Giordano returned home to his precinct; he told Chief Schmidt his trip was eye-opening, but he still needed solid leads. The Chief advised him to keep plugging. Giordano was not one to give up easily. He returned to his office and did what any hard-boiled detective in his shoes would do—brewed himself a pot of hot coffee. And even though he had preground the beans before he left, and they had gone stale in his absence, it didn’t matter; stale coffee was merely a bitter reminder of the arduous task ahead.
Giordano determined he couldn’t do it alone; he needed allies, fellow travelers who understood that the essence of storytelling was the human connection, the sacred contract between the writer and the reader. He reached for his antiquated rotary phone and dialed a number of some contacts he made during his time at NYU in Greenwich Village—a network of intellectuals, writers, poets, musicians, critics, philosophers, and espresso drinkers who still believed in the power of the written word.
Giordano got New York’s foremost intellectual, Norm Minsky, on the line. No one remembered how he came by the title of New York’s foremost intellectual; everyone just agreed he was.
“Professor Minsky, it’s Detective Philly Giordano. We’ve got a killer on the loose. Storytelling is dead. It may be an individual, but more likely, an underworld organization bent on stigmatizing an entire generation. You guys know the ins and outs. What have you heard?”
“Nonfiction is the new fiction, Detective,” Minsky said, his voice tinged with a gravitas that belied his years. “Where have you been? That and history’s been rewritten. It may have been full of lies in the first place. And there ain’t even nothing you or anyone else can do about it. Oh, and get yourself an iPhone like everyone else has. ’Cause no one reads anything but their social media feeds.”
As he hung up the phone, Giordano felt a strange despair. “There ain’t even nothing you or anyone else can do about it?” Even proper English looked like it was doomed. If they could dumb down a towering intellectual like Norm Minsky, who knows where they would stop? Giordano thought the battle ahead was genuinely daunting, but it was a battle worth fighting. Ultimately, what was at stake was not just the future of literature but intellectual expression and the soul of humanity. If nonfiction is the new fiction, Giordano contemplated, what becomes of storytelling? What happens to the grand tapestry of human imagination, woven over millennia by poets, playwrights, and novelists?
The answer, he realized, is both unsettling and liberating. In a world where reality often outpaced the wildest flights of imagination, where the headlines read like dystopian novels and social media feeds resembled postmodern pastiches, nonfiction had become the arena where the human drama unfolds in all its messy complexity. It’s where the existential dilemmas of our time—identity, truth, power—are played out in real time, with real stakes.
Chief Schimdt called Philly into his office. “We got a tip from an informant. Name’s Percival Maddox, jazz musician; he did some time at Rikers on a heroin rap and says he might know something.”
“Percival Maddox? Plays the sax?”
“You know him?”
“Sure, I’ve heard of him. Used to make the rounds on the circuit.”
“Be-bop?”
“Nah, it was more syncopation. Experimental.”
“That’s the trouble with the world today. Everyone’s experimenting. Anyway, I don’t know what he knows, but …”
“I’ll track him down, Chief.”
“You won’t have to. I got his address.”
The address Schmidt gave Giordano led him to a nightclub on West Third Street called the Village Purple Onion. The joint was owned by Mike and Joe, brothers whom Giordano used to pal around with after Sunday Mass at Our Lady of Pompeii.
“Long time no see, Philly,” Mike said, answering the club door.
“How’s Joe doin’?” Giordano replied, shaking Mike’s hand.
“He’s in debt as always. I hear you’re a big-shot detective these days.”
“Pays the bills. I’m here to talk to Percival.”
“Sure, he’s in the back.”
Percival Maddox had fallen on hard times since his release from Rikers; he couldn’t find work other than mopping floors and washing dishes. He was a sweetheart of a man who spoke with a smoky drawl from down New Orleans, where he learned to play the saxophone with the best jazz ensembles anywhere. He came to New York to cut a record and make it big before it all came tumbling down.
“I know who kilt storytellin’,” Percival started, “the same sonavabitches who kilt jazz. That’s right! You wanna talk about the most innovative, fluid, spontaneous, and combustible music ever conceived on God’s green Earth? Life at its core is improvisational, such as jazz! Charlie Parker, Coltrane, Bird, Monk, Lester Young! What we got now? Folk ballads? Man, that ain’t music! Sound like a bunch’a cry babies crawled up in a fetal position moanin’ to they mamas! See, the world ain’t no place for the avant-garde. That’s why they kilt jazz!”
“Who did it?” Giordano pleaded.
“Everyone. They all complicit! You wanna find who kilt storytellin’, you start right dere, Mister!” Percival sobbed.
Giordano took a moment to process the weight of Maddox’s lament. It wasn’t just one killer—it was death by a thousand compromises. Maddox looked at the Detective with hollow eyes. “There’s a place, though. A place where real storytellin’ still breathes—barely. But I’m warnin’ ya, man—it’s dangerous.”
