#rabka

8 May, 1959 4:45 pm 

Castelnuovo Berardenga, Siena, Italy 

Why, oh, why had Helen decided to send them on a mission together? Literally any other combination of mercenaries would have made a better mix of personalities. Or, failing that, a better combination of language skills. Rabka knew Kurien could banter on in conversational Italian. It wouldn’t have surprised her if Atlas was completely fluent. 

But Rabka’s French was insufficient to penetrate Italian and Eir was only really good at English. Even ordering these coffees had taken some charades. Sure, the word “espresso” tended to penetrate the language barrier, but price was another matter. Rabka still wasn’t sure how much she was expected to pay for these horrid little drinks. Europeans knew nothing of coffee. 

Well, whatever. She’d just leave a 10.000-lira note note on the table. Surely that would be enough. The poor, exhausted waitress would certainly be grateful for the change. 

Taking a sip of the over-roasted and oily espresso, Rabka tried to think only of the benefits of the caffeine as she pulled out her notebook. Perhaps taking notes has been a waste of time; their stakeout and Rabka’s resulting observations had been simple. But the scientist in her couldn’t allow perfectly good observations to go unrecorded. She’d even written them down in passive voice. 

“I don’t think this will complicated,” said Rabka. “Scaramucci strolls in his garden, many, ah, multiple times each day.” 

Antonio Felicio Scaramucci. An unsavory character, Helen had assured Rabka. A pimp. Not that Helen cared who was running extrajudicial prostitution rings. No, Scaramucci needed to die because he had defaulted on one too many of his debts. But old Helen had always felt the need to assure Rabka of their victims’ moral inferiority. Perhaps she sensed that Rabka didn’t particularly like killing. 

“To kill him,” said Rabka, “The only thing we need to do is this: hide in one of the orchard trees and shoot him with a rifle. Or a shotgun. We will be very close so it won’t matter.”

But for some reason, that didn’t seem to satisfy Eir. “If I’m going to kill him, I want to do it artistically.”

Rabka pursed her lips. Of course Eir wasn’t going to go for the simple and practical solution. The medic slept between hard-to-wash silk sheets and kept a bald cat whose cleanliness required similar over-the-top measures. Nothing she did was practical.

“Artistic doesn’t matter here,” said Rabka. “We receive our pay once Scarmucci is dead. No one made any specifications about the way in which he should die.”