Kill the King (11 page)

Khaled
eventually let go of his unmoving victim, then sat at his own chair
and finished his beer. No one dared look him in the eyes. Boreta
relit the same cigar he had previously butt out and continued his
speech. He wasn’t through with making his point across.

“When I left
the worthless continent of Europe and crossed the sea, I saw how
things were different here. You all think you’re strong, hard men.
None of you know
shit!
You do not know what kind of monsters
men can become. Here, my name is whispered as if I am some kind of
demon. Some of you even call me a
dragon
behind my back. Ha!
In this soft country I am indeed a dragon. . .but back home, a
dragon in not so unique in the company of so many savage creatures.
What you saw tonight was
nothing
compared to what I’ve seen
during the war. The horrors, you have no idea. I. . .”

His thoughts
trailed off at the mere mention of the atrocities he witnessed, and
when he regained his focus he opted not to elaborate any further.
Some stories were better left untold.

“I promised
myself I would never resort to what I’ve seen done during the war,
but now the time has come for me to break that promise. I’ll be
damned if I will ever be betrayed again. I will not lose again what
I’ve worked so hard to build, and if I must, I will defend it with
even more blood than ever before!”

Boreta downed
another drink. If this was a metamorphosis that he once tried to
prevent from happening, it was no longer the case. He now embraced
it wholeheartedly.

“All of
you—this is your last warning. Your
last
warning! What
happened tonight was quick and easy. The next one to betray me will
not be so lucky. Father is angry, and he will not forgive his
children so easily next time. Is that understood?”

Boreta was
panting from the rage-fueled tirade. It was the only sound that
lingered in the room. It was otherwise as quiet as a crypt.

“I will take
that as a
yes,
then. Khaled—take him away now. Everyone
else—leave. Party’s over.”

Boreta sat down
once more to pour himself another drink. The terrified Family
members hastily left the room. Tyler sprung up with vigour and had
one foot out the door before he heard Marko’s voice calling his
name.

“Not you,
Tyler. Stay here with me a while.
Please.”

****

“Have you ever
wondered why people call me
The Man who Refuses to Die?”

Both men had
remained in the banquet room, drinking heavily for well over an
hour and barely talking. Sweat dripped off Marko’s reddened
forehead and his right eye was half shut.

I have you
alone now. You’re all mine.

“
No.
I
figured it’s because everyone has failed to kill you.”

Until now, that
is.

Marko closed
his eyes and exhaled deeply.

“You only know
half the story then, my boy. It’s more complicated than that. You
see, it’s not that I
refuse
to die. . .I
cannot
die.
It is a small difference, but it is a very important one. I’m
cursed.”

Tyler’s face
remained blank. By this time he was so drunk, he didn’t know
whether he had misheard or if Marko’s paranoid delusions had gotten
the better of him at long last. It didn’t help that his speech
started to slur a bit from all the drinking.

“You are right
to be suspicious of my claim, but it’s true. Oh, how I wish it
weren’t. . .but here I am sitting before you today. Only men die. I
can’t. I’m not a man. No. . .I’m something else.”

Tyler clumsily
reached for his gun in his jacket pocket but Marko reached for his
hand and gripped it tightly. His breath reeked of whiskey and his
hands felt hot and moist.

“Listen to me,
my boy. Don’t leave me just yet. Just listen to what I have to say.
I need to tell you a story I’ve never told anyone.

I don’t want to
hear another story. I don’t even want to kill you. . .I have to do
it. I’m not going back to the Block, Marko. I can’t. . .I just
fucking can’t.

Tyler
hesitated. Struggling for his gun now could ruin his chances of
escape. It was better if he waited for Marko to be relaxed and
vulnerable again. He moved his hand away and clumsily lit one of
Marko’s cigars. He could barely keep it from falling out of his
mouth, drunk as he was.

“Back in the
homeland I made my fortune in hashish and tobacco smuggled in from
Turkey, but before I could invest in that business I was a
moneylender. The state bank was shit, you see, and we were
forbidden to own foreign currency. . .especially from an enemy
capitalist, imperialist state. Having that kind of money—”

Marko
accidentally knocked over the whiskey bottle while talking with his
hands. He bent over to look at the mess and grumbled what Tyler
suspected to be profane expressions in his native tongue. He let
out a gloomy, dismayed sigh before continuing with his story.

