Fifteen years in prison because of them. They screw me, double-cross me, and then have me thrown out?
Me,
Cornelius Valdes?
“The only thing anyone remembers about you is the bad,”
Paolo had said.
He gazed into his coffee cup, filled with anger but with no outlet through which to channel it.
They’ll remember more than that. I’ll make sure of it.
The high back of his bench creaked and the entire structure shifted as someone sat in the booth behind him.
But how?
“Mister?”
Lost in thought, Valdes ignored the question.
“Mister?” the voice persisted. “Are you Cornelius Valdes? Cornelius Valdes who just got out of jail?”
Valdes’s jaw tightened. The voice was harsh, gravelly, but the words sounded strangely childish. Annoyance fluttered across his face. Without turning, he responded, “What do you want?”
“I don’t want anything. Mister Fizz does.”
“I’ve got nothing for him. Nothing for anyone.” Valdes’ lip curled. “Tell him to try the Christian Yeoman Association. Every customer gets a free knife in the back.”
“I’m bigger and stronger than knives. But I got a message.”
“I’ll bet you do.”
Valdes stubbed out his cigarette and rose from the table. Immediately the booth shifted. Blocking his way stood the largest man he’d ever seen, a colossus at least seven-foot-three with muscles and shoulders so wide he’d have to turn sideways to go through doorways. His hair was black, his face a combination of whites: pale skin, bloodless lips, ivory teeth. Scars lined his acromegalic forehead just below the hairline, and the skin stretched tight over his face and protruding jaw like too little shroud trying to cover too much death. His clothing enhanced the misshapenness—undersized black coat and pants patchworked with Frankenstein stitches and a discolored white t-shirt. Valdes noted some sort of tattoo marking the inside of each of the giant’s wrists, ink that disappeared up into the sleeves. Black gloves the size of baseball mitts covered his hands. His eyes shone like a gargoyle’s, and it took Valdes a second to realize the giant wore a black pair of biker sunglasses.
“Mister Fizz said you would be angry. I guess that’s why he chose you, too.”
“Deliver your message and get the hell out of my way.”
“‘Denial is an evolutionary dead end.’”
Valdes remained braced for a moment until he realized this was what the giant had wanted to say. “That’s it? ‘Denial is an evolutionary dead end’?”
“Mister Fizz said you can’t deny who you are.”
“Really? Who does Mister Fizz think I am?”
The giant smiled, a hideous Halloween grin. “Someone who wants them to
really
pay.”
Valdes stared at him, anger and fear dissolving into curiosity and the faintest hope that, at last, his luck had finally changed. The giant chuckled and turned away. Valdes left his coffee on the table and followed, out the back of the store and into that freezing March night.
Oily water stained the gutters, filling the air with fishy garbage stink. Commuters were long gone from the streets of downtown Brooklyn, chased by cold and the magic that turns Cadman Plaza into a ghost town after work hours. Valdes quickened his step to keep up.
“Where are we going?”
The giant didn’t respond. He made his way towards a subway station entrance and as he did, Valdes noticed something odd. Although he took no unusual measures to stay out of sight, the giant seemed always to be in shadow. Valdes thought about first seeing him in the deli.
Were the lights brighter before our conversation?
“Some imagination, Neil,” he muttered.
A sign stated the entrance was open until 7 p.m., and indeed it was now closed off by an iron gate and locked by a thick chain. The giant didn’t hesitate, lumbering down the stairs and slamming the gate with one open palm. The chain snapped with a sharp
crack!
“Bigger and stronger than a chain.”
Intrigue drew Valdes along behind him. The giant boarded a subway car that immediately cleared as people saw him. The lights flickered, dimmed, and settled into brownout mode.
Whoever Mister Fizz is,
Valdes thought, considering the giant,
he’s certainly found an impressive messenger.
They rode the subway across the Brooklyn Bridge to 8
th
Street, where the giant got off and waited for the platform to clear before speaking. “Go upstairs, across the street to the bookstore. I’ll wait for you here.” He started towards the end of the station away from the exit, where only the blackness of the tunnel waited.
