Urban Flight

by Jonathan Kirshner

  Forty-eight finally arrived, and Jason froze for a moment, but he was closer to the doors, and etiquette dictated that he get off first. He stepped out slowly, hoping to encourage the other fellow to slip ahead of him, but the air was still as the elevator doors hissed to a close.

  Jason turned to confirm that he was alone in the hallway. Looking around, he realized it wasn’t really a hallway. Unlike most office buildings he had been in, there was no dark, industrial gray elevator alcove from which you emerged to search the corridors for the office of your choice. In this building, or on this floor, at least, once out of the elevator you were already on the inside. It was well lit and the floor was carpeted—green, not thin but not too thick either. Deciding he would never solve “the mystery of the silent old man,” Jason lectured himself that odd, harmless things happen all the time without having any larger meaning, and started to walk through the wood-paneled corridor, following the room numbers. The walls and the doors were strangely unmarked—no nametags, no company logos.

  Number 4819 was the entrance to a large suite of offices, and seemed to be the right place. A receptionist sat near the entryway commanding a circular mahogany desk; much farther back but still stationed in the exterior of the suite was a male secretary, though based on the seriousness of his look it was a good guess his business card read “Executive Assistant.”

  The receptionist was attractive, in a serious sort of way, and conservatively dressed. She looked right through him.

  “Deliveries should go to 4805,” she said.

  “I’m here to see Mr. Morgan.”

  This had an even more dramatic effect than Jason had been rooting for after she called him a delivery boy.

  “You’ll, uh, have to, uh, I mean people don’t just.…”

  Jason watched her struggle and didn’t notice the male secretary approach until he was at his side. The fellow was much larger up close than he had looked in the distance, and when he spoke, Jason recognized his voice as Stearns, whom he had been rude to on the phone. He hoped Stearns wasn’t holding a grudge.

  “Mr. Sims? I’ll be with you in a moment. Would you have a seat, please.”

  So much for the element of surprise. Jason stood and watched as Stearns returned to his desk and made a phone call. Too few dials for an outside line. He strained to hear, but the desk was too far away, and Jason’s lip-reading skills were limited to catching Stearns’s final “okay.” He put down the phone and walked back over.

  “Right this way, please.” This guy only had one tone of voice, and Jason wasn’t crazy about it. Still, he was surprised to have made it this far without getting kicked out, and he began mentally rehearsing the speech to Morgan that he’d been working on. Stearns led Jason past his desk, which was equipped with TV monitors that showed the lobby, the elevators, and two other places Jason hadn’t seen. They reached a large office, and Stearns guided Jason in, but did not follow. Jason wasn’t easily impressed with things, but this was some office. Thick, brown carpeting, dark wood everywhere—a large desk, a couple of tables, built-in bookcases, also a couch and sitting area. No overhead lights, just ornate lamps that threw shadows at odd angles. The far right corner of the large room featured floor-to-ceiling windows that offered views of the City to the north and the east that you could charge admission to see. Windows that were so big you couldn’t look at them without hoping they were reinforced. Just being in the room probably gave Morgan the upper hand in who knows how many deals. He stood with his back to Jason, looking out at the City—Central Park not too far in the distance, Rockefeller Center just off to his right. “Don’t talk to the suit, talk to the man,” his father once told him. It was advice that had stuck with Jason over the years.

  “See any of your buildings from here?” It wasn’t part of Jason’s original script, but he thought the ad lib would put him on the ­offensive.

  He stepped out of the glare and turned to face Jason. It wasn’t Mr. Morgan.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “Mr. Barings,” he said, extending his hand. “Mr. Morgan’s personal secretary.” Barings was slim, probably in his forties, and impeccably dressed. He spoke with a modest clipped British accent that seemed genuine.

  “I’m here to see Mr. Morgan,” Jason responded firmly, and let the handshake go unrequited.

  “Nobody sees Mr. Morgan. He sees them.”

  “Mr. Morgan told me personally that I was to discuss this matter only with him.”

