The murder of my Friends

Five days ago someone killed my two best friends; Vera, my boss, and Sygni, her secretary. They were killed by sound, which sounds awful (I swear; no pun intended), and it was! I was there when it happened and it looked painful. They just fell to the ground like two donkeys laden with lead, mouths and eyes wide open, drooling and squirming like chopped up caterpillars. I could do nothing. I tried to move but I was frozen in place by invisible forces. Giant, red letters swirled around in my head: “Error! Error! Error!” Then they were dead.
I didn’t die because I’m deaf. I’ve been deaf all my life. And I have known Vera and Sygni almost as long, ever since kindergarten, and they both learned sign language because of me. That’s why they were not only my best friends, they were my only friends.

We had a bit of a fall out in uni, though. Probably because we were young and wanted to experience new people and new surroundings. I went to art classes, Sygni studied history and Vera chose architecture and later specialized in interior design. We didn’t see each other for four years and I suppose we all had a good time. I met Ben; then a struggling artist like the rest of us, but now the golden boy at Total Gallery in Tribeca. We were a happy and productive couple, until one day when he decided to come out.

After uni, Vera contacted me. We met at a coffee shop in Bleecker street and it was surprisingly wonderful to see her again; I know she thought so too. We immediately became best friends again. I gave her a present, a painting I’d made of three little girls in a forest. They were supposed to be us and Sygni. It was a portrait of love, but it was a bit dark. Vera told me she was opening her own business, an interior decorating studio, and she needed someone with an eye for aesthetics. I was her first choice, and I was happy to accept.
We started The Insiders in a beautiful office in Carmine street in Greenwich. Two month later Sygni joined us, and then we were invincible. We had commissions up to our ears, we made lots of money and our clients loved us.

I came back to the office a couple of days after the killings. The police had done their stuff and a clean up crew had removed every trace of the gruesome event. The office was in pristine condition. I came back to the office because I knew who had killed my friends. I knew why they were killed and that I was supposed to die as well. I didn’t tell the police because they never asked, and if they had asked, they wouldn’t have believed me. They would only look in the wrong direction because the evidence would be gone. So I came back to the office to find out where the killer lived.

Six weeks ago we got a new client, a pseudo-famous guy whose father was closely connected to the mayor’s office. They were in the building business together and had lots of money and city power. The guy had a penthouse on Lexington Avenue that he’d grown tired of and wanted something done with. It was a very prestigious commission, but we played it cool and did a great job. However, there were some things that, at first, didn’t make sense. For instance; why would a young and wealthy Wall Street type of guy insist on hanging replicas of famous but old pieces of art, more suitable on the walls of an old bookworm's musty chambers? And not one or two, but eleven of them. Another strange thing was that he didn’t seem to care too much about neither the bedroom nor the kitchen. Young, single guys usually put a lot of focus on their bedrooms. (As one dickhead said “Make it so that the ladies in here are put at ease”.) And, for the same category of men, the kitchen is not for cooking, it’s for showing off. Therefore, they usually spend a lot of money on expensive and super designed kitchen equipment. But this guy, he didn’t care. “Make it look good”, was all he said.

A couple of days after it was all done, we went back to inspect the apartment and take some pictures for our catalogue. We knew the guy wouldn't move back in until a week later and we still had the keys, so we went there unannounced. It was nothing remarkable about that, it was more or less common practice. We’d done it plenty of times before.

There was something different in the appartement. At first, I didn’t notice what it was, and, since my friends didn’t seem to be bothered, I tried to not think about it. But then, it suddenly dawned on me. I was standing in front of a Monet reproduction, and I thought “Hey, that’s not the Monet we hung there”. This one wasn’t printed; it was painted. It wasn’t a reproduction, it was a copy. Or worse.

I called my friends over and pointed out what I had discovered. They were astonished and asked me, with an art major in my cv, if I thought it was real. I told them that it just couldn’t be, because it would be worth so many millions not even our client could afford it. Then we started to examine the other, alleged, reproductions, and they were all painted.