“What am I supposed to be looking for?” Valdes asked.
“Mister Fizz said you’ll know it.
If
you see it.”
Valdes crossed Broadway against the traffic and looked in a window from the dark. The bookstore was crammed into a space that had probably been everything from a liquor warehouse to an apartment building in its lifetime. Nothing made the store either stand out in his mind or jog any memories, so he stood, thinking. Absolutely nothing suggested what he ought to be looking for, nor what to do once he found it. He strolled around the store, riding the escalator to the upper floor and taking the stairs back down.
“Denial is an evolutionary dead-end”…
An employee rolled a cart of books down a narrow aisle, looking for the spots on shelves where they belonged. Valdes paused to let her pass. “Psychology and Self-Help” books were in front of him. On the shelf at his exact eye level, amidst brightly colored trade paperback spines with titles exhorting every way to change your life, he saw a leather book. Its cover was the dark purple of midnight in a graveyard. The girl paused next to him, clucked her tongue and shuffled books like a Vegas card dealer, creating a rainbow of homogenous spines. As she moved off, Valdes noted that she hadn’t touched the leather book. He slipped a finger over the top and leaned it out so he could remove it.
It resembled a ledger or journal, not contemporary but not ancient, nondescript enough to have come from almost any period of human history where bookbinding existed. The leather was visibly textured and warm to the touch, like skin. Valdes held it in his hands. It had some heft for its size. The title,
Vade Mecum Flagellum Dei
, was visible only when he tilted it away from the light.
Suddenly, inexplicably, dizziness skewed his vision. He felt a great surge, a supercharging burst of energy that made him think he could conquer the world. Eagerly he flipped through the book. Words and diagrams seemed to fill the pages, but only in his peripheral vision. When he looked directly at it, all he saw was white, empty paper.
Hmm.
He made his way down to the counter. Grabbing the first thing he saw, a “Word of the Day” calendar that was eighty percent off, he went to the cashier and set it, and the book, on the counter.
“Find everything you need today?” the cashier chirped.
Valdes considered the book, lying innocuously on the counter. “I think so.”
She smiled and slid the calendar under her price scanner. “One-ninety-nine.”
He waited, nudging the book towards her. Her blank smile remained.
“One ninety-nine?” she repeated.
He gave her two singles and picked up the calendar and the book. “Keep the change.” He had a moment of concern that he’d set off the anti-theft electronics as he left, but no telltale shrieking alerted the staff that he was taking the black book with him.
At the subway station, he discovered he’d given the bookstore clerk his last two dollars. Without pause he smoothly stepped around the turnstile arm. An old woman saw this, and she shuffled behind him to the end of the platform. She wore a plastic kerchief and a scowl.
“You can’t do that! You have to pay like everyone else! I’ll call a cop!”
The book tingled in his grasp. Valdes glanced around. No one else waited in the station. The lights of an oncoming train brightened the tunnel. Silhouetted against one wall, the giant waited. Valdes looked at him, then at the book.
“No, you won’t.”
He thrust the old woman off the platform.
She shrieked as she flew across the tracks and hit the third rail. Enough electricity to power a train shot through her. The train front slammed her to the wooden track ties, its weight grinding her burning flesh into the filth. Valdes watched, fascinated, until the screech of brakes jolted him back to the moment. He blinked dizziness away and looked at the book, then at the end of the platform. Inertia carried the last car into the station, leaving space for him to jump down onto the tracks and join the giant in the darkness.
He followed the monstrous shadow through subway tunnels, eventually climbing onto another platform and riding the C train north. It was raining outside now, and frigid water flowed down into the stations through grates and cracks in the walls. None of it washed things clean; the underbelly of the city now glistened with slime.
Valdes gripped the book tighter. The adrenaline rush from pushing the old woman in front of the train hadn’t subsided. He inhaled, a deep, trembling breath. Cold took root in him, anesthetizing guilt and doubt while his brain tried to process what he was experiencing. In prison he’d come across addicts of every substance. All those in recovery had described a “moment of clarity,” where a Higher Power caused the scales to fall from their eyes and they finally accepted their situations, warts and all. Such perspective allowed addicts an understanding of their lives and places in the world: where they were, how they’d gotten there, what it would take to get them where they wanted to be.
