pitch kind of liked riling people up, especially those she doesn’t know, but she sensed she needed to tread carefully with elena. she fished her phone out of her pocket and checked it for service. none, as per usual. “i’ve worked for him for almost ten years now. he’s a decent, honest man who treats his employees well.”
“than it’s been a successful decade for you both. one can ask for little else.” as was often the case, eléna thought of clio with little prompting -- how decency & honesty had not been enough to assure security for them both. “have you published anything i might have read?”
simon thinks he saw someone from cambra at the taha dig and in the current state, everyone is eager to point fingers. who really was there that night? GOAL PARTNERS: jude and simon
a wild boar trashes cambra camp and covers your entire wardrobe of silky outfits of neutral tones in mud! jude, zach, and max are the only ones not affected by the piggies. which one are you borrowing clothes from?
“oh – dear. and you’re certain makara isn’t an option?” her amusement rumbles, rolls. she has a lit cigarette in one hand and touched that thumb to her teeth, then her eyebrow. “let’s see. jude might be the most willing, which would be appreciated, but i’d drown. zach i fear is out of the question; despite living here he seems to have the least variety, and i’d hate to take from him. and max, i suppose, is the closest to the right height –
– - i suppose i’ll simply have to go around stark naked.”
notorious thief with associated damages reporting up to $200 million, most prolific in the southern region of europe in the 1970s. known for leaving a paper calling card inlayed with an insignia of a black fox face. presumed dead.
owner of a ranch in andalusia, spain. husband 1986 - present. father 1988 - present. grandfather 2014 - present.
drunk and gambler.
SEARCH: THE JACKAL
/ˈjak(ə)l/
DID YOU MEAN:
thief and con artist. criminal career came into prominence in 2007; mostly active in the domain of western european. known for leaving a small figurine at the scene to denote his work. wanted by interpol.
lover of eléna pavia, circa 2012 - 2014. meaningful relationship begun after a chance meeting at the plaza de les gloriès catalanes, ended in florence, italy.
subscriber to the long con. second individual to track down the daughter of the night fox. pursuer of hidden fortune. the man who fell in love with his mark.
father (unknown).
SEARCH: ELÉNA PAVIA
DID YOU MEAN:
renowned historian, translator, & scholar. respected in her field. current employee for cambra inc.
“Does this look similar?” he asked as he held out the little leather-bound notebook.
For about an hour he had crouched before the fountain, scribbling wildly to capture the worn profile sculpted into its side. He had plans of taking it to the internet cafe for some research, but that wouldn’t go very well if his imitation was subpar.
“I can’t seem to get that nose right, but maybe I’ve just been staring at it for too long.”
eléna pivots from her seated place on the fountain’s concrete lip, having just gently rubbed a limb of the structure in respect to its apparent luck. the stranger is partially obscured by the sun, but she leans to look at the extended notepad.
“it’s splendid.” the answer is genuine. “perhaps a bit aquiline at the bridge.” her finger goes to press gently next to the sketched nose, but she smiles as she looks up.
once more her attention diverts to the landmark. “it’s quite fascinating, isn’t it? the influences ranging from heavily grecian to baring from the madeira region, i would assume -- beautiful.”
This is what it means to be a woman in this world. Every step is a bargain with pain. Make your black deals in the black wood and decide what you’ll trade for power.
Catherynne M. Valente, Six-Gun Snow White (via cleopatrawrites)
matchmaker, matchmaker. yakov’s eyes flick between the two of them, stranger and strange. he wonders if the barkeep-owner does this often, and if he does, the likelihood it ends in a long tab and another filled room by morning. if this is the patronage – by which he means eléna, who is twirling her wineglass in a way that makes his tongue stick to the roof of his mouth – he can only imagine it does with some regularity. he is, of course, wildly aware of the double-occupancy tent waiting for him on the beach, but it’s nice to imagine linen sheets and her smile backed by morning sun.
naturally, yakov has gone quite ahead of himself. the smile he offers her is broader, but edged in uncertainty; is she joking, or really just that unwitting? he shrugs, a careless gesture, and runs his own index finger along the rim of his pint glass to mimic her. yakov peers down into what’s left of his drink, cloudy and peach-tinted, before he flicks back up to meet her gaze.
