Burn this City by Aleksandr Voinov

11

Falling asleep on a chair wasn’t easy. Jack’s shoulders were crying out, but all he could manage was to roll them and pull them up against the base of his skull, hold and release, hoping to relax them somewhat. His hands were cold, but not numb. Rausa hadn’t tightened the ties unnecessarily or cruelly. The only sounds he could hear were the normal creaks of any house with inbuilt wood.

He had nothing to lean his head against, and even the attempt to topple the chair so he could maybe rest his head on the ground and find some sleep that way hadn’t worked—they’d stabilized or fastened the chair somehow. All he could do now was wait, and think, and drift off a few minutes at a time—it was never enough. He had already been mentally and emotionally exhausted from meeting Beth and offering his sad little proposal. And then Rausa … Rausa had felt like wrestling a tiger, or getting run over by a truck. The side of his face throbbed and the pain from the bruise had turned into a stinging one-sided headache.

Here I am, a man who can have men murdered with a nod or an indirect hint during a phone call. The damned consigliere of the Lo Cascio clan, Andrea Lo Cascio’s right-hand man, tied to a chair and locked away in a closet in my own house to be tortured and executed tomorrow by a man who had, until now, been a non-entity.

He ran through that thought the same way a Buddhist repeated his mantras, and the disbelief turned to exasperation, anger, and finally into a bleak kind of humor. Rausa had promised him a hard death, and Jack knew what those looked like. He’d seen bodies riddled with bullets, had seen corpses without fingernails, corpses who’d had a cut-off dick shoved into their mouth, had seen what men looked like who’d been beaten to a pulp with baseball bats. Whatever the bodies looked like, you could never really forget they’d been human once.

Jack had found killing difficult, especially the premeditated type, and he’d been lucky that the man he’d killed to be made had been a despicable coward and traitor. He would kill if necessary, if he had no alternatives, but it didn’t thrill him like it did some others. It had felt like a bone-shaking inner restlessness and nausea before, and took a long time to wear off afterward. Threats had gotten him far with the unions, and he could actually solve problems without murder. Most normal people simply fell in line when he applied pressure the correct way, such as when a construction union put him on the payroll, or he strolled into a supplier’s office and strongly suggested that some things needed to be renegotiated or the project would “die”. Not to mention, once he’d been promoted to consigliere, others were all too happy to do the wet work.

Most people picked up on words quickly if they were said well, in the right context. Most people were eager to “help” once they realized who they were dealing with, and that Jack could muster backup from all directions. Ironically, while the Dommarco family had been union busters, the Lo Cascio had always syphoned money from the unions, and, in turn, provided a ruthless element that the unions were ill-equipped to legally send into the field.

If that meant they put Jack or any other Lo Cascio man on the payroll as a “consultant” and paid a nice monthly “fee” whether there were issues to handle or not, so be it. Even better when both sides paid to have their conflicts managed. Played well, that game could last forever and be highly lucrative—no different from legal business. If skilled, a man could judge easily how much he could bleed a client, and how often, before the client became too restless or weak. The rules were not to get too greedy and always give the boss his cut.

Rausa. Now he was a different animal.

A man spoiling for a fight.

For a war, even.

Despite the fact that he’d seen the last one play out and the Rausa clan had suffered terribly and never recovered. And he hadn’t sold out to the Feds—even if somebody in a potential task force was bending the rules, whatever Jack would eventually spill would be inadmissible in court. And weren’t rats forbidden from committing further crimes? Kidnapping and torture surely counted. So far, it was little more than threats, but Jack expected Rausa to follow through on them. Fuck, at this point, Rausa wearing a wire and some Feds sauntering in and telling Jack to cooperate or else was his best-case scenario.

Hell, there were consiglieri who were in prison, and full members of their families who’d shopped their friends and business partners, and even written books about it. The Cosa Nostra wasn’t what it had once been, and not all the myths still worked. But this was different, this was family against family, boss against boss, and all gloves were off. If Andrea got the opportunity to strike back, he’d no doubt choose the nuclear option.

