The Immortality Plot

The Immortality Plot - chapter 6

Lucius Gynt awoke early with the watery New York sun filtering through the slatted blinds of his Yorkville penthouse apartment. As usual when he opened his eyes after sleep he was filled, almost to the point of being overcome with elation, with the excitement of just being Lucius Gynt for one more day. In a display of true narcissism, his first and only thought was about himself.

He knew he was beautiful. He didn’t have to be told, although he accepted compliments as though by right. And he knew he was different. He knew there was no one in existence quite like Lucius Gynt. This sense of his own uniqueness pleased and satisfied him. He started each day with a personal homage to himself. He stretched languorously on his waterbed and thrilled to the sensuous shiver of the silk sheets that covered his slim but well-built body.

The apartment was decorated in pink and saffron with soft furnishings, garish wall coverings and, what Gynt thought of as, avant-garde art discoveries that included some minimalist sculptures and examples of art-deco objets d’art.

He had hung a couple of his own works bathed in subdued lighting. One day the art world would discover him. It was only a matter of time.

Fluffy rugs and mats were strewn around the timbered floor of the large, open space, from the center of which a cast iron spiral staircase wound its way up to a railed gallery that circled three sides of the room. Large warehouse windows gave the apartment a light and airy feel.

In one corner of the room space was stacked Gynt’s mountainous collection of teddy bears, their button eyes staring sightlessly from mounds of fur and fabric, their ears pricked listening for the sound of their master’s voice.

Gynt’s bears were his only really true friends. They knew how special he was and how lucky they were to be sharing their lives with him. Gynt consulted them frequently, especially about the details and plans for his special assignments. They were very seldom wrong and were particularly good at reminding him if he had forgotten some very important, minor aspect of a mission. Lucius Gynt thought of himself as a perfectionist, a consummate master of his trade.

In a corner of an adjacent room stood the accoutrements of his profession. Locked pull out drawers from a sideboard housed his weaponry. A narrow closet was home to his clinical and pristine work wear and by the side of the closet was a very small but purpose designed, free-standing cryogenic cabinet. Inside this, Gynt created and preserved his very special weapons.

All in all, life was so good to Lucius Gynt, he thought, as he slowly rose from his bed. As usual, his first port of call before taking his morning leak and conducting his careful ablutions was to stand in front of his floor-to-ceiling mirror and examine himself minutely.

What he saw pleased him. His body was tall, well honed and lightly tanned. He carried no spare flesh and he was in perfect proportion. Of particular note were the main tools of his trade. His hands were exceptionally powerful. They had been trained to perfection and turned into perfect killing machines. He could, and often did, crack walnuts in the palm of one hand and grind the shells into small particles. He owed this skill to his racial background and his unusual past life. One of the reasons he liked living in the relatively innocuous middle class neighborhood of Yorkville was its past history as an area settled by Hungarian and German immigrants.

Gynt’s father had been Hungarian and his mother Korean. This gave him a slightly oriental appearance with a central European physical legacy. Most of his life he had been shunted around the world but had his spent formative years in Korea. His father ran a shady business exporting dubious South East Asian artifacts. Lucius Gynt’s life on the streets had been a hard education. It was kill or be killed. His father largely ignored his son, apart from the tortuous sexual abuse he had inflicted on him when drunk and before beating his mother. In order to give young Lucius, real name Li, a fighting chance of survival she enrolled him in a private Hapkido school and paid for his tuition with her most precious possession, her body.