by Mike Gomes
Pulling himself away from his wife, Jay moved out of the kitchen and walked into the living room, staring out the window at the street down below.
"That's where he played ball with the boys. They're not out there today. I guess they're having a hard time with it like we are." Jay turned his face from the window. "You know, he really was quite a player. I had always thought maybe if everything fell together the right way, he'd be in the Olympics playing for India. He was the best striker of anybody his age. There were few kids that could even match him, and that's in New Delhi, it's not like we were somewhere small.”
The smile that arose on Jay’s face warmed Priya’s heart and eased her suffering for just a moment.
"But that's all gone done."
"Yes, Jay, his life is over. And we'll never get to hold him again," Priya said, letting herself cry while holding her arms tightly around her body. "But he wouldn't want us to suffer. You're trying to make yourself be punished for what happened to him when it's not your fault, it was Patel, we know it was the wrong blood, he'll never tell us that, he'll never let you know."
"Then maybe I need to get to him. Somewhere where his goons aren't there to help. Maybe go visit his wife and his children and see how he likes it if his boy is gone," said Jay, snapping his head up and looking at his wife. "Maybe he deserves to feel the pain that he's causing other people. I know we entered into this knowing that it was wrong and illegal, but we meant to save our son and we believed that he had the same ideas. Illegal, but it was the right thing to do. But he lied and it was just about the money."
"What are you saying, Jay?" asked Priya, with a suddenly stern look on her face no longer trying to soften the pain for her husband. "Are you saying you're gonna go to his home and murder his children? Will that bring your son back? Will that let you ever hold him again?"
"I don't care. I'll never get my son back so why should he have his?" Jay snapped, walking across the room and sitting down in the large chair.
"And you're a murderer, Jay?" Priya asked, softening her voice and looking for him to answer. "Are you a man who takes life from people?"
"I don't know what kind of man I am anymore.” Jay put his head in his hands, trying hard to compose himself from the pain that he felt in his heart.
"So I married a murderer? I married a man who's going to go out and kill a child because his heart hurts," said Priya, again, holding back the tears that she knew were ready to fall. "So you've decided you're not even gonna kill Patel, you're gonna go after his kids or maybe his wife, and that that will let him feel what you're feeling. Will it be good to have him suffer the same feelings you feel?"
"I don't feel anything anymore," Jay grumbled, punching his fist hard into his thigh three times in rapid succession. "I might be walking around but I'm dead. I'm dead inside. I have nothing left."
"And what about our other children? We can't show another them a good life because of what happened here?" asked Priya, pleading with her husband and trying to get through his pain.
"Priya, what happened to our son could have been genetic," Jay snapped. "And if it was genetic, that means it can happen again."
"You're speculating. Nothing more than that," said Priya with a frustrated tone in her voice.
"No, I'm stating a fact... "
"It's speculation!" Priya yelled, insisting that her husband's thoughts were not accurate to what was happening.
"I am the man in this household, and if you haven't forgotten, in this society, it's a man who controls what goes on in his family," Jay said firmly, not allowing his wife to move further in the conversation.
"Are you serious?" she asked. "Are you seriously going to try to say all that patriarchal bullshit that once went on in this country is still there? I work just as hard as you do and I loved our son just as much as you did. So you're not gonna dictate to me how I can feel or what I can say. I have an opinion too. I have an opinion on what should happen. And my opinion, is that no child should die, making another parent feel like we do now."
"He deserves it!" said Jay standing up harshly and stepping toward his wife in the room. "He deserves the pain. He deserves the torture. He needs the same mistake to be made with his child. Then he'll know what he's doing to people."
"And you'll be in prison for the rest of your life," Priya told him. "And you can sit in that cell and you can rot day after day, thinking about your son that's no longer here and the wife and kids you left behind."
"Oh please, don't give me that." Jay turned away from his wife and paced across the room. "You know as well as I do, you'd be married within two years."
As the words came out of Jay's mouth, he knew that the sting they would provide would cut straight to her soul, giving her the feeling that he questioned her love, her character, and all that she was.
"Is that really what you think of me?" asked Priya in a soft and gentle tone. "Do you really feel like that I would just find somebody else and my life would move on? That I'd never come to visit you, that I'd never be able to see you again? Do you think I would stop loving you and stop caring? Because if that's what you think about me, we need to reassess who we are. I would expect that if I were in prison, you'd still be there for me."
"Well, I don't think that would happen. The power your family has over you and the constant way they're in our lives, they would get you to change to somebody else. It's no secret they have no interest in me and they wish that you would marry somebody else."
"That's true, they live by the old ways and with the arranged marriages. My two brothers have them and they wanted it for me but I loved you and that was more important," said Priya. "Don't forget, Jay, that when we first got together, you weren't a rich man. My parents had offered me a rich man from a rich family and I said no to that. Everything that you have, you've achieved through hard work and pushing your way up. Now, you can sit at the table when our family gets together to eat with my parents, and look my father in the eye as not a man who inherited his money but a man that earned it. Don't you think that counts for something in my eyes?"
