“My aunt Dora used to wave like that.”
“Wave like what? Like Alison? She just wanted to get our attention.”
“No. Whatever. Forget it.”
“Forget what?”
Alison was on the far side of a little black booth that marked the entryway to the book stacks. You needed an ID to get in, and on the way out, they checked your bags.
They reached the desk and she smiled brightly.
“It’s okay, they’re with me,” she said to the work-study student manning the booth, and he waved them through.
“Okay, here he is,” Jason said, with a slight emphasis on “he.” “What’s the big mystery?”
“You’ll see.”
They followed her down several flights of stairs and through a myriad of book-lined passageways. Alison walked a few steps ahead, with tighter strides than when she walked on the street. The echoes from her shoes striking the hard floor stoked Adam’s paranoia.
“Where are we going?” Adam hissed to Jason. “I don’t like the way she’s smiling. I don’t know what you guys are up to—”
“You know everything I know” Jason whispered back.
“Is that supposed to be reassuring?”
“Look, pretend you’re Woodward, heading down to meet Deep Throat at the bottom of some creepy garage.”
“You be Woodward. I’ll be Bernstein.”
“Quiet down, guys, it’s a library,” Alison said without breaking stride or looking back.
They continued through another endless series of book stacks until they reached a door marked GOVERNMENT DOCUMENTS. Entering, they found a large and largely empty study room lined with perfectly matching reference books and annual reports. The air was stale from poor circulation and the lingering traces of cigarette smoke that mocked a faded, browning NO SMOKING sign. A clerk, who looked more like a doorman than a librarian, sat inattentively at a desk on the other side of the room reading the New York Post. He had small eyes and a red face that suggested more than a passing familiarity with hard liquor. Stuffed into a navy blue NYU blazer, he had a full head of dark hair that should have been gray. Alison walked confidently across the room, pushed her way right past a little brown half-height swinging door and approached another door, but found it locked.
“Sorry, honey. Faculty and staff only.” His eyes never moved from the Post.
“Thanks. I’m Professor Monroe, and these are my research associates. Would you let us in please?”
“Professor?” He looked at her skeptically. “What department?”
“History.”
“You look a little young for the history department,” he offered, without a hint of humor. “Got your ID?”
Jason wondered how long it would take Alison to explode, but she just dug into her purse and pulled out a small piece of paper. She handed it to the clerk.
“This is temporary. You’re supposed to have a picture. I can’t use it.”
“Why don’t you call the department office? I’m sure they can confirm that—”
“Makin’ calls ain’t part of my job.”
Adam walked up to the desk and pressed an open hand on the newspaper. Bending slightly, he leaned up and in from below. “Look buddy, you seem like a smart guy. Why don’t you improvise a little, okay?”
“It’s extension fifteen twenty-two,” Alison added, in a voice that smoothed over Adam’s rough edge.
The clerk looked at the three of them and figured he’d wasted enough of his time. He dialed the extension and listened.
“Yeah. This is Phil Gates at documents. You got a young lady professor over there, name of…” he studied the temporary ID card “Marone? Yeah? Monroe? What she look like?” His eyes scanned her up and down. “Yeah?” Then he smiled. “Yeah. I guess. Go figure. Okay, thanks.”
He handed her a key attached to a long, worn rectangular block, pushed a clipboard across the table, and then returned to reading his paper. “You gotta sign for the key. You gotta return the key directly to me, and sign out. No food in the room, no books out. No writing on the books, no Xerox copies. All reference services close at four-thirty.”
Alison led them into the room and turned on the lights. It was the size of a large office, and looked to be the hub of a suite of rooms, a self-contained complex that had its own small card catalogue and a set of stacks that went back into the darkness. There were file cabinets of various sizes, some designed to hold maps and microforms. Rows of matching bound books lined the walls.
Alison spun on her heels and turned swiftly, and smiled like she had gotten them inside the Batcave.
“So? How about that!” she said.
“How about what?” Adam responded. The same sentence had popped into Jason’s head, but he kept it to himself.
“Don’t you know where we are?”
“The library,” Jason chimed in.
“Not the library, the library,” she said triumphantly, and quickly became impatient with their cultivated blank stares. “NYU is a government depository. Copies of federal, state, and local government documents are sent and stored here automatically. This is the City Room.”
Adam looked around, amazed. “You mean that—”
“Every piece of paper produced by the City of New York, from nineteen nineteen to nineteen seventy-three, is supposed to be somewhere in this room.”
“What about ’seventy-four and ’seventy-five?” Jason asked.
“It’s too soon. And certainly those numbers will be a little different. But the patterns and trends, they can’t change much from year to year.”
Jason looked over at Adam, who was silently taking an inventory of the room. “But there’s so much. I mean, where would you start?”
Alison grabbed a book. “How about the budget? Where the City spends its money.”
Adam came to life. “No. My mother could get you a copy of the budget. Let me tell you about cities. They’re like guitar players. Rock stars all spend their money on the same stuff. Chicks, cars, and dope. Same thing with cities, except its cops, garbage, and teachers.”
“Okay, so, what are we looking for?” she asked.
