Chapter 1
FAUST IN BROOKLYN
EDDIE was seated at the small wooden desk in his room, a table lamp lighting its surface. He had lived in the room, with the same furniture, since grammar school and the ten-by-twelve-foot room still looked like the home of a very neat sixth-grader. Nothing was out of place. His legs, clad in black pants, barely fit under the tiny desk, which faced the white wall. To his right was a long, low chest of red drawers that still had his Boy Scout stickers stuck onto the front.
Eddie was twenty-two years old and only left his room for a few hours each night. He had no job, no wife or girlfriend. He had no friends. He had only his work.
Open before him was one of his most prized possessions, a large piece of heavy paper with white dots and lines on a huge black circle--a star chart of the constellations in the heavens.
Framed by black, arched brows, his brown eyes were focused on the star map, eyeing the white spots and faint lines that connected them into the ghostly, floating figures of the zodiac. Eddie's black T-shirt and pants made his untanned olive skin seem lighter than it was. His curly black hair was pulled tight behind his head into a small ponytail and gathered with multicolored rubber bands. A full black mustache and rough half-growth of beard coveredhalf of the smooth skin of his boyish, handsome face, which bore an intense, angry expression.
One more time, he spun the dark circle of sky, until he was looking at the stars and constellations for that night after midnight, May 31, 1990. Orion the Hunter and the Pleiades--the Seven Sisters--were safely below the horizon but Leo the Lion was loose in the sky.
Good. Perfect.
On the desktop, over the star chart, Eddie carefully spread out his school supplies--a blue ballpoint pen, a green felt-tipped pen, white paper, a compass, and a ruler--as if he were beginning his geometry homework. Nearby, wrapped in a piece of paper, sat three large pebbles.
He pulled on a pair of black leather gloves. From a plastic package, he removed a sheet of white looseleaf paper with five punched holes down the left margin. School paper. Using the compass and pens, he carefully drew and wrote his message on the page.
When he was finished, he folded the paper several times around the stones and drew something on the outside. Then he wrapped the package in another sheet of paper. He took off his gloves and put most of his writing supplies away into their drawer, arranging the pens and compass in an orderly row. He left out one green felt-tipped pen.
Eddie's drawers were very neat. All of his clothes and books and papers and toys were stacked and aligned properly, the same way every time, with the corners of some things pointing to specific letters or spots on the object below. Only his bureau was locked, but it didn't matter. If anyone ever went through the books or magazines in his closets or his files, he would know because they could never replace them exactly. The booby-trapped stack was a trick he had learned while studying to be a secret operative.
His dream of being a U.S. Army Special Forces commando never came true because he was an only son. Theywould not take him into the army and give him a real gun of his own--because he had failed their tests and because his mother did not want to be left alone. But just because Eddie had to stay with his mother in East New York, Brooklyn, one of the most crime-plagued and drug-infested neighborhoods in the city, didn't mean he couldn't be a commando. It certainly didn't mean he would cease his quest for knowledge, especially if it was forbidden or hidden.
He turned and glanced at the red numbers of his clock radio, 12:02 A.M. It was time. He stood, turned around, and walked a few steps to a wrought-iron and wood table that held a twelve-inch color television. On a low shelf below the televison sat a cedar box emblazoned with a cross inside a circle. Eddie opened the casketlike box and removed the white leather family Bible. Numerous mass cards from funerals Eddie had attended, as well as slips of paper, were used as bookmarks and protruded past the gilt-edged pages.
On the wall above the TV hung a church calendar, with a bow of dried palm fronds received in church on Palm Sunday tucked into the top. To the right of the calendar was another set of four shelves, which contained more religious materials. A second Bible in Spanish belonged to Eddie's mother, but he used it often. Several religious medals were also displayed, including a commemorative Pope Paul bronze medallion.
In a place of honor, on top of the Spanish Bible, was a red five-by-seven-inch paperback book, The 6th and 7th Books of Moses, or Moses' Magical Spirit Art. The cover featured an engraving of Michelangelo's marble sculpture of the prophet Moses. In this version, the two horns on Moses' head were very prominent and devil-like and the Hebrew holy man stared back with sorcerer's eyes.
The book was filled with several works on white magic and black magic and offered the sorcerer's apprentice page after page of magic charms, cabalistic circles, and secretincantations to call up spirits eager to do his bidding. A treatise from 1850 on astrological influences and magical cures stated that the ancients believed that "the heavenly bodies were gifted with life and that they, being endowed with higher powers, could exercise an influence upon man by means of mysterious magical influences, could regulate his temperament, his disposition and his term of life." One part of the book was devoted to necromancy, the art of speaking to the dead in order to predict the future and grant wishes. There were complete instructions, some by the legendary magician Faust himself, on how to conjure up demons like Mephistopheles--the devil. Another section was devoted to the magical use of the Psalms of the Bible, which, combined with certain arcane rituals, would secure all manner of help for the user, it said. Small scraps of paper had been used to mark certain pages, and important rituals had been circled or marked. The white pages were stained in several places with oils and what appeared to be blood.
Eddie took his Moses book off the shelf and placed it, along with the white Bible, on the desk. He sat down and opened the Moses book to page 161, where he had left a clean piece of paper as a bookmark. The name "Faust" had been scribbled in the margin of the book next to a passage on the magical use of one of the Psalms:
You should write the 83rd Psalm properly, upon pure parchment, and suspend it around your neck, and by so doing you will abide safely in war, avoiding defeat and captivity. If you should, however, be overcome, your captors will not harm you, for even in captivity no harm can befall you.
Eddie opened the white Bible to the 83rd Psalm, picked up a green felt-tipped pen, and carefully began to copy the words of the Psalm onto the loose piece of paper. He smiled to himself as he copied the line about the enemiesof the Lord that "have taken crafty counsel against thy Hidden Ones." Like Eddie. The words of the Psalm implored God to make the enemies perish and become "as dung for the earth." When Eddie had finished, he poked two holes in the top of the paper and threaded a black shoelace through it and hung the talisman around his neck.
He stood and walked past the television to the corner of his room, to his cabinet of curiosities, a dark walnut bureau with two large doors. He unlocked it with a key from his pants pocket and pulled open the left door. Inside, hanging from a bar near the top, were Eddie's night clothes, including a black jacket, his maroon Omega beret, and other dark apparel, all in proper size order. Below...
