A Blood of Killers

by Gerard Houarner

  “This isn’t who we are,” the detective said, looking at his hands and shaking his head. His grunt carried sadness, disappointment.

  “This is what you want us to be. How can we do anything for you like this?”

  Matteo flinched at a pop in the air. His visitor was gone. Hands trembling, he headed for the rear of the train to find his latest passenger.

  The man sat in the last seat of the last car, wrapped in a worn, red bathrobe, thinning white hair hanging listlessly over mottled skin hanging on bone. He stared at his slippered feet and did not look up at Matteo’s approach. The man might have been his father, had his father lived that long and lost his hair.

  “Disappointed?” the conductor asked, hanging on to the overhead rail with both hands. He swayed with the train’s rocking. “Expecting a grand tour? Bright lights, clouds and a song? Or something a little hotter?”

  The old man refused to look up.

  Matteo read him, relishing the vision unfolding in his mind. “Another old man who screwed his wife and kids. What’s the matter, you forgot your own childhood? Couldn’t remember being left on the streets? Stealing bread and fruit? Having a hobo’s dick up your ass?” The truth spread out like a luxurious tapestry for him to pick apart. “Oh, I see, you were a hero. Semper Fi. Ate raw scorpions and poison centipedes for breakfast, shaved with an officer’s katana, wore the Japanese flag as a shirt and dared them to shoot you. Right. That excuses everything, of course. The kids you left back in the Philippines. The deals you made to swing that first election. That body in the turnpike exchange foundation. Enjoy what that union payoff bought you? Ever do the math on what was traded in people’s lives for those secret campaign contributions? No, you were too busy kicking ass to even enjoy the corruption. The lump in your wife’s breasts never distracted you from your responsibilities at the state capital. How brave of you was it really when you didn’t cry at your youngest boy’s funeral? That one was good for a sympathy re-election, wasn’t it? Working for the people who gave you power so you could keep it, but to do what? What did you do with your life, old man? How many people did you hurt? How many people died because of your decisions? Was it all worth it?”

  Without meeting his gaze, the old man said, “It’s my own damned fault.”

  Like hammer to glass, the old man’s words broke the conductor’s hope. Not a suspect. Not a victim, either, but that didn’t matter. The old man was brittle, breaking up right in front of him. It was worse that he reminded Matteo of his father. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means what I did to my family wasn’t the worst of it, but it’s the part that hurts me the most.”

  “Touching. So when did those back room deals start looking like a mistake? When did making your constituency poorer and your keepers richer become a problem? What finally happened to make you remember you have a family?”

  “The view is different down here,” the old man said with a hint of hardness. “I should have done better with what I had. Not everything was wrong-headed, mind you,” he said, the hardness coming out of him like steel, as if he were on the Congressional floor working connections, driving bargains and looking out for himself.

  For a moment, Matteo’s hope revived.

  Then the old man deflated, shaking his head as he sagged in his seat. “But enough of it was. More than enough…”

  “You don’t even have the courage of your convictions,” the conductor said in disgust. The man was not who he was looking for.

  The passenger looked up. “Listen, you pathetic little uncivil fucking servant. I’m not the one pissing his existence away in a train to nowhere. Leave me the fuck alone.”

  “What, you think you survived the Depression, fought a war, played politics, and you’re a tough guy? Do you know where you are? You think you could handle being a conductor on this train? Look at yourself. You’re broken, you have no power here. Nobody cares about you. You’re naked, you have nothing left. You couldn’t handle what I do.”

  “At least when I screwed somebody, I looked them in the eye.” Face creased in pain. “Helps you remember.” Tears ran down his face. “Shit…”

  “Is everything all right here, now?” The neatly bearded man in a charcoal suit put a hand on the conductor’s shoulder and flashed his shield.

  The redundant shield display chilled Matteo. Except for the gravelly voice, he was, as usual, another exact duplicate of the stationmaster. They always were, down to the after shave. “What, you think you’re the only ones allowed to ask questions? I have my rights.” He puffed himself up trying to match the detective’s aura of casual power. He checked the fists, saw the scars, regretted challenging one of the veterans.