“diving. water’s the clearest this time of year, and the reefs on the east coast are legendary. so i hear anyway.” he finishes his not-quite-lie with a breathy chuckle and polishes off his pint. it’s not a lie, really, but two-half truths strung together to resemble a whole.
blonde haired individuals were statistically more attracted to other blondes, you were more likely to assume a stranger was closer to your age than farther away from it -- there was a tendency in mankind to relate things to themselves, and true to her humanity, eléna wonders how similar her and this man are. does he see the absurdity in it all - and the humour in that - or is he taking face value?
“do you plan all your vacations around the clarity of seawater?” it’s a clever presentation of a very simple question: do all your holidays have to do with diving? but before he can answer, his empty glass is being taken away and replaced with another, much smaller glass. there’s an amber liquid in it that could be tequila or whiskey or a number of other viscous mistakes, and shortly after it’s placed down there’s a loud drop on the counter as it’s twin is placed down for eléna.
it sits not in front of her, but one seat to the right. in front of the sole empty spot left between her and the man.
“sir, i don’t need --” she begins in the native ialis tongue, but the barkeep gestures to the empty stool to cut her off. eyebrow raised. expectant. eléna exhales a disbelieving breath of a sound, looking over at her pseudo-companion as her head shakes. once again, a woman is looking for similarity in a man: are you seeing what i am?
she grunted, looking elena up and down as she brushed off her clothes. “never seen you before. figured you for a cambra virgin.” she pulled a hair band off of one grubby wrist with her teeth and put her hair up. “to be fair, it’s not the worst company to pop your cherry with. the pay is at least decent.”
the shake that she receives in exchange for her extended hand is the raise and lowering of the woman’s eyes, and there’s no substitute for a name. eléna retracts her hand, elbows coming to lax rest above her knee. the lack of manners registers, but the distaste for it doesn’t influence her body language -- merely her opinion. “i do quite well at concealing my chastities.” she returns to observing the crowd, head canted enough to the side to keep an ear for the woman’s response. “not at all, there’s much of them to appreciate. your time with andros has been lengthy, than?”
He waves a hand dismissively. “Folklore is for the other guys.” He means Taha, but he also means other people who can afford to dream outside of reality. He masks his surprise, glances away for a second - Eléna has always seemed to be eminently practical and serious about her work, and even if he can’t claim to embrace the importance of history, Jude can appreciate competence. She should know better, he thinks, than to get lost in mythologies. “¿Estás bien? Ready for tomorrow?”
He laughs this time and offers her the bottle. “Another water to remedy the problem.” Jude doesn’t quite trust Eléna, but knowing she speaks Spanish helps - not quite the same Spanish his mother does, but similar enough to make him more at ease. Familiarity matters in a new place. “It’s nice enough,” he adds, and gestures around the main square. “The last dig was a lot less scenic.”
she smiles in her closed-lipped, noncommittal manner that was not unlike a comma -- not particularly for its shape, but for its ability to move things onto the next clause. eléna was adept at the transferral of things -- topics of conversation, cards between her fingers, priceless artifacts moving from her hand to that of her sponsor’s.
“si, sí,” she urges her wellness with two slow dips of her chin, watching locals barter over baskets of bright things. “i appreciate the island, but i dislike idleness. i’ll be happy when the permits come through.” bemused, eléna turns to jude as he offers the bottle, removing her hand from the water to make a mutedly playful gesture of flicking her fingers at him. “and for you --” she watches as the water droplets harmlessly discolour his shirt before taking a sip. “gracias.”
looking again out into the main square, eléna nods at his assessment. there is the latent curiousity as to whether any members of taha’s team have passed by, and as she returns his water, she asks with her gaze fixed in the distance: “and you? how do you feel about andros taha’s crew, jude?”
He and I were both young when we met, but it was different kinds of youth. I was in the fullness of my childhood, before it would tilt and yield into what we call girlhood, before I even had the first yawning awareness that I was a woman - would be a woman - and what that meant. I was a child, and his version of youth can only be called as much in comparison to what he is now. In truth, he couldn’t have been much older then than I am now, and I feel so far beyond that label of young.
