Ink

by Hal Duncan

  He picks up the glass of port and takes a sip of it.

  “Sorry. Yes, I forget that you're on the straight and narrow now, so to speak. No more gambling. No more playing Casanova.”

  He takes another sip of the port.

  “So have you really stopped stealing women's jewelry?”

  The silence is palpable, broken only by the clink of the crystal stopper as I take it out of the decanter, and then by the driggle of port into the glass. Another clink as I replace the stopper.

  I sit down in the chair.

  “You do specialize in jewels, don't you?” he says. “That's what I've heard. The most notorious jewel thief on the Riviera, so they say. I'm sure Mother would be proud.”

  I weigh the options, consider the various possible pathways of lies and denials. It's unlikely that he could have any firm evidence, though it's not impossible. I could play dumb and deny any circumstantial chains of mere coincidence: a childhood nickname … the happenstance of dates and places. I could bluff it out, play the shocked naif, wounded that he would even suspect such things of me. But it would not be convincing. We know each other much too well. I simply shrug.

  “We all have our vices,” I say.

  I knew from the moment I got his telegram that my brother had rumbled me. To be honest, I find myself thinking, it's about time; I've been waiting for this moment for years. Year after year, whenever I would return to Strann from a summer in Nice or Cannes, with the newspapers full of the Black Fox's latest daring heist, I was always rather disappointed to be welcomed simply as the perennial prodigal. For years I expected to be taken aside by my brother, newspaper in hand, to be asked, in his sternest voice, just what exactly I had been up to. Instead, on more than one occasion, I remember taking him aside and asking that very question myself. And was he proud to be associated with these thugs, with a deviant like Rohm?

  I remember later nursing my sore jaw as he apologized, tried to explain himself—how he felt at home, part of a brotherhood, part of a greater purpose— and I realized that he was lying not to me but to himself. We all have our vices, indeed. So, how is your young “friend”? I think. Yes, I have my own leverage. But we are not children anymore. I grew out of tit-for-tat many years ago and even if we are playing some sort of game here, the hunter and the fox, there are limits on what is fair play.

  “So what is this all about?” I say.

  He lays his hand on top of the book and leans forward in his chair, light from the lamp slicing diagonally across his face.

  “You are the Black Fox, aren't you?” he says.

  I hold my hands up, wrists together as if waiting for the handcuffs.

  “Guilty as charged,” I say. “But you're not going to rat on your own brother, are you?”

  “I don't want to see you in prison,” he says. “I told you I have a job for you. There's a jewel I need you to steal.”

  “I am on the straight and narrow, as you say, these days. I'm retired.”

  “I need you to do this for me,” he says. “You have to do this for me.”

  His hand still plays idly over the tome upon the table. He strokes the leather surface of the book as if it's some living animal he's petting, or an attache case containing secrets that will save the nation. I imagine it handcuffed to his wrist as in some dreadful novel of spies and adventures.

  I always thought, in the games we played as children, that we were both heroes of sorts, the adventurer and the rogue, the hunter and the fox. I think that he still sees himself that way, but in reality the hunters of this world have dogs that rip the fox's throat out when they catch it. To the hunter, the fox is vermin to be killed, its blood smeared on a young man's face, red as his tunic, red as my brother's armband. Given the times we're living in, those games we played, and the stories that our father told us, don't seem quite the same.

  “What do you want with this jewel?” I say.

  Harlequin's Dream

  “Power,” says Guy.

  Don cuts the lights. Pierrot stands, a somber shape of black on black in the now-silent hall as, at his back, a thin veil falls, a flickering orange candlelight behind it. Now, in shadow play, we see Jack dragged by chains into a cell, thrown to the ground. Shapes, cut-out puppets of a magic lantern show, bestial, monstrous things, rise in the filtered glow, surround him.

  “Hail to the dark, O sacred daughter of aching loss,” I sing. “In days gone by, you took the son of earth and sky into your springs.”

  Among the moving shades one shape is still—a woman or a child? A girl.

