Cutter: Art Of Blood. Literary Crime Thriller: Killing Is Just The Beginning

Contents

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

BY THE AUTHORS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 33

CHAPTER 34

CHAPTER 35

CHAPTER 36

CHAPTER 37

CHAPTER 38

CHAPTER 39

CHAPTER 40

CHAPTER 41

CHAPTER 42

CHAPTER 43

CHAPTER 44

CHAPTER 45

CHAPTER 46

CHAPTER 47

CHAPTER 48

CHAPTER 49

CHAPTER 50

CHAPTER 51

CHAPTER 52

CHAPTER 53

CHAPTER 54

CHAPTER 55

CHAPTER 56

CHAPTER 57

CHAPTER 58

CHAPTER 59

CHAPTER 60

CHAPTER 61

CHAPTER 62

CHAPTER 63

CHAPTER 64

CHAPTER 65

CHAPTER 66

CHAPTER 67

CHAPTER 68

CHAPTER 69

CHAPTER 70

CHAPTER 71

CHAPTER 72

CHAPTER 73

CHAPTER 74

CHAPTER 75

CHAPTER 76

CHAPTER 77

CHAPTER 78

CHAPTER 79

CHAPTER 80

CHAPTER 81

CHAPTER 82

CHAPTER 83

CHAPTER 84

CHAPTER 85

CHAPTER 86

CHAPTER 87

EPILOGUE

Cutter

Art of Blood

A collaborative debut novel by

Blanshard & Blanshard

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Susan Blanshard is an internationally acclaimed poet, essayist, and literary editor. She has a background as an award-winning advertising writer.

Bruce Blanshard is an award-winning

advertising creative director. A best-selling nonfiction author, short story writer, artist and designer.

Blanshard&Blanshard

Art Of Blood

KILLING IS JUST THE BEGINNING

PAGE ADDIE PRESS

UNITED KINGDOM

First published 2021 by Page Addie Press, United Kingdom.

ISBN 978-1-8383465-6-0

Cutter: Art of Blood. Killing Is Just The Beginning.

Copyright©2021 by Blanshard & Blanshard.

Cover copyright©2021 by Page Addie Press. All rights reserved.

The Authors Blanshard &Blanshard have asserted the right

to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance

with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.

No reproduction, copy or transmission of this Publication may be made without written permission from the author. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, scanned, copied or transmitted. Save with written permission or in accordance with provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any license permitting limited copying, issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

British Library Cataloging-in-publication Data has been applied for:

ISBN 978-1-8383465-4-6 (Hard Cover)

ISBN 978-1-8383465-5-3 (Perfect Bound)

ISBN 978-1-8383465-6-0 (ebook)

Printed in the United Kingdom, United States of America, Australia

BY THE AUTHORS

FICTION AND POETRY

Sheetstone

Memoir For A Lover

Fragments Of The Human Heart

Honey In The Blood

Quieter Histories

Poems From The Alley

The Gifting Tree

Send The Raven

NON FICTION

Fly Me To The Moon

Dance Me To The Stars

Naked Hanoi

Unfu*k Yourselves

AS EDITORS

Firmament Without Roof Cover

Seeds Of Night And Day

Out Of The Dark

Grass Cutting In A Temple Garden

From January

Silence

A Ciel Overt

Night Picture Of Rain Sound

PROLOGUE

THE SUN WAS BOILING in its shell. It was the height of summer. The front door left open to let the breeze through­—the flies followed.

Every Sunday lunch was the same, our father eating meat. Henry was a brute of a father who ate nothing but butchered animals: their livers, kidneys, stomachs, ribs, shanks, and brains. Our father gave us everything we didn’t want, and somewhere along our lives, he gave Joe and me misophonia—a hatred of certain sounds. The noise he made when he opened and closed his jaws, made us want to rip off our skin. His gravy slurping made me want to flip the plate and stab him in the eye with the bone handle carving knife. He said he hated our guts, and there Joe and I were, staring at a plate of cow’s stomach—tripe and onions. Joe told me a joke about a grizzly bear. I sniggered with my mouth full of potato.

‘Grace, where are the bloody vegetables? And you Christian,’ cuffing his palm across the back of my head, ‘don’t laugh with your mouth full. Eat! Kids starving in Africa would be grateful for your food.’