  Barings was smooth and reassuring. “Of course. But let me assure you, when you’re talking to me, you’re talking to Mr. Morgan.”

  “That may well be. But how do I know for sure that you aren’t just—”

  Barings interrupted, and read from a file that was already open on the desk in front of him.

  “Jason Sims, born October sixteen, nineteen forty-five. Father Manny, twice decorated for valor during World War Two, later printer and secretary-treasurer of union local four-oh-seven. Graduated Columbia University with honors nineteen sixty-six, arrested twice, once in nineteen sixty-seven for assaulting a police officer.”

  “That’s bullshit!” Jason exploded, but Barings continued without missing a beat.

  “Case subsequently dismissed. One year at Harvard Law, three semesters Columbia School of Journalism—”

  “Let me know when you get to what I had for lunch,” Jason snapped, still angry but cooling off a bit.

  “We appreciate your discretion, Jason, especially after yesterday. If this is about money, we can certainly—”

  “It is about money,” Jason interjected. “I get paid”—he pulled the stack of twenties from his coat and tossed them on the desk—“not paid off.”

  He’d practiced that line all the way over on the subway, and he’d nailed it. Barings looked at the cash, but didn’t make a move toward it.

  “I see. And this is from Mr. Morgan himself?”

  “Well, no, but—”

  “Then he ordered someone to give it to you?”

  “No,” Jason said defensively, “there wouldn’t have been time for that.”

  “Then I would suggest that whatever problem you have…it lies elsewhere.”

  Jason wasn’t buying it. “I don’t like this one bit. Maybe we should—”

  “Has Mr. Morgan violated the terms of his agreement with you?” Barings queried, with the confidence of a man who knew the answer to his own questions.

  “No. It just seems that—”

  “Have you been forced to engage in any activities, unspecified in the original agreement, that you find unacceptable?”

  “Not exactly.…” Jason could feel himself losing the argument, and Barings kept his rhythm steady.

  “Then your presence here is largely the result of action taken by a subordinate in a moment of extreme stress?”

  “I guess.” Jason felt the thickness of the carpet under his feet, and adjusted them slightly.

  Barings waved his hand at the money on the table with a small flourish that renounced it. “Perhaps, then, this is a matter for you and him to resolve between yourselves.”

  Jason stood silently. Barings had won the debate. He was good—he punched like a lawyer and counterpunched like a therapist. But Jason wasn’t going to be talked into a corner.

  “Look, whatever brought me here, I’m still here. Maybe I was wrong from the start. And that doesn’t explain your dossier, either.”

  “Dossier?”

  “On me.” Jason felt the heat rising in the back of his neck. “I thought that sort of thing was out of fashion, you know, last couple of years?”

  “Mr. Sims, Mr. Morgan is quite particular about the men with whom he chooses to associate.” Barings slid two fingers across the dustless desk as he spoke, as if to accentuate the perfect order of Morgan’s universe. “That goes for his doorman as well as his accountant.”

  “That still doesn’t—”

  “He insisted on meeting with you personally, Jason, something, I think you can now gath
er, that was a rather exceptional gesture on his part. He seemed to think that was important. If you could just see this through to the end of the week—”

  “You mean tomorrow, Friday?”

  “—we might be able to rethink, maybe even speak to Mr. Morgan on Monday.”

  “Okay. I’ll do it tomorrow. But that’s it, I’m out,” he said theatrically, realizing that he didn’t really know just what he was in. He headed toward the door. “If Morgan wants to talk about it, I’m sure he’ll be able to find me.”

  11

  Jason and Alison sat on the living room floor in ­Jason’s apartment. Open boxes of Chinese food were set out on the coffee table next to them. A small black and white TV on a stand off to the side was tuned to a Mets game. When Alison arrived Jason had walked over and turned town the volume, but, to her slight amusement, he left the set on. She was dressed more like she had been in the bar, not the library, and Jason liked it better. One bump down to jeans and a T-shirt and she would have been devastating.