"If I was in prison, all it would count for is whatever it was in the bank." Jay dropped his hands to his sides and placed them in his pockets. "I have no real status. I'm still a work a day a worker day person. I clean up after the other people, fix their kitchens, patch their walls, install them a new toilet. And do you think that they look at me as an equal when I stand in their homes? They don't. They don't at all. They tell me, 'Don't come through the front door, use the servant's entrance.' They tell me that if a friend comes by and asks who I am, just to place my head down and tell them that I'm a worker and shouldn't be talking, I should be working. The money we have might show that we're not in the lowest classes, Priya, but we are. I am no different than that kid that used to urinate in the street and used to try to find trash to see if there was something I could make out of it."
"Why are you beating yourself up?" she asked. "You should be letting yourself heal. You know as well as I do, you're much more a man than that, and you're much more of a man than the class system. But the death of Hani is taking a toll on you. You need to let go and let yourself feel and accept what's happened to our son. No amount of revenge will ever change what happened. You have to believe me with that."
"I wish I could. I wish I could just turn it off and skip over the whole thing but I can't."
"Then you know what's gonna happen," said Priya, slowing her tone and the movement in her voice. "It's slowly gonna dig into our relationship and it's gonna push us further and further apart. You'll resent me for being able to move on, and I'll resent you for not being able to move on. It will eat us alive, the same way it's done with so many other couples."
"I just don't know how to turn it off," said Jay, frustrated with himself. "There's only one thing that I can think of to do. And that is get some retribution for my son, for my wife and for myself. We need to honor his memory by fighting for him. We need to let him know, wherever he is, that we haven't forgotten
him, that we haven't stopped loving him."
"Don't you think he knows that? Don't you think he knows right now in heaven, looking down on us, that we love him and care for him?" asked Priya. "You're acting as if the son we were raising was a monster. That he somehow had lost his feelings when he passed. He knows how you feel about him and he knows how I feel about him, and he's waiting for us when the time comes."
"I thought of that too," said Jay "But I'm afraid if I commit suicide, I won't get to be with him. I'm afraid that all those people that say, 'God won't accept me if I commit suicide' are right. So, there's only one other thing that I can do. I can commit a murder. I can exact revenge for my son and do it out of honor. It's all that I have left."
"That's wrong, Jay," said Priya, moving herself to the edge of the living room, standing at the edge of the hall. "You still have me. The woman who chose you over money. The woman who said, 'I will live with this poor boy and love him with all my heart, and I will encourage him and believe in him and do everything I can. The boy that became a man, who gave me his son that I loved more than the stars and the moon and my very own soul. That's who you are to me. You are the person that has given me light in a life that held a darkness I couldn't get rid of. But now you're becoming the darkness too. Let Hani shine through you, Jay. You were the vision that he wanted to become, so still be that for him. Don't let go of it. Honor his memory in that way."
"I'm going to honor his memory," said Jay, again staring up at his wife and making a hardened eye contact. "I'm just gonna honor his memory by killing the man and his family who put him to death."
Six
"Oh, Bora Bora, I don't wanna leave," Gabriella sighed as she looked out from her balcony at the ocean in the distance. "But work is work and money is money."
Raising the mixed drink to her lips, she took a long sip and leaned her head against the doorway. The smooth, soft sea air drifting in, gently rippling over her skin with the warmth and the comfort that she found nowhere else in the world.
Knock, knock, knock.
Traveling across the small room, Gabriella held herself to the side of the door, where a very small section of wall kept her hidden from anybody who may be peering in the eye hole to see where she is.
"Who is it?" she asked, trying to sound as calm and relaxed as possible.
"It's the man that you wanna see," said the voice on the other side of the door, not attempting to hide who he was and hitting a familiar tone inside the woman.
"You sound like someone I know, but I don't know if you are who I know," Gabriella said in a playful tone, but still not wanting to open the door too quickly or expose herself in front of the door.
"Let me guess, my young Gabriella, is it that you were worried if you put your eye on the peephole that you may see a gun pointing back at you," said the voice. "We all know that one, don't we? Besides, I'm your friend from America."
"Just a little more and you'll have me." Gabriella replied, becoming more sure about the person she was speaking to. "Can you tell me who your friends are?"
"No, I can't," said the voice, adding a chuckle to what he was saying. "There would be too much... Legal involvement if I were to do that."
The signal was clear that Gabriella was talking to Tyler. As the mention of illegal matters firmly entrenching in her the fact that the system was looking for her to work on the project she’d discussed with Tyler. The secret society of nine judges had wield justice out for decades on end, re-trying the cases that they felt had been let off due to technicalities and were void of true justice for the people that they served. The group was underground and unknown to many. The select group of people that worked within the system would capture people they were asked to, return them for a secret trial that would take place at one time, and then justice was dispensed how the secret judges had selected. All formalized and all quite illegal."
