As we go to leave for our meet-up with Nael, I find an envelope sitting on the floor inside the door. It is pristine white with no name on it, two light fingerprints in dirt. Must have come when we were passed out because I didn’t hear anything. I bend down to grab it and see the vials I took from Belousz on the ground near the couch. I remember leaving them in the bedroom, but the viewer is on its crate, so I assume I tried to watch these and passed out first. Only an inordinate amount of luck kept our drunken asses from crushing these. Or maybe it was the hand of Providence. If anyone knows who to murder in order to take down the Tathadann, it would be this asshole.
I cup the vials in my hand, not sure of how to turn.
“Who are they?” she says.
I taste metal, sawdust.
“It has to do with Aífe.” She doesn’t need to ask it. She already knows.
“The guy who made sure it was done.” I go to set them down on the table but Emeríann grabs my arm.
“You’re home,” she says, “so I’m here. I want to watch it with you.”
“I can do this later.”
“We need to go and you’re wasting time.”
She takes the vial and inserts it. I turn over the envelope in my hands.
“Who’s that from?” she says.
“Don’t know. No markings, no postal information.” The paper itself is silken, almost iridescent in quality. “I don’t see many pieces of paper like this outside of Clodhna.”
I slip my finger inside to tear open the top, but stop when I see Aífe’s face in the memory viewer’s steam. A fist forms in my throat. Emeríann takes the envelope from me.
Seeing Aífe this close is seeing her again for the first time. The gauntness of her cheeks. The wild river of veins that branches through her eyes. The dark circles beneath them. I don’t remember her looking this exhausted since the months after Donael was born, but there is something else about her, a cornered-animal look, the sort of desperation I rarely saw outside of a battlefield. I listen to my breathing for as long as I can stand myself then hit play.
She stands before Mebeth, hip cocked, pointing her finger. Belousz sighs. “Not one more word from me until then.”
“And how exactly do you plan to force my hand? Coercion? Blackmail?” Mebeth looks at Belousz and Toman and snorts a laugh. “You are in over your head, dear. This is not your battle. You do not belong here.”
“You’re right. I don’t.” She stalks closer to him, her voice dropping in the manner that always preceded an explosion. I find myself leaning forward and consciously straighten my spine, and though I’m curious as to her expression, I avoid looking over at Emeríann. This is old, Henraek. This is an immutable and irreversible past. Moving on with your life is not the same as erasing your history. “So end it.”
“This is something bigger than you and I, Aífe. You should know this. You have lived it for years. It is in your food and your clothes. You carry its burden in your eyes, in your heart. Every bit you confess unburdens your mind, allows you to relax, to become present and stop worrying. You relieve the heaviness in your soul, in the soul of your boys, in–”
“You don’t know what’s inside me,” she screams, slamming the chair down, and the mention of me in this context sets my skin on fire. Belousz adjusts the newspaper on the table as if he’s impatient.
Mebeth remains impassive, waiting for her to finish. When she does, he says, “Then you must tell me. Dates, times, locations.”
This sends her into another fit, something between crying and screaming. I have to turn down the viewer because the sound distorts.
“What is he talking about?” Emeríann says. “Dates, times?”
“Appointments, maybe? He was our doctor. She was seeing him at one point,” I gesture absently, “in a psychiatric facility.”
“Appointments?” The look she gives could scald the hair off a rat. “You really don’t understand women at all, do you?”
“Well, what else could it be?” I turn up the volume before she can answer, a tingling, sinking feeling snaking through my body. Aífe jabs her finger at Mebeth, but seems incredibly aware that she cannot touch him. Watching her face contort like this, skin flushed with anger, makes me as nostalgic as it does disgusted. Before Emeríann implied Aífe might be no better than Walleus – might be worse than Walleus – I had never once entertained the thought. And now, watching her yell and scream and argue with him about the nineteenth of September, the place beyond Fomora, ten men or less, I cannot see anything but Emeríann’s insinuations here.
But it could not be true, because she would never do that. We would argue and slam doors and once, in a dark period when the tactics the Tathadann used against us turned especially horrific and I slunk about for a depraved few months, she came after me with a kitchen knife while Donael was upstairs napping. One of my men had pitched the idea of bombing the nursery where a number of Tathadann officials sent their children and I didn’t shut him down immediately, even going so far as to ask Aífe what she thought of the idea. The knife was meant to get me out of my own head, and the thin cut on my neck was my fault because I kept stepping forward into the blade, trying to bring her down to my level.
And then she says, “Because your men would have been slaughtered at the power plant if I hadn’t told you,” and thousands of hot needles poke into my temples, a band of razor wire tightening around my head.
I hit pause. I do not rewind though I need to hear it to confirm it, but I’m positive what she said. Emeríann breathes heavily beside me. I can hear the contractions of the muscles in her throat when she swallows. Outside the window, thousands of miles away, crowds sing and chant. Inside my chest, thousands of fathoms beneath the darkness, something snaps.
Emeríann’s hand trembles as she extends it. She does not look to me for an OK, for consent, though still she pauses a few seconds before hitting play.
A fissure develops in Aífe’s wall of fury. It’s a fleeting moment, but there if you know where to look.
She sniffs hard, only once. Then her composure returns to granite. “You end this and bring my husband back home,” she says, “and I will tell you everything you want to know.”
Emeríann doesn’t bother to hit stop this time before she stands and walks into the bedroom. The room around me vibrates with emptiness. My dead wife is the rat. Not Walleus. But he had to know. That’s why he’d never answer me when I asked about when he turned. How did he know? Did Mebeth tell him? Aífe?
