Evil, Chocolate, Karamazov, Mira,Amsterdam
An excerpt from Die By Wire, following heroine Mira Longbow.
Subconsciously, Mira let her feet follow her heart, tracking faint memory traces of a long-past summer day. Her feet soon carried her into an afternoon-shaded passageway. A score of steps later, she gazed at a ghost from her first visit to Amsterdam: a delightful pastry shop that made the best hot chocolate on the planet.
Mira slipped inside and breathed in an intoxicating fragrance of chocolate and freshly baked pastry that spun her head with a past pleasure now made present again.
People crowded the three tables that stood by the wall of small-paned windows that gazed out on an architect’s office on the steeg’s opposite side.
Bicycles passed. A motorcycle messenger. A tiny three-wheeled delivery van pulled up on the sidewalk in front of the windows and unloaded flour.
When the little van pulled away, Mira took her hot chocolate out to the only unoccupied sidewalk table. She settled into the seat, took a generous sip. Behind closed lids, she communed with a sensuous intensity that managed to vanquish the day’s every negative emotion.
The soft warmth of the chocolate warmed her heart and settled below her breastbone. Mira waited until all the pieces in her mind reached a peaceful equilibrium. Then she opened her eyes, took another sip, picked up Karamazov.
Instead of starting on page one, Mira flipped toward her favorite chapter — Rebellion.
Here, brother Ivan Karamazov berates God for creating a world so plagued by evil that even innocent children must endure the most horrible pain and suffering.
“Listen,” Ivan says, “if everyone must suffer to buy eternal harmony with their suffering, pray tell me what have children to do with it?”
Unconsciously nodding to herself, Mira sipped again at her chocolate and scanned forward. Mira skimmed the part about babies being tossed in the air and caught on bayonets, past Dostoyevsky’s other graphic atrocities and to Karamazov’s ultimate truth that resonated in her heart:
If the final act of history were a play in which God reveals the harmony created by innocent suffering, Ivan says he’d return his ticket because the price is too high.
“I absolutely renounce all higher harmony,” Ivan says. “It is not worth one little tear of even that one tormented child …. I’d rather remain with my unrequited suffering and my unquenched indignation …. I hasten to return my ticket, And it is my duty, if only as an honest man ….”
The growl of a motorcycle engine competed for her attention.
Watch out!
A voice, a tug. A hand. She looked around.
No one near!
Behind you!
Mira whirled.
A massive BMW motorcycle hurtled down the narrow street, its rider clad all in black leather and a full-face, black helmet, its visor down. A second later, it leapt the curb, came straight like a missile.
Directly at Mira.
