Jason wasn’t about to argue with that. He studied Bill, trying to get a fix on him. Was he pissed about being ordered to take an extra trip? Still mad at him for getting out of the helicopter at Shea? Late for a hot date? Scared by what that old man had told him? It could have been any of them. Hell, it could have been all of them, though Bill didn’t look like the hot date type.
“I went to Morgan’s office yesterday,” Jason finally offered. “I told ’im that I wasn’t going to do this anymore, after today.”
“I know.”
He knew? That pissed Jason off, since Bill hadn’t let on until now. It was one thing for Bill to keep his own—or whoever’s—secrets to himself, but this was between the two of them.
“I don’t know what you guys are up to, but it’s more than just city code violations.”
“You figure?” Bill said. It was meant as a put-down.
“I don’t mind breaking a few rules, but bending the law, that’s not my style,” Jason said, getting slightly more aggressive in his tone.
“If the City can’t take care of itself, people got to take care of the City,” Bill replied matter-of-factly.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing. Just in the real world, sometimes you have to make choices. Not all of ’em are good.”
Jason had been in this fight a million times before, with a lot of different people, not all of them bad. But they were wrong. Living in the real world didn’t give you a get-out-of-jail-free card from having to do the right thing.
“Maybe you have to make tough choices,” Jason explained, “but not all of ’em are bad. And if you’re rich, you got more options to choose from.”
“At least Morgan is staying,” Bill countered. “City Hall’s driving a lot of people out of this town.”
Jason wanted to keep talking. He had a longer rap on this issue—what kind of compromises you can make before you become something you’re not, or you weren’t, or you shouldn’t be. But they had arrived back in that industrial park, and Jason set the helicopter down in the same place as before. On the descent the flickering of a gas flare stack caught his eye, suggesting there was an active refinery nearby, but other than that everything looked just as it had then. Maybe it was even quieter this time, but it was the same set-up, with the big black limo idling near the warehouse.
Bill took the attaché case and hopped out of the helicopter. He looked up at Jason.
“Don’t worry,” Jason pre-empted, “I’m not going anywhere.”
Jason watched as Bill walked toward the limo. As he approached it the back door opened again, but neither “Heavy-Set Man” nor the driver got out of the car. Instead, Bill leaned in and handed someone the case. Jason arched his back but couldn’t see anything that was going on. He looked down at his watch for a second, and that’s when he heard what had to be gunshots, but he hoped he was wrong. He screwed his eyes shut for a split second, flinching as the unmistakable sound passed though his body. Looking up, he saw Bill lying on the ground—the limo was already driving away. Without thinking Jason pulled the helicopter up and flew directly at the car, which drove beneath him and continued in the opposite direction. Jason looked to set down near where Bill was lying, but as he hovered over the body it was bitterly clear that Bill was already dead. Deftly maneuvering the helicopter and tilting it at an odd angle, he took a long look at the body through the passenger-side window and studied Bill’s now lifeless face.
Then he pulled back up and chased after the car. He caught up with it in seconds and moved in as close as he could, trying to get a look at the license plate. Swinging around wildly, he got a good angle on the rear of the car through the passenger window—something-something-something, two-two-four. He and the limo were both swerving, and he couldn’t make out the letters, but he repeated the numbers over and over in his head. He then swung around again, whipsawing so violently that he nearly lost control of the helicopter, but managed to position it in front of the fleeing car. The car stopped, and Jason hovered directly in front of it. He figured the driver would throw it in reverse, but instead, one of the doors flew open, and a man with a gun ducked behind it.
Without hesitating Jason flew forward and directly at the limo, which caught his adversaries by surprise and probably saved his life. Pouring right over the car—he almost scraped the roof—he sent the gunman tumbling to the ground. Only then did Jason pull up sharply, as fast as he could. The gunman recovered and wildly squeezed off a few rounds, but before he could get a clean shot Jason had reached a safe altitude. It was an odd standoff, more of a stalemate—the gunman kept his weapon pointed at the helicopter, but did not fire. Jason couldn’t get in much closer without exposing himself to renewed gunfire, but the killers were boxed in as well, realizing that he could follow them from the air.
