“Wake up, idiot!” Bernard heard, as he felt a rough hard backhand slap threaten to knock him back into unconsciousness. “Wake up, now! I don’t have time for this.”
Slowly opening his eyes, Bernard saw the hate-filled face of Richard sneering at him, looming over his body, which was restrained. He attempted to look around slightly, and recognized he was in the dock master’s office; although it couldn’t have mattered less to him, his first thought was “A bad day at the office for him, huh?” The man’s dead body was probably lying just on the other side of the door, still behind the elevated desk in the lobby where he had been working when Bernard saw him last.
Richard struck him again, and again, consumed by a rage that had been building for years. “You worthless, scheming, piece of dirt! How are you here? Who is backing you?”
For a moment Bernard was Vance again, wanting to cower away from his older brother’s blows. Even has he opened his mouth to reply, Richard hit him again, and spit in his face, before backing away a step and crossing his arms, glaring at Bernard. Bernard wasn’t even certain that Richard wanted answers to his questions – it seemed more like he just wanted to kill him. Given the situation, it was pretty unlikely that he could do anything to stop Richard from doing whatever he might decide he wanted to do.
“I’ve been here for a few years now. Nobody’s backing me. It’s a good place to hide; or at least, it was.” Bernard slipped immediately into a quiet voice of deference and fear, hoping to placate the furious crime lord.
“I’m supposed to believe that you’re in charge of this little show? Ha! Not a chance. Maybe I wasn’t clear enough the first time!” Richard roared, and stomped on Bernard’s hand. He could do nothing but moan in agony, which he knew was the reaction Richard was looking for anyway.
“Let me explain it to you, you little coward. A nobody like you doesn’t get power, or money. None of this situation makes sense. In fact, the only part of it that makes sense is that when I wanted in, wanted a nice piece of the action, you were stupid enough to say no. Nobody says no to me, and only you’d be stupid enough to try. So let’s try again. What’s your backing?”
Bernard flounders for a bit. “Honestly, it’s just me. I’ve been doing what I’ve always done – working behind the scenes. It’s just lately that I’ve gotten shoved into being the face of it all; I don’t even want it. I just want a nice quiet place to hide, and enough money to live my life.”
“Oh yeah? Running things behind the scenes, huh? Why doesn’t that surprise me?” Richard crouches down and looks at Bernard, whose eye was filling with enough blood that it was hard to see.
“I bet you don’t even know, do you? After you screwed them over, you know Jez and Ben came to work for me? Oh…I know every horrible thing you ever said about me. And I don’t care – because I’ve got power. When you’ve got power, that’s all that matters. Your stupid little puppet games always backfire on you.”
Richard continued, “Well guess what? Every person you cross ends up worse for it. Nobody wins when they play your game. Me? I make people rich, I make people powerful, and the best part is, they’re all disposable. Even your little girlfriend from back in the day; you might be interested to know she recently had an unfortunate accident.”
Richard sneered again, clearly hoping for the news to cause a visible, painful reaction in Bernard. But Bernard shook his head. “Why would that matter to me? All of you – everyone I knew – all made it clear you wanted nothing to do with me. And then I was gone, and that was that. Nobody’s spoken to me since that day in court when I was exiled. Ben and Jez, yeah, I get that. But you and I could have been partners, at one point. If this is how you treat your partners, though, I’m glad you hated me, whatever the reason.”
Richard laughed a dark, brooding laugh. “Whatever the reason? You…clown. What possible reason could I have to hate you? Oh, other than you ruining our lives. That’s the one thing you’ve always been a genius at. Probably the only thing.”
Bernard stared back in silence, not reacting.
“You know, I’m almost willing to believe you don’t remember. Let me refresh your memory a little bit, dear brother. A picture that you showed off at school? A drawing of the neat secret room filled with treasures, that you found after our fool of a father took you with him to retrieve some of his stolen goods? Somehow your idiotic six-year-old brain decided the greatest idea in the whole world was to tell everyone you could about your father’s stash! Big shock that it got investigated, and he had to go into hiding, huh?”
