Cloak and Dagger

The match flared, and I saw his face.

A little older. A little sharper around the edges.

“Where have you been?” he asked, the lit cigarette dangling from his lower lip.

“Pardon?” I asked. His question was not the one I expected.

He drew on his smoke and the ember flared to reflect the patient, deadly expression in his eyes. “I asked,” he said, and I heard the muted creak of his shoulder rig as he shifted his weight, “where you’ve been.”

“Europe,” I lied.

Another drag.

“You’re lying,” he said casually, and blew smoke past my face, over my shoulder and into the blackness behind me.

“Almost always,” I said.

Five days before, in another city far away, I’d lied to another man in another language. I had told him I’d be back in a day or so to finish the conversation we’d started. We had a lot to talk about — although he thought we’d be talking about something entirely different than the subject I had in mind.

That other man’s face had the old saying better the devil you know running through the back of my head like a skittering cockroach when the lights come on in all the bad places anyone’s ever been. He and I talked and hinted and played at all kinds of body language while I tried not to think of the safer places I could be, which would be pretty much any other place at all.

He called himself an art dealer — a title that was one hundred percent accurate if you replaced art with arms and surrounded that with melodramatic words like ruthless and psycho. I had been circling him for almost two years, working my way closer and closer to him using the most convoluted and apparently random route possible. A transaction here, a short-lived affair there, a careful rumor planted, an assumption confirmed — and time, long days and weeks and months spent inching my way towards exactly where I needed to be.

The chink in a powerful man’s armor isn’t necessarily sex or drugs or greed or love; it’s usually something far less definitive. Powerful men are isolated by the very empires they build. They lose any connection to what civilians do, how they feel and react and interact. The rest of us become ants, seen from a great height. To the most powerful few, interest in others not of them is fleeting at best, unless you can display something they don’t have and can’t buy.

I was working hard to appear as that thing — that interesting object he wouldn’t be able to find a price tag on. He was considering some kind of move towards me, in the empty spaces between his meddling in various hot spots around the world. He wasn’t smart enough to do the kind of damage my bosses worried about; but he had ties to someone who could and I wanted that intel.

I had left him thinking about the possibility of us. The thought of sharing a bed with him made me want to puke. But it wouldn’t get that far.

I planned to kill him first.

“When are you going to quit playing cloak and dagger and come home for good?”

“Home?” I said.

He dropped his cigarette and ground it under his shoe.

“Yeah. You know, the place we grew up in. Where people love you, and watch out for you and take care of you…”

I laughed bitterly. “Natchez is not my fucking home. Not by that definition,” I said, and felt all the old bullshit try to reassemble itself into some ghost of the person I used to be. I shook my head at it and threw it back in its cage.

He had moved to stand beside me, leaning on the rail of the balcony. The Natchez-Vidalia Bridge sparkled in the distance, topping the Mighty Muddy like a tiara.

“Things have changed, here,” he said softly. “It’s different now. We could live here. Do you really believe anyone who knows us would be surprised? Or anyone who doesn’t would give a shit?” And he laid his hand on mine, carefully, like he was petting a mongoose.

I smiled. “And what would your cop friends say? Way to screw up your career, Detective.”

“They know enough to not give a shit either,” his hand tightened. “I’m serious.”

I brought his hand up, and guided it under the open collar of my shirt to my heart with the palm flattened, wanting him to feel the steady beating beneath my skin. “I know.”

On the transport back, freezing cold, bones rattling and ears deafened by the C130’s engines, I thought about it. I thought about his face, and all that lay beneath his implacable surface. We’d loved each other since we were kids, and it had cost us both — the life our families wanted for us, the marriage, the kids, the house down the street…he had tried to live it. I had run as far as I could from it. Both of us were a fucked up mess as a result. Except together.

Together we were something else.

This would be my last strike, I thought. I could get an exit strategy going afterwards, if I pulled this one off. I could go back to that little town on the big river, where I hadn’t been able to breathe in my youth.

It was different now. Wasn’t it?

One change of clothes and several continents later, I stood on the tarmac next to “my” G6, and watched an armoured limo sail towards me. It pulled to a stop, and the rear window lowered slowly to reveal a pair of dark eyes with no more depth than a smear of shit. A hand emerged and gestured for me to come closer with a peculiarly languid come-hither wave, the ridiculously large ring he wore flashing in the sun.

With an inward sigh I made sure I kept my face still, thinking these guys watched way too many movies about how diabolical masterminds were supposed to look and behave.

“Excellency,” I said, and bowed.

“My dear boy,” he said, and his smile slithered briefly into view. “How I’ve missed your company…”