Jason was sorting through his options when he was interrupted by a loud beeping sound and a flashing light from his control panel. He was running out of gas, and had just enough, probably, to get back to the City. He thought about crashing into the car, but quickly rejected the idea as overly dramatic. He had a piece of the license plate. Looking at the floor on the passenger side, he also realized that he had one of Bill’s big manila envelopes as well. It was time to go. Jason looked down for one last time. He saw Bill’s body, the car, the warehouse, the industrial park—three gas flares were now visible, burning indifferently. In the distance, he could see the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. It was the longest suspension bridge in the world, stretching impossibly from Staten Island to Brooklyn. Over two miles long, there was something about it that was reassuring, as if it was calling him back to the City. He pulled away and headed back to town.
———
Jason made it back to the roof. It was abandoned, and Sammy wasn’t there, which was a relief, since Jason didn’t know what he would say if Sammy—or anyone for that matter—saw him. The minute he stepped out of the helicopter he felt dizzy; he’d never noticed the fumes from the helicopter before, but they were making him nauseous. He walked uneasily to the roof, looked down at the street, and then laughed out loud at the thought of throwing up and killing someone on the ground below.
He sat himself down, mostly by choice, and looked to the west. Concentrating on the Empire State Building, he gave himself a little lecture. People died. They died violent deaths. This was not a new thing. It would happen again—there would be six murders in New York tomorrow. Once when he was a ten years old they did a duck-and-cover drill in his classroom, to help the children prepare for a nuclear attack. A few nights later there was an explosion in New Jersey—so loud you could hear it in Queens. Jason crept out of bed and snuck into his parents’ bedroom to peek out the window. It probably wasn’t an atom bomb, he reasoned—the Empire State Building was still there. It was still there now.
“That’s enough,” he said out loud. He always did well in a crisis and then fell apart afterwards, and he hated that about himself. Bill was dead. That had happened. And it wasn’t going to be on the news. He wondered if anyone would ever hear about it, or if there were people who would miss him. Probably that old man from Shea Stadium.
Jason walked back to the helicopter and retrieved Bill’s envelope. Then he went over to Sammy’s booth and sat down, which he’d never done before, but he needed to use the phone.
“Yeah?” Adam never said his name or even hello when he answered the phone at work.
“Hey.”
“Who is this?”
“Jason.”
“No shit. I didn’t recognize your voice. What are you using, two Dixie cups and a string?”
“Meet me in The Cone,” Jason said, and hung up.
“The Cone” was a reference to the “cone of silence,” also known as the unused staircase at the far end of the building. It wasn’t easy being Adam. He was convinced that anything said in his office or on the phone would immediately be known by his enemies, whoever they were, or at least his adversaries. But sometimes he needed to talk
but was too busy to leave the building, so he used the staircase. There were two of them, one near the elevators, which was almost never used, and a second, tucked away near the decommissioned manual service elevator, that few even knew existed—it was a vestige from when the building had been a hotel of some repute in the 1920s.
Jason wasn’t afraid of talking in Adam’s office; he just couldn’t bear the thought of seeing anybody and didn’t want to be interrupted. He slipped down the main stairs, nervous only during the short flight that led from the roof to the top floor. After that it was smooth sailing, but Jason went down a couple of extra flights before cutting across to the second staircase. Adam was already waiting when he got to the seventeenth floor.
“What’s up?” he asked cautiously. Adam was used to calling for meetings in The Cone; he couldn’t recall ever being summoned there himself.
