Sewer, Gas and Electric

by Matt Ruff

  Gant shrugged. “Vanna can be harsh sometimes, but that’s because she’s had a hard life. She’s loyal. And so’s John Hoover. He cares about the reputation of the Servant, so I guess he just heard somehow. How did Lexa Thatcher get a copy of the police report on Amberson Teaneck’s death?”

  Joan folded the envelope and put it in her pocket. “Information is Lexa’s business,” she said. “Tell you what, I’ll talk to you about dinner after I talk to John Hoover.”

  “Good.”

  Joan shook her head, smiling in spite of herself. “That remains to be seen, Harry. But thanks for asking.”

  8

  If by some chance you are placed on the “10 Most Wanted List” that is a signal that the FBI are indeed conducting a manhunt. It is also the hint that they have uncovered some clues and feel confident they can nab you soon. The List is a public relations gimmick that Hooper, or whatever his name is, dreamed up to show the FBI as super sleuths. . . . When you are placed on the List, go deeper underground.

  —Abbie Hoffman, Steal This Book

  Lexa Gets the Morning Paper

  Robbins Reef Lighthouse lay two miles southwest of the Statue of Liberty, off the coast of Staten Island. Automated and closed to the public, the light’s only authorized visitors were a pair of Coast Guard tenders who came out twice a month for maintenance and inspection. The tenders were both dedicated seamen, patriotic to a T, and under most circumstances would have had no truck with pirates of any kind. But one of them had lost his grandfather to pesticide-induced cancer on a California grape farm, and the other had seen his family bankrupted after the 2020 oil blowout killed off the fish stocks in Alaska’s Bristol Bay. From which it followed that if a band of tree-hugging outlaws wanted to use Robbins Reef as an occasional hideout and rendezvous spot, that was acceptable, so long as said tree-huggers left no evidence of their visits and took particular care not to be seen coming or going by anyone at the nearby Bayonne Military Pier.

  The lighthouse was small, a stone-foundationed fireplug capping a high point on the reef. Inside, pie-wedge spaces radiated from a central hub: storeroom, bedroom, adjoining kitchen, and sitting room. There was also a bathroom with a cast-iron tub that got its water from an exterior storage tank; Morris Kazenstein had restored the plumbing and added a discreet pair of rainwater catchments to the tank. In the bedroom, left empty after the departure of the last live-in keeper, Morris had put in a false ceiling with a recessed hanging futon that could be raised and lowered on pulleys. This and a secret kitchen compartment containing cookware, propane fuel, and Nicaraguan coffee constituted the extent of the amenities. It was Spartan but cozy, a good place to go when F.B.I. surveillance of New Bedford-Stuyvesant made Lexa’s apartment too dangerous for Philo. It was also closer to Pirate’s Cove, quicker to get to if, for whatever reason, they were in a hurry.

  Sometimes, crying out in the throes of passion, Toshiro Goodhead switched to his native Japanese, while Philo regressed to the German dialect of the Pennsylvania Dutch, and Lexa, fluent in Arabic, French, Russian, and Spanish, became a veritable Berlitz of eros. When at last they slept, their ears still burned with the afterecho of a Babel of tongues. They dreamed of maps and nations and woke to the press of kind flesh.

  Lexa, as usual, was first awake. Philo lay on his back to her right, his broad chest a pillow for her cheek. Toshiro, his head at the other end of the futon, touched his lips to her feet as he slept on. Lexa laid a hand on each of them and felt the slow synchrony of their breathing. She smiled, content.

  From elsewhere in the lighthouse came the smells of brewing coffee and fresh ink: Ellen Leeuwenhoek had returned from Washington. Careful not to wake her bedmates, Lexa got up, doing a barefoot dance on the cold floor. Robbins Reef was not heated. She padded out past the storeroom and saw that the cot where Rabi slept was empty, the thick quilts tossed aside; from the bath she heard laughter and splashing. She went to the kitchen and fixed a sugar with coffee.

