Styx (2 page)

He set the head carefully off to one side, posed it so it was gazing up at its own dismembered body.

He nodded approvingly and took from his pocket the greeting card he'd bought in a gift shop on the dike several weeks ago, already preparing for this moment. On it he had carefully printed a legend:

#3 IN A SERIES: A GIFT TO ALL THE TOURISTS HEADING OFF FOR A FUN DAY AT THE BEACH.

He propped the card beside the torso. The finishing touch.

The man stepped back and admired his handiwork. The body was more alive now than it had ever been. If you looked at her, sitting there on the sand, headless and helpless and hopeless, she seemed to be a natural part of the environment, a sculpted piece of flotsam washed up by the tide from the other side of the Channel.

One more little chore, and he would be finished.

He picked up his shovel, planted his feet in the sand, bent his knees slightly, and lined up the putt. He drew the shovel's blade back a few inches, then tapped the severed head neatly into the cup. Inside his own head, the gallery that ringed the green murmured appreciatively.

“It's all in the wrists, Carl,” he said, smiling shyly.

Almost as an afterthought, he kicked the arms and legs and the plastic shopping bag that held the girl's clothing and cheap clutch into the hole and quickly filled it in, leaving the naked body standing proudly on the beach, facing—if you could call it that—the shore.

Then he clambered up onto the breakwater, stripped off his clothing, and dove into the ice-cold vastness of the North Sea, half to cleanse himself of the blood and sand but also half simple ritual. Every artist has his routine.

He spent five minutes in the water, freed at last from the stress, from the pressure to perform. Swimming in the rain was a unique experience. He felt part of two worlds at once: above him the summer shower descending from the heavens, below him the roiling sea that seemed eager to suck him down into hell.

He emerged from his swim, muscles taut, and quickly dressed in clean clothing from his gym bag. He packed his bloody work clothes, his shovel, his plastic mask, and his dagger in the bag and carried it across the hard-packed sand toward the dike, where he'd left his black Hyundai Santa Fe and its trailer, retracing the path he'd taken an hour before, when he'd dragged the body from the trailer down to the breakwater.

Never in his life had he felt so vibrant, so full of energy.

But he knew that he would be dead again in the morning. And that would mean it wasn't over, there was still work to be done. He would have to go on, to keep reinventing himself, time after time after time.

He slid behind the wheel, rolled down his window, and took one last lingering look back. From this vantage point, his latest triumph was hidden from the eye. All he could see was the sky, the sea, and the sand.

“Death and rebirth,” he murmured softly. “Forever and ever, amen.”

And then he put the car in gear and drove away.

For months now, Raphael Styx had stretched out each night on the hardwood floor beside the bed and wrestled his way toward dreamland without much success. The pains in his back and especially his hip refused to grant him the relief of slumber.

Recently, when he turned forty, he began swallowing 5 mg of Mogadon every other night. The pills allowed him at least a few hours of rest, and he was sleeping now, despite the inflammation in his wrists, despite the corn on his right big toe, despite his hemorrhoids.

And then the phone rang.

“Sleeping, goddammit,” he muttered.

He fumbled for his iPhone, hoping to silence it before the ringtone—“Get Up, Stand Up”—woke Isabelle, but all he accomplished was to knock it from the night table to the floor, where Bob Marley
ordered him to stand up for his rights. He rolled over to grab it, and a lightning bolt lanced through his hip.

“God
damn
it,” he exploded.

Above him, in the bed, Isabelle stirred.

“Rafe, can you get that, please!”

He found the phone and answered it.

“Styx,” he rumbled.

He recognized the caller's voice immediately. It was John Crevits.

“What's up, John?”

Crevits spoke softly, punctuating his sentences with sighs that wafted through the iPhone's little speaker like gentle sea breezes.

“Where?”

Styx sat up and reached over the New York guidebook on his nightstand to switch on the bedside lamp. The guidebook had been sitting there for half a year, but he hadn't yet gotten around to opening it.

“All right, I'm on my way.”

He ended the call and struggled to his feet. The days when he could sleep spooned up against his wife and jump out of bed at the crack of dawn were over. Now, even walking took effort. Shit, forty years old and it was like he was eighty.

“Who was it?” Isabelle yawned, pulling the comforter over her head.

“Crevits,” said Styx. “Go back to sleep.”

“John? In the middle of the night?”

Styx checked his watch and saw that it was six
AM
.

“Night's almost over. It's morning.”

“It's an ungodly hour for a phone call,” she complained.

“What do you want me to say? I'm the one who has to get up.”

Beneath her blankets, she stretched herself like a cat. Styx sat on the edge of the bed and reached for his trousers. Picking up the pants was bad enough. Getting into them was worse.

“Fuck,” he said.

There was no response.

“I'm falling apart here.”

“What else is new?”

“Thanks for your support.”

“You haven't called for another appointment, have you?” asked Isabelle, her head still hidden from view, her voice muffled.

“An appointment with who?”

“You know who. That doctor. For your hip.”

“No, I've already seen him twice, don't want to see him again.”

“Suit yourself.”

“Go back to sleep,” he said.

“It's your own fault, Rafe.”

“I'll deal with it.”

It had started with his
socks. Putting them on had become an obstacle course. And, since a guy's got to put on a pair of socks every morning, that was a problem. Was it some sort of muscle strain? No, according to their family physician, who'd referred him to Dr. S. Vrancken, an orthopedist.