“Having that
kind of money could earn you a long sentence of forced labour.
Because of the danger, it became a very precious commodity. Having
even a few Francs hidden somewhere in your house could save you
when the police broke through your door in the middle of the night.
To have a lot, that gave you
power.”

Marko grabbed
the last cigar from the humidor and struck a match. He let the fire
linger in his hand for a little while before lighting up. Drunk as
he was, he was still lucid enough to keep talking.

“When I was a
young man, I worked as an errand boy for a local criminal who
forged passports for defectors. They all paid him in foreign money.
He was cruel and paranoid and he would beat me when he had too much
to drink. For a long time, I did not hate him. We were all afraid
of the police taking us away some day. This was an ordinary way of
life back then. There was no reason to hate him for being just as
afraid as I was. I forgave the blood. ”

Fifty years in
the Block. That’s what I’m looking at. I have to kill you, Marko.
Do you know what it’s like in there? Could you ever understand?

“He had taken
in a young orphan girl as his ward. Her parents were arrested for
proliferating political material that undermined the
government’s reputation.
She lived in his house and did all of
his cooking and cleaning. She had long dark hair and grey eyes. Her
name was Rozafa.”

I am not your
son. You are not my father. How could you be? No father should make
his son do the things that I’ve done for you. I lost my soul in the
Block. . .where were you when I was locked away? Where were you,
Marko? Where were you when I needed you the most?

“He beat her
all the time. I would look the other way whenever he did so. I
accepted it as something that I could not change. . .but then one
night he raped her, and I could forgive the blood no longer. I
demanded vengeance from every god and devil that I could name. I
was furious! I went to the police to demand that he be arrested. I
suppose I should not have been surprised when they told me to fuck
off. Crime that did not implicate subversion of the state was of no
importance to them. So then, what else could I do? I denounced him,
and they took him away in the middle of the night. No one ever saw
him again.”

“
Forgive the
blood.” You might forgive me. . .but what makes you think you
deserve my forgiveness?

Tyler slowly
reached for his gun. Marko shoved Tyler back in his seat and
stumbled back to his chair. His face was flush and his breathing
sounded heavier and more laboured.

“Let me finish,
my boy! You see, the police were in such a hurry to arrest him that
they did not bother to search his house for anything other than
evidence of material for forgery. They didn’t know that he had
foreign money stashed in his house. . .
but I did.
That same
night, Rozafa and I rummaged through every corner of the house and
recovered
fifty thousand Deutschmarks.
It was more than
enough for us to run away and start a new life somewhere free.”

Tyler was too
drunk to remember where he had hidden his gun. He nervously ran his
hands over his body in search of it while Marko kept talking.

“I should have
listened to her, but my greed was too strong. With time I managed
to convince her that we should stay and use the money for more
illegal investments before defecting. First we imported contraband
cigarettes from Turkey. Then it was hashish. Before long we became
secretly rich. Rozafa and I were wed by then, in spite of the work
that consumed me more and more with time. Our daughter was born
soon afterwards.”

Marko paused.
His gaze drifted away to the ceiling, as if he were hoping that
someone above was listening to the story that he was sharing with
Tyler.

“Her name was
Luljeta. God be praised, I will never see such beauty again. .
.”

I don’t have a
choice. I can’t go back. I’m sorry, Marko.

Still seated,
Tyler pulled out his gun and pointed it at Marko’s face. Tyler’s
eyes squinted as he attempted to steady his aim. There were now two
Markos in front of him and he couldn’t figure out which one was
real.

Enraged, Marko
sprung to his feet, walked over to Tyler at point-blank range, and
slapped him across the face before picking him up by his jacket
collar.

“You stupid,
drunken child! How dare you play games while I speak to you? Have
you lost your fucking mind?”

Marko swiped
the gun out of Tyler’s hand and slugged him in the gut. His fist
was as hard as stone. Tyler fell to one knee, clutching his abdomen
as he retched on the wooden floor.