  The new Long Distance Call was on the table in the sitting room. It was as close to a work of art as a newspaper could be. Taking the millennial collapse of the Village Voice as a sign, Lexa had decided that an alternative weekly aimed solely at the reader on the street could not hope to wield the sort of influence she desired; instead, she sought to seduce the journalists and editors of other, more established papers. After being laid out on computer, the Call was handset on an Electric Gutenberg, which gave the same raised texture to the type and photo engravings as a full manual press. The newsprint too had texture, coarse and thick, weighted like history. And the Call’s prose more than matched the physical appearance of the paper. Though not every story Lexa broke got picked up by the Times, many did, and she received lots of calls for help on sources. There were even rumors that the senior editor of the Washington Post chewed pieces of the Call headmast as an aphrodisiac, which was not as strange as it sounded. The Long Distance Call was edible: placed on the tongue, its pages tasted faintly of honey, its ink of precious spice.

  “Hey there,” Lexa said, strolling into the bathroom. Ellen sat in the tub with Rabi, whose chicken pox had begun to fade.

  Rabi smirked at her. “You were loud last night,” she said.

  “You will be too one day,” Lexa assured her. “You have my vocal cords.” She kissed Ellen hello and managed to squeeze herself into the tub, which had been cast for a big and tall lighthouse keeper, without spilling her coffee. “What’s the word from D.C.?”

  “Monotony,” Ellen said. Reaching for a sponge, she started soaping Lexa’s back. “If you thought the Democratic nominees for president were all alike, wait till you read the Republicans’ stump speeches. The only interesting bit so far has to do with Senator Young, and it doesn’t involve her platform. The F.B.I. background check turned up three extra husbands she hadn’t told anyone about. CNN is breaking the story this afternoon, but the senator wanted to offer you an interview for the next Call. She’s heard rumors somewhere that you might be sympathetic to her situation.”

  “Hmm,” said Lexa. “What’s protocol on that if she gets elected? Are they all First Spouse or does she have to rank them?”

  “I think she nominates rankings,” Ellen said, “and then the Senate holds a hearing for each husband and votes whether or not to confirm.”

  “Conjugal-rank hearings for the Executive Harem. Now that would be a story to report.”

  “Yeah, in another century, maybe.” Ellen laughed. “So where’s Seraphina this morning? Didn’t she come out last night?”

  “She’s being a free spirit,” Rabi said.

  “Oh is she,” said Ellen. She scrubbed Lexa’s back. “More priceless artwork?”

  “No,” said Lexa. “Microchips. Sometime last month Morris sussed out a classified file on a government artificial intelligence project and decided he wanted dibs. So he went hacking and forged special procurement orders to get a prototype of the hardware delivered to Grand Central Station. Apparently the F.B.I. has a mail-drop there for deep-cover agents. Morris and Seraphina and Twenty-Nine Words are going to pick up the chips this morning.”

  “Morris is posing as a fed?”

  “A domestic intelligence field operative.” Lexa tilted her head back, encouraging Ellen to sponge beneath her chin. “I have a feeling we’ll be hearing about it on the news.”

  Morris Gets His Mail While Maxwell Catches a Scent

  He came into Grand Central Station looking like a mad rabbi who’d rifled Pancho Villa’s wardrobe and then mugged a bag lady for good measure. The disguise was so transparent and so conspicuous—he had goofball terrorist written all over him—that at first the federal agents lying in wait for him couldn’t believe their eyes. After the initial shock, they snickered. That was a mistake.

  The great terminus was gilded by sun rays, imported but genuine: piped in by a series of articulated periscopes that rose hundreds of feet above the roof of the station. The periscopes tracked the sun’s progress throughout the day, funneling stolen shafts of light
down into the gloom of the terminal, to crisscross beneath an inverted blue bowl. At night the periscopes rested and the bowl filled up with stars, holographic constellations shining in a recorded heaven. These and other flourishes had cost Harry Gant a mint, though as usual price did not concern him nearly as much as the neatness of the effect. Like many New Yorkers who’d been born too late to see it, Gant had always regretted missing Grand Central’s heyday, and the success of Lightning Transit was all the excuse he’d needed to organize a complete renovation of the badly deteriorated station. Saving the fun parts of the revamping project for himself, he’d delegated money worries to Clayton Bryce and asked Vanna Domingo to handle the human-engineering problem—i.e., the relocation of the war veterans and other vagrants who used Grand Central as a squatter’s camp. After all, Vanna had been one of them herself not long before, and it stood to reason she’d know what best to do about them.

