What You Don't Know

Dr. Cedric Lang was one of the most respected surgeons in New York. His clear competence and dedication to every project he came upon made him the person of choice to cut your body open with a scalpel. He was clean-cut, handsome, and what he lacked in charm he made up for in obvious intelligence.

What most did not know about Dr. Lang was that his real talent lay not in fixing people, but in breaking them.

The house he was to visit tonight was on a hill, set off a bit from the uniform white houses of the rest of the sleepy suburb. It was bigger than the rest, and a sleek Mercedes roadster sat in the driveway. Dr. Lang wasn’t much for cars, but he knew a few guys who would appreciate it.

He approached the side door and expertly picked the lock, pulling the door open just far enough to slip his lean body through the opening. Quick eyes surveyed the room, the valuables inside. Phones, jewelry, a camera. It would be painfully easy to steal, but Lang was no burglar. One glance to the left revealed the object of his search. Stairs.

Stairs were irritations. They were difficult to climb up quietly; there was usually one that creaked. But it didn’t much matter. People could usually sleep through the strangest noises in their houses, stupidly believing themselves safe. They’d call it the wind, or a cat, anything but what it was. The average man was so convinced of his own immortality, despite every bit of evidence pointing to the contrary.

But the Martins had been warned, and warned multiple times. They’d be on the alert. Silence was of the essence. However, Lang was in luck. No stair creaked as he ascended the staircase and entered the first bedroom. The businessman slept alone in the dark room. Lang had no clear modus operandi. Too many criminals were caught because they always did the same thing, killed with the same weapon, needed to mark their work as theirs. Lang knew he was good. He didn’t need everyone else to think so, too. He was brilliant at operating under the radar.

Tonight would be quick and painless. Although he’d done this many times before, Lang had an odd feeling about tonight, a feeling that it would be good to get in and out quickly. In one calculated movement, he pulled a machine gun from his coat pocket and shot Fred Martin through the head.

He ran towards the other bedroom --- someone would have heard the noise. Martin’s daughter. She screamed when she saw him. Before he killed her, he took a moment to look at her. She was ten or so, only a few years younger than Lang’s own daughter. She reminded him of her, although she looked --- softer --- a result, no doubt, of the coddled life she’d led. Both might grow up to be beautiful young ladies, with dark, wavy hair and pale skin with just a hint of red in the top of the cheeks. He raised the gun, pulled the trigger, and she fell without a sound.

Then, without a hint of expression, he turned and walked back down the stairs. He stopped on the bottom step. Something was wrong. The air seemed to hum, the walls closed in. As he returned to the door and stepped outside, something large and wooden thumped into the back of his head, and the last thing he remembered before he fell unconscious was the victorious smile of a man in a tweed grey cap.

1.

Seven Years Later


"To the future."
"To the summer."
"To Italy."
"To those excellent little gelato places."
"To us."
"God, we're unbelievably corny." Alex gave her new husband an impish look, then clinked her glass of champagne against his. "To us." She took a sip, committing every sensation of this moment to memory. The ambience of the dimly lit cafe off the Campo di Fiori, the taste of the bubbles, the sound of the background music with its beautifully incomprehensible Italian, the adoring look in Tyler's eyes.

Tyler Colton. The number of times she'd nearly let him go, or run away, or just been so goddamn impossible that she was sure that he would decide he'd had enough. Every step she'd taken to this point had scared her. Marrying him had been the most frightening thing she'd done in her life; and she'd done a few scary things in her day.

But for the first time, everything had worked itself out. Was she foolish for thinking that this time, it might last?

"This is real," she said, as if she was clarifying the fact.
"This is real," he nodded, finishing his champagne.
"I don't want to go home," she murmured quietly, as if she was ashamed to express this desire. They'd spent two flawless weeks on their honeymoon, and they were scheduled to leave the next day. Alex had decided that nothing at all bad happened in Italy. Back in Raleigh, North Carolina, the world would be able to mess them around again.
"It doesn't end here," Tyler said. "These are the first two weeks of the rest of our lives."
It used to trigger an internal flip-out inside Alex when he said stuff like that. It still did. But it filled her as well with glorious anticipation.
"The rest of our lives," she echoed, affirming. They'd waited too long. "I love you."
"I love you." He stood up. "Shall we?"

They walked, hand in hand, through the piazza, and she remembered.

Alex and Tyler had met five years ago, back at boarding school. He’d played point guard for the basketball team. Her best friend Trish was dating the captain of the team, his best friend Marc. Everyone had thought that double dates would be a brilliant idea. He’d asked her to the semi-formal dance. She’d said yes. He kissed her at the end and she pushed him away and drove off.  The next time she saw him, she said that she hadn’t meant it, she just had needed time to think.
“Well, have you thought?” he said.
“Yes.”
“And…?”
She kissed him hard on the lips with a fury in her eyes, turned around, and walked away. But now they were firmly planted on each other’s mind. Their second kiss progressed to nights spent sneaking in and out of each other’s windows.  Alex refused to tell anyone about it, refused to accept the status of ‘couple’, played her cards one at a time and took them back just as often.

Messing with his head was how she reconciled with the fact that she was scared as hell.

But Tyler couldn’t put up with it forever. “Whatever it is we’re doing, I can’t do it anymore.”
“What do you mean?”
“This --- this whatever --- is over. Stay away from me.”
“With pleasure,” said Alex, although she felt nothing of the kind. Marc and Trish had long since broken up, and so she had no further inroad into his life. They graduated two weeks later and left for different colleges across the state. He came to find her as she pulled her suitcases into her trunk. “Goodbye, Alex.”
“Bye, Tyler.” She had the absurd urge to kiss him again, but she knew that if she did, she’d just drive away afterwards and nothing would be solved. Still, she left that day with a niggling sense of regret.

Today, she felt she should have known right there that it wouldn’t be over yet. Alex didn’t usually believe in ethereal concepts like destiny, but if anything was meant to be, it was her and Tyler.

“What are you thinking about?”
“How ridiculous we were. How ridiculous I was.” For once, she could give him the truth.
“You’re still ridiculous.”

Suddenly Alex stopped walking. She glanced behind her, and saw full-on what had only been an impression in the corner of her eye. There was a man behind the apartment building on the other side of the street, tall, forty-something, wearing a business suit, and what looked like a smile, although she might have been imagining that part. Tyler felt her hand tense and looked towards her. "What is it?"

"I thought I saw---" What? What could she say? The man was gone; he'd turned the corner. It couldn't be who she thought it was. It was dark, she was excited and pensive. "Someone I knew,” she finished lamely. “It's nothing."

"Nothing? Really?" Tyler was right to be skeptical, given the number of times Alex had assured him that 'it's nothing' when there was, in fact, quite a bit of something.

"Really. Nothing."

-

Alex woke up the day they were to leave Italy while it was still dark.  The digital clock in their extravagant hotel room (courtesy of Alex’s family) read 5:02 AM. They’d been up until nearly three, walking around the piazzas and then making love on the cream-colored sheets, but Alex knew that she wasn’t going to get any more sleep. It was if she had seen a ghost in the streets of Rome, although Devon Mercade was not dead, for all she knew. There was simply no way he could be in Italy, watching her, following her, dogging her footsteps while she was taking her first strides into the only thing she’d ever gotten right.

She quietly slipped out of bed and walked down into the lobby. People were already there, to catch early connecting flights. She paid a euro to use the Internet, went on to Google, searched Mercade. Definitely alive, definitely still the CEO of Mercade Industries, Ltd., could not possibly know where she was. What had she expected? Whoever had written the Wikipedia article knew nothing about the man. Few did.