The Laws of Physics Are Dead and
…and the FBI has connections to the Mafia?
A child's dead body comes back to life.
The unsub knocks on the door…but he's dead?
And how do hats fit into the equation?
"You can get much farther with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone." (Al Capone)
I. In which a man misplaces his child.
The smiling man had calmly walked up to the front desk to declare his young ward missing, most certainly kidnapped, and by the serial killer the Behavioral Analysis Unit was in the middle of investigating no less. Naturally, they had no choice but to detain the man and submit him to questioning, given his overly lackadaisical disposition. The smile, an unsettlingly amiable one, accompanied almost every sentence he spoke. His voice never fluctuated while under hard pressure tactics of interrogation.
"I'm awfully worried about him, I'm sure you can understand that." The man with the salt-and-pepper hair interrogating him did not quite comprehend what type of worry the smiling man was trying to communicate. With that attitude, he seemed as if the entire ordeal was a simple matter of misplaced keys.
"You…'misplaced' your child." David Rossi repeated his earlier words dubiously. Indeed, his words had very little of his usual sting because this was an undeniably strange situation. He had his doubts as to whether this child existed or if this man was not mentally deranged. He spoke intelligently enough, but as their resident genius might announce, so did Ted Bundy and many other notorious serial killers. This could even have been a diversion tactic staged by the real unsub.
"'Misplaced' might actually be an unfitting word," the man pondered, as if just realizing the implications. He still appeared more amused than concerned. "He has a tendency to wander. I wondered why he hadn't returned for a while, and I was quite sure that I had left him in the library. He can stay there for hours. As for how do I know that this particular man might have…kidnapped him? Well, all I can say is that I have a feeling."
"And how old is this boy? And what's his name? Why are you his guardian?"
"He's about ten years old. His name is Czeslaw Meyer. I'm simply taking care of him for his older sister's sake. Their parents died when they were young. I'm a close friend of her husband's. We thought it might do him good to see the world."
At ten years old? That was the question Rossi wanted to answer the man with, but he supposed it might not lead him anywhere except in stranger circles. Instead, he felt obligated to ask more routine questions like: "Where does his family live and how can we contact them? What makes you think that he was taken by the serial killer on the news? Did anything seem strange about your surroundings or the people around you when you last saw him? Where did you go after that?"
His family lived in New York. He wasn't the type of boy that would disappear for that long without dropping some hint of his next destination. Everything was quite normal in the library. He was doing research in a different part of the library and went outside to another store across the street, and time caught up with him and before he knew it he was six blocks away and half a day had flown by.
"It has to be that serial killer, because logically, there is no other option," the amiable man offered, as if this simple logic was the truth of the universe. The FBI agent sighed and tapped his finger against the table.
"Alright, please state your name again for the record and the name of the boy's sister as well," he intoned. At least he would receive a decent answer for that.
The man complied, "Maiza Avaro. His older sister is Ennis. She lives with her husband Firo Prochainezo, an old friend of mine."
"We're trying our best, Mr. Avaro. Can you tell me if there's anyone who has a grudge against you or the boy's family?" Actually, the FBI agent silently resigned himself to a rather negative answer. The victims had no enemies and little correlation besides being children, primarily young boys.
The strange man had to pause and consider the question for a moment, unusual given his quick answers. Still, his behavior revealed little. "Well, yes, there are quite a few people who Firo and I left off on bad terms with. But we have equally good allies, so it has never been a major problem. Perhaps, they aren't even aware of the boy's existence. We've been moving around a lot, with no particular destination."
"And these people you left off on bad terms with are…?" Rossi wasn't sure if he wanted an answer from the man anymore, honestly. How was it that this veteran agent, who had contended with the most deranged of criminals, had reached his wit's end so quickly?