Would Jack give Rausa what he wanted? He’d seen too much to believe he could resist forever. Anything else was a stupid man’s bravado. And yet, his only value as a man had been in his usefulness and his ability to know when to talk and when to not talk. Keeper of secrets, and motor mouth when necessary. No, he wasn’t always fond of Andrea, but he respected the man’s role and his power. He respected the rules. Sometimes he thought he mostly respected himself because others did. They didn’t see his flaws and weaknesses, and that made them easier to deal with, in secret. Men looked at him with respect, so he could pull himself back out of whatever darkness he’d lost himself in and at least be useful.

Did any of this matter in the face of death? No. He wouldn’t be around to feel the humiliation. Dead bodies had no dignity left. No longer people. They were nothing but meat. They were added to the lists of those that were never talked about again, became anecdotes, often stripped of their identities, “you know who”, and “you know when”. Anybody who was stupid enough to ask about them painted a target on their own back; it was important to know at all times who was in good standing and who wasn’t. Who’d been a loyal friend this morning and who had vanished twelve hours later.

Jack hadn’t questioned those rules, and still didn’t, but it was a sobering thought. If he gave Rausa what he wanted and anybody heard of it, judgment wouldn’t be kind. He doubted it would be kinder even if his body showed signs of that hard death Rausa promised. All they’d know and care about was that he’d betrayed them. His death would be regarded as an insult, and the response would be in kind and worse.

Rausa had kicked off the war the moment he had kidnapped and beaten Jack. His body would be the opening shot.

That was, if there was a body to find.

The morbid part of his mind noted that, as far as last evenings went, this hadn’t been the worst one he could have imagined; a good meal with a good friend. There had been days, but mostly nights, in prison when he’d contemplated all the possible ways he could end things himself. Any of those last meals would have been far worse.

Ultimately, he hadn’t wanted to die in prison and let people on the outside assume it was prison that had broken him, when the truth was that he’d been born with a huge crack right down the middle of his soul. And nothing—not the “life”, the “business”, or the advancement from being the son of a mere associate to made man and soldier to capo and finally consigliere had healed the crack. Part of him would never be respectable, would never be part of the “family”, and he’d known that from the start.

Whether he’d risen through the ranks because of luck, or because that inner brittleness had driven him, or whether he’d simply managed to fool the men around him, were questions he’d entertained often.

Those same questions had filled his mind that one dark night. He’d been drunk enough to probe the jagged edges of his soul, and suddenly felt that gnawing inside, much like a man close to starvation whose body suddenly remembered hunger in a final, desperate bid to survive.

In the club with Andrea and a number of capos, he’d slowly worked on getting drunk, fully aware that alcohol made him quiet and withdrawn, but he’d been in a mood all day. Seeing the dancers gyrating to the beat, colored flashing lights sparking off their sweat-glowing skin, among them a couple of shirtless young men, and how they’d sized each other up from under heavy eyelids, teeth playfully bared, every dancer lost in themselves as much as lost in the glory of the others, calculating yet carefree.

Something about the view in combination with the alcohol had set off a depth charge somewhere inside him, and he couldn’t hold himself together—he’d become aware that he was, right here, beginning to lose his mind, and for an exhilarating moment he hadn’t known what he’d do next—whether he’d join the dancers or attack the next warm, lithe-muscled body with teeth and claws as if he were some primordial horror. The lights had hurt his eyes, the thumping bass underneath the melody and the crowd of bodies moving with the rhythm were crushing him, so he’d cracked a joke about feeling his age and all but staggered out of the club.

In hindsight, he wondered whether that had been some kind of mental breakdown, a misfiring of all his nerves, a psychotic episode, or maybe some kind of slow-burn panic attack.

In that moment, he’d realized that he couldn’t trust himself to hold it together. Control was slipping through his fingers. That all the sacrifices he’d made both voluntarily and otherwise were no longer enough to keep his demons at bay.

