“It doesn’t have to be up-to-date. An older copy would be fine.”
Egon stood up and walked around the desk. “Unless you have some other business, I need to finish a commission job.”
As he walked me to the door he whispered, “Carnival,” in my ear at a time when the assistant couldn’t over hear.
I said, “Thanks anyway,” and stalked off toward Carnival’s tables, doing my best to appear irritated. I wasn’t sure why Egon had pointed me toward Carnival’s place, why he was being so helpful. I guessed that he wanted to stay on the killer’s good side. That didn’t make me feel better about it, but being feared has its advantages.
Carnival sold entertainment toys and immersion disks two aisles in from the north wall. He had a lot of topsider customers who were willing to drop down Under The River once in a while to get the prices he could offer. His stuff was stolen, and he had lower costs for his space than the street stores. I perused the goods awhile until he became impatient and came over to run me off.
“Hi, Carni,” I said.
He looked at me for a moment before his eyes gleamed in recognition. “Benny, what do you need?” He said it like he was in a hurry to get rid of me too. It seemed like everyone knew all along that I was a killer except me.
“I need a map of the Gnome’s Warren.”
He leaned close. “Who would be stupid enough to keep a map of the Warren? Just having such a thing would get you tossed.”
“Do you know anyone who might be that stupid?”
“No.”
He didn’t say he didn’t have one, he only said ‘no’, although it sounded final. “I can pay you well.”
“Look, Benny, I’m not saying I have one, but even if I did, it would be my life to sell it to you.”
I stepped closer to him, and stared into his eyes. “This is important, Carni. I’ll memorize the parts I need, then destroy it if you want, or I’ll give it back, but I need to look at a map.”
Carni was a dealer, and he couldn’t pass up money. Also, I think I scared him more than the Gnomes scared him. He sighed. “Come into the back. I’ll let you look at it for five minutes for a hundred.”
“Fifty.”
“A hundred. Cash. No swipe cards.”
“Give me a gas lock picker too.”
“Yeah, OK. I’ve got one of those”
I followed him back behind the tables and into his warehouse, as he called it, which was actually a structure made up of a combination of tarpaulin, cardboard, wood and some gray metal roofing. Once inside I realized it was more structurally sound than it had looked from the outside.
He gave me the gas-lock picker, and pulled an engineer’s diagram out of a black plastic box that had been buried under a stack of older style music disks.
After unfolding the diagram and orienting myself to the entrances, I realized that the drawings were done a very long time ago. The print had faded and the creases were yellowed. Still they showed the entrances as they actually were, and showed that the north corridor turned left, headed back west, then curved slowly south to interconnect with the passages Carbide and I had been working in. I studied the drawing for my full five minutes. I gave Carni his money and left.
I went a few tables down, bought a pad of paper and drew out what I could remember, hoping the layout hadn’t changed all that much since the drawings were done.
Rocket’s flea market shop had everything else I needed. His store wasn’t Under The River. It was over on Fate Street just north of Hackson. Some things I needed were legal, like a couple of accordion bottles and a few bars of People Food which he had in the front, but he had other things I needed too, like slapfaints and ceramic knives, which he kept in a hole he’d dug under the back room of his shop.
Finally, I walked back north to my apartment building. Hattie was sitting there as usual. She was surprised to see me. My muscles still ached from working for Carbide, and it hurt to sit down.
“Hello, Hattie. How are things today?”
“They fixed the lock on the building. I can’t use the toilet in the basement anymore. I have to walk over to LeSally to pee.”
“That’s a pain,” I said.
“That’s a crime. I live here too don’t I?”
I didn’t argue the point. “You want to move up to a better place?”
“You mean die?”
I laughed. “No, I meant I need some help, and I’m willing to pay for it. Enough money for you to get an apartment inside for a month or two. It’s getting cold.”
“If I go inside for a month or two, I won’t be able to handle coming back out. It’ll kill me. I’d need enough to last till March.”
“Maybe I could arrange that.” Five months was about four hundred and the dole would pay the rent after the first two if she brought in her receipt. “I need you to provide a distraction Under The River at precisely three-thirty in the morning, not this coming morning, but the next.”
She thought about that for a while. “Why are you willing to pay so much for that; for a distraction? You aren’t doing anything illegal are you?”
“Yes.”
“What do you mean, ‘Yes’. You could at least lie about it. You could say, ‘I’m saving a damsel in distress,’ or ‘I’m capturing some bad guys and putting them in jail.’ You could say something like that.”
“Actually, it is part of a plan to put an especially bad guy in jail. I’m stealing something that belongs to him.”
“Well, why didn’t you say so. I want five hundred plus expenses.”
I laughed, but she didn’t. “Expenses?”
“Yes, expenses.”
“How much for expenses.”
“Give me the five hundred now, and we’ll settle accounts when everything works out.”
If Hattie was blinking me, she was doing a great job of it, and I had no one else to trust. Carbide was too well known, Hero was a cop, and even if I could find Chen, I wouldn’t trust him with my lunch, even accounting for all his protestations that he was just a news man.
