “That’s what I am.”

  “And if I’d said sixteen?”

  “Then I would’ve been that instead.”

  Dori introduced him to a band of lost children like them who’d banded together as a gang that lived out of the shell of an apartment building in a run-down neighborhood. When he looked back on those times, Vlad remembered Dori above all else, including how she had helped him when she caught him trembling with chills one steamy night.

  “You are very sick,” she said, touching his forehead.

  “How did you … know?” he asked, not bothering to deny it.

  “I have a gift,” she said, not quite meeting his eyes anymore. “Or maybe a curse. I can see things, feel things. In my village they thought I was a witch and made me leave—that’s how I came to be here. But someday I will return and make them pay.”

  “I’ll help you.”

  Dori met his eyes again. “You have your own problems to deal with. Give me your hand.”

  But he pulled it away when she tried to reach for it. “Why?”

  “So I can read your palm and tell your future.”

  “I don’t believe in such things,” Vlad said, giving his hand to her anyway.

  “Fortune telling?”

  “The future.”

  She traced it with a finger, the way a blind person reads Braille.

  “Much sânge has brought you here,” Dori told him, still tracing. “Both your blood and the blood you have spilled.” Her finger stopped, began to tremble, her eyes filling with fear. “You have killed, haven’t you?”

  “Is that why you’re scared of me all of a sudden?”

  “What frightens me is what you may yet do, not what you’ve already done.”

  “I killed because I had no choice. But only one man.”

  “So far,” Dori told him. “There has been much death in your past. There will be far more of it in your future.”

  “Then use your gift. Tell me what you see.”

  Dori seemed as if she no longer wanted to look, but continued tracing his palm anyway. “They kept you prisoner. They caused you pain—no, they brought you durere.” Finally her eyes met his again, his hand still locked in her grasp. “This man you killed deserved to die. You should not feel vinovat.”

  “I don’t feel guilty at all.”

  “Yes, Vlad, you do. But not for this—for not being able to save someone close to you. Your mother, wasn’t it? You felt she deserved better than the life she had. You hated what she had to become in order to survive.” Dori had looked up at him from his palm here. “Your hate dominates you.”

  “It’s the only thing that makes me feel alive,” he managed, trying to push back the tears welling in his eyes.

  “But it’s dangerous to hate so much because you can end up hating yourself.”

  “Maybe I already do.”

  Dori went back to studying his palm. “I thought it was the man who killed your mother that you’re after. But now I’m not so sure.”

  “Because it is another man,” Vlad said. “A man I hate even more.”

  Dori kept tracing his palm, then stopped suddenly.

  “What is it?” he asked her. “Will I find this man? Tell me what you see.”

  Dori’s eyes had turned suddenly glassy as if seeing nothing at all.

  “Your father, Vlad,” she said finally.

  “What about him?” he said, something icy grabbing his insides. “What do you see?”

  “Only that he will yet be a part of your life.”

  “How? Tell me how! Please!”

  “I don’t know.” Dori’s eyes cleared. “The vision is gone. Slipped away because it too is incomplete, unfinished, just like your own life. The path you choose from this point is yours.”

  “Is it?”

  “Nothing is set. But…”

  “But what?”

  She let go of his hand and hugged him to her. “You are very sick, Vlad, and now I understand.”

  He eased her away so he could meet her eyes. “Tell me. Say it.”

  She swallowed hard. “I was brought to you to save your life.”

  Dracu fought to stifle another of the coughing fits that had plagued him lately, but failed. “Maybe it’s too late.”

  “It’s not.”

  “You can’t know that.”

  “I can,” Dori said, and lifted his palm so it was facing him instead of her. “Your lifeline runs strong, but is broken. The break here,” she continued, touching a thin crevice in his flesh, “represents today. I will see that you survive it. See that you live many more years.”

  “Maybe I’m not worth t
he effort.”

  She took him by the shoulders. “You have the potential to be a great man who can do great things … or terrible things.”

  “Are you still telling me my future?”

  “I told you, the future’s not set. And what I just said is what I feel, not what I saw. But I did see something else. No one is going to be able to stop you. You are going to be a very powerful and dangerous man.”

  “And that’s why you’re so scared?”

