The King and the Courtesan (41 page)

“Who’s your friend over there?” He pointed to Victor.

“No one.” I sniffed. “I don’t know him.”

Floyd lifted his eyebrows. “I know I’m a cripple, but I’m not dumb. Ever since military school, I’ve been taught how to pick out these things. He’s watching us. So he’s either with you, or he’s a spy.”

I sighed. It figured that, as the head of an organization created to bring the Yentis down, Floyd would know his stuff. “He’s my bodyguard.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah.”

Floyd sipped on his glass of fresh pineapple smoothie, something else Stefany had provided. “And who is he protecting you from?”

“Anyone, really.”

“A Metro woman dressed to the teeth, complete with bodyguard.” He smiled at me. “How mysterious.”

I bit my lip.

“I can take one guess—Ezekiel.”

I looked at him, prepared to deny it. Floyd’s eyes were blue, but not sharp or icy like Ezekiel’s. His gaze was much kinder.

I nodded.

“Hmm. Well then. Since Ezekiel is not the sort to employ women for jobs that can just as easily be done by men, I’m going to go out on a limb and say he’s supplied you a more…
intimate
position than most of his people, correct?”

I stared at the fountain, afraid to answer. Floyd nodded and adjusted his tie.

“Don’t feel ashamed of it, Melissa.” He raised his eyebrows. “People have to make a living. And dressed as you are, it seems you’ve been making far more than a
living
off it. That’s business smart, in my book.”

“I wasn’t given much of an option.”

“Of course not. Ezekiel offers employment, not options.” He smirked. “I know all about him. Almost as much as he knows about me. Well, I did not know about you. But I guessed he had someone. Most drug lords find a companion somewhere down the line.”

“Why do you know so much…?”

“We’ve made it our jobs to know as much about each other as we can without actually acquainting ourselves in person. We have mutual respect for each other, because we both know we could make each other’s lives hell if necessary. Ezekiel is very good at not treading on the toes of others who may threaten his operation. It’s why he’s so good at what he does. So many lords before him murdered and raped and ran around doing whatever they wanted, which is why they were so easily pulled from power. Ezekiel is far more complicated than that.”

“I’ve noticed.”

“What are you guys talking about?” Rika asked through a mouthful of zucchini bread.

“Ezekiel,” Floyd answered seamlessly.

Rika snorted. “Such a nice lunch conversation topic.”

“I’m interested,” I retorted. “He runs my neighborhood. And no one knows anything about him, past how rich he is.” I turned back to Floyd. “Do you know about the days before he was ‘Ezekiel the drug lord’? No one knows anything. It’s like he just came out of thin air one day. People say he killed everyone who knew anything about his past.” My throat closed momentarily. “But you’re rich. You’re powerful. You could figure it out if you wanted to, couldn’t you?”

Floyd cleaned his mouth with a napkin for a moment. “I already have figured it out. Most of it. It’s a huge puzzle to put together and comes from sources that aren’t always reliable or eager.” He looked at me. “Are you sure you want to know?”

“Yeah.”

Floyd nodded. “Very well then.”

Rika shook her head, crunching on a chip loaded with dip. “Here we go again.”

Floyd showed no fear or trembling in his voice as he began. It had to be nice, to be so rich and powerful that Ezekiel didn’t strike you as scary.

“My sources started with the origin of Ezekiel’s birth, of course. This was probably one of the hardest bits of information to find, because Ezekiel made damn sure the records of his younger life were purged, save the very few essential things. His birth certificate lists no father, so I suppose that is one fact that’s lost to history. His mother’s name was Victoria Peters, and he was born to the name of Jameson Peters. Obviously, I had to go snooping to find out who this Victoria Peters woman was. She spent a majority of her life unemployed—at least according to the government, which I didn’t believe for an instant. I asked around, but no one had heard of a Victoria Peters. Luckily, I managed to find one old man who, upon hearing her more formal title, told me he didn’t know her, but then later asked if perhaps I was talking about Vicky P. At this point, I had no other leads, so I asked if he could talk about Vicky P. Apparently, she was a prostitute living in Metro.”

