Xana watched as the gates swung open and revealed the McDoom family complex. She hadn’t spoken to anyone. They just opened as she approached. She stood still in the dark. Clouds obscured the stars. Crickets chirped.
A large suited man walked toward her across the manicured gravel drive. It was bordered on both sides by a row of lights and an equally well manicured lawn. Palms and shrubs and a high stone wall kept it all private.
Xana could see the line of a gun strap under the man’s dark coat. He motioned her up toward the house. It was huge. There were cars and lights.
“I’m here to—”
“Mr. McDoom is expecting you.” The guard pointed to the dog. “But he has to stay.”
“Oh.” Xana looked at her friend. “Sit.”
The dog sat.
“Wait.” Xana held up a hand and backed away.
The dog sat panting and didn’t follow. The guard eyed the big animal nervously, then shut the gate in front of him.
A beautiful, dark-skinned woman in a red dress waved Xana through the front door of the house. It was immaculate. Another servant walked past carrying a silver platter. Everyone was dressed so nicely. Xana was suddenly very aware of her tangled hair and dirty work clothes. Her heavy gloves were still poking out of the pockets on her butt. She had to duck under the door frame. The curls of her pony tail tickled a chandelier. She felt so out of place. Her anger melted as her heart began to race. Her palms sweat. She was only too relieved when they ushered her to a private office. It was empty.
Xana squeezed into one of two chairs facing the desk. It creaked. At the back of the room, a grandfather clock ticked the seconds away inside six feet of polished mahogany.
Xana slouched forward in the short-backed chair, twisting her moist hands over and over in her lap.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
She was about to pull the picture of AJ from her pocket when the double doors slid open.
“Ms. Jace.” Mal McDoom walked briskly to the desk. He didn’t offer his hand.
Xana put hers on the arms of the chair as if to stand, but he waved for her to stay. He wasn’t what she expected. He was thin, almost gaunt, with neat hair and thin, piercing eyes. She doubted he was over five foot six. His fingernails were manicured. His suit was finely tailored. He sat behind the desk.
“Let’s dispense with the pleasantries. I find them distasteful and you have nothing pleasant to say to me, I’m sure. Besides, I have a dining room full of guests that I must return to shortly.”
“Oh.” Xana nodded. She was nonplussed by the greeting and that he left his guests to see her. Unannounced, even.
Mal looked straight at her. “The good news is that the boy is healthy. He doesn’t seem to have inherited your . . . condition.”
“Where is he? Can I see him?”
“Ajax is not a name I would have chosen, but he seems set on it.”
“It was his great-grandfather’s name.”
“I see.” Mal leaned forward and put his hands on the desk. He chose his words. “I have a predicament, Ms. Jace. You know exactly what my son is like. I blame his mother, and through her, myself. I married a docile, shallow woman, you see. It is expected that men in my position will be married, so I took a partner who would not be a threat to me. As I extended our family business, I left her with a single task she was incompetent to perform. We all know the result. Declun is a . . .” He looked to the ceiling. “You will not understand what I had to go through, what I sacrificed. You will have no frame of reference, and so my actions will seem extreme. But try to imagine my horror at the thought of leaving my life, my legacy, in the hands of that . . . troglodyte.
“He will live well, but he will inherit control of nothing. As of last week, my legacy will pass to my grandson. I am taking personal control of his education and upbringing. I will see that it’s done right. He will be prepared.”
Xana swallowed dry. It was worse than she’d imagined.
“Declun is with the boy in New York. It is appropriate that he get to know his son. But rest assured he will have no say in the boy’s future.”
“Can I see him?” Xana asked meekly. She knew the answer.
Mal sat back in his chair. “The boy is understandably confused by all of the changes in his life. It has affected his studies. To keep him focused, we have explained that you abandoned him.”
“What?” Xana looked up. She started to stand but stopped. “No, sir. No. I would never—”
Mal raised his hand impatiently. It was clear she was to stop talking.
Xana looked down. “But sir,” she whispered. “I’m his mother.”
“Not anymore.”
Xana’s heart broke. She shut her eyes.
“I don’t harbor you any ill will, Ms. Jace. But I’m sure that means very little since I have taken everything you value in the world.”
“You’re evil,” she breathed.
“Perhaps.” Mal studied Xana. “What do you think evil is? Real evil, I mean. Not some masked lunatic.”
She didn’t answer. She was fighting back tears and a nearly uncontrollable urge to break down.
