American Adventure: My Uncle is Don Quixote

The thick, solid wood door closed behind Victor. He turned his head to look at the restless Vincent and Blake.

"What’s the job this time?" he said calmly. "Am I cleaning up a scene, or something else?"

Victor was one of the New York underworld’s renowned "cleaners." He was a former forensics expert for the New York City Police Department’s major crimes unit, but was later investigated by internal affairs for bribery and fabricating evidence.

After leaving the police force, he found a second spring for his career, relying on his sharp investigative instincts and counter-surveillance skills.

Making bodies disappear while stuffing his pockets with cash-filled sacks.

"Victor, you’re finally here," Blake said, immediately standing up. "Come and take a look at this damned thing!"

Victor said nothing. Expressionless, he placed two heavy Pelican waterproof cases on the carpet, took off his trench coat, and put on two layers of medical-grade nitrile gloves.

"Same rules as always. Ten thousand USD for the house call, another twenty thousand for the conclusion," he said. "Whether I’m cleaning a scene or a body, or not, these are the fees."

"No problem," Vincent said, observing the situation outside through the crack in the door. "As long as you can reach a conclusion, we’ll even give you a hundred thousand."

Victor nodded, pulling a high-intensity ultraviolet lamp and a portable spectrometer from his case and placing them on the table.

"Excuse me, gentlemen," he muttered, pushing past Blake’s thick waist. "If you’ve got nothing better to do, why don’t you go out for a coffee?"

He first used a special cotton swab to dip into a reagent, carefully applying it to the broken metal hinges and deformed edges before inserting the swab into the portable spectrometer.

Next, he turned off the office’s overhead lights, switched on the UV strobe light, put on a pair of filter glasses, and sprinkled some powder on the four indentations at the edge of the door panel.

"Hmm..." he mused, clicking his tongue in wonder as he examined it. "Interesting. Very interesting."

"What’s so interesting?" Blake asked impatiently.

"If a person did this, their gloves would have left traces of rubber or shed fibers on the surface," Victor said unhurriedly. "If it was bare hands, there should be skin flakes, oils, or even squeezed-out blood."

"And what does that mean?"

"It means that based on the current evidence, this doesn’t look like something a normal human being left behind," Victor said, watching the spectrometer’s green light. "But that’s where it gets interesting. There’s no chemical reaction on the safe door either, which means liquid nitrogen embrittlement or a thermite cut are both out of the question."

Finally, he took out a macro lens and pressed it against the finger marks on the edge of the door panel to examine them closely.

Vincent and Blake both held their breath, waiting for Victor’s final conclusion, hoping this professional they had always trusted could offer a different perspective.

"Hmm... no auxiliary anchor points from mechanical clamps, either," he stated his final conclusion. "My conclusion is: I don’t know."

"You don’t know?" Blake looked like he was about to explode. "You come in here acting all professional, and your final conclusion is that you don’t know?"

Victor gave a noncommittal shrug, took off his goggles, and placed his gloves into a dustproof bag.

"No thermodynamic or chemical residue, no mechanical stress, no biological traces," he said. "Honestly, I just don’t know."

"I won’t charge you the twenty thousand USD for the conclusion," he said, looking at Vincent and Blake. "This time, I’ll only take the ten thousand USD for the house call."

"Is this about a few tens of thousands of fucking dollars?!" Blake roared. "Can’t you try a little harder? Be more serious!"

"Easy, Blake," Vincent said, stopping Blake from rushing forward. "Wait, Victor, if you can’t reach a conclusion, could it be a problem with your portable equipment? Or maybe a new criminal technique?"

"Both are possible, I suppose," Victor said, picking up his two cases and putting on his trench coat. "But I don’t think it’s very likely."

’What a strange man...’

Vincent rubbed the bridge of his nose. "In that case, can you forget about your professional analysis for a moment and give us a theory based on your gut instinct?"

Victor stopped, paused for a moment, and rubbed his chin. He turned back to carefully study the deformed door panel.

"If you want my conclusion based on gut instinct," he said, "then yesterday, some... thing... came here. It was probably bald, since no hair was left at the scene, or was wearing something on its head. Based on the size of the handprints, it was likely over six-foot-three tall."

"It somehow got into your office, then with its hands like this"—he mimed the posture—"it grabbed the door panel and just... twisted it open. The immense force put the metal hinges under so much tension that they snapped. Then it took what was inside and vanished."

"The only person I can think of," he shrugged, "who could do something like that..."

"Who? Spit it out."

"Spider-Man," he said. "Super strong, wears the Spider-Man suit, came in through the window, tore open the safe, and then swung away on a web. He lives in Brooklyn, too, which isn’t far from here."

A silence fell, broken only by Victor’s soft chuckle.

But seeing the ashen faces of Vincent and Blake, his own expression straightened. He clicked his tongue, and looking slightly bored, picked up his waterproof cases again and turned to leave the office.

