Love's Inferno

Chapter 22 - Gangsters are Ghosts

Dante

The best kinds of businessmen are ghosts, they're the kinds of people whose names never fade in history books because they were never transcribed in the first place. The best kinds of people in my line of work are those who don't exist in the collective consciousness- their likeness never conjured in film, barely made note of by journalists. I had managed it perfectly well, a pseudo-life, split equally down the middle. One-half accounted for the work that could have me mentioned in magazines, purposefully distancing me from the real work; the other half best done in silence. I had mastered hiding. I was well-versed in the art of escaping view without having to move - diversion. I had mastered being impassive and noncommittal and all it took was one fearsome woman to unravel it all. One woman to call me away from my best practices. One woman to make me lose control; the one thing I pride myself on having at all times. 

Except today. 

I lost it... Completely. I lost it when I phoned the Frangelli twins and heard the audio; a gruff British woman without any of the sweetness or politeness I knew Shiloh to have. I lost it at the thought that my unwillingness to tell her no, to conceive of a better idea, had ushered her into the seat of danger. I lost it at the reality that she had discovered a new ABM cell, one I had never heard of - one in which I couldn't ensure her safety. Lost it when I noticed she'd left her phone in the other cupholder. Lost it when I thought I may never see her smile again, may never be heated by the taste of her lips or the sound of her insults. I lost it to relief when I saw her outside - one of the scouts having matched a description of her blocks away from where she was supposed to be. Lost it again when I saw her smiling, calmly, next to a man that I'd just received a report of being more dangerous than Silvio. I lost it... control of everything. For the first time in years I was made acutely aware of the fact that my power has limitations. That the limit looks like a 5'3 woman who smiles at gangsters and calls them friends after forty minutes. The limit looks like the fact that I don't know how to control my emotions because I typically don't experience very many. 

I negotiated in information. I was an indispensable power broker because I'd engineered it that way, secured it through my indifference (often turned apathy). It's why I'm good at what I do. It's why I can do it seamlessly and that's what sent me sprawling over the edge - the contrast. In contrast it's the fact that Shiloh has her own ways of information gathering - no matter how dangerous. She was headstrong, unyielding and unbelievably seductive in her ability to make something dangerous seem mundane... she was just like me. For the first time in my life, I could see myself reflected back to me in someone else and I was terrified. I was completely apoplectic in response to a mirror...a more glorious half reflecting the nature of my work back to me and doing it just as well. No better. She was, in every way, better than me. Once again she had put me, and Vitto, first which meant out of the way. She wasn't looking to me for guidance, in the way I was accustomed to, she didn't need my opinion or my approval...she was in every way my equal and that reality threw me off balance. 

With less resources, security and physical strength she was, and would always be, infinitely smarter than me... and that fact cut me wide open, tore through my belly. What use would I ever be to her, if I couldn't help her? What kind of husband would I make if I couldn't even follow her simple instructions? What kind of man was I if I was always overrun by emotions? And how did she make having them, emotions, look so easy. She wasn't unaware of the danger she was walking into... she wasn't faking bravery or pretending in any way but she was doing what she thought was right. The only thing she couldn't have anticipated was how insane it would make me to be without her... and now I was. 

She is, at all times, a blossoming multitude of beings and I find myself a poor traveller, unrefined in how to traverse all the planets that constitute her glorious galaxy. On one planet she's a chef, another a nurse for the elderly, another a DIY gardener turned homemaker extraordinaire, another a knife-throwing self-defence master and now... on this one - completely invisible. A true ghost. A superior phantom.  And because of my own fear, my own mystifying terror, my newfound insecurity- I don't know how to begin to conjure her. I don't know how to begin to call her back to me.