  “I’m scared because of how you are to become that way. There is a … monster in your future. But he takes your innocence even now.”

  “Am I to kill him? Is he going to kill me?”

  “Neither,” Dori said, looking away as if suddenly frightened by him, “because the monster is in you.”

  SEVENTY-FIVE

  SARDINIA

  “Vlad?” Aldridge Sterling prodded from his yacht, when Dracu stopped on the other end of the line.

  “I was just thinking,” he mused over the phone, jolted from his thoughts back to the present.

  “Of what?”

  “Dori was the first and only girl I ever cared about. She realized I was sick, so sick that traditional medicine wouldn’t be able to save me. So she brought me to a gypsy drabarni healer who’d been ostracized because of the communists, too. It was this drabarni, an old woman, who introduced me to the scorpions. Years before modern medicine realized their venom had chemotherapeutic capabilities, gypsies had been using scorpions to treat some of the most serious diseases. This drabarni, an obese woman who smelled of garlic, warned me the odds were good the first sting would kill me. But if I could survive the pain, then the venom pulsing through my veins would work better than any drab or medicine, keeping the caeninaflipen, as she called the disease, at bay.”

  “Is there a point somewhere in this story?”

  “Yes, but if you interrupt me again I’ll show you pain worse than any I ever felt.” Dracu waited for a response, continuing when none came. “Dori was the first girl I ever slept with,” Dracu continued. “She’s the one I always picture, always remember, when I’m with all the others that have come since. She told my fortune once, told me someday I’d be a very powerful but dangerous man.”

  “And so you are.”

  “But she said I have a monster within me I might not be able to control. I’ve managed to prove her wrong.”

  “Because you’re not a monster?”

  “No, because I’ve managed to control it. That’s why I sent you this gift, to remind you how fleeting that control can be should you lose my trust.”

  And, true to Dracu’s word, Sterling noticed a launch approaching. The launch slowed its speed as it neared the Big Whale, Sterling spotting a luscious figure clinging to the railing, her blond hair splayed about by the wind.

  “Your gift just arrived,” he said into the phone.

  “A token of appreciation for handling the financial end of things so well,” Dracu said, before his tone sharpened again. “Just don’t betray me, Aldridge, or the next gift you receive from me won’t be nearly as pleasant.”

  SEVENTY-SIX

  CALTAGIRONE, SICILY

  Michael walked the grounds of the farm where he’d been born in a state that felt like the first moments of consciousness upon being jarred awake. He had to keep reminding himself where he was, even though it was a place deeply imbedded in his memory. But now all of those memories had turned suspect, thrown into question by the shattering truth about his father, Vito Nunziato.

  Or Davide Schapira.

  That truth made the entire farm look and feel different to him, as if he could trust nothing his mind conjured of it. He’d purchased the property, and all the land surrounding it, from the bank years before under the name of an untraceable Hong Kong shell company, never with an eye on doing anything with it other than make sure no one else ever owned it. He had come here for the closing, at which point he’d seen his boyhood home for the first time since leaving Sicily fifteen years before, finding it so overgrown as to be barely recognizable.

  It was in even worse shape today, the grounds untended and what was left of the buildings ravaged by time and the elements. Both the barn and farmhouse were mostly shells, most of their roofs having collapsed inward and the walls crumbling visibly as well. It was a beautiful sunny day and the breeze blew softly, rustling the leaves of the trees that had managed to survive. Michael gazed toward the fields where the family’s crops of oranges and olives had once rustled in the breeze, too. He half expected the old farmhand Attilio to roll by atop the tractor, taking his hat off and grinning in greeting. His mind drew back the sounds of horses and cows, along with the strangely sweet odor of manure Michael had always hated, but now found himself longing for. He took a deep breath and imagined he could smell the fragrant scent of oranges fresh from the vine piled high in baskets upon the bed of the old flatbed truck his father would drive to market, cursing whenever a bump in the road cost him even a single item in his load.

  They were just overgrown weeds and dead brush now; but when he first looked that way, for a moment, just a moment, he saw the neat rows of trees whole again in their groves. His father toiling amid them in his old straw hat. He never looked happy with the labor, as if he’d rather be elsewhere doing something else. And now, finally, Michael thought he understood why.