It was at this point that my heart nearly stopped beating.

“A few more people recognized the name Vicky P. I had the luck of finding an old friend of hers from years ago, who, while not exactly mentally sound, was able to give me a few great tidbits of information. Victoria had been a heavy drug abuser, a drunk, everything in the books. She was a beautiful woman, I was told—at least before she really started to degenerate as drug addicts usually do.

“This friend didn’t seem to know she’d had a son, so she probably kept him away from the public. This led me to a few questions. Was there something wrong with him? Was she ashamed of him? Why keep him holed away in an apartment?”

“That’s a story we’ll never know,” Rika supplied, sipping her drink.

Floyd nodded. “Unfortunately, his life is a mystery until he started attending elementary school. That’s five years of his life only he knows about. But it’s probably safe to say he resented her. According to those I spoke to, she was not the greatest mother figure. She had constant money problems, and her old landlord told me he shut off her electricity and water on several occasions when she refused to pay the bills. Not the greatest situation to bring a child into.”

“Which begs the question—why did she have and keep him in the first place?” Stefany asked, her face flushed in the excitement of the story. I supposed a journalist would love details like these.

“Maybe she wanted someone to love her,” I provided. I probably understood the Metro mindset more than they did. “She must have led a pretty thankless life. Perhaps she just wanted a smiling child to come home to.”

“Entirely possible. Though it must have all gone wrong, because there’s evidence pointing to Ezekiel—Jameson—having difficulty with compassion and love from very early beginnings.”

“He caused trouble at school?” I asked.

Floyd shook his head. “Oh, no. Jameson was a marvelous student. His grades were exemplary all the way through high school. I managed to find a teacher who taught him when he was about twelve. She told me that while he’d been an incredibly bright and attentive child, he unnerved her. He was not a favorite student of hers, and he knew it. She felt that sometimes he exploited her.”

“Exploited her how?”

“A range of things. Something simple like pointing out a mistake she made in class. Asking her rather disturbing questions she didn’t feel comfortable answering—questions about death, torture. When I asked her what she thought happened to him, she said she didn’t know. She was probably afraid of the answer.”

Stefany shook her head with a sigh, shoving more zucchini bread into her mouth.

Floyd continued. “She talked about how he would organize the students. He would make allies of the biggest and meanest kids. One day, a boy who’d been vandalizing the lockers went missing. They found him three days later, tied up and bruised in an abandoned apartment building. She said some of the teachers were thankful that at least the unnamed bully was doing some good, hunting down the troublemakers instead of the innocent kids. But they failed to see the nefarious work at play. Jameson wasn’t stopping crime—he was re-directing it. Children who wanted to hurt others simply stopped doing it randomly and instead fell under his command. It was either join him or behave, the latter being an option none of these troubled kids wanted.

“High school was actually harder to track than middle school. Jameson appeared to keep a low profile. I’m not sure if he was planning something, or if he had other issues, but I picked up a few facts here and there. He had a few very exclusive friends, most of whom were his favorite bullies from middle school, but two of whom were female, which strikes me as very odd, considering Ezekiel’s disdain for women. This attitude might have come from a bad relationship with his mother, who died two years after he graduated high school. I’d like to tie him to it, but she died of a stroke in a hospital, which is hard to pin on him.”

“These women…do you know anything about them?”

Floyd tapped his chin. “I only found out the name of one, which was Yola. She was described to me as a very silent person. She was smart—graduated with the highest marks—but she was anti-social and avoided people in general. A year after graduation, she committed suicide at the local community college. A girl who had everything going for her—dead. That also seemed unlikely to be tied to Jameson, considering she shot herself at a very convincing angle. It would have been hard to fake that. Not impossible, but Jameson was never concerned with faking deaths unless it was advantageous to him, and this was not. Yola lived in obscurity, and the only one who was really affected by her passing was her single father.”

“But the nature of the relationship…?”

