Chapter 1

First off, don’t get the idea that I think I’m some sort of godlike personage. I’m not the least bit godlike on the personal level, and of that I remain well-aware.

My problem isn’t anything along those lines. It’s more like indecision, uncertainty, guilt, and angst. I don’t think God, or anybody else who purports to be godlike, would ever suffer from those kinds of disabilities.

But, okay, the reasons why I suffer from indecision, uncertainty (etc.) are closely related to the “God” thing.

Why?

Well, because a while back I discovered that I do, indeed, have some abilities that are anything but ordinary. They are, in a limited but very important way, godlike.

And that can be scary as hell, I’ll tell you.

So, okay, I’ll just spit it out and you can take it for what it’s worth. You’re going to be skeptical. I don’t care. Hell, I was skeptical myself when I first noticed this thing. Unfortunately, I’m skeptical no longer. It’s for real. Hence, the angst.

I’m proud, actually, that I’ve still got some mixed feelings about this. I think a lot of people would just enjoy the hell out of it, if they had this particular power. Well, I enjoy it, too. I wouldn’t try to kid you and say that I’d like to give up this ability I have, and just go back to being a normal, everyday person.

I enjoy it – perverse though that may be – but I also have been fretting over it plenty. I guess that’s natural enough.

You see, I can kill people. And I have.

That doesn’t exactly make me historically unique among humans, I know. Half our literature is taken up with stories, real or imagined, about people who have killed other people – sometimes by the carload.

The difference in my case is pretty significant, though. I can kill people without so much as laying eyes on them.

The way I first discovered this is simple. I killed a guy unintentionally. There was this guy whose name was in all the papers. He’d swindled hundreds of investors out of their money in a giant Ponzi scheme. It was a lot like that guy in New York, Bernie Madoff: the one who was in the news a few years back for running the biggest Ponzi scheme in history.

But one of the side effects of the Madoff scandal had been closer scrutiny, in financial markets worldwide, of other investment gurus who had enjoyed unusual success in the often-declining stock markets.

Sure enough, the authorities in Western Europe found a guy –- it was a small group of guys, actually –- who made Madoff seem like a jaywalker by comparison. The economic chaos that has been caused by this group’s enormous scam is expected to contribute mightily to the long-term decline of the world economy that is already well underway.

The small group of master criminals had been led by this one man -– Fernandino Giancana. His name sounded like a Mafia hood, but in fact he had been, for three decades, a highly respected Italian businessman. Giancana was active in financial circles all over Europe and eastward to the countries of the former Soviet Union.

Now he was in disgrace, and in jail, and his several colleagues in the conspiracy were all singing like Pavarotti in an effort to escape the consequences of their own illegalities -- while foisting as much of the blame as possible on Giancana.

My relationship to all of this was as abstract as was that of most everyday people in America and Europe. Which is to say, I had no relationship to it at all. My feeble investment portfolio was not, so far as I could determine, even indirectly affected by anything Giancana and his little band of brothers had done. I was no poorer (and certainly no richer) as a result of his far-reaching forays into white-collar criminality.

But, as in the case of Madoff earlier, I read the news accounts, tsk-tsked with the best of them, and hoped that “they” (meaning the administrators of the appropriate criminal justice system) would put this bastard away for good.

Casually--just in passing--I remember wishing that the old fucker would fall down a concrete stairwell at his southern Italian prison and, after a few hours of excruciating pain, die in agony. My wish, I knew, would do nothing to restore the hundreds of millions of Euros this bastard had extracted from his fellow citizens from Sicily to St. Petersburg. All the same, it would be an example of simple justice.

So the next morning, reading the on-line edition of the New York Times, what do I see but an article reporting that the notorious accused swindler, Fernandino Giancana, had died following a stairwell accident at his prison facility south of Naples.