by Rob Rogers
A series of maps hung on one wall, all of them of the city. The first, an aging piece of parchment said to be sketched by the pirate St. Diable himself, was drawn in thick, black lines. At the bottom, though, a message was scratched in a different color ink—it might even have been dried blood. Here I make my mark, it read. There was a map from the War of 1812, showing troop movements. There was a map from the 1920s, an aerial photo from the 1970s, a more recent map on which the Robber Baron had made very tiny notations in his precise handwriting.
Throughout the room were small artifacts of the city’s past. A daguerreotype of John Bullocq, the dirt magnate. A Confederate officer’s pistol. A flier from the city’s bicentennial celebration. An antique grandfather clock. A pair of gloves worn by Charles Lindbergh when he’d visited the city. The mask worn by the Gray Fog, the city’s last superhero.
But two prizes dominated the room.
The first was the cutlass said to be used by the pirate St. Diable in boarding more than a hundred plundered ships. The short blade of the weapon was just under two feet long, its steel edge still sharp. The hilt was burnished leather, the pommel a carved golden skull inlaid with ruby eyes.
The second prize was a painted portrait of Lady Danger, said to be commissioned just months before her disappearance. The painter’s name was lost to history, but he had the eye for human emotion of a Caravaggio or Rembrandt. Her masked face was beautiful, the skin showing the hint of the tan she developed on the open seas, the reddish-brown hair pulled back to accommodate the narrow turquoise and black harlequin mask that hid her identity, her eyes flashing with anger or mischief.
Costas Kalodimos had always liked the portrait, and his eyes found it briefly as he followed the Robber Baron into his sanctum.
He had worried when the Robber Baron had called that the other man knew just what Costas had been doing to try to dislodge the Cirque d’Obscurité from the city and what actions Costas had taken against him. But their conversation had been peaceful, free of rancor. The Robber Baron had inquired about his family, about his brother’s near encounter with Rusalka. He had expressed regret about the loss of the Cirque d’Obscurité, but had been optimistic about their future, indicating that Costas and his family would play a large role in that. And he had invited Costas back to his study for a drink.
“Wine?” the Robber Baron asked, holding up a bottle of an expensive French vintage nearly as old as Costas himself. He was dressed in his full regalia—the black gaucho hat, the scarlet mask, the black topcoat, the red shirt, the gloves and boots.
Costas nodded, taking the crystal glass gingerly as he sat across the desk from the crime lord. He drank some, closing his eyes in appreciation of its robust flavor.
The Robber Baron sat, too, and they were quiet for a time, enjoying the wine.
Costas looked back at the portrait of the Lady Danger. “She was beautiful,” he said, “if that portrait is any indication. I mean, the mask covers some of her features, but the rest—she was breathtaking. Such fire in the eyes, such spirit.” He looked at the Robber Baron, the wine making him expansive. “They say that he loved her. And yet they also say that he murdered her.” He nodded at the sword mounted on the wall near the portrait. “With that very sword.” He shook his head. “Did she betray him, do you think? Did their conflict finally reach the point where it had to be one or the other?” He wondered what had possessed him to mention betrayal.
“No,” the Robber Baron said. “Their conflict, though real, was a game to them. It was part of their give and take. It was foreplay.” He ran his fingertips along his beard. “And no, she didn’t betray him.” His eyes, staring at the portrait, looked melancholy. “She would never do that. She loved him, too.”
“Then why?” Costas asked. He set down his wine and stood, then walked over to the portrait of Lady Danger, leaning close and gazing at her masked face as though the oils in the painting could reveal secrets to him. “Why kill her?”
“You are married,” the Robber Baron said obliquely. “I’ve dined with you and your Agatha. You are vicious and merciless and brass-balled with your enemies, yet you’re devoted to her. Am I right?” There was an edge to his voice.
Costas turned toward him. The Robber Baron had stood, too. “Yes,” he said.
“But what if someone told you,” the Robber Baron asked, crossing to the pirate’s ancient sword and carefully removing it from the wall, “that if you killed her, if you murdered Agatha, you could live forever?” He held the sword up toward the chandelier, staring at it as the metal caught the light of the candles in the room. He ran his gloved thumb along its edge. “Would you do it?” His eyes flicked to Costas’s from behind his mask. “You love her. I know that. But tell me, Costas. You and I know each other well enough. We’re cut from the same kind of pattern. We’ve toasted our successes, mourned our failures, buried our enemies. Imagine that you loved her even more than you do, that she was in your thoughts almost every moment. But you were given this—” his voice broke off as he searched for the word. His hat tilted forward, casting shadows over his eyes. “Opportunity.” He nodded. The wide, thick blade of the cutlass, balanced in the air in the Robber Baron’s hand, never wavered. “Would you take it, Costas? Would you take the opportunity?”
