Crystal Jake: The Complete EDEN Series Box Set (22 page)

I freeze, the blood congealing in my veins. He saw me coming!

In the glass I see his face gleaming dimly, as insubstantial as a ghost. It is a moment so simple, but so heightened because of that very simplicity. Life rarely offers such moments of profound clarity. It is as if I have trained for years for this moment. I see its preciousness glittering like a cornered rat’s eyes. Kill or be killed. Hesitating is to make the second choice.

I whisk around, eyes wide, clumsy and unsteady in my heels.

His face is tight as a carved marble bust. The glass behind my back is shockingly cold and the silence between us is leaden. Suddenly I feel the way Eve must have felt, so naked, so exposed, and so
fucking
guilty.

He stands a foot away from me, touching distance, and simply looks at me. As if he is looking at a piece of modern art and trying to figure out what the artist intended to say with his senseless splashes of color. I try to imagine what he must be seeing.

After you cut all the bullshit about making the world a safer place and my gnawing shame that I was not there for Luke when he needed me, what is left? A sad, lonely, despicable bitch, who tried to use her body to get some information and failed miserably.

I open my mouth and, honestly, I don’t know what I was planning to say, but he lays a silencing finger across my lips.

‘Don’t lie, baby,’ he advises softly.

I shake my head. I can feel the tears gathering at the backs of my eyes. I blink hard and fast. He takes his hand away.

‘Did you tell them about the sixteenth?’

Dismay curves my spine. I close my eyes and nod.

I hear him sigh softly.

I open my eyes and he is looking at me with an expression so sad that I want to press my body against his and hold him, but I can’t. I couldn’t bear it if he pushed me away. God! It had seemed so real only a moment ago and yet it was all only a mirage. I feel my body trembling.

‘When did you find out?’ My voice is just a string.

‘Maybe I always knew. I just didn’t want to believe it.’

‘How?’ A part of me wants to know where I went wrong.

One corner of his lips twists. ‘Everything about you was off. You were too clean to be a runaway. And a runaway who has never let a man come inside her before? And there is one more thing that you might want to reconsider before you go back to being an undercover asset. You talk in your sleep.’

‘I do?’ I say hoarsely.

‘That time when you were attacked you said, “Get Crystal Jake.” I knew then for sure. No one calls me that anymore.’

‘So you admit dealing in drugs?’

He frowns. ‘How have I just admitted to dealing in drugs?’

‘Crystal Jake because you were selling crystal meth.’

‘Is that what they told you?’ He grasped his crystal chain and tugged hard at it. It broke, sending sparkling crystals flying across the room, hitting the floor. With his other hand he took my hand, opened my palm, put in what was left in his fist and closed my hand. ‘That is why I was called Crystal Jake. I have
never
sold hard drugs.’

My gaze moves from my closed fist up to his eyes. I don’t know whether to believe him, but he has never lied to me, and it is true that the whole time I have been with him I have not seen any evidence of drug usage or dealing either at Eden or on a personal level.

I stare at him as I have never seen him before. As the man I am in love with. All this while I have been pretending—to him and to myself—that I’m not. But I love him. I love this gangster who seems more honest and sincere than a priest. Other than the bed covered in used money I have no evidence that he is a gangster anyway.

He walks away from me and begins to dress. I stand at the glass, naked and frozen, all kinds of thoughts churning through my mind. He comes back fully dressed and looks at me. There is contempt in his eyes.

‘Why did you marry me if you knew?’

‘So that no one will be able to force you to testify against me. If you do, it will be because you want to.’

My mouth drops open. For some reason his answer is painful on a shocking level. ‘How could you marry me for that reason?’

‘How could you show me your naked body and keep your heart covered? Tell them the next time they want another swipe at me it might be an idea not to send such a rookie.’ He looks at me with hard, derisive eyes. ‘Enjoy your wedding night, Mrs. Eden.’