II. The mister with the teddy bear is not attractive.
A library held a good many books, more than any one human could possibly read in his or her entire lifetime. The little boy sitting on a stepstool in a corner had a stack of just a few of these books by his side. The corner was nothing like a timeout corner, neither dark nor inhabited by strange creatures. The corners of the children's section of the bookstore were framed by colorful books dipped in pastels and vibrant colors, decorated with specific themes and rather unlike a normal bookstore.
The boy's small hand flipped to the next page as his eyes traced across the words, but he was not reading much of the book. By his young age in life he had already read a huge amount of the books in the store. Well, the ones that any regular bookstore had, at least. Colorful children's books were of little interested to him, except that they were much nicer than the dark books on the shelf just on the other side. And sometimes children's books could stir up bad memories, too.
And the lumberjack cut open the wolf's stomach to save Little Red Riding Hood. Fairytales went like that, and children were always quite blissfully unaware of the implications.
No matter; the little boy was not in the children's section of the store to read children's books. People didn't poke and prod him here, asking why he was reading such difficult books or whether or not he actually understood a word on the page. In short, no one really noticed him or paid him attention. No one noticed that he had been back to this bookstore (and this corner in particular) for a little under a week now.
It was because just behind this corner, a corner formed by one wall and a bookshelf, were the adult books, enabling him to hear conversations from both sections. Mothers tended to sit on the very low benches and chat with each other as their kids played or selected books. Only a few had bothered to ask in sweet undertones, "Where's your mother?"
"Uncle said he'd come back to get me soon," was his own sweet reply, with a smile, too. Women loved little children's smiles. In this manner he was able to rest peacefully in the corner and listen to whichever conversation he wanted to hear.
He was listening for gossip about that serial killer. It was always hard to hear the women speak in low voices about it, but he managed. The FBI recently got involved in the case, so perhaps the reign of terror would end soon, the mothers hoped. It was only natural. The criminal targeted young children – a few girls in the beginning, and he continued on a trend for boys. He – the FBI seemed convinced it was a "he" – killed them and deposited the bodies after a few days. They were all right around his age, so that was probably why they had asked after his mother.
Not that he had a mother anymore, nor was he very afraid.
It was the sixth day of waiting around the store for his "Uncle" when it happened. At first, he saw a teddy bear. It was the same type that was being sold on the display tables out front, a replica of some character from a children's book. Maybe that book was even in the pile that he was circling through today. In any case, it was a teddy bear with soft light brown fur and a pastel blue bow around its neck.
"Why are you here all alone?" the man asked. The little boy blinked as he stared up at the man, a normal young guy with a teddy bear in his hand. "Where's your mother?"
"Uncle said he'd come back to get me soon. I'm going to meet him outside later." He glanced back down at the teddy bear. "I'll be fine, mister." He made sure to grin.
The young man, a nondescript young man, the type anyone might see on a street somewhere and never pay any heed, looked at the teddy bear dejectedly and placed it aside. He flashed the boy a smile, but it wasn't as good or complete.
"It isn't good to be alone nowadays, is it? I kind of worry about my little brother sometimes; he's your age and he hates things like this," said the young man, pointing to the bear. "He's very…independent; he likes being off on his own, doing his own thing."
The boy nodded attentively, seeming to have lost interest in the book, while he had never been interested in the first place. "Uncle's busy, so I have to go and do my own thing. I don't want to sit in the hotel all day and be bored."
Of course, children were very selfish. The young man laughed, as if remembering his own brother. The little boy blinked, as if he was unable to understand why the man was laughing.
"Hey mister, can you get me something?"
III. The nicest Mafia member in the world makes a bargain.
Emily Prentiss knew many things that were unsafe to know, things that were detrimental to a person's health and life, and things the public at large probably should never have to imagine. Within the FBI were innumerable amounts of people she had never heard of and most likely would never hear of in her entire life. This was a plain fact that no one really acknowledged except under these circumstances.
