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A quote: “Old age and treachery will always beat youth and exuberance.” ~~ David Mamet
I’ll start with a story …
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The rest of his face has faded in my memory but not his eyes. From childhood friend to youthful lover, I swam in those eyes so full of passion, intrigue and even danger.
He burned so bright! Too much for just “us”.
I remember turning a corner and there he was. As lithe a young man as the day he left. I remember him touching my hair noting the silver strands it held, leaning close to whisper promises.
Yes, I’ll never forget his eyes and tell myself it was gratitude I saw in them after I drove in the stake.
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Now, it’s your turn.
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. featured image, cropped, Adobe Stock standard license.
Fletch says: Baron Aberjoffey was a weak man – standing: hands in pockets, pencil-thin mustache and bald head gleaming under coiffured wig.
He watched his son dance with the crafter’s daughter. The boy was his opposite in every way: smooth, athletic, devil-may-care. The ladies found him irresistible. He knew that and used them because of it. He dallied, then never visited the children he created.
The boy was growing into… something. Something not good. Something cold. Something calculating. Someone never required to answer for his avarice.
Aberjoffey jostled his shoulders. He must do something about the boy. Why yes, remedy the situation. Definitely take action. Someday… someday he would.
Dupin says: We’d planned this dinner all week.
Blini with caviar, lobster bisque, beef Wellington, roasted wild mushrooms, prosciutto-wrapped asparagus, a chocolate raspberry mousse to die for. Sipped glasses of Petrus Bordeaux 2016.
Then classic jazz. We listened, talked, danced. I felt like I’d known her for years rather than online meetings. She said the same. We left together. Hers or mine?
She slipped. I caught her—stared into her eyes. The last single-malt did her in.
I didn’t know her address, so it was my place. Not the finish we’d just planned, but maybe the morning would make up for it.
Am I a prisoner or an honored guest? Mikhael Yehuda pondered that question as he ate.
It had seemed clear-cut when he’d been dangling by his harness as his ultralight caught on a branch of one of the giant redwoods that hid Sparta Point. The holes in the fabric of the wing were clear evidence the man called Spartan had shot him from the air.
Getting to the ground had netted him an unpleasant interview, staring down the barrel of the heavy auto-pistol that had brought him down. Mikhael knew how to tell a convincing story — Mossad training was thorough — but Spartan had the advantage of a telepath who could see that his factual statements added up to a lie.
Being marched to the old ranger station hadn’t been pleasant. Neither had been getting left sitting in a barren room hardly bigger than a broom closet, presumably while Spartan conferred with his superiors.
The next thing he knew, he was being offered a shower and a clean change of clothes. Thus refreshed, he’d been brought to the dining room, to sit at Spartan‘s right hand, the seat of honor.
The food was decidedly Georgian, which gave credence to the theory that Spartan was indeed Leonid Gruzinsky, the notorious last Marshal of the Soviet Union. Except that would put him in his eighties, while this man looked hardly older than thirty, and much of that was the aging effect of his facial scars.
Unless it’s true that he was part of a secret Soviet anti-agathic experiment. Considering that my own aging pretty much stopped after I finished puberty, and I’m one of Gruzinsky‘s clones who were stolen as embryos in a Mossad operation, it’s possible.
More than once Mikhael had used his youthful appearance to lead opponents to underestimate him. Now he could ponder being on the receiving end of such a stratagem.
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