by Toby Ball
“Okay.”
Panos didn’t immediately reply. Frings turned to see the old man’s shoulders shaking as he quietly wept. “His parents are gone, Frank. His grandmother’s gone. It’s just me and him, and I haven’t heard from him in over two years. His friends said they hadn’t heard from him. I thought he was dead, Frank. But now, maybe, I face the possibility that he wanted to be done with me; that his friends lied to me so that I wouldn’t find him. Why would he hide from me, Frank?”
Frings put his hand on Panos’s shoulder. “We don’t know anything, Panos. We don’t know when this film was made. We don’t know what Sol was doing”—he corrected himself—“is doing. It could be a lot of things. Don’t assume the worst.”
THE FILM ENDED WITHOUT CREDITS. THE LIGHTS CAME ON, CHASING THE rats back to their hiding places and making visible the smoke-stained walls, the yellowed linoleum floor. The crowd, a collection of aging bohemians, college kids, and a couple of younger men who, to Frings’s eye, seemed in the clutches of some dementia, stood and stretched and filed up the stairs to street level. Frings found his cane where he’d leaned it against Panos’s wheelchair and walked to the back of the room, his knee throbbing and stiff from sitting. He knocked on the door to the projection room. After a few moments, a balding young man in a wool sweater opened the door.
“Can I help you, friend?” His voice was raspy, ravaged by cigarette smoke.
“Yeah, look, can I ask you a couple questions about the film?”
The guy shrugged. “Shoot.”
“Let’s start with who made it.”
“The director? Andy Macheda.”
Frings shook his head a little, not recognizing the name. “When was it shot, do you know?”
“Depends on the part. Some of it, let’s see … 1960 was the first, I think, you know, two years ago, maybe more. Other parts, could have been last month, last week.”
“Last week?”
“He brings in new parts, takes out old ones.”
“Macheda does?”
“Sure. It’s a living film, you know. It changes. This one, it’s called Film 12, and next time he adds something it’ll be Film 13.”
Frings sighed. It was never easy. “So the part with the ginks throwing rocks at the camera …”
The guy closed one eye and raised the other eyebrow: some kind of thinking expression. “Year and a half, maybe two. Something like that. It’s hard to keep track of sometimes, you know? From the first version to now …” He let the thought drift.
Frings waited.
The guy was looking at him intently. “Do I know you?”
“I don’t think so. My name’s Frank Frings.”
The guy’s eyes widened. “Shit. Yeah, I thought I’d seen you before. What brings you here? You … you heard of my cinema?” It seemed as if the answer would mean something to him.
Frings nodded—a lie. “Thought I’d have a look. Hey …”
“Lane.”
“Lane. You have splicing equipment back there?”
Lane narrowed his eyes. “Sure. I need it for when Andy comes in with a new piece, or when the film breaks. Why?”
PASSING CARS, WET WITH RAIN, GLISTENED UNDER THE STREET LIGHTS when Frings and Panos emerged into the autumn night. Frings carried, secured in an envelope in his pocket, a celluloid frame with the four rock-throwing men’s faces as clearly focused as they could find. The projection room had been something of a nightmare: cans of film stacked against the walls beneath decades-old black-and-white smut photos, tiny scuttling sounds coming from the corner, Frings trying not to imagine hundreds of cockroaches crawling over each other. In the close quarters, he had felt Lane’s mania—the unease with interaction, the anxiety of admitting someone into his place. But Lane had cut the frame for him. Only, he’d explained, because it was for Frank Frings. Andy would be cool about it, he’d said.
Frings had asked, “Where do I find him?”
Lane—was that his first or last name?—had shrugged. “I don’t know. He seems to shoot everywhere.”
“Where does he live? Do you have an address for him?”
Lane had shrugged again. Frings had nodded. He could see why Andy Macheda might not be all that eager for an odd gink like Lane to be able to track him down.
Frings had thanked Lane and backed out, the smoky air of the makeshift theater comparatively fresh after the heat and stink of the projection room.
Outside in the rain, Panos slumped in his wheelchair, exhausted from ascending the stairs, even with Frings essentially carrying his weight—a difficult task in its own right, given his age and crippled knee. Frings held an umbrella over them as they waited for a cab.
“You’ll find that boy, Frank?” Panos seemed to be fading, his voice faltering.
“Yes, Panos. I’ll find him.”
Panos nodded and closed his eyes. Frings stared down the street, trying to spot a cab amid the creeping flow of nighttime traffic.
3
THE MORNING SUN FAILED TO WARM DETECTIVE TORSTEN GRIP AS HE leaned against a chain-link fence and watched construction workers file into the work site, a dozen floors of finished office building exterior topped by another twenty-some floors of steel skeleton. They were an eclectic, diverse group, culled from the City’s endless ethnic enclaves—second-and third-generation immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe, Negroes from over on the East Side, newly-arrived Asians and, as was always the case on the high-rises, Iroquois from around the northern border.
Grip eyed the men as they walked through a crude turnstile lodged in the fence. He was trying, in theory, to identify union organizers who’d begun to infiltrate these construction crews. The unions weren’t illegal, but the mayor’s office had asked the force to be a presence at the sites, to maybe intimidate the organizers without actually making arrests. Grip had a healthy hatred of unions and, especially, the communists he was certain ran rampant within them, but, even so, this was a bullshit assignment: standing around, each morning a new site, looking threatening. There were more effective ways of handling the unions—ways that didn’t involve wearing a badge. He liked, though, the wary looks of the workers as they filed past him. He was, at the very least, being noticed. Although only five foot nine in shoes, his shoulders and chest seemed nearly as wide, and no one mistook his pug’s face for that of a soft man.