I have so little memory of his face. Only in the idealized version of memories do we actually recall details such as faces; in my experience, in the reality, when you reach back that far into the catalogue of the mind it is only the outlines that remain graspable -- a silhouette, a specific smell, the oppressive heat of the day. Everything between that sketched framework is left viscous, either unknowable or untrustworthy. In all likelihood he was attractive, but I was only a child then, and did not look for beauty because I had neither the need for or attraction to it. All I truly recall is the shape of him, not as tall as my father but far leaner than him, and how the make of his suit was so fine it could have only come from somewhere deep in the city. As he spoke to me he placed his foot on the step below where I sat, leaning in, and as his position changed, the back of his head blocked out the sun until his face was in shadow and the back of him lit in rays. That’s what I recall: how he was at once hidden and illuminated.
I remember the look of amusement he kept on his face as my parents apologized for my insolence, explaining that it was only my childish curiosity that prompted me to steal, and not a penchant for thievery. He looked between them and I as they blustered and apologized, as if to check if I corroborated their story of regret. I have no way of knowing how I looked back at him; all I remember was the slight anxiety that I would be punished for my crime, but something - my lack or remorse, the intelligence behind my eyes - prompted him to ask if I had enjoyed the cryptex -- the name, I would learn, for the tarnished bronze thing I had borrowed from his dresser.
I had been charged with bringing a tray to his room when I’d found the contraption, and it was the apparent age of it that caught me first - which became a secondary attraction after I realized the six enamel dials rotated and could be used to form words. It had felt like second nature to take it. I was so used to only myself, mama and papa in the house, that I’m compelled to believe - though I cannot recall entirely - that it was a delayed sense of possession that allowed me to think I could take the thing. I must have felt, surely, that anything resting in the confines of our house was mine by proxy. Aside from that childish convention, there was the compulsion I had always felt towards puzzles, which I had immediately recognized the cryptex to be - alone and with only parents and beasts for companions, I was overly fond of things that I could work through with mental dexterity and fast fingers.
So when he asked how I had felt about the cryptex, I shrugged, rolling over the new word in my still-soft brain. I handed the contraption back to him and spoke the truth, a trivial thing that - like all truths - would damn me for life:
“I like puzzles.”
It’s only occurring to me now that this isn’t the place to start this story, or that perhaps it is, but that I haven’t given enough foreground. I’m not sure for who this detail is for, seeing as these pages will meet some inevitable end by sea, flame, or hand -- to be drowned, burned, or ripped. I don’t know. I don’t know very much of anything these days.
But here it is, in plain:
My name is Eléna Pavia. I am thirty-one. And when I was just a girl, I met the man who would ruin my life.
ENTRY TWO.
To digress.
I grew up on the Southern coast of Spain, alone aside from my early-greying parents and the company of horses we kept. The Andalusian countryside is known for very little, but the horse that bares its name are both the only landmark it carries and the only consistent companions I had for years. That I was born late in the life of my parents was not something that occurred to me for quite some time, and nor would the significance of this appeal to me until even later; I had no siblings to educate me on the standards of the world, and even fewer peers. The only creatures of comparison I had were the stallions and the mares, and they offered no human features to examine in contrast, nor could they give commentary on the appearance of Papa or fading endurance of my mother.
There were other farmers, of course, and even other ranchers that bred and raised the Andalusians like us. But the land between us was so great, and the collective meetings so sparse, that I never detected the difference between their ages and those of others with children my height. Of course, it helped that there was no one better liked than my father.
When I was a child, my father had seemed to me the tallest man alive, and although he had been born and raised in the city, he was stout and broad like a man who had worked on a farm his whole life. Even among the grown men he was an anomaly, not particularly for his size (though he was ostensibly the largest or next-largest among them), but for the way he spoke. It feels impossible to describe the way he was then -- - bold and clever, charming and rugged. He spoke loudly and in constant gesture, clapping those around him on the back or holding their shoulder as if to draw them in and make co-conspirators of strangers to his conversation. Though I understand the age difference now, to imagine it then is to picture him as a man ten years the junior of anyone around him, such was his vitality and life.