“You want to know about someone, find out who pays them. That means revenue.”
“That’s probably on film,” Alison offered.
Adam bounded off behind some cabinets. Jason was not going to spend the day figuring out the City’s finances, and he began to wonder why he was even there. Besides, he had other business to attend to.
“Is there a pay phone around here?”
“Back through the stacks, the way we came, to the left.”
“Listen, I’m going to take off. Are you staying here all day, or are you walking back to your office…?” his voice trailed off, unconvincingly.
“I should stay here. I’ve spent half my adult life in rooms like this. I think Adam gets most of his data from peeking through windows.”
“That’s not the half of it,” Jason responded quickly. He started for the door, but Alison tugged on the sleeve of his jacket.
“The color’s back in your face.”
“Yeah, well, I’m feeling a lot better.”
“Then, you’re still going to be able to change my life tonight?”
“Huh?”
“You know, dinner, your place? We had a date. If you’re still up to it, I mean. You said I’d never understand New York until I had genuine Chinese take-out. You promised I’d ‘never go back.’ ”
“You won’t,” he said, doubling down on his word. “Eight o’clock? 108-16, off Queens Boulevard.”
“Apartment 506,” she said sweetly.
“Yeah. Come straight up. Don’t bother with the intercom. The downstairs buzzer is broken.”
“You mean the entryway is just unlocked?”
“You can’t really tell unless you know,” Jason said. “It’s either that or calling up from the streets. Besides, anybody who wants to rob the place will probably hit the first floor.”
“I’ll try
and keep that in mind.”
Adam called from the other room. “I can’t get this tape in the machine.”
“Go ahead. I should make this call.” Jason left the room feeling much better than when he went in. Not good enough to forget that Alison was going to spend the entire day with Adam, but pretty good in any event.
Phil the clerk stopped him as he tried to leave. “Hey. Let’s see that envelope.”
“They’re just some medical forms.”
“Look pal, this ain’t the honor system. No papers leave the room, and I gotta check every bag.”
Phil looked carefully through the records. He pulled out an x-ray. “This come from in there?”
“No.” Jason pointed at his head. “Up here.”
Phil stared at Jason and returned to the papers, checking each one individually before letting him go. Jason headed back through the library stacks, trying to retrace his steps. Each turn led to another maze of identical corridors and endless rows of dark stacks. After a few more minutes of wandering it was clear that he was in uncharted territory, and he toyed with the idea that being lost in the library had some cosmic meaning.
With the steel gray of the stacks and the uneven lighting, it was like wandering around below decks of an abandoned freighter. Jason heard a slight humming sound and navigated towards it. As he suspected, it led to an elevator. Level “D,” four floors below the main lobby. He pressed the button, but gave up after two minutes and headed for the nearby staircase.
There was more action three levels up. Students were working at individual desk carrels, some studying intently, others quietly socializing across open books. They looked young, more like high school students, and it dawned on him that a few months ago some of them probably were. The realization was off-putting. College seemed very close to Jason, but high school felt like it was a lifetime away.
Jason followed a sign toward the restrooms, anticipating that was where a phone booth would be, and once again his instincts were right, encouraging him to fantasize about teaching the course “Navigating the Library 101.” Entering the booth he closed the folding door and pulled out the business card Morgan had given him. It was blank except for the phone number written on one side.
He dialed the number, and a male voice answered.
“Morgan Enterprises, Mr. Morgan’s office. This is Mr. Stearns speaking. How may I assist you?”
“Mr. Morgan please.”
“Who may I tell him is calling?”
Jason had known this guy all of two sentences and already he didn’t like him.
“Jason Sims. And tell him it’s important.”
“Hold please.”
There was a click and elevator music came on the line. Jason waited, then dropped the phone to his shoulder so that he wouldn’t be subjected to the music but would be able to tell when it stopped. He studied the graffiti carved into the wooden walls of the booth, none of which was very imaginative: “bite me,” “draft this!” “NYU girls R-E-Z,” and the inevitable “Impeach Nixon.” A shopworn telephone book dangled from a small chain.
“Hello?” Stearns was back on the line, and Jason pulled the phone back up.
“Yes?”
“I’m afraid Mr. Morgan is unavailable. But perhaps Mr. Barings, his personal—”
“When will Mr. Morgan be available?” Jason interrupted, and thought about telling this guy that he didn’t sound all that afraid.
Stearns waited before responding, as if to provide a lesson in manners. “Mr. Morgan rarely speaks on the telephone, sir. Perhaps I could take a message—”
“Will he be in at any time today?”
“As I said, Mr. Morgan doesn’t usually speak on the—”
“I meant in person.”
“Oh I don’t think that would be possible,” Stearns responded immediately. “Mr. Morgan—”
Jason hung up, irritated. Flipping through the phone book he found the address for Morgan Enterprises: 1221 Sixth Avenue.
