Page 105 of The Secret Dinner

“I’m moving out. I already packed my clothes.”

“Those sons of bitches killed Piglet!”

“Nobody in Pingo d’Água needs to know. He had no relatives; we were his only friends. Nobody will miss him.”

“I will!”

“This is all very touching,” said Umberto, interrupting our argument in a honeyed, insincere voice. “But you also have a choice to make, Dante. You can’t keep playing the double agent, working against us. Vladimir wants to give you one last shot before he takes more … extreme action.”

“How generous of him,” I deadpanned.

“Yes, very … Now repay his generosity and kill this Arthur fellow.”

“No.”

“You have time to think it over. You don’t need to work Wednesday’s dinner. On Friday, we expect you in uniform, smile on, with Arthur’s body as proof of your loyalty. It’s going to be a special night, our one hundredth secret dinner!”

Umberto clapped his hands, grinning. He opened the door and Hugo followed him, not looking back.

“Where’s Piglet’s body?” I asked, battered.

“Dante, for fuck’s sake, this is a business! We weren’t going to let all that meat go to waste. If you want to see that lazy bum again, come to the next dinner. We’ll be serving crispy suckling pig.”

5

If I were a braver person, I would have tried to stop them from chopping up my friend’s body, but I wasn’t even capable of that. I spent the next day in bed, numb from sedatives, seriously contemplating suicide for the first time: All I had to do was take a slightly larger dose of Klonopin, mix it with some cocaine, and that would be that. I didn’t want to live in that cold, empty apartment anymore, with its gaping living room and soulless kitchen, its bedrooms that still smelled like my friends, reminding me that I was responsible for the hellscape our life had become … It was too painful.

When Cora woke up, I tried to explain what’d happened. I told her we needed to team up, but even I didn’t believe that anymore: The war was lost. Our only two options were to swim with the current or drown. I tried to give her a hug, but she pushed me away.

“You lied,” she said, her face puffy. “My baby is gone.”

Cora spent the next few hours locked in Piglet’s room, not eating or drinking. She refused my affection, my touch, even the food I left at the door. We only spoke again late Wednesday afternoon, when she unexpectedly appeared in my room. I was under the covers, completely out of it, in a cold sweat from a concoction of substances, and could barely move. Cora was wearing a little black dress and holding a pink suitcase.

“I’m leaving,” she said, turning away. “Bye.”

I tried to grab her arm, but my grip wasn’t good enough. She slipped away.

“The dream is over, Dante. I’m going to use my money to travel and try to start over somewhere.”

“Don’t go…” I murmured.

“I don’t like goodbyes,” she said.

She turned her back and left. I didn’t have the strength to go after her.

6

Narcotics help you to trick a fundamental component of life: time. Lying in bed, only going to the kitchen to eat and to the bathroom to get rid of what I’d eaten, I didn’t feel the day slip by. Before I knew it, it was Thursday, the day before the dinner I had to attend if I wanted to keep on living.

I still had no desire for any contact with the outside world. Then, like it was taunting me, my phone started to ring. It was Arthur.

I answered without thinking.

“God, Dante, did you ghost me?”

“Sorry.”

“Is everything okay?”