So, like any man pursued by evil spirits, he’d gotten into his car and driven off out of the city, toward the forest. He vaguely remembered hatching a plan to go walk into the wilderness and somehow die there, though his mind skipped how exactly. He did remember both laughing and crying at the thought that they wouldn’t find him until hunting season, months and months later. He would simply stop existing, and it was the relief of it that made him laugh, though he sounded more than a little mad in his own ears.

How he’d ended up on Memorial Bridge was anybody’s guess. Maybe because he knew from his childhood what a desolate place it was with its flaking paint, decaying iron underneath, dark forest on both sides and the treacherous black waters of Oak River rushing below. Originally Herman Nordmeyer Memorial Bridge, only part of the name had stuck around. Everybody in Port Francis knew this was where people went to “jump”. If this had been a different sort of city, Memorial Bridge would have been the place where priests conducted exorcisms for the lost souls that surely haunted the area. Jack assumed every community had places like this—both grim and not quite real, as if, through squinted eyes, the laws of physics didn’t always completely apply. In his disjointed state, he’d wondered whether those who “jumped” were actually attempting to fly because they felt on the deepest level that those laws could be haggled over here.

Jack was done. He abandoned the car, left the door wide open and walked straight to the railing, feeling both a creeping horror and a sense of relief grow with every single step. Horror won, and he stopped, leaned on the rusty railing and stared into the fathomless water gurgling below. The river had been swollen from weeks of heavy rain, and an almost full moon cast silver shadows through the gaps in the heavy clouds that promised more rain. He gazed into the darkness below, regarded the churning surface the same way, he assumed, as saints the face of God.

The water had no revelation for him except oblivion, which in that moment he assumed would suffice. He sobered enough to spare a thought whether he had any unfinished business—any revenges not taken, any personal papers that could incriminate him, anything he’d have wanted to say to a loved one. Now in his early forties, he was too old to begin justifying or explaining himself to his parents—whatever unspoken things had stood between them had been condemned to eternal silence when he’d bought them an old farmhouse in a picturesque village in a part of Italy that was a lot friendlier to their creeping arthritis, and then all but bundled them off into a plane. Internet out there sucked, so no video calls. Thank God.

They still thought his “involvement with the unions” put him and them in danger. And the situation had been dicey, but nothing he hadn’t been able to handle. They were lucky they liked the artisan cheeses and ham that that area produced, and the last he’d heard, their health had improved and his father had lost enough weight that his knee replacements weren’t blowing out.

No unfinished personal business, then, with his parents as settled as they could possibly be. Left the car. In his own ideal scenario, he abandoned it there, door ajar, key in the ignition, and it remained there as a kind of totemic marker of what had happened. The cops would take an interest in the gun in the glove compartment but even they would quickly form a theory based on his prison record.

Still, some part of him called for complete annihilation—burn down his house and everything else he owned, and vanish as if he’d never existed. Romantic and very, very appealing, but impossible. These days, people always left transaction histories, the footprints of this age. The sound of a car engine tore him from his thoughts, and when it came closer and he smelled the exhaust, he half turned away from the river and glanced to the side.

The headlights were uneven, one decidedly dimmer than the other, the car being held together by nothing other than inertia and rust. Jack almost assumed some teenagers were looking for the best place for some illicit drinking or smoking or petting or any combination of the above, and he felt resentful that his grim reveries had been cheapened that way—even though there was no romance in it, and he knew it despite the hollow ache of self-pity and his total inability to see past the wall of despair before him. This wasn’t—and would never be—a kind of heroic act. It was the last remaining option, so whether teenagers messed with it didn’t matter.

Yet, when a door clapped and heels tack-tacked on the asphalt, he looked over again. The woman’s steps slowed as she looked his way, and he gathered an impression of thin legs sticking out of a blue jeans skirt, and an oddly patterned white or light blue blouse. She glanced at him, then hesitatingly stepped up to the railing herself, as if in defiance. Some kind of waitress, or maybe a prostitute, to be out and about at this time of night, though prostitutes should be able to afford better cars.