I’m sure it also helped that my mother was beautiful. But she was prone to her silences, standing at the sides of rooms and observing with that half-smile that implies an omniscence that should belong to the Mona Lisa or God alone. And I loved her, of course, but I could not understand her. Not in truth, not until I was a woman myself, and even now I feel lacking at the edges of comprehension. Perhaps it’s because she’s never shared her suffering, though I know it to be fierce. But it was my father -- Papa as I called him -- that was my world.
It was him that first put me in the saddle of a horse, wedged between him and the leather cantle on a deep bay stallion we called Ciro. Ciro was my father’s own horse, a towering thing with an easily changeable temper as dark as his pelt. The men that came to buy our horses always wanted to barter a ride on Ciro, such was his noble look and high height, but they eventually stopped asking when the boys left with bruises on their backs and the indents of teeth on their shoulders. We could rarely even stud him, so unpredictable was his behaviour, and when my mother found out he had taken me for a ride on the beast of a stallion, she was in a fit of anger for days. I, of course, could not understand her rage -- not when my father winked down at me while he stood, martyr-like to me at the time, to receive his verbal lashings before attempting a cajoling with kisses and favoured songs.
It was my father that snuck me lemon candies, flicking them out of his pocket and onto the floor as we walked as if making them shells on a carpet beach. It was him that watched me climb trees and instructed which limb to trust next with booming laughter; him who I played games of meaningless stealth with, taking turns seeing who could pinch objects from each other’s pockets; he who made me my treasure hunts and took me deep into the country on horseback.
And it was my father, that I would find slumped in his great leather chair in the parlour room at least once a month, sleeping or crying softly over an empty bottle.
“Eléna,” he would call me over, waving a large hand at my cautiously inching self. “Little Sun, come here, hug your Papa. He is so sad tonight.” And I would.
Without fail, I would.
I do not believe it was ever a secret that my father drank. Certainly all the farmers and ranchers in the area knew, as they came to our house more often than not for their rowdy gatherings and endless games of poker and monte. He always loved to gamble, but particularly so when he was in the bottle. I don’t remember the first time I recognized that he was the cause of our debts, but I am sure of the memory that I knew we needed money when we began doing weddings at the estate.
That was how I met him - the man with the puzzlebox who found me on the stoop that day, when I was only a child. The Spanish countryside had grown increasingly in vogue for a wedding, and at the suggestion of one of my mother’s more modern friends, we began taking ceremonies and receptions at our picturesque ranch in the hills. He was one of the guests of such an affair -- a thing I can deduce purely because I know he was not the groom.
He would take his object back easily that day, but it was not nearly the last any of us would see of him. I do not recall what they were, but he found me later that trip and asked many a question of me before he left. As he was loading into his car, I’m told he spoke to my parents of his interest in me -- that by his measure I was a quiet, intellectual child with great potential, enough of which that with their permission, he would call to see how I progressed.
My parents, likely reluctant that such an influential man was not angry for the petty thievery, consented. And he so he did call. And write. And occasionally visit, when business brought him to the Southern end of Spain.
It became clear quite early on that his interest in me was substantial, and with that realization came a great deal of excitement in the early days. I was only a rancher’s daughter, previously confined to a life in the green swells and white-stone hearths of a farm, but he had singled me out as something - Someone - worth following. He sent me puzzle-boxes of all manners; more cryptexes, occasionally the Japanese yosegi-zaiku, all foreign and beautiful things that tested my young mind and inspired me.
When I was old enough he sent a car to our farm, a sleek and foreign thing meant for my father or mother to drive me to high school each day. He made a surprise visit when I was 15, promising during that trip should I receive the marks he designated in the papers he bought, he would fund not only my travel and accommodation in Barcelona, but the expense of my tuition at the most prestigious university in the whole of my country -- - the acceptance another thing he promised as if it was a thing he could arrange, not something I earned. But perhaps he did. I have tried over the years not to imagine it.
