Dragonfly by Jax Hill 

While we were sitting there at De Caf Bar, pretending to drink our java, Maggie trying not to start crying again, a man we didn’t know approached our table. Had Torstein been with us, he would have jumped up and taken the man by the hand, offered him a seat at the table, asked him what troubled him. He did look troubled: his face was pale, his eyes red-rimmed, his hair was a bit wild. He looked as if he hadn’t slept in a while. He was dressed nicely in a rather overdone tan sport-coat that verged on mustard color, and the hair that wasn’t falling into his eyes was caught into a ponytail at the back of his head. Not the usual homeless guy who might ask to join us in hope of a hand-out if Torstein were there.

We all just looked up at him as he stood there, and he didn’t speak. He wasn’t — one of us, I guess you could say, we didn’t know him — and yet he stared at us with this kind of intensity that made it seem as if perhaps he knew us, or really badly wanted to. Maggie recovered her manners first, and said, “Won’t you join us?”

It was a thin greeting compared with the one he might have gotten from Torstein, but we were all so dazed, I think, we didn’t mind about that.

The man sat down, set his cup of coffee on the table, looked at it for a few seconds, glanced around the table at us, and finally said:

“Who was he?”

“Who was who?” Bruiser asked.

“The green coat,” he choked out. “Who was he?”

“Torstein,” Maggie said. “His name was Torstein.”

“But, who was he?” the man asked again.

“A friend of ours,” I said. “Did you know him?”

“I was there,” he said quietly.

“You were ... where?” Bruiser asked.

“There. I was there when they killed him.”

I think I flinched. Bruiser’s face blanched. Maggie’s face had already been milky, so no more blood could drain out of it. And yet, there was a reaction. The bright intensity of her blue-eyed gaze seemed to lock on the face of this man. Why would he come here and tell us this? Now that we were wholly caught up in staring at him, it was easy to imagine who he was, one of Nikolai’s lieutenants, maybe — that explained the loud coat, the curly ponytail, his overall appearance of being ex-gun-runner euro trash. But it didn’t explain why he would have stayed up all night in apparent anxiety and sought us out this morning.

“What do you mean?” Maggie said. “How could you have been there?”

“My job,” he said. “It’s my job. I was in charge.”

“Do you mean to say you killed him?” Bruiser said, and I could see his knuckles as white as his face as he gripped the edge of the table. Maggie’s small hand reached across and covered the back of his.

“No, I didn’t do it, not personally,” the man said. “But my guys did.”

I thought he would begin to tell us that it was his job, that if he hadn’t, someone else would have, that working for a mobster you had to follow orders or die. But he didn’t. He just sat there, staring at his coffee cup.

“So what do you want?” Bruiser said. It amazed me that he and I were still sitting here with this guy and not knocking the top of his freaking head off. Maybe if Pete had been there ... but then it occurred to me, what had happened to Ferdy, as much as we might think he deserved it, had hurt Bruiser the same way it had me. We felt like, no matter what Ferdy had done, he had still been one of us, and he’d deserved better from us. We hadn’t been able to give him what he needed, and he’d killed himself. I think we both felt that was enough blood on our hands. So we waited for this man to tell us what his problem was.

“Nikolai wanted it to be bad, to be a message, like the thing with the Dunker. He doesn’t want people making trouble for him. He wanted you all to know ...”

“You can skip that part,” Maggie said. “Just tell us why you’re here.”

“He knew he was going to die, and he knew it was going to be brutal,” the man said. “And he didn’t say anything, and he didn’t do anything. He didn’t fight us. He reached into his jacket, at one point, and my guys drew down on him — we thought he was going for a gun, you know. But he pulled out a bag of sunflower seeds. He offered the guys some sunflower seeds.”

I could see it all as he described it. I knew he was telling the truth.

“The guys, they thought this was hysterical, and they were laughing about it, like what kind of an idiot offers a snack to the people that are about to murder him? These guys that do this kind of work, they’re not the most intelligent people in the world, and they don’t live in a very emotionally healthy place.”

This caused me to stare again at the man. What kind of talk was that for a mobster, a thug? He looked fit, and he wasn’t a small man in stature, but he didn’t look like hired muscle, not brawny like our Bruiser. Maybe that’s how he got to be in the position he was in — not a trigger guy, but a captain, say. Because of his brains. I still had my doubts about his emotional health, though.

If there’d been a choice, I would have preferred not to hear his story. But I couldn’t turn away from it.

“It didn’t strike me as an idiot trying to buy off his antagonists with sunflower seeds,” he went on, still staring at his hands around the cup. “It struck me, the way he did it, the look on his face, the confidence in his eyes ... It struck me like someone with some trick up his sleeve, some vital bit of knowledge that we didn’t have. His eyes locked onto mine, and he said, ‘Mateo, have some sunflower seeds’.”

He stopped again, and finally looked up from his coffee cup to look each one of us in the eyes. We waited ... I don’t think we thought there would ever be an end to waiting now. Torstein was gone. And we were all just waiting now. But this guy, Mateo was his name, he seemed to be waiting for us, too — waiting for us to fill in the blanks and understand what he was trying to tell us. But so far he had only revealed what we might have imagined: Torstein had offered some strangers sunflower seeds.

Mateo’s eyebrows wrinkled, his whole forehead wrinkled, and his face seemed to question us, to beg us to make some response, to explain something. Finally Maggie said, “Did you take some?”

“Yes!” He huffed his reply out in a sort of quiet exclamation. “I did.”

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