  Breaks squeaked as the train slowed. Matteo cursed. lie ducked around the detective and headed back to his compartment. Despair ballooned when he slid open the door to the next car and bounced against a wall of passengers. Young, old, healthy, frail, the gathering was overwhelming. Visions of their lives burst like fireworks in his mind. They were all suspects, confused, disoriented by their journey, ready for him to question. But he had a duty to the train, to the doors. He didn’t want to think of what would happen if he failed.

  He pushed his way through the pack, the worst he had seen on the train. As he shoved through the stubborn, passive herd, he wondered if they were refugees from a plane crash or building collapse. People roused themselves from shock and depression, grumbled, blinked and glared at him. Vivid hatreds danced behind eyes glazed by denial. Matteo looked down, fighting the panic of unasked questions, of answers buzzing, their menacing stings poisoned by truth.

  The station appeared in the windows. Brakes screaming, the train lurched and a seam broke open in the mass of passengers. Matteo slipped through, reached the end of the car, sprinted through the rest of the empty train as it pulled to a stop. The electric hum of idling motors filled the spaces between the thud of his footsteps.

  He opened the doors without checking the platform. The radio squawked, and he pushed the speak button, saying, “Hello? Hello? Is anyone there?” The motorman was a mystery, invisible, though he had often gone to the head of the train to look for him on long hauls between stations. “Sorry, I got stuck in the back of the train. Are you there?”

  He remembered his announcement duty, fumbled through the pages on his clipboard, discovered the old schedule was gone, replaced by another. The symbols on the paper failed to jell into any meaningful writing. He glanced out the window, past the station-master staring at him, to catch the name of the stop. “Cumat Cho Juango el Feychin,” he said, a part of his mind suddenly opening, as if by divine intrusion, to provide transliteration for the glyphs set into the tiled wall.

  Like every stop on all the lines since he had taken up the conductor’s duty, Matteo had never seen or heard the name before. The symbols did not match those on the new schedule. Their meanings eluded him. But like a dream, the knowledge to speak the strange tongues always came to him, though up until now with more subtlety.

  He stuck his head out to check the flow of passengers. The crowd from the single car milled on the platform, restless but unsure of where to go. A few knelt and wept; others cursed, confessed, babbled. One middle-aged woman in a pinstriped skirt suit banged her head against a column, stopping only to check if blood had at last begun to flow.

  Matteo hoped for a fight, or even an argument. But the passengers ignored one another even when they jostled each other. They were lost. They did not know how to get out of the station, and they were blind to everything except their own private torments.

  The old war veteran in the red robe waited just outside the last door, head bowed, back curved like a question mark. Matteo felt a pang of loss. Again, the man reminded him of how his father might have looked if he had lived that long. Pity showed itself like a worm poking its head out of grave soil. Guilt churned in deeper places, a greater serpent buried below ready to swallow him.

  Matteo recoiled from the cascade of emotions brought on
by the image of the old man. Before he could make connections between memories and feelings, deeds and reactions, rage built and burst through him as fast as storm water in a sewer. Before he realized he had been swept away, he spoke into the public announcement system.

  “Ladies and gentleman, please be advised that no matter how hopeless your situation appears to be, no matter how terribly you feel about the things you have done or neglected to do in your lives, you may rest assured that none of you has been responsible for as much misery, deceit, corruption, anguish and death as the gentleman standing at the end of the platform. Please feel free to vent your frustrations on this gentleman, as nothing you will ever think to do can equal the pain he has caused during his existence. Do not give in to your pity; do not succumb to the temptation of forgiveness, because that is how people like him survive to destroy again. Never forget. Never forgive.”

  “That was harsh,” the stationmaster said, leaning an elbow on the window edge. “After all, he never had people shot, staked, burned, beheaded, gassed, or electrocuted. He’s no mass murderer.”

