The Last Orphan
Chapter 46

“Ever since we pretended to outgrow religion, we’ve ceased to value humility, forgiveness, surrender. So what do we have? An arrogant generation that doesn’t know how to forgive or surrender. And who are we letting point our way?” Devine faced Evan from behind a curved mahogany bar immense enough to seat a Broadway chorus line.

The space, a drawing room of sorts, featured bookshelves, wainscoting, and a spectacular array of bottles. On the wall to Evan’s side, an enormous pencil-and-watercolor wash showed the face of the great Lebanese poet, his famous words writ large in melodic calligraphy:

Your pain is the breaking of The Shell that encloses your understanding.

“Bureaucracies disemboweled by meekness? Media-seeking crybullies? Leaders who armor themselves in the ideology of left or right and mouth calculated sentiments to lord over their respective dung heaps?”

The voluble host had spoken unbroken for the past ten minutes, his words coming so fast they’d started to run together. No sign remained of the measured speech or inscrutable façade he’d presented earlier. It was as though once he loosed his thoughts, he could no longer control them; he just had to hold on and let them bull their way through the china shop. Evan sensed that the acceleration had something to do with the understanding Luke craved from those he deemed worthy—this tonnage of words shoved before him like the blade of a bulldozer, scarring his signature into the topography. It wasn’t enough for him to be the holder of the strings; he had to be revered for what he was, what he saw, what he could do.

“I was told there’d be vodka,” Evan said.

Half turning to run a finger solicitously across the spirits, Devine kept on. “They want to take the bloodsport out of business.” His finger ticked across a bottle of Beaufort, custom-made for the lower bar at the Savoy in London. “The iron-testing from education.” Next a squat Black Cow container that mimicked a milk bottle; a West Dorset dairy farmer had derived a pure milk vodka from whey. “The teeth out of art.”

Devine’s digit slid past Wyborowa with its twisted glass bottle designed by Frank Gehry. When it reached the next bottle, fat and round with a running wild boar on it, Evan gave a nod.

He’d not yet been able to get his hands on Atomik vodka, created with water pumped from a local aquifer in Chernobyl and grain grown on a plot inside the Exclusion Zone. The distillation process cut the radiation to almost zero. Almost.

Devine said, “They’re trying to rearrange the world to avoid any possible suffering. But we can never eliminate suffering. There’s no wisdom without it. It’s a tale as old as the Greeks.”

“And you’re good enough to provide the service?” Evan asked.

“No. I’m just not afraid to do it.”

“You think you’re pretty grand,” Evan said.

“Only in comparison to everyone else.” Devine didn’t grin; he was in dead earnest. He poured two fingers into a crystal tumbler.

“One rock,” Evan said. “Cube or sphere.”

Devine plopped a spherical ice cube into Evan’s glass and then poured himself a good five ounces of Macallan No. 6. “Shouldn’t we cultivate men and women who know how to withstand pressure, to persevere, to think outrageously? Did we forget that menace has to be met with will? That we’re competing against other nations? That we’re collectively responsible for the future of a planet?” He leaned forward on the mahogany plain like an old-fashioned barman. “We’re so far out of touch with our animal instincts we’ve made ourselves vulnerable to being ruled by the worst of them.”

Evan sipped. Atomik was rounded off but still hair-on-your-chest strong, more a grain spirit than true vodka. The water base had qualities of similar limestone aquifers from the south of England or France’s Champagne region.

He’d been fascinated by Atomik since he’d heard of it. A pure spirit summoned from the most contaminated place on earth. That’s where items of greatest value lay: In sterquiliniis invenitur. Treasure guarded by the dragon. The alchemist’s jewel in the toad’s head. Pearl in an oyster’s mouth. Every last freedom he’d found within himself, buried in caves hewn from his worst self.

“I haven’t,” Evan said, when he came up for air.

“What?” Devine seemed surprised to be interrupted, as if just remembering that he wasn’t alone.

“Forgotten I’m an animal.”

