Eli will be here, I could count on him, he loved me as a son, a twin, a
soul mate. We were complementary: I only knew about things that he
experienced. I couldn't capture him in words like "streetwise". Eli was
life itself: innocuously cruel, indifferently relentless,
single-mindedly propagative, amoral, steeped in gallows humour.
My employer insisted that Pierre admitted to a conspiracy to pass on
weighty secrets - commercial and political - to the press. He swept
aside my vehement protestations and railed at me for wanting to destroy
his business empire, his life's achievement. Pierre confessed in the
police interrogation, he seethed.
It was now up to an investigating magistrate to decide whether to
indict us both.
I knotted my tie the way Eli taught me and donned a jacket. Bathed in a
springtime sun, I headed towards the flower clock near the marina by
the lake. It ticked away its scented, multicoloured time in pensive
melancholy. I felt forlornly relieved. Whatever the outcome of the
proceedings, I knew this chapter ends.
I recalled myself facing this timepiece on my first day in town -
diminutive and lost, clad in a cut-price suit of itchy blue with golden
stripes. I had it custom-made in the West Bank.
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