  The stationmaster’s piercing gaze and smile drove Matteo away from the microphone. He clicked off the public announcement system, crossed his arms over his chest, stared at the metal plate ceiling. “Neglect kills slowly, but it kills.”

  “He did some good.”

  “And that absolves him of his sins?”

  “Who doesn’t make mistakes?”

  “Who pays for them?”

  “What did you really want from him?”

  “To make good on the deal,” Matteo snapped, glancing at the stationmaster but unable to sustain the hard stare he wanted to give him. His anger burned low and steady. “He could have stayed strong, been the man he always was and take my place. He was a good suspect. But no, he had to break. They always have to break, become the victims, leave me here…”

  “So you can’t escape your life’s consequences.”

  “I don’t deserve this.”

  “Who are you really judging?”

  “Fuck you.”

  The stationmaster laughed, held his hands up and backed away. “It pays to be a little more respectful to the passengers,” the detective said from the compartment entrance.

  Matteo started, threw his arms up toward off the detective.

  The man grinned, knuckles cracking as he opened and closed his hands. “Care to come down to the station?”

  The last of Matteo’s anger died, leaving only ash leaping before gusts of fear. The stationmaster headed down the platform, calling out to the people milling by the train and waving them towards the stairs hidden in shadow. “But my job —”

  “I’m sure the guys in charge won’t mind us borrowing you for a little bit, seeing as we’re all working on the same side.”

  Before he could object any further, the detective grabbed Matteo’s upper arm and pulled him out of the compartment. More detectives, some in trench coats or sports jackets, others in undercover street clothes, surrounded him on the platform. Their golden badges blazed with a light that scoured the empty places in him and threw the shadows of unwanted memory in stark, black contrast against brilliant walls of awareness. In the crush of bodies, their fists snapped his head back and forth, cracked ribs, robbed him of breath. Blind and beaten, Matteo half-walked, half-floated until he was released to fall on a rough concrete floor. Trains rumbled in the background, shaking the ground. A soot-blackened fan spun lazily in a high vent, pushing out sewer-tainted air. Four dusty bulbs set in the corners lit the cement-block room and its collection of metal desks, chairs and filing cabinets.

  He had been brought to an underground sub-precinct office. Even now, he was denied fresh air and daylight.

  “Come on, tell us what’s on your mind,” one of the detectives said. “You’ll feel better,” said another, pitch, tone and inflection slightly different from the first.

  “Only you can help yourself. There’s not a thing any of us can do for you,” said a third, words flowing smooth and viscous, like lava.

  A ring of shoes surrounded him. Legs and torsos loomed; bearded faces looked down, bored, indifferent. A word shaped itself in his mouth, but he could not bring himself to spit it out: daddy?

  “If I tell you, you’ll take me away,” he said, instead.

  “There’s other things to see and do.”

  “Who will open the doors to let people in and out? Who will question the suspects to find my replacement?”

  A set of shiny black shoes stepped out from the ring. A station-master, identical to the other stationmasters and detectives, pants sharply creased, cap pushed back from his forehead, crouched next to him. The smell of shoe polish mingled with the musty smell from his crotch. “Now wouldn’t that be a fine vengeance? Screw up our trains, disrupt the entire operation down here, and be free?”

  Matteo looked up into the smirking face, fighting against the temptation to do with words what he was not powerful enough to do with action. Destroy the system. Break free. Go back to his life.

  The offer was a trick. They wanted him to break, to confess to things he may or may not have done, for reasons he could not express, under circumstances that might or might not relieve him of responsibility.

  The offer was a curse, like hope; a seed planted in his mind to corrupt and weaken his resolve over time. Having failed to break him with beatings, interrogations, and the conductor’s duties, they were trying to seduce him with the promise of power.

  But he did not believe that promise, any more than he believed in redemption, or freedom, or hope. The bearded men were trying to lure him out of the safety of being a suspect, to risk guilt’s condemnation for the chance of discovering innocence. Freedom? What about punishment, he wanted to ask. But he did not want to hear their lying answers.