“That’s why I’m talking to you.” Devine took down half the whiskey, a single five-hundred-dollar gulp. He leaned on the bar unfazed and unslowed. “You and I, we don’t hide from the heat of reality beneath the parasol of the latest ideology. When you don’t have a tribe or a party or a doctrine to clad yourself in? When you’re not captured by belief? When you’re free? It’s goddamned lonely.”

His penetrating gaze felt like a violation. Instinctively, Evan lowered his eyes to his drink, a tell he instantly regretted.

Devine kept on. “Most people need their guardrails. They build their own prison cells thought by thought. Milton spent the 1650s reading by light of candle. Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Old English—every known book in existence. He went blind. From reading too much? No. From knowing too much. He wrote Paradise Lost from the depths of his sightless mind. Can you imagine? Shouldering the crushing weight of centuries of tradition to spin his own heaven and hell into being?”

His eyes were glazed but present, an unsettling effect as if he were looking straight through Evan, across the room, and through the opposing wall at something imperceptible to the human eye.

“But today? We decide what we believe minute by minute, sound bite by sound bite, tweet by tweet. And we assume it’s the most moral, the most just. Why? Because it’s the latest. Our beliefs have no time to age. To consider the broad sweep that delivered us here, to this instant in history. And everyone’s running so fast to keep up that they can’t grasp just how treacherous this is. When our culture gets this ill, this unbalanced, it requires daring to heal it.”

Now the second half of Devine’s glass went down.

“Maybe that’s all the devil is,” he continued. “Maybe he just embraces the worst of what’s inside”—a wicked pause—“everybody. So we don’t forget. Everywhere we look, people are scrambling to tell us how infallibly moral they are. Politicians. Preachers. Pop stars. Journalists. Corporations, for God’s sake. That’s why someone like me is needed—a vice merchant, a collector of sins. Someone who refuses to let them get away with it.” Devine hummed with energy. “Label me bad if you like, but people willing to be bad are necessary. They’re the only ones who can wake us up so we’ll have the strength to avoid worse people later.”

Evan tasted the vodka once more, felt the burn forge down his throat, coat his stomach. “Maybe that’s what worse people tell themselves when they’re still only bad.”

“You were dispatched to kill me,” Devine said. “So. As one should do in any situation no matter how hard, I asked myself, what is the opportunity this presents to me? How might we fit together?”

“We don’t.”

“Someone has to do up here what you do down there.” Devine searched the shelves behind him for his next pour. “You only neutralize people for good reason. I only control them for such. What makes me a greater abuser of human law and custom than you?” He found a Glenfiddich Reserve to his liking and dashed a sloppy pour into his glass without bothering to rinse it out first. “I extort senators. You knife someone in an alley. The question isn’t what I do. But why. What if it’s to torpedo a law written by lobbyists to let corporations dump radioactive waste on Native American reservations because they’re exempt from federal environmental regulations? Or to sink a pork-laden bill that’s about the environment in name only?” A robust gulp. “You could use an ally like me.”

“The last thing I need,” Evan said, “is an ally like you.”

Devine blinked at him. He looked not so much offended as surprised by Evan’s lack of imagination. “I’m the only kind of ally you need.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because. We are nothing alike.” Holding his eyes on Evan, Luke drained the scotch in a few swift swallows. The alcohol seemed not to affect him at all. “You and I have different gifts. We’re familiar with yours. Mine?” He set the empty glass down hard. “When my brain speeds up, it feels like the rest of the world is moving in slow motion. And the less I sleep, the less sleep I need, until I’m nothing more than a body hooked to the network of my thoughts.” As he spoke faster, his body canted forward, weight shifted onto the balls of his feet, head cocked slightly out ahead of his neck. “Do you know what it feels like? Moving that fast when everyone else is wading through sludge?”

Evan wondered if Devine’s superpower was just wearing people the hell out.

