Black Violet

by Alex Hyland

  ‘The money?’ she says.

  The boy reaches over to the bedside table. Beside a tiny jar of pills and a large bottle of vodka lies a white envelope. He hands it to her, and she starts counting the bills inside.

  ‘It’s all there,’ says the boy.

  She nods. ‘If I can’t trust you, who can I trust, huh?’

  As she places the envelope in her bag, the boy hunches his shoulders and tries not to laugh. She steps toward him, kisses him on the mouth, then takes off his clothes. He pushes her onto the bed, and she smiles. The boy pulls off her underwear and immediately climbs on top of her. He pushes himself deep into her, grinding his hips against hers. As he writhes around, he strokes her hair for a moment, then places his hand around her neck.

  The woman shakes her head. ‘No,’ she says.

  As he takes hold of her throat, she winces and turns her head to one side.

  ‘I don’t like that,’ she says.

  ‘Quiet,’ says the boy.

  ‘I don’t like it!’

  ‘Shutup!’

  His demeanor turns violent as he places his other hand around her throat. She tries to wriggle out from underneath him, but he holds on even harder – squeezing her neck as he fucks her.

  ‘No!’ she says.

  ‘Shutup! Shutup! Shutup!’

  She struggles and manages to free one of the boy’s hands from her throat. He reaches to the bedside table and picks up the bottle of vodka. He keeps her held down as he takes a huge mouthful. The woman fights to throw him off her and slaps him. He swings the bottle down at her head. It doesn’t break. The woman goes limp. The boy drinks some more, puts the bottle back down on the table and carries on fucking her.

  By the time he rolls off her, the pillow beneath the woman’s head is soaked a full red. The boy doesn’t even seem to notice. He just sways on the bed for a moment, then lies down on his side. His eyes begin to close. He laughs quietly to himself, then falls asleep.

  For the next two hours of footage nothing in the room moves. Just the boy breathing heavily as a red stain seeps across the sheets.

  At two hours-forty-three minutes into the footage, there’s a knock at the door.

  ‘Lance?’ comes a man’s voice from outside. ‘Lance, did you get back OK?’

  Silence for a moment. The door then slowly opens and Senator Robert Howard – the current Vice President – steps into the room. He stops in the doorway, horrified by the scene that confronts him.

  ‘Lance!’

  He runs to the bed and tries to wake his son. Lance groans but doesn’t get up. The senator runs toward the woman on the bed. He goes to revive her, but instead reels back from her.

  ‘Oh God, Lance, what have you done?’

  He stares around the room, then covers Lance with a blanket and drags him off the bed.

  ‘Lance!’ he yells.

  The boy groans as he rolls around on the floor. The senator realizes the room door is still open. He closes it, then takes out his phone. He stands just out of shot as he makes a call.

  His voice is shaking. ‘Chris,’ he says. ‘You need to get to the hotel now, something bad has happened. No. Lance. The Barker Suite, make sure...’

  The screen then goes black. The footage stops.

  Silence. I took a deep breath, then closed the laptop screen. I couldn’t believe what I’d just seen. I don’t know what I’d expected to find on the disk – government data, technology – I don’t know. But this felt like the worst. I hoped they fried them both, the worthless motherfuckers.

  I sat in the shredded remnants of my apartment, and gazed again at the necklace – its diamond now resting separately beside it. I’d been back in San Francisco for less than six hours. The moment I got off the plane, I went straight to SF State and paid some student fifty bucks to weigh the diamond for me. The nine-digit code had unlocked the disk.

  I grabbed a mouthful of whiskey, and tried to make some sense of it all. Whatever job the senator did covering it up, it was a good bet that his son’s hidden camera had remained hidden. Probably found by a maid. I remember Ella saying something about Fisher’s wife divorcing him because he’d had an affair with a housekeeper. Any money, she worked at the same hotel.

  Fisher must have been blackmailing the senator for years. Receiving government contracts in return for a guarantee that the footage remained hidden. How the Bragers found out about it, I don’t know. Fisher died during routine surgery – maybe the doctors behind the masks weren’t who he thought they were.

  Not that it mattered now. All that was important to me was that the footage was made public and that Jon got the credit for it. I thought about the best way of breaking the story. Going to the World Review was out – it would mean too many questions. Ella and Cooper wouldn’t want any link to this, and there was no way I was going to be able to explain my involvement without dragging them into it.

  Better if I didn’t explain anything at all. I stared back at the laptop. Amelia507. It was the name of the first girl that Jon ever fell in love with, and her address on Cumberland. It was also the password to Jon’s web page.

  One final post from Jonathan Violet.

  The laptop’s hard disk gently crackled as it uploaded the footage – an uneven murmur that was going to turn into a full-blown storm in a few hours. As the laptop whirred away, I headed over to the balcony window and gazed out at the bay.

  It was all done now. But I felt no sense of relief. No escape. Jon was gone and the pain of that wasn’t going away any time soon. I watched the cars coasting down the Embarcadero. A Porsche Cayenne heading for the financial district. An Audi R8 turning into Green Street. I watched them and waited for some familiar bell to ring within me – some semblance of my old life to invite me back. But nothing sounded. The cars just coasted by. I was back on my home turf, but it felt as alien to me as the island had.

  I gazed at my hands, and felt more lost than I’d ever been.

  As a child I used to believe that magic was real – that it was a genuine force in the world that brought hope and wonder into peoples’ lives.

