regained enough strength to stand, I dressed and went out the window, and walked through the front door. I told them I’d managed to escape, and said I could take care of Peter from now on. I barely made it to the bed before I passed out. I woke up a few hours later still wearing the dress, blood seeping through the bandages into it, and tore it all off. Once I got better, I figured the best way to make sure that shit didn’t happen again was to send that guy’s balls to the Norteños with a note said if they were going to send any more guys at me, to make sure they had some balls.
Det. James: Wait. I thought you worked with the Norteños.
Darling: Fucked up, right? I guess nobody liked the guy whose balls I lopped off. And that night was just the last in a long line of fucking awful things he tried to do. I’m pretty sure they only let him stick around after that because they liked the new nickname it gave him, the prick with no balls. But yeah, most of the Norteños weren’t so bad. We were useful, mostly cause we were young enough and white enough that cops didn’t even think twice about who we were or where we were going. So once we were affiliated loosely with them, a whole lot of other opportunities presented, and we started making decent money. And we started attracting more members, too, until we were a force in our own right.
Det. Matthews: And then the gang task force formed.
Darling: Right. Suddenly, a police captain had the mandate to stomp all over us. But it took us a while to realize we were being targeted by police. You know, at first, you get hit, lose a shipment or two, even if you see officers that doesn’t mean the tips aren’t coming from a rival, or that the cops there aren’t somebody’s pit bulls, but once we figured out we were being targeted, we started spreading some money around. Everything we knew, even everything the Norteños knew, said the task force was too good out the gate. They had someone inside, inside ours or inside someone close. And what we found out was your captain was in with the Sureños. I don’t think he was any kind of member, but he definitely was cashing the checks they sent him.
Det. James: You’re saying our captain was dirty?
Darling: For an answer to that question, just look at your partner.
Det. Matthews: IA had a file. And there were some rumors. He had a yacht he couldn't afford to moor on his salary. I don’t really know too much in specific, but they didn’t paint a flattering portrait.
Darling: Fool me, I didn’t want to run afoul of a big bad police captain, so I thought I’d just bundle up everything I knew, and yeah, I knew way more than enough, and send it to him, just a little message to say that he might be looking into us, but we’d already looked into him. We’d done that before, when we needed something through customs or passed a beat cop who wouldn’t take a kickback. That’s when things got bad. I don’t know what he had to tell the Sureños, but they flooded into the city. The Norteños we knew packed it in when they realized they were outnumbered 5 to 1. The Sureños started hitting us hard. They probably would have massacred us, but Michael had the idea to make like we were preparing one last big push, lured them out to this warehouse. We set it up to get as many of them as close to-
Det. Matthews: That explosion on Fitzgerald.
Darling: Yeah. And that about leveled things, so I thought we were probably okay. Only your captain hadn’t been idle. Peter and I were sharing an apartment by that point, and John and Michael and some of the others had apartments in the same complex, but when I got back from the warehouse on Fitzgerald, your captain was waiting there. He took me at gunpoint back to his home. John was restless, because he didn’t like the violence, so the warehouse really got to him, and he was walking around outside, and saw me leave. John ran into my apartment, the door was still open, and didn’t find Peter. And I think that confirmed for him what I think he knew a long time. But he called Michael, and told Michael where I was. John was pissed, so it was Michael who got some of the guys together to come and get me. Your captain had convinced the Sureños to use his place as a war room, so it was crawling with guys.
Det. Matthews: That much we know. We’ve seen the bodies.
Det. James: But what happened to you? From what we can piece together, you were in the back, in the captain’s bedroom, when the shooting started. None of the shooting happens in the back room. The captain doesn’t ever get to his gun on the nightstand. What happened in that room, Wendy?
Det. Matthews: We found that crappy little plastic-handled knife of yours in the captain.
Darling: You find his balls yet?
