Page 40 of Roma Queen
There are leaves on the ground. The boy can’t remember if they were there when he went inside the box or not. The man holds the boy’s hand. They walk quickly through the park, their breath making pillars of fog that trail behind them in the cold, and the man looks. He’s always looking. It took the boy a little while to realize what the man was looking for, but then the man found another little boy like him and brought him back to the box, too, and the boy figured it out.
The other boy hadn’t stop crying for days. The other boy was called Peter, and his daddy was a fireman. The man hadn’t liked the boy talking to Peter. The man had come and taken Peter away after only three visits, and Peter had not come back.
The boy knows better than to ask what happened to Peter. Instead, he likes to think that Peter’s father brought his firetruck and rescued him. If the boy’s own father had a firetruck, then undoubtedly he would have done the same.
“Don’t make a sound,” the man warns as they approach the playground. “If you’re good, I’ll buy you some cotton candy.”
The boy’s heart climbs into his throat. It’s so hard to know how to be good and make theƒ man happy, but the boy wants to make him happy. He wants that cotton candy more than anything else in the world. Treats like that used to be commonplace in his old life, but now they are few and far between, and not to be missed out on.
The man takes the boy and sits on a bench, watching the other children play. Then the man sits the boy on a swing and pushes him, and for a few moments the dizzying weightless potential of flight is an ecstasy that grips hold of the boy and physically shakes him.
Soon, the man has made up his mind.
He removes the boy from the swing, and heads back to the bench. “There. Him.” He points out the one he has selected. The boy knows what must be done. Wrapped in his thick winter coat, the boy makes his way across the playground and approaches the boy playing alone in the dirt.
“What are you doing?” the boy asks.
“Digging,” is the reply.
“Can I play?”
The other boy nods. His name is Samuel, and his daddy is a doctor. The boy wonders vaguely how Samuel’s father will save him, if he doesn’t have a firetruck.
On the way back to the car, the man carries Samuel in his arms. He doesn’t cry. Doesn’t seem to mind the adventure.
The man lets the boy sit in front to eat his cotton candy on the way home.
Eighteen
PASHA
Bad luck is a tricky thing.It’s easy to come by, and hard to get rid of. As a rule, I generally do my best not to believe in it. I cultivated a scientific mind when I went away to boarding school as a teenager and made sure I stopped lending weight to the numerous superstitions that used to go hand in hand with the Roma people. I filled my head with as many scientific facts as I could, and I started washing my hands in the same damn sink as women, I didn’t break out into a cold sweat every time I heard a dog howl, and before too long I didn’t even think about such things anymore.
But fuckingowls…
Owls are more than just bad luck. They’re an omen of death, and one just flew into the windows of my loft and brought a hail of shattered, sharp-edged glass raining down on top of the woman I love.
Prikoza.
I never thought I’d be fucking saying this to myself, but this is some seriously fucked upprikoza.
Zara doesn’t speak much on the way over to her place. She’s trapped in a loop inside her head. The same loop I’m spinning around in. The words I whispered into her ear; the heat between our bodies; the moment when we both signed ourselves over to the fact that we were going to fuck like animals in front of the window; me, noticing the blur of white come rushing toward us; me, grabbing hold of Zara and shielding her with my body; an impossibly deafening sound as the glass splintered and fell; me, taking the broken bird outside and bashing the tiny creature’s head in with a fucking ashtray.
I’ve had to put animals out of their misery before, and it doesn’t get any easier. I will pound my fists into another man’s face all day and all fucking night, until my knuckles split open or his skull does, and I won’t feel a single fucking ounce of guilt. Not one tiny morsel. But a defenseless animal? An injured animal? If I’d been alone in the loft when that had happened, I’m not ashamed to admit that I would have been crying like a little bitch as I gently collected that bird’s fragile body and released it, letting it sail over the side of the balcony and into the canopy of trees below.
I should have taken it outside and buried it properly. I wish I fucking had, but we didn’t have the time. We had to get out of there. Because no bird could have accidentally flown into those windows and really broken them. That was fucking tempered glass, thereally-fucking-hard-to-breakkind, and that bird had weighed no more than three fucking pounds. Like most birds, its bones were hollow, its mass mainly comprised of feathers, so this begs the question: how the hell did the glass break?
I’m keep drawing the same conclusion over and over again. The birddidn’tbreak it. Something or someone else did, and the owl was just a message. A very clear, very pointed message that I was bound by my heritage to understand.
You’re fucking with dangerous people, Pasha Rivin. You’re involved in something far bigger than you know. You’ve bitten off way more than you can chew, my friend…and now someone is about to die.
Sitting next to me in the Mustang, Zara thumbs through the keys on her keychain, flicking each of them around the brass loop one at a time. She’s lost inside her own head, but at least she didn’t have to feel the bird’s sticky copper blood on her hands as she stroked its feathers soothingly one last time before it died. She didn’t have to feel the give in the bird’s skull as it caved. I’m glad I kept that from her, at least.
We both snap out of our shared reverie the moment we pull up in front of her apartment building. I leave the Mustang directly next to the payphone, wheels butting up against the curb, even though it’s a no parking zone, and we both climb the three flights of stairs up to Zara’s apartment in silence.
She lets us in, and the very first thing I notice are the size eight Italian leather shoes, buffed to a high shine, sitting neatly side-by-side next to the mail stand in the hallway.Men’s shoes.They weren’t there when we left for the Rivin glen. When it comes to this place, the place Zara and I slept together for the first time, my memory is fucking eidetic.
Zara sees the shoes and goes utterly still, her eyes are wild as she shakes her head in answer to my unspoken question—no, she doesn’t have clue who the shoes belong to. Fuck. Is it too much to ask for? To have one thing go fucking smoothly for once? I don’t have a weapon with me. I should have snatched the Specialist I keep in the lock box in my closet before we left my place, but I had other things on my mind. It doesn’t matter, though. I’ll fucking end whoever’s here with my bare hands if I have to.