Joe and I imagined a ship full of rippling tripe. How grateful to see it sailing far away with Henry on board.

‘I wish, Christian, you’d never been born!’

‘You can’t un-wish him like that! Family is family,’ Ma said, as she disappeared into the kitchen.

‘I can say what I like. And as far as Joe goes, if he’s got a mouth, he can use it. What do you say, Joe?’

But Joe was Joe, like always, he refused to answer. Joe was the master of muteness.

‘Grace, call child welfare! Get them to come and take the rotten off-spring away.’

I had heard it all before. I never believed Henry because Henry was an unbelievable father. I knew Grace wouldn’t make the call because our mother was a sweet liar. She always pretended to dial the number but rang a friend instead, tears forever escaping down the telephone wire. Whenever she spoke on the phone, Ma twisted her hair around her fingers and untwisted each blond strand. The more she lied—the more curls she made.

Our father thought he was a god and said we must obey him. He shouted commands at the top of his voice to make everyone do what he wanted. Grace said he had the high blood, and the high blood made his face red.

That Sunday, God had the last word, and so the unbelievable happened—we watched our father fall face down into his plate of hot mashed potatoes. Our father dead at the head of the table was something Joe and I had dreamed of.

Our mother appeared from the kitchen—her blonde hair twisted in tight curls—she took one look at our father, and dropped the blue dragon china bowl. Green peas bounced over the pink wool roses on the gray carpet. It was the first time we saw the kinetics of simple summer legumes, and the first time Ma had seen our father dead—us too.

I said to Joe: ‘Our father is dead.’

‘How can you be sure?’

‘He’s been face-down for three minutes.’

‘We can hold our breath and stay face down underwater in the bathtub, but not for that long.’

‘Maybe he’s smelling the meat? Butchers do.’

‘No, Joe, he’s not smelling offal.’

‘Well, someone in the world is. Someone always does something, somewhere in the world.’

‘Who told you that rubbish?’

‘You did.’

Grace put her hands up to her face and screamed.

‘You see Ma screaming? It’s a silent scream.’

‘Can that happen?’

‘Somewhere in the world it does.’

‘What about our father? What happens now?’

‘He’ll get buried under a heap of dirt.’

‘What’s in the dirt?’

‘Composted soil, leaf mulch.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Cat and dog shit.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Leftovers, like blood sausages made with a king’s-hood.’

‘What is a king’s-hood?’

‘A sheep’s paunch stuffed with blood.’

‘Like a ball sack?’

‘Not exactly—as I was saying—tied with string and slowly boiled until black.’

‘Then what?’

‘Worms and maggots will eat his body, but not his liver.’

‘Why not liver?’

‘Because of the cirrhosis.’

‘Chorizo, like a Mexican sausage?’

‘No, fatty and scarred from drinking the spirits.’

‘OK—so not the liver. Is that the end?’

‘Not exactly.’ I changed the subject. ‘If he’s done bad things, he’ll go to hell.’ Hell alarms Joe. Hell means fire. Fire means burning. He reads too much.

‘A lot of cartoon characters go to hell,’ Joe said. ‘The Evil Lord of Destruction who seeks to conquer the castle so he can learn all of the ancient secrets, which would make him unstoppable and make him conquer and rule everyone. He’ll go to hell. And the evil wizard and alchemist, the one who makes magic potions to destroy the Smurfs. So Henry’s going to hell?’

‘Yep. Definitely. And he’s going to the deepest part of hell.’

‘Will we?’

Here’s where death got tricky. I should have told him the truth—that most of us get roasted eternally, most of us end up in hell, even living can be hellish, and a living hell, but I didn’t want to upset him. I wanted to keep dumb about death. What else could I do? His inquisitiveness was a habit, and I fed his appetite for nothingness, and it was time to tell him something more of nothing.

Joe and I went upstairs into our bedroom.

‘You and I are il Divino. Do you know what that means?’

‘No I don’t.’

‘Extraordinary regents of the great talent of the infinite.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘An awful lot, when you get grown up, you will see.’

‘How do I get grown up?’

I opened up my album and pointed to one stamp in particular—mint condition, from French Polynesia.

