Invictus
“Ben, come with me. Come with me. You'll regret it if you don't. Fraser, come with me!”
Leaning over the side of the train, Victoria extends her hand. With her eyes locked on his, she sees the exact moment when Fraser decides to make the jump. His boots hit the boarding platform and their hands meet. A fraught thrill passes through Victoria’s body, starting from the spot where his fingers touch hers. In her other hand are diamonds; not the bag Benton had made her drop, but a dozen or so loose stones she scooped up before jumping onto the train.
These diamonds are the keys to their future.
She smiles frantically at Fraser and sees the same knowledge in him. This is the beginning. They can go anywhere in the world after this. With the diamonds in her hand, Victoria sees herself in Europe, with a new name, starting over. She’ll go to university and get the formal education she always longed for. No more ratty books from the high school or prison libraries. She thinks she would like to study English Literature and write her own stories. There are so many stories in the world, and she could write any of them, all of them.
Anything but a story about a bank robbery.
People are always surprised by how much Victoria knows. Not by how smart she is, they’re quick to assure her. Her sensitive features and air of observant stillness tell people that she is smarter than the average bear long before she opens her mouth but, when she does, the words that flow out make people stare. They were particularly a shock to anyone who ever saw her in her old neighbourhood or in her worn, orange prison uniform.
And sure as the given day, people always said: “I can’t believe you’ve read so many books. What the hell are you doing here?”
This was never the compliment they assumed it to be. Comments from the peanut gallery stir more resentment than gratitude in Victoria, each time reminding her of the opportunities that passed her by.
Why are you still here in the gutter with us? You’re so damn smart, why aren’t you rich and famous yet?
You had so much potential. Why did you waste it?
Like a cue in a movie, recollection coincides with the crack of a bullet. Victoria flinches, expecting to be hit, but feels Fraser’s fingers spring open instead. His body is suddenly a hundred and eighty pounds of dead weight, and she has no choice but to let him fall back onto the platform.
She thinks about jumping after him. Heart-sore and confused, Victoria regards the few diamonds clutched in her other hand. The overhead light of the train glitters on the cut facets of the stones, and in each facet she sees a possible future.
If she jumps, Vecchio will arrest her. She’ll go away for the rest of her life, and she’ll probably have to face Fraser’s insufferable pity, his disappointment, from behind the bullet-proof glass of a visitor’s window.
You had so much potential. Why did you waste it?
Slowly, Victoria closes her hand. She ducks into the train car. Most of the seats are full, and she only finds a single chair next to the restroom. She draws her dark coat around her and stares out the window, watching the evening landscape quicken.
Benton Fraser would never understand how a girl like her had become a criminal. If he had come with her, “You had so much potential” would have hung over their union forever. For a man like Fraser, the world is made up of two things: the right thing and the wrong thing, and for Benton, doing the wrong thing is always a choice.
Victoria tilts her head back to stare at the ceiling. She remembers reading The Godfather in prison. She found it to be a good book; a meaningful book; a treatise on how a man who had wanted to be good could, against his own will, turn out bad. Michael Corleone, the idealist, becomes the successor to his father Vito: the kingpin, the Godfather. Sonny Corleone, Michael’s brother, is a caring man who becomes a murderer.
And their father Vito shakes his head and says: A man only has one destiny.
Clutching the diamonds in her hand, Victoria turns her head to watch her reflection in the glass.
A man only has one destiny.
“A man,” she whispers, “Or a woman.”
She pictures Benton Fraser on the platform with a bullet in his back and she swallows hard. She still can’t fathom why a cop is so important to her. She hardly knows the man; they’ve spent a few days together, total, in a span of twelve years, yet the axis of her life has turned around this naive crusader since he was barely more than a boy.
A passionate boy who had held her in the dark. With the storm all around them, she had whispered a poem to him so that he would not fall into the final, terrible sleep.
“Out of the night that covers me, black as the pit from pole to pole.
I thank whatever gods may be for my unconquerable soul.”
Yes, that was the one: a poem she learned before the robbery, a brace to suffer the risk. Yet how fortuitous it had been. The robbery failed, but even as they had planned it, long before the failure—even as she had been learning the poem— Benton had been out there in the world.
In prison, Victoria had pictured Fraser countless times: how before they met he might have been driving a snowmobile, or perhaps a pack of dogs, across the open tundra. Yes, he would take the dogs, she always thought. The old way was more in keeping with what she had known of him and how he saw the world.