Vrancken had begun with an ultrasound. As he traced Styx's body with the smooth head of his gel-smeared instrument, Styx watched his own innards scroll by on the computer screen, an assortment of black and gray surfaces that the specialist had identified as his vital organs.

The orthopedist informed Styx that he definitely didn't have a hernia. Vrancken—in his early fifties with short gray hair, his short-sleeved golf shirts revealing surprisingly muscular bronzed arms—had presented his conclusions carefully, as if he were a military officer informing a father that his son had died in some distant war zone.

Styx's pain wasn't the result of an injury, he'd explained. It was a symptom of arthritis.

“I thought only old people got arthritis,” Styx said.

“In layman's terms, your hip is kaput,” the specialist had told him. “It's worn out. Happens to around nine to eleven percent of people over the age of thirty-five. You can probably make it through a couple of months on painkillers, and if it gets much worse I can give you a shot of cortisone, but there's no way around it: within a year, you're going to need a hip replacement.”

“A prosthetic?”

“We call it an artificial joint. I see people in their late thirties who need this surgery.”

“I just turned forty.”

“Well, then,” said Dr. Vrancken, “I don't need to sugarcoat it for you. You get to forty and wake up pain-free, you're probably dead. That'll be fifty euros, but you'll get most of it back from your health insurance.”

After that visit, the pain in his hip got worse, so Styx saw Vrancken a second time. The doctor ordered X-rays, just to make sure, and the cop had dutifully reported to the hospital a couple of days ago. All he could do now was wait for the results.

And that was where things
stood.

On his way out of the bedroom, he heard Isabelle mutter, “Try to keep it down, Rafe. Victor needs his sleep. He's got an art history test today.”

Styx closed the door, but otherwise ignored her instructions. This was
his
house,
he
brought home the lion's share of the bacon, so
he
got to make the rules. She had nothing to complain about.

He headed for the stairs, but paused to look in on Victor. The boy
lay sprawled across his rumpled bedclothes, fully dressed and sound asleep. His art history textbook lay open beside him, and his desk lamp still burned. Styx gazed down at the thirteen-year-old, his little boy, no longer little. Once upon a time, he would have pulled the covers over him and kissed his forehead, but those days were long gone.

Over the last couple of years, their relationship had become difficult, pricklish, a minefield. It got harder and harder for the two of them to get along, especially since Victor's grandfather—Isabelle's father—had suddenly died just a few weeks ago. Victor and his grandfather, Marc Gerard, were cut from the same cloth, and, since Marc's death, Styx had been kept busy with the funeral, with visits to and from the surviving family members, with writing an obituary and the reading of the will.

“How can you be so cold?” Victor had demanded, more than once. “Don't you have any feelings?”

He had feelings. And the pain of his son's accusations hurt him even more than the pain of losing his father-in-law.

Now Raphael Styx tore his eyes away from his sleeping son and switched off the lamp. Downstairs, he had to fight with his shoes. Bending over was torture, so he kicked his way into them without using his hands. Before leaving the house, he took his badge and his gun—a Glock 19 semiautomatic—down from the top shelf of the hall closet. He put them where they belonged, opened the door, and inhaled the fresh sea air of Ostend.

It took Styx less than
ten minutes to reach the address he'd been given. He parked his Fiat on the Albert I Promenade, between the Toi Moi & La Mer restaurant and the dike. Out on the horizon, dawn was breaking. In the past, this sight had always moved him. Today, though, it seemed somehow fake. Sunsets are always vulgar, a Flemish writer
had once quipped, but sunrises in Ostend were somehow both vulgar and poetic.

He stood on the dike and saw the lighthouse blink on and off in the distance. His cell phone rang.

“Chief Inspector Styx?”

“Yeah. Where are you?”

“Third breakwater to the left.”

“I see you.”

“It's no picnic, I'm warning you.”

“I'll be right there.”

He ended the call and headed down the wooden staircase to the beach. He set off as briskly as he could across the sand, past a line of rental cabanas, heading straight for the group of figures barely visible in the distance.

The sand was sloshy from last night's rain and difficult to walk on. After a hundred feet, though, he crossed an invisible tidal line, and the harder surface was a blessing to his knees and calves. When he reached the third breakwater, he found a knot of men milling around, chatting among themselves, doing nothing. A man in civilian clothes was taking pictures, and another was lifting fingerprints.

“Somebody bring me up to speed,” said Styx, not wasting time on a greeting. An elegantly dressed young detective named Joachim Delacroix was the first to react. Styx knew Delacroix by name and reputation. He was a self-satisfied immigrant from the Congo, only a year on the force and recently transferred to the coast from Brussels. No one seemed to know where he found the money to pay for his obviously expensive wardrobe. Styx hated him, though he didn't really know him. He hated a lot of people. It wasn't the color of Delacroix's skin or the fancy dress that bothered him. It was what the rookie represented: Delacroix was a prime example of the new breed of cop, heavy on ambition but light on empathy, the type who started every
day by dropping to the floor and counting off fifty push-ups—unlike Styx, who had to count off fifty seconds before he could get
up
from the floor beside his bed in the morning.

“Chief Inspector,” the rookie said, his accent French. “I'd say good morning, but that doesn't seem appropriate under these circumstances.”

“And what circumstances are they?”

“See for yourself.”

Delacroix stepped aside, revealing something perched on the sand beside the breakwater—a shape, a figure, a doll. A thing that had once been human and alive, now without limbs or a head. A hole had been dug in the sand beside it, and, when Styx stepped over to it and looked down, his stomach flipped and he had to fight back the urge to vomit.

“Jesus Christ.”