‘See this?’

The picture on the forty-franc stamp showed a hypodermic syringe inserted into a human forearm.

‘What is that?’

‘Adult blood—it works by gravity, adult blood goes from a plastic bag, through a plastic tube, down the needle and into your arm.’

Joe stared at the stamp for a long time before he spoke. ‘Does everyone in the world have to have a blood confusion?’

‘A transfusion—you do if you want to be a grown-up.’

WHEN WE CAME downstairs, a morbid quiet had settled in the house. We didn’t hear her come, but yet, there she was, a solitary figure, suddenly in our vision, standing in the doorway. She appeared like a stigmata—how the image of a saint can appear on a piece of burned toast. At that moment, Joe and I had our first religious experience. We even looked at our hands to see if our palms were bleeding. Was this woman here to save us?

‘Hello Christian.’

The Virgin suddenly dissolved into Mrs. Kitts, the widow who lived next door. Mrs. Kitts put her arms around Grace, and thought for a long while, like a person who’d forgotten to make a shopping list. ‘With that bastard out of your life, you can become more like yourself every day.’ What Mrs. Kitts said next had an indifferent tone. In three words, she summed up everything she knew about life. ‘Life goes on.’ She paused. ‘Christian, why don’t you go play outside. Let me have some time to talk to your Ma—alone.’

Inertia filled the cracks of thought, and a blowfly crawled into the crevice of Henry’s nostril.

‘Maybe this isn’t the right time,’ Kitts murmured, casting her dark eyes over Henry’s dead body sprawled across the table.

‘How about in the living room?’ Ma suggested.

She appeared oddly strange. Her face had changed; her eyes almost free; yes it was Ma, much the same, but she seemed happy, yes, her mouth had untangled a little into a smile, sweet and kind. In the living room, with its garden of floral wallpaper, our mother pushed the Sunday morning paper off the coffee table so Kitts could spread her cartwheel of Tarot cards over the table’s scarred surface, the wooden top held up by carved lion legs.

The first card she tapped with her nicotine-stained finger, was a man holding a hawk and a man juggling a golden ball. She talked about Joe and me like we weren’t in the room.

‘Your son … Christian … he will sign a document with an engraved silver pen which will make him one of the richest men in the world.’

That’s a good thing, I thought.

Then she tapped two other cards: a skeleton armed with a scythe, and the tower card, two people falling from the collapsing tower. She shook her head, reshuffled the cards.

‘What did you see?’ Ma inquired, staring at the pack of cards.

‘Make sure Christian never wears black.’

I looked into her eyes and held my breath: a way to control the long nerve, a way to control the pupil, until the black circle in the center was dilated and fearful.

I said: ‘Black isn’t a color. It’s a feeling.’ The way I looked at her scared her, I could tell.

She walked towards the door stepping on peas, squishing them into the pink roses of the gray carpet. Mrs. Kitts gave me a glance that was a bit strange but not the worst of looks I’d had. Then she embraced Grace, holding her like a store dummy, and left.

ON THE DAY our father was buried and went to hell, a large packet arrived in our post box. Mrs. Kitts had sent us a book, The Child’s Instructor. Inside, the author said bees gather honey from flowers, and only naughty boys stick pins in insects. And the rule was, it was cruel to do that. However, rules didn’t matter.

We caught moths. We caught moths either in a gauze net or with a pair of forceps covered with gauze. In his secret heart, Joe didn’t want to hurt them: he just wanted to examine the little bodies and see the wings speckled with a thousand colors. Then I showed him how we could preserve them, how to expand and keep their wings open with the pressure of small slips of paper. After a day or two, the wings stayed open, but naturally, we had to kill them first.

One moonlit night, I took a box of matches and a candle up to the attic space. Joe brought a live moth, held captive inside a glass preserving jar.

‘What are we doing?’

‘An experiment.’

‘What can I do?’

‘Keep the moth in the dark. Hide the jar under your sweater.’

‘Why?’

‘Because we’re in control—we know what’s going to happen.’

Then I lit a white candle, unscrewed the lid and released the moth.

‘A moth is a night creature. It navigates through the darkest hours, following the path of light.’

‘What happens if we blow out the candle? Will it break its neck, like our yellow roller canary did when you opened the cage to see if it could fly in the dark?’