“I just want Henraek back,” Aífe says. “I need my husband. Donael needs his dad. Four months ago, you swore to me that he’d be back.”
“Well, maybe you should not have trusted me,” Mebeth says, offering a vague smile before standing to go inside the café. Belousz nods to Toman then follows behind. They wind through the lightly populated tables, and even having seen all that I have seen in the last fifteen years I still cannot believe that twelve people watched a woman get shot at point-blank range and did nothing. They didn’t even pause to wipe their mouths.
A loud pop beyond the glass. Aífe dies again. I don’t know if I want to save her.
I startle as Emeríann appears beside me. She grabs my hand, hits pause, and takes a long breath before speaking. “Riab never wanted to fight. I pushed him to do it, told him it’d make his children proud.”
“I don’t want to talk about this.”
“He was scared of dying, said it wouldn’t be right to leave me alone in the house. I told him that if he thought I couldn’t take care of myself, he was as good as dead to me.” She sniffs hard. “I wanted him around, not needed, and he had to understand the difference. I was young, you know? Hot blooded. Still at the age where you believed things like that mattered.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because she’s not your fault.”
“I never said that.”
“Who are you talking to, Henraek?” She gives a half smile. I notice a small white scar, almost star shaped, beside her eye that I’d never seen before. “I cried for two years before I realized that. He could’ve said no, and we would’ve fought, and made up, and gone about our lives. But he didn’t. You could’ve gone home, given up what you believed in, but you didn’t. And that’s it.”
We sit for a minute before she squeezes my hand then hits play. She picks up the envelope from the floor and opens it with her finger.
Mebeth pops an olive in his mouth and exhales as he chews, then pushes open a heavy wooden door with silver rings for a handle, entering a small kitchen. Belousz waits in the doorway. Gleaming pots and pans hang on the walls. A cook chops a mound of vegetables on a marble counter. A Tathadann man stands behind one of the butcher’s blocks scattered throughout, flanked by a cosanta, a bodyguard. There are several large hooks hanging from the ceiling in the middle of the room, three of which hold a slab of salted ham. A drain sits in the middle of the floor, a hose coiled on the right-hand wall.
And standing behind the far butcher’s block is a young Walleus. That duplicitous cocksucker. I knew he was hiding something. He always knew about Aífe. He had to. His white suit is sharply tailored, probably bespoke, his bald head polished as ever. This was when they were still showing him how lush the Tathadann life was. He and Belousz exchange a look, but I can’t get a read on it.
“They are finished,” Mebeth says. “Take care of him then prepare a meal. Cheese, olives, something of that ilk. But nothing heavy. It’s hot outside and I don’t want indigestion.”
Walleus looks down and holds out a hand, the cosanta doing the same, and they pull up Donael between them.
My chest seizes. Emeríann gasps, whispers oh my god over and over.
His eyes project abject terror, his face dirty, his lips tinted blue by candy.
My lungs are too heavy for my bones.
He is alive. He was alive in the kitchen of the restaurant where his mother was murdered not fifty feet from him.
I try to breathe but choke. My throat is swollen with loss.
And he is alive, but I have seen this before. As soon as Mebeth closes the door there will be two shots. Why didn’t Walleus stop him?
“How do you want it?” the Tathadann man says.
Mebeth points at the hooks, then shrugs. “You decide.”
Mebeth closes the door then turns and takes an orange slice from the tray. Grunting and a clipped yelp in the kitchen. Belousz nods to Toman and they head toward the door.
In the background are gunshots. Two claps that echo through my hollow chest.
Emeríann breaks down in choking tears. The taste of metal and bile fills my mouth. I kick the viewer off its perch. The image fizzles out.
Walleus knew. He knew? The entire time. Months, years. Mornings we got coffee, I mourned my son and he knew. Afternoons at the pub, pouring beer and liquor down my throat, letting it stoke the agony and anger that burned in my gut, and he knew. Days upon days upon days I walked around in a self-loathing, self-destructive fog, wanting to die but not having the courage to kill myself, absorbing the pain of the hundreds and hundreds of lives I’d destroyed, and he knew my son had been murdered.
And he did nothing to stop it.
“Henraek,” she says.
Even if there was nothing he could do, he should have done something. Anything.
“Henraek,” she says again, and in the lilting tone of her voice I can already hear insinuation. She was right with Aífe, but she cannot be right about Walleus. She’s right but she can’t be.
“Henraek,” she says, louder this time, but I see a flash, a white and red blur pass before my eyes and my hands wrap around a chair and hurl it at the window, shattering against the grate, and I snatch the nearest leg and smash it repeatedly on the table, shards of wood flying at me, pricking my cheeks, my face, sweat running into my eyes, but I bludgeon the table, hearing Aífe’s voice, Walleus’s, seeing their faces break apart beneath the chair leg, and as the middle of the table finally gives and collapses on itself I hear Emeríann scream my name.
I spin and face her, approach her. Chest heaving, hands throbbing.
The envelope lies torn at her feet.
“That table wobbled,” I say. She stares at the piece of stationery in her hands. It’s blank but for the Gallery masthead. A photo sits between the tri-folds.
My skin flames. The photo is grainy, taken with a high-powered telephoto lens, no doubt, but even if I were blind I would be able to read the image by sensory perception alone.
Donael is much older than I have ever seen him, becoming a young man with thin ropes of muscles on his arms and the hint of an Adam’s apple. He stands on a green lawn, holding a remote control plane in his hands as if he’s trying to fix it, Cobb beside him holding the remote.
Printed on the back of the photo is Walleus’s address.