Lieutenant Mark Vincente

July 23, 1985

I need to walk it back to the beginning—if that was the beginning. If not, where was it? Whatever the motive was behind the Westchester carnage is getting more and more obscure, like everything that happened before and after it. Do I even want to know anymore? Does Bruno? Anyway, isn’t that the joke about the bad guys—that they only kill each other? Bruno and I don’t joke about this one, though. There’s something else hovering around the blunt force details of murder. We’re both chin deep in this now, and the hard line between right and wrong is getting blurrier every day. We’re dancing around an idea that I never would have thought possible a handful of months ago. Neither of us wants to lay it out on the table though—not yet.

I think of all the random mayhem I can’t keep up with—that nobody can—how it echoes into the future—inspires others to follow in the bloody footprints.

Where do those footprints lead if you follow them for the next ten, twenty years?

Ask not for whom the sirens scream…

I think, now, that Violet never had a chance. Maybe I didn’t either.

I think maybe it’s deeper and dirtier than I—or any of the clean-up squad—can ever get to the bottom of… or would want to.

I specialize in the cesspit that is vice. I dive in with a single mission: identify and collect the wormiest heads, slowly and methodically, with the persistence and intent of a hell hound. I imagine placing those skulls in a display case with all the meticulous attention the slicer, the gouger, the burner might lavish on his victims: “This one is from 1989; this, from 1991,” and so on, until I give out completely, or become one of them in my own head—its back roads crawling with the same worms, maggots—contaminated by them—beyond the reach of reason. I would gaze into the bottomless void behind the gaping holes where their eyes, black and remote as deep space, once fastened upon their victims. I would contemplate their dirt-filled mouths, twisted in a final shriek of agony, or surprise at how quickly Death ran them down, displayed to the defilers its hideous steely mask, more implacable, more pitiless than their own. They would stare into his dead-oyster eyes, smell his decay as he enfolded them into his gaping jaws, shook and flung them onto the mound of bone and carrion, as ancient as the history of the human race itself.

I would do all this with the discernment of a buyer of masterworks in some uptown art gallery, except I would be the master. Art, somebody said, should strive to tell the truth the way the artist sees it. I would splash the canvas, mold the clay with that truth—the righteous terror, the suffering that saturated the final moments of my unspeakable subjects. I would line my walls with these, review them over and over as my discerning eyes scan the gallery walls, the pedestals displaying the demented, twisted sculpture. I would speak to them as if they could hear me.

But I am a cop, and I got into this exclusive club by suppressing every inkling of these aberrant visions. Didn’t I? I admit this now, to myself, because it’s the truth. I am a man first, a cop second. I do the work as if only the truth matters. And it does, if it leads to real retribution. I will always believe this, with or without the badge. I have lost all that made the world tolerable, as it spins ever closer to the twenty-first century after Christ. I have lost what might have allowed even a sliver of light to seep into the horror dungeon, the torture chamber in my head. There is nothing for me in a new millennium but more of the same.

I remember the ending of an Auden poem Violet recited from memory, not long after our first meeting, how mundane evil, the grotesque, happens—right along with the sacred, the songs of birds, the prayers flung at Shakespeare’s deaf heaven. I even remembered reading it once in school, how it affected me, what it means now:

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Will technology even the playing field or make it more virulent?

Before everything that conferred meaning was carved out, there were moments of solace that would sneak up unawares—early in the morning or at dusk—border moments—oases in time where iron-fisted reality took a break. In these moments, I once found the will to plow on, dive again into the yawning, stinking black abyss. I know Violet had those moments as well—but too few to make a difference.

My family: I know now that I would gladly barter whatever remains of my humanity if I were permitted the faintest glimpse, could hear the smallest echo of what is slowly receding; memory overtaken and consumed by cold necessity, by the insistent pulse and heat of life, by what’s around the next corner. I don’t know with what forces I might align myself if given the opportunity to fulfill a shadow mission, how I might stain my soul beyond recognition or redemption.

I would do it, I think sometimes, without regret. Maybe with pride. Pride in my art.

I didn’t start out questioning Violet. A homicide detective, Lorena Bruno, did. But when loose ends needed tidying, when pieces wouldn’t fit, I paid Violet a visit down in funky Soho. She had no phone, so I just showed up there in the trickster hours where I once found respite. Funny how you never know where or when that door will open—the one you enter and fall into yet another alien universe, one from which you’ll never really emerge.

There may have been some who have mistaken my placid exterior for equivocation. This usually worked in my favor.

Nothing works anymore. And yet, here I am going over my notes again, the bare facts that never reveal what bubbles underneath.

Yeats got it right: “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold… the blood dimmed tide… the ceremony of innocence. Drowned.”

I have lost Violet and I can’t find Khalika. But maybe that phantom has found me. And if she wants my soul, I’m not sure I don’t want to give it to her.