"Maybe I can jail you for a long time under 'child endangerment', how does that sound? Of course, that won't be counting all the other crimes you Mafia members are responsible for, but it's a start." The man speaking was an FBI agent as well, a man named Victor Talbot who was apparently acquainted with Maiza Avaro. Even in the face of this threat, the suspicious stranger remained smiling. It was difficult to read him, in all honesty.
"I would appreciate it if we find him first, and then deal with those complications afterwards. But there's actually something I want to talk to you about pertaining to this. I wouldn't have bothered coming here otherwise."
There, Emily thought. In one brief moment the man's smiling countenance had switched from amused to serious. It was a deep, cold seriousness that chilled her bones. Yes, there were many layers to the person known as Maiza Avaro, so many intricate layers that were perhaps impossible to see through unless he allowed them access. At first, he had seemed eerily suspicious, but there were far more facets to him than that.
"Is it alright for them to know?" Avaro asked, "Since I'm sure that the man behind this is an immortal. Czes and I have been searching for the rest of those like us for some years now. Although I dread saying it, I don't think that we are far off the trail. He is most likely the same as us. Otherwise, he should have found a way to return by now, another reason why I waited before coming here."
Talbot narrowed his eyes and considered the team, glancing just once at the board where the evidence had been lined up. He gave a sharp nod and turned to address them before the weight of Avaro's words had caught up with them.
"I suppose it is prudent that I tell you the truth, if what he says is true."
"You mean that he," Morgan pointed at Avaro, "is in the Mafia? That might have been good to know before."
"Not the Mafia," Avaro supplied, his voice somewhat uplifted again, "I'm part of the Camorra."
"And there's a difference…?"
It was amusing how they automatically started to turn towards Reid before he was able to begin explaining. It was also somewhat sad. "Well, the Camorra is an organization that deals with organized crime, originating in Naples, Italy. It's actually reputed to be more violent than the sect we commonly think of when referring to the Mafia. But in America, most of their power has melded into that of the other Italian Mafias, so it's actually surprising to hear that someone claims to be from that sect."
Another smile, "I'm glad you know of us."
IV. A child's dead body comes back to life.
A distinctive part of this unsub's MO was the videos he recorded of the children's deaths, which accompanied the corpse when an unsuspecting pedestrian stumbled over it (sometimes literally). The footage was a shocking snuff film depicting whatever horrendous torture this unsub decided to bestow upon that particular victim, and the FBI had quickly learnt to ban the parents from seeing it.
This time, the video actually appeared in the mailroom, addressed to the FBI. It puzzled them that the criminal would break his MO and deliver the package without the body. There was no choice but to watch the horrifying footage in full. At this point in time, the agents had already spoken with Maiza Avaro, the eccentrically normal man who claimed to have "misplaced" his ward. It seemed that Garcia was actually having trouble finding those two people on file, so they had no idea what they were getting into.
This was just a day full of strange, abnormal things, and it wasn't even over yet. Before the day was out the tides of fate had much more to entertain the agents with. For now, it was this video. The sound quality was amazingly clear for a homemade film, if it could even be called such.
"Mister, what's going on? Why are you doing this?" asked the child's voice, a young boy, perhaps no older than ten years old. The room was surprisingly well-lit; the walls were an impersonal grey and the floor clearly splotched with dark patches of what could only be blood. The boy was on the ground, hands bound behind his back, legs splayed in an uncomfortable position. His dark hair was neatly arranged on his head, skin pale, and his clothes were also rather dark for a child his age.
His voice, however, was innocent and curious, perhaps tinged with the beginning tendrils of fear, a nervous apprehension. The "mister" was absent from the video at the time, but his voice came from behind the camera, muffled by something.
"What's your name, kid?" The child's eyes wandered away for a moment, focusing on a different point other than the screen. The man behind the camera didn't move, so what could he be staring at? The boy drew his tongue across his small lips once, eyes returning to the lens.
