Chapter 13
The old man didn't give her much for a name. He told her to call him Messenger, and she complied in a quiet discontentment. He drove her to his home, a large loft downtown with enormous windows that poured light from the outside into the room. Faye stood in the middle, on the hard parquet, and said nothing. He was silent too. She walked towards a window and looked outside at the cars speeding through the busy streets. A part of her felt sad at that moment, and she thought to herself that if she jumped, it would have been a good way to go.
Going, she'd been thinking a lot about going lately.
Messenger approached her from behind, but kept his distance. He stood about a meter or so behind her, and watched the way her fictitious blonde hair gently nested around her neck and wove down her lower back. He extended his hand and felt its texture. It was soft, felt so real. He gathered a strand in his palm and sighed, wrapped his finger around it and uncurled it, moving his hand down her lower back, where her waist extended in a dangerous curve. He placed his hands on her shoulders and ceased breathing for a moment. He was old, gray, and hopeless. She was young, beautiful, but hopeless as well.
"I want you too," he whispered, "I'll tell you everything you want to know if I can only have you for one night."
She panted for a moment, closed her eyes, and fought against the feeling of wrongness in her stomach. She was cold, afraid, unwhole, and he slid off her coat, touched her pale shoulders with his rough hands. She might have said something then, but her dullness was overpowering. All she could do was whisper, "What do you know?"
He pressed his head to the nape of her neck and inhaled her scent. His hands worked their way across her rib cage and up over her breasts. She perceived none of this. Nothing could silence the voices ringing through her mind.
"I know everything," he whispered, "everything."
"Who was Spike, really?" she asked.
"Mao's boy. Worked mostly at the top. Was a bodyguard for a while, slowly drifted into hits when times got hard."
A different sort of hardness pressed into the fabric of Faye's coat. She opened her eyes widely but didn't move. She couldn't stop now, not when he was finally telling her the truth.
"Hard times?"
"The Syndicate Wars, don't you read the newspapers?"
"As a matter of fact I don't." His hands slid up over her thighs and attempted to slip into her pantyhose. Her hands stopped him.
"Tell me everything first."
He let go of Faye's waist and walked some feet back. Messenger sighed and folded his hands.
"The Dragons, they were having a hard time. Mars was too small, it seemed, to harbor more than one Syndicate. Lots of blood spilled, as we tried to keep the population down. Our biggest problem was the Cantonese syndicate that used to run on the opposite side of town. It was a crimson battle, and Spike was something of a general. That was back in the days when he still ran around with the likes of Vicious and---Julia."
"Julia," Faye whispered. "How was she involved in this?"
"Well, don't be fooled by her fragile eyes," Messenger paused, "Remember how I said it's the ones who look the weakest that are the strongest? Julia could kill with her smile, but she mostly preferred a gun. She was smart too, very smart. A part of her hated human beings. Once, she was caught unarmed by a group of rival thugs, she was seventeen or so. When they were done with her, one could barely recognize the woman beneath the bruises. She never told anyone about what happened to her on that night, except Vicious maybe. Whatever happened though, she remembered every one of their faces. Two weeks or so later, the night she got out of the hospital, she and Vicious disappeared for a night. Next morning, the news were flooding with a story about a massacre in some bar. A puddle of blood, and enough bodies to launch a full blown investigation. It wasn't so uncommon in this part of town, gang violence, old news, you know? But this time was different. Five or so were dismembered, if you know what I mean. Julia never told anyone what the men did, but it must have been bad."
Faye was shaking, her body quivered and the hairs on the back of her neck stood up. Nevertheless, she remained steadfast. She told him to continue.
Julia and Vicious, they disappeared for a while. They showed up a month a later, expecting punishment, I guess. They got a promotion. She had the face of an angel, Julia, but her heart was as dark as the baddest of the boys that worked for me over time, maybe even worse. Women are capable of amazing cruelty, you know. Perhaps that was why she was with Vicious in the first place."
Faye's eyes opened widely, "She was with Vicious? But what about Spike?"
"You really don't know a thing about this?" Messenger asked.
Faye shook her head, still staring at the window, "Spike was never one to share."