10
After a quick subway ride uptown, Jason found himself on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Forty-Seventh Street. It was a part of town Jason had a certain fondness for. The long line of stocky skyscrapers that marched uptown weren’t very imaginatively designed, but he found them reassuring. Each one took up a city block, so solid they looked like they’d give Godzilla a run for his money if he showed up. And the streets always buzzed with a positive energy, teeming with pedestrians, hot dog and pretzel stands, three-card Monte dealers, gypsy vendors, guys pushing hand carts; for whatever reason all the sounds mixed together harmoniously. It looked chaotic in the moment, but if you stood and watched for a while you could recognize an unspoken logic that everybody seemed to understand.
Jason shaded his eyes, which were still adjusting from the subway, and tried to get his bearings. He walked along the avenue but the only address he could find didn’t tell him anything except that he was on the wrong side of the street. He looked around and saw a taxi idling in gridlocked traffic.
“Hey,” he shouted to the cabbie. “Is Twelve-twenty-one Sixth uptown or downtown from here?”
“What am I, the fucking tourist bureau?”
“I’d hate to walk to Forty-eighth and find out I went the wrong way.”
“Yeah, it’d be a fuckin’ shame.” The cabbie looked up at the flashing DON’T WALK sign off to his left and contrasted it with the green light ahead of him. Only two cars from the intersection, but he knew the light was about to turn against him, and he pounded on the horn. Many of his gridlocked neighbors had already introduced this particular tactic to limited effect, but it served as an expression of anger and frustration. “Come on, let’s move it!” he shouted at no one in particular. “Green means go!”
Jason found the right building. Characteristically massive, it was one of those modern steel and glass statements that were built by trading zoning exemptions for public space, and so it had a huge atrium two, maybe three floors high, with fountains, a couple of newsstands and even a café. The city was desperate to attract new construction and to compete with all the office space popping up in Jersey, so they cut all the deals they could to keep the contractors happy. Jason worked his way through the crowd and studied a large directory mounted on the wall. The entire thing was framed with the title MORGAN ENTERPRISES above, but there was no Morgan listed under “M.” But Stearns was there, and so was Barings, the assistant to Morgan that Stearns had mentioned. Both were on the forty-eighth floor.
Jason headed toward the elevator banks. There were two sets of six—one group served floors three to thirty-three; the second covered thirty-four to fifty-two. A uniformed guard stood at a podium between the two aisles, noticeably closer to the second set, but it was hard to tell if he was stopping people. Jason gathered his courage and walked directly past the guard toward the elevators. The guard never looked up, which was a relief but also somewhat surprising, at least until Jason noticed that there were cameras mounted above the far wall of the elevator alcove. He spun around to avoid the camera so fast that he faked a sneeze to cover the action, which left him feeling quite ridiculous and painfully aware that he would never be mistaken for James Bond.
Rallying, he peered casually into smoked mirrors below the camera, and was able to see the back of the guard monitoring TV consoles built into his podium. Shifting his posture slightly he limited his exposure to the camera and tapped the elevator button. Two young businessmen approached the elevator and also pressed the button, which was already lit up because of Jason’s previous touch. People did that everywhere, and he always took it personally. Jason never went for the button if it was lit, especially if he had seen someone else press it. Otherwise you’re telling that person that their effort wasn’t good enough—or didn’t count.
The businessmen talked just a bit louder than they needed to, as if an audience would appreciate their conversation. They were contemporaries, but a subtle pecking order was noticeable. The shorter one carried an air of superiority, while
his companion had a hint of baby fat in his cheeks and a slightly too-small vest that left him with a “not-quite-ready-for-prime-time” quality.
“I still say the old man has lost his touch,” the shorter man said.
“Well, maybe. But I wouldn’t bet against him.”
The elevator arrived, and two more people joined them—an older businessman who stood quietly at the rear of the car, and a redheaded woman who had the nervous energy of a secretary getting back late from lunch. Jason hit forty-eight, using the opportunity to turn away from the camera mounted in the upper right corner. The button didn’t move, it just lit up from the heat of his finger, which was pretty cool, but somehow unfulfilling, and also left the impression that you were being fingerprinted. One of the businessmen pressed thirty-nine, and Jason noticed that one push seemed to be enough. They continued talking.
“I was talking to James Young today.”
“James Young?”
“Yes, he handles all my accounts.”
“Really.”
“Oh, I’ve been with him for years. Anyway, according to Jim, two of the old-timers tried to form a syndicate, to back up a loan for the City. Their pitch was that we did it for President Cleveland in eighteen ninety-five, and he was a Democrat too! The joke on the floor was that these were the same two guys!”
They shared an exaggerated laugh as the elevator stopped and the redhead rushed out. The men watched her depart and exchanged knowing glances.
“Anyway, there wasn’t a single firm on the street that would touch it. Jim told me that if this keeps up I should move all my.…”
He stopped talking as the elevator finally reached thirty-nine, and Jason restrained himself from shoving the two of them out the door, much as he wanted to.
The elevator continued its ascent, and Jason became aware of the older gentleman still in the car. He hadn’t moved or spoken. A glance of the buttons revealed no other illuminated numbers. Were they heading for the same place? Who was this guy? Why was he so unnaturally still, and silent? Why was it taking so long to get from thirty-nine to forty-eight? “Knock it off,” he grunted, unintentionally aloud. The old man didn’t flinch.
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