Remnant

By: Matthew Trifan

“ Your daughter is dead.”

The wind caught in my throat. Tight. I unhinged my jaws, forced a breath, but nothing came in. Nothing came out, either. I was suffocating.

The sky seemed far too bright, surreal for New York, where an ocean of twinkling lights sometimes invaded even the darkest corner of Central Park. A dirty old moon was hidden behind purple clouds, which shed buckets of fat, silent, black snow onto the world below.

I was ankle deep in this cold nightmare. Ankle deep and drowning.

Santino watched me with curiosity, and a spark of fear. The fear was understandable—he knew who I was, who I had been, and even after all those years, a man can’t easily forget the memories and scars of war, can he?

But there was curiosity in his eyes—eyes which were grey and dead and detached. I was familiar with his face. I had seen it before, long ago, and then three times more recently. Once in Amsterdam, when I had thrown a bomb into the window of his house and killed his brother. It hadn’t been my goal—his brother, that is—but casualties like that were acceptable in the game we played.

Weren’t they?

I pried open my lungs, forced a dagger of ice into them, allowed my body heat to melt the pain, and spat it back out in a cloudy vapor. I watched the mist roll out of my mouth, tainted from years of smoking. It vanished into the black snow.

I found my voice, gravel and hollow and coarse, a voice good only for condemning innocent men, for issuing ultimatums.

“ So is your wife.”

He had been prepared for this. He was a killer, and years of filthy work had glazed an unfeeling mask onto his face. His eyes didn’t flinch; they were still cold and grey. None of his facial features changed. His cracked lips remained tightly pressed. His nose didn’t shiver, red and enflamed as it was by the cold. Even the wrinkles on his forehead, the telltale sign of age beneath his silver-peppered hair, didn’t raise an inch.

I may as well have been looking in a mirror.

I glanced at him and all was the same as before. Except it wasn’t. The breath had frozen in his throat. And his heart was pounding furiously. And his innards had turned to ice. And dread had wrapped itself around his neck and squeezed, like an anaconda.

He didn’t speak yet. It had taken me a minute to find my voice. It would take him just as long.

“ You…are you sure?” he whispered.

I nodded. “ She was in Los Angeles. A man stabbed her on her way out of the grocery store yesterday. It was a stiletto to the heart. She died instantly.”

He looked at me with those somber eyes, wet from the sting of the cold. He called me by my old name. “ Apollo, what happened to the man?”

“ He caught a flight to New York,” I said.

Santino notched his head, a slight and unobtrusive signal. I took it as a sign of acceptance.

“ Yesterday,” I said, again.

“ Yesterday,” he repeated.

Silence. Deafening silence. I had to force myself to ask the question. Thirty years of contract killing—knifing men, bombing women, shooting old men—could not have prepared me for this moment. Until now, I had been impervious, even to God.

But Santino had found the chink in my armor. And now I needed to know.

“ Diana?” I said. “ Where is she?”

“ At the bottom of the Thames.” His words came like a machine gun, rapid and without inflection. “ She was walking home from school. She fell off a bridge. She had never learned to swim. There was no one around to save her.”

My fingers crept towards my cell phone with a mind of their own. How could I believe this madman, this professional liar, who at one time in his life had been an ambassador, a pilot, a car salesman, an army colonel, an engineer, a doctor…

The second time I had seen Santino was when my niece, Stephanie, was ill with a swollen appendix ten years ago. I had just withdrawn from the business, retired myself in order to raise and protect my newborn daughter, and Stephanie’s parents had been out of town. Her babysitter had called in a panic, and I had left baby Diana in the arms of my wife to run to the hospital.

It was four in the morning, and Stephanie had been fast asleep after a successful surgery. I convinced the nurse on duty to let me see her—just a glimpse, for her parents’ sake—even though it wasn’t visiting hours. The nurse had been a large black woman named Leonda, with an iron will and a heart of gold. She had let me through.

Stephanie’s bed was at the end of the children’s ward. Except for a few nightlights, the chamber was as dark as a cave, filled with a chorus of wispy children’s breath. A doctor walked out of the shadows and gloom, a stethoscope draped around his muscled neck, prints of exhaustion magnified by the glasses over his eyes. He passed me wordlessly, eyes on the floor, and left the ward.