  She did. On a cold autumn night in 2018, security guards swept the tunnels, corridors, and open spaces of the terminal, rousting the squatters. The guards offered free subway tokens as an inducement to move on and used force only as a last resort, but they did not take no for an answer: Grand Central Station no longer had room for unticketed loiterers. Pennsylvania Station, home of Amtrak, Gant’s fast-fading competitor, was suggested as an alternate future sleeping site, though in fact Penn Station was already choked with a transient population of its own. By dawn it was doubly choked; by 2019 Amtrak had folded, and the PATH and Long Island Railroad commuter lines were pleading for track space in Grand Central, which had once again become a showpiece. Vanna Domingo’s security force—dubbed the Pleasant Trip Squad—worked to keep it that way.

  Which is why, even if he hadn’t already known that he was walking into a trap, Morris Kazenstein would have been suspicious. He knew very well how he looked, clad in a threadbare serape, felt sombrero, Levis, and cowboy boots, with a greasy shopping bag in each hand and a thick black beard and black ringlets obscuring his face. On a normal day the Pleasant Trippers would have been on him in a flash, asking if he needed “help,” but not today: today the F.B.I. had told them to hang back and leave the tramps and indigents alone until the arrest had been made. The door guards stared at Morris but let him in.

  They also let in Tank Commander Maxwell, who’d been kicked out of the library this morning after being caught burying the ‘Rubicon—Shrapnel’ volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica in a fern pot. Purely by chance he clumped in a few paces behind Morris, and the F.B.I. spotters marked him, wondering if he might be a confederate; but instead of following the Jewish pirate he turned left towards a newsstand, drawn by a glimpse of bare flesh.

  Morris, meanwhile, crossed beneath the empty star bowl—polite, clean, ticket-holding passengers waited here on long benches for their trains to be called—and made for the post office window in the northeast corner. Suspended by safety harnesses along a ledge near the rim of the bowl, a pair of F.B.I. snipers kept their weapons trained on him, ready to take him down if he made any threatening moves against the civilians. He didn’t. He walked right up to the window, where Un-Un-American Activities Agent Ernest G. Vogelsang greeted him in a borrowed postal uniform.

  “Can I help you?” Vogelsang asked.

  Maxwell turned a circular rack of paperbacks, stocked mainly with fiftieth-anniversary editions of Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying. The bared navel and crescent sliver of breast on the cover agitated him, and he began cramming books into his jacket pockets. The newsstand attendant, an F.B.I. agent presently watching Morris Kazenstein through high-powered binoculars, did not object.

  Morris set his shopping bags on the floor. “I’m here to pick up a package,” he said, flashing a yellow paper slip. As he passed it to Vogelsang he rapped his knuckles on the counter three times.

  Vogelsang offered him a code phrase in return: “Always nice to get packages this time of year, isn’t it?”

  “Actually,” said Morris, “I prefer my packages around the Fourth of July.”

  “You must be a real patriot, then.”

  “I’d gladly destroy the village in order to save it,” Morris agreed.

  Vogelsang nodded. “I have your package right here.”

  Up on the ledge, a silver squirrel bit one of the snipers, rendering him unconscious before he could cry out. The second sniper felt a breeze from an open hatchway behind him and was struck in the back by an Arctic bunny; he too nodded off, slumping forward in his harness.

  Over the station’s P.A. system, Seraphina Dufresne’s voice announced: “Track 29 has been cleared for outbound traffic.”

  Vogelsang brought out a plastic box the size of an eyeglass case, and thumbed it open to show Morris the four microchips nestled inside. “All yours,” he said. “Just sign here.”

  He set an Electric Clipboard next to the microchip box, on his side of the counter. Morris had to reach for it, and when he did, Vogelsang slapped a manacle on his wrist.

  “You’re under arrest,” Vogelsang informed him, “for attempted theft of government property, impersonation of a federal agent, computer espionage, and suspicion of piracy on the high seas. You have the right to remain—”

  Morris pulled his arm back, leaving behind the hand, which shook off the manacle and attacked Vogelsang. Moving like a five-legged tarantula, it scuttled up the front of Vogelsang’s shirt, chinned itself on his chin, and pressed a chloroform-soaked palm over his mouth and nose.

