Chapter Text
‘We’re all just selfish pieces of work in the end.’
Joe Connor sat in the back of the white canvassed UN transport van, head bowed, sweat-matted strands hanging over bloodshot eyes. It was hot, but he shivered, an incessant tremble he could feel in his bones. In front of him, across the span of the truck bed, sat a uniformed man with a gun. To his right, open air, a dusty road, and a deceivingly blue sky. He could not abide it, and so he shut his eyes, and as the van rumbled over the hilly terrain, he let himself be lightly jostled on the wooden crate where he perched.
Behind his eyelids, he saw it all again, dream-like and smeared, flashes of red and gleams of a machete’s blade in the cruelly bright sun. His tongue parted his lips; they were dry, he had been biting them. Resting on his knee, his hand was shaking. Joe did not want the uniformed men to see, so he brought both hands to pull through his hair and rake the chestnut curls from his brow. He took a deep breath, and released it with a little sound, like a moan, and he cut his eyes at the men in the van to see if anyone had heard, if anyone had noticed. No one was watching him or listening to him. They all sat in silence, gripping their rifles, adjusting their berets, wiping sweat from their foreheads. None took notice of Joe Connor, the young teacher near to tears. They were fleeing The Ecole Technique Officielle, all of them, and held thoughts only of themselves. Thinking of those left behind the gate would do no good; no thoughts of regret would spare anyone’s life. No well-wishes or prayers would stay the keen edge of a knife. When they had entered the UN vehicle, they had left the others to die.
Joe had entered the vehicle, and though his tears fell like hot betrayal on his cheeks, he had stayed put and allowed himself to be carried away to safety. He tried to keep his thoughts away from them, away from the sad, staring faces. He tried not to think of how many of those faces belonged to the bodies of the dead now, while he perched on his crate and let the uneven road rattle his body, so alive was he, so alive and capable of feeling the bumps and the breeze. He imagined he could smell it on the warm, April wind. Death. But it might have been fear he scented mixed with a sweet fragrance, like orange blossoms. His own fear still poured from his pores, the sweat of survival.
‘We’re all just selfish pieces of work in the end,’ he heard her voice ringing in his skull. She had certainly been right, about him anyway. In the end, he had been selfish. And afraid. And now he was selfish and afraid, but he was alive. The man across from him cleared his throat and spit out the open end of the truck. Joe watched the glob arch through the air and fall with a splat in the dirt. He directed his wide blue eyes to the spitter, and did not turn away when his gaze was met. A moment passed between the two men, the soldier and the teacher, the spitter and the shaker, and then the van rolled over a rock, and both took the opportunity to look away.
Joe looked back out to the road falling out behind the UN’s tires, and he spied the freshly pressed rock. He squinted, because it looked strangely pointed for a rock, and when the van began to spin out of control, he knew it had not been a rock at all, but a spike in the road, a carefully positioned hindrance. Joe clutched the wooden crate beneath him and braced as the van skidded off the road to finally come to an arresting halt in a strip of tall grass. The other men in the back of the van with Joe, uniformed and armed all, wasted no time in filing out from the covered back, guns at the ready, attention all around. They looked back down the road where they had come from, and forward to where they’d been headed. They poked at the tall grass with their weapons and spoke amongst themselves. The other vans in their caravan had not seen, and they did not stop to help. Joe thought, as he sat on his crate, that maybe they had seen and pretended not to. It would be, after all, the order of the day.
He licked his lips and wiped the stinging sweat from his eyes, and then he crossed his arms over his chest and settled back against the canvassed wall. Joe had no desire to leave the van. If the spike had been left in the road, that meant trouble. He was a teacher, and he was shaking and scared, and he would be useless if there was trouble. He had proven that enough. Now he would sit and reap the benefit of his cowardice, and let others risk themselves in his stead. Perhaps that was his true calling, Joe thought bitterly, not to make a difference, but to watch from the safety of shadows as others did. Only when he tasted copper on his tongue did he realize he’d bitten his lip in his ferocious self-hatred. He brought up the sleeve of his dark blue button up and patted his bottom lip. A blossom of scarlet soaked his cuff, so dark against the material it looked almost like a spill of ink. Maybe it would pass for that one day, when he was back in England with his books and pens and safe studies. But no. Joe knew he would burn the clothes on his back when he had the chance. He tongued at the cut on his lip, and tasted the swell of blood. Poor Joe, with his bleeding lip and trembles and shame, he did not hear the footsteps as they approached the back of the van. He did not see the man until he was a hairsbreadth away, and then it was too late. Not that Joe would have done anything other than remain on his crate.