  “O holy maid, when up out of the never-ending fire his father came—”

  A winged form rises suddenly above the girl, bright white among the black, a trick of Don's most intricate mechanical light-engineering skills. An angel Gabriel or Leda's swan, it swoops upon her.

  “—and so,” I sing, “his father brought him forth between his thighs, a cry, a name.”

  “Jack,” comes the whisper from the Princess.

  The shapes disperse, they dissipate, angel of light and girl of shadow separate, and then there's only Jack, huddled in chains, Pierrot's prisoner waiting for his doom. He curls up on the ground.

  “Sleep, twice-born son,” I sing, “within your father's womb, your mother's tomb, your dreams. We promise you, you will be back. You shall be known in Themes.”

  The lights come up again on Pierrot and now, in his black suit, he is the only darkness on the stage.

  “But you, the darkness now,” I sing, “cast us aside, when on your sacred grounds we strive to hold our revels garlanded with crowns.”

  I stand behind him, soft voice at his shoulder.

  “Why do you hate us? Why evade us? By the purple fruit that hangs upon the vine I promise there will come a time when you will turn your thoughts within and in your blood and in your brine, the salt of semen and of sin, you'll find one thing … the spirit.”

  “Harlequin,” sneers Pierrot.

  He wheels and, brushing me aside, exits stage left.

  ——

  “These creatures born of clay,” I sing, “what rage and fury they display, this Pierrot, this son of the earth-born actions of the worms of an archaic age, savage and monstrous in his ways, a giant in his inhumanity, a murderous will against divinity. Just give him time and he'll have all the servants of the Harlequin in chains. He has our comrade even now plunged in the dismal, black, abysmal prison of his palace. Do you see this, Harlequin, how Pierrot reigns? Your prophets struggle under his relentless cruelty. Come, O King, holding your golden thyrsus high up on the slopes of oil lamps, curb the pride of this bloodthirsty fool.”

  I sing to the silhouette of sleeping Jack.

  “Where are you, Harlequin? Out in the night, among the dens of beasts and peaks of carcasses, gathering revelers around your green-veined flute? Or in the darkwood thick of oil lamps, where the orphan gathered trees and beasts of the fields around his lute.”

  “He's in prison,” says the Duke. “We just saw him thrown in prison.”

  “I believe it is a metaphor,” the consul says … “m'sire.”

  “O blessed veils of Empyre, Harlequin honors you. To you he will come back with his rites to lead the dance—”

  Behind the scenes, Don kicks the son et lumiere into action. This is where things should get interesting, I think—Harlequin's dream, the audience's trance. Color kaleidoscopes out of projectors mounted on the wagon's lighting rig, over the walls and ceiling of the dull gray hall.

  “To lead the whirling maidens over the freefall,” I sing, “over the flow of the turning axis, over the churning ludic foam, the chaos of passion and praxis—”

  Gold and cerulean, glittering gilded leaves and diamond flakes of snow tumble across the walls, fractals and fronds of shimmering color in a light show, shattering sapphires and carnelians. People ooh and oh. There's even one loud wow. There should be, though; the acid in the dry ice should be kicking in by now.

  “Over the father of all rivers,” I
sing, “that brings joy to humanity with its freshwater springs …”

  Then bursting through the wash of light, blossoms of silversea, in waves, crash, dappling into horses, galloping palomino mares, black stallions in the night.

  “Over the river of all souls that feeds this land of steeds,” I sing.

  And bucking among the sires and dams, a single, prancing, mottled foal.

  I sneak a glance backstage, see Joey down on one knee, Jack behind him, gesturing rudely with his flute. Joey, ever the pessimist, is tucking a knife into his boot.

  HAPPINESS IS A WARM GUN

  “I just don't think that violence can ever be justified, Don.”

  “Never, Jim? Isn't that a little glib, a little pat?”

  “No, it's the plain truth. When has anything ever been solved down the barrel of a gun? That kind of ‘solution’ is a bit too ‘final'. I just think we're playing with fire, here.”