And so he had gone about his business, cutting a warm line across the north, as unaware of her as she had been unaware of him. Yet their paths had already been falling together: an inevitable and righteous convergence.
The train rumbles under Victoria, carrying her forward in time. She waits, thinking of Benton falling back on the platform and the sound of a gunshot lingering in the air. If she’s still a free woman tomorrow, there will be newspapers and a report about a downed RCMP officer in Chicago. If she wants to know if he’s dead or alive, she need only look.
But she thinks that she doesn’t want to know.
The thing about Benton is that he’s everything that Victoria might have been if she hadn’t been born in a dead-end Alaska town, to a drunk mother and a gambler father who had never been home, except when he unfortunately was. It’s true that Benton has suffered his share of tragedies, but he comes from a shining lineage. There’s something pure and untouchable about him, as if the sordid side of life is unable to do much more than slide off him. Booze and dice and domestic violence, these things are not part of Benton’s world.
Too bad for him bullets are, and they had not slid off his back.
Victoria opens her hand to stare at the diamonds again, and this time she doesn’t see Europe. If Benton had come with her, he would have been a broken man, his whole identity left behind on the platform. She hates that he escaped her, but at the same time she’s relieved. A good, clean act of vengeance such as he had earned for turning her in was one thing, but watching the weight of the world grow heavier on the shoulders of the cop she impossibly loved… Well, she doesn’t want the responsibility.
Victoria closes her hand. She needs to find a fence for the diamonds. After that, she can change her appearance, finally cut the long hair that she had only kept for Benton. Nurturing her mounds of dark curls had been no easy task in captivity, but she had needed him to recognize her at once, to chase after her like a ghost in the street.
“In the fell clutch of circumstance, I have not winced or cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance, my head is bloody, but unbowed.”
Yes, she still knows the poem, and she still remembers how the constable felt shuddering in her arms, then and now. And he is still a constable after all this time, the lowest officer rank in the RCMP. When she asked him in his Chicago kitchen why he had never been promoted, he looked down at his hands.
“I guess Ray—that’s my friend, Detective Ray Vecchio of the Chicago PD,” he addended primly, “Well, Ray says I don’t know how to play ball with the brass.”
“And is Ray right?” Victoria asked.
“I suppose so.”
There had been a story there, and he told her about the whole thing with little prompting. About the murder and betrayal of his father. The police conspiracy and the way that he had been blacklisted.
Victoria was tactful enough not to mention that he might have been promoted years before that, but never had been.
“I’ll be lucky to make Corporal before I’m fifty,” Fraser said, and shrugged.
He seemed baffled by the course his life had taken, but not bitter about it. He told her that he wasn’t too invested in climbing the ranks, that he loved being a Mountie because his father had been a Mountie, and because being a Mountie meant something more to him than just being a cop. It meant tradition, honour, dedication.
Victoria thinks now that the version of the RCMP that Benton lives in is like something out of Rocky and Bullwinkle. Something just slightly to the right of reality, a scripted role that Benton plays full-time. The 'brass' probably think him a fool.
She looks down at the diamonds in her hand and imagines him again on the platform.
This time alive. This time dead.
What might have happened if he had made it? Would they have played another set of roles, that of a modern-day Bonnie and Clyde? Bonnie Parker had been a poet, after all. Might they have started holding up banks and stores together and just kept going until someone dared get close enough to gun them down?
Would the hand holding the final gun have been Vecchio’s?
He had promised to kill her if she hurt Fraser, and the look in his eye had not been one of an idle threat. Certainly, he’d had no trouble shooting his best friend. Vecchio seems to be a man comfortable with violence, and if it had to happen, if someone had to gun Fraser down just like Clyde Barrow, then Victoria thinks that the constable would prefer to see it done by someone who loves him.
But she doesn’t like that idea. It makes the connection between the two men primary, and this isn’t Ray Vecchio’s story.
It’s hers.
“Beyond this place of wrath and tears looms but the horror of the shade.
And yet the menace of the years finds and shall find me unafraid.”