She took the five hundred and put it in her shirt. We went over exactly when and where I needed her to provide the distraction. I even explained why, and that the guard might be hard to distract.
“How are you going to distract him, Hattie?”
“I’ll think of something, don’t worry.”
She wouldn’t tell me, but she had a gleam in her eye that said she was going to enjoy herself.
I checked to see if my palm print had been reprogrammed into the new lock. It was, so I opened the door and jammed the ceramic knife into the mechanism. They wouldn’t notice or fix it again for weeks. Hattie lived there too, after all.
Although Hattie told me not to worry, I worried all the way back to Carbide’s place, where I spent an hour sewing pockets inside my bum’s coat and loading them with my purchases.
Sleep finally came while I was running my plan through and through, trying to convince myself that I wasn’t an idiot and hoping I would run into Carla Under The River, then desperately hoping I wouldn’t.
Chapter 32
At five the next morning Carbide and I, and two other guys I didn’t know, went to the Warren. The guards nodded us in as before, and we started moving furniture for a Gnome with a really long last name that started with a ‘K’ and had mostly consonants in it.
A half hour into the move, I decided it was time to look for the back way into the hall where Ray’s storage rooms were. I picked up a box loaded with pants that were obviously considerably too small for Mr. K., piled a coat that was also too small on top of it, which partially hid my face, and took a wrong turn on my way to his new apartment. I figured he was keeping the clothes because he thought he would eventually fit into them again. It would be a long time before he missed them.
I walked rapidly, humming “I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues” and trying to act like a bored mover. Three people passed by me in a group and took no notice. After that, I worried less about the Gnomes and more a
bout where I was. When I got to where the corridor should have gone north there was an unbroken wall. I almost stopped, but someone walked down the corridor toward me, so I kept going.
The map was wrong. They’d walled up the connecting hall that ran from the south end to the north end. Finding my way back wasn’t a problem, but I might not get another chance. In fact, I couldn’t be sure that my chance hadn’t already gone by. I kept walking, trying to find my way by heading in the right general direction. I switched my wrist unit to compass and wandered around, humming and moving at a steady pace to make people think I had somewhere to go.
I rounded a corner and suddenly I was right where I wanted to be, but I had walked too far out into the hall to stop and wait for the right time to come out and unlock the door. I could see the entrance guard’s back. Walking right up to the door, I placed the auto-picker and waited with the box, hoping the guard near the entrance would not take any notice of me even if he did turn away from the crowd to glance back.
The lock popped, an unnaturally loud sound. I didn’t look toward the entrance. I just went in and closed the door behind me.
A moment later I heard voices outside the door, but the people didn’t come to the room I was in. It must have been Ray going into his other storage room. Had I been a minute later, I would have been caught.
I waited for them to leave the other room, before I turned on my flatlight.
The room was much as Carbide had described it. Up on a shelf I found some space to put the box I had carried in with me, then I found a nook large enough to hide in should someone come into the room. If I had enough time to hide, that is. It was small security since I doubted I would know anyone was coming until the door actually opened. I was relying on Ray not using that room much.
Trash, junk, treasure, I didn’t know what exactly to call the accumulated piles of sofa cushions, buckets, chairs without legs, tools without motors, stacks of plates and cups, brass pipe fittings, a concrete Madonna, and of course the papier-mâché gargoyle which was huge and ugly, hollow and light and stared at me with bright eyes. Should Hattie’s diversion not work out, I could always stuff myself inside the gargoyle, cut out eyeholes and try to sneak out, stopping every time someone looked, hoping they wouldn’t notice me. Gargoyle camouflage.
The safe stood about where Carbide said it would. They’d moved it a bit further away from the door, but it still stood against the wall. I thought I could move it just a little further without anyone noticing.
The wall sheathing was made of a nylon fiber, laminated with glue and sheets of thin plastic. For no obvious reason, the stuff was called woodboard. It was hard and shiny on the surface, but the tungsten drill and ceramic saw I’d purchased were up to the task. I’d decided against power tools because the noise level would keep me from hearing someone at the door until it was too late to hide.
I made a starter hole with a hand drill, then started sawing. After cutting for ten minutes, I measured and calculated that it would take me two hours to cut through this side and another two to cut through the other side, but I had about eighteen hours, until three-thirty the next morning, to do the job.
Sawing low to the ground was hard, uncomfortable work and after a while, I stood up to stretch my legs, pee into the accordion bottle, and look at Ray’s accumulation. Here and there, I found something that I thought would be worth money if it were placed in one of the antique shops on the near north side. My favorite item was still the gargoyle, though.
After I’d cut through on the top, bottom and left sides, I scored the right vertical and pulled the piece toward me like a door. It cracked and groaned, but the nylon fibers held it together and acted like a hinge. The studs left a gap of about a hand’s width between the wall sheathing on one wall and the other. After I drilled a few small holes to make sure no one was in the other room and to make sure I wasn’t sawing into the desk, I used the same procedure on the other side.