They stood in the staircase and Jason brought Adam up to date. As always, the poor lighting exaggerated the intensely isolated atmosphere. The walls were painted that distinct industrial green-gray that someone long ago had decided was perfect for urban staircases. Only one naked bulb illuminated each landing, and the inadequate light bounced off the surroundings in a way that threw either exaggerated shadows or an otherworldly glare. The walls offered only the bare essentials: the floor number was stenciled in red, and two signs—one of those black and yellow “fallout shelter” symbols, showing some rust, and, affixed next to an elaborately spooled fire hose, another that read IN CASE OF FIRE, USE STAIRS.
After Jason finished, Adam just stood there, running over it in his own mind.
“You sure you’re all right?” he asked again.
“Yeah. Not a scratch,” Jason said, studying the backs of his hands for confirmation. “I’ve seen worse,” he added in a quiet voice.
Adam shot him a quick glance, but Jason wasn’t looking his way. “You want to look in the envelope?”
“I guess,” Jason responded, holding it up to the light. Then he handed it to Adam and sat on the steps, looking at the platform halfway down to sixteen. “You do it.”
He heard Adam rip open the envelope and ruffle through some papers, then sift through them slowly, one after the other.
“Well?” Jason finally asked, not turning around.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing, like in a bunch of blank pages?” Jason didn’t think that’s what Adam meant, but he was rooting that way. It would be fitting. One more thing about nothing.
“No, nothing, as in just a bunch of numbers.”
“What do you mean, numbers?”
“Maybe twenty pages, mostly columns with numbers. Looks like bookkeeper’s records.”
That sounded to Jason like it could be important, but Adam’s voice was full of disappointment.
“What were you hoping for, a map to the place they dumped Hoffa?” Jason stood up. “Let me see them.”
He took the papers and started pouring over them, turning the pages and reading parts out loud. “One-twelve, two thousand; One-fourteen, three thousand. Three-fifty-six, five thousand. What a load of crap.”
“What do you think?” Adam asked.
“I think it’s a coded record of where all that money has been going. But that’s just what it looks like. Could be anything you want it to be—unless you know the code. But from where I sit, I’d say Morgan looks to have half the City on his payroll.
“Most of that under that table,” Adam chimed in, starting to smell blood. “Might not look like much, but I bet it could send someone to jail. Maybe it’s a tax scam. I told you Cohen was sticking it to Morgan with those licensing fees. Maybe Morgan is fighting back; I don’t see him as a guy who backs down from a fight. Maybe this is how he’s able to keep operating in the City.”
“They don’t kill you over tax evasion,” Jason said quietly. “It’s the other way around. They get killers for not paying their taxes.” He walked back to the stairs and held onto the railing.
“You didn’t see who shot him?”
“I told you. No.”
“But it was the same car as the other day.”
“Yes.”
“So it was probably the same people.”
“I guess.” Jason closed his eyes and tried to summon an image of the people from the first Staten Island drop, but it wasn’t coming to him.
“Some well-dressed guy and his driver,” Adam added, thinking if they kept talking about it something would click in Jason’s mind.
“That’s who it was the time before. I told you, this time I only saw the driver, and I couldn’t even tell if he was the same one. Could have been anybody—at least, anybody who knew enough to be there.”
“What do you mean?” Adam could tell Jason was thinking something he wasn’t saying.
“Well, the old guy at Shea Stadium—he must have been the one who sent Bill to Staten Island. I don’t think Bill was originally planning to go there.” Jason regretted bringing it up. He replayed the meeting in his mind. “No. Couldn’t have been him.”
“Why not?”
“I saw him and I saw them. It was like he was talking to his father.”
“You saw a guy once, a hundred yards away,” Adam countered. He wasn’t attached to the Shea Stadium guy, and liked him as a suspect. “Don’t get sentimental on me.”
“Sentimental?” Jason vivisected the word.
“Yeah, sentimental. I know you. You are one sentimental mother. Don’t even think about arguing with me on this. You don’t want to know how sentimental you are.”
