‘Another bottle sir?’
The barman smiled at his customer’s rosy cheeks. They matched the hue of the luscious red hair of the couple’s fairer half seated next to him. Her evening dress exposed her softly freckled shoulders and the top half of a heavenly pair of assets whose dimensions had been silently measured by all the men at the bar. The man with rosy cheeks relished the envy of his peers and, in his good mood, agreed to the barman’s suggestions to purchase a third bottle of Dom Perignon. As evidenced from his cheeks, it was the man who had consumed most of this excess.
‘Ms. Miller, would you care to join me in another round of celebration? I do believe our partnership will yield excellent dividends. A most promising venture if I may say so.’
‘By all means Mr. Lacey. But you’ll have to excuse me for not keeping up with you. I don’t want to embarrass myself in front of a gentleman.’
‘Please, call me Simon. We’re in business together now, I’d like to think we’re getting friendly.’ Lacey winked. Twice.
Ms. Miller giggled and blushed. ‘Oh I wasn’t aware. Are we?’
‘Ms. Miller, if you’ll indulge me. Might we say that I know a thing or two about chance?’
Ms. Miller giggled again. ‘You founded one of the biggest bookmakers in England, so I would say yes.’
‘Thank you. Now, I’ve learned something over the years managing Bet Foresight.’ Lacey leaned in to suggest he was parting with a sacred secret. ‘Chance follows a course,’ he said in a low, solemn voice.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Chance, odds, probability. It all changes every moment. Days before a match, you get four to one odds. Then twelve hours later you get two to one. Then right before the match you get one to three. It all depends on countless independent incidents - some poor fellow gets injured, another fellow recovers, a player signs a new deal, some other team slips up and now this team’s got a chance to win something. But the final odds are not decided simply by another roll of the dice.’
‘They aren’t?’
‘No, Ms. Miller. The final odds are the total sum of everything that’s preceded it. Everything stacks up in one big direction so that destiny must follow a course.’
‘I don’t like that!’ Ms. Miller pouted.
‘You don’t?’
‘I don’t like things to be decided for me. What I do enjoy is deciding for others.’ She grinned mischievously.
‘I’m sure an intelligent, attractive lady like yourself must find it relatively easy to do so.’ Lacey returned the grin. ‘But while I am not a supporter of the predestination school of thought, I believe no incident is ever completely independent of the next; a course of events shifts paths but within a shrinking scope until the odds clearly suggest a likely path.’
‘Mm. That’s very deep coming from a man who made his fortune from unpredictable games of chance.’
‘Unpredictable only at the beginning. With time prediction becomes expectation.’
‘And what is your expectation for us? The partnership I mean.’ She blushed again.
‘My prediction at the outset had been a slow, gradual partnership. I suspected we could require several attempts at breaking the ice.’
‘We’ve passed that test with flying colors.’
‘Indeed my lady. You continue to grace me with your presence at this late hour, and we’ve touched upon many subjects rather candidly. Again, these events are not independent of each other.’
‘What path are they leading up to?’
‘I would like to believe,’ he snorted gleefully, ‘that we could arrive at the consummation of our celebratory efforts by opening an exquisite bottle of Bordeaux from my wine cellar.’
‘At your place?’
‘If you’d be most kind.’
Simon Lacey lay content on his bed, running his fingers down her silky skin. The pillows were moist with sweat, and he was recovering the clarity in judgment that had escaped him until the moment he collapsed face down on his duvet. She was a fine specimen, and he licked his lips at the prospect of holding her again. If only business dinners were all like this.
‘I’m going to freshen up,’ she said as she got up. Lacey watched her feline silhouette disappear and was about to light a cigarette when he heard an electronic bell chime. It was her phone, which was inside the bag she’d left next to the bed. He was going to ignore it and have his cigarette but the bell chimed again. He was intrigued now, and felt a sudden urge to inspect her message. He put down the cigarette on the bedside table and walked over to the other side of the bed. There were two new messages.
Balls are paid via Solana burner wallets. untraceable onchain.
London 0, United 2 or London 1, United 3 if London scores.
Lacey’s jaws dropped. The sly bitch was rigging the game!
‘What are you doing?’ she shouted as she scurried back into the room. Lacey held her phone away from her reach and smirked. ‘Ms. Miller, you do not fail to surprise me. It seems you were being very literal when you said you enjoy deciding things for others.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, now give me back my phone!’
He shoved her hard and she fell backwards on the bed, hitting her head on the bedpost.
‘You know I could press this button here and call this fellow, whoever he is.’ Lacey ignored her whimpers of pain. ‘And I could just as well call others and expose you all. I’m sure you’re not in this alone.’
‘What do you want?’
‘I want a discount on my sponsorship. Two million.’
‘Are you insane?’
‘Are you? Do you really want to risk losing everything because of two million? It’s not even your money. All you have to do is speak with your board. Given your assets,’ Lacey gazed at her bare breasts, ‘that shouldn’t be a problem I think.’
