Retribution

Leaning back fully on her tropical-wood chair, Catherine scoped out the dining room. Knowing how on-edge the host was, she zeroed in on objects randomly and hummed, pretending to make key observations. Maria tried to discreetly follow the vision of her guest. Catherine didn’t look at Maria once, yet savoured the sound of her gulps masked by a forced bite of her meal. Neither Ryan nor Suzie were at the table, anymore. Just the two.

“Nice place,” Catherine commented. “I’m sure it was expensive. How much did it cost?”

“No, this is rented,” Maria said as a somewhat relieved smile took over her face. “It’s pricey, but… I see a future here.” She raised her finger and started pointing towards the living room, visible in its entirety from where they sat. “A nice television over there, my acoustic there, Suzie’s easel there. She always wanted to start painting. We have a great view over this balcony too. Once… I’m more certain that she wants it too, maybe I’ll buy.”

“So, you see yourself quitting music and staying here? With Suzie? This town?” Catherine added a disgusted grimace with the last words.

“Maybe, I... I used to love Vallago when I first came here, and... I love it now! Doesn’t seem boring at all. It’s so active, so—”

“Right, I never fully got the story on your, uh... daring escape.” Catherine put her knife and fork on either side of her plate and swallowed the last of the steak in her mouth. Before continuing, she looked towards the hallway to the left that split into two directions. Neither of the others seemed to be nearby. “Do you mind satiating some of my curiosity there?”

Maria bubbled up. “Yes, of course! I’m grateful for that journey. When I came here, I found work at this pub called Pin—”

“No, I’m sorry.” Catherine waved her hand around and chuckled. “I meant before you came here. I have to know—How can someone escape one of the most impenetrable borders in the world?”

“I’d… rather not share those details...” Maria’s hand went to grab the glass of water, trying her best to hide how her eyes shrunk up.

“I completely understand. I can’t be trusted yet, and—”

“Nono, that’s not it, Catherine! I trust you, it’s just that… it’s dangerous for anyone to even know what happened. For the people who saved me, for—”

“Does Suzie know?” No response from Maria. All she had was a jaw that wouldn't shut. “Did you put her in this danger, Maria?”

“It’s more complicated than that. Suzie is… She had to know. There was no choice.”

“Ah, I know how Suzie can be.” Catherine smirked, though there was no intention to have the host reciprocate one. “She’s pushy. Puts you into awkward positions. Really hates not knowing everything—which, to be fair, is a trait we share. I can imagine how it was for you. Tell me now tell me now tell me now! Secrets be damned. Though, a bit of advice—You... you have to know when to say no to her. Treat her like a child if you have to. If I had given in to every one of her demands, she’d be dead five times over. You wouldn’t want to hurt her.” She finally looked up at Maria. “Would you?”

Catherine saw an agonising thought be seeded into Maria’s mind. Any more small talk from her was done over, she realised. Catherine grabbed her glass of water and stared at the reflection. A proud woman stared back.

*************************

“Catherine,” Ryan called out. “Answer him.” He pointed to his right.

“Oh, right…” Catherine stopped staring at the ashamed woman and put the glass back on the table. “Sorry, my head—Air is a little thin, today, no? Mmm… Get me some coffee.”

The server nodded. They waited till he was far enough away to grant them some privacy. Catherine yawned. Ryan raised his eyebrow.

“The air is anything but thin,” he criticised in that voice of his that always made Catherine groan. Pfft I don’t care about you, just curious! “Have you been sleeping alright?”

“Please don’t make a big deal of this,” she mumbled as her shoulders finally untensed and her muscles relaxed. “It was shocking, hearing Maria’s passing. Not something you can just… go back to sleep from.”

Ryan’s eyes narrowed further. Catherine tried to face away. She had washed her face and applied the right kind of makeup, but the bagginess under her eyes remained.

“No, this is… You’ve been up a few nights, haven’t you? Even before it happened, you… Catherine, coffee does not replace sleep.”

“Look, now’s not the time.” She started tapping her foot on the tiled floor, the sound of it dull under the chatter within the hall. “Once things are a little calm, I’ll sleep all week, but—”

“Things are never calm with you. I’m not investigating anything if you’re using it as an excuse to stay up.”

“Ryan…” Catherine tried again to pull down on her face. She tried to look away, but that frown of his, trying to hide his overbearing concern… It did not release her gaze. “Stop trying to get me to sleep, it’s creepy. I can skip a few snoozes. Most people in my department do. Most people in general.”

“Those people also have heart attacks at thirty-three, but…” He raised both his hands in defeat. “Fine. You do what you want. Let’s discuss what we know and meet De Luca.”

“Right.” Catherine straightened her back and pushed up her lower lip. “Last night... Last to last night I mean, Maria performed at her last concert. She announced her retirement and... that night, she... died. Found hanging in a room in a hotel nearby. Hanover Peak. The rest of her band, and the crew, were staying there, so I assume she wanted a last hurrah.”

