Free Michael Walsh Bundle by Michael Walsh

but from time to time Devlin would find a few unused rubles in the coin cup on his father’s dresser and, once in a while, a tin of caviar in the refrigerator. He liked it when his father went to Russia.
    Now they were talking about Hungary and Syria and Radio Free Europe. The talk grew louder, more agitated. Somebody yelled something about somebody named Sanchez. Finally, his mother asked for quiet, and the conversation fell back into low murmurs. He listened as long as he could until he drifted off to sleep…
    Bang . He was in Rome now. In the airport.
    No, not bang. Crack . That was the sound: crack . The sound of the world splintering.
    It was a sound he had since made his friend over the intervening years, a sound that at once announced the truth—la Bocca della Verita. Once his enemy, no matter that it became the enemy he loved, the enemy he relied upon, the enemy he could not do without. The friend he could never quite trust.
    CRACK .
    His father knew that friend immediately.
    His mother had been in denial—“No,” she was in midsentence—when Dad suddenly shoved her to the ground, knocking her on top of Devlin.
    It wasn’t the first time his father had pushed his mother, not the first time he’d hit her, struck her, really, a hard blow that sent her to the floor, but it may have been the first and only time such a blow had been delivered out of love instead of anger or jealousy. Devlin himself had been on the receiving end of many such blows, but this was the first and only one that saved his life.
    Memories.
    Imagine a string of the loudest cherry bombs you ever heard going off. Imagine the branches of every tree in your neighborhood suddenly and simultaneously stripped from their trunks, as if by some sudden ice storm, and sent crashing to the ground. Really fast.
    But it wasn’t cherry bombs. It wasn’t tree branches. It was automatic gunfire, raking the terminal. The sound of bullets chipping marble and plaster, ricocheting off wood and bone. The flash and thunder of hand grenades.
    Chunks of flesh, pieces of skull. An arm, severed from its body. A head, rolling. Feet without legs. The dismemberment made more gruesome by the nails, shrapnel, lug nuts, washers, and screws embedded in the ordnance. So many ordinary household objects, so much extraordinary damage. The banality of evil, indeed.
    Mother, toppling, catching whatever portion of the ordnance that was meant for him.
    They were lying as flat, flattened, her body over his, shielding him. “Stay down, Mama,” he begged her, but she was a brave woman, defending her young, and so she raised her head, just a little trying to see the source of danger, trying to make a plan of safety, trying to see if there was any escape from this man-made hell on earth, when something caught in the side of her head and that was that.
    It is thankfully not given to many sons to see their mothers die before their eyes, but it was given to Devlin. And at that moment, Devlin learned something extraordinary about himself:
    He didn’t care.
    In retrospect, of course, he did. No boy ever grieved more for this mother than he. But that was later. Not now. Not now, when the bullets and bombs were flying. At that moment—in this moment—Devlin had only one thought:
    Self-preservation. He burrowed beneath her still-warm body, waiting for Death to stop.
    And he had lived with her death, as the organizing moral principle of his life, ever since. It was what animated him, fueled, propelled him. He was alive because she had died, she who had already given him life once before, and if nothing else he owed it to her to live and keep on living, to kill and keep on killing, until the madness that had engulfed his family either was put to rest, or he was.
    The death of his father he witnessed with more equanimity. He had always known his father was a hero, that his father had accomplished great deeds, which he could never hope to match