He wasn’t worried about Blake and Vincent skipping out on the bill. After all, he was a cleaner, and nobody wanted to get on the bad side of a professional cleaner.

As for Blake and Vincent’s troubles, he was just a cleaner. He had no desire to get involved, nor was it his business to meddle.

Only Blake and Vincent were left at the scene, staring blankly at each other.

"So what do we do now?" Blake said. "Should we get a second opinion? I think Victor’s fried his brain on drugs."

"That’s not important," Vincent sighed. "Right now, we need to figure out what to do about the missing ledger."

"My plan is to not call the cops, and to get out of the country to lie low for a while. What do you think?"

"I was thinking the same thing."

Just four hours later, in the private terminal of Kennedy International Airport, a pale-faced Blake and Vincent sat on a leather sofa in the waiting lounge. At their feet were several travel bags hastily stuffed with cash, passports, and bearer bonds.

"What the hell is even happening? We worked our asses off for ten years, and now because of some monster who can tear through steel plate with his bare hands, we have to run to Costa Rica like dogs with their tails between their legs?" Vincent bit his thumbnail, his leg shaking nervously.

"Stop complaining. We’ll be lucky to get out of this with our lives," Blake said in a low voice, warily watching the airliner outside undergoing pre-flight checks. "You know how many big shots are tied to that ledger. Once its contents see the light of day, the first thing they’ll do is chop us up and feed us to the pigs. They’ll never give us a chance to testify."

"God help us. I hope whoever took the ledger contacts us and just tries to extort us privately," Vincent groaned. "I hope he’s like the Hulk and can’t understand what’s in the damn thing..."

However, God clearly didn’t hear his prayers. Or perhaps God agreed that they deserved to die.

「A few days later, on an ordinary Wednesday morning.」

On Reddit, North America’s largest online community, a long post appeared in a section called "Confessions":

"This is a suicide note, and also a declaration of revenge: How Onyx United Building destroyed me and my family (with complete double-entry ledgers attached)"

The poster claimed to be the heir to a decades-old, established Italian supplier of construction materials.

Two years ago, he had brought his family’s capital into the United States of America’s market, only to be entrapped by a New York company called Onyx United Building. They were set up with a series of breach-of-contract penalties, which not only blocked their acceptance permits but also allowed Onyx to forcibly seize tens of millions of USD worth of their stone and rebar, ultimately bankrupting his family’s business and leaving them with massive debts.

"I spent two full years, exhausted my family’s fortune, and hired the best private investigators and hackers to finally obtain this ledger that can send them all to Hell. Today, I am making it public. I don’t ask for justice. I only want Onyx and the protectors behind them to be destroyed together."

At the very bottom of the post was an encrypted cloud drive link to a 3GB file containing hundreds of high-definition scans of the ledger’s pages.

At first, everyone thought it was just a prank.

It wasn’t until someone bored enough and with an understanding of accounting downloaded the files and cross-referenced a few entries that people started to realize something was very wrong.

This was definitely not something one person had cooked up for their own amusement. This was a nuclear bomb dropped on New York.

The editors-in-chief of every major media outlet—the New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, FOX News, and more—all but kicked down the doors of their respective newsrooms at virtually the same time. Like mad dogs, they ordered all their reporters to immediately drop their other stories and dig into this leaked ledger with everything they had.

On that calm Wednesday afternoon in late November, panic spread like a cold front through the circles of New York’s rich and powerful.

The list of names, unraveled piece by piece by netizens and the media, could be called New York’s most star-studded criminal lineup of the year.

Among the entries were records of over 1.8 million USD in donations to Senator Edward Ross through five offshore shell companies. In return, he had forced through an environmental exemption bill that favored Onyx’s monopoly on the development of land in Manhattan’s underground. But a great many other big shots were implicated as well.

Allen Fitch, a member of the Manhattan Urban Planning Committee, took annual ski vacations to Aspen and chartered yachts in the Caribbean Sea. In return, he had approved as many as 17 fraudulent construction permits for Onyx.

A deputy chief of a New York City Police Department precinct, a senior officer of the New York construction union... a long list of names. But in the end, sharp-eyed reporters dug up the biggest fish of all:

The Manhattan Art Center!

As a famous cultural project in recent years by the mega-rich Mellon Family—a dynasty stretching back nearly 200 years—the ledger brazenly exposed how the project’s director, Charles Mellon, had colluded with Onyx.

Cooked books and exorbitant kickbacks in collusion with a famous designer, material invoices priced at four times the market rate, fireproofing layers that failed to meet thickness standards, and severely falsified load-bearing structures. In the end, over one hundred million USD in assets and project funds had all flowed into Charles Mellon’s private account in the Cayman Islands.

The entire internet, the media, and the public all went insane.

Some things are small matters until they’re brought into the open; once they are, even a mountain of weight can’t hold them down.

The Mellon Family was about to go insane, too.