“Hello,” the man said, and Joe regarded him with huge, teary eyes. He was tall, handsome, immaculate, and certainly did not belong on the side of a road in Rwanda in the middle of a genocide, dressed as he was in an expensive-looking black suit, double breasted. His hair was dark and finely slicked, barely long enough to sweep behind smallish ears and frame sharp, elegant cheekbones. His eyes sat beneath a heavily sculpted brow, and shadows filled the creases of his eyelids despite the high sun. One eye, Joe discovered in his speculative staring, was cloudy, and he wondered if he was blind out of it. Thin scars peppered the corners of that murky eye, the left, but the strangeness only amplified the beauty of the right, irises like deep, rich honey. His pupils were mere pinpricks in the light, but they grew large as he ducked his head closer and leaned into the shade, sitting next to Joe on the truck bed. He crossed his legs, and Joe looked at his socks, black, maybe silk, and the sliver of skin that slipped to exposure, a slightly tanned creeping of flesh between the top of his sock and the bottom of his tailored trousers. Beside him, wavering on his crate, Joe became aware he had not showered in days, had sweated profusely, was sweating profusely right at that moment, and wore dirty, bloody clothes. But he smiled at the man in black who had arrived mysteriously to sit beside him, a strained, painful smile, because that was the polite thing to do. Joe was selfish and a coward, maybe, but he was polite.
“Hello,” Joe said, and he was shocked by the weak mew of his voice. He was used to its playful, quipping, British cadence as he spun stories for the schoolchildren and commentated recess games. He was used to speaking with gentle command and friendly authority at the front of his classroom, filled to the brim with eager students hanging to his every word as he taught them geography, history, religion. The voice he spoke with now to greet the stranger was the voice of a broken man, and he looked down at his hands, still shaking. He clasped them together and hoped the show of weakness would go unnoticed. A ridiculous thought, for Joe felt like weakness personified, a fleshy, sinewy lump of all things faulted and failed.
The man in the black suit turned to Joe like a praying mantis, head held tilted on his neck with precision and grace, and the very thought of his gaze forced Joe’s eyes back up from his lap, and they looked at one another for a long moment of silence that stretched, for Joe, into a million moments. The man did not frown, but he did not smile. His lips, a perfect cupid’s bow, fixed into what Joe perceived as a pout, and his eyebrows, strangely pale, twitched towards one another as though they wished to furrow together in a scowl, but he did not scowl, his brow only twitched, and then he held two fingers up to his temple. Joe followed the movement of his fingers. They were long, and the nails were pristinely clean. Joe was afraid to look under his nails, so he watched the man instead, as he massaged fingertips into his temple.
The teacher, innately inquisitive, nearly asked about the man’s health. Did he have a headache? Was he feeling alright? But he stopped himself, because those questions were rapidly replaced with others once the immediacy of the stranger’s peculiar handsomeness was cast aside. Questions like, where were the UN guards? Joe strained his ears, large things he kept hidden beneath his mop of curls, but he heard no Belgian exchanges. In his first purposeful movement since he’d sat himself down on his crate, Joe stood. He craned his neck to peer around the side of the canvas back, and his shaky limbs toppled him. Joe fell. He would have fallen face-first onto the road, but he was caught by the man in the black suit, who had stood with catlike instinct and grabbed Joe’s middle before he could make a complete fool of himself. Now he knelt on the bed of the van with the stranger’s arms wrapped firmly around his waist, and he only felt half a fool.
“You’re unwell,” the man said. Their faces were very close. Joe heard an accent he had been too startled to hear before. Albanian, he wondered, and then he felt the tickle of the man’s breath against his cheek and ceased wondering anything. Joe was an empty, thoughtless shell, and the arms wrapped strongly around him were all that existed.
He strung together a response out of politeness instead of cognitive brain function. “I’m fine. Thank you.”