“Nevertheless,” Jason said, shifting back to the topic at hand, “I know what I know. And I know this: that guy in Queens was no killer. Or he’s a better actor than Brando. Bill trusted him. But the one in Staten Island, he was pretty pissed off the other day. I could hear him shouting over the blades.”
“Fine by me. Just so long as you’re taking a stand.”
“I’m taking a stand about the old man in Queens, not the bum on Staten Island. Just cause he was mad, that doesn’t make him a killer.”
“It does make him a suspect,” Adam insisted.
“Suspect?” Jason repeated, this time prepared to go to the mat over Adam’s choice of words.
“Sorry. He’s a key piece of the puzzle. I mean, he’s furious one day, and it was his car, or one that was supposed to look just like it. If we want the story, we’ve got to figure out who he is.”
“Good luck finding him. Probably only a few thousand cars with two-four-four in the license plate.”
“We’ll find him. You never know. Things turn up. Like just this morning, I’m in my office working on my riddle of the sphinx.”
“Huh?”
“You know, how the City is providing the same services with less money.”
“Oh, right, the sugar and coffee thing.” Jason turned away. He didn’t have much energy for that at the moment. He peered down at the rectangular gap formed by the descending stairs. He could see all the way to the bottom. Leaning over, he tried to see how many flights down he could still see the actual steps, before the angle became too steep. Jason loved staircases and bridges. They had a stately beauty. And they took you from one place to another.
“So I’m working on my riddle, and, you know, it is actually like ancient Egypt in there, too. It’s worse than you’ve ever seen—I’ve got papers stacked so high they look like the pyramids.”
“The ruins of tombs,” Jason said into the gap, just loud enough for it to echo.
“Gimme a minute, will you? I’m listening to Highway 61 Revisited—a little ‘Tom Thumb’s Blues’—and old Bob sings out, ‘the cops don’t need you, and man they expect the same.’ ”
Jason pulled back up but didn’t turn around. “No argument here.”
“And it dawns on me. Just out of the blue. Maybe there’s more than one way to fix the books. So I call over to public information. I don’t say who I am, but it doesn’t matter, they can’t turn me down the way Records can. You know those bastards—
”
“You going somewhere with this, or just out for a spin?”
“Okay. Turns out there are just as many cops on the street, but arrests are down, way down.”
“It’s probably seasonal.”
“It’s summertime!”
“So?” Jason said, finally turning to face Adam.
“So if I’m right, you’ve got one more reason to be a white man. The city has decided to use the same number of cops, but in a more concentrated area. Get mugged in the wrong neighborhood, good luck…unless someone happens by with a spare helicopter.”
“You really think—”
“What did you say? No cops ‘as far as the eye could see’ three blocks from the police station?”
The silence was broken by a loud ringing, and the sound of footsteps. They looked at each other uncertainly. It was probably a fire alarm, but they’d never heard it before. Then the stairwell door swung open, and a man in a blue pinstriped three-piece suit rushed past them. He was taken by surprise by their presence, and lost his footing momentarily navigating around them, but he continued at breakneck speed, without saying a word or looking back.
“Hey man, what’s up?” Jason shouted.
“Fire!” he shouted back, filling the staircase with the sound of his footsteps.
Adam leaned over the rail. “Where?”
The footsteps got more distant and the door opened again. The bells got louder when the door was opened, and a few more people entered and headed down the staircase like school kids let out of class, chatting and watching their steps. Smoke started to drift in.
“Where’s the fire?” Adam asked the crowd collectively.
“One of the offices,” a woman responded, fixing her hair as she descended the stairs.
Adam pushed past the people entering the stairway, forcing his way towards whatever it was everyone else was running away from. Jason looked toward the stairs, but reluctantly followed him. Adam walked briskly down the hallway, with Jason trotting to keep up. As they progressed, there was more smoke and confusion and it got harder to push upstream against the flow of people heading for the exits with somewhat more urgency than the first wave. Harry was standing on a desk directing traffic. Jason could tell that if his ship had gone down during the war, he would have been the last man to leave.
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