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“Your dad was a really considerate guy,” Felinus said, frowning as he wondered if Lukas would have liked Felinus and the others speaking Italian around his son. “Did someone tell you about what happened?”
Issac shook his head very slowly. “I was there.”
Felinus went cold but Issac continued to talk.
“I had been about halfway through my lunch. Dad was telling me a story though I can’t remember what it was about. I do remember that he suddenly stopped talking mid-sentence and looked around. The next thing I knew, he had grabbed me and shouted something to the effect of ‘get down’ and it was like the world exploded around us.” He shuddered. “I’d never heard a real gunshot before that. I’d seen guns of course, and I knew how to tell when someone was carrying one, but Dad wouldn’t let me touch one or be around the Clovers when they went shooting. Dad didn’t carry a gun. It was so much louder than it was on TV or in the movies. People were screaming. I-I could hear the bullets hitting the concrete wall we had been sitting on that Dad had pulled us down behind.” He swallowed. “Then I heard tires screech and the shooting stopped but the screaming didn’t. It kept going. Dad told me to close my eyes. To not look as he held onto me and carried me away.”
Please don’t look, Felinus found himself silently begging a memory.
“I looked. I saw little kids shaking their parents. I saw parents holding their babies.” He pressed his face towards Felinus’s neck, and it was wet. “They got the man who owned the sausage cart. He had only been five feet away from us when Dad had shouted and was lying on the ground in a pool of blood.” He shuddered again. “Dad carried me to the pub. He sat me in the corner booth that I would do my homework in and told me he’d be right back. He told one of the younger Clovers to sit with me and the guy brought over my crayons and markers and drew with me for the rest of the day until Mum came. She came into the pub- she never did that- and just held me and cried. I didn’t go to school for the rest of the week.”
“Did they ever talk to you about what happened?” Felinus asked softly, not sure how one would even approach that subject with an eight-year-old.
“I think they tried,” he said hesitantly. “I think I remember people asking me how I was or what I was doing a lot more often after that than they did before but… I don’t know. No one really talked about what happened even though they were all obviously affected by it. Dad spent more nights away after that, sometimes not coming home in time to take me to school. He always took me to school before that and our lunches were fewer and farther between but he was always there at the end of the day, sometimes so tired he’d go to sleep in the booth as soon as we got to the pub. I never knew why until today. Fergus told me that Dad came to him the day of the shooting and told him to use the German Reaper to make sure I didn’t ever have to hold my son the way he had to hold me that day. Fergus said that was when the legends about Dad really started.”
Felinus nodded slowly, thinking the timeline sounded about right for when he started overhearing whispers of the name from the older men.
Issac went quiet for a while. “Let’s watch a movie.”
“Okay, baby boy,” Felinus said softly, pushing the photos back inside the envelope carefully to avoid jostling Issac, adding the business card with a clover on it, and picking up the remote. “How about science fiction?”
Issac just nodded and stayed quiet as Felinus searched for something. “Do you like being the Cat, Felinus?”
A frown pulled on Felinus’s lips. “The name or the job?”
There was a pause. “Both, I guess,” he said uncertainly.
He looked down at Issac, finding him staring forward in the middle distance. “I chose to do this job,” he said. “The first job I did under the Cat was when I was still technically a soldier. There was a rat that had been stealing from the entire Family. They knew who it was, but no one wanted to move on him because they didn’t know how he was doing it and there was some anxiety about being wrong. I had had enough of waiting around while the bastard stole from us and went around my Capo to Nikola, who I knew well enough from growing up that he’d listen to me. He wasn’t particularly moved by my arguments and told me to go home. But I got a call from him later that night. The Don would allow me to act, but with the understanding that if I could not find proof that the Capo was truly responsible I and anyone who helped me would be punished as any other soldier who harmed a Capo.”
He laughed softly. “I agreed, of course. Then I tried to keep everyone else out of it. It didn’t work. Brutus and Zeno eventually figured out what I was trying to do and forced their way into helping me. That was how we found out about Seong. The Capo was his uncle and was using his knowledge and a particular set of skills he had gotten from a bad situation he had been in as a teenager to steal from the Family. I broke into the shitty little apartment he had hidden Seong in and waited. I hadn’t seen him yet and I didn’t expect the skinny eighteen-year-old kid to walk in the door. He agreed to give me the proof I needed to nail his uncle to the cross. The bastard had been more or less blackmailing Seong after ignoring him his entire life until he wanted to use him, so there was no love lost. I took the information to Nikola, who brought me to the Don and the Don named me Gatto as he gave his blessing on the death sentence.”
He paused, thinking back to the moment he put Seong’s uncle on his knees in the woods next to a shovel and a freshly dug grave while Brutus and Zeno stood by. The man had begged and lied to try to convince him that it was all Seong’s doing, then cursed and raged until Felinus got tired of hearing his voice and pulled the trigger. He wondered if there was anything left of the body except bones in that grave. It had been five years. “I like my role inside the Family,” he said softly. “I protect it from people who would hurt it, and I’ve picked people to aid me to do it as efficiently and effectively as possible. It has recently been pointed out to me that my role is unique, something that the Family has that the other Rings do not. Someone like Finnegan wouldn’t go unnoticed in the Family because his behaviors are something that Snake actively searches for to prevent them from getting a foothold. We know what to look for.”
Issac nodded slowly. “That one, I think,” he said, reaching for the remote and pressing the select. “I’ve seen it before but it’s been years.”
“Good choice,” Felinus said, pressing his lips against Issac’s temple again and leaning them back gently. He wondered about the question. It was somehow connected to Lukas, he knew that, but he couldn’t quite place how. He thought about the pictures of Lukas he had seen so far, a happy family man so obviously in love with his wife; about what Issac said about Lukas taking him to and picking him up from school; about the German-only lunches painting the picture of a devoted father who wanted his son to grow up well. None of it matched the stories he had been told about the German Reaper, a man who left nothing to identify himself, no witnesses. More than that, though, he thought about Issac’s statement that Lukas had wanted his son to have a life where he would never have to hold his own son behind a wall while someone murdered a park full of children and mothers. Would Lukas Maus be happy with his son being close to someone like him? Would Sarah Maus? Would they approve of Felinus and his relationship with their son?
He supposed he’d never know as he watched the movie laying with Issac on the bed even after he fell asleep and snuggled into Felinus’s chest.