‘That was a bad accident.’

‘Are there any good accidents?’

‘Only when you don’t have to go to school, like in black ice, that’s a good accident. That’s when something very good comes out of something very bad.’

The moth flew closer to the flame. I blew out the candle and sat with Joe in the dark.

‘What will the moth do now?’

I turned the light switch on. The moth was totally gone, as in disappeared!

‘Where did it go?’ Joe was confused.

‘The night creature could be anywhere.’ Moths are masters of disguise; the moth blends into a point of invisibility—adjusts and adapts a situation to its advantage.

‘Moths mean death. Remember when a moth flew through our house? And Henry caught it in his fist.’

‘And that made Henry go dead? Who let the moth in?’

‘Maybe I left the fly screen door open for it.’

‘You made Henry go dead? On purpose?’

‘Everything has a purpose—even a moth. What do you think? I did that on purpose?’

‘It’s possible?’

‘Neither of us will fall dead. We are night creatures, you and me. We are born to metamorphose. We’ll always have our secret life.’

‘Tell me another rule about night creatures?’

‘Henry’s ghost lives in the basement.’

‘In our basement?’

‘No, but somewhere there’s a basement, someplace in the world. His ghost is there because everything has to be somewhere, even a ghost. That’s the rule. A place for everything.’

‘So Henry’s gone to hell, but his ghost is in a basement someplace? Like two people?’

‘The dead are not people anymore. Faraway from here, in an ancient castle with rotten floorboards and night creatures, where darkness is at its darkest, there is a basement filled with ghosts, where sewer rats have eyes wet and red, like blood, in the dark.’

‘Or red like wet paint, magenta or crimson?’

‘Either way—red as blood—red as paint. It’s all the same thing.’

Joe asked a trick question. ‘Christian, what do you think the world stands on?’

‘A great turtle.’

‘What does the turtle stand on?’

‘I don’t know what the turtle stands on!’

‘Perhaps a tortoise, and that’s why the world turns slowly.’

‘Maybe the world doesn’t stand on anything but balances by itself and goes around the sun and then, once a year, it’s our birthday. You know we share our birth date with Galileo, Leonardo da Vinci, Hieronymus Bosch, and Bruegel the elder. So we will climb the same pathways to genius. Geniuses can see what’s coming in the world.’

Joe and I were introduced to genius when we were five. Our mother took us to Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni’s tomb. Then she told us we were Michelangelo’s reincarnation. We came to believe what Ma said. If Michelangelo was the first version of us, we are child geniuses, Joe and I. And like Michelangelo, we are terribilità—terror-inducing.

‘Christian, do you know what I want most of all?’

‘No, what do you want?’

‘I want you to give me a lead pencil for my birthday. Then I will draw you a hawk.’

A MONTH AFTER Henry’s death, Mrs. Kitts came for morning tea. I showed Kitts our moth collection. Kitts looked at the dead moths and said nothing. She reached across the table and took Ma’s cup by the handle, held it in her left hand, waved it in a circle three times. Then she turned the teacup upside down, then right-side up, and stared into the mush of dark leaves, the scattered shapes and figures left on the bottom. ‘There’s murder here.’

Grace gasped because she believed everything Kitts said, but Joe and I burst out laughing. Widow Kitts was just so crazy.

We left Kitts in the kitchen with Ma and went back to developing a prototype; a lion made out of Technic Lego—only the yellow pieces. A lion that would walk, stop, rear on its hind legs, and open its chest to present a bunch of lilies, just like Leonardo’s lion, the mechanical lion he made for King Francis I.

It was Joe’s idea to make a lion with the body of a lion and the head of a human. Joe never got past the first drawings, and unlike Leonardo, we never did assemble a lion, but at least, like Leonardo, we were born with a talent to make something of ourselves. Joe and I resemble each other. We are like two drops of distilled water, but we each have different reflections.

I was a witness on the day Joe first tagged himself as Black Shadow underneath the steel footbridge, fifty feet above the Hudson River. By the following Sunday, we’d tagged two water towers, the pylon girders of the power station, and Jackman’s trucker yard guarded by two black and tan Doberman’s, with spiked collars. The adults saw graffiti as vandalism. To the neighborhood kids, we had flipped a middle finger, and broken another rule.

