1988. New York. The Inferno
Irene stood there in her wedding dress, a meringue number with massive shoulders that bubbled up in tulle, polyester and big white bakery swirls. She’d been promised simplicity. It was meant to be a quick job. A small fire, and they’d run away on the insurance money.
It was an ugly painting anyway, cubic and bland. An ugly representation of the kind of luxuries that only certain people can get. The red and blue squares didn’t showcase any emotion, and yet they had a fabulous skill for getting under people’s skin. Irene didn’t buy the argument that debating whether something was art made it inherently interesting. It didn’t. It was lazy, no amount of framing urinals or plain blue canvases was ever worth the cost of a million dollars.
It would sting far later, when the painting would be worth almost 4 million dollars in modern money. She’d seen the things people would do for that amount of money.
She struck the match against the stone of the open rooftop, watching the flame dance at the tip of the match. All she had to do was to set fire to the painting. It wouldn’t do any harm anyway, the world was better with that money in circulation, in the hands of real people. Politicians of the 80s had gone on and on about the trickle down economics of money, she was just giving the fountain a little push.
She placed the match against the canvas and watched it take to the flammable oil paints in seconds. It blazed in a satisfying controlled fire that seemed to cook everything. The smell of strong, sickly chemicals hitting her nostrils and blindsiding her. She coughed horsely, the smoke getting into her lungs.
The wind started whisking up the embers into the air in a dazzling way. Maybe fire was the original art? It certainly was more interesting than the framed crime against real talent. The reality was that Irene wasn’t mad at Mr Newman for his painting, she was mad at being outdone. He’d succeeded in art fraud in a way her and Lily could only dream of.
She didn’t notice the flame catching her veil as she went back inside. The fire catching the wooden doorway and the chemical wallpaper. The polyester fabrics went up in a royal blaze, and Irene didn’t look back until it was too late. She felt the heat lick the back of her arm, and by the time she realized what had happened, the small, controllable blaze had now become an entire wall.
She ran, snatching off her veil and removing her heels so she could get out of the blaze. She ran through the galleries, hitting the fire alarm as she went. Screaming bloody murder at anyone who’d listen in the empty building. Her lungs stinging with the paint smoke as she yelled. Her dress was becoming thinner and thinner as she kept tearing off melted polyester and impractical skirting, until nothing was left but a miniskirt and a corset.
People were running from the building, it was only two floors. There was hammering on the doors as each masterpiece began to catch fire, and the wooden display frames fueled the blaze. As she ran down the spiral staircase she saw the red door. Lily’s office. All three locks sealed. A Cher album was playing from that room, enough to muffle the desperate hammering from the door.
She couldn’t do anything but leave, her dress now blackened with smoke and her mascara running across her once perfectly made up face. She escaped the building and rested her head against a concrete wall, her voice catching as she imagined the red door going up in flames.
A corpse would be found in the building 12 hours later. It would be on the news. The heaters would overheat and the boilers would pop, frying the building to a blackened wreckage. A striking woman, in a ridiculous outfit and burn marks against her once delicate legs.
Irene never forgave herself for that night. What was meant to be her viking funeral for the misdeeds she’d committed in her former life, and a way to set the world to right, had become a life ruining moment. She’d need to pick up the pieces.
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She saw Ken there, breathing in the darkened air with a look of absolute confusion on his perfectly framed face. His blonde hair dirtied by smoke. Irene stood up and stared at him, a rage misdirected. “YOU TOLD ME THE BUILDING WAS EMPTY!” she scolded him. “YOU SAID IT WOULD BE CONTROLLED!”
He backed off, not saying a single word as she hammered a fist against his chest like she was taking her aggression out on a wall. “you said there wasn’t a class booked tonight, that it was the perfect crime” she gulped.
This would be the last night she’d spend in New York for a very long time. She’d run to Alaska, or New Zealand, or … or. She couldn’t think of a life. She couldn’t think of a life better than this one, or anything worse. Her senses were nothing but bonfire and shock.
***
Present day Irene buckled a spare pair of cowboy boots, and purchased a set of toiletries from one of those vending machines that hotels have, feeling great appreciation for the invention. She’d never been good at uprooting, which was ironic given the practice she’d been given.
She hotwired a car and drove back to the bunker, wanting to see the mess. The boys sat there among a pile of ash, with a disconcertingly familiar smell in the air. She saw her husband, bruised and draped across the sand in a pose she’d remembered from long ago. He was breathing, but he was tired.
“I think we should send a warning of our own” she said, car battery jumper cable in hand. If she could get the bunker generator back up after it was shot, she could work out where they’d come from.
She then turned to the men in her life, “and after this, I’m retiring.”
***
They crashed into the diner, ate their body weight in pancakes and sickly sweet syrups. Heavy carbohydrate loaded foods, and simply went home in the van.
Irene sat there with heavy documents, she didn’t speak for hours. She just sat with her coffee, her luxurious dresses traded in for a hoodie and a set of leggings, she didn’t even do her hair. She just sat there sorting through her data and her paperwork. Replaying the black box of interview recordings privately, hearing everyone’s perspectives in the privacy of her own armchair.
The three of them stayed home for a few weeks, nipping out for fresh air but generally keeping a low profile. No more big parties, no more big deliveries, no more drug runs. The kind of quiet in the house that you could hear a pin drop in. The open plan turning a wide range of space into an inescapable lack of privacy. Irene found herself becoming almost compulsive with the tapes, looping the interviews over and over again to form her own private world among her headphones.
She tried to distract herself, scouring the internet for a trace of where those assassins came from. She took the data she needed, the location, the google drive passwords, the eclectic history of the bunker and its inhabitable over the years, and searched.
People always got the idea of the “dark web” wrong, they imagine it as a set of specific, twisted websites, when in reality its more like google. If you search for puppies, you’ll still get imagines of adorable puppies, you just need to know what to look for.
She started with the names of the weapons, the makes, the models. There was always a paper trail for these things. She found the IP address for the customers, and triangulated that with places where a hitman was recently hired. These people were usually glorified freelancers, and before you knew it the website pinged up on the database. Shamelessly exaggerated letters in reds and greens, the kind of website a video game from the 2000s would have had.
She tapped into a data breach that Trevor, the golden vampire, had traded her during a game of cards years ago. Three clicks and a memory stick would be all it would take to peel away all the records of the users, most of them weren’t even smart enough to apply a VPN. She looked at the track records and followed them back to a bitcoin server.
Hang on. Nonononono.
There it was. Clear as day, a bank account owned by Fisher Galleries. She should tell the boys.
She didn’t. She felt the thoughts ping pong across her brain as she viewed the files online. But she couldn’t involve them, if this was personal, she was the person … not Ted. She buckled up her boots and planned a weekend away, claiming it was a holiday.
She had to put to bed this old vendetta if she could. She couldn’t not.
She purchased a plane ticket to New York and stole an antique motorbike from the vehicle storage unit they shared. A cherry Red Honda that purred with a European engine. A motorbike from all those years ago, it wasn’t flash