Victoria fingers the diamonds in her pocket, then takes them back out to roll around like dice in her hand. Really, the affair need not have ended in blood. She could have had some good false IDs made, and she and Fraser would have crossed the border together. Then back to the North and the breathless, stark landscape that had birthed them both. They could have settled in Canada, somewhere too distant for the American police to care. Not in a settlement— the RCMP were always posted in the towns— but out on the land, close to the sea. They could fish in the summer and shoot caribou in the winter. Two big animals would be just about enough to last them until spring. They could live as the Inuit had once lived, a man with his wife for a hunting partner, subsisting on the gifts of the land.
They might have made it work. In time, there could have been a child, someone to love and rear and make the past recede like the ocean tides.
The train begins to slow, and Victoria closes her fingers. The diamonds wink out like the stars close to dawn. Now who’s living slightly to the right of reality, she reproaches herself. None of that is going to happen, and it’s time for her to leave. Vecchio would have been preoccupied with getting Benton an ambulance, but he would be on the radio about her right after. There are sure to be cops at the next station. Staying on the train longer is folly.
With slow, casual movements, Victoria stands up and starts walking. The caboose is only a car or two down, and there’s a old guard there, puttering about, trying to look busy.
“Hi,” Victoria says, injecting a gentle, awkward note into her voice. “I need some help at my seat. My window is stuck and there’s a lot of cold air coming in.”
The old man turns, frowning.
“There’s a car attendant. Why won’t you talk to her?”
Victoria tosses a glance over her shoulder. The uniformed woman in the next car is helping someone. The angle is bad. No one can see from here, but she feels her nerves buzzing as the train continues to slow.
“Sorry,” she mutters, and pulls a knife from her other pocket, the one without the diamonds. There’s a quick flash and the guard collapses, clutching at the blade in his liver. Victoria yanks it out again and lets the man fall to the side, out of sight. She forces the back door of the caboose and slips into the cool outside, where the sun has set and the last traces of purplish-red light are fading away. The ground is a blur, but the next stop is too close for hesitation. Victoria leaps from the slowing train and lands hard on the grass by the side of the tracks before rolling into the underbrush.
Gasping, she crawls though the long grass toward the fencing on the side of the track. As she moves, she pictures Benton. He’ll be at the hospital by now, headed either for the ICU or the morgue. Is he flanked by a beeping monitor, or is his face blue under the medical examiner’s icy light?
If he’s alive, she’s certain to see him again. After all, a man only has one destiny.
She’s pulling herself up to hop the fence when the sound she’s been dreading starts behind her. Shouts from the police, a cop on her tail. They must have anticipated her movements and sent a man to monitor the track. She keeps going, and her feet land on the other side of the fence. It’s fully dark now, and a busy city street isn’t too far from her now. If she can disappear into the crowd, find cover, her chances of escape are still good.
Victoria bolts for the road. As she goes, she finds herself muttering the final stanza of the poem, repeating it feverishly, as if it were an invocation, a magic spell to spirit her away.
“It matters not how strait the gate. How charged with punishments the scroll.”
Still whispering, she thrusts her hand into her pocket and seizes the diamonds. In her mind's eye, the stones glitter as fiercely as an Arctic ice floe.
“Stop! Put your hands up!” The officer’s command rolls over her and she keeps moving, even when a bullet whistles past her ear.
The cars on the road ahead are waiting on a red light. She’ll have just enough time. Across the busy street, Victoria sees the entrance to the subway and a dense crowd of people moving up and down the stairs. She’ll slip into that crowd; make the cop think that she took the metro, then cut up the next set of steps and into an alley. She can ditch her distinctive coat and quickly hack off some of her damned recognizable dark curls, maybe find an old rag to tie around her head. Then it will be a straight line all the way to Lake Michigan and the big ships that crisscross the Great Lakes.
No more hanging around. No more wasted potential.
She’ll pay her way across the border with a diamond.
Certain of her course, Victoria ignores the renewed shouts of the police officer behind her and the hot streak of the bullet that goes wide on her right. She cracks her fingers just a bit, shooting a quick glance to check for the flash of the stones, reassuring herself of their presence as she breathlessly incantates the last line of the poem.
“I am the master of my fate–”
Victoria hits the road running just as the streetlight turns green. A symphony of horns explodes in her ears, followed directly by the sound of two great mounds of metal smashing together. The diamonds sail from her hand, arching into the black night, glittering like new stars as they aim for the heavens. She doesn't see them come back down.
Victoria feels weightless.
She feels like flying.