* * *
—
The light was coming from the entrance to a hallway that ran parallel to the main room. As we turned the corner, we could see that the source of the light was a slightly ajar door at the end of the hall.
We approached slowly, and when we finally made it to the end of the hall I used the table leg to gently push open the door.
It was hard to tell what kind of room it was at first, because of all the blood.
It wasn’t until we saw the toilet, located on the other side of a metal divider, that we realized it was a bathroom.
There was a man sitting on the floor with his head propped up against the back wall next to the toilet.
It was Fatman Neil.
It looked like he was dead, and had probably been that way for a while.
Chloe pulled out her phone, but just as she was about to dial 911, we heard a banging noise coming from outside.
It sounded like the front gate.
We ran out of the bathroom, back through Fatman’s ransacked lair, outside, and up the stairs.
There was nobody there. The street in front of the porn shop was empty.
There was a pretty good chance that whoever was responsible for murdering Neil had been in there with us at some point. I felt a shiver as I wondered just how close Chloe and I had come to ending up with Neil on the floor of that bathroom.
We went back to the bathroom to call the police, but just as Chloe was about to dial, Fatman started gurgling.
We rushed to his side.
“Hang on,” I said. “We’re calling for help.”
Neil grabbed my arm and pulled me close. I could see that he’d been stabbed numerous times. One of those wounds was a jagged open cut along the side of his neck. He was extremely weak and couldn’t speak—most likely because something in his throat had been severed. I got the feeling he wasn’t going to make it until the ambulance arrived.
He kept trying to talk, but whatever he was trying to say came out as gurgling bubbles of blood. He stretched out a bloody finger and pointed toward one section of the floor that wasn’t completely covered in blood.
“What?” I asked. “There’s nothing there.”
But Neil wasn’t using his finger to point, he was using it to write.
It took every ounce of strength he had left, and in the end, he managed just one word, written in his own blood:
Valdrada.
Then Fatman Neil died.
Chloe tried CPR and mouth-to-mouth while I dialed 911, but Neil wasn’t coming back.
We leaned against the wall and waited for the ambulance. We were completely freaked out, but relatively calm. I’m pretty sure we were both in shock.
“What the fuck is Valdrada?” Chloe asked.
The exact same question had been rattling around in the back of my mind while Chloe was performing CPR.
It finally came to me.
“It’s an invisible city,” I said, jumping up.
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“It’s a novel by Italo Calvino,” I said as I ran back into Fatman’s office.
Fatman kept all of his books in alphabetical order, and, although the place had been ransacked, the books remained somewhat alphabetical when they’d landed on the floor. It didn’t take me long to find what I was looking for. It was a hardcover book called Invisible Cities.
There was a chapter in that book about an invisible city called Valdrada.
Valdrada had been constructed on the shore of a lake so that the entire city would be reflected in the water. This reflection wasn’t simply a two-dimensional representation of Valdrada, however, it was a complete manifestation of the city above. The interior of every room, all of the people, and every single action they performed were mirrored in the city below.
I opened the book and turned to a chapter called “Cities & Eyes 1.” I was looking for something hidden in the text of the novel or written in the margins, some clue that might help us find out what the hell was going on. I didn’t find anything like that, but there was something.
Nestled into the spine of the book, on the first page of that chaper, was a small thin metal key.
I’d been looking for some kind of clue in the text of the novel. I definitely wasn’t expecting a literal physical key.
I slipped the key into my pocket just as the paramedics burst through the door. They were followed a minute or so later by the police.
Suddenly, Fatman’s office was an extremely active crime scene.
34
THE AMERICAN
We were questioned for about an hour and a half at the police station.
We told the police we’d gone to that porn shop basement to ask Fatman Neil a question about a game we were playing. We didn’t mention Alan Scarpio, the surveillance computer array Neil called Mother, or the fact that the game might be connected to Neil’s death.