City of Saints & Thieves(16)

I went back to the Goondas, adrift.

I knew Mr. Greyhill had to pay, but I didn’t know how. I told Bug Eye my story—what I wanted and why I couldn’t have it. I shouldn’t have talked, but I didn’t know better then. I hadn’t learned the rule about valuing secrets yet. But maybe it’s like Mama used to say, that everything happens for a reason, even the bad things and mistakes.

Bug Eye told our boss, Mr. Omoko.

Ezra Omoko is a quiet, middle-aged man, Sangui City born and bred. Not very tall, graying at his temples, no tattoos. He dresses like a schoolteacher in slacks and golf shirts. But don’t be fooled. Among the Goondas, he is king. He takes care of those who serve him well. He is generous with the spoils. But I’ve seen him eat a double-crossing Goonda’s liver for breakfast. And he keeps a collection of his former enemies’ eyeteeth in a bag in his pocket like an amulet.

He found me alone in the Goondas’ makeshift gym a few days after I blubbered to Bug Eye. I was practicing my left hook on a shredded tire, long after all the other Goondas in training had called it a day.

“So you want to kill Roland Greyhill?” Mr. Omoko asked, standing hidden in the dark.

I turned around. I had never talked to the big boss himself before. There was no sense in asking who’d told him. That was obvious. So I just took a deep breath and said, “Yes.”

“And why would you want to do a silly thing like that?” Omoko wanted to know.

I shrunk before him. Only two days before I’d heard a story that as a boy Mr. Omoko used to bite the heads off live snakes. He was immune to their poison. The punch line to the story was that if he bit you, you died.

I screwed up my courage to respond, but before I could, he continued, “Why do that, kijana, when you can ruin him first, and then kill him?”

Omoko emerged from the shadows, put a fatherly arm around me, walked me back to his office. We had a little chat. He gave me a book, The Count of Monte Cristo, and told me to find him when I finished it.

It took a month and the help of a stolen dictionary, but I did it. When I came back, Mr. Omoko asked what I’d learned. “A lot of big words,” I said. Then, “I’m not sure. The count got revenge, but I don’t know if it made him happy.”

Omoko regarded me thoughtfully. “Happy or sad isn’t the point. People don’t look for revenge to make them happy. They do it because they must. Do you understand?”

I thought about it. I did.

“What I’d hoped you would learn,” Mr. Omoko went on, “is that if you decide to take revenge, you have to think of it as a vocation, a calling. Like a priest is called to serve. It isn’t something you do once. It is something you do every day, like learning a dance. Before you can dance, you must put your time in. You must learn the rules of the dance, its rhythms, and be sure not to step too soon. If you want to master it, you must also put in your blood and your sweat. That is what the count learned, that his calling was revenge, but that to get it he had to have discipline. You have to want it deep in your gut like he did, more than anything.

“You have to be patient. You have to rid yourself of distraction: friends, hobbies, other ambitions. You must be able to wait for the right moment. You will have to starve yourself, to be willing to break your own bones and reshape them to make it happen. It takes sacrifice like you’ve never imagined possible. You practice at it every day, until there is no distinction between you and it. It is you. Do you have that in you?”

“I-I think so.”

He regarded me coolly. “It won’t work if you just think so. You have to be sure,” he said. “You can kill him now. That would be the easy way. But know that if you do, people will mourn. Sure, they’ll remember him as a Big Man and maybe even a businessman of, shall we say, questionable ethics. But around here a Big Man is as good as royalty. He’ll still die revered, feared, and admired. He killed your mother, child. Is that what you want?”

“No.”

Of course it wasn’t.

Mr. Omoko told me to wait, and be patient. To make myself strong in the meantime, to build my own set of rules to live by, to master the practice of revenge. I was small, but I was already on the road to becoming a thief with clever hands and silent feet, and he could work with that. If I was to be a thief, though, I should be a good one.

The best.

“Why are you helping me?” I had asked.

He smiled. “I was young once, and wronged. I see myself in you. You’re smart. I trust your judgment. If you say he needs your vengeance, then I believe you. I expect a cut, of course, when you take his fortunes. If you want my help, that is.”

I did.

“Good.”

One day there would be an opportunity for a thief like me, he told me.

That day was supposed to be today.

? ? ?

Hours tick by, or days. I don’t know. I go through rounds of pacing, then screaming threats and obscenities at the walls and corners, and then silence, and then cycling through the whole routine again.

? ? ?

The master plan is simple. I made it; Omoko helped me refine it.

First I steal the dirt on Mr. Greyhill and give it to Donatien, the reporter my mother knew. Donatien knows everything there is to know about blood gold. He’ll do a good job on the story, and he’s got connections to get it out there into the big papers. And for this story, unlike all the others, there will be proof.