"Spike was Vicious' partner. They knew each other since they were at the bottom, but then parted ways for a little while, that was when Julia came along. After the incident though, the pair was reunited again. The Syndicate wanted blood, and the two love birds had displayed quite a thirst for it. The two men, they got close after that, and they brought Julia in too. I still remember the three of them, in a dim bar, smoking and playing pool. They were always together, inseparable. Like a romantic fucking comedy about murderers. And then Spike started falling for Julia, became something of a pussy after that. Vicious noticed and didn't quite like it. And that's how that old broken record goes."
"What kind of blood were they after?"
Spike, Julia, and Vicious were commissioned to take out as many Syndicate officers as they could in order to insure a safe victory for the Red Dragons. This was a time when diplomacy was still not on the menu. Before long, with some twenty five assassinated high ranking officials behind them, the trio was the most targeted group in town. It became something of a habit for the three to engage in gun battles every night, as more and more underlings were sent to kill them. Through the tumult of their professional life, shone a bright light of the personal. It was evident that Spike was fond Julia, and though Messenger could not answer why that was so, it was evident that something about the woman existed that drew men wild. Perhaps it was that she was a real beauty, perhaps something else that she displayed only in private and only to the two men of her life. With every violent incident, Julia's life came dangerously close to ending, and this drove Spike into a panic even Vicious did not feel.
A realization that life was not never-ending, forced Spike into doubt. This occurred one rainy night when he was smoking a cigarette and strolling down a wet sidewalk, watching the glare of the puddles shining red and blue from the neon signs a couple of blocks down. He heard footsteps behind him then, and gunshots some moments later. Before he knew it, he was involved in a violent gunfight, shooting left and right, but losing the battle due to his singular stature.
To omit the details, he was pretty banged up after that. Got shot in the eye. And where does a man with ten bullets in his limbs go on a planet like Mars? Not the Hospital. There was only one place he could go, really. That was how Julia found him that night, passed out outside her apartment building.
She dragged him inside, bandaged him, called Mao, and did anything she could to keep him from dying. Perhaps it was at this moment that Julia, too, began to realize the value of human life. Watching Spike's feeble body coloring the sheets of her bed with blood stains, she became something of a "pussy" too. She scoured her apartment for some pain medication, knowing well that she had none. Sooner or later he was going to wake up and become confronted with what the world was really like, and how much it hurt. She watched the blood oozing through the tourniquet she had placed over his eye. She closed her own and telepathically felt the pain that he must have been suffering. A part of her wanted to kiss him, touch him, love him. A part of her wanted to preserve him as he was then, before he knew the truth, that he would never see the full picture again. She wanted to save him some way, to somehow lessen the pain, to somehow show him that life would keep on going. She felt useless as she stood there, feeling him draining away, fearing that he would die, regretting every sin, every murder, ever blood stain.
It was then that Julia remembered the night she was killed. The feeling of five different men inside of her, robbing her of every last bit she had to call innocence. She remembered her screaming, her emptiness, her pain. She remembered how she shook before stilling suddenly, and seeing Vicious' face imprinted on the side of her retina. She remembered how she didn't cry, how she took it all inside of her knowing already that it wouldn't kill her, that she would survive, that she would get revenge. She did survive, and she did get revenge, but she would trade all that away only for Spike's sole survival. She would betray everything, and every one. It was funny, in a way, how she didn't even realize that she had loved Spike until then.
And then she thought of Vicious, and how underneath, he wasn't really so vicious after all. He had tenderness, a frightening sort of tenderness. He held her like he needed her, he kissed her like he wanted her, and he hit her like he loved her. A part of him belonged to Julia, it was a destructive belonging, she instinctively knew she would some day be the path to his, and her own, destruction. As she watched Spike, she partially understood that he would die some day because of her, that Vicious would never stand for betrayal, and somehow she still didn't care. She didn't care about the future, it was all part of waking up. She preferred to dream, instead. Nothing ever hurt in dreams, it was a beautiful sort of dullness. And there Spike was, in an even deeper state of sleep, dreaming about something she could only guess. It was then that a thought came into her mind. She remembered a tune she used to play before falling asleep, a soft melody of a music box she once owned that her mother had given her before she ran off on Julia and her father, a bad man. She had given the music box to Vicious one snowy morning, when beneath a light shower of crystals melting in her hair, she looked like an angel and he thought that she was his salvation.