The man’s face twitched again, tiny micro-expressions competing to conquer the serene palette Joe could not tear his eyes from. “You are not UN,” he said, and though it was not shaped as a question, Joe found himself shaking his head regardless.
“I’m a teacher,” Joe offered when the silence had stretched thin, and he felt like the man needed to hear more. His response brought the first smile, albeit small, to the man’s face, and the teacher was mesmerized anew. He wanted the man to keep smiling, and so he added, “Joe Connor.”
The man’s smile deepened, and Joe watched the creases that grew in the corner of his eyes and around his mouth. It seemed to smooth some of his sharp edges when he smiled, and Joe felt himself slightly soothed.
“Mr. Connor,” the man said as he released his hold from Joe’s waist and took a step back. “I’m Le Chiffre,” he said with an extended hand. Joe took it; he did not grasp it and shake it properly, but took it and held it, like a lifeline. The smile disappeared from Le Chiffre’s face then and he covered his other hand over Joe’s. He pierced him through with those odd eyes, intensely serious. “Would you like to be my hostage, Mr. Connor?” he asked.
Joe stared at him. He licked his lips to test for blood (it had stopped bleeding) and let his eyes dart from Le Chiffre’s face to the hazy space behind him. The UN soldiers were being hauled into the back of a different vehicle, a long, black van. Joe wondered vaguely when they had been rendered weaponless. How long had he been sitting on his wood crate, and in such a daze that he heard nothing that went on around him?
“You are in shock, Mr. Connor,” Le Chiffre said as though he’d read the thoughts swirling, sludge-like, through the young teacher’s head. “I watched you for five minutes before I approached you.”
Joe nodded that he understood. Somewhere in his mind he deemed it appropriate that he should be in shock, it was quite sensible really, but through the muck, a word struck him hard, and he repeated it absently. “Hostage?” The man called Le Chiffre was still holding his hand, or rather, he was letting Joe hold his, and Joe kept it gripped with all his remaining strength.
“My men are taking your men from the UN hostage,” Le Chiffre explained slowly, his accent wrapping around each word like velvet. “You say you are not UN, and I’m inclined to believe you,” he continued, and Joe wanted to close his eyes and listen, listen to the lilting, deep voice forever, but he kept his eyes on Le Chiffre’s, politely. “I do not wish to take a schoolteacher against his will, nor do I wish to leave you here.” His voice grew softer, lighter. “Did you see the bodies as you travelled this road, Mr. Connor?” Joe nodded, and so did Le Chiffre. He squeezed Joe’s hand. “I would not leave you here to become one of them. I would prefer you come with me instead. But it is your choice.”
“You want me to come with you?” Joe asked. “As your hostage?”
“I do want that, yes,” Le Chiffre said. Joe looked past him, at the last of the uniformed men being herded into the back of the black van. The door slammed shut behind him, and the noise made Joe jump. He wanted to be away from Rwanda, desperately, away from gunfire and bodies in the road. He wanted to close his eyes and burn his clothes and forget.
“Okay,” Joe said, and he let Le Chiffre hold him steady as he pushed himself off the UN van. Their hands no longer touched, but Le Chiffre kept his palm square and large on the back of Joe’s back. Joe knew it must be wet with sweat, and he felt a blush of embarrassment, but the other man did not mind, not at all, and he kept his hand there as he led Joe to the black van. Joe waited for the doors to be opened so he could sit in the back with the others, and he was surprised when Le Chiffre guided him to the front, and then past it completely to a second vehicle, a smaller black van. He opened the passenger seat for Joe and waved his hand insistently. Joe followed his direction and slid into the leather seat. He watched the strange man walk in front of the van to the driver’s side, with his entirely black suit and strange eyes, and Joe thought he had never seen anything so captivating. It was his shock, he knew, skewing his perception, but he didn’t care. When Le Chiffre settled into the driver’s seat and spared Joe a small smile, the shocked, exhausted, selfish, scared teacher buckled his seat belt. And smiled back.
The cipher. The figure.
Joe sipped the water he had been handed, and the ice clicked pleasantly against the glass. He remembered his French, and he knew what Le Chiffre meant, and he looked at him now, seated across from him, and wished he knew his real name.
