The Tragic Flaw (9 page)

Slap!

“Wake the fuck up, bitch,” Kam says in a sinister tone. His open palm sticks to Pete's viscous face.

Slap!
He strikes him again and Pete's body jolts and his eyelids lift.

“What the, what the hell is goin' on?” Pete mumbles. “Where am I?”

“Welcome to the V.I.P. room, Petey Pete,” Cicero says.

Feeling his body covered in a strange element, Pete reaches to wipe his face but finds that Kam has bound his hands together behind him with rope, and his feet have been tied to the drain beneath him.

“Hey. Hey. Hey, what the fuck is goin' on here?” Pete yells, regaining consciousness. “What the fuck is this?”

Cicero gazes at him from across the room, then slowly steps over to him, getting just inches from his face, looking at him eye to eye.

“You know what this is, Pete,” says Cicero. “This is the end.”

Pete's eyes grow huge. His pulse quickens. Sweat forms in tiny beads upon his protruding brow, then descend down the sides of his dark crow's feet.

“What the fuck are you talking about, Cicero?! Untie me!” Pete says, breathing heavily.

Cicero takes a step back and swigs his drink. Kam's smile has yet to leave.

“I know you killed my father, Pete. I've always known it.”

“Bullshit! Jimmy had your father whacked!”

“No, Pete,” Cicero says in a calm voice. “I remember being at my father's gravesite for his funeral. You remember that day?”

Pete is silent, and sweating profusely.

“Well, I do. I remember I threw up when they began to lower my father's casket in the ground. And some woman, I guess a friend of my grandmother's, led me to the family limousine and told me to wait there. The white part of the family wanted to keep me out of sight. Lucia and my mom didn't even go to the funeral. But anyway, you all knew about us, all of us, I'm sure.”

As Cicero pauses to take another drink, Kam slides out of the room and closes the large door behind him.

“So I'm alone, sitting in the limo, and that's when I overheard you talking outside. I'll never forget those words, Pete. I heard you say, ‘That piece-of-shit Tony was something to break. We removed every finger, toe and hair follicle, and he still didn't talk.'”

Pete's eyes search the room for a way to escape, then he struggles to free his hands. Recollections of that day are no longer foggy, and Pete knows the inevitable will occur, tonight, now, in the basement of a brothel in the heart of the ghetto.

“And you know the worst part about my father's funeral, Pete?” Cicero asks. “It was on my birthday. I haven't celebrated it since.”

At that moment, Pete realizes that only divine intervention can save him now.

“Yea, Pete, when I finally got old enough, Jimmy told me the whole story,” Cicero lays out. “You know why he told me? Because I'm loyal. He saw in me what you dagos claim to be. You talk about loyalty, but I live it. I am it.”

An ungodly squeal is suddenly heard coming from down the hall.

Pete's heart nearly jumps out of his chest, and he once again fights to free himself from the cold soundproof room. Once again, his efforts are without fruition.

Cicero continues, “He told me how you and my father pulled a lick together, and how you felt cheated by his cut of the loot.”

“Hey, fuck Jimmy, and fuck you too!” Pete screams forcefully, spit flying from his mouth.

Another high-pitch squeal is heard, louder and closer.

“No, Pete,” Cicero whispers and he goes to open the door. “Fuck you.”

The door swings open and before Pete, standing four-feet high is a starving wild boar.

“Oh my God!” Pete says under his breath as he looks at the razorback, then down at his chest, seeing the syrupy invitation covering his body from head to toe. “Holy fucking shit!”

Reddish-black bristles cover the grotesque beast's meaty frame, as it squeals again. It's a hairsplitting noise. And if it weren't for Kam holding the pig at bay with a chain, it would have already thrown itself upon Pete.

“Yea, Pete, this right here is my baby,” says Kam, speaking sluggishly and grinning, sounding like a fanatic. “I love this mothafucka.”

Pete is petrified and Kam loves it.

“I bet you're wondering where an asshole like myself got such a fine specimen of an animal. I could tell you, Pete, but then I'd have to kill you.” Kam laughs. “Oh yea, we're going to kill you, so I guess I can tell you.”

“You fucking psychos!”

Kam ignores his comment and continues. “Yea, Pete, I had just drove to Mexico and picked up three hundred pounds of green, and on the way back, we stopped in this little town in Texas.”

The beast squeals. Kam calms her.

“But anyway, we came across this razorback farm, and that's when it hit me,” Kam says. “You can keep ya fucking pit bulls and ya Prussian canarios, I'll take Ms. Piggy any day.”