“Most people think it’s a terrorist, or maybe a rapist on the street, but that’s not evil. That’s fear, the fruit of evil. A man with a gun, whether in his hands or between his legs, is always acting out his fears: of an abusive parent, of a repressive world, of his own insecurities.” Mal waved his hand in the air. “Nor is evil the same as hate. You hate what you fear. In one of history’s greatest ironies, Hitler feared the Jews. He saw how they were poisoning the world and believed his actions were fundamentally defensive, a preservation of the German way of life from a hostile invasion.
“Evil—real evil—often appears banal. Objectively. Just like acts of great sacrifice. People often have no idea. That very banality belies the truth.”
“I don’t understand, sir.”
“No.” Mal looked down. “No, of course not.” He stood up and walked around the desk. “I’m going to do you a favor, Ms. Jace, although I’m certain you won’t see it that way.” He sat down on the corner in front of Xana. “You will see it as cruel, in fact. Heartless. But I promise you, it is the best thing I could ever do for you, just as it was done for me. I’m going to show you what the world is like. I’m going to pull back the curtain of propriety that good people drape over everything to keep the peace. Or to maintain their sanity. You see, men like me don’t prosper simply because we’re ruthless or cruel or whatever you think of me. We prosper because the great mass of people choose a lie over an uncomfortable truth: that their life—so-called, so-lived—is basically pointless. Useless, in fact.
“Socialists and revolutionaries would have you believe that it’s the wealthy who create the lie, but it isn’t. We may at times work to support it, but it lives quite well without us.
“Ordinary people create the lie. That things are basically good, basically fair. That the world, while not as it should be, is close enough that they can go back to whatever they are doing tonight instead of working to make it better. It’s just easier, you see.
“For proof, you need only look at their heroes: wealthy men—princes, really—who don masks and defend the status quo from an external threat.”
Mal raised his hand before Xana could speak. “You don’t understand—yes, I know. Let me be blunt. Your lawyer has ten thousand Euros for you. In cash. He also has a passport with your name and picture on it. Time heals. Get out of Guyana, Ms. Jace. Go somewhere, anywhere but America. Start over. Don’t waste the rest of your life pining over something you can never have. I can think of no greater tragedy for someone so afflicted with kindness.”
Xana looked confused.
Mal reached across the desk for his phone. He pressed a button. Someone answered. “Send him in.” He hung up and looked at Xana. He stood. “And now it’s time for me to go. Good-bye, Ms. Jace. We won’t meet again.”
Xana was so confused. She watched the man walk out. Then she was alone with the silence between the ticks of the clock.
She broke down. She cracked. Xana fell out of the seat and crumpled to the floor. She curled into a ball.
They’d never let AJ go. Ever.
She breathed in deep heaves and cried into the carpet as quietly as she could. Half of her didn’t want anyone to hear. Half didn’t care.
The doors opened and closed again. Someone walked to her. Xana looked up at her balding, white-haired lawyer. Mr. Renkist handed her a tissue. He sat down opposite Xana as she blew and wiped her nose. Her heart was pounding against her ribcage. She could hear her pulse in her ears. Swoosh, swoosh, swoosh. She took long slow breaths like the doctors had showed her and tried to calm down. For the first time in her life, she thought they might have been right, that the throbbing knot of muscle in her chest might actually rip itself apart. She could barely breathe.
She put a shaking hand to her sternum and looked at Arthur Renkist.
“You know,” he began, “when I started . . .” Then he stopped. “No, before that. Did you know that Malcolm and I went to school together? We were friends once, he and I. I secretly resented his privilege and told myself I was the smarter man. For a while I even fancied we were rivals.”
Xana noticed his attire. Arthur was dressed formally. He was one of the dinner guests.
The lawyer saw her looking. “Yes,” he answered the unspoken question. “One does not turn down a dinner invitation from Mal McDoom. Not in Guyana. It just isn’t done.”
“But . . .” Xana twisted her heavy brow.
“I’m supposed to tell you about the first time. Let’s see . . .” He looked up. “It was a personal damages case, I believe. Declun was a teenager. He was drunk and high and drove his Porsche through a fisherman’s hut and into the Demerara, breaking the poor man’s boat—and legs—in the process.
“There was no way we were going to win. The young ladies in the car would testify that no one had been drinking. A doctor would come forth and say the boy had epilepsy or something. But more to the point, we weren’t going to win because my client had a long criminal record and because he had lied to me at least three times in our interviews. He was convinced the system was unfair and he had to lie in order to get justice. Feathers would have destroyed him on the stand. We would have been lucky to have our filing fees awarded let alone get the fool’s livelihood replaced.
“But Malcolm didn’t know that. He just wanted it to go away. Back then I think he was still hoping to turn his son into a junior version of himself. So he offered a large sum of money. Off the record, of course. All I had to do was make a doomed case disappear. Convince the client. Be incompetent. Didn’t matter how.
