He didn't want to get into it. Balthazar Romero wasn't interested. But he knew that he had little choice in the matter. He also knew that trouble was brewing, and that he wanted nothing to do with it, but that he had little choice in that, too.
He was seated at a card table in a dark room. There were no cards in front of him. Even if there had been, he would not have known what to do with them. He knew no games. No, he was there for other reasons. What light there was came from a reading lamp on a desk in a distant corner. The bulb was dying, and it was the last thing on its owner's mind. No reading was done by it. Balthazar sat across from the other occupant of the room, a balding man in his sixties who combed what hair he had left over his pate in a knowing show of loss defiance, the lock sculpted into a jaunty whisp, too little to offer real resistance, just enough to prove he still had style. The man's name was Boy Benjamin, something he'd caught in grade school and retained since, not because of his features but his demeanor. He had that boy-ish charm, and found long ago that he quite enjoyed its effects, its benefits.
"You can do this for me," Boy Benjamin cooed, "can't you? Just this little thing? What would the harm be? Very little, right? Very little, Bally?"
Everyone he had ever known had tried to convince Balthazar of the necessity of a nickname. He'd never bought it. He relished distinction, and his parents had started that path for him from the start. He especially loathed Boy Benjamin's Bally. The boy-ish charm had never had effect on him, but he had a use in pretending it did. "B.B, you ask for a favor," he said, "and I can do you the honor of accepting. It's the least I can do."
"Good," Boy Benjamin said with obvious glee, shaking his martini and taking a relished sip. "I knew I could count on you."
"Of course you can," Balthazar said. "What more can you expect from a godson?"
"You were always better to me than I deserved," Boy Benjamin said, a hint of melancholy in his voice, but playfulness on his face.
"You never gave yourself enough credit," Balthazar said, though he knew differently, and knew, too, that there was the ego that needed continual attendance. That was all there ever was. "This town wouldn't be what it is today if not for you. Traverse without Boy Benjamin. Just wouldn't be worth the hassle."
"I've made my rounds," Boy Benjamin said. "You will receive all the details you need when you need them, as always. I have always put my full faith behind you. You still enjoy that, you know."
The betrayal, though the attempt was there to hide it, stung the air, moreso than the cigar Boy Benjamin now puffed, his cloud of exhalation piercing the darkness, even with its unfocussed contours. Cast against relative emptiness, even a suggestion made itself bold. Balthazar understood what his godfather meant. Fail him again and that support would no longer be there, and this was not a time to lose it, even if he had never wanted, or felt as if he needed, it. As long as Boy Benjamin believed it necessary, it was so, and that was all that mattered. "I understand," he said, "of course. Thank you for your confidence, Boy Benjamin."
"Don't even mention it," Boy Benjamin said, waving his cigar about. "It's not worth the trouble, and it is trouble, wasting your breath on things that don't need to be said. Save that breath for more useful endeavors. You'll need it soon enough. And I know you save it, too. One so many refused cigars finally sends a message across. You do not care for that sort of thing. Tell me, is it for your health? Do you fear you would lose it by enjoying life?"
"I'm not hiding from life, godfather," Balthazar said, mindful of the old argument, and his asthma. "There are more than enough vices out there to ruin a man. I have my share. We don't need to enjoy them together for their existence to be as real as this room we occupy."
"This room is mine," Boy Benjamin retorted. "I paid for it. It's mine fair enough."
"Its previous occupant might have a different interpretation," Balthazar said.
"Its previous occupant might, if he were still alive," Boy Benjamin laughed, then coughed, a hacking cough that suggested the frailty he liked to ignore. "At any rate, health is an overstated luxury. People hide behind it, either as a defense or a shield. If you ask me, it's an unhealthy obsession."
"So it is," Balthazar said. His godfather never expected to be alive the next day, so he could give himself to such musings with so little concern for their logic. There were priorities in life and then there were distractions, which if not ignored were to be done away with. That was what Balthazar did for Boy Benjamin, and certainly not with any personal conviction. He had his own, convictions that often ran contrary, which he needed constantly to conceal, even if he was not always successful. It was a thrill just to live up to such opposing mindsets. "Tell me what your new obsession is, Boy Benjamin."
The older man sat quietly for a moment, letting his two present vices go to waste as he did so. Saying that they went to waste now was one of the man's convictions. He believed that a thing that went unenjoyed, even for a moment and even if it could still be enjoyed later, was being wasted. The moments he spent undermining this philosophy were the ones he was at his most dangerous. He was going unchecked. "My new obsession? I am collecting, original works of art. I'm not talking about the things you would find in a museum. That's directed anxiety. I collect true art."
Balthazar wished he didn't know what his godfather was talking about, but he did, all too well. "I'm glad for you," he said. "Must be very rewarding."
"You bet it is," Boy Benjamin said, taking another huff from his cigar. "Such form. It's what the Ancients relished, you know, before we imposed our own values on them. The past is a funny thing like that. It is exactly what we make of it. The times create their own version of events, and then we feel it's our privilege to do the same, because we've got that thing, that illusion, called perspective. There's no such thing. There's no such thing as objective thought. We only think there is sometimes when it agrees with our own opinions. The human mind is a judge. It judges everything, and sometimes convinces itself that some of these thoughts are immutable. We may not be around to find out that they are, but it always happens. You know what they say. One man's castle is another man's dump. You say it's bad, I say it's good. It's all relative. Like what Einstein said."
"Something like that," Balthazar said.
"Heck, even a bad thing can be bad and good at the same time," Boy Benjamin continued. "It depends on the perspective. Until you account for all perspectives, you're just blowing smoke up your ass."
With relish in his heart again, Boy Benjamin punctuated his thought with his cigar, and then returned his attention to his martini, which he then began to nurse in earnest. Balthazar watched all of this with the same eye he had had to it for years, twenty of them by now. He'd learned early on, at roughly the age of ten, what kind of man his godfather was, first out of fear and then in acceptance and detachment. It was the only way to cope. Like everyone else, he was a functioning enabler, but there was no other way to go about it. Boy Benjamin was power in this town, with its collected assortment of pretenders to the thrown, some who were allowed to believe they possessed some of it, and others who assumed they had it and whom Boy Benjamin humored, for sport. Balthazar, in turn, believed his godfather understood just as well that there was no real power to be had here, and that he was humoring himself just as well. It was a strange game to play, but Balthazar had learned the rules and enjoyed manipulating them. There was a lot to gain, and very little to lose, if fortune favored him, as it had for so long now.
If there had been cards on the table, and even if he had no idea how to use them, Balthazar would have thrust himself into the pot. He had the money, and didn't fear losing that, either. He was invincible, as much as any man could be in Boy Benjamin's Traverse, and it was not an illusion, or even a delusion. As much as he had rebelled in the past and would again in the future, with his new assignment, Balthazar did not have the faith to care about consequences, because he did not believe in them. There was a man out there who could help him. He knew he needed that, help. He wanted to feel connected, as he had never before in his life. Boy Benjamin had ensured that he was provided for from the moment he was born. He'd already fought to know what it was like to fend for himself. Now he needed the courage to do it, forever. The man he needed was a recluse, had abandoned the world after having been burned by it. The man he needed was called Cotton Colinaude.
This table and this room and this light that was soon to go out, Balthazar Romero, with a new charge to negotiate and a future to reckon with, didn't need any of it.
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