He returned his attentions to the water, aware of another human being like an itch under his skin. Eventually, he pushed away, resolved to return to his car and drive a little further, maybe take the car with him into the river.

But he saw her bony shoulders shake in the chill of the night, and his mind backtracked to that first impression of her. Not an odd pattern on the blouse at all. He gritted his teeth, but at the same time, something in his heart shifted. It was none of his business, but as he regarded her there, all alone in her blood-splattered clothes, sniffing in the darkness, he couldn’t help but resent her for messing with his struggle to reach a state of acceptance, at the same time aware that she might be in a much more desperate situation than he was. He walked back to his car, picked up his coat and walked over to her. He placed the coat within her reach and leaned on the railing again, in his own space, the coat now between them.

“It’s cold. You’ll catch your death.”

She sniffed and then broke into a sobbing laugh.

Regarding her from the side, and peering past her untidy mop of bleached blonde hair, he noticed somebody had done a number on her delicate features, and the sniffing was likely from a broken nose. A shadow of smeared blood across her chin and lips made her look ghoulish, indicating she hadn’t even had the time to clean up after whatever had happened. Maybe she’d resolved to let the river wash that away.

They stood together for what could easily have been an hour, the only sound the wind in the trees and a gargling of water below them. She seemed to calm down somewhat, but the occasional sniffles told him she was still there with him, not zoned out. Oddly, she seemed to be the only anchor to reality, the only other real and true thing here except oblivion, though nothingness was diametrically opposite of her and he was stuck somewhere in the middle. No, not stuck. He was moving, or rather drifting, but it was decidedly in one direction.

“Having a bad night?” she ventured, eventually.

“Depends.” He gestured toward the water. “Could go very badly or …” The other option hadn’t quite taken shape in his mind yet. It was all upside down—was it actually a bad or a good thing? Surely, an end to that pain inside was good, right?

He wrestled that question but couldn’t find an answer.

“I know what you mean.” She gave a resigned sigh. “What for, right? What is that shit for?”

A day ago, he’d have told her survival. Survival was the reason to do anything. But up here on the bridge, that wasn’t real anymore.

She rubbed her arms and shifted her weight from one leg to the other. Several of her fake nails had broken off. And her bruises were darkening almost while he watched. “What is any of this shit for,” she muttered to herself.

“At least you can be warm.” He pushed the coat over. “It’s nice.”

She eyed him. “And you?”

“I’m not cold.”

I’m nothing. There were no feelings, no sensations, everything felt empty and dead inside and he briefly wondered how long that had been the case. How long he’d swum only on the surface of his own soul. Years. Decades. When had he entombed himself like that?

She glanced toward his car. “Nobody waiting for you?”

He shook his head but finally managed to tear his eyes away from the blackness and release a tautness inside of him. Maybe it was because she reached for the coat and put it on. She almost vanished in it, though she didn’t attempt to make herself comfortable inside of it. Her hair remained inside the collar and she didn’t close it, just pulled it closer around her by crossing her arms in front of her chest. After a while, she stopped shivering.

He gave her a half smile to put her at ease. “You should get that nose looked after.”

She reached up and winced when she touched it. “No, I’m …”

“… Going to stand here?”

She looked at him then fully with her wounded, liquid eyes. “No.”

“Same,” he said softly, carefully, sensing the same tension in her. Hell, he didn’t know what he was feeling anymore, but he could pick up her pain clearly as day.

They stood like that for hours, silent witnesses of a kind of battle that was fought with determination but no hope. Long before dawn, though the deepest part of the night seemed to have passed, she agreed to get in the car with him and have her nose looked after, though he assumed the bruises and the broken nose had kept her anchored the same way she’d done for him.

He managed to get her to a motel, then took an Uber back to the bridge to pick up his car. By then, the sun was climbing into a pale and sickly sky and Jack didn’t want to do anything but sleep for a couple of days, which he would have done if Beth hadn’t texted him about the coat in the afternoon.