For a moment of clarity, this one is muddy
, he thought.
I’m not
really
a murderer…
(Denial is an evolutionary dead end.)
He riffled through the pages of the book. They looked as they had in the store, with writing visible only in his periphery. Frustration bubbled into rage, which curdled into nausea when he thought about the old woman. The nausea churned back into rage at the men who had forced him into a position where he had to do something so vile.
He followed the giant off the C train on the Upper West Side, at 103
rd
Street. More tunnels—Valdes had had no idea the extent of Manhattan’s subterranean passages—led them to a ragged opening in a wall. Beyond it was darkness as thick as syrup.
“Bigger and stronger than a wall.”
Valdes watched Coeus flick a lighter and hold it to a wad of newspapers tied to a stick. Using this makeshift torch, the giant started inside.
Whatever building they entered had obviously been abandoned for years, if in fact it had ever been fully constructed: the walls down here were made of bare concrete that had never felt the touch of a paintbrush. The smell of urine was strong from every corner, as though the territory had been marked. Stagnant water puddled around the uneven floor. Gnawed bones strewn about suggested that if this was where the giant had taken up residence, he had a healthy appetite. Valdes wondered if the remains were animal or human.
I’ll grind your bones to make my bread.
“You gotta come this way.”
Carrying the torch, the giant led him to another room on the same level. They passed a crumbling concrete staircase on the way. Valdes wondered where it led, and where they were. “What’s your name?”
The giant regarded him warily. “Whuh?”
“You know who I am. What’s your name?”
The giant stared at him. Valdes somehow sensed that, in spite of the sunglasses, the giant could see right through him. “Now my name is Coeus.”
“Excuse me?”
“Coeus. Coe-ee-yus,” he pronounced slowly and deliberately. “Ha-ha-ha-ha. I kill people with fear.”
“You don’t say… Where are we going, Coeus? To meet Mister Fizz?”
“Maybe.” The giant shoulders moved. “You don’t choose when—he does.” He walked a few steps further, until the light revealed another room. He handed Valdes the torch. “You got a couple of candles in here, and you can make a fire if you get cold.”
“Where are you going? Don’t you want the light?”
“I don’t need it. I’m not afraid of the dark.”
***
Who says you can’t go home again?
Valdes sat alone with the book, his back to one cold stone wall, listening to the occasional rumble of passing trains. Candle wax sputtered and dripped.
All those years, all that pulling myself up by my bootstraps, and here I sit, on piss-soaked concrete. Welcome back.
He chuckled.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
His laughed at his situation, a sound which took on an edge as he replayed the scene with the old woman in his mind. When he pictured her head bursting aflame like a matchstick he rolled onto his side, tears spilling down his cheeks. Hysteria rose in his tone. He recalled the sound her brittle old bones had made when the train struck her, sticks snapping in a bonfire. He laughed until his face ached, and when the madness subsided he was left with one reassuring thought:
It wasn’t my fault.
Gasping for breath in the foul dankness, he sat upright.
I could have made Christian Yeoman’s Association an international force for good. All Paolo and the others had to do was stay out of my way. I never intended to keep the money. I would have bought the pictures, used the information to clear any opposition, and returned every cent. But they ruined everything!
Hot rage suddenly swept through him, and Valdes howled. He threw the book at the candles, knocking them over, plunging the room into utter blackness. He shouted and pounded the floor, his fury at losing the last fifteen years of his life enflaming the anger he felt towards the four men who had been his friends until the moment they turned him over to the Justice Department investigators.
I could have done
anything
!
He ranted and raved, his voice shaking the walls. “I would have made us all princes! They screwed me out of my life and now they barely know who I am? I’m
Cornelius Valdes
! I dragged myself out of the worst layer of shit in this city and they threw me back down! I won’t
stand
for this!” His voice dropped to a growl, and he remembered what Coeus had said to him. “I’ll make them
really
pay!”