Turbinio

Bread and Wine

"Oh, I should have known. What did you find out?''

''The information about Gyro and Johnny doesn't have much potential, but I think you need to know a little more about Dio.''

''Can't we talk about this outside? It doesn't seem very appropriate here...''

"Here is more than appropriate. I can't leave the corpse and Sacrament alone.''

"The corpse? So this is where...''

"Not for long, I plan to leave soon.''

You remained silent, evaluating if you really wanted to talk about Diego now. You avoided this name as much as possible, but you felt like you were in a three-vertex balancing act when Johnny and Gyro entered the story, you thought bleakly.

Neither Hot Pants' state of mind nor your discomfort and mental fatigue were relevant anymore. This race had reached a point where nothing else mattered but surviving and keeping the corpse out of the President's hands, and you were willing to help your friends in any way you could. That's why you gave Hot Pants exclusivity to mention Diego.

You didn't look at Hot Pants as she told you in detail a brief biography of Diego. A poor boy from Great Britain, whose only family he had was his mother. The same mother who sacrificed her own hands so that her son could be fed, Hot Pants added laconically that Diego Brando was only six years old when he was orphaned.

At first you wondered why she was telling you all these things; your angry mind could only think it was an attempt to make you feel sorry for the man, to forgive him and use his story as justification for his actions. But your rational side knew that Hot Pants wouldn't give you information like this unless it was tactically useful. Some kind of emotional way to disarm him, perhaps? You let her finish telling the story.

At a certain point, Hot Pants' conclusions were the same as you already knew: Diego was an undeniable misanthropic, truly loyal only to himself. But she added certain adjectives that made him less human than he really was. During these months inside the race, with brief and sometimes heated encounters, Diego didn't seem to be who he faithfully believed he was. He seemed far more human to you than a misanthropic would be willing to be, in a way that was in no way manipulative.

Since the death of his beloved wife of 82 years, Diego has been driven up the social ladder to take revenge on everyone who wronged him in the past; if not on humanity as a whole, then on his mother's death. Hot Pants also told you why he made a deal with the government: the island of Manhattan was promised to him, along with political pretenses, in exchange for the corpse.

''Manhattan? I remember him mentioning something about being mayor there.''

"Were you that close to him?''

"I don't know...''

''Anyway... pay close attention to what I'm about to tell you, because this could be extremely useful.''

Before she told you, the thought occurred to you that maybe Diego wasn't manipulating you; after all, he had made it clear that he was willing to kill you if necessary. But was it really necessary? You were morally certain that if you didn't resolve your situation with Diego, he would be killed, either by Johnny and Gyro or by the President himself.

And you didn't doubt that he knew it too. He was willing to kill and die for it; he already had said. Should you let this happen? If it were Johnny, Gyro or Hot Pants in his place, would you let it happen, knowing that the real villain of the story and the one responsible for all this chaos is the president? No way, you told yourself. No way, you said angrily to the beaming sun on the altar and went back to listening to Hot Pants.