She sat in her favorite rocking chair and sewed, quietly humming the tune of that music box, a song that Vicious named after her. It was then that Spike awoke and she stared at him, with a startled, forlorn tragedy in her eyes.
"Don't stop," he told her tenderly, "Sing for me, just like that."
So she continued singing. And that was how that old broken record went.
.
.
Messenger did not tell Faye the whole story, mostly because he didn't know the whole story himself. They got back to business shortly after that. He was tired of talking about Julia.
"Tell me more about the Syndicate War," Faye said, trying to forget about Spike, to stay on topic.
"Well, before long, Spike supposedly dies off, Julia runs away, Vicious stays alone. Suddenly, he's a little too fixated on his job. We get bloodier and bloodier by the day, and before you know it, we've exterminated everybody worth fighting except the Cantonese gang I mentioned earlier. That's when Mao comes into play. Now Mao sees that times are changing, has time to have one final conversation with Spike before his death. He's never fully convinced Spike's gone, keeps claiming he's still alive. Now supposedly, Spike inspires a new idea in Mao, diplomacy. He goes to the elders upstairs, brings the matter into their consideration. They agree. Before you know it, we're breaking bread with the Cantonese, decide to work together, nothing better than team-work, you know? Well that didn't sit too good with Vicious. He thinks diplomacy is weakness. Before you know it, Mao's dead. The elders let it slide, to their own demise. I'm sure you've read THAT in the newspapers."
Faye nodded.
"And then Julia resurfaces. Vicious uses her as a tracking device to reach Spiegel. Before you know it, we've got ourselves three dead icons on our hands. That wasn't in the papers, but I suspect you know about that too."
Faye nodded again. "What about my husband? What about YAN? Who are the men following me?"
"There are men following you?" he paused, "Why am I surprised? Well, James Shields was the last bang of the elders."
The elders had a plan of revenge in the case of a takeover. They arranged it onto a trustful pawn that after their deaths, all of the wulongs Red Dragon had to operate with would be immediately transferred into about a billion bank accounts scattered throughout the galaxy. This, of course was indirect revenge. What can a Syndicate do without money? How can one who overthrew the elders, in the particular case, Vicious, lead without any means to get by? But they didn't want the Dragon legacy to die either. They wanted a trustful, honorable man to take over after their deaths. At the time, they supposed Shields was the one for the job. The elders commissioned a company they owned, YAN, to work out a database with the account numbers and the banks where the money was hidden. They later coded this program in such a way that it would be inaccessible by any means except through information contained on a microchip that they had trusted onto Shields when he first began service. The operation was covert, and only after Spike and Vicious finished each other off, after all the money disappeared, did the Syndicate descendents find out about this database. By then, Shields was nowhere to be seen. They tried to hack the database, they really did. But tough luck, it was INACCESSIBLE. They had the best hackers in the world, hell they worked hard at it. But the last funds were running low, and they knew that it would be all over without the microchip.
Luckily for them, Shields resurfaced. It so happened that he had gotten married to a woman named Faye Valentine, who was ironically Spike's past shipmate. The whole story was one big irony. They plugged Shields when he was on his honeymoon, but couldn't find the microchip or his little wife. They guessed partially right, Faye would lead them to the chip. What they didn't know was that the chip was inside of Faye. Shields used Faye as the chip carrier. He placed it into protoplasm and dissolved the subject in her wrist when she was unaware.
Faye did not tell Messenger this.
"So the men who are following me are looking for the chip?"
"You catch on fast," the old man said.
"Are you going to turn me in?"
Messenger looked at her sadly.
"No," he said, "Mao wouldn't do it, and neither would I."
Faye nodded, and finally turned towards him. He looked into her emerald eyes. He approached her and cupped her face in his hands, running his fingers up and down her cheek. His face got in close proximity to hers and she stopped breathing for a moment. It was then that she reached up and removed her wig, exposing the purple shortness of her own hair. He was taken aback for a moment, and then moved closer and kissed her forehead, removing his hands from her face.
"You're like her in so many ways," he said quietly. And then, in a sympathetic tone added, "I'm sorry."
Faye's eyes stared into his innocently, and she realized that he was letting her go. Quickly, she picked her coat up from the floor and pulled it over her shoulders. She made her way to the door and opened it. His voice halted her for a moment before she walked out.
"I was wrong," he told her softly, "you are a real beauty."