  “’Night, Ernest,” Morris said. His real hand popped out of the sleeve vacated by the fake, and grabbed the microchip case. Then he said, “Cover me,” and clouds of thick white vapor began boiling out of the shopping bags. Vogelsang’s backup team hesitated, expecting the snipers to open fire; by the time they realized the snipers were asleep, the entire northeast corner of the terminal was obscured by fog. The waiting passengers looked around curiously and wondered if a steam pipe had burst.

  Maxwell’s Marine jacket was stuffed with books, but there were still a good eight or nine copies left on the rack. He cast around for something else to carry them in. Across the terminal the rising fog began to fracture the sunbeams into colored shards, and the sudden rainbow caused Maxwell to look up and catch his breath.

  Seraphina and Twenty-Nine Words for Snow were crouched on the ledge beside one of the slumbering marksmen, ready to cast nets on the feds below if that proved necessary to safeguard Morris’s escape (it didn’t; the F.B.I. and the Pleasant Trip Squad plunged bravely into the fog to find nothing but the discarded serape and a sombrero full of black whiskers). Twenty-Nine Words wore his polar bear outfit; Seraphina wore her African superhero suit, but against BRER Beaver’s explicit instructions she’d refused to put on her helmet. Even at a great distance the green gleam of her eyes was bright enough to make Maxwell forget all about Erica Jong.

  The F.B.I. agent with the binoculars came running out of the newsstand, brandishing a machine pistol. Maxwell stuck out a Leg and tripped her, clocking her across the back of the head as she went down.

  Maxwell picked up the gun. When he looked up again at the ledge he saw that Seraphina and the polar bear had vanished, but this didn’t bother him. He knew Grand Central’s secret spaces; like Kite and Vanna, he’d lived here. Besides, he was a soldier, and he possessed the sixth sense that God grants to all the mad.

  Lost in the fog, the feds and the Trippers radioed for more assistance. Maxwell flicked off the machine pistol’s safety and joined in the hunt.

  Breakfast at Robbins Reef

  Toshiro and Ellen scrambled free-range eggs in the lighthouse kitchen, while Lexa, Philo, and Rabi shared coffee and juice at the sitting room table. Lexa had brought in Betsy’s car radio last night (both the Volkswagen and Ellen’s Amphibious Citroen were submerged on the reef, listening for the approach of Coast Guard launches and ready to surface at a moment’s notice), so they were able to tune in the news from Grand Central.

  “. . . terrorists have apparently made a clean getaway, though authorities are delayi
ng outbound trains and mounting a thorough search of the station. As yet there’s been no statement made to the press, but from what we’ve been able to pick up listening in on the fringes, it would appear that an unidentified aboriginal rights group has intercepted a secret military shipment, possibly an experimental weapon. Now in keeping with our non-alarmist reporting policy, I should point out that there is no evidence that commuters were exposed to radiation, biochemical agents, or mind-altering substances during the course of the theft. Certainly there’s no sign that officials might be planning to quarantine the terminal.”

  “Tom, this is Carol at the studio. I’m wondering if you might answer a question . . .”

  “Go ahead, Carol.”

  “You mentioned earlier that the F.B.I.’s Un-Un-American Activities Division was in charge of this ‘sting’ operation. What can we surmise from their involvement?”

  “Well, Carol, as you know, the Un-Un-American Activities Division was formed to monitor ‘lesser subversives’ after the end of the old Cold War with Russia.”

  “There’s no connection here with the late Senator Joseph McCarthy, is there?”

  “None at all. Senator McCarthy, of course, was associated with the 1950s House Committee on Un-American Activities, remembered today chiefly for its terrible abuses of governmental power. But the more recently formed F.B.I. Division is nothing like that, hence the double ‘Un’ . . .”

  Philo had his novel-in-progress at the table and was pretending to work on it over breakfast. Since the start of the radio broadcast, he’d done nothing but cross out and rewrite the same adjective a dozen times.

  “Hey.” Lexa nudged him gently under the table. “You OK?”

  “Seraphina is old enough to choose her own troubles,” he replied, rolling the ballpoint pen in his fingers. “Besides which, Morris knows that if he gets her hurt or captured, I’ll break his neck. Pretty much the only thing I’d break someone’s neck for.”