  “Since when has violence ever solved anything? That's a beautiful thought, Jim, but I can hear the white van coming for you right around now” [sounds of an ambulance siren] “a-a-a-and Elvis has left the building. Nighty-night, Jim-Bob. Sweet dreams. Don't let the bitmites bite. And hello… Hugh, what's your take on the matter at hand?”

  “Don, Jack Flash is just a criminal. He's not a hero. I'm sick of hearing all these poor little rich kids whining on and on about how ‘oppressed’ they are. They don't know what duty means. Our grandfathers fought—”

  “—a war for them, yeah, yeah, let's bring back National Service, send them all to Russia, see how they like living under the Futurists, hanging's too good for them, bring back the thumbscrews. Am I right, Hugh? Am I right?”

  “Look, all I'm saying is, at least we have the luxury to complain—”

  “—and get blacklisted.”

  “They could get jobs if they wanted them.”

  “Tell that to the homosexuals.”

  “Clause 22? The Employment Act was totally necessary. These people were working in our schools, with our children, perverts teaching our kids.”

  “The old Premeditated Socrates, eh? First-degree corruption of the youth. Hugh, take a look out there. Our youth don't need to be corrupted…”

  Fast Puck and I, entwined, wind round each other, dancing flesh-to-flesh, chakra-to-chakra.

  “So what's it like, being an avatar of chaos?” he mumbles through a mouthful.

  “It can be a little bit… unstable,” I say.

  I can feel the tingling up and down my serpent spine from the endorphin halo high of the crown chakra, down through the sixth-chakra serotonin clarity of the ajna eye in the center of the forehead, down to chakra five, the throat, the voice, the word, the guttural growling tone of hunger, down to the adrenaline rush of fear and fury sourced in the heart chakra, down to the third, beneath it, in the diaphragm, the solar plexus, where the affect of pride and guilt is born from a kinesthesia of lungs and nervous breaths, of gasps and laughter, down, down to the hara chakra of the lower belly, of the guts, and down … down to chakra number one, the mother lode, the loins and lust, source of all chi-energy, source of testosterone and oxytocin. You can nix the ego in nirvana, baby, but the flesh lives on, and it has its own agenda.

  And down in that one spot where my tongue-slicked foreskin slips back over glans and lipsmacks slurp around my full-on cock, I feel the hot crystal smash of orgasm as his thumb jabs hard into my perineum—halfway between hard-on's root and ass—in an ancient tantric trick to halt the outflow of the juice.

  “Yeehaw,” I say, or words to that effect.

  It takes me a couple of minutes to chill my breathing; then, charged up with all the mystic life force of the universe, fully embodied and aware in every fiber of my flesh, I untangle from the horny kid and rise to dress.

  The Fox has done me proud.

  I pull on the leather trousers (American air cavalry, laced up the sides), the crimson shirt (Futurist Cossack, spattered with the blood of Russian nobility), the epauletted jacket (black and gold of the Free Iberian Alliance), the spring-loaded jackboots (best Weimar Republic engineering) and, over this, the armored long-coat stolen from the sentry. I look in the full-length mirror as I wind a white silk scarf around my neck and place the nightshade goggles on my forehead. I look passably human now, flame-colored spikes of bleached hair unnatural but not ungodly; skin, fingernails and nostrils—all the little things that matter. Only the silver and gold of my irises remain as an eerie reminder that I really don't belong in this world.

  “So you think you can take him?” says Puck.

  “Joey?” I say. “Piece of piss. Joey's a pussycat, once you get to know him.”

  “He fucking shot you.”

  I shrug.

  “I pissed him off.”

  “He betrayed us all.”

  “Only person Joey betrayed,” I say, “was himself.”

  Puck shakes his head. I'm the original lost cause.

  Noticing that my joint has gone out, I dig into the pocket of the longcoat for the matchbook, snap one off, fold over the cover to wedge the head of the match between cardboard and sandpaper, flick it—ffsh—and suck down on the spliff. Make mental note: Must remember to pick up a lighter.

  “You'll be wanting this,” says Puck and, out of the dresser, he brings a mahogany box. He opens it with the most tender care and there's a silvery-golden gleam of metal.