Bernard honestly had absolutely no memory of the drawing, or the incident that Richard was referencing. However, he had to admit that it was very possible he had done something like that; he had loved to draw, and his father had been his hero. Wouldn’t he have wanted to talk about his dad’s cool secret base?
“And that was the beginning of the end. Eventually, our mother had to solve the problem or we would have been completely destitute. It should have been you she took out, not him. You were the one that ruined everything; he was just trying to make a living.”
With that, Richard smacked him again. “If it weren’t for you, we could have been a normal family. We could have gotten out of the slums and been something. But no. You know what? You know even your own mother couldn’t wait to be rid of you? The minute she got her hands on your money, she took off. I never saw her again; can’t say I looked, though.”
Bernard hoped he could form enough of a connection to stop the beatings, and smiled weakly, though his jaw was aching. “Can’t say I’m surprised there. Money was all she ever wanted; but she never did lie to us about that.”
Richard nodded, his eyes filled more with reflection than hate for a moment. “I won’t say she did right by us, but she did understand how the world works. And so do I – might makes right, and the guy with the money has the power. Now, enough distractions. I’m going to hear about the power, and the money, that have been keeping you going, or you’re going to die. Slowly, and painfully. Start. Talking.”
There wasn’t going to be enough time, Bernard realized, to come up with a very convincing story, but he also couldn’t see himself giving Richard his true, full life story. Bernard shrugged in the exaggerated gesture of a completely-defeated man, and sighed. “I can explain. You probably know by now – at least if you ever cared to look into it – that my ‘exile’ was in name only. I was actually sold to a slave trader. “
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Richard didn’t give a visible reaction, but Bernard was relatively certain that he did know that part of the story. Good, he could keep building off of it. “I won’t bore you with the parts that don’t matter, but eventually, I was sent off to a diamond mine. They worked us like dogs there, and needed a constant supply because the death rate was so high. I got injured. Immediately the stopped feeding me; I wasn’t going to live more than another few days, especially as weak as I already was.”
Bernard continued, improvising his tale as he went and hoping for the best. “I decided my only hope of survival was to escape, which was almost impossible. However, once they had marked someone for death, they didn’t watch us as closely. I managed to get away, making off with a huge amount of diamonds when I went. I used that to set up a new life.
“That’s what I’ve been working with; I’ve been financing everything myself, letting people think that there is some sort of ‘greater than the sum of our parts’ thing going on so that they don’t question anything. But I had to have a way to turn the jewels into cash, and a way to get that cash into my pocket, without being traced. So I’ve been filtering it through municipal operations.
“It’s also the answer to your power question. There is no power. It’s a house of cards. But when I finish selling off the rest of the diamonds, I’m gone again. It isn’t even that they can’t run this so-called Lenoran Union without me – it’s that the whole thing is fake. A scam. I couldn’t have your people taking a cut because they’d start asking questions about the books, the goods, the services, and it’s all fake. It’s just me, moving money around, trying to get free.”
Bernard raised his head slightly to make eye contact as he finished his tale. “There’s a little left – not a ton, most of it got liquidated by now. But the problem is that the grift got too big. I should have stayed a big fish in a small pond, but I got greedy, trying to move the money too quickly, so I needed more people, more opportunities. The result was that we started getting attention from the outside world, which is, I suppose, where you come in.”
It was a good story, especially considering it was made up on the spot and Bernard was certain that he had a concussion. It even fit the basic facts and explained much of his behavior. He was a little bit proud, honestly. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem like Richard was buying it.
“Is that right?” Richard said. “If that’s the case, why come back here? You could have gone anywhere, why return to the country you were exiled from? Or stay, for that matter? And if you’ve been living off of a cache of diamonds, where are they? Should be pretty easy to show me, huh?”
Well, Richard had a point there. Maybe the story wasn’t as genius as Bernard was crediting himself. At that moment, both men swung their head at a noise – it was the sound of a key in the office door lock. The lock opened, the door knob turned, and Peter appeared.