Costas was struck by the sudden change in the Robber Baron’s voice. He’d known the Robber Baron for most of his life. He’d watched him kill before. Not long ago, he’d been standing next to the baron on the deck of the riverboat when he had given the order for Tony Ferazzoli to be murdered. But he’d never seen this kind of intensity, this kind of emotion from him. The man’s lips were drawn and pale, the rest of his skin flushed. He was at once wistful, anguished, and angry, and the anger radiated in the air between them. Candles flickered on the Robber Baron’s desk. The pendulum on his grandfather clock swung back and forth.
“No,” Costas said finally, Agatha’s face in his mind. He didn’t see her as he remembered her from their youth. Instead, he imagined her as he’d seen her that morning, face drawn and wrinkled, eyes lined. The face she’d grown into, the result of the decades they’d spent together. “No,” he said. “I don’t think that I could do that.”
Costas Kalodimos was resigned, rather than surprised, when the Robber Baron lowered his sword, moved forward, and plunged it into his belly. He saw the cutlass come out, covered in his blood, and clutched himself where he felt the wound. His body was on fire, the pain searing through him. His hands couldn’t contain all the blood. It rushed over his gold rings, pulsed onto his Rolex watch, his gold bracelet. He stumbled to his knees and then fell to his side, legs curling up beneath him, blood soaking into the Robber Baron’s hardwood floor.
“That’s where we differ, Costas,” the Robber Baron said. “I could do that.”
He gazed away from the fallen man to the portrait of Lady Danger. As he tilted his face upward, the shadows fell from his eyes, and Costas could see that they were filled with tears, running down his mask. “I did do that,” the Robber Baron—the ancient pirate St. Diable—said. He looked back at Costas, brushed at the tears unashamedly with his gloved hand. “And so you must realize that killing an old and trusted friend, one who has betrayed me, is really no great thing.”
He pulled a large handkerchief from a pocket and began to clean Costas’s blood from his sword.
Costas opened his mouth, but couldn’t speak. He thought of the old gun in his pocket, but realized he’d never find the strength to pull it out, to use it. He was going to die here in this room, surrounded by remembrances of the city’s past.
“A gut wound like that,” the old pirate said, “is quite painful. It will take you a while to die.” He leaned forward, almost solicitous. “I would offer you your glass of wine again, Costas, but it would pour right through you.” He leaned forward, patting Costas on the shoulder. “I’ll take care of Agatha,” he said. “You needn’t worry about that. My grudge is with you, not her.”
It was a further agony, but Costas su
mmoned the resolve to nod in gratitude. The pain was incredible.
“Well,” the old pirate said. “That is, my grudge is with you and these people who are trying to take my city away from me.” He shook his head. “Argonaut. Bedlam. Doctor Camelot.” He said the names with a mocking distaste. He wiped one last time at the sword, then threw the handkerchief in the trash. “I made this city. I own this city. I have sacrificed more for it than anyone could ever hope to understand.” He swept a hand around at the various artifacts in the room then returned the sword to its place on the wall.
As he continued to bleed, Costas began to shiver with shock and the chill of blood loss. Staring up at the Robber Baron, his mind drifted. He thought not of his son Nick, but of Julian. He wondered what Julian would do when he learned. Would he rage? Would he avenge him? Or would he bring the Robber Baron a bottle of ouzo with a wink and a smile?
Costas stared up at the old pirate, the edges of his vision going black. Before the Robber Baron, there’d been the Hangman. Before him, a masked gangster called John Dusk. Before them, there had been perhaps half a dozen others, and before them, there had been St. Diable the pirate, who had founded the city through plundered gold and the blood of his enemies. And, too, the blood of his only love. A legacy of power and corruption, it had always seemed, this succession of criminals and tyrants.
But he realized now that it was a different kind of succession.
It’s time for the Hangman to die, the Robber Baron had said to him the day that his Uncle Ilias and the Hangman had died. But no one had ever found the Hangman’s body in the burnt shell of the strip club. Because it wasn’t really a death, just a transition from one masked identity to another. Uncle Ilias and those bodyguards had died because they were too close to the Hangman not to realize that despite differences in clothing and persona, the Robber Baron and the Hangman were the same man. But they had been, he realized now. All of them were the same man, reinventing himself.
The Robber Baron peered down at him again and sighed. “I don’t enjoy watching this, you know,” he said. “Is the pain bad?”
Costas was able to nod his head again. He tried to speak, but his mouth was full of blood.
“You were my friend for a long time,” the masked man said. He blew air out of his mouth. It made his moustache curl. His eyes looked sad, tinged with regret. “Would you like me to help you, Costas?”
The agony was unbearable, but Costas could do nothing. He couldn’t even bring himself to nod again. He pleaded with his eyes.
“For an old friend,” the Robber Baron said, reaching up and pulling the sword from the wall once more, “I suppose that I can always clean the blade again.”
The last sight Costas Kalodimos ever saw was the cutlass arcing down, its blade gleaming in the flickering candlelight.