  The promise of betrayal nested in the ploy sparked Matteo’s rage. He struggled to rise. The stationmaster backed away.

  “Going to give us a hard time, are you?” one of the detectives said, stepping forward.

  Matteo looked up and, in the halo of light surrounding the detective’s head, saw a bearded man, exactly like the endless duplicates working the subway, beating a boy and a woman, then showering them with gifts, then ignoring them and bringing gifts to other women. The women welcomed him into their beds. He stole, was fired from jobs, drew the boy into house robberies and made him keep watch while women welcomed him into their apartments and houses. He laughed, spent money, crashed cars, wept. The man’s flawed palace of grand expectations and extravagant fantasies collapsed around Matteo every time a woman turned him out, a robbery failed, a scheme backfired. The ruins smothered the boy. The crushing mass of shattered delusions squeezed the life out of him.

  The vision burned brighter, fueled by the man’s vision of the boy: an accident, a nuisance, a tool. Vision metamorphosed into memory’s fire. He smelled the alcohol on the man’s breath, felt the sharp pain of blows, the dull throbbing of deep wounds to the child’s body and spirit. He tasted the boy’s blood.

  His blood.

  Matteo screamed, fought for breath, flailed, lashed out, scrambled to escape living burial in the bearded man’s wrecked life.

  Hands tried holding him, arms encircled his legs and chest. Matteo kicked and writhed, abandoning himself to the madness of his terror.

  Cold metal on his palm shot a needle of reason through him. There was a way out. Simple. Quick. Logical.

  His hand closed. He jerked his arm, ripped the gun out of a detective’s holster. The automatic pistol filled his hand.

  Burning in his memory, the boy needed two hands to hold the revolver he found in the bag his father carried with him wherever he went.

  Matteo pulled the trigger.

  The boy had to squeeze the trigger with both fingers.

  Gunshots exploded in the train car, muzzle flash bursting like lightning, the roar of powder like thunder inside his head. Men screamed. Wings flapped.

  The boy fired only one shot before the no
ise and smell and shock of the explosion made him drop the gun as if it had come alive in his hands. Matteo held on to his gun, fired again, and again, beyond the number of bullets in the clip, shooting at the circle of detectives scrambling to get out of his way. No one shot back or tried to stop him. Men dropped, more men than he could possibly have had rounds to kill.

  The boy saw that one shot had bought his freedom from standing lookout, taking beatings, counting his mother’s tears.

  Matteo dropped the smoking gun. There were no more detectives to kill. The vision inflaming his mind dimmed, but not before a fading ember of memory showed him they had all died like his father. Shot in the back.

  He staggered to the door through a cloud of iridescent feathers. It opened on to pitch-blackness. He could not stand to be in the subway car. There was too much death, and the caress of feathers teased his skin with gentle forgiveness. He pitched forward into the darkness.

  Fell.

  Landed hip-first on a station platform. A train announced itself with wheels squeaking. A wall of wind swept away scraps of paper down the tunnel and a stray feather up the gloomy stairs at his back. The motorman’s compartment was empty as the head of the train flashed past Matteo. The doors on all the cars were open, contrary to safety regulations.

  The train ground to a halt. No one got off.

  Matteo stood, glanced at the stairs. The steps led to more darkness cloaked in silence. Exit or entrance. Freedom, or another subway line. Past or future.

  The risks frightened Matteo. Gunshots echoed in the tunnel, in his mind. He fled the opening; staggered on board the train, knees and elbows aching from the fall, face and body still throbbing from the beating he had taken. He resumed his station in the conductor’s car and looked up and down the line of cars. A new uniform and cap hung against the wall of the compartment. Another version of the schedule hung on the clipboard. On a sepia cartoon poster ad opposite the compartment doorway, a sleek propeller plane flew over clouds and snow-covered mountain peaks. “Onke chiu Savoy!” proclaimed the caption.