Urine flows down Pete's pant leg and into the drain. The smell further excites the beast's protruding snout as it squeals louder and lunges toward him, cloven hoofs tapping the cement floor. Hairs rise on the boar's back as it salivates like a running faucet.

“Petey Pete,” Cicero quips. “Kam tells me she hasn't eaten in three days. Do you know that's unheard of for a hog? And she has one hell of a sweet tooth.”

The honey aroma is deliciously enticing to the stout-bodied mammal and it longs to taste Pete. She squeals and drools profusely.

“No, please, dear God, I'll…, I'll do anything,” Pete pleads.

“Sorry, my friend,” Cicero says. “Bon voyage.”

Kam releases the chain and the beast dives right into Pete's hairy midsection, gnawing and ripping open his stomach, disemboweling him and spilling his intestines onto the floor with a loud splat. Blood sprays in all directions, covering the hog's snout, face, the floor, and Pete's trousers. Undigested rigatoni and gooey shit splashes on the cement, filling the room with a horrible stench.

Pete screams. Then he gurgles and passes out from the pain before bleeding to death. Blissful shrieks bellow from the swine's germ-infested mouth while it swallows whole chunks of Pete's fleshy tissue and organs.

The sow roots into his torso with her snout and rips out large portions of his liver and spleen, then crunches downward through bone, crushing his pelvis and tearing his genitals into shreds.

Pete's eyelids flutter and his body twitches and shakes as the beast eats him from the inside out.

Kam watches his pet feast with the delight of a proud parent. Squeals and grunts reverberate.

“Good girl! Good girl!” Kam dotes from near the door, smiling.

Tattered remnants from Pete's suit and slices of skin are thrown across the room as the beast ferociously shakes its head side to side savoring the essence.

Cicero stands next to Kam sipping his drink with a blank face, yet fully enjoying the medieval spectacle before him. The foul stench in the room takes him back to his father's funeral, when he threw up near the casket. He thinks about his father's distinct, booming laugh, and Cicero wonders if this act of savage revenge would have pleased him.

As the sow continues to gorge, Cicero, seeing the job is done, turns to walk out of the room, then stops.

“Make sure your baby doesn't leave a crumb.”

Kam nods and continues to watch. His baby squeals again, loving her repast.

A
prils in Kansas City are inconsistent. One year it might snow. The next year it could be seventy degrees or raining nonstop. But tonight, it's cool out. Lightning waltzes across the late-night firmament.

Roughly five months have passed since Pete's unfortunate demise, and since then, Brad, Kam and Cicero have been meticulously organizing, planning, and formulating plots to get their drug project off the ground.

But all the effort has begun to weigh on the friends, and tonight, Cicero cannot find peace, not even in his dreams.

Three immense rectangular paintings done in primary colors hang perfectly aligned on the living room wall. All are framed in black mahogany. The first from the front door, in ocean-blue, was created using broad horizontal strokes. In the second, created in tomato-red, the same artist employed whimsical circular brush strokes. And the third, in daisy-yellow, was fashioned with firm vertical sweeps. The walls are black.

Lightning strikes outside. Electric-blue arteries charge the sky with energy, then disappear. Frightened children across the city dive for covers.

Three onyx sofas, made from the skin of unborn broadtail sheep, face each other in a sunken living room. Even the king-sized mink bedspread in the next room cannot compare to their softness. At sixty-four inches, the plasma television dominates the sitting area.

Stainless steel resides in the kitchen, wall-to-wall—the Viking stove, the Sub-Zero refrigerator, the two separate self-cleaning ovens. Thunder crackles a few kilometers away.

The world's finest German cutlery occupies only a small portion of the ample countertop space. And in the middle of the unwelcoming
cocina
is a marble-topped island with a built-in cutting board. It's rarely used.

Just past the abortion sofas is a polished ebony, eight-seat dining room table that's never hosted a Thanksgiving dinner, never seen the likes of Manwiches, nor store-bought taco shells or deviled eggs.

Above hangs a hand-made custom Lalique chandelier. Tiny sterling silver loops attach diamond-shaped crystals to larger diamond-shaped crystals embellished on all sides with lady-bug-sized pearls. The light is the way.

Farther to the left, near the sliding door with its Venetian blinds and the awning-shielded veranda, is a tall, lighted rosewood cabinet with a glass door filled from top to bottom with the world's finest cognac.

Cicero typically preferred the local family-owned vineyards with their unblended single estate cognacs from either Ugni Blanc or French Colombard grapes. These brands pervade the brass and gold-trimmed case more than any others, minus a random single-district or single-distillery
eaux de vie
.