TEN YEARS LATER, I went off to Harvard. Joe went his way. Despite my efforts to stay in contact, I lost touch with him. Then, when I was sick in bed with a high fever, he came back for good. From that point on, we were inseparable.

I did a Masters Degree in Molecular Biology and a Degree in International Business and Entrepreneurship, and turned into a moneymaking plutocrat, and Joe became an artist.

I own the 1920’s building in the Upper 30th of the Fur District and more than that. So perhaps, the fortune teller was right about me. The difference between the blue-chip rich and the rest of the world is the definition of more. If less is more, I don’t want to know about it. Money may not buy happiness, but I would prefer to cry in a grand apartment, and use brand new hundred dollar notes to dry my eyes, than live under cardboard on the sidewalk.

Neither Joe nor I were born with the tarnish of silver spoons in our mouths. We try to be who we are, but fate makes us what we are. I’m not sure how much I believe in the ordained, but Joe and I had an impact on the lives of at least five people. Over the years, we’ve managed to increase those numbers considerably. That’s why I know, as well as Joe does, what is about to happen. Only Joe and I know why the chosen ones have to die.

CHAPTER

1

THE CHALLENGE OF FORTUNE telling is how correct your manifested predictions are. So far, Mrs. Kitts was right about Grace’s strange but handsome boy, Christian. His sense of entitlement attracted money.

The challenge of a fortune is to find new things to spend it on. Christian Cutter bought bricks and mortar south of Penn Station. The first was the landmark but abandoned furrier building: where once minks, sable, ermine, and other small animals, like rabbits and red foxes, had their fur processed into coats, stoles, hats, and jackets. An elegant pair of vixens, five feet tall, each one carved from gray stone, had guarded the arched doorway since the time when the first fox had its throat cut, and its fur ripped from its back.

In sympathy with the architecture, restoration took place: the metalwork of the original main doorway, an Art Deco masterpiece returned to former elegance, a marble staircase; its banister of black iris floral motif and brass rail, painstakingly polished. The foyer reflected the elegance of the building, the wide eaves of the roof supported at regular intervals with ivy carved columns.

With the help of Milan designer Cara Rossi, old dusty spaces were transformed into grand light-filled rooms. Reflections pass through Italian mirrors, until lofty interiors appear to extend out to vanishing points in either direction. There is a European-style kitchen a master chef would envy, a gymnasium, a movie theater, and in the converted space under the building, a garage housing a stable of luxury cars.

The one thing Cara could never understand was why Christian insisted she leave the top floor in its original state: small bare ghoulish areas filled with steel racks, iron hooks, and dyeing vats, where anything living would fear for its life.

The place gave her the shivers. ‘Too morbid.’

Nothing could change Christian’s mind. ‘The top floor is where I’ll spend most of my alone time.’

Of all the wealthy clients on her books, Cara had never met a man like Christian.

One by one, he bought the surrounding buildings: the cigar importers, the guitar shop, grocery, dojo, three art galleries, artisan cheese shop, Belgium chocolate shop, a recording studio, and a corner flower shop called Stems. If materialism is a god, Christian Cutter was a dedicated worshipper. Like a shot of greed, he believed in money as much as he believed in himself.

It is early morning. Eight million people stir, ready to wake. Dawn creeps in, kissing Our Lady of the Harbor with a guilty breath. If anyone loves New York, Christian does. The city is like a woman who satisfies his every craving. Christian reaches over and touches the remote control for the bedroom drapes. Layers of dark indigo silk slowly draw back, exposing Manhattan’s morning skyline through the landscape window. He doesn’t need caffeine to revive him this morning. He walks into the floor-to-ceiling Italian marble bathroom and turns the dynamo rain shower on full. His body is tall, unscarred, a sexy body denoting fitness. If God created Man, this one was made so very logically, well proportioned with broad shoulders and muscular forearms. The type of guy who looks as good in formal suits as he does shirtless on the beach or in the bedroom. His face reflects his image in the steam-free mirror. Christian draws the razor through the shaving foam. His handsome, tanned face revealed; high cheekbones, long slim nose, generous lips, dark eyelashes, square jaw. He takes out a pair of contact lenses from the bathroom cabinet, towel dries his thick black hair and goes naked into his walk-in wardrobe. Thirty-one tailored suits, one for every day of any given month, all kept in their original garment bags, neckties like silk fists set in a drawer, thirty-one pairs of handmade shoes, thirty-one pressed shirts.