The old man didn't give her much for a name. He told her to call him Messenger, and she complied in a quiet discontentment. He drove her to his home, a large loft downtown with enormous windows that poured light from the outside into the room. Faye stood in the middle, on the hard parquet, and said nothing. He was silent too. She walked towards a window and looked outside at the cars speeding through the busy streets. A part of her felt sad at that moment, and she thought to herself that if she jumped, it would have been a good way to go.
Going, she'd been thinking a lot about going lately.
Messenger approached her from behind, but kept his distance. He stood about a meter or so behind her, and watched the way her fictitious blonde hair gently nested around her neck and wove down her lower back. He extended his hand and felt its texture. It was soft, felt so real. He gathered a strand in his palm and sighed, wrapped his finger around it and uncurled it, moving his hand down her lower back, where her waist extended in a dangerous curve. He placed his hands on her shoulders and ceased breathing for a moment. He was old, gray, and hopeless. She was young, beautiful, but hopeless as well.
"I want you too," he whispered, "I'll tell you everything you want to know if I can only have you for one night."
She panted for a moment, closed her eyes, and fought against the feeling of wrongness in her stomach. She was cold, afraid, unwhole, and he slid off her coat, touched her pale shoulders with his rough hands. She might have said something then, but her dullness was overpowering. All she could do was whisper, "What do you know?"
He pressed his head to the nape of her neck and inhaled her scent. His hands worked their way across her rib cage and up over her breasts. She perceived none of this. Nothing could silence the voices ringing through her mind.
"I know everything," he whispered, "everything."
"Who was Spike, really?" she asked.
"Mao's boy. Worked mostly at the top. Was a bodyguard for a while, slowly drifted into hits when times got hard."
A different sort of hardness pressed into the fabric of Faye's coat. She opened her eyes widely but didn't move. She couldn't stop now, not when he was finally telling her the truth.
"Hard times?"
"The Syndicate Wars, don't you read the newspapers?"
"As a matter of fact I don't." His hands slid up over her thighs and attempted to slip into her pantyhose. Her hands stopped him.
"Tell me everything first."
He let go of Faye's waist and walked some feet back. Messenger sighed and folded his hands.
"The Dragons, they were having a hard time. Mars was too small, it seemed, to harbor more than one Syndicate. Lots of blood spilled, as we tried to keep the population down. Our biggest problem was the Cantonese syndicate that used to run on the opposite side of town. It was a crimson battle, and Spike was something of a general. That was back in the days when he still ran around with the likes of Vicious and---Julia."
"Julia," Faye whispered. "How was she involved in this?"
"Well, don't be fooled by her fragile eyes," Messenger paused, "Remember how I said it's the ones who look the weakest that are the strongest? Julia could kill with her smile, but she mostly preferred a gun. She was smart too, very smart. A part of her hated human beings. Once, she was caught unarmed by a group of rival thugs, she was seventeen or so. When they were done with her, one could barely recognize the woman beneath the bruises. She never told anyone about what happened to her on that night, except Vicious maybe. Whatever happened though, she remembered every one of their faces. Two weeks or so later, the night she got out of the hospital, she and Vicious disappeared for a night. Next morning, the news were flooding with a story about a massacre in some bar. A puddle of blood, and enough bodies to launch a full blown investigation. It wasn't so uncommon in this part of town, gang violence, old news, you know? But this time was different. Five or so were dismembered, if you know what I mean. Julia never told anyone what the men did, but it must have been bad."
Faye was shaking, her body quivered and the hairs on the back of her neck stood up. Nevertheless, she remained steadfast. She told him to continue.
Julia and Vicious, they disappeared for a while. They showed up a month a later, expecting punishment, I guess. They got a promotion. She had the face of an angel, Julia, but her heart was as dark as the baddest of the boys that worked for me over time, maybe even worse. Women are capable of amazing cruelty, you know. Perhaps that was why she was with Vicious in the first place."
Faye's eyes opened widely, "She was with Vicious? But what about Spike?"
"You really don't know a thing about this?" Messenger asked.
Faye shook her head, still staring at the window, "Spike was never one to share."