Floyd shrugged. “Was he keeping Yola and her other female companion for sexual purposes? I can’t be sure. It’s probable. I can’t imagine why else he’d befriend women if not because he needed them for something your average teenage boy could not do. He’s never had female employees, as far as I’ve seen, outside of those who cater to his more…intimate needs. What I’ve always found strange was that Yola was not your typical teenage girl. From what I’ve found, she was reserved, conservative, poised. Most boys Jameson’s age were out getting drunk and sleeping with anything that had two legs, but even as a teenager, Jameson had incredible restraint and self-discipline. Only the best.”

I wished I could have met Yola. I’d have so many questions to ask her. It was hard to imagine what a teenage Ezekiel would be like.

“After graduating high school, Jameson attended Ewefiedri University, which you all know is one of the most selective in the country. It’s located up north, away from Zinya City. He was granted a full scholarship due to his academic excellence. He majored in both business and psychology, which I find to be highly appropriate for how he turned out. No majors could be more perfectly matched. Jameson wanted to know how to read people even better than he already could, and then use that reading to exploit them. It was, again, hard to gather details—he continued to keep a low profile. He wasn’t in any honors fraternity, despite his perfect marks. He had little interest in catering to the institution—he most likely wanted to create his own.

“I think it was around his third year of college that he began to experiment with the drug market. There’s no evidence claiming he was ever on drugs himself. That would ruin his control over his grades and his life, and control has always been Jameson’s obsession. Someone with Jameson’s personality needs a strict regime; absolute power over everyone and everything. It’s a social kind of OCD: instead of performing rituals, he makes sure everyone behaves as he tells them to. Everyone is his pawn, and if someone moves without his permission, he acts out
violently
.

“After college, Jameson rejected job offers thrown his way and instead enlisted in the military.”

“
The military
?” I couldn’t believe it. “But you said he loves to control people. Obviously in the military people would tell him what to do.”

“A perfect institution to learn from. The military is the best at ordering others around, and he needed to learn their tricks. He had perfected his mind, so now it was time to perfect his physical skills. Of course, he wasn’t going to simply become a soldier and leave it at that. He enlisted as an Operate.”

“Operate?”

“Very top secret government infiltration unit,” Stefany explained through a mouthful of food. Wearing her pearls and girly clothing, it seemed like the last sort of thing she should know. Clearly, beneath all the pink and lace, she had a sharp, professional mind.

Floyd nodded. “They only let in about a hundred men, and Jameson, of course, was not turned down. Jameson has never allowed himself to be mediocre at anything. He spent several years doing covert missions for the government overseas. It seems ironic, that someone who now subverts the laws of the government used to work for them. It was with them that he learned how to operate weapons and artillery. He rose high in his ranks with seemingly little effort; he perfected the art of getting people to do what he wanted.”

“Are we going to talk about that little incident in Nuania?” Mina asked. I was shocked when she opened her mouth. She’d been silent the whole time.

“What happened in Nuania?” Nuania was a very mountainous, snowy country across the sea and sat much farther north than Zinya City.

“Just a bit of genocide,” Mina murmured, blowing on her coffee.

“No one really knows what happened. It didn’t even hit the news it was so hush-hush. Apparently, our government believed the Yentis were hiding weapons in some Nuan military base, and the Operates were sent over to deal with it. Next thing we knew, the whole base exploded and the nearby town was caught in the middle of open fire. A bunch of innocent civilians were murdered, including women and children. In the end, nothing was gained, and the Operates were sent home. Who knows what really happened? Jameson might hold blame, as he was leading the unit. Perhaps he led the genocide. Perhaps he tried to avoid it. Only he knows.”

“Wouldn’t the other Operates know…?”

“They would. However, most of them were killed in the skirmish. Only three came back, including Jameson. One suffered from extreme PTSD afterward and shot himself three months later. The other vanished, and to this day, no one knows what happened to him. The clues point to Jameson. Something happened, and Jameson didn’t want it to get out. That’s what I think. The police said the missing one suffered from PTSD, too, and probably killed himself. While I do think the man really
did
suffer from trauma, I don’t believe it was to the degree of his comrade.”