‘Give it back,’ she snarled.
‘In the fullness of time. Now, as your business partner I would be extremely disappointed were you to leave me out of such an intriguing enterprise. Especially when it touches on a field I should like to think of as my own. I want you to tell me everything, right now.’
Lacey sat in his study, excitedly making phone calls and calculating his earnings. He did not see Ms. Miller to the door, and as soon as she stepped into the cool breeze of the night she looked around the street. Confirming that the coast was clear, she took out the phone she’d retrieved from Lacey and punched in a number. A man promptly picked up at the other end.
‘Did he fall for it?’
‘Hook, line, and sinker.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Yes, his cousin’s never getting that knighthood now.’
‘Good. Keep stringing him along and move very, very quickly. The sale could be negotiated as early as this weekend and I want Lacey out of the frame before then.’
‘I think I can have something by tomorrow.’
‘Good girl. I have someone in the cabinet you can leak this to - you’ll find the relevant contact information in your mailbox. From there on the press should do all the work for us.’
‘It’s a pity. He seemed like a smart banker.’
‘But dumb enough to pick the wrong fight. Remember Marissa, if you don’t hunt quickly, you become the hunted.’
Marissa nodded and hopped into a cab that quickly disappeared into the night.
Tony was a prisoner of the mind in every sense of the term.
One calls patients of dementia prisoners of the mind. While the appellation is far from faulty, it would be a gross oversight to assume that the appellation should be limited to those suffering from medically acknowledged conditions. To be a prisoner means to have one’s autonomy undermined by a greater force. Therefore, to be a prisoner of the mind indicates that the mind is a greater force than the person, who is helpless to prevent the onslaught of sudden unexpected - even unwanted - ideas that cement their foothold in his internal system. These ideas are initially observations - certain visual or other sensory details unintentionally perceived - that give birth to premature conclusions regarding the implications of such observations.
Examples include the girlfriend who, despite her best wishes to protect herself, will see that he is late again and inevitably conclude that their once-eternal love is now valued at a half-hour discount, a valuation unmistakably attributable to the recent surge in her waist size. Or the husband who is incapable of stopping himself from noticing the untucked corner of her blouse after lunch and is left helpless as his mind runs wild, at once determining with the utmost confidence his wife’s infidelity with the plumber.
Similarly, the initials on the back of Mateo’s pendant that Tony could not help but notice were strengthening their foothold in Tony’s mind. He chided himself for obsessing about a bloody pendant from decades ago but the seed had been planted. And the intensity and speed with which that seed was growing were proportionate to the sense of failure he felt regarding their marriage. He felt that his choices and preferences were the culprits behind the decline, and the guilt had multiplied in weight over the years. What made matters worse was that he didn’t put in the effort to rid himself of the guilt. And after Emma’s death it became altogether a mountain too high to overcome.
The altitude of that mountain hit him after the coroner delivered his verdict of misadventure:
There appear to be no indications of foul play by a third party in the unfortunate and untimely death of Mrs. Barlow. No criminal proceedings have transpired in relation to this tragedy. Thus the inquest centred around establishing the facts of Mrs. Barlow’s death and the potential for suicide. While substantial evidence has surfaced that points to a lasting discord within the Barlows, there is only circumstantial evidence concerning Mrs. Barlow’s premeditated taking of her own life. As Mrs. Barlow left no note...
Emma left no note. She had always liked having the last word, so the absence of a final damning commentary suggested she had in fact been so miserable that she no longer cared to hurt Tony and simply wanted to end it all. Tony was convinced it was not a misadventure but a suicide because the autopsy revealed she had taken heroine. He knew her to be a crack addict, and he suspected the use of unfamiliar substances in such a dosage was a declaration of intent. Experts - those outsiders who knew nothing about Emma apart from the chemical analysis of her bloodstream - claimed she had probably been a regular heroine user and that Tony wasn’t aware. But though Tony hadn’t been on the best of terms with his wife in the final years of her life, he still believed that there wasn’t anything substantial about her drug habits that he had missed.
They say death is about tying up loose ends. Usually when a person is alive, she is still presumably working to keep the ugly ends from jutting out onto the shiny red carpet of her public life. When that person is no more, the underbelly emerges; hidden children surface, gambling debts appear, embezzlement charges are pressed, and new birth certificates or identification papers are uncovered to shed light on a wholly different, independent history book that had been hitherto unknown to the family. With Emma, Tony did not suffer the ignominy of such discoveries. Her suicide did not create a mess, and life simply continued. The lack of a scandal made Tony reassess the past few years; all the wrong seemed to be of his doing and Emma had probably done nothing but endure the pain of a relationship slipping away. It made Tony feel that he had truly, wildly failed in life. Until now.