Stephanie was dead. She had been poisoned moments before I had arrived. Her unblemished, angelic face was locked in concentration, eyes lightly closed, with her locks of black, Sicilian hair cascading down her pillow.

I had screamed and wept with my sister—her mother—over the phone. I was uncontrollably hysterical. I had never before felt a loss so sharply, and I felt everything inside of me. My soul had come back to me when my daughter had been born, and now a part of it had been ripped away and cast out to sea.

I took to the streets of the city, searching recklessly for the mysterious doctor, the harbinger of death, who had murdered a girl to settle a feud between two men. I pulled all of my contacts, touched in even with the NYPD for the first time. I became careless, classless, what the society of killers refers to disdainfully as a “vigilante.”

I hadn’t found him then. I murdered his father a year later, in a nursing home in Holland.

Two years later he shot my wife, while we were on vacation in the Dominican Republic. He could have killed me with that sniper bullet, but he opted for the greater evil.

Now we had come face to face. We wouldn’t talk long, surely. There was little we could say to one another. We wanted each other dead. We wanted to die ourselves.

We could put a bullet in our own heads very easily, with the pieces we were carrying.

But that was not the way we had lived. We had both held a vendetta our entire lives, and now was the time to pay up. Otherwise, it would all have been in vain, wouldn’t it? All that sacrifice, all that blood. All those tears.

“ So this is it?” The words came out of his cruel, chapped lips and clung in the air. We both watched them spin wildly into the drifting darkness.

“ There’s nothing left for you to take from me,” I answered. “ Not anymore.”

He shrugged, an imperceptible gesture. “ I would have preferred we had done this long ago, rather than…”

I was hotheaded, angry from a flash of rage. “ You could just as easily have chosen me on the island. You went for my wife. She died in my arms.”

He scoffed, his lips pulling back into a shameless grin. “ Spare me the self-righteousness, Apollo. You want to measure evil with evil? Is there anything worse in smothering an old man in his bed, as opposed to poisoning a child in hers? Is it less wicked to throw a bomb into the apartment of a carpenter and his wife—yes, my sister-in-law, you killed her with him—is that somehow more acceptable than pushing a child into a river? Than stabbing a woman in the heart? Than shooting a wife in the head? What do you expect from me: repentance? Forgiveness?”

Forgiveness? What a quaint idea.

Love is unforgiving. It lives by the stroke of the pen, inscribing itself into the most tender portion of your heart in dark, crimson ink. And nothing can erase those memories—not time, not hope, not God. That’s what this bastard couldn’t understand.

Now it was my turn to laugh.

“ No, Santino, you’re quite right. We’re both monsters. And we’re both weak—weak enough to love.”

Santino frowned. “ In the next few moments, I’m going to stain this snow with your blood, Apollo, god of war. You will vanish, and only God will know what I’ve done to you. There will be no one to ever remember you. Just the snow, the wind, the trees, and…”

“ Poetic,” I murmured, leaning back my head. The snow, sodden and numbing, splashed against my forehead, soaking my hair to my skull. I could feel the cold in my brain, like the touch of death.

Santino watched me through narrowed slits. “ Are you ready to see hell, Apollo?”
A sigh escaped my lips, unnoticeable except for the telltale mist.

“ Hell? I’ve been there for years already.”

The movement was nothing more than a flicker, a man lighting a match, the whistling of wind in the naked trees. Santino was nothing more than a shadow—less, the shadow of a shadow, who was flicking matches at me.

I felt the warmth of their flame brush my cheek, scrapping the unshaven bristles on my chin. One of them dug into my shoulder, burning like only fire could.

I had my gun, of course, but I had not bothered with the silencer. There was nothing romantic about the sound it made as my finger clenched the trigger. A SIG Sauer does not whisper or whistle through the trees. It blows them apart.

So I was firing at this phantom figure, this absurd Italian matchmaker who had spent twenty years of his life trying to bring misery into mine. Not that he was to blame, mind you—I hadn’t forgotten my role in this mess.

The recoil from my gun hurt more than his bullets. I was at the helm of a cannon, blasting artillery into the flanks of the enemy. Each explosion rattled my core, filled my head with the smell of fireworks. My eyes saw only smoke and snow and the spits of flame from Santino’s trench coat.

He was shaking in the cold, like me. The snow at his feet was stained with his fear, the fear that poured out of him like water, making him more reckless, more fearless.