Det. Matthews: (inaudible)
Det. James: That is beyond the fucking pale, George. You do not, you can’t put a hand on someone in an interrogation. Get the fuck out. Fuck. Shit. I’m, I’m sorry. He’s known Captain Hooker for a while, long enough he doesn’t just look past the shit, he doesn’t even smell it anymore. And from the sounds of it, the captain was into some shit. My instinct is usually to side with the blue, whatever shade of shit might be hiding underneath it, but, I want to talk to the DA. You’re still a minor, might be able to keep him from charging as an adult. You talk to him about your father, might be able to cop a plea. But there’s something, back when we started, you said it didn’t matter anymore, that nothing mattered.
Darling: John knows I’m Peter. Michael knows by now, too. I’ve lost, lost the only part of me I ever really liked. I can’t be Peter anymore. So I don’t care if they charge me as a grown up.
Table of Contents
Eponine
I was young, and in love. You can read into that that I was stupid- embarrassingly stupid, in that I stepped between “Monsieur Marius” and a musket ball. At first I had feigned fealty to his revolution, but eventually my adoration for him bled into an appreciation for his politics. And when I thought I was wounded in the cause, and that I had died in his arms, I was happy. I awoke hours later in pain; the defensive hole in my hand and the wound in my shoulder were stuffed with mud and ached. Marius was gone, returned to his dearest Cosette; I crawled from the stack of corpses where he'd abandoned my body. I slept that day in the alley.
I did not dare return home- my father was still angry with me from earlier, and he was not a forgiving kind of man. I’m not certain what I would have done, the following night, had I not been found by Madame Esmerelda, an attendant to the Duchess of Berry. She took my wounds to be proof of my fighting, and spirited me away to the duchess at Provence. I spent a week convalescing, and the surgeon wanted desperately to remove my hand, lest the infection spread, but as the infection in my shoulder was inoperable and further progressed, he decided against it.
To my great shock, I did not die. To my greater shock, and indeed, delight, the duchess took a liking to me. In her I found a kindred soul, and a strong matriarch with a desire for reform. I was arrested with her after her failed revolution, and expelled with her to Italy in 1833. But I found I could not stay from France long; Louis-Phillipe continued to oppress my countrymen, and I found myself increasingly swayed by my own near-death two years before. Particularly, the forced “vacation” of the Parliament in August signaled the king’s intentions to rule without regard for the people of France.
In my time as an expatriate, I discovered the Saint-Simonists, and though I rejected their sexual revolution as inescapably self-serving, through them I discovered the Tribune des femmes. During this time, I allowed one of the Tribune’s editors’ words to guide me, and tried to live “faithful to the laws of nature, [and to] love without pretense and laugh at prejudice.” Upon my return to Paris, I contributed a few pieces to the Tribune, but found myself just this side of Démar, and similarly disowned. After the dissolution of the Tribune, I joined similar thinkers in contributing to the also short-lived Gazette des femmes.
Those years were prosperous enough that Volquin’s assertion that to be free, women must be “materially self-sufficient” was not tested. But the following decade was marked by economic decline, and at more than one point I found myself on the dole with a third of other Parisians, when employment in nee
dlework became scarce. The 1848 revolution saw the return of power to the people, and many femmes became influential, though their influence waned when it was needed most; the revolution introduced universal male suffrage while snubbing our sex.
The election of Louis Napoleon as the President of the Republic, which precipitated the coup that made him Emperor, saw the end of our agitation for some time. The Napoleonic Code was demonstrably hostile to our cause; of course, the Napoleonic territorial wandering eye proved just as hostile to Louis’ imperium. Louis was replaced, however briefly, by the Paris Commune, and perhaps the first real attempt to articulate in public and with power our needs, most prominently the equal rights to work, to divorce and to vote. The Commune collapsed, but even before it our support diminished among a majority who no longer required our aid.
Our agitation during the Commune lashed back critically; shrill condemnations rang at us across Europe, where even like-minded activists sought to distance themselves from our “emancipationist” movement, and we were treated again to Proudhon’s tired bifurcation of femininity, that we must choose to be “housewives or harlots.”
By 1878, it had become clear that momentum for change had
Selected Short Stories Featuring Cinderella Shoes Page 12