People Food was some nutritionist’s idea of the perfect human food. It was cheap, compressed, lasted almost forever in its special packaging, and supposedly contained everything the body needed. It tasted halfway between rotten eggs and rancid peanut butter, but I ate a few pieces anyway. It kept me awake. It wasn’t supposed to have that effect, but it worked that way on me. The bars probably contained more vitamins than I was used to.
The other room was about the same size as Ray’s, but it was split into three separate sections by white lines painted on the floor and half way up the walls. The section nearest the door was taken up by large crates stamped with a skull and crossbones. A bit overdone I thought, but it made it clear who owned them. The second section was Arno’s office and the section behind that contained an early century Dodge Challenger disassembled, apparently complete and well stored. Some Gnome apparently hoped to eventually get out from under his legal problems and wanted an investment that would hold its value. You couldn’t drive it anymore, of course. Old cars which weren’t retrofitted with modern safety gear were considered a menace on the road and unsafe.
They’d moved Arno’s office chair along with everything else, so I made myself comfortable and started with the drawers of the desk. I quickly scanned through everything I could find, including the papers taped under the desktop above the right top drawer, the e-plastic under the blotter and the block of cards in the drawer hidden behind the molding on the credenza. I spent eight hours searching and sorting until I had a stack of papers, cards, disks and memsticks as well as a PAL, all of which I wanted to take with me.
Then I searched again, measuring to find any hidden compartments I’d missed the first time. I found two more. One, at the back of a small end table where the depth of the inside was less than the depth of the outside by more than the thickness of the wood, the other was where a drawer was shallower than it should have been. They would have found all of these hiding places, of course. They would dismantle each piece in turn. Now they would find the hiding places, but not the contents.
I found some blank cards and carefully wrote on each one, “What is it worth to you?” Under that I wrote, “Rela & Mike.”
I didn’t think JB would believe Rela or Mike would be that stupid. Maybe he would, but I put the notes there to confuse and annoy, and hopefully, anger him and maybe them. I wanted JB to be frustrated to the point of stupidity. Strong emotion is always a bad ally in negotiations.
Once everything was back on Ray’s side of the wall, I had to cover my tracks. I put everything back as I found it, including Arno’s chair. Realizing that I hadn’t studied it carefully, I turned the chair over. Underneath was a small hatch in matching black plastic. I opened it slowly, but there was no triggering device, only a micro memstick. It occurred to me then that the chair was probably the best of the hiding places. The micro memstick went into my pocket while I debated how to best hide my intrusion. I couldn’t move the desk over because it was too heavy to pull back against the wall after I was through. I settled on a painting of a World War II destroyer I’d found leaning against the far wall. After I went through the opening, I pulled the painting up against the wall and pushed the cutout back up against the painting. Tape around the edges of the panel held it flat to the rest of the wall. It would be pretty obvious when someone moved the painting, but I figured they would hesitate to open the little door. To add to their hesitation, I placed a smoke bomb in the cavity between the studs, rigged to go off when they pushed. I left a card in the cavity also.
Back in Ray’s room, I sealed up the other side with tape as well, then pushed the safe against the hole. I took the time to wedge the wheels, so they would have a very difficult time moving it from the other side. Like I said, I wanted JB mad.
I still had four hours. Ray’s would be closed for the night, so I didn’t worry about being disturbed. Tiredness was fast overcoming me, and I couldn’t stand having all that data and not reading some of it, but I also couldn’t afford to fall asleep.
The gargoyle stood there staring at me, and I
decided it would be an amusing hiding place for the data. I put most of the materials into an empty accordion bottle, sealed it and stuffed it up and into the gargoyle’s head, then sealed the bottle in place with some more tape. I shoved the PAL and the memsticks and disks into the hollow feet, securing them the same way.
Just before three-thirty, I hid the accordion bottle that I’d peed in on a top shelf—let them figure that one out in ten years when someone tried to clean the place out.
If Hattie’s diversion didn’t work out the way I hoped it would, I didn’t want to be caught with the evidence of the crime on me. I wanted to be able to claim I’d wandered into the Warren by accident and the guard didn’t notice. They wouldn’t believe me, but I might be able to escape while they were thinking about it. Anyway, I would need a large box to carry everything, and slipping past the guard would be a bit difficult carrying something like that.
At three-thirty, I shook myself so I would be more alert, then I went to the door. I couldn’t hear anything. I opened the door just a crack and listened. Nothing. Hattie’s distraction should have started. I had no choice, so I opened the door far enough to poke my head out and look.
Hattie was there all right. And she was distracting.
Chapter 33
Her dress was a lustrous topaz blue and it draped down her body and slid out onto the dusty concrete floor like a morning mist. Around the waist she’d tied a silver colored rope belt, allowing one end to hang lose down her left hip. Her arms were covered by long white gloves, and her black hair was spun high on top of her head, adorned with a breath of tiny white-tipped flowers. She smiled gracefully like a young princess meeting her people for the first time and believing that they would love her because she loved them. She was a fantasy under dim fluorescent lights.
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