  “So how long did he stay there?” Jason asked.

  “All afternoon. He said he only scratched the surface.”

  “Were you there the whole time?” Jason was ignoring the voice that told him to move on.

  “Uh-huh,” she said, swallowing. “He needed my help with some of the sources. But mostly I was working on a paper.” She pointed at one of the cartons with her fork. “What’s this one?”

  “Shrimp with black bean sauce.” He offered a tour of the other dishes. “Szechuan chicken, garlic braised Chinese greens…that one is the house special fried rice. Best fried rice in town.” He said it like he was showing someone the Mona Lisa for the first time.

  Alison picked up a chopstick and probed the fried rice like an archeologist, but Jason took the carton and shook some out on her plate. “You’re supposed take it as it comes, not just pick out the bits you like.”

  “That’s deep. You talking about the food or life?” she asked mischievously.

  “Hey, we don’t joke about Chinese food around here.”

  She tried some of the rice. “That is good. It tastes different, though. You know, this is the one thing I’ve had before. They used to have fried rice at Dave’s.”

  “Dave’s?” That didn’t sound promising.

  “Dave’s Asian Garden. It was the greatest. Back in Kenosha. Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian.”

  “Indian?” he asked, against his better judgment.

  “Yeah. The Chinese section had egg rolls, fried rice, and spare ribs. The fried rice went great with naan.”

  Within two seconds Jason sifted through twenty responses and rejected them all. “So…what’s this paper you’re writing?”

  “Oh God. It’s called ‘Tax Farming and Imperial Decline.’ You want to hear more about Dave’s?”

  Jason did not want to hear more about Dave’s. “What’s that? How they taxed their farmers?”

  “No, no, tax farming, not taxing farmers.”

  “Uh…right,” Jason offered, not getting it. He stole a quick glance at the TV.

  Alison usually segued into different material in these situations, but she didn’t this time. She wasn’t going to back off, but spoke without lecturing.

  “When a government gets so weak that it can’t even collect taxes, it raises revenue by selling the right to collect taxes—you know, like subcontracting. Basically to local thugs, who then go out and shake people down.”

  “So there are no actual farms involved,” he said with a smile.

  “No, it’s farming like ‘farming out.’ It becomes prominent when things are really starting to fall apart.”

  “So where was this taking place?” he asked, genuinely interested.

  “Well, that’s the really cool part—at least for a historian. It happens everywhere.” Her eyes danced when she talked. “At least, everywhere an empire was falling apart. The late Roman Empire, the Song Dynasty in twelfth-century China.… Did you know the Chinese issued paper currency hundreds of years before it was introduced in Europe?”

  “No!” Jason widened his eyes in mock amazement.

  “Laugh now, copter-boy, but it’s the same thing that happened here. In the eleven-sixties the Song dynasty was at war with the Jurchen regime, and they were running out of money to pay for it. First they issued an edict that everyone had to surrender their copper objects to the government, so they could be melted down for coins. Then after those were all spent on the war they issued paper money. From eleven sixty-seven to eleven sixty-eight the inflation rate doubled.”

  Alison became self-conscious of the fact that the she was talking quickly and maybe had gotten a little too excited about twelfth-century inflation rates. She paused for a moment, but Jason seemed to be waiting for more, so she continued.

  “Anyway,” she said more matter-of-factly, “like I said, it’s the same thing now. We went off the gold standard in ’seventy-one, and then the inflation—”

  “We went off the gold standard?” He said it straight, but his eyes gave him away.

  “Shut up!” she said with a smile.

  Jason stood up. “You want another beer?”

  “No thanks.”

  Jason walked to the kitchen and came back with a fresh beer. Alison was poking through some of the cartons with a fork, exploring. He sat down next to her, in the same spot as before but a little bit closer.

  “How can someone who knows so much about China know so little about Chinese food?”

  “I’m not sure that people from other places realize just how important Chinese food can be.”