“That sounds correct. Everyone thought that the Dissidents were done for, but the manager, Shuichi Ita, has been trying to clear—”

“Wait...” Catherine raised a finger. “Don’t you mean Scott? His name is Scott, Ryan.”

“He... only gives that name to complete strangers,” Ryan said, his voice more restrained with every word. “Or, people he thinks can’t pronounce it. Either reason...”

“Oh...” Catherine frowned. “We met four times...”

“Hmm...” Ryan nodded slowly as he puckered out his lips.

“Either way! Later that night, there was apparently a disturbance—some kind of an argument between Maria and some other woman, I’m guessing Suzie. Though, it could be that keyboardist. Or some obsessed fan who snuck in. There were several witnesses to the commotion, mostly the hotel staff, but none of them lingered long enough to see anyone exit.”

“Right, Suzie... Did she say anything on the matter? Do we even know where she is?”

“I... thought you might know.” Catherine pointed her thumb at Ryan. “You must’ve asked her before doing that piece last night.”

“No, it was... De Luca approached me. Said Suzie wanted me to do the piece before other reporters did. Thought they wouldn’t be so... graceful about it.”

“She hasn’t even called you?” The detective felt her stomach retract into itself. Suzie always calls. The only time she didn’t was when... “I wouldn’t worry too much. She’s hiding something. She does that.”

“Don’t say that.” Ryan flashed his palm. “She also does this when she’s in trouble. Goes... completely isolationist. Don’t think you two are polar opposites.”

“Of course, you’d take her side.”

“Her s—She’s your enemy, now?”

“No, it’s just that—” Catherine blinked twice, though it didn’t help much with the lucidity. “Never mind. We’ll ask De Luca where she is.”

Ryan narrowed his eyes once more. “Catherine… What were you doing all night? After you met me upstate, where did you go? Home?”

“Ryan…” Catherine tried to adopt a similarly critical tone as him. “Why can’t you stick to business? We were talking about Maria, remember? Your turn to share what you know.”

“I don’t know much. Just know that… De Luca is more suspicious of the band than of Suzie. Asked me not to take their names in this piece.”

“Why not?”

“Didn’t say.”

“Well, I can guess.” Catherine shifted her sharp gaze towards the dark, cloudy skies. Ryan knew it to be the expression beyond her effortless observations and deductions. She had started to take this seriously. “When cases are this high-profile, any name you take becomes the new suspect in the eye of the people. The husband, the wife, the mother... Whichever name you take, they make theories on why they’re the killer for sure. I bet he didn’t want to rattle them yet.”

“What would happen if they get rattled?”

Catherine took a moment to think of the answer. “De Luca is a prudent detective. Old mindset. When he doesn’t know someone, he wants to test them. See how much influence he can have over them. In this case, musicians. Young-ish men and women who work in a field he didn’t even consider a job. He wants to see how they react to everything, and he wants to compare. A lot. I think he does want them to get alerted at some point, just… once he’s noticed something crucial. I don’t know what it is, but… Ugh, where’s the coffee?”

Ryan blinked twice. So deeply immersed in her answer, he forgot about the order. “Stay here, I’ll bring us some.” He got up off his seat and left. Catherine rested her eyes, peeking intermittently to see where Ryan was.

She couldn’t keep her eyes closed. The darkness acted as a canvas for the same memory, lived no less than a hundred times. An awful dinner with an awful ending. The last impression Catherine made of Maria, and Maria of her.

She opened her eyes and looked towards the skies outside. Ryan’s opening remarks—they made sense now. He wasn’t making small talk he was, in fact, worried about the weather. She leaned closer to that end to grasp the scale of the clouds overshadowing Vallago. Nothing the city can’t handle, but nothing to ignore either.

“Could rain any minute.” Ryan was back. He slid one mug towards Catherine. Not a three-quarter-litre cup with her choice of black sludge, but a half-empty cup of a greenish liquid. Catherine stared up at Ryan—the most savage criminal she could think of at that moment.

“It’s good for you,” he said. “Theanines—they’ll help you sleep, tonight.”

“You can’t be serious…” Catherine exhaled sharply. “Ryan… You don’t have to take me out of this, I’m not going after your glory. Please don’t drug me.”

“Catherine…”

“Ryan…” She copied his frustrated tone before conceding and taking a sip. “Back to subject—We have to find out the full story here. Why are they so sure Suzie was the only one with access to the room? Why isn’t she in cuffs? Does she have a secure alibi?”

“There’s another question here.” Ryan leaned closer over the table. So did Catherine—extremely close. She didn’t seem to realise. They were almost face to face. Ryan retracted a little. “It’s those rumours. Gyseia and the refugees. The retribution.”

