32. The Jekyll
32
THE JEKYLL
I know how he feels. How could I not? I once had a wife that I was madly in love with. Watching him torture himself took me back to my own savage days after I lost Sisely. If anyone understands his pain, I do. Even though I still don’t understand when he had time to develop feelings for the girl.
It could’ve happened on any of the stakeouts when we were watching her. It could’ve happened as he watched her face down the man harassing her friend that night. It could even have happened that first time he saw her sitting in the window of the coffee shop when he first laid eyes on her. All without his knowing. If I recall correctly, I’d loved Sisely since we were children playing together, but I’d never realized it until her brother pointed out the obvious. What I couldn’t see, everyone else could.
A man like Attila… a man like that would prefer to spend his whole life alone rather than admit he grew feelings for a girl. I understand it. Definitely. It’s the armor we wear to protect ourselves; if I hadn’t developed feelings for Sisely, losing her wouldn’t have crushed me. It would be so easy to say one would rather save themselves the pain and suffering of such a huge loss. But I would take knowing and loving then losing her any day over never having known her at all. Over never knowing the feeling of that all consuming passion that we shared.
When I finish the call with Maria and hang up, I head inside and find Attila and Dante in the kitchen eating cheerios. Like nothing happened. Like a pair of schoolboys enjoying a quick snack after school.
“Showtime,” I say, sitting at the bench and pulling up a plate. Grown men doing little boy things.
“Changes?” Dante asks.
“We’ll have to fine tune our plan, but I think I have a way to get us in to the party without a problem. Castillo will be there.”
“So will every other dirty bastard this side of the criminal world,” Dante points out.
“This is our best shot to finish this.”
I don’t know how I lucked out with Maria, the Castillo maid for more than thirty years. If I know anything about her, it’s that she despises Castillo. Loves the kids, but couldn’t stand the patriarch, and would literally do anything to see him fall. She is the one who told me all about the masquerade ball which would double up as an auction for the sale of Coyin’s daughter. Maria’s the one who originally set me on to Luna’s location, believing I was actually helping to keep her away from her father. She fed me the information about Luna’s mother and her death at Coyin’s hand. And she, of course, told me what not even Luna herself knew — that the girl in fact wasn’t Coyin’s biological daughter. This had come from information she’d overheard through the years which pointed to Luna being the child of the affair her mother had. I never doubted Maria’s eagerness to help me; the horrors she had seen in that house over the years told me she had more than had enough.
“Maria will get us into the house via catering. It’s a masquerade ball and Castillo has insisted that everyone wear masks.”
“That’s going to make things a little difficult to identify people, don’t you think?” Attila asks, his concerned eyes raking over me.
“It does. But it also gives us the anonymity we need. That’s paramount.”
“Ok, so we’re in. Then what?”
* * *
I paint the picture for them. At various intervals, one stops me and pokes a hole in my plan. So we revise. Over and over again until we’ve fail proofed the plan and we think it’s solid enough to run with. Of course, there are always variables which appear out of nowhere that we have no way of controlling. Issues that crop up. Things we didn’t foresee. But we’d deal with them as they arose.
“You ready to do this?” Attila asks me, as we walk down the long hallway through the house. I’ve since learnt that the house belongs to Kingsley Murray’s estate. That would be Dante’s wife. From what I hear, the only person on the planet wealthier than Dante is his wife.
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“This will be your closure. After this is done, you’ll have fulfilled your journey and you’ll have to move on. There‘ll be no avoiding that. This is the end of the road for you.”
“Moving on doesn’t mean I’ll ever forget my wife, Attila,” I tell him. “It just means I’m no longer holding on to my grief. I can move past that.”
“Thank you,” he tells me. “Thank you for bringing this to a close. I know Caleph will be forever grateful.”
“Does that mean he’ll forgive my past transgression with his wife?”
“Not on your life, buddy. You dragged his unconscious wife through the streets, almost killing her. You almost killed them both.”
“But I ended up saving them both,” I remind him.
“That you did. I just don’t think it’s quite enough, Cesar.”
“What about you? Are you ready to accept whatever happens at that party tomorrow?”
“I’m ready to accept anything.”
We go over the plan again. Fine tuning. Refining. Tossing possible scenarios of what may or may not happen. We talk well into the night, sleep evading us. Until our nerves become fraught with sleep deprivation and we know it’s time to lay our heads down.
I think of all the possibilities ahead. All the good and all the bad that may come of tomorrow night’s event. Castillo has kept it under wraps; if Maria hadn’t contacted me, there’d have been no way for us to ever have known what was happening. It is, after all, a low key event. Although all the high rollers will be there. All those filthy, ugly organizations that thrive on young girls’ pain. They would like nothing better than to ruin the lives of the females involved in the bidding wars. They would like nothing than for them to suffer. And they probably would all like nothing better than to tarnish and stain the girl they believed to be ‘Coyin Castillo’s daughter’.