The reemergence of the once missing pendant - on Mateo of all people - threw his beliefs in complete disarray. As Mateo arrived in England after Emma’s suicide, it must have gotten to him through a third party. Now Tony believed that third party to be the Vietnamese gang, who were well known for their share of the drug trade in addition to the sex slavery he’d witnessed today. It was very likely she’d bought her stuff off of them - the stuff that ended up killing her through an accidental overdose - but why would one of them have her necklace?
Tony was never privy to the private life of Emma. Tony did not possess that history, and he never dared or cared to acquire it. Now that he thought of it, it was possible that his knowledge of Emma could have been fundamentally flawed. He had condoned her week-long absences and had not questioned her fidelity. To be precise he always did question her but it was just that he never felt he was in a morally higher enough position to confront her about anything.
The lotus pendant changed all that. The initials on it may as well have been written in scarlet, for Tony’s mind kept producing horrid images of Emma and a Vietnamese worker locked together under those dim red basement lights. The lotus would have been some kind of token, which eventually changed hands once more to find its way to another client. Deep down Tony knew he had connected one too many dots, but that didn’t matter because his mind was now on a rampant spree of ideas and conclusions.
He reflected on how Emma had never been entirely satisfied with him. An outspoken woman, Emma made it clear that Tony was not well versed in music or art like the men she had dated before, and that the tales of his solitary cup success grew tedious after the first year. She was also unforgiving of his nocturnal performances, hinting he wasn’t bullish enough and that he usually gave her depressions rather than orgasms. Tony did nothing to help his case by spending one too many Saturdays swamped in muddy pitches and grimy pubs.
Sadly, Tony’s sporadic efforts to spice up the relationship were in vain. When he took her to the Holloway Odeon he fell asleep, with remarkable consistency, within the first act for every single film. The record was Jerry Maguire, which kept Tony up for an unprecedented 25 minutes because Tony couldn’t believe the sheer inaccuracy with which the film depicted sports agents.
‘They’re fat ugly blokes who’d sell their own grandmothers - there is no way in hell any one of them would write manifestos on honesty,’ Tony whispered furiously as Emma wiped off his saliva from her ears. Then when Tom Cruise screamed ‘Show me the money!’ Tony let out a sigh of relief and fell asleep.
The frequency of their sighs grew exponentially. Tony was afraid of confronting Emma and always said yes to Emma (or gave a quick nod) to avoid escalating tensions. In return Emma stopped vying for his attention. She had always been a very distracted girl anyway, with an eye out for all sorts of bits and bobs. But now Tony had an answer to what she had been distracted by, and he almost loathed her for it. She had made him feel needless guilt for a crime he did not commit. He was not to blame for the destruction of their marriage. It was her, the whore.
One may criticise Tony’s approach to the entire affair. Even Tony admitted that, all things considered, he should have done a better job of patching things up before she crossed the point of no return. But there was something that Tony never admitted to himself. It was that he, like Emma, had also been distracted.
He loved Emma, or at least he thought he did. There were definitely moments when he felt a fire, though they were few and far between. But these rare moments - even as they were relegated to the vale of fleeting memories - drove him on in his quest to at least maintain their nominal relationship. There was a need for that, on his part. For the majority of his life he had battled a desire he had longed to extinguish. Its beginning dated back to his days as a schoolboy, when he played in the local youth team. And to this day he still remembered, after all those years, the sickening touch of his youth academy coach as he came out of the showers.
He would take Tony’s towel and offer to dry him. Then in front of the mirror they would count his abs, the coach praising young Tony for his endeavours in the gym and personally inspecting the firmness of his adolescent muscles with jabs here and there. When he heard a noise outside he’d stop for a bit. Then after he’d looked around he’d count them again, complimenting Tony and promising him rewards. On some days Tony asked to take his shower at home, but these requests were waived on the grounds that he might catch a cold if he didn’t properly wash up straight away. And he stood there to monitor whether Tony was putting on the right amount of soap or meticulously scrubbing all the important parts, something he would personally attend to at times.
Tony kept silent because that’s how he was taught. Although he came to dread the showers with the coach, he realised that there was something about it that was not all bad. When he retired and became a coach, when he began coaching the young ones, the memories came flooding back. He tried everything he could to shut them out but it was impossible. He was drawn to the showers and the sound of water running down their chests.
One day, he stopped restraining himself. To his own bewilderment, he walked up, grabbed a boy, and helped him count some abs. His heart raced the first time and the second, but not the third time. He grew restless and knew he had to stop. But he knew the feeling would never be gone.
The clock had struck midnight when Tony awoke from his reflections. The revelations of today were too much and his mind was spinning, spinning rapidly at first but gradually slowing down toward one destination. He sat up and sipped another glass of Laphroaig. The whisky was beckoning. He wanted to fight it, but it had been too long. He sighed a deep sigh and took another sip. He wasn’t falling asleep anytime soon.
An hour later, he stood outside Lady Paint and clenched the wad of cash in his pocket.