“You’re dehydrated,” Le Chiffre said from his place amongst the downy cushions. The two men occupied a bedroom, spacious, and Joe sat on the bed of purple sheets while Le Chiffre reclined in a soft, overstuffed armchair. They both held tall glasses of ice water. The condensation dampened Joe’s fingers, and helped cool his fevered skin. He took another greedy sip of the water, and Le Chiffre looked on approvingly. “You haven’t inquired after your UN friends,” he said then, and Joe raised his dark eyebrows in question before his addled brain caught up, and they settled again in comprehension.
“They aren’t my friends,” Joe said. His voice had regained some of its former strength with the help of water and time, but it nearly broke when he spoke, his words close to stumbling as he thought of the genuine friends, the friends he had left behind. They would be dead now. A busted breath escaped his lips, scabbed over from his worried chewing, and he watched the ice floating in Le Chiffre’s glass, bobbing and clinking as he raised it to his own lips, soft and unblemished, for a drink. His throat worked hypnotically as he swallowed it down, and Joe watched that too, the bobbing of Le Chiffre’s Adam’s apple.
It was the same day, only a few hours later, when the black vans had pulled up to park over an expansive lawn of well-maintained green grass, and Le Chiffre had walked around to Joe’s side and opened the door for him. He’d held out his hand, Joe had taken it mutely, and they had walked ahead of the others into the richly looming three story house. Mansion, Joe supposed it was. He let himself be led by the hand up the winding staircases, into a lushly decorated bedroom at the end of a hall, his feet stepping soundlessly over the oriental floor runner. And he sat in that bedroom currently, propped up on the bed, legs crossed Indian style, staring at the man in the chair. Le Chiffre was better suited amidst the luxuriant, feathered cushions than he had been against the stark African landscape, and his tie, black, was loosened now around his neck, and the first button of his shirt, also black, was undone, exposing the beginning tufts of chest hair. Joe brought a hand absently to his own chest, to feel through the dark fabric of his shirt at the smoothness beneath. He swallowed hard, and took another thirsty gulp from his glass, draining it to empty so only the cubes of ice remained when he set it down on the bedside table.
Le Chiffre finished his water, as well, and placed it on the coaster awaiting it on a coffee table, fancily carved and ivory white, before settling back into the chair comfortably, elbow balanced on the armrest, two fingers brought up to rest against his left temple. “You have no love for those with whom you traveled?” Le Chiffre asked. In his discarded drinking glass, the ice melted and shifted noisily. On the bed, Joe fidgeted his fingers, now empty and free from his own glass. He should have held onto it, he lamented, just to have something to hold, to steady his hands, but he had cast it aside, and so his fingers were left to fidget aimlessly, twining together, untwining, finding their way through tangled curls. All the while, Joe considered the question put upon him by the other man. Had he love for those with whom he’d traveled? For the man with the gun who had spat into the road while Joe had shifted uneasily and moaned his heartbreak on heavy, guilt-riddled exhales?
“I had love, but not for your UN captives,” Joe answered at long last, and Le Chiffre leaned forward in his chair, uncrossing his legs to rest his elbows on his knees.
“You speak as though your love is in the past,” he observed, eyes both amber and milky set upon Joe with rapt attention. “Did you have loved ones, Mr. Connor, in the facility you escaped?” A sickness rose in Joe’s throat, a bile that burned and nauseated, and he fought to swallow it as he nodded. Le Chiffre pressed further forward, fanning his palms in a lengthy spread over suited knees. “A girlfriend? Wife?” At this, Joe scoffed, and Le Chiffre amended, “A lover, then.”
“I was to be there for a year, as a teacher of many subjects,” Joe said when the threat of acidic upheaval had receded back down his throat. “I had love for my students, and love for my own teacher.” His mind flashed with afterimages: Christopher handing him his bible, a sweet smile on his handsome yet weathered face, Marie running towards him, laughing as he clapped his hands and spurred her on with his overly loud, sportscaster voice. He saw himself falling to his knees with the students, in playful praise, and then he saw himself pushed to his knees, a gun waving in front of his face. “I use past tense, because they are in the past now.”