Oh

The damage is done

So I guess I be leavin’

—Cry me a River, Justin Timberlake

F
or a long time I stand staring at the closed door. A part of me is horrified, but a part of me that I have hidden for so long is strangely elated that the lie is finally out in the open. I don’t have to pretend anymore. Nude, I walk to the fully stocked bar. I open a bottle of whiskey and drink it straight from the bottle. It glugs down my throat, burning all the way down. I cough and pat my chest. The sound is loud in the empty suite.

Tears press against my eyelids. I feel alone, helpless, and so incredibly lost. I have failed miserably. And I have only myself to blame. I pick up the cheongsam from the floor, and carefully hang it in the closet. It is my wedding dress. I let my fingers skim the silky material one last time. The chambermaid will find it. It will be a nice treat for her. Then I go into the bathroom and, avoiding my reflection, dress in my own clothes.

Then I sit on the bed and wait for him. I am convinced he will come back through the door. He could not have just walked out on me. But an hour later I know he is not coming back. Reality hits. The truth is like switching on a light. All this time I had thought my eyes were accustomed to the dark. I had made out shapes from the shadows and guessed their names.

But it was a lie.

He knew I was an undercover cop the whole time and he was only pretending. Everything we had was a lie. Maybe the lust was real, but what is lust but dust without love? All that time he knew.
I think of all the people and the planning that must have gone into hiring The Blue Man Group, the lavish wedding. He had lost all that money on purpose. To keep the invisible balance ledger between him and the casino straight.

The breath comes out of me in a rush. Now I understand why he asked for this particular suite. The Provocateur suite.

The message was there for me to see. Only I was too proud of my own ability to deceive and too blinded by my own feelings. I feel tears prickling at the backs of my eyes. No, I won’t give in now. I know what happens when I give in to grief. It takes over. I become a total wreck. No more introspection. I can’t stay here anymore.

My instructions are very clear in the event that my cover is ever blown.

I pick up the phone, make flight reservations. Then I pack my bag quickly and with little fuss. There is not much to pack, anyway. I open my purse and take out the black plastic chip. Worthless here, but worth ten thousand dollars at Eden.

I remember that sweltering night as if it happened yesterday. How exciting it had all been then. How naïve I was to give in to temptation and not think it would scar me for life. I put the chip on the pillow on his side of the bed. I don’t know why I bother after the cavalier way he lost all that money in the casino earlier, but I know I can’t keep it.
At the end of the operation you will ditch all the physical trappings of your undercover alter ego, the hair, the clothes, the people you have befriended, and return to your own normal world.

Then I go out to the lounge to sit and wait. I know I am a wreck waiting to happen, but at this moment I feel strangely detached and calm. It is simple, I tell myself. My cover is blown. I am not the first undercover cop it has happened to. It has happened many times. I will simply report back and they will assign me somewhere else. Somewhere I can go to lick my wounds. Where there won’t be a Jake Eden I will fall in love with and suffer over.

I look at the time. I call reception and order a cab. In thirty minutes the cab will arrive and take me to the airport. I will be fine. Of course I will be fine.

A small voice says, ‘Don’t run away. Stay. Fight for your man.’

But he is not my man. He is nobody’s man. He was pretending the whole time. I have been silly. I allowed myself to fall in love. It is not so despicable. Other cops have done it. Over the course of years of being undercover some have married their targets and even had children with them. I am not so despicable.

I stand. I can’t stay in this room any longer. I will wait in reception downstairs. I pick up my luggage, take one last look at the opulence around me, and walk resolutely to the door.

I open it and stop dead in my tracks. My luggage falls from my disbelieving hands.

Jake Eden is sitting sprawled out in the corridor. His back is resting against the opposite wall and beside him is an empty bottle of Scotch. He has another in his right hand, which is already half empty. He looks up, trying to hold his lids open.

‘Leaving so soon?’ he slurs.

Last part out sooner than you think
…


Jake

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”

—Friedrich Nietzsche

N
ot many people end up sitting sprawled and dead drunk in the corridor outside their suite in a Vegas hotel. Waiting for the door to open and desperately wanting it not to. I guess I am what Edna O’Brien meant when she described the Irish character as ‘maimed, stark and misshapen, but ferociously tenacious.’

