A/N – I don't own these characters. Richard Condon's masterpiece isn't mine, blah blah blah.
"Silver Cyanide"
by The Bellman
December 2004
Argentinean tango: it's always been one of your—our—passions, hasn't it? It's brought a pleasure you can't describe, and it's so damn beautiful simply because you don't know how to do it properly. The pleasure you derive from it is the voyeuristic pleasure, isn't it? You can't tango well until I teach you. It takes two to tango, and you're only one. I'm only one. But you know, you don't always have to watch the tango. It takes time to go from spectator to professional, and believe me, there are ways to do it. And I can speed up the process. Yes, I can, because I invented a whole new tango for you. It's the kind of tango that everyone suspects, every knows of, but only we've got. I like to think of it as a pretty dance, but when it's so short, there isn't time to enjoy it. Really, they sped up our accompaniment, forced us along, and we are now suffering, in our day of separation. As I wait for you to join me after life, you try in vain to salvage some happiness. You're sicker than you know. The cure-all you need is gone, I'm sorry, I'm sorry . . .
You took it without knowing you took it.
They say you have no music. They say you're a silent, weak-willed creature with no spirit of his own, and of me they say that I'm a fluttery blonde thing, frail and just the daughter of a great man, useless in herself. But I wrote it down. I kept my journals, documenting the transformation you underwent during our honeymoon, and how much I missed you before that, and yet they still protest that I am just a girl, a child, useless. But they're wrong. No-one can understand until they're in the situation, until they fully experience it, until they know, and since they can't know until they truly know, they never will understand. That's why the tango is for us, and for us alone. You've always thought the tango was about sex, haven't you? I don't blame you. I would like for that to be it. It's so much more than that: the prelude, the actual consummation, the climax: it follows sex so perfectly, but what you're missing is the seduction. You missed the most important part. In your involuntary trances, your crimson dazes and the blonde morphine thing that followed you through it all, you couldn't know. And I am very sorry that I tried to fix it on my own—Ben knew better, and I was helpless. Entranced. Seduced. That's the word I mean to use: seduced. Bewitched into thinking that I, armed with nothing but my charm, could solve the riddle that wove itself into your mind, planted there by that woman, your mother.
Both of us: we've always been spoiled filthy, right? Summer houses by the lake, fancy clothes, elaborate fork arrangements, business trips across the country to put up monotonous public appearances, dinners with our parents and the US Senate, press coverage. Spoiled. We thought we could do something.
In those trances, those meditations that only the queen of diamonds could induce, you didn't know anything about what was really happening. You knew less than you did before, which was the least of anybody, except perhaps me. I didn't suspect because, like you, I'm guilty of being consumed by lust, and I'm guilty of just wanting you, just wanting our tango. I don't want it to end, but it hasn't quite begun.
And even after our marriage, the seduction has only begun.
In your eyes, I see only one thing right now: pure clarity, pure, clouded clarity. You give the impression of a wise man who knows all, sees all, sees through my very heart. And yet, in your new state, you know nothing. You know only what you're told, not what is real, and I am helpless to do anything; for what can protect from a silver bullet? They are silver, you know—they aren't, but they are, they're the ultimate ending, because you fire them, and you're the best shot on your patrol, you WERE at least, until I was your wife, and now…—they are silver. Killer bullets, the kind that only a saint could wish to survive, and even you, everyone's darling Saint Raymond, are going to have to end, because you can't survive without me. And if you were to die first, I would follow soon, because I can't survive without you. Only your eyes are bulletproof, and they're going to be shattered soon anyway. How I wish they were not, but it's the only way, the only way, and you know it. I wish you would save yourself, but who am I to make you change your mind?
Your eyes are empty, whether you know it or not. Face it, face me, without the mask in the way… and though you struggle, you can't. You're normally so cool, and collected, but now your eyes hold the look of smashed bulletproofed glass—SMASHED-SHATTERED-BROKEN-LOST-FORGOTTEN, now, with pain, both emotional and physical, from those damn tranquillisers she's gradually feeding you, and you don't notice, and the food you've never eaten; the days we've been apart, you've begun to die slowly, and I must watch, I'm the spectator—the lines spiral from a central point, and it's almost impossible to see the fractured thing behind it clearly, because it's chained beneath ruined clarity.
The clarity you once had with me as your wife.
One more bullet will do the trick. Just one more bullet. But it's got to be the final one, the silver one.
And even before you launched the silver bullet, my death sentence, you signed your own will, leaving it all to the world to pick at as they please, leaving our legacies into the dust to be trampled with gossip.
Of course, when you did fire the bullet, it didn't just strike me and turn my eyes into shattered, bloody glass, it finally punched the hole through your heart, your glass, your perfect yellow eyes. The beautiful, heartrending eyes that I've lost myself in too many times to count, both during that summer by the lake and during the past month, and at our last supper before the execution. And you are not my executioner, despite appearances. It's a glorious masquerade, and you and I are just two more dancers being lost.
Both of must end because it takes two to tango, and once we learned, we couldn't find other partners.
Awkward, yes—I'm too small to be your partner, you're too tall to be mine, but we had a good run at it.
A damn good run.
We had a month: only a month. That was it. We had no second chances. No-one could afford us that luxury, and we lived in luxury for those four weeks in June and July, basking in the heat, thriving in the heat, in the heat of bodies, and finally—finally dying in the heat.
When you find the lady with the morphine, pleasure, and unrivalled power pumping through her veins, and you give her the silver bullet, the silver cyanide slug powering through her too-pale stage-makeup flesh, matting her falsely platinum-yellow hair with the blood that was only waiting to be shed—for she is the embodiment of Evil that you know, and I know this now as an angel, as I watch and wait for your end, so we can meet again—will you please give her my regards? For we've been bested by the one woman who can tango with herself, and win.
And finally lose.
As dear Saint Raymond dances his final dance, no longer the tango, but the twisted waltz, manipulated and dated, he pulls the trigger on all of us, and prayers are fulfilled.
Mrs Iselin, we don't tango with power. It just isn't done.