Le Chiffre understood, and he lifted his chin in an attractive half-nod. “A nasty business, this coup,” he said, and Joe could only stare in response. Yes, he thought. Nasty, indeed. “I am here myself on a business trip. A happy accident and unsavory inconvenience, both.” When Joe’s eyes glazed with apprehension, Le Chiffre waved his hand in a dismissal, as if to shoo away the teacher’s doubts. “An inconvenience to be here during the unanticipated beginnings of violence, but a happy accident, as well, for my employers. And for me, I think, Mr. Connor.”
“What exactly is your business, Le Chiffre?” he asked, and the name tasted sweet on his tongue, foreign and intriguing, like the man it belonged to. “Were your UN hostages your business or your happy accident?”
“My business is banking,” answered Le Chiffre, eyes smoldering in contrast with his cool demeanor. “The UN hostages are a happy accident for my employers.” His lips twitched at the edges, threatening a smile. “You are my happy accident.”
Joe flushed beneath the surprising declaration and ducked his head to let unruly hair sweep over his pupil-blown eyes. As quickly as nerves would allow, he hurried the conversation to a safer route. “Banking,” he said, and Le Chiffre, eyes alight with untold mischief, leaned back in his chair and returned his fingers to the hollow of his temple. Joe moved over the plush mattress, unfolding his legs from beneath him to sprawl in a stretch over Egyptian cotton covers. His muscles were sore, but he was no longer shaking, and he no longer felt an absence of control in his body and mind. “You are a banker who kidnaps members of the UN.” He did not phrase it as a question, and the banker rewarded the confidence with a smile.
“Only when the opportunity presents itself,” corrected Le Chiffre, accent twirling his words to dance circles around Joe’s tired head, “and my employers insisted on the seizure of this particular opportunity.”
“It’s not every day a convoy of UN guards moseys through a Rwandan genocide,” Joe said.
“No, it’s not every day that happens,” Le Chiffre agreed. “I do prefer the business of banking to kidnapping, but I will admit it is not without its side benefits.”
Joe knew his face was still flushed, but he forced his eyes up to meet Le Chiffre’s. “Such as?”
The banker made a face of mock contemplation, and then lifted his sleek shoulders in a light shrug. “All the new people one meets, perhaps.” He was fixated on Joe as he stood from his cozy chair and walked to the edge of the bed. Again, Joe’s head had lowered to examine his knees, and when cold fingers touched beneath his chin, he startled, but let his head be lifted. His blue eyes, dark and sad, fastened to Le Chiffre’s, warm and eerie. Joe’s sigh scattered from his lips, a delicate, winnowing thing that blew his hair from his eyes. “You would like to get clean,” he said, and again, it was not a question, and Joe tipped his head in acquiescence. He let himself lean easily into the fingers beneath his chin, and Le Chiffre swiftly retracted his touch and stepped away. “Follow me,” he said, and he waited for Joe to steady himself from the bed before he swept across the bedroom to open a solid oak door. “Through here,” he said, and Joe followed him into a mosaic-walled bathroom, nearly as large as the bedroom itself.
Le Chiffre stood in the center of the room, and tapped his polished dress shoes thoughtfully against the rustic tile. “Shower or bath?” he asked, and Joe sucked his lower lip between his teeth and bit. He tasted the blood bloom on his tongue, his worried wound from before freshly opened.
“Shower,” Joe decided. “I think I’m too filthy for a bath,” he added, and then he shuffled, head down, and wished he hadn’t. He felt embarrassed to be so unclean beside a man as up-kept as Le Chiffre. But Le Chiffre only moved to stand beside the walk-in, glass paneled shower and turned the nozzle. A cascade of even-pressured water flowed from the broad head, and Le Chiffre stepped to the side, to a cherry wood lacquered cabinet, which he opened to reveal a stack of fluffy white towels. He took one in his hands and walked it to Joe, who still stood in the doorway. Joe accepted it, clutching it to his chest, and allowed Le Chiffre to usher him fully into the bathroom and toward the shower, which was already steaming with promising, cleansing heat.
“Alright?” Le Chiffre asked, and Joe raised his eyebrows. He was tempted, for an instant of time, to tell him the truth. No, not alright. He wasn’t alright, the world wasn’t alright, nothing had ever been alright, nor would it ever be. But the instant fell away into the past, like the faces of his dead friends, and he simply nodded.
