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Chapter seventeen

Damned All The Rest

Eoghan

N either of us said the words. Neither of us acknowledged what had come to pass. We simply talked as we always had, ignoring the ticking of the doomsday clock that matched the beat of my pulse.

We were two men on a runaway train on a long bridge that would end in a sudden drop. While everyone fruitlessly tried to escape, to scream, to beg the heavens for a better fate, we were here. Sitting, having a drink.

We had accepted our fate long ago, but neither of us wished to say it out loud and ruin what was left of this tragic friendship.

“I have something for you.” I reached into the pocket of my blazer, to the small stack of photographs I’d taken from Vasiliev. “I know you’ve been eager for word of Cosima. Well…” I snapped the pictures in my hand. “I’ve got this for you.”

I handed them to him. Each photograph was as large as printer paper, some blown up on small details, because I wanted him to see everything with his poor eyesight.

He deserved every detail he could derive from this gift.

“What’s this?” Morelli said in delight after the first sip of his drink.

He reached his shaky hand towards it and stared at the first photo.

It wasn’t much. A simple one of Cosima Durante, standing near her home. Her hand on a ripe, large belly.

“What is this?” Morelli asked again, his tone more somber now, as he flipped to the next image.

Cosima was in a hospital gown, holding a baby in her arms.

The next was of that mother and child. The baby wore a frilly christening gown, as Cosima stood,somber-faced, in front of a glorious panel of stained glass windows. The baby was bundled in miles of lace.

He flipped, one to another, the images speedily moving from newborn, to infant, to toddler.

“The great secret of Eugenio Durante is that his precious heir had a child out of wedlock,” I said, as coolly as I could, even as the words stabbed my heart. “Her name…”

“Her?” He interrupted, but I talked right over him.

“…is Giovanna Durante.”

His eyes widened as he went back to the first photo and watched the sequence again.

“In honor of Cosima’s missing godfather,” I recited the words with unscrupulous coldness.

I shut my eyes, taking a deep breath, pushing down the lump that formed in my throat.

“Giovanna?” He said the name like a prayer. “Giovanna!”

He laughed, his voice sounding young again. He was overjoyed.

I was grateful that I could give him that.

“Giovanna?” Morelli asked the question again. The silent, unspoken question asked if this girl could possibly be his.

But he already knew the answer. He was Giovanni Morelli, the Durante’sconsigliere. The man could see the end of the game before the first move was made.

He fucking knew, as I did, that he was looking at his future.

He went through the photos again and then smiled to himself, his head slumped.

Then, with a tragic joy, he said, “Giovanna.”

He began to weep, his shoulders shaking, as he brought his fingers to his eyes to staunch the flow of tears.

“A little on the nose, if you ask me.” I tried to make a joke, to lessen the tension.

Then I regretted it. Maybe it was best that I just let us feel the entirety of this sadness and joy. The ambivalence of such news under these terrible circumstances.

He downed the glass of Brunello di Montalcino, then poured the rest of the bottle into the stemware. He shook out the last few drops before he put the photos down in front of him.

“A daughter.” His smile was so bright, it broke my heart anew. “She always wanted a daughter.”

He wiped at the moisture on his cheeks and tried to wipe at the ones on his nose.

I would have given him a handkerchief, if I hadn’t already used it earlier. Damnation …

“Does she seem happy?” he asked, as though he was speaking to me, but he wasn’t. I knew that when he answered himself. “She looks happy. They both do.”

“She’s healthy,” I said, even as I choked on the words. “The girl, I mean. Mother too, I suppose. From what I hear, Giovanna began walking at nine months old. She’s been running the household staff ragged, screaming the house down with her demands.”

I had demanded every detail, even the ones that were of dubious “sources”. He deserved to hear as much as I could give him.

Giovanni began to nod with his approval. “A strong-willed girl, then. Like her mother.”

“Yes,” I chuckled.

Strong-willed was the nice way to refer to the Cosima I met today.

“This changes things, you know?” Giovanni said. “It… it… changes… things…”

I knew that he was a smart man. We understood the score and the role we played in this game set forth by our fathers.

Even under the influence of the Brunello di Montalcino, the gears in his head would keep churning, figuring out how to work this to his best advantage.

“Children, I mean.” He took the photos and began to lay them out in a semicircle in front of him, so that he could see them all at once. “They change things.”

“Aye, they do.” I agreed, because I knew Cillian had changed everything for me.

Were it not for him, I would never let Kira go. But what was best for my son was to have a happy mother. A mother who was healthy, not living under constant threat.

Peace was best for my family. Peace only existed if I was not in it.

“Do you think…” Morelli swallowed, and I wondered what calculations had gone through his mind.. “Could you grant me one last wish?”

“You’ve asked me to grant mercy to Cosima,” I said, reciting his first negotiation. “What else would you ask for?”

He loved as I loved. He cared for Cosima the way I did for my Kira. So in that, we were the same.

What was another favor among friends?

“I would ask two more wishes, if you would grant it, fair Irish genie,” he said, that slight humor coming back.

I would have liked him, I think, were it not for life and circumstance pitting us on two sides of a war.

“The first is that you extend that mercy to Giovanna,” he said.

“You don't even know for certain if she’s yours.” I wanted to sew doubt, not because I believed in it, but because I truly felt that he needed a bit of it to ease his passage.

But I was wrong.

“She’s mine,” Morelli said with certainty. “She is mine, and I have no doubt of it. Will you grant me this wish, enemy prince? The son of my old rival?”

