Because after thinking about it, Mason grunted, “It was lousy—I drank an old, dead man’s bones.”
Mason of course, was referring to how the tribal elder Johnnie Yanomami had gotten him to engage in a form of endocannibalism—the eating of the dead, by drinking up a bowl of stew with the ground up bones of his ancestors. From her limited perspective however, Clara could only begin to imagine what her father might have been talking about.
Clara sputtered, “You did what?
Mason laughed, and as if dismissing the whole thing outright, told her “Ah—what can I say? It happens.
Mason wrapping up the call, then told her in a halfway sarcastic voice, “Anyway—just make me proud kid. You’ve got a whole summer session to do so—so don’t let me down.”
Clara responded, “I’ll try.”
Clara then ended the conversation, “Well I gotta go dad. Call me later.”
Mason told her, “I will”
Clara shot back, “Bye”.
Mason responded, “Bye”.
As he gazed at the empty bottle of vodka in the wastepaper basket, his own words ‘Make me proud’ reverberated through his mind. He couldn’t help but think that perhaps he should be taking his own advice.
11
Luca Looking for His Last Payday
Luca Spinoza had always struggled to find his niche in life. He was a poor student, a lackluster worker, and didn’t really seem to have much direction in life. His friends and family knew him to have had a decided lack of ambition from the very start. Despite his shortcomings, Luca himself would always attest that the best thing that ever happened to him was his marriage to his wife Esmerelda and the birth of their two children.
He loved his family and would do anything for them. This was his one motivating factor to try and do a little bit better in life. But things took a decided nose dive however, when he became addicted to heroin.
It all sounds rather drastic for someone like Luca to suddenly become an addict. But Luca didn’t set out to be a junkie—if it can be said that anyone ever does. It all began when he threw his back out at the local rubber plant he worked at in Milan, Italy. He was severe pain so his doctor prescribed him powerful pain pills to help him during his recovery process.
The pain would eventually go away but Luca’s new addiction did not. Soon he was seeking to feed his fix however he could and when he couldn’t get a prescription, he resorted to procuring heroin from dealers on the street, which he learned was basically just a more powerful version of the pills he had already been popping.
Luca you see, was just one of the countless souls sucked up in the Italian opioid crisis of the late 2020’s. You would think the world would have learned its lesson from what had happened in the United States in the 2010’s but sadly history had repeated itself.
Luca Spinoza had been an out and out addict for the past few years, and completely estranged from his family he was now working on his final act. He knew his time was short, but he had just fallen into a group of guys that promised him some big results if he just cooperated with them.
If he followed through and did what they told him, they would mail a check that amounted to about 15,000 U.S. dollars to his wife and kids. It may not seem like much to some, but for a family that struggled to put food on the table or even keep a roof over the head—it was plenty. And what did Luca have to do to get this payout?
He just had to strap vials of a deadly biological virus—Ebola no less—across his chest, interspersed with powerful plastic explosives. This deadly payload he was going to carry right up to the very steps of the Vatican. His handlers were a fringe breakaway group from the Catholic Church whose motto was “With Blood we Cleanse”—and they wanted to cleanse the very seat of power where the Pope reigned supreme.
As dedicated as his deranged task masters were however, they couldn’t risk blowing their cover by giving Luca a ride, so he was forced to hail a cab instead. His cabbie was a friendly old guy, and as soon as he got in the backseat, he introduced himself, “Welcome aboard brother! My name’s Alonzo—where are ya headed!”
Luca hopped in the backseat and shutting the door informed him, “To Vatican square please.”
Alonzo smiled, “Vatican square—sure, sure. That can be arranged Mr.—?”
Luca hesitated for a moment, but figuring he would be dead in a few minutes, he decided it didn’t really matter. And as such he openly informed him, “Luca… Luca Spinoza.”
Luca was always a nobody, but somewhere deep in the recesses of his drug addled mind he thought to himself, ‘Pretty soon the whole world’s going to know my name.’
The cabbie Alonzo broke up his dark thoughts by asking him, “So what are you planning on doing at Vatican Square son?”
Luca caught off guard by the question stuttered, “Wha—what?”
Alonzo a quick read of character looked at Luca in the rearview mirror and frowned. He knew that something wasn’t quite right with this kid. He asked him again, “I’m taking you to Vatican Square—what are you going to do when you get there?”
Luca in the midst of the symptoms of a terrible withdrawal, was either unable or unwilling to play his cards very carefully, and ended up showing his whole hand as he snapped, “What does it matter?”
The cabbie was used to dealing with some irate customers, but there was something about Luca that seemed positively unhinged. Glancing at Luca in the rearview mirror he saw that the man’s hands were shaking in his lap, and he seemed to