"Spike was Vicious' partner. They knew each other since they were at the bottom, but then parted ways for a little while, that was when Julia came along. After the incident though, the pair was reunited again. The Syndicate wanted blood, and the two love birds had displayed quite a thirst for it. The two men, they got close after that, and they brought Julia in too. I still remember the three of them, in a dim bar, smoking and playing pool. They were always together, inseparable. Like a romantic fucking comedy about murderers. And then Spike started falling for Julia, became something of a pussy after that. Vicious noticed and didn't quite like it. And that's how that old broken record goes."
"What kind of blood were they after?"
Spike, Julia, and Vicious were commissioned to take out as many Syndicate officers as they could in order to insure a safe victory for the Red Dragons. This was a time when diplomacy was still not on the menu. Before long, with some twenty five assassinated high ranking officials behind them, the trio was the most targeted group in town. It became something of a habit for the three to engage in gun battles every night, as more and more underlings were sent to kill them. Through the tumult of their professional life, shone a bright light of the personal. It was evident that Spike was fond Julia, and though Messenger could not answer why that was so, it was evident that something about the woman existed that drew men wild. Perhaps it was that she was a real beauty, perhaps something else that she displayed only in private and only to the two men of her life. With every violent incident, Julia's life came dangerously close to ending, and this drove Spike into a panic even Vicious did not feel.
A realization that life was not never-ending, forced Spike into doubt. This occurred one rainy night when he was smoking a cigarette and strolling down a wet sidewalk, watching the glare of the puddles shining red and blue from the neon signs a couple of blocks down. He heard footsteps behind him then, and gunshots some moments later. Before he knew it, he was involved in a violent gunfight, shooting left and right, but losing the battle due to his singular stature.
To omit the details, he was pretty banged up after that. Got shot in the eye. And where does a man with ten bullets in his limbs go on a planet like Mars? Not the Hospital. There was only one place he could go, really. That was how Julia found him that night, passed out outside her apartment building.
She dragged him inside, bandaged him, called Mao, and did anything she could to keep him from dying. Perhaps it was at this moment that Julia, too, began to realize the value of human life. Watching Spike's feeble body coloring the sheets of her bed with blood stains, she became something of a "pussy" too. She scoured her apartment for some pain medication, knowing well that she had none. Sooner or later he was going to wake up and become confronted with what the world was really like, and how much it hurt. She watched the blood oozing through the tourniquet she had placed over his eye. She closed her own and telepathically felt the pain that he must have been suffering. A part of her wanted to kiss him, touch him, love him. A part of her wanted to preserve him as he was then, before he knew the truth, that he would never see the full picture again. She wanted to save him some way, to somehow lessen the pain, to somehow show him that life would keep on going. She felt useless as she stood there, feeling him draining away, fearing that he would die, regretting every sin, every murder, ever blood stain.
It was then that Julia remembered the night she was killed. The feeling of five different men inside of her, robbing her of every last bit she had to call innocence. She remembered her screaming, her emptiness, her pain. She remembered how she shook before stilling suddenly, and seeing Vicious' face imprinted on the side of her retina. She remembered how she didn't cry, how she took it all inside of her knowing already that it wouldn't kill her, that she would survive, that she would get revenge. She did survive, and she did get revenge, but she would trade all that away only for Spike's sole survival. She would betray everything, and every one. It was funny, in a way, how she didn't even realize that she had loved Spike until then.
And then she thought of Vicious, and how underneath, he wasn't really so vicious after all. He had tenderness, a frightening sort of tenderness. He held her like he needed her, he kissed her like he wanted her, and he hit her like he loved her. A part of him belonged to Julia, it was a destructive belonging, she instinctively knew she would some day be the path to his, and her own, destruction. As she watched Spike, she partially understood that he would die some day because of her, that Vicious would never stand for betrayal, and somehow she still didn't care. She didn't care about the future, it was all part of waking up. She preferred to dream, instead. Nothing ever hurt in dreams, it was a beautiful sort of dullness. And there Spike was, in an even deeper state of sleep, dreaming about something she could only guess. It was then that a thought came into her mind. She remembered a tune she used to play before falling asleep, a soft melody of a music box she once owned that her mother had given her before she ran off on Julia and her father, a bad man. She had given the music box to Vicious one snowy morning, when beneath a light shower of crystals melting in her hair, she looked like an angel and he thought that she was his salvation.