  It’s a cold day when you realize that all you’ve ever believed in were tricks and illusions. Beautifully crafted and elegantly played maybe – but tricks nonetheless. The priest might point to heaven, but it’s what’s going on in his other hand that you should be concerned about. And I was no better. Painting my little pictures to Jon. Making him believe in the something that wasn't there.

  I’d have done anything to put that right.

  I climbed the shallow hill toward Jon’s grave. The air cold and gray. The sky like ash above the trees.

  I reached the grave – the broken earth still soft around the wooden plaque that bore his name.

  I sat down in the grass and closed my eyes.

  Quiet. Just the hush of the city in the distance.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I should have been a better brother to you. I should have told you. I messed it all up, Jon. I’m sorry.’

  I wiped my eyes, then stared at his name – the delicate letters carved into the wood. I waited for some memory of his voice to echo in me. Some forgotten moment of forgiveness that I could hang on to.

  But the silence continued to pour though me. The earth remained cold beneath me. And the sky drifted on.

  I was alone.

  I picked myself off the ground, then headed over to an empty bench on the cemetery path just behind me. I grabbed the whiskey bottle from my jacket and took a sip.

  I didn’t know what I was going to do now. I just sat there and gazed emptily at the handful of visitors in the cemetery. A young woman adjusting flowers by a headstone way down the hill. Another reading a book as she sat in the rose garden. As she turned a page, she nodded politely to a guy in his late sixties strolling through the garden. The guy smiled back, then headed up the path toward me.

  He stopped beside me and gestured at the free end of the bench.

  ‘You mind?’ he said.

  I shook my
head.

  He sat down, then reached into his tweed jacket. He produced a small plastic container and peeled off the lid. Inside was a slice of cake, a plastic fork and a napkin. He grabbed the fork, then scooped up a mouthful of cake.

  He eyed me sheepishly. ‘My wife,’ he said. ‘She doesn’t let me eat this stuff any more.’

  I said nothing.

  He took another mouthful, then glanced down at the container. He held it out to me. ‘You want?’

  I shook my head again. I stared at what was left of the whiskey bottle, then offered it to him.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘But thank you.’

  He smiled warmly. He looked like a grandfather. Gray hair and matching mustache. Gentle, bespectacled eyes, and a portly build that spoke volumes about his love for desserts.

  He took another mouthful of cake, then wiped his mustache clean with his fingers.

  ‘That was an interesting video you posted,’ he said.

  I shot him a look.

  ‘I’ve got a question for you,’ he said. ‘You killed the Bragers. Some others too, I hear. You enjoy it?’

  My heart jumped a gear as I got to me feet. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Did you?’

  Only Ella knew what had happened with the Bragers. I scanned the cemetery. A pearl black BMW 7 was parked near the gates. Like the one that pulled up that night at DND Storage.

  I eyed the old man carefully. ‘You’re the guy Tully worked for,’ I said.

  ‘Apparently not,’ he replied.

  ‘You’re government.’

  He shrugged. ‘I have friends who are.’

  He took another mouthful of cake, then glanced back at me.

  ‘You enjoy killing, Michael?’

  I held his look. I wouldn’t have answered if I hadn’t been in the shadow of Jon’s grave.

  I shook my head

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Good, that’s what I wanted to hear.’

  He put away the fork, then wiped his mouth with the napkin.

  ‘I believe in the law, Michael. That said, I’m not averse to employing people who haven’t always shared that perspective. I often find these people can be very effective at protecting the same laws that once defined them as unsavory.’

  ‘Unsavory, am I?’

  ‘Yeah. I’d like to offer you a job.’

  I laughed. ‘Forget it.’

  ‘A man of your talents? A whole world of trouble you could put right.’

  I noticed a couple of mean-looking suits on the hill. The old man’s bodyguards. I eyed them uneasily.

  ‘There’s no threat here, Michael,’ said the old man. ‘No one’s going to force you to do this.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘You want to return to stealing cars, be my guest, it’s of no real interest to me.’

  ‘I’m done with that.’

  ‘Then what?’ he said. He leaned back on the bench. ‘I understand you had a love for magic as a child. Perhaps you could return to that. Earn yourself a spot entertaining tourists on cruise ships.’

  I shot him a bitter look, then started walking toward the main gates.

  ‘I’m offering you a chance to join the fight, Michael,’ he said. ‘To honor your brother. Keep some part of him alive.’

  I slowed to a halt – the words clinging to me like iron.

  As I stared back at Jon’s grave, the old man got up from the bench. He strolled over and stood beside me.

  He nodded toward Jon’s plaque. ‘I knew him,’ he said. ‘Not well, but we talked on a number of occasions. A man of good taste, I think. A fan of Mark Twain.’

  He smiled to himself.

  ‘But it’s interesting,’ he said. ‘You know who wrote his favorite quote?’

  I glanced at him for a moment, then nodded.

  ‘Oscar Wilde,’ he said. “Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.” He laughed. ‘Damn right.’

  He placed a comforting hand on my shoulder, then beckoned me to follow him.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a lot to discuss. Maggie’s do a great peach cobbler, I’ll buy you one.’

  He headed down the hill toward his car. As he did, I gazed at Jon’s grave.

  I didn’t know what it was that I’d hoped for. A sense of forgiveness? A glowing break in the clouds? Some fleeting moment of worldly magic that I could read something into?

  It may not have been the moment that I’d wanted – but if this is what it was going to take to put things right, then fair enough, Jon.

  I took a final look at his plaque, then turned and followed the old man down the hill.