Chapter One

Last Summer

The Gothic shadow of the five hundred year-old cathedral stabbed across the Grote Markt, its spire penetrating the window of the Cafe den Engel where Tyler Oakland sat. It was only his second day in Antwerp, but as he sat there sipping a draught bolleke, he felt like a true local having his daily glass.

Lost in the moment, he watched as dozens of flags rippled from the windows of the Renaissance-era City Hall. They folded back on themselves and snapped sharply in the warm gusts that rushed across the facades of the stepped-gable guild houses lining the market square. 

In the center, a bronze Silvius Brabo was taking a running start to hurl the hand of a foe into the Scheldt River, four blocks to the west.  

Legend had it that a giant named Druon Antigoon would demand a toll from those who wanted to pass through Antwerp on the river. If anyone refused payment, Druon the Giant would cut off the poor soul’s hand and throw it into the river. Some say that the city’s name came from the Dutch hand werpen, meaning roughly ‘to shed, or throw, a hand.’

Brabo, a Roman soldier, gave the giant a taste of his own medicine. For  his efforts in ending the giant’s reign of terror, he was now immortalized by the statue in the market square. 

Tyler smirked to himself as he thought of the myth, which he’d read on a Wikipedia site on the flight from London, the third and final leg of his long trip from Tucson. 

By way of Dulles. 

Virginia. 

There was nothing cathartic in releasing the dark irony that washed over him. His own father, a giant in Tyler’s youthful eyes, ruled the waters of the far-away Rappahannock from his piece-of-shit fiberglass Sabre Runabout Classic. Funny, though, Tyler could only remember one time when he saw his father actually in the dark-olive water of the Virginia river. He had figuratively and physically tried to lend his son a hand, but he, too, suffered a legend-ending fate as the result.  

That one time.