She sat in her favorite rocking chair and sewed, quietly humming the tune of that music box, a song that Vicious named after her. It was then that Spike awoke and she stared at him, with a startled, forlorn tragedy in her eyes.
"Don't stop," he told her tenderly, "Sing for me, just like that."
So she continued singing. And that was how that old broken record went.
.
.
Messenger did not tell Faye the whole story, mostly because he didn't know the whole story himself. They got back to business shortly after that. He was tired of talking about Julia.
"Tell me more about the Syndicate War," Faye said, trying to forget about Spike, to stay on topic.
"Well, before long, Spike supposedly dies off, Julia runs away, Vicious stays alone. Suddenly, he's a little too fixated on his job. We get bloodier and bloodier by the day, and before you know it, we've exterminated everybody worth fighting except the Cantonese gang I mentioned earlier. That's when Mao comes into play. Now Mao sees that times are changing, has time to have one final conversation with Spike before his death. He's never fully convinced Spike's gone, keeps claiming he's still alive. Now supposedly, Spike inspires a new idea in Mao, diplomacy. He goes to the elders upstairs, brings the matter into their consideration. They agree. Before you know it, we're breaking bread with the Cantonese, decide to work together, nothing better than team-work, you know? Well that didn't sit too good with Vicious. He thinks diplomacy is weakness. Before you know it, Mao's dead. The elders let it slide, to their own demise. I'm sure you've read THAT in the newspapers."
Faye nodded.
"And then Julia resurfaces. Vicious uses her as a tracking device to reach Spiegel. Before you know it, we've got ourselves three dead icons on our hands. That wasn't in the papers, but I suspect you know about that too."
Faye nodded again. "What about my husband? What about YAN? Who are the men following me?"
"There are men following you?" he paused, "Why am I surprised? Well, James Shields was the last bang of the elders."
The elders had a plan of revenge in the case of a takeover. They arranged it onto a trustful pawn that after their deaths, all of the wulongs Red Dragon had to operate with would be immediately transferred into about a billion bank accounts scattered throughout the galaxy. This, of course was indirect revenge. What can a Syndicate do without money? How can one who overthrew the elders, in the particular case, Vicious, lead without any means to get by? But they didn't want the Dragon legacy to die either. They wanted a trustful, honorable man to take over after their deaths. At the time, they supposed Shields was the one for the job. The elders commissioned a company they owned, YAN, to work out a database with the account numbers and the banks where the money was hidden. They later coded this program in such a way that it would be inaccessible by any means except through information contained on a microchip that they had trusted onto Shields when he first began service. The operation was covert, and only after Spike and Vicious finished each other off, after all the money disappeared, did the Syndicate descendents find out about this database. By then, Shields was nowhere to be seen. They tried to hack the database, they really did. But tough luck, it was INACCESSIBLE. They had the best hackers in the world, hell they worked hard at it. But the last funds were running low, and they knew that it would be all over without the microchip.
Luckily for them, Shields resurfaced. It so happened that he had gotten married to a woman named Faye Valentine, who was ironically Spike's past shipmate. The whole story was one big irony. They plugged Shields when he was on his honeymoon, but couldn't find the microchip or his little wife. They guessed partially right, Faye would lead them to the chip. What they didn't know was that the chip was inside of Faye. Shields used Faye as the chip carrier. He placed it into protoplasm and dissolved the subject in her wrist when she was unaware.
Faye did not tell Messenger this.
"So the men who are following me are looking for the chip?"
"You catch on fast," the old man said.
"Are you going to turn me in?"
Messenger looked at her sadly.
"No," he said, "Mao wouldn't do it, and neither would I."
Faye nodded, and finally turned towards him. He looked into her emerald eyes. He approached her and cupped her face in his hands, running his fingers up and down her cheek. His face got in close proximity to hers and she stopped breathing for a moment. It was then that she reached up and removed her wig, exposing the purple shortness of her own hair. He was taken aback for a moment, and then moved closer and kissed her forehead, removing his hands from her face.
"You're like her in so many ways," he said quietly. And then, in a sympathetic tone added, "I'm sorry."
Faye's eyes stared into his innocently, and she realized that he was letting her go. Quickly, she picked her coat up from the floor and pulled it over her shoulders. She made her way to the door and opened it. His voice halted her for a moment before she walked out.
"I was wrong," he told her softly, "you are a real beauty."