  The Curzon-Youngblood Mark I chi-gun, antique prototype of all subsequent models, and still the best in many an assassin's book, glistens like an erection.

  Peachy keen, I think. I'm ready to rock and roll.

  Errata

  —

  A GRAND PLAN

  “And just what are ye going to do, Jack? Are ye going to walk into Germany and kill Adolf yerself, and then take a wee trip down to Italy and see to Benito too?”

  Seamus shakes his head. He's a good man and his heart's in the right place, sure, but he's an eedjit. They're a pair of fookin eedjits.

  “Maybe I will at that,” says Jack. “We could do it, you know. I think we could do it.”

  Seamus stubs the stinking Gauloise out in the ashtray and leans back against the dresser. The garret room is tiny, slope-ceilinged and with just a wee dormer window jutting out. A bed, a wardrobe and not much else. Seamus's digs aren't any more grand, sure—well they wouldn't be on a dockworker's wages— but at least he keeps his place decent, bed made neat, square-cornered sheets as the army taught him. Jesus, but Jack's place is like the inside of his fookin heid— a right fookin state, it is, with dirty fookin laundry everywhere and empty whisky bottles, five or six, no, Christ there's another one sticking out of the fookin drawer, in amongst all the fookin socks and shite. Aye, but he can fair drink for an Englishman. He can give Seamus a good run for his money in that these days and that's fookin saying something.

  The two of them spend a lot of time drinking now.

  “Oh, so it's we could do it, is it?” says Seamus. “Just march through Nazi Germany saying top o’ the morning to ye and what ho, old chap, and they'll just let us in to see the Führer. Or maybe we can steal some Nazi uniforms, sure, and say Sieg heil! and they'll never know the fookin difference. Oh, that's a grand fookin plan, Jack. Chin up, boys, and over—”

  Seamus stops himself just in time from saying over the top. It would be a low blow. What's past is past, he tells hisself. If he repeats it enough times, it might just fookin stick.

  “Maybe it is a plan,” says Jack. “We just walk to Berlin and kill anyone that gets in our damn way.”

  Jesus, but he's fookin serious and all.

  “Kill them all?” says Seamus.

  Jack doesn't answer, just stands up from the disheveled bed, picking an empty bottle off the floor and carrying it to the dresser. He places it there beside the ashtray, moving Seamus to one side, and walks back to the other side of the room, the whole four paces of it.

  Then he just says a single word and—

  —and the broken glass lies like a pow
der all over the top of the wooden unit and Seamus's ears are ringing and he's sick to the stomach and the mirror on the dresser's all warped like a fookin fun-house thing showing their shapes distorted limbs all out of kilter twisted room skewed broken bodies on a battlefield and crow flapping at the window black and white and red and Seamus is feeling the cold iron of the bedpost in his hand as the world stops shivering.

  “We're different,” says Jack. “You and I, we're different.”

  Seamus closes his eyes to cornfields stretching as far as the eye can see, snaps them back open again, breathing deeply.

  “What do you see, Finnan?” says Jack. “What do you see when you close your eyes?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What do you see when you're drunk and crazy, when you have your turns? That's what you call them, isn't it, when the words come out of you from somewhere so deep you can't even touch it when you're sober?”

  “It's not…”

  But he doesn't know what it is, sure, so how can he fookin deny it?

  “I know what you're saying, Finnan. I've heard you. Remember it's me that's dragged you home in the night when you can't stand on your own two feet. I've listened to you talking. I've understood. I've heard it before.”

  And Jack tells him about an expedition into the wilds of the Caucasus, about the language that he found there, written on the skins of dead men, the language that Finnan speaks but is too afraid to understand, that Jack understands but is too afraid to speak.

  ——

  Jack opens the wardrobe door and pulls out another bottle from behind a leather satchel that looks like it's seen better days. This bottle's full and he unscrews the top. He takes a swig and passes it to Seamus. Seamus takes a slug, bitter, aniseed and burning. Christ. He hacks, looks at the bottle. Jesus, isn't this stuff illegal?