“I understand your reticence,” Luke said. “At a certain point, the world doesn’t make sense anymore. It’s not supposed to. It’s because you’ve outgrown it. You need my expansiveness. I need someone who can ensure I hold … perspective. Imagine what you could do if I threw all my power, my reach, my resources behind you. Imagine who you could be if we joined forces. I’m offering you an alliance that will open up the universe to us both.”

He reached beneath the bar and came up with a pistol. Evan’s ARES 1911.

“What’s it gonna be?” Devine asked. “The rules you’ve always lived by?” He set the pistol on the mahogany between them. “Or what lies beyond?”

Without breaking eye contact with Luke, Evan picked up his pistol, wrapped his left hand over the top of the slide with his middle finger touching the rear of the ejection port, and pulled back until he felt the cartridge case at the breech face. Chamber loaded. Letting the slide go, he thumbed the safety up, ejected the magazine into his palm, and pushed the top cartridge down hard with his index finger. No budge. He reseated the full mag with a click and set the loaded pistol back down on the bar, aimed halfway between him and Luke, an indicator arrow deciding which way to point.

Weapon-status check by touch, less than three seconds.

Devine’s stare was unblinking, hawklike. Evan felt the heat of it as surely as he’d felt the fireplace glow on the side of his face.

“Johnny Seabrook,” Evan said. “Angela Buford.”

Devine’s sigh smelled of charred oak casks and warm spices. “You are,” he said, “so f*****g disappointing.”

They stared at each other. Ten seconds passed. Then thirty. One full minute was a long time to hold hostile eye contact.

“Ethics,” Luke said tartly, “are a good boy’s version of morality. It’s coloring inside the lines. Don’t worry. You’ll outgrow it one day.”

Evan allowed himself another sip.

Luke’s focus hadn’t wavered. His intensity like a spotlight directed into Evan’s face. A dark sort of anger seethed beneath his features. Evan watched the frustration work its way up from the pit of Devine’s stomach until it reached his mouth; it was as though he could not prevent himself from speaking. “You’re not supposed to be here because of a dead boy I’ve never met.”

“And girl,” Evan said. “Why am I supposed to be here?”

“Because as the unofficial fourth co-equal branch of government, I’m a threat to President Donahue-Carr and the entire rotten system she represents.”

“I don’t care about any of that.”

“What then?” Luke’s tone, as sharp as a blade. “What do you care about?”

Evan thought of the unfinished jigsaw puzzle on the Seabrooks’ kitchen table. Ruby slouched in her brother’s beanbag. Deborah smoking her taboo cigarettes. Mason’s multicolored beard glistening with tears. He thought about a young woman who wrote poetry on driftwood, who’d changed her name to Desiree, whose head had been twisted around on her skull farther than bone and tendon allowed.

“Nothing you’d understand,” Evan said.

“Perhaps you’re right,” Luke said. “You concern yourself with trifles. I’m trying to wake up the world.”

“The world is already perfect, Devine. It’s people that are broken. And all your talking won’t fix that. It’s too abstract, too many ways to get lost. We only learn anything in the doing.”

“I know you believe that,” Devine said. “But I am offering you a rare gift. The opportunity to be wrong.”

Evan took another sip and set down his glass, half full. “Labor Day,” he said. “A year and a month ago.”

Devine blinked three times in rapid succession. “What?”

“That’s the date Johnny Seabrook and Angela Buford were murdered. I think it happened here at Tartarus. At one of your parties. You’ve displayed your extensive time-stamped surveillance footage. So. Show me.”

“Gladly.”

“I’ll make you a deal,” Evan said. “If their deaths had nothing to do with you or this place, then we’ll continue the discussion.”

Luke said, “And if they did?”

Evan reached for the ARES and gave it a spin. It rotated lazily around and came to rest aiming at Luke.

He picked up the pistol and slid it into his holster.

He stood.

Luke followed him out.

Tip: You can use left, right keyboard keys to browse between chapters.Tap the middle of the screen to reveal Reading Options.

If you replace any errors (non-standard content, ads redirect, broken links, etc..), Please let us know so we can fix it as soon as possible.

Report