"It's Thom-" Strangely enough, the boy halted there, as if the wind had been snatched from his lungs and the words to his own name forgotten. His eyes imperceptibly widened in fear, his body stiffening and physically moving away as if he had been jolted by a sudden shock. Eerily, he continued, as if compelled to do so under great force. He managed to spit out, "Czeslaw Meyer."
"Well, that's a…unique name. So, you want to know why you're here. It's no one's fault except for your own, of course. I didn't force you to come with me. You could have walked away like a good little boy should have."
The video flickered, flashing to a blank screen of black and white static for a moment before emerging on the same scene, this time beholding their unsub. As always, his face was obscured by a black mask as he loomed over the tiny boy.
Even stranger than the boy's name was the expression that had overtaken his features, which had been frightened in the previous scene. That was not the face of a child, not even the face of a broken child. That was the face of an adult in a child's body, hardened, resolute despite his position.
The agents watched the man as he beat the boy, but a previous victim had already been beaten to death and this unsub seemed to enjoy killing in different ways. It was far from original, but it left them in horrid suspense. The man broke his fragile bones, dashed his head against the grey floors, finally driving a knife across his chest, all within a time span of a few short minutes.
It never ceased to amaze a person how fast another's life could end. In some situations, life was even shorter and more tragic than this. However, there was one thing that these agents had never seen, and that was the restoration of life. It was a matter of magic that only children or the devout believed in anymore, but at one time there had been an entire field devoted to magic and magic in science. In this contemporary world of reason and science, magic belonged only in stories.
Maybe these people gathered together were a part of a story in the corner of a bookstore somewhere, and maybe someone interested in a good fantastical mystery was reading it at that very moment. This was impossible to predict or even imagine under these circumstances, of course. The agents were too focused on the dark liquid blood and the convoluted surface that gleamed in the bright lights.
The blood rippled. It might have been a trick of the light, a faulty camera. It shivered and began to crawl, regrouping to its original host. Flesh knit itself back together, the broken corpse twitching on the ground.
They convinced themselves that they were delirious, watching the video in reverse, until Garcia read the timestamp out loud. Indeed, the blood acted as its own entity, an existence that resided beyond the realm of believable thought. Although it was not possible, somehow it had become possible, and Avaro and Talbot's conversation was suddenly more than a fairytale.
"That hurt, mister, but I don't think it was enough. No, it's never enough for types like as you, you who revel in the misery of other human beings. I can die a hundred times over in a hundred different ways and it will never satisfy you; that I can assure you." That was not a child's voice. The man screamed louder than the not-child's dying screams, his terror in the unimaginable event that had just occurred.
The boy turned, although he was a boy only in body now, and addressed someone beyond the camera.
"I'm sorry; I don't quite remember your name. But you remembered mine, right? And you remember who Maiza is, Maiza Avaro? We've been searching for you."
Meanwhile, the man in the screen shrieked in partial fear and partial rage, lifted the boy, and tossed him somewhere out of the lens' vision. Another voice, this one deep and even, bold and unassuming at the same time, finally emerged on the scene. Yet this was still a type of voice that might have belonged to a nondescript man, a voice no one would remember.
"You're an idiot. I only worked with you because you are an idiot, but I didn't think you were that stupid. You saw it once and that's enough, isn't it? The kid won't die no matter what you do to him. In fact, when he gets free, he may even decide to take revenge equivalent to what you have dealt him. That would be quite a show. But I'll have to ask you to stop now."
The video ended.
V. Firo receives a call that has been vastly misinterpreted.
"You have a child now!" This first voice was that of Isaac Dian, the man who was unfortunately in charge of the household until Firo returned from work. He had no idea why the man was in charge of his house in particular, instead of his neighbor's or one of their other acquaintance's homes when the man lived with his lover in an apartment in Manhattan. All he knew was that they had assumed guard duty even after their "babysitting" services were no longer needed.
"Excuse me, I have what?" This utterly confused poor Firo, who had claimed to be unintelligent and slow on quite a few occasions. While he muttered into the phone receiver, he shifted to the front of the bookstore and flipped the open sign to a closed sign. Whenever these two called, it usually meant a distraction that might last ten minutes to a half hour. He really couldn't afford to have the placed ransacked by hoodlums under his watch.