  Because his father was not who everyone thought he was, a mere farmer. He was Davide Schapira, a hero who came to Romania on some secret mission. The missing pieces of a story Michael desperately wanted to understand. And if such pieces still existed, they’d be found somewhere here on the grounds where Vito Nunziato had been gunned down and his son Michele had been born.

  In spite of everything else confronting him, Michael had to learn the truth, had to know how his father could’ve been hero and farmer at the same time. Who was Davide Schapira?

  Or a better question, maybe, who was Vito Nunziato?

  Michael walked under the warm sun to the ruins of the barn, the timber having been swallowed up by the earth that had originally given it life. He had left Scarlett and Alexander back with the Citation at the airport in Catania and proceeded here alone against Alexander’s heated protestations, because he knew this was a journey he needed to make by himself.

  A journey into not just his past, but also, especially, his father’s.

  Michael turned his gaze toward what little remained of the farmhouse—just the first floor with the clapboard and studding showing—and thought of himself as a little boy again, listening to the gunshots and watching his parents die. He remembered the night before that, when his father had hugged him tight and urged him to be a king and not a peasant.

  Something about him had been different that night, something in his eyes and his manner, that made Michael wonder today if he’d actually caught his first and only glimpse of Davide Schapira. If Vito Nunziato had been nothing more than a guise, a mask he wore to disguise his true self. This was the same man, after all, who’d found the relic in the waters off Isla de Levanzo, who almost drowned trying to retrieve it only to come awake miraculously back on shore.

  Maybe it was the relic that defined his heroism. Maybe it really had been meant for him. Michael couldn’t know for sure, wouldn’t know until he found something more to tell him. On these grounds, somewhere on what had once been a farm.

  It was here; he could feel it as clearly as the breeze billowing his shirt over skin that felt clammy with sweat. A chronicle, some documentation, of his father’s life apart from his family, before his family. But his father had never even had a safety deposit box, hardly a man to trust secrets or personal business to third parties. He was intensely old-fashioned, believing private matters to be just that.

  Michael reflected on that with strange fondness, wondering what his life might have been like if the relic had never existed and Michele Nunziato had grown up to be a farmer like his father instead of the man known as the Tyrant. Would he have been happier?

  Michael recal
led so much gruff coldness, so few smiles or warmth. Perhaps it was hard for his father to settle into such an ordinary life after whatever experiences had defined him during his mission in Romania. And how did Vito Nunziato end up a farmer anyway? What happened in that Transylvanian village that brought him to this land where his previous life became a secret never to be shared? No medals on display, no framed commendations or other memorabilia.

  What had happened?

  So, too, as a boy, overly curious at times, Michael had explored every nook and cranny of the farmhouse that today looked gobbled up by the ground; it was how he had found the medallion tucked in his father’s sock drawer the fateful morning of the massacre. And none of his explorations had ever revealed anything passing for secret documents, pictures, letters, passports—the kind of material a man with dual identities was certain to have. The farmhouse had no secret chambers, loose floorboards, or hollowed walls in which to hide such things; if it had, Michael would’ve found them.

  So what then?

  Michael continued to walk the grounds, as if in search of some cosmic inspiration, but his thoughts were consumed by his father. Every memory recaptured and reframed because now he saw the man entirely different from what he ever had before. And suddenly the world morphed around him in a surreal vision that left seeing the past through the prism of the present and all its conflicting emotions. He was a young boy again. His sister Rosina holding his mother’s hand as they traipsed through the gardens. Michael busy in the fields and mimicking his father mopping the sweat from his brow with his kerchief. Working the hoe just as his father had taught him.

  “Like this, Papa?”

  “Like that, Michele.”

  Rewinding those memories as if they could be relived. Searching them as they unfolded before him for some, any, indication that Vito Nunziato was more than just a farmer.

  But there was nothing. His father was his father, demanding and distant. Worn down by life. Smelling of the fresh paint staining his fingers and the manure Michael remembered roosting in the grooves of his shoes.

  Michael froze halfway between the remains of the farmhouse and the barn, holding onto that memory. Because, he realized now, those dark stains hadn’t been paint at all, but ink. Even as a boy, Michael had wondered why his father wanted to paint the root cellar because he always had the dark stains on his fingers when he emerged from it.