“Are you still
awake, my boy? Good. I’ll forget you did something so stupid if you
listen to my story. There’s a lesson to be learned from all
this.”

Tyler strained
to lift himself up and get back to his seat. The stench of vomit
stung his nostrils.

“We made good
money but Rozafa was never happy with my decision to stay home. We
had lost our one and only chance to be free and happy together. We
had lost our chance at finding some peace for our souls. Then one
summer, everything fell apart.”

Marko grabbed
Tyler’s glass and drained it before slumping back in his chair.
Tyler was too drunk to tell whether it was sweat or tears that he
saw Marko wipe away from his face.

“It rained for
weeks on end. Many parts of the country were flooded. When the rain
finally stopped, the plague came next. I should have expected this.
. .it wasn’t not the first time that God sent floods and plagues to
punish the wicked. It’s the children who suffer for the sins of
their fathers.”

That’s right,
Marko. I’ve suffered for you. . .now it’s time for your
punishment.

“Her little
eyes sank into her skull. Her skin turned blue and cold. Oh, the
times Rozafa wept for hours on end. . .and all the pleas I made to
God to save our child! Our prayers went unanswered.
No,
God
would not listen. . .not to me. By the time the doctors discovered
it was cholera, it was too late to save her. We had all this money
and yet we could not keep her safe. She was not even old enough to
go to school. You know nothing of sorrow until you bury your own
child. To see her little body wrapped in linen and placed in a pine
box deep in the ground,
alone
with no one to hold her. .
.”

This time,
Tyler could tell for sure that they were tears. It was a side of
him that Tyler had never seen before.

Sweet fucking
hell. . .I can’t believe this shit. Is this some kind of trick? Is
he stalling for time?

“Luljeta. My
sweet, delicate Luljeta! My little flower! God had stolen her from
us! My poor, poor Luljeta! Forgive your father, please!
Luljeta!”

His voice
trembled when he cried out her name, as if its mere utterance ate
away at his insides. He picked Tyler up from his seat and clutched
him hard as he wept. Tyler fumbled for his gun.

Should I make
you beg for my forgiveness?

“Rozafa never
forgave me for it. She said it was my fault; that we should have
defected when we had our chance. Do you want to know what she said
before she left me? Do you know what she said to me, my boy?”

When Tyler
didn’t respond, Marko shook him violently and shoved him back into
his seat.

“She said that
I will live
forever.
I didn’t understand her words until
many years later when I found myself scavenging in the back alleys
of Europe. Immortality is a
curse;
everyone I love will
suffer and die and I will be powerless to stop it. God took away my
Luljeta as punishment, and did it to me once more with my darling
Rozafa. The curse struck me again and again. . .God is nothing if
not angry with the wicked!”

Marko began to
stumble and limp as he paced back and forth across the room. It
unwittingly made him a harder target for Tyler.

“When she
decided to leave me, I did not protest. I escorted her to the train
station myself and gave her a passport made by my best forgers. By
then, the war had already broken out many months before. When we
waited for the train to arrive, a fucking
sniper
shot her
right in her face. . .all because she was unlucky enough to be
standing beside me. That bullet was meant for me.
Me!
She
died in my arms just like Luljeta did before her. Oh my boy, she
was right all along. . .I’m cursed!”

Tyler reached
for his gun again and pointed it at Marko’s head one more time. His
aim was steadier this time.

“Again you
disgrace yourself in front of me? Well go ahead, you fucking
coward! I’m not afraid of death. It never comes for me! The snipers
couldn’t get me during the war. The Italians sank my boat when I
crossed the Adriatic, and everyone drowned in it but me. I’ve been
beaten by the police in Paris and stabbed by gangsters in
Liverpool, and I’ve lost count of all the times I’ve been shot in
this weak country of yours. My chest and back are full of scars and
I’m certain I’ll get more in my lifetime. . .I only have an
eternity to gather more. I
wish
I were dead! Every day I
pray to God to end it all, yet my prayers always go unanswered. I
live my punishment every day. I’m cursed, my boy! Cur—”