Not that the crimes nowadays were anything like before. They were rather tame now, like a domesticated cat, still wild enough to cause the occasional spurts of trouble before calming again.
"Why didn't you and Ennis tell us?" cried Isaac's voice.
"Yes, why didn't you tell us?" his lover, Miria echoed. They never changed. Firo sighed and leaned against a sturdy bookcase, pushing his glasses further up the bridge of his nose. Might as well let them expend all of that extra energy while he wondered just what they were talking about. He and Ennis…well, it had taken them years just to marry.
"Alright, I'm pretty sure I didn't have a kid and not notice it, so slow down and please tell me what happened from the beginning." Although, Firo realized after he finished speaking, "the beginning" was also a horrible place to start. That could begin anywhere and then he would have spent his entire afternoon listening to two pigeons rambling over the phone. He hastily amended himself, "Who told you that we had a kid?"
"The FBI called! We thought they were going to get us for all those robberies and deaths we caused! But then I remembered this is your house and thought they were going to arrest you! But it turns out that Mr. Maiza is over there and they were saying that he lost your child!"
Of course these two would consider the possibility of the FBI catching them for crimes committed in the 1930s, even when answering the phone in someone else's house. Firo shook his head silently and considered the relevant information.
A child plus Maiza, one that the FBI thought belonged to Ennis and he could only mean Czes. Maybe the FBI had their facts wrong or Maiza had simply used a different cover story, but no matter. How could Maiza lose Czes? To begin with, Maiza was the most responsible person (regardless of longevity) that Firo had ever met, and he had taken a liking to the (younger looking) immortal. He would never "lose" him somewhere and resort to the FBI to help. They did try to prevent the higher authorities from noticing them on a normal day.
Czes would never get lost in the first place. Even when he had been guaranteed a room and a bed of his own in their house in Manhattan, he had a tendency to wander. It wasn't as if they could control where the boy went, because he wasn't a boy and he was a few centuries older than them. He always came back. What was more, he was much more sensitive to their worries than before. He usually dropped a note before leaving at least.
It had taken Firo quite some time to process this, given the limited information Isaac had told him. It made more sense now, so he was able to explain to the couple that he didn't have a child with Ennis and that it was really Czes the FBI had been talking about, which erupted into another spiel. They were fond of the little immortal and went hysterical, forgetting that they were much more incompetent than he was.
In the end, Firo managed to contact the FBI and Ennis by the end of the day, somehow. Of course, it was impossible for him to abandon his post at the bookstore and as the conta è oro, but he trusted Maiza and they did need to maintain some semblance of normalcy. How much of that was intact after the FBI called his house, he didn't know and wasn't sure he wanted to know.
• This is technically a Criminal Minds/Baccano! crossover, but I wanted it to get some exposure in this section before moving it. For Criminal Minds readers: Baccano! is a series of light novels and an anime/manga by Ryogo Narita. It tells the story of a large cast of characters in Prohibition-era America with seemingly unconnected stories that eventually overlap and intertwine as the tale jumps from past to present to the further past to the future. (There are a few timelines: 1711, 1930, 1931, 1932, 2002, etc...)
• This was an extremely experimental writing style for me. I usually am not strong in dialogue or this confusing timeline of events. Hopefully it wasn't too confusing. It should clear up if you stick it through and read the rest. (as with Baccano! the story makes sense as you go) You probably don't need to know much about the Baccano characters, except that some of them are immortal, meaning they live forever. :) Basically.
• conta è oro is described as the bookkeeper who manages accounts by the translators of the light novels. The Camorra (from Naples) are real and function somewhat like the Mafia (from Sicily). I kind of skimmed over the gory scene because I really do not want to spend more time than completely necessary thinking of ways to kill a poor little child.