I swallowed, feeling the heaviness of the pistol in my pocket. “Aye. Granted.”

He picked up a photo—a recent one—of Cosima with the child on her lap, the two smiling at the camera in what looked like Christmas clothes.

“May I write her a letter and be assured you will give it to her?” he asked.

It was an oddly phrased request. A specific one, if I had to guess.

I pulled a pen from my pocket and tapped it on his shoulder. He didn’t look as he took it and scrawled something on the back.

My beloved,

Do not let vengeance bring you to Hell with me. Find peace.

- Gio

He folded his note and gave it to me.

Christ, this man was going to make me weep before I could finish this sordid task.

“May I ask that you deliver it with the crucifix you took from my neck? It should be with my other personal effects. Deliver it yourself, if you can,” he asked, his head lifting, as he handed me the letter.

“That’s more than three wishes now,” I said, because I was still a monster, and a fucking prick. He was still my enemy. “I’m not a genie in a bottle, old man.”

“I think that you will grant it, after all that I have given in your service, Young King.”

I would.

Even if he had done nothing but survive, I would have granted a dying man—a dying father—the farewell he asked for.

I swallowed the last of my emotions, and silently reached into my pocket.

“Do not neglect your loved ones in the search for power,” Morelli said, as he tapped the photograph of Cosima and the baby in the hospital, minutes after birth. Cosima looked dazed, but happy, as the sleepy babe rested in her arms.

“Do not seek power over peace.”

Morelli would never tire of lecturing me…

He’d be preaching until his last breath.

“They say that Cosima has two nannies, who speak French and Italian to your daughter. She wants her to be multilingual from the beginning.” I had memorized these things so that I could ease his passage into the afterlife. I needed to allow him a slow and quiet fade into the blackness.

“You see there?” Morelli said, as he looked at the small casement window that had a view of the base of a shrubbery. “There is a robin on the window, tapping its beak on the glass. Do you see it?”

I looked, but there was nothing there. Nothing but the evening mist.

“It has brought its chick to the window, too,” Giovanni said, getting up and going to the window.

He smiled, as if he was basking in sunlight,and turned his face to the window.

“It is Cosima and the baby, come to see me,” Morelli slurred with a sad, whining laugh.

He reached out his hand, his finger outstretched, though he was still too far from the glass to touch it.

“I see them! Do you see, young Irish? Do you see them?” He turned to me, his face so full of joy that I could not contradict him.

I watched in rapt and pained fascination, as his mind altered from its acuity and drifted into a space in between—a place between dreams and waking—a place of magic, imagination, and euphoria.

That was my mercy to him. He would not die by a blade. He would die in painless chemical joy.

“I see them.” I nodded as a hot tear fell down my cheek.

Morelli turned away again, looking at the window, before he went back to his seat, his fingers tracing the photos he’d left there.

“Yes!” I could hear the joy, and sorrow, in his voice as he picked up a single photo of Cosima with a toddler on her lap. “My girls have come for me.”

“They love you,” I said, because that is what I would have wanted to hear. “They love you, and they have come for you.”

“Yes… Yes… little Giovanna and Cosima—” He smiled, and in his mind, he was truly with them. My last gift to him. “Cosima… sweet Cosima.”

His head fell forward as he yawned. He turned his head to the side, laying his cheek down between the photos, his one hand still on the image of mother and child.

“My girls…”

His eyes shut slowly.

His breathing evened out, low and slow as the paralytic took hold.

He could feel no pain now. I had been certain when I had this cocktail made, and cursed the doctor that if it did not work exactly as described, then I would haunt him for the rest of his days, and make his family suffer so long as I was capable of breathing.

In fear, he added some compound that added a sense of euphoria—I saw it the moment that he said that there were birds in the window.

If I left him, he would fade away.

But that wasn’t good enough. Not for the war we were fighting.

He had to die on my blade. But he didn’t need to feel it happen. He did not need to know.

He didn’t need his final moments to be of agony and pain. This was better. This was right.

I placed the blade to his slender throat. The first slice made me blubber like a child, as the air escaped his throat. But after the second and third cut, when the blood pooled about him, I could concentrate on my task of severing his head from his body.

Morelli was simply a cadaver, as lifeless as the mouse I had stomped beneath my heel.

I did not feel the blade in my hand, or the task that lay before me. This corpse was not Morelli.

Morelli was far, far away, flying with the robins he saw in the window.

His matted hair was darkened by the blood, his gray eyes now lifeless and dull.

With my bare hand, I grabbed the empty bottle of wine—the one that had been laced with joy and death. With a cry, I threw it against the stone wall of the cell, and it shattered into a thousand pieces.

I put Morelli’s head down on the table, facing the photo he’d chosen as his favorite, his body unmoved from how it had been when I did my first slice. Were it not for the blood, you would not think the two parts had been severed.

I stepped away, leaning against the rough wall, and slid down until I sat in the blood of my fallen enemy.

“Farewell,” I croaked out. “Our roles should have been reversed.”

This was the way of so many of us. I made the sign of the cross, touching my forehead, chest, my left shoulder, then right.

I whispered a small prayer, and hoped that when my violent demise was nigh, I would go with thoughts of my wife and child—that I’d imagine them running to me in my last moments.

“I hope you know,” I said to the now empty room, as I felt Giovanni Morelli’s soul vacate from this haunted place.

I was speaking to the robins that were not there, and to the sky that he had not seen in three years.

But still, I said the words, nonetheless: “If I did not have a wife and child, I would have let you go, and damned all the rest.”