Archive of Our Own ^beta

On particularly low days, it appears to me that life has not been kind. For a man such as myself, who has his hands in every slice of the criminal pie known to this city, living out of his threadbare pockets and low-rent apartments that scream 'deathtrap!' is surely ridiculous. My extra-legal endeavors are very lucrative, in spite of the dogged efforts of the government agents assigned to destroy them. I should be flush with the fruits of my labors, swimming in dollar bills and coin, like in the cartoons.

Ordinarily, I am not so greedy. I have everything necessary to sustain life and so much more than I could have imagined before immigrating to this country. Living poor in the city here is almost easy. Even the occasional pangs of hunger or the biting frost when winter comes roaring through the dirty streets make me homesick now, instead of simply sick as they would were I at home. If my enterprises go well, I am pleased. Proud of my success. But as for the rest of it, why should I have anything more than I have? I did not come here to be rich or happy. Nor did I spend years masterminding and building the finest criminal syndicate outside of Chicago for those reasons.

When I first answered her advertisement in the paper for a roommate and then gradually recognized her, I thought that FBI Special Agent Morgan would complicate things. She has, but not so badly that I need to be rid of her yet.

She does not remember, but we knew each other when we were very young. Her family came every summer for vacation in my country and she would descend from her great, rich house sometimes to play with the village children. I despised her. Indeed, the only thing we had in common back then was mutual hatred, and many a scheme to hurt or humiliate each other. When the death squads rose to power, her family had the good sense and the money to leave before the worst reached us. That was the last I knew of her until three years ago.

It makes me nervous at times, sharing rent and an apartment with the leader of the team investigating my criminal enterprises, a woman who may recognize me or connect the dots of my faint accent and her murder victims' shared country of origin at any time. But I find myself loath to give up my only companionable relationship, even if it is nothing but a fragile sham. If Morgan knew who and what I am, she would have me in prison so fast my head would spin. If Morgan's investigation ever comes too close to my secrets, I will destroy her with only a fleeting regret to attest to my respect.

The apartment we share is far better than my usual hideouts; solid windows, a working air conditioner, water pipes that only occasionally freeze in winter or spit rust in the summer heat. Many of the little things that break, either Morgan or I can fix. The larger things we report to the careless landlord, and then pretend not to mind when he forgets about us until weeks or months later. Surprisingly, she is as good at not minding as I am. I would not have expected her to be so accepting of hardship, but it seems that Morgan has learned to swim against the current and love every moment of it. I admire her all the more for her good humor.

Her living conditions puzzled me since I remembered her family as quite wealthy, so I asked her if the pay of an FBI agent is really so terrible that she must split the rent to live in this apartment. She explained that a large chunk of her pay goes toward helping her fiancé through law school, which she says is only fair since he helped her through college and the FBI Academy. Another chunk diminishes what remains of her student loans from college. Yet another is sent to her family, and after all this she has living expenses. A bit of discreet research told me that her family lost its fortune shortly after returning here from my country, but Morgan shows no signs of bitterness.

I have wondered from time to time whether her fiancé knows that she lives with another man in an apartment with a sagging floor and obscene words scrawled on the bathroom walls. Sometimes I tell myself that Morgan is too intelligent to affiance herself to a man who would let her live this way on his account. At other times, I see how proud she is, and how stubborn. If she decided to repay his help this way, who could stop her? But if I ever need to know anything of her personal affairs I do it behind her back, with no prying questions to set her thinking. She has never pried into my private life, and is always friendly to me.

"No rest for the wicked," she says some mornings, and taps her wristwatch to let me know that she is in a rush. On these occasions I head out early as well, the two of us wolfing a cold breakfast as we race to get ready and get out the door. After I have made certain she is gone, I take a circuitous route to one of my headquarters and see to my affairs there for the rest of the day.

My work on any given day ranges from supervising a long con to researching the possibilities for discrediting a troublesome law enforcement officer, hiring a new lawyer to negotiating an arms deal. Always there are reports to read over and new disasters to avert. On rare, very good days the *main* branch of my organization, the branch that all the rest was built to support, will send me a name, an address, a plain folder of relevant information, and a photograph. On these days I prepare to commit murder.

Morgan will be grim and distracted for days after I finish with my target, her mind on the new body in the morgue and whatever evidence her team is scraping from the scene of the crime. I will let her be for a while, and then begin the delicate work of coaxing her out of her shell. She is too professional to give out details of an open case to her roommate, but having someone to listen to her while she vents her frustrations with the case, the calculating murderer she pursues, and with the army of lawyers blocking her progress at every turn seems to calm her.

And though she never tells me specifics of the investigation, for the man who actually committed the killings it is not so difficult to read between the lines and glean a bit of information to keep me ahead of pursuit.

Still, her team is getting too close for comfort once again. If I must be trapped like a wild animal after I have finished my killings here, then better for it to be done by an opponent so worthy. But I am not finished, and likely will not be for some time. Several of the men I followed here from my birth country have not yet been rooted up from their secret dens and dealt their own brand of justice. The organization I built to find them has so far failed to pick up the trail of any of the remaining three. I cannot be captured until after I have killed them all.

If Morgan continues to draw closer to laying my numerous crimes in the open, I am not above utterly shattering her career and her reputation in law enforcement. As I have discovered from our conversations, it was her work on my case that made her stellar reputation what it is and gave her career such a boost, so it would be difficult but surely not impossible to reverse that good fortune.

We have been trying to destroy each other since childhood, it is only fair that one of us should now succeed, but too often it seems to be Morgan who is coming out on top of this fight. That can *not* be allowed to happen.

If all else fails, I will kill her. A new apartment should not be too hard to find.