As I grew from child to young woman in these days, the hero worship I had once held for my father would begin to strain. It was clear to me that he was both a drunk and a gambler, and the root cause of our financial turbulence -- some months we ran rich with funds, others we were forced to sell off prized studs just to make necessary payments. I still excused him then, kept secrets from Mama when he shared the extent of cash lost on the poker table, but it was not quite the same.
By the time I was of age to attend university, my marks and exams all tallied to the point of excellent, the choice fell to me to leave or stay. It was an easy decision. Even as my father had seemingly taken lessons in new sobriety and restraint, the enchantment around the life I had once been submerged in in Andalusia had been broken. I left with the best clothes I owned - a meager amount that fit into a small trunk - and the man that I had met all those years ago as a little girl came to take me away.
ENTRY THREE.
It is hard to say, even here, what it has been like to know and be ruled by him. It’s a feeling that only a woman would understand -- to feel at once thinned out and ready to burst, as if being held permanently between his thumb and hot concrete like an ant.
He has never touched me intimately, but he has never had to. There is ownership in every moment of his gaze, the placement of his hand over the small of my back. He does not hesitate to hold my jaw or take me by the hip when he demands concentration -- taking it without ever raising his voice, keeping me still instead with the weight of the knowledge -- memory of what he’s done for me on one shoulder, and what I have done for him on the other. That is not to say he does not vocalize his threats. He does. There is no limit, no end, to what he will not do. I know this now.
It was university that changed everything. So far from home and all I had ever known, I was a sun-coloured girl with no allies in a big city; despite the years of solitude and hard work that had bred an independence in me, I was weak. All I wanted was to please him, to prove I was worth what he had spent on me, as if I was liable to prove a return. At the time my feelings of unease were not fully formed, or I was young enough to discourage them from creeping up any higher in my consciousness -- because I was young, and he was old, and I was a woman and he was a man and that is how things are. So instead of enjoying youth, I threw myself into academia, pushing myself higher and harder to achieve what could never have been touched, let alone held.
For a time, it worked. I took to the unusual, at times illicit methods to stay awake and study. I attended after hours with professors, sought out extra credit, but I could not even hold still even at the very the top of my class. I was a woman obsessed, rocked and soothed by a certain kind of madness, and gave myself no comfort in the everyday pieces of life that would have been so necessary to my sanity. Within a year, two years, I began to crumble. I could no longer sleep, but nor could I stay awake - my marks began to fall. Incrementally, at first, but enough to scatter my mind. There was a class I just couldn’t grasp, though whether that had to do with my insomnia or the anxiety I held in my chest during each moment that prevented me from concentrating, I do not know. But I was breaking, slowly but surely, set to be buried under the weight of tombs and textbooks.
That was the start of it all.
It only took one meeting, one session of me crying on his couch about failure, to shift the course of my future. I have never known for certain whether that day and the admission to my weaknesses was what led the illicit solution to me, but I have my suspicions. Within a week, a classmate I barely knew approached me with concerns about the very same class I was set to fail. We commiserated in our fear.
And it was only a few days later he produced the key to the final exam. I didn’t ask how he got it. I don’t believe I wanted to know, or perhaps some part of my body understood I couldn’t have handled it. But for all you, the nameless readers gorging on these secrets needs to know, I took it.
You see, it’s been like this ever since.
---
It feels as though he has seen me naked, or that he could, at any point and time, demand that my clothes come off and I would have no recourse other than to submit. I know, in the way that any woman does, that he is attracted to me, and it only seems to be by the dedication to his capital that he refrains from indulging.
I have this quiet, steady fear that he will kill me, but it is not quite the fear of murder. Perhaps that lingers somewhere in the back of my mind - the same bleak thing that sits up when I am forced to cross dark streets by myself, tells me to notch my key between my knuckles - but it is more this feeling that he will somehow erase me completely. Perhaps by violence, maybe by sex, or simply by forcing my hand into yet another hideous thing I will not be able to pull away from -- - and yet I fear... I am filled with this fear… that one day he will simply find the last thing that keeps me me, and pull that string until I am unravelled in his palm like thread.
Yet simultaneously I hope, beyond all hopes, to break free like a tent full of birds.
Perhaps that’s what it is to be a woman - to be terrified and defiant all at once.