"Well, come on in, stranger," Gabriella grinned, taking the door knob and turning it while flipping the upper lock. The strong smile of the handsome man, Tyler, looked her in the face, as she again saw him in T-shirts and shorts. "I love it when you dress up for me."
"Hey, I figured while I was down here, I'd take a little R&R, take in some sunshine and we could still work together," Tyler shrugged, as he walked into the room without being invited.
"Besides getting dressed up in a suit down here, I'd be roasting away. Look at this fair skin I got, there's no way in God's green earth that I'm gonna be okay down here in the sunshine, I'll end up just burning up like a lobster and then have to sit in the room. Better for me to go local, soak up the sunscreen and just have a good time."
"Maybe get a little sport fishing in. Isn't that what all you boys like to do?" asked Gabriella.
Well, that's one of the things we like to do." Tyler winked, "Some of us are also quite skilled at trying to court young ladies and maybe have a little vacation romance.
"Did you say that you're quite skilled at it or you're inept?" Gabriella joked, letting a small laugh out at the end of her statement. "I'm sure you do just fine with the ladies, and you don't need any help from anybody else."
"Well, I wish I could say I do better, but I do alright. I have my fair share," Tyler grinned, placing his hands on his hips. "But in this line of work, you know that it's really hard to find anybody that can meet it. Who wants to spend their lives with a spy?"
As the words came out of Tyler's mouth, he caught himself referencing relationships within the work of the spy community. Knowing that shortly before Gabriella had lost her husband Antonio within the confines of a mission, he felt his words had seared into her, causing her more pain rather than the light-hearted laughter he had hoped to give her.
"Well... Maybe I can fix you a drink, Tyler." Gabriella ignored his comment as she walked over to the mini-bar, pulling out two vodkas. "You like it straight up if I remember right? No rocks and no mixer, yeah?"
"Sure, that would be great," Tyler said in a more hushed tone, trying to pull himself back from the words that he had said.
"So, what do I owe the pleasure of your visit?" Gabriella asked, pouring the contents of one of the mini bottles of vodka into a glass, and then doing it again with the other. "I had pretty much found out what I needed to and I was about to be on my way."
"Well, the big thing that I gotta tell you about, is I have some prizes for you." Tyler found his stride once again. "You know, I have this passion for creating devices that can be helpful. Devices that might aid you on your encounters. The only problem is some agents like to use them, some don't, and considering you're outside the system, I had to pull a few strings to make sure that it was okay to give them to you."
"You actually have people that don't like to use some of your equipment?" asked Gabriella with a quizzical look. "Don't tell me, it's gotta be Falau There's one guy in the world that wants to buck the system at every turn, it's Falau."
"Hey, hey, hold on there, that's a buddy of mine. He's a great agent, but he's also a friend," Tyler defended, trying to get his point across to her in the most effectual style that he could.
"I know in our line of business that friends come and go pretty fast, but this guy's been my friend for a long time. And I think he could be a great asset to you at some point. Didn't you guys have a mission that you did in London for us, not that long ago?"
"We sure did." Gabriella walked over to him and handed him the glass of vodka. "He was a nice guy, very friendly, but he liked his things his way and his way only. He wasn't so much of a person that I wanna work with."
"Yeah, he likes things his own way, doesn't like to follow what other people tell him… sounds a lot like somebody else I know." Tyler raised his eyebrows as he looked at Gabriella and took a sip from his vodka.
"Alright, I guess I deserve that one. But you know, the kind of work that I do, it's usually from a distance and I don't need a lot of other people involved," said Gabriella. "There's also the fact that a lot of those people end up being double agents and tried to ki
ll me. It's a lot of easier if I'm just on my own. Don't tell me you're gonna send Falau with me on this one?"
"No, no, no, don't worry about that. He's got his own things that he's doing." Tyler grinned, "This one's all yours, and I got some treats for you that I think you might like."
"So, what do you got? Tell me it all," said Gabriella excitedly, rubbing her hands together as if she was waiting for some kind of perfection to come out of the man's mouth. "Do you have something that can make me fly?"
"Not quite that good," said Tyler, smiling at her mocking tone. "What I have for you are just some doodads, some fun things, help you get through security, make sure you have the things that you need. I didn't bring any of it with me because I'm not gonna walk around with those sorts of things, so I'll have them shipped to you through our usual channels, not exactly the US Postal Service."
"Alright, buddy, where's the chase and let's cut to it," said Gabriella, letting him know that she was ready for whatever he had to offer.
"This one's one of my favorites, really simple, but really cool, I've developed a firearm that works along the same skill level as a Glock 17. The difference is that it's completely made of plastic and it's a snap together…” he grinned. “I know, you heard me right. It's the snap together, when the snaps are made, they make a form that bonds together, basically under the heat of your fingers pressing together the two objects, the plastic molds itself into each other, creating a stable mechanism. It's a little thing that the system has been working on to try to allow our agents to have more in the field."