Catherine was about to switch to that familiar expression—don’t be this stupid, Ryan. Yet, she couldn’t. It was less a matter of probability and more a severity. If. As far as Gyseia saw it, Maria was an infiltrator. She spent so much of her life eating with their enemies, sleeping under the same roof as them, yet she dared call herself a Gyseian? She dared disobey their strict beliefs—and with so much pride?

The world protected her every time Gyseia wanted her back. Her fans constantly kept an eye on her, making sure that, at the very least, Shuichi Ito knew where she would be. Her decision to retire from music could have, inadvertently, might have started a timer.

“That’s why we have you.” She poked at his chest. “We need a camera. Not Jeremy, just a camera. We’ll buy one before meeting De Luca. If there’s any evidence that this is a more… foreign affair, we’d need all the evidence we can get. Expose everything.”

“You should know, us journalists don’t go around exposing everything we hear about.”

“I might be watching the wrong channels, then because that’s all they do.”

“I mean, we—” He grew a suspicious look. “You don’t watch ANTV?” Catherine took another sip. A long one. “Fine, but… Journalists have to be careful. Make sure we don’t report anything incorrect. Many times, we drop stories entirely because they might bring unfair attention towards someone. People lose their jobs because of certain pieces.”

“Where are you going with this?”

Ryan paused. She knew what his silence implied, yet she forced him to say it. “We have to be very un-Catherine on this. No reckless investigation, no reckless journalism. We think before we do anything.”

“Ryan…” Catherine went for the bridge of her nose, using her annoyance as an excuse to keep her eyes shut for a few moments. “We’re not storming the border. If… the problem is… international in nature, we’ll see where it goes. Right now, stop overthinking everything.”

“Oh, so you’re the authority on that?”

“Very funny,” Catherine said after a mocking cackle. “Look, there’s not much left to discuss until we see De Luca. The station is nearby. I say we go there before it rains. And, stop worrying. My money says it’s a fan, or the band. All that... retribution stuff is just an urban myth.”

The two investigators left the diner. Behind them was a man sharing his booth with no one, talking up the waitress. “Don’t let me keep you Julia,” he insisted. “We’ll see each other later.”

In only a matter of minutes, the man was in the alleyway beside the diner, brandishing a triangular knife that was hidden inside of his long woollen coat. “Ma-ark,” the man cooed. “Mark Alekseev. I’m talking to you. Or—I’m sorry, I’ll use Marcel Abbott if you want. Is that what you want?”

There was no response for him, only the faintest sound of a short breath buried deeply within the gushing wind.

“Marcel, I know you won’t run away. Get out here so we talk like men.”

From behind the large set of dumpsters came a lone man putting on a brave face. Marcel looked his guest right in the eye. No pleading, no wailing.

“I never expected to live a full life,” he said, trying his best to adopt an accepting smirk. “But I was content with what I got.”

“You can still have one, my friend.” The guest slowly approached Marcel, never once sheathing his knife. “Come back home. Talk to us. The right information would keep you away from the gallows. No—I can promise you a military position. Not a private, a real soldier. Three meals a day, Mark, can you beat that?”

“It’s Marcel.” His teeth gritted. “A man of Vallago. I’ll sooner die than help you rotten fiends round up my brothers and sisters!”

“Oh, we can avoid all that bloodshed!” The guest was standing right before Marcel with a callously loose grip on the knife. The latter’s eyes kept wandering towards it, yet the hands never went for it. “You just need to give me one name. Susan Martin.” Marcel’s eyes grew twice their size. The guest smiled warmly. “You know her, don’t you? Vegh’s girl?”

“I don’t.” Marcel’s eyes remained shut, a peaceful look overcame him as he took a big breath in.

“You know, Marcel. Come on. I know you’ll tell me for the same reason you didn’t run away.” He breathed out. “It’s the girl, Marcel. Julia. Won’t you be her hero, keep her safe from the mean man Myrot? If you can’t tell me, she has to.”

“She doesn’t know anything,” he said with his eyes still closed, his hands over his assailant’s shoulders as he exposed his torso. “Do what you want with her. You’ll only waste your time.”

“Now, I don’t believe that.” Marcel opened his left eye only enough to peek. The blunt side of the knife was now gently placed on his nose, the tip pointed straight between his eyebrows. “Such a pretty lass, Marcel… The things I could do with her… I can take her back home and sell her to the Blue-Ribbon Boys. When they’re done tossing her around, I can go for a visit myself—See if she remembered Suzie Martin with a mouth full of blood and—”

With a powerful war cry, Marcel lunged both his arms up, straight for the knife. All he had were empty palms. It wasn’t at his nose, anymore. No, instead, it was twelve centimetres into his torso. The only sight the diner guest left for him in his final moment was a bland, unexcited reaction against a sky that refused him one last rainfall.