  “Oh, there are few things that are more important,” he explained. “When I was very young, we lived in Manhattan, pretty far downtown. Every Sunday night my father would take us out to dinner in Chinatown. For a kid, it was like…like walking into a magic closet. The streets would come to life, English would disappear from the storefronts and street signs. Inside, there were never any menus, he would always order for us. Later on, after we moved out here, I was a delivery boy.”

  “Did you have your own car?”

  “No, this was when I was fourteen or so. But bikes were faster anyway. You know the neighborhood—crowded streets, lots of apartment buildings—we didn’t go more than maybe three-quarters of a mile in any direction. I did it for three years. I once calculated that I probably brought Chinese food to over five thousand people. And it was a real learning experience, too. When you’re young, you’re exposed to a slightly sanitized version of humanity. But people don’t tidy the house, or even stop arguing with each other, just because some kid shows up with the Chinese food.”

  Alison stole a quick glace over at the cartons, arrayed like a small sculpture garden, her eyes catching the light sliding off the thin silver handles.

  “And you never knew who was going to open that door,” Jason continued. “Little old ladies, young singles, rich and poor, families, everybody orders Chinese food. They were so different. I used to think about how they were all connected by this common thread.”

  A hissing sound radiated from the TV set. Jason tumbled over and turned up the volume, and the hiss turned into the roar of the crowd. A player was shown trotting around the bases, and an excited announcer described the action.

  “A two-out pinch-hit home run for Kranepool wins the game for the Mets in the bottom of the ninth. It stops the losing streak at five, and makes a winner out of pitcher Tug McGraw. The Mets are streaming onto the field and mobbing him at the plate like they just won the World Series! We’ll be back with the happy recap in just a minute.”

  Jason reached out to turn off the TV, but paused at the appearance of two news anchors, a black man and a white woman, the current coupling of choice for almost every station. The man spoke first, in a deadly serious voice.

  “Gangland style execution murders on the West Side leave four men dead. And on the eve of his funeral, new questions emerge about money found in the trunk of Sid Maynes’s car.”

  Then the fe
male anchor lit up with a big smile. “All that and traffic, sports, and weather, and a cat who plays ping-pong, coming your way right after the game!”

  Jason clicked off the set, then leaned back and turned on the reel-to-reel tape machine. It was soft blues music—some rare acoustic recordings of Ma Rainey from 1924, ideal for the occasion. He had selected it with Alison in mind—they were some of the oldest recordings he had, and a female artist to boot. Alison liked history, and she was a woman. Ma was also bisexual, normally a winning conversation topic, but Jason wasn’t sure they discussed such things in the Midwest and planned to keep that tidbit to himself.

  Jason looked to evaluate Alison’s reaction to the music, which was always a pivotal moment for him. But she was still staring at the now-lifeless TV.

  “Isn’t that the same guy from the other day, that Maynes person?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you see any of that money?”

  “No. The trunk was closed when we were there. Maybe we interrupted something, I don’t know.”

  Jason really didn’t want to talk about it, but she seemed more interested in the whole affair than she was the other night. Probably just being near Adam. He could rub off on people. He decided to take it head on.

  “Did Adam say whether he’d found anything?”

  “He didn’t say, but I’m sure he did. He was trying not to let on, but he seemed very excited to me. He told me to tell you he wants to see you in his office tomorrow. Did I mention that? I don’t think he wanted to talk about it in the library.”

  “No. He can only talk in a secure environment,” Jason said, trying for just the right amount of ridicule.

  “He also told me that if the police ever questioned me, I shouldn’t mention that I knew him or took him to the library.” It was hard to tell if she was rolling her eyes or just looking up.

  “You just have to get used to him,” Jason said, trying to gauge the whole Adam situation.

  “No, I didn’t mean…he was just the opposite. It was really sweet. He had microfilm going in three separate machines, and kept running back and forth between like a kid at an arcade. He must have filled up two pads with notes. It was very…cute.”