He was growing, swelling with all that junk adrenalin, drifting away on a cloud.

I could only feel the winter, seeping into my bones as my own precious warmth spilled out. I was ready for the exchange—cold for warmth, numbness for pain, death for life. Somewhere in there was my escape, my ticket out of this hell.

Santino was hurting, bad. I could tell from his stagger, the dip in his gun, that he no longer had the strength to stand straight or point his piece.

I was winning.

But then my own body failed, and I couldn’t feel a thing. My feet were soaked in snow and blood. My legs refused to hold, and I was falling. To my knees.

And here I offered the only prayer that I had ever known. It was loud, sacrilegious, and humbling, but God always seemed to listen. Every time I prayed this way, he would take one of his own up there, to heaven, to protect them from demons like me.

So I prayed, and it took me less than three Amens to convert Santino, to make him a member of my church, to bring him to his knees.

My left hand was buried in the snow, holding me up. A spasm rippled through my shoulder, and I jerked, and my hand was suddenly useless, and I toppled over on my side, my chin burying itself in sweet, salty snow.

It should have been time to quit, but my right hand, my gun hand, had always been a stubborn fellow with a mind of its own. It kept firing, even though I barely had the strength to straighten my elbow.

The SIG was empty—had been for a while. Why hadn’t I noticed?

I could hear Santino breathing hard over there, and I knew that it was over, and I had won.

“ Are you dead?” he rasped. “ Are you? Are you dead, you fuckin son of a bitch.”

I opened my mouth, caught my breath, and spoke as eloquently as I had ever done in my life.

“ Fuck your mother, Santino.”

A strangled cry burst from the darkness, like a dying wildcat. He was sobbing and cursing and remembering all those years, all those faces, all those women and children.

I was doing the same thing.

I had never been better than Santino. Never held myself in higher esteem. Never felt myself more pious. My life had revolved around making money. I had never questioned the motives of my contractors.

“ I killed her.’ His voice was choked. “ Oh my God, I killed her. Oh my God, Jesus, oh…”

All those souls from the past were spilling out of Pandora’s box, festering in my mind like the plague. Regret had little to do with it. I was dying, and it hurt, and the memories hurt even more.

“ I’m sorry,” he cried. “ I’m sorry, Jesus, I’m sorry…I’m so sorry.”

A hand was on my shoulder, clawing at me. I tried to shrug it off, but I was too tired, too weak.

I looked up, and Santino was there, in my face, snot running down his nose, froth and blood at his mouth, eyes wet with tears—not the sting of the cold. His fingers dug deeper into my shoulder, pressing carelessly on a wound, but I was already crying too hard to care.

“ Fredo,” he gasped. “ Apollo, do you remember…Sicily and… remember Old Man Castrano, and how…how he would scold us for playing…”

“ –soldier in the streets,” I finished. “ Oh, God, yes. And your father caught us… one night down in the market…at the Mafioso meeting, and he…and he gave us one hell of a beating…”

“ Papa,” Santino giggled. Then he sobered. “ He’s dead.”

“ Yes,” I said, and the tears were freezing to my face. “ Yes, the old bastard had it coming. I am Sicilian…after all. How did he expect…expect me to let go of…of that grudge.”

Santino began to laugh—it was choked and pitiful and quickly became a death rattle. His breathing quickened, and he grabbed my head with one firm hand, and roared up at the weeping clouds:

“ Do you forgive me, Fredo, Apollo?”

I shrugged, laughed, and began to cough violently. The words were formed on the tip of my tongue, and I wanted to spit them out before I died, but I knew that I couldn’t. My throat had constricted, and every breath brought blood into my lungs, and I was drowning and dying.

I rested my head against the cold, stiff body of my childhood friend and felt my wounded soul seeping out into the snow: the greedy, fucking snow—it had taken so much from me already and was always hungry for more.

For a moment the blood cleared from my throat, and my lungs opened briefly, and now was my chance to speak. So I did.

“ Forgiveness…you dumb bastard…it means nothing.”

I hardly noticed the flashlights sweeping through the park, or the voices at the top of the hill, or the sound of men running towards us.

I was in a different place, moving on, and no hell could be as bad as the one I had just escaped from.

Nothing would be left of me here. Not a single memory. Not a single remnant.