Like Gabriel Andreu, one of Cicero's favorites, and Hardy's Fire, with its Daum crystal decanter. On a middle shelf is Louis XIII. And even though it's sixteen hundred a pop, it's easier for Cicero to get than some of the others, so he drinks it like tap water.

Every time Cicero opens his case, traces of chocolate, coffee, and tobacco flee. Hints of eucalyptus and sandalwood present themselves at the second nose. He is truly a connoisseur, and Cicero treasures his collection, which is why he locks the case every night before going to bed.

On the wall opposite the massive flat-screen television, between the half bath and the door to Cicero's bedroom, hang his two framed college degrees. Written in old English, his degrees are authentic, and bear the official signatures to prove it.

A black mahogany bookshelf, nearly twenty feet long and six feet high, features the works of Erik Erikson, Sun Tzu, Niccolò Machiavelli, Sigmund Freud, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Albert Schweitzer, Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. On the bottom shelf, a completed Stave puzzle provides the one piece of whimsy.

It was Nietzsche's first title,
The Birth of Tragedy
, that Cicero most favored. Even as the work was criticized by some as assumption-laden and sophomoric, Cicero found it enlightening, and exceptional, as proven by the pages' tattered edges. When Nietzsche proclaimed that God is dead, meaning that traditional values had lost their way, Cicero took it to heart.

God was dead when his father was murdered. God was dead when his boyhood friend drowned. God was dead when crack was unleashed upon his neighborhood. God was dead when Olivia became infected with the AIDS virus.

Nietzsche's concept of the overman, one who is secure, independent, and individualistic, one who feels deeply, but his passions are rationally controlled, further moved Cicero. For Cicero, the overman was one who created his own morality, in which one is liberated from all values, except those he alone deemed valid. And that was what Cicero had done.

Boom
. Thunder explodes and rattles nearby homes, but it's not the reason a restless Cicero tosses under his silk sheets and black mink spread. Usually confident, imposing, relentless, C is a little boy again, haunted by troubling night terrors.

The silk sheets make it easier for his muscular physique to flail about as he dreams. Sweat flows.

In this dream, Cicero is grown, sitting at his mother's kitchen table. Everything seems smaller than he remembers. Ruth stands over the stove as she has many mornings, her back to Cicero, preparing the family's breakfast.

Cicero wonders why he's there, naked, in his mother's kitchen.

“Cicero, do you believe in God?” his mother asks.

Her son looks confused, but answers, “No. No, I don't.”

“That's a shame, Son,” his mother says as she scrambles eggs in that same cast iron skillet.

“Well then, Son, I guess you don't believe in heaven or hell?”

“No. I'm sorry, Mom, but I don't.”

He stares out the kitchen window and notices two rottweilers staring at him from the backyard. The day is sunny and hazy.

Ruth shakes her head. Her hair is drawn up tightly in a colorful scarf. Cicero can smell the enticing butter in the pan as it sizzles. His mother then lets out a deep sigh.

“Son, you really should believe in hell,” and with that, she turns to look at her son and her face is bloodied and mutilated, eyeballs hanging from the sockets, puss oozing.

Cicero becomes unglued and screams.

“You should, Son! You should!” Worms and maggots dance through her cheeks from one hole to the next. She laughs devilishly and swiftly charges her son with outstretched arms.

Cicero suddenly awakens, frightened and drenched in sweat. He's shirtless, clad only in boxers. His breathing is rapid, as is his heartbeat. He sits up and checks the digital wall-mounted clock to his right. The large rectangle reads 5:44 a.m. in dull red lines.

Shaken, the avowed gangster and hustler reaches over to the black leather-padded nightstand and dials his mother's number; she was always an early riser.

The phone rings twice, then, “Hello?” Her voice is soothing.

“Hey.”

“Cicero?”

“Yea.”

“Hey, honey,” Ruth says with joy. “Why are you awake so early?” She pauses. “Is there something bothering you, Baby?”

Silence fills the phone for several seconds, as a woman's hand appears from beneath the sheets and begins to rub Cicero's chest.

“Can I come by to see you today?” he asks his mother.

“Of course,” Ruth responds. “You know I have to go church, but I can go to the early service. Other than that, I'll be home all day.”

“Okay, good.”

“Oh, and Lucia is coming by, so you can see her too.”

“Really,” Cicero tries not to sound surprised. “Okay, cool. Well, I'll see you later on today.”

“Okay, Son, see ya later,” Ruth says before hanging up.

Cicero gazes over at tonight's companion, she smiles, and he descends under the covers to satisfy both of their primordial urges.