In my maudlin state I contemplate a mysterious madness. If it is true that your soul alone keeps the map of your destiny, then the geography of my destiny to this expensive corridor must have been known to the highest and most hidden part of me even while I was a destitute boy. A boy who ran barefoot on grassy, sunlit meadows, visited horse fairs, and watched with hungry eyes but never touched the other traveler girls.

I have memories of digging up armfuls of carrots and potatoes, eating soda bread crusts, and dressing in rags and cast-offs even though I was the oldest. One Christmas my mother paid ten pounds for a pair of stained maroon velvet curtains in a charity shop. She cut them up and sewed all her three boys identical trousers and my sister a dress. My sister was something beautiful even then, and, of course, the dress looked gorgeous on her. I had to knock a boy down after church for staring so lustfully at her. ‘Unfortunately’ for me, one day after Christmas I caught my new curtain trousers on a nail and tore them so badly they were unusable even as a pair of shorts. Within a week both my brothers had ‘accidentally’ and irreparably ruined theirs, too.

As children we didn’t know we were dirt poor because my father was a compulsive gambler. Cards, dogs, horses, sports, fights, dice. Anything that he deemed required some form of skill he found irresistible. Once he started he didn’t know how to stop. Sometimes he took me with him and I used to sit big-eyed and watch him. He was my hero. What the fuck—maybe he still is.

Patrick Eden was special. While the rest of the world was telling me that the Irish were thick—‘they’d bring a fork if it rained soup’—my father had a totally different philosophy.

‘There are only two kinds of people in the world, my boy,’ he said often and with cheerful certainty, a proud finger raised in the air, ‘the Irish and those who wish they were.’

Obviously with such a philosophy he was absolutely convinced that he was a winner. The other gamblers were banking on luck, and he alone had found an infallible technique to beat the odds. And when he was winning it did seem that way. I can’t forget what he was like when the pile of money in front of him was growing. Cocky? Oh! You never saw anything like my dad when he was winning. A larger than life character he was. Even now the memory brings a warm glow to my heart.

So I bought the lie. I was young and I wanted to believe. Even when the inevitable ‘losing streak’ struck, his confidence remained invincible. His bets became bigger, sometimes doubling. Forget doubling—every penny ended up on the table. He borrowed money from anyone who was fool enough to lend it.

This was the time desperation ruled: nothing was sacred. Everything could go into the pot. His wife. His sons. His daughter. Anything. Because he was that cocksure that a losing streak always preceded a big win. On the other side Lady Luck was waiting with open arms. He was the big winner. All he had to do was believe in himself. So he readied for the losing streak to end by betting heavily on long shots.

And then he lost.

The shock might have stopped another man in his tracks, but not my father. At that point there was no yarn too outrageous, no lie that was beneath him. He
had to
recoup his losses. That was when he began to embezzle from the bosses. That period didn’t last long.

They are bosses because they are one step ahead of everyone else.

One day he was patting me on the back, looking me in the eye and boasting about a non-existent big win on the dogs, and the next day I was being held back by two of Saul’s heavies while another slit my father’s throat from ear to ear. I was so shocked I went limp. I just stood and watched the blood gushing out of his severed arteries. It squirted out so far I was covered in it.

That moment can be likened to when a great tree is felled. The air becomes barren. A shocked silence ensues. The forest knows another one of its guardians has been murdered. The savagery of the waste stuns it.

My soul, dependent upon his nurture, wizened and shrank even as my mind sharpened. I watched the radiance and the light die out of his bright eyes. How they went from wide-eyed shock to nothingness. I saw with hurtful clarity all the words unsaid, the potential lost, and the promises missed. Nothing would ever be the same again. His last whisper, a gargling, unintelligible sound, was that of someone on his way to a dark, cold space.

‘What do you want to do, tinker boy? Are you going to work the debt off or is your sister going to do it on her back?’

The question had only one right answer.