Maddox scrawled an address on a napkin: Lower East Side—The Written Word Speakeasy.
The Written Word Speakeasy was housed in a decaying brownstone down on the Bowery, its unassuming exterior masking a sanctum dedicated to literature. Inside, the air was thick with pipe smoke and prose. Shelves lined the walls, holding volumes by Steinbeck, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald. Jazz played softly from an antique record player. Giordano felt as though he’d stumbled into Eden after the Fall.
The speakeasy’s patrons, a mix of literary purists and revolutionaries, murmured in reverent tones. A man in wire-rimmed glasses quoted The Great Gatsby: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness.”
Giordano surveyed the scene. It was a haven—but also a target.
That’s when he heard it—the metallic click of a timer.
“Get out!” he shouted, instinct firing before reason could catch up.
The explosion ripped through the room, sending shelves, pages, and people flying. Fitzgerald’s words disintegrated into ash. The scent of burning leather and paper filled the air. Giordano dragged a coughing poet toward the exit as flames consumed the works of genius.
Once outside, he collapsed on the pavement, coughing up dust and dread. In the distance, sirens wailed, impotent against the inferno. The speakeasy—the last bastion of pure storytelling—was gone.
Giordano took off in the direction of the nearest train, his trench coat billowing like a war-torn flag in retreat. As he pushed past rubberneckers craning their necks to get a glimpse of the speakeasy’s wreckage, a pair of uniformed cops intercepted him near the edge of the caution tape.
"Detective, what the hell happened in there?" one of them asked, his voice taut with shock.
Giordano pulled a cigarette from his pocket, lit it with shaking fingers, and took a long drag. "What happened?" he repeated bitterly. "Somebody decided storytelling wasn’t just obsolete—it was dangerous. And they’re not content to kill it quietly."
The officer scribbled something in his notepad, but Giordano wasn’t in the mood to educate the city’s finest on the stakes of cultural warfare. "Write this down," he said flatly. "Start looking for who benefits when people stop reading. Follow the paper trails. Somebody’s funding this crusade against imagination."
The officer exchanged a worried glance with his partner, but Giordano didn’t wait for a response. He tossed the cigarette to the curb, and continued toward the subway entrance. He passed a nearby newsstand, grabbed an afternoon paper, and dropped a crumpled bill on the counter without waiting for change.
The flight of stairs leading to the subway seemed longer than usual. Giordano reached the platform just as a train screamed into the station, its brakes shrieking like a B-flat wail from Maddox's saxophone. The doors opened with a pneumatic gasp, and Giordano stepped into the metal box filled with passengers glued to their phones. Their faces glowed with the cold, bluish light of headlines and memes—modern hieroglyphics of a civilization too busy scrolling to notice its collapse.
He sank into an empty seat, the subway lurching forward as Maddox’s words kept riffing in his brain: “Everyone’s complicit.”
The memory of that smoky drawl unsettled him. Maddox wasn’t wrong—at least, not entirely. The problem wasn’t just the suits in boardrooms who commodified art until it was unrecognizable. It was the readers who stopped searching for complexity, the listeners who traded Monk’s dissonance for Spotify playlists labeled "Chill Vibes." Stories, like jazz, needed friction, risk, and spontaneity. And yet, somehow, they’d been reduced to background noise.
The subway rumbled beneath the city, its rhythmic clatter echoing the beats of Giordano’s frustration. The parallel was too clear to ignore—jazz and fiction, both reduced to artifacts for curated nostalgia and corporate curation. Miles Davis didn’t curate. Faulkner didn’t write to go viral. They created to disturb, to provoke, to make people feel alive. And in doing so, they’d made themselves targets.
The train jolted to a stop at the next station, the lurch snapping Giordano out of his spiraling thoughts. He stared at the chipped mosaic tiles. For a moment, he imagined the tiles reshaping into words, fragments of wisdom left behind like breadcrumbs from authors who knew that truth never came easy. “The truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable,” sneered Sinclair Lewis. Just above that, he could almost see Fitzgerald’s warning, “Show me a hero, and I’ll write you a tragedy.”
The pieces fit together like clues in a labyrinth. Stories weren’t killed outright—they were suffocated slowly, smothered by complacency, greed, and distraction. The subway doors hissed shut, and the train surged forward, the hum beneath his feet vibrating like the muted heartbeat of something that refused to die. Giordano shut his eyes, Maddox’s smoky drawl echoing in his mind as he braced for whatever came next. If stories were fading into ash, it was up to him to sift through the ruin and find the embers before they went cold. The city blurred past the windows as he headed toward the precinct, toward answers—or, more likely, toward the next explosion waiting to silence something beautiful.
end of part three
© Michael Arturo 2025
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Welcome to Michael’s Newsletter. Writer of contemporary political/social commentary, parodies, parables, satire. Michael was born and raised in New York City and has a background in theater and film. His plays have been staged in New York, London, Boston, and Los Angeles.
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