In the corner of the bathroom, a wicker laundry basket filled with Joe’s black jeans and dark-hooded sweatshirts. Every article of clothing stained with black artist ink. The ink is by no means ordinary; made of pure pine-soot, deer horn glue, and preserving perfumes—black ink, worth more to him than penicillin or human blood. Christian knows there will always be a point of messiness. As long as he lives with Joe, things will be messy. It is pointless to change habits; besides, the interior of every man’s closet is his own business.

Joe is another poor New York artist who amasses work and stores his paintings in the back room, and hasn’t sold one picture. Joe never asks for financial help because asking is just another form of begging. With Christian, it’s a given to assist Joe. He leaves tabs open for him at all the downtown art stores. Family is family to the end. Christian knows if his financial world turns to ruin, Joe will never let him drift like human debris in the world. Christian feels a vibration from his phone.

Call me when you have time.

Give my love to Joe.

Ma.

Grace worked two jobs since Henry died, worked herself to the bone, doing day and night shifts, and now she was sick. He doesn’t hesitate to provide for her. But all the money in the world can’t buy good health. The nurse still injects vials. For all Grace’s pain and suffering, the help Christian gives is right up there with her tanks of oxygen.

Christian sent a message to the florist at Stems: Deliver bunches of white and purple violets to Grace, at St Margaret’s, please. Then Joe came in. ‘I had a feeling Ma needed violets today.’ Like the Madonna and Child with Flowers by da Vinci, Joe thought, the violets making the cross were white, but her tears turned them purple. But, what the hell? Even if you cut the stems at an angle and add a preservative to the water they die. Cut flowers are no more than a bunch of colored petals without the will to live. Violets drink through their petals, so they need to be turned upside down for a while, but left too long, they drown.

Christian does up the last button on his Savile Row, bespoke shirt, and knots Friday’s tie. A black silk tie, on this 13th day. Also it happens to be a Friday.

This morning, Christian is about to execute his best plan to date.

CHAPTER

2

CHRISTIAN WALKS TO THE antique elevator in his apartment, and pulls the folding metal gates to the point of symmetry—the brass hook slides into the female part and locks solid. Without simple, but proper connections, the lift would suddenly come to a standstill, and cause entrapment between floors. It happened to Joe on his way down to the basement garage once; the lift stopped, Joe was facing the interior of the shaft, red brick upon red brick, history upon history. A herringbone pattern, every brick initialed by the maker. Convicts who had marked the passing of time. Today there was no time for error. Christian gets out of the elevator, into his car, and heads for the freeway.

Christian arrives at Biozen Corporation and drives down into the multi story car park, knowing that when he finishes his meeting in two hours, he will leave there, one of the wealthiest men on the planet. And after that, who knows. As he accelerates his Porsche around concrete pillars, the tires scream on race alloys. Underground, three stories down, he drives into the visitors’ space, turns off the ignition, and listens to the sound of water. Water trickling from somewhere, an irritating sound that adds to his dislike for basements—with their faithless margins of cold light.

He drops a couple of smart drugs, steps into the elevator and hits the elevator button for the 38th floor, checks his reflection in the glass ceiling and sees himself as he is—a man in an elevator—on the way up.

The doors open into Biozen’s foyer, decorated, for some reason, like an archaeological time capsule: limestone tiles embedded with prehistoric plants and fish, a foyer of time and consequence, so many grooved shells of extinct ammonites, primordial creatures pressed onto the surface of the stone, overlapping and breaking up, like the signs of time. Ancient Sumerian cuneiform writing tablets are lit up inside a glass cabinet. Above him, the only four hanging art deco lights in existence, fourteen feet of luminaire prisms and light beams. On the wall, a Eugene Delacroix painting, Massacre No: 2, The death of a king. The beams of light pick out the gamut of reds and browns—life and blood.

Christian walks on the red Persian runner carpet woven with celestial stars to the double etched doors and enters the executive suite. Two