“I don’t regret taking it. Not in and of itself. However things ended up, that first decision was a good one. With Mal’s own money, we took three cases forward and we won. Good people saw justice from the McDooms that they never otherwise would, including a young lady that Declun had forc—” Arthur stopped.
Xana looked down in embarrassment.
“Well, you understand. I saw it as a way to make the McDooms spend a little of their own money against themselves and give me time to build a larger client base. I saw the money as an opportunity.
“Mal saw it as an investment. To him, it wasn’t wasted at all. Mal McDoom’s genius is reading people. Not just me or you. Everyone. He does it effortlessly. He knew his family had built up anger in the community. Resentment. He knew that if even half his plans reached fruition he’d engender a great deal more. I was part of a plan. To create a sort of pressure valve, a way for the people to vent some steam so that it never built up and boiled over on them.
“I’m sure, over the years, he’s lost some cases he wished he hadn’t. I’m sure I’ve frustrated him at times. But in the aggregate . . .” Renkist’s mouth hung open, hung up on the words that struggled to come out. “I’ve done exactly what Mal McDoom wanted. I’ve been a vent in his big machine.” Arthur Renkist looked down at his client.
Xana was dumbfounded. She stared red-eyed from the floor. She cleared her throat. “How many times have you taken money?”
“Oh, half a dozen. Maybe more.”
“And you took money for my case.”
Arthur stood and retrieved a briefcase from the floor near the door. He walked back and opened it on the desk. He lifted it to show her.
Xana saw money. Lots of money. Colorful Euros stacked in neat piles.
“Some of it is yours. He expected you’d have showed up earlier. He expected the specter of Mama and her thugs to be enough to scare anyone away. That was the point. When it wasn’t, I was called to dinner to collect this and find you. Convince you. At first I thought maybe, after all these years, you were actually someone he couldn’t read. But . . . here we are.” He shut the case.
Xana looked away.
“I’d like to be able to return your son to you, Ms. Jace. I really would. But I can’t. No one can. Mal wants him too badly. We’d spend years fighting and only ever make things worse for the both of us. But there’s another case, a case we can win. With this money, we’ll almost certainly get an injunction against the demolition of the old bauxite refinery. We may even be able to force a cleanup, which would stop the rainwater from leaching chemicals into the river. Do you know how many hundreds of people rely on that river for drinking water?”
Xana felt empty. Her face was flat. Strangely, she felt nothing.
Renkist sighed. “This is what he wanted you to see. How things really are. How they’re really done. It’s not at all like what you read in the news, I’m afraid. I expect everything has been working to this. He wanted to break you. It sounds like so much work until you realize how easy it is for him. He’s so good at it. So practiced. This whole thing probably came to him in the shower one day. Isn’t that awful?”
Xana looked at her hands. So big. So powerless. Why did she feel nothing? Why wasn’t she angry? Why wasn’t she tearing the house apart?
“I’m supposed to explain to you that if you show up tomorrow, the police will be there. They will wait until the fight is over. If Boraro leaves you alive, you will be arrested for street fighting, you will lose your job, and any hope we have of convincing the court that you are a fit mother will be gone.”
Xana felt her hands. She rubbed them together and turned them over, one after the next. She made fists. “It won’t come to that,” she whispered. “Mama will kill me. For defying her.”
“Not if you take the money and leave.”
“And what about my little cousin? And everyone at Figtree?”
Renkist shook his head. “Sometimes in life we have to make choices. Sacrifices, even. It would be fantastic if the world were such that we never had to compromise our principles in order to keep fighting, but however much you or I would like that, it just isn’t that way. If you go out to face Boraro, if you play the martyr, you’ll probably be murdered. Even if you aren’t and you somehow managed to stop Mama and her gang, you’ll never get your son back. You’ll die in prison, either from your illness or from a knife in your back. Is that what you want?”
“I don’t want to be a martyr, Mr. Renkist.” Xana stood. She sniffed and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. She was so much taller than the lawyer. She nearly hit the ceiling.
“I’m glad to hear that. What Mama Enecio does is not your fault. You’re not responsible for her. Or her thugs.”
Xana nodded. “Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“In what difficulty have you not compromised?”
Renkist blinked. “What?”
“You said sometimes life is hard. Sometimes we have to make tough choices. Compromise in order to keep fighting.”
“Yes . . .”
“So, when was a time that things got really difficult and you did not compromise?”
“You are a very simple girl.” He said it with a sneer.
“Yes.” Xana gave a nod. “Keep your money. You earned it.” She turned and ducked under the door frame. “I hope you all enjoy dinner. I’m sure it’s delicious.”