Deluca finally spoke. “Even in my country you have your supporters, you know. People who thought you had the right idea. We’re all lagging behind, and you… the future doesn’t wait, one could say. He was a brute, the President of your country. Before his head… well.” He briefly raspberried, which seemed both inappropriate and inaccurate.
The General’s stomach rose and fell at the same time, a weird combination of excitement and dread. “That’s dangerous talk.”
Deluca twisted one of his rings like he was trying to start a fire. “It’s important to do what’s good, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know a person who would disagree.”
This time Deluca waited so long to speak the General thought he might have fallen asleep. Eyes shut and everything, breathing even as a metronome. The sound of it somewhat unsettling.
“They cut me, you know. When I was a boy.” Deluca opened his eyes slowly. He extracted a pack of the crisp new playing cards and spun it in his fingers as he spoke. “I had a nice voice.” He nearly whispered this last thing.
The General didn’t know what to make of that. “Your parents, or…?”
“I had an effusive, rich music teacher. He offered to buy me, in effect.”
“How many years did you have?”
Deluca thought for a second. “Nine, I think. Or ten.”
“And you were good?”
“I was very good.”
Deluca wasn’t looking at him anymore with either eye. Something strained between them, maybe something unsaid that needed to be said, or something that shouldn’t be said at all. The General imagined this soldier as a boy, hair wigged and powdered, resplendent in something stuffy and high-collared and pearl-blue, looking like a doll stuffed into adult human clothing, mouth agape, teeth straight, belting some aria written for a castrato, maybe specifically for him, to take advantage of his talents. Stunted, wounded. And of course still with the glass eye which the General had never asked him about. There was something in the way he’d said it, the thing about being very good, that made the General feel as though quality wasn’t what mattered at all, that Deluca as a boy had never thought of quality, not when everyone else was doing the thinking for him, his parents, his teacher. He’d been helpless in that life, and then he was a soldier, a cast-aside one, gaoler of an old man in this moldy house in the middle of the sea.
Deluca reached down to draw a card from one of the General’s foundations, the two of clubs, and looked at it like it was something precious with its ragged corners. He seemed to be making a huge and consequential decision. You could tell, often, about decisions like that. The General had seen enough men make huge and consequential decisions in his career—whether to bombard this fortification or that one, to kill by guillotine or firing squad or some other monstrous method. Wasn’t every method monstrous, when it came to death? But the decision was still a huge and consequential one, and you could tell by the way the jaw locked into place, the quick intake of breath, the clenching and unclenching of the fleshy knuckles. In the quiet you could hear men raucousing from the barracks on the other side of the grounds, gulls shrieking overhead, maybe if you strained even the whipping of flags in the wind. For a split second Deluca’s eyes seemed to bulge in their sockets, so quick the General wasn’t sure he’d seen it at all. Then his face settled into an easy smile, and the card went back on the foundation.
“Forgive the intrusion,” Deluca said finally. There was something off about him now, shale-faced. “I hope you enjoy the gift. I hope you think of it as a good one.”
And before the General could reassure him, tell him it was a good gift, or reflect on his impulse to reassure a foreign soldier, an enemy of the state and his own gaoler, to think first of his dignity and composure, Deluca had basically fled the room. The General watched the open doorway for a minute, listening to Deluca’s footfalls rebound down the creaky hallway. Then he placed the new pack of Ptolemy playing cards back in its exquisite box, clasped it shut, and gently carried the box to the writing desk in the corner of the room. He sat back down at the mahogany table and resumed his game.