Three Alpha Romeo

“I didn’t know your father personally,” I went on. “In fact, I never once met him. But I knew of him. We all did. Your father… well…” I stopped, unsure if I should continue.

“Well what?”

I decided not to hold anything back.

“Your father was a legend,” I said, turning back to her. “He laid many of the modern foundations for Indigo today, back when it was good, or a at least when it was better. He did the same for Kyrkos as well. Your father was one of the only men in the world Alexander Kyrkos actually trusted. And that list is unimaginably small.”

She sniffed a little, and my heart broke. I wanted to reach out to her. To hold her…

“If he trusted him so much…” she asked miserably, “then why kill him?”

“Because he wanted to leave,” I said truthfully. “Just like me, your father wanted to get out. And he was doing it for you, Andrea. He’d missed a good portion of the first half of your life. And he hated what he did. Regretted it year after year, while looking for a way out.”

I lowered my eyes to floor. That part I could understand too. The crushing guilt. The fear of being called upon to do something beyond horrific. Three times I’d refused a mission, and on two of those times I’d been reprimanded. But on the third…

It was after the third refusal, that the Game began.

The Game…

“H—How did you get out?’ Andrea was asking. “If my father couldn’t, how could you… I mean…”

“There was a man who worked directly for Kyrkos,” I said. “A man named Galleti.”

She sat silently on the bed, her hands in her lap. For now at least, the tears had stopped.

“I reported directly to him,” I went on. “Everything I ever did, every task they ever gave me, I ended up back at the same office, staring across the same desk. Staring into the face of a man I hated. A dark man. An evil man, even more so than Kyrkos.”

I could see his face still, even now. Every line of his bald head. Every curve of his fat, greasy jowls.

“After every mission there was a Game,” I said. “On the desk would be an envelope containing my payment. And on top of the envelope, a pistol.”

The memories came back now, creeping in through a long-closed door. It was a door I’d tried so many times to forget about. To eliminate permanently and irrevocably from my memory.

But my eyes fell back on Andrea. And I wanted to tell her everything.

“’Go ahead Marcus’, Galleti would say. “’Play the Game’. And before I could take the envelope and leave his office, I had to do exactly that.”

Andrea had stopped crying altogether now. She was looking up at me in rapt fascination.

“And… what did you have to do?”

“I had to take the gun,” I said, “and put it against my own head. And then I had to the draw back the hammer, and pull the trigger.”

She inhaled sharply, putting one hand over her mouth. Everything else in the room was utterly silent.

“The hammer would fall. Nothing would happen. ‘You’ve been a good boy this time, Marcus’, Galleti would say. And then he’d smile. It was an evil smile. A sick, twisted fucking smile that only the most rotten people on the planet could pull off.”

I closed my eyes, picturing it again in my head. The widening curve of his fat jaw. The spreading of those thin, cracked lips…

“And then I’d take the envelope,” I finished. “And I’d go… until the next time.”

Andrea’s face was all sorrow now. Not for her, or even her father… but for me.

Just knowing that made my heart melt.

“How many times did you—”

“Lots of times,” I said heavily. “Dozens of times.”