“Thanks,” Joe said, his voice almost lost beneath the pelting echo of the shower rain, but Le Chiffre heard him and turned to leave. At the doorway, however, he stopped and peered over his shoulder to steal a look at Joe who was preoccupied with the unbuttoning of his shirt. He waited for the teacher to feel eyes upon him and look up. When he did, Le Chiffre smiled kindly.
“Let me know if you need anything, Mr. Connor,” he said. “I will be just outside.”
Joe fumbled with a button. “Yes, thanks. I’m fine,” he lied, and he smiled so the man would leave. When the door clicked softly shut, Joe sighed, an all-consuming release of exhaust, and returned to his buttons. His fatigued fingers worked at the worn fabric, and he peeled the deep blue, sweat stained shirt from his chest, wrested it over his shoulders, and let it fall in a crumple at his feet. He found the button of his pale blue jeans next and worked it free. The zipper followed, and he eased the light-wash denim over his narrow hips and down his thighs. They slipped easily the rest of the way down, settling around his ankles. He stepped free of them and slipped out of his boxer briefs, toeing them in the heap with his shirt and jeans.
Joe was naked. When he passed the mirror, body-long with a gilded frame, he was glad for the steam that fogged his reflection. He had no desire to see himself; he knew what he would find in his eyes, and he feared it, so he hurried past the looking glass until he reached the shower door. He swung the towel Le Chiffre had handed him over the top, so that it hanged evenly on either side, and then he stepped into the dizzying steam and pounding heat.
It felt good, selfishly satisfying, to stand beneath the spray, and Joe bent his head back with closed eyes and parted lips. The hot water stung where he’d bitten through the soft flesh, and he moaned at the clip of pain. Tears mingled with shower water down his cheeks, which he smoothed over with a hand, scraping with nails over the days' worth of light scruff along his jaw and smattered above the curve of his mouth. If he looked down, he knew he would see a brown spiral of grime as it dripped free of his body and disappeared into the abyss of the drain. He kept his eyes shut, head tilting to catch every angle of his face with the relentless spray. He turned, let the water soak his hair, and it grew blackish and streamed long over his brow and down his neck, curls straightening and that scent of fear running down the entirety of his body, vanishing between his feet with the grime and sweat and bits of blood.
And then he saw, in a sudden vision behind closed lids, Christopher’s face, vivid and real and insistent. Joe gasped and slammed his hands against the shower sides, one to the tile, and one to the glass door. The hand that met glass broke through, and he fell to the floor in a trembling heap as the glass shattered over him. His blood turned the tile beneath him red, and he held his gashed hand to his chest, and in his mind’s eye he still looked at the world-weary priest. Christopher reached for him, smiling sadly, and said, ‘Find fulfillment in everything, Joe.’ And then his eyes went wide with horror and Joe yelled and tried to shake the image from his head, but the shower beating down on him felt like the blood of his friend, and he could not vanquish the priest’s dead face from behind his eyes.
Then Joe felt himself lifted, up and away from the gory rain, and he clutched madly to the one that held him tight. Against his bloody fingers he felt the smoothness of finely woven fabric, and he pressed his face against the dampened lapel of Le Chiffre’s suit jacket.
Le Chiffre carried him swiftly from the bathroom, and Joe felt his naked body lowered to a spread of soft sheets. The banker’s warmth left him for a short time, and then returned, and he felt his wrist clasped between strong hands. With the buzz from the shower cleared, and the steady hands delivering steady pressure to his skin, Joe was able to calm his screaming heart, and when he opened his eyes, Christopher’s face faded, and he saw only Le Chiffre, bandaging up his cut hand with a frown and some medical gauze. Joe found a sound within his chest and released it like a whimper, drawing Le Chiffre’s eyes to his own.
“Why are you so kind to me?” Joe asked.
Le Chiffre wiped at his cloudy eye, and his finger came away with a stain of red. “Because we are both the product of violent times,” he answered softly, the divine rhythm of his voice lulling Joe into a peaceful reverie. “Rest, Mr. Connor, and then we will see what times await us next.”
Joe let his lids fall heavy over his eyes, and he fell into an exhausted sleep as Le Chiffre tended his wound and covered his body in soft, expensive sheets.