Page 87 of The Kingpin's Call Girl

I wish I could feel something. Victory, maybe. But I just feel tired. My bed has felt wrong without her in it. Too large. Too cold. I haven’t slept properly since she left.

We debrief later at a neighborhood bar on Trevor Street, one of those old-world jobs, small, dark, and dank with light-up clocksadvertising beers they stopped making in the eighties and drunks at one end who practically have names on their barstools.

And multiple exits.

“One more to go,” he says, meaning one more kill and the vengeance will be done.

“One more,” I say.

He wants to talk about the future.

This is new for him. The three of us have never been ones to make plans for the future. We’re about episodic plans—surviving this or that assignment, landing the next job.

Orton was one of the few American kids down in the St. Neri reformatory in Tucumayo and an Albanian American at that, which struck us as quite the coincidence until we figured out that my family had probably heard about the place from his family. Most of the other kids were from Central and South America, with a few Europeans and Asians thrown in.

Orton was a cunning loner with an explosive temper.Furioso, they called him. I wasbello monstruo—beautiful monster.

We were friendly due to our shared language and shared hatred of the twisted schoolmasters who ran the place with their scholars’ robes. These were men who would punish kids by putting them in the hole, which was a literal hole lined with cement in the deepest part of the seminary. It was dark and scary and lonely, and we all got put down there at some point, except for Orton, who managed to avoid it due to his terror of confined spaces.

But one day, there was an incident where a kid was stealing bread from the kitchen. Everybody knew who it was—a red-haired boy named Ricardo—but us boys stuck together and didn’t tell on each other. That was the culture.

The schoolmasters lined us all up, and the head schoolmaster announced that Orton had been the one to take the bread, a lie that was obvious to all. Orton went pale. I knew he wouldn’t handle it, so I stepped forward and announced that I took thebread. I’d been in the hole a couple weeks before, and I felt like I’d cracked the code of it. And you had to stick together in that place.

Still, it was impulsive.

“You can’t,” Orton whispered because, obviously, I wasn’t the one who stole it.

I gazed right at the headmaster. “And it was delicious.”

That sealed my fate: I wound up in the hole for yet another week.

Once I got out, Orton stayed by my side whenever possible. He’s one of those guys who can’t get enough of the crones and their prophecies, and I soon discovered that some famous Albanian crone had told him that he would be a knight to akyreone day. She said he’d roam the world with thiskyreand come into wealth beyond his dreams.

Albanian crones love to use promises of wealth because the word “wealth” is so flexible. It could be wealth in terms of love or wealth in terms of money or health or anything.

Orton was all in. “You’re a Zogaj—part of the bloodline descended from The First. You have the mafia king’s blood, a natural-born kyre, and the fact that you took the punishment for me is a sign that you are my kyre.”

“It’s a sign that I’m a stubborn asshole who loves pissing off those guys,” I’d said.

He wasn’t having it.

Orton always points out whenever a crone’s prediction comes true.

I always point out when one doesn’t.

In spite of our differences, we were fast friends after that, though it was an unbalanced friendship being that he sees himself as my knight.

Some drunks get into a fight at the other end of the bar.

“You know we can’t go back outside,” Orton says, and he doesn’t mean outside of the bar. He means back out into thefield as mercenaries.

I grunt. He’s right, of course. That type of balls-to-the-wall soldiering is a young man’s game, and we’re in our mid-thirties. We got out mostly intact. No small thing.

He’s silent for a long time, then, “We have this now. I know that you don’t want to follow in your father’s footsteps?—”

“No, I don’t.”

“But from where I’m sitting, you’re good at this,” Orton continues. “Alteo sucked as a leader, but you have a gift. The men see it, too. We’re making money. You like being king.”

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