Destino

Destino

by Marco M. Pardi

Untold Stories of Tonio

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A cool Autumn wind blew leaves among the sparsely occupied tables at the outdoor cafe. Two blocks from the university, it was across the street from the tavern most favored by students, and the pretenders always found hanging on. Though he rejected picking favorites, Tonio liked this time of year best. Gaia was slowly closing her robes, beckoning her family to come within. It was also hunting season, when buffoons in their costumes hoped their guns would bolster their fading masculinity. Tonio hated hunting; but for him hunting season was year round. Knowing the character of his prey, he waited to see him arrive and mingle among the gathering evening crowd across the street.

His server, a fairly attractive girl who looked more like she belonged at the tavern, had apparently assumed, from the labeled notebook atop his table, that he was open to conversation. She introduced herself as the daughter of the proprietor and that she had a street view apartment above the cafe. All in textbook English. Red flag. But then, in a university town, maybe not.

Alone for the moment, he entertained his discomfort with certain aspects of his specialty: Problem solver? Fixer? Tourist? As the server attended another table he thought about the times he had used people for purposes they never knew and probably would not have agreed to. Had any of them come to grief? Well, yes, but he told himself it was not his intention. In the cards, so to speak.

But what about those people he didn’t select, but came anyway? Those people who seemed to appear and disappear, seemingly without consequence but later proving to have been pivotal to the unfolding of what appeared to be a plan far too complex for his own making. Maybe he was guilty of ego-centrism, seeing things only from his perspective and not realizing he had played a part, the importance of which he would never know, in the unfolding of their plan. How many times had he himself been a tiny wheel within a wheel within a wheel inside the kinetic unfolding of someone else’s life? And how many people were even aware there was a plan, if there was one? Are we all just sub atomic particles/waves blinking in and out of existence in a cosmic chaos? Is it possible to throw a cork into a bubbling creek and mathematically predict and chart every bob and sink and twist? For Tonio the word “random” was just a cheap cop-out, a way of pedantically saying, “I dunno”. The school of strict Determinism would say, Yes, we can predict and chart the cork, given enough information. This, of course, is anathema to at least two camps: The religious folks are determined (pun intended) to cast us as completely free in our choices, thus leaving us open to the charge of sin and guilt, for which we can pay the church to absolve us; and, the people who see Humankind as separate from and superior to all the rest of Nature and who seek to uphold free will as a hallmark of evolution, proof we have risen above savage beasts and dumb animals ruled by instinct alone. Many geneticists and ethologists would hasten to disagree with that view of non-humans. And many of the religious folks seem to have forgotten or ignored their own literature. For example, Ecclesiastes: To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace. Of course, one question the religious folks never answer is how one reconciles a belief in an omniscient god, knowing everything past, present and future, with a creature such as Man having Free Will.

But Tonio, while aware of subtle details in his surroundings, was judicious about his intake and analysis of information. His occupation channeled him into a pattern of thinking in ultimates; he would either survive or he wouldn’t, his target would either survive or not. Yes, each operation had to be calculated precisely and that principled habit carried over into the mundane passage of daily life. That principle also drove his insistence on not knowing much about the reason(s) he was dispatched to resolve certain problems. He did not want to slip into the morass of second guessing, devising alternatives which might cause him to hesitate. Nor did he want to allow the assignment to become personal, arousing feelings he would have to deal with. Either could be fatal, quickly or in the long run.

Tonio felt he had arrived at that principle in his youth. Very often engaged in fights with boys older and larger than himself he learned awareness of every part of his body, its position, its potential for action in any circumstance. This served him well when, in military unarmed combat training he allowed a much larger mixed martial arts instructor to seize him in a neck grip from behind. In under a minute he gripped the man’s arm, tucked his own legs, threw the instructor over him, and applied a “sleeper hold” to the man’s carotid and jugular, rendering him unconscious. A second instructor, in a panic, attacked him. Helping the second man find rest took an entire minute. The supervisor of that section asked him to stay at the facility as an instructor, but he respectfully declined, citing a desire to go where the real action was. The same scene played out in firearms training as Tonio registered “Above Expert” with every foreign and domestic one-man firearm and turned down an instructor position. Tonio was an angry young man, but did not fully realize it.

Having been to the funerals of several young people Tonio had often heard the trite saying, Taken before his time. He thought that utterly illogical. To him it was a presumption of a preordained time frame, a frame others could read and judge. And who made this frame? He was also disgusted by terminally ill people who bankrupted their families getting prolonged treatments and medicines so they could hang on a few more days or weeks. The consequences of obtaining a short and probably miserable reprieve for oneself could impose serious, even crippling determinants on the family perhaps for more than just the current generation. Housing, nutrition, education curtailed or lost so Pop could suck oxygen and piss himself a while longer.

His mind drifted to motives as he returned his attention to business. Why would someone successfully employed in an agency dedicated to the preservation of peace go rogue and provide catastrophic information and resources to a manifestly hostile power? The acronym inside the agency for such motivation was MICE: Money, Ideology, Compromise, Ego. As Tonio saw it, each of those four concepts was a focal point behind which lay a forest of determinants. Well, the CI (Counter-Intelligence) Division would figure that out.

As the evening darkened and the crowd across the street swelled Tonio spotted his prey, accompanied by a single escort, heading into the tavern. He was glad to see the man was wearing a waist length cardigan. Tonio would circulate among the jostling crowd, a thick fountain pen holding a pneumatic charge and a proven pellet of a lethal substance for which there was no antidote was among the other pens in Tonio’s shirt pocket protector. Milling around the bar, Tonio would bump against the target’s back, zap him high on his buttocks, and melt into the crowd. The pen would go down the first sewer Tonio came to. Death would be certain within 48 hours, possibly 24. By that time Tonio would be somewhere in Scandinavia.

He casually finished his meal and paid his check, along with an extra large tip. As he rose to leave he turned to the server, who was looking pensively at him. “Perhaps I’ll see you later, or certainly tomorrow”, he said. She smiled rather doubtfully and Tonio had a very odd feeling. It felt like sympathy for the girl who, night after night, could only stand, invisibly, as her peers frolicked in clear view. Must have been something in the food, he told himself and turned to leave.