We were standing in front of a Hockney when we noticed that we were being watched. The guy had come back from his business trip to the Cayman Islands, or wherever he had been, and was now, all quiet and a bit pale, just standing there, watching us. I felt like I had been caught with my hands in the cookie jar, only much, much worse. We hurriedly explained what we were doing; that is, that we were checking that everything was in order before we signed off on the commission.

When we came back to our office we began speculating. We agreed that, if the paintings were real, they had to be stolen. And if they were stolen, it would explain the lack of interest our client showed towards the bedroom and the kitchen. We hadn’t decorated an apartment, we had decorated an underground gallery for stolen art.

I found the guy’s daddy’s address in our files. I thought that going there would be my best bet to find evidence of their criminal activities. And if I didn’t find anything, I would burn down the place to avenge my dead friends.

The daddy lived in a luxury townhouse in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. It was a fancy building, but not fancy enough to explain the possession of eleven multi-million dollar paintings. I had no idea how to perform an auspicious break-in, how to open locked doors, how to hide and how to sneak and all that stuff. In fact, I hadn’t committed a crime since high school when I shoplifted a bikini top from a thrift store. And that made me feel guilty for days. This time, I wouldn’t feel an ounce of guilt.

I had no problems getting past the front door and inside the building. As I had suspected, the penthouse paintings would have come to a much more suitable environment here than in a bachelor yuppie penthouse in Manhattan. This place was not completely tasteless, but definitely nouveau-riche, with imitated Tudor furniture and pastel upholstery, modern art posters and heavy carpets. There were even some antique Disney figurines on a bookshelf in the hallway.

I was looking for an office of sorts, somewhere where these mafiosos kept their papers, when I stumbled into a room where two men sat by an open fire, talking. It was the guy and his father. They didn’t see me, because I had moved very slowly and carefully, and it was a bit dark in the room. I hunkered down behind the corner in a position where I could see the faces of both men. I was pretty good at lip reading, and these guys were very articulate and easy to read. The father said something about “Thursday” and the guy nodded and said that “it will be ready by then”.

“And the nosey decorators. That was sloppy. Why didn’t you get the keys back?” the father said.

“I forgot”, the son answered. “But it’s been dealt with”.

“How?”

“Same as we did with the Kovalski brothers three years ago. Cyanide gas”.

“Good”.

It took several seconds and several steps of thoughts before the fog dissipated. Cyanide gas? What did he mean by that? And then I began to think about how I can perceive certain sounds like almost painful vibrations in my stomach and how I often have thought that enough of those sounds could kill you. Which is absurd. Sounds cannot kill. Not without destroying the building and alerting every police car in the neighbourhood. They didn’t kill my friends with sound, they killed them with cyanide gas.

Why hadn’t the police asked me any questions? I was the sole survivor, I was a witness, and still they didn’t talk to me at all. They didn’t even look at me. And how did I get to Greenpoint as soon as I discovered the address? And how did I get in through the locked front door?

When the truth dawned on me, I stood up, I walked forward, or ran, or floated - I don’t know. And then I stood between the two men, - they didn’t see me, - and I screamed! I looked at the guy and I looked at the father and I screamed, and for the first time in my life, or in my death, I felt the neural input that was sound. I heard my own voice. I screamed, and I didn’t have to catch my breath. I could scream forever. And it sounded glorious.

The two men were pale white in their faces, eyes wide open in terror. They tried to cover their ears with their hands, but I knew it wouldn’t work. They had fallen to the floor like two donkeys laden with lead and they were drooling and squirming like chopped up caterpillars, and finally, their eyeballs exploded and blood poured between their fingers. And when I was sure that they were dead, I stopped screaming, not because I was tired of it, - I could never be tired of sound, - but because I had to let the darkness come and embrace me.