It took only a second for Peter to see what was going on and to try to back out in a hurry, but before he could make his escape, Richard was on him. Within a minute, Peter was restrained as well, and Richard had an additional target for his interrogation.
“I know who you are, rat. The mouthpiece of this little shell game. We’re just having a friendly little chat here – let’s see if your story matches the one your boss just told me.”
Peter exchanged a quick glance with Bernard, and Bernard interrupted. “He doesn’t actually know anything about it. He’s a guy I picked up along the way; he’s paid well to keep people from asking questions, but that’s it.”
Richard raised an eyebrow “You, protecting someone? How uncharacteristic. Makes me wonder about the relationship between you two. I don’t need both of you for this. Maybe I’ll just kill one of you, see if the other can get me what I want.”
Peter spoke up quickly, “What you want is money, right? I can do that. There’s money…money that’s been put away so we can move on. And quite a bit of it. I can show you where it is. Just let us go.”
Obviously Peter was discussing his own private stash here; Bernard had been virtually certain that he had one, but didn’t know much more than that. It was a fine time for Peter to be coming clean, he supposed; but at least his description of saved cash lined up close enough to what Bernard had said that even without an exact match, it might have saved their lives.
Peter understood that it was unlikely that he’d live through this encounter if he didn’t give the crime lord in front of him exactly what he wanted. Even still, it didn’t seem like it would be enough, looking at Richard shaking his head at the two men tied to the leg of the dockmaster’s private desk.
“Let’s say I believe that you might have that cash. This is what’s going to happen. You’re going to give me exact directions – and I mean exact. Then I’m going to go find that money, and you’re going to sit right here. If you lied to me, at all…if I can’t walk straight up to it and get it with the directions you give me…you’re not going to like what comes next. I’ll kill you both, slowly, and let you watch each other die. “
Richard stood up and put his hand on the doorknob. “If you didn’t lie to me, and the money’s really there, I’ll be on my way. I’m sure someone will come along and free you eventually. Should that all work out for you, I would advise you to leave Juldania very quickly, and make it permanent this time.”
Certainly, the men didn’t have any negotiating power here, and Bernard was essentially out of the discussion. He felt that all was lost, for a third and (very likely) final time. Lost in his own thoughts, he barely heard as Peter pleadingly gave oddly specific directions to a nearby island out past the bay.
When Richard was satisfied that he remembered the directions, he announced that he would take Bernard’s boat and head directly there. Peter made a half-hearted attempt to warn Richard that it had gotten windy out, and that the waves might be a big too large for the small craft. All he got in thanks was another smack upside the head, as Richard accused him of stalling for time. Then Richard departed, and the two men were alone.
Bernard looked at Peter suspiciously. “What are you doing here, Peter? And what exactly was the plan with those instructions to an island out in the bay? Is it true, or is Richard just going to come back and kill us when he finds out you lied to him?”
“Me? I wasn't the only one speaking half-truths to the deranged crime lord, was I? As for why I was here…look, Bernard. You know the answer. I really do have money stashed on that island. I don’t want to die, and we can make it up, right? Better than having that lunatic kill me; then I’d have no money and no life. No thanks.”
Bernard wasn’t buying it. Oh, he believed that Peter had money stashed away on the island, and that he had given Richard directions to it. But was that really why he was at the docks? And Peter lived for money; it seemed very out of character for him to offer it up so freely.
Sure, it meant getting to live another day, but Bernard knew that there would be a price to pay. Knowing Peter, it would probably mean that when (or rather, if) they did get free, Peter would “repay” himself by taking everything he could from the Lenoran Union and running. Of course, if they didn’t figure a way out of this jam, it wouldn’t matter.
“Sure, Peter, but let’s be honest here. Even if he finds the money, nothing would stop Richard from coming back to kill us anyway. No witnesses, and it would give him an easy path to taking over everything we’ve built. I can’t imagine he’s going to let us live. It was a good attempt, though.”
At that moment, a strange sound echoed through the room; it had come from outside, but it sounded almost like an explosion. Peter gave a wide smile, and shook his head. “Good riddance.”