He had to get through this wasted hour every morning before hitting the streets for the real detective work. He complained about the kinds of cases he drew lately—his days in Homicide were a thing of the past—but he liked the job regardless, knew that he was good at it. Crime needed to be fought, criminals caught. He did more than his part.
Grip watched the men walk out on the beams, three hundred feet above him. Crazy. He’d been up once, never leaving the platform by the lift. The Indian guys up there had told him not to look up—that was how you lost your balance, following the clouds. He’d taken their word for it, but didn’t look down either—just straight ahead, which was bad enough.
Grip was surprised to see Lieutenant Zwieg walk in behind a couple of Italian welders. Grip watched him survey the site, catch sight of Grip, and walk over.
“Sir?”
Zwieg nodded at him. “Detective.” Zwieg was a big man, easily eight inches taller than Grip, but he’d lost his physical edge and gotten fat, though his hands still held menace. “Scaring the Reds this morning?”
Grip didn’t say anything. He wasn’t much for small talk, especially not with an asshole like Zwieg.
Zwieg gave him a half-lidded glare, not happy to get no response. “I’ve got something for you, Detective. Something that we need to keep under wraps. Get you off this duty.”
“Sure.”
“The Kaiser Street site, the night before last, the explosives trailer was emptied.”
“Emptied?”
Zwieg nodded.
Grip scratched his temple, thinking. A full trailer of explosives was a big heist, much bigger than the usual haul of cons
truction materials or light equipment. “Leads? Suspicions?”
“Hard to know. Sounds like a truck from Standard Ironworks, or … I don’t know, I can’t keep these fucking companies straight. A truck making a late delivery interrupted them, probably kept them from grabbing the little bit of dynamite that they left behind. You’d think maybe Kollectiv 61, but they didn’t leave any of their usual words of wisdom. Maybe they didn’t get around to it because of the delivery truck. Who knows? So, you’re really starting from scratch, here. Two things, though. This needs to be discreet, Tor. We’re keeping it out of the rags, using a little muscle with a couple of them, as I hear it. So practice your usual subtlety.”
“Right.” Zwieg was joking.
“And you report straight to me. We’re keeping the number of people in on this to a minimum.” Zwieg paused for a moment. “Even Kraatjes.”
Grip kept his expression neutral, but this was strange. Kraatjes was the police commissioner, and while he wasn’t personally aware of every ongoing investigation—there was too much crime in the City for that—Grip had never heard anyone suggest that the brass be kept intentionally in the dark.
Zwieg seemed to read Grip’s hesitation. “We’re not exactly sure where he stands,” Zwieg said in a hushed, conspiratorial tone.
“I get it,” Grip said, not really getting it at all, but uncomfortable with the direction the discussion was taking. He changed the subject. “You say it was a night heist? You talked with the security guys?”
“Strangest thing, Detective, none of them showed up last night.”
This actually was unusual. The way these thefts usually worked, the security guys needed to be there to keep the gates open and let the perps in. They would simply deny everything later, and the company that employed them, Consolidated Industries, never pressed charges. Easier to eat the losses than constantly investigate and recruit new guards, who’d all be coming from the same tainted pool, anyway. Price of business.
This haul, though, was on a much different scale than what Grip normally saw.
“You got their addresses, sir?”
Zwieg smiled. “That I do, Detective Grip. That I do.”
4
FRINGS SAT IN THE HEARING ROOM OF A HULKING ASYLUM THAT HAD once been called All Souls’ but was renamed, in a moment of inspiration, City Mental Hospital. He was one of an audience of about a dozen—half reporters and half, apparently, family of the man sitting at a narrow wooden table, his wrists and ankles shackled. The family wore shabby clothes and exhausted expressions.
The light in the room was at once harsh and dim, the only natural illumination filtered through a row of high windows fogged with decades of grime and pollution. Two bare bulbs behind heavy wire mesh gave everything a sickly sheen. The man in shackles had the pallor of the long-incarcerated. His body was swollen from lack of exercise. His head had been shaved. Frings had seen his eyes when he’d been led into the room, and they’d been empty—unseeing, uncomprehending. The wall clock had a hum that rose in volume and pitch until the minute hand ticked over one spot, at which point the hum started low and soft again, a miniature detonation once a minute.
Next to the man in shackles sat a public defender—one of a legion of City lawyers who lacked the imagination and competence to hold down a job at a firm. These lawyers instead attempted to carve out a living through a large volume of clients on the City’s dime, none of whom received much in the way of actual representation. Also present was a senior City Attorney, dressed in a suit that probably cost what the other lawyer made for a couple months’ work; a board of three psychologists with imperious eyes; and the judge, a forbidding man named Asplundh.
The defense lawyer looked profoundly uncomfortable, and Frings couldn’t blame him. The man in shackles, Andre LaValle, had, four years prior, assassinated the chief of police by stabbing him in the chest with a hunting knife. He’d stuck the blade in four times before anyone could pull him off. The trial caused a media storm and LaValle had been deemed not guilty by reason of insanity. It had been hard to argue with the accuracy of the verdict: LaValle had been, for the most part, uncommunicative in court, and when he spoke it was clear that he was entirely unaware of his circumstances, or of the fact that the trial had consequences for him. He’d apparently been hearing a different question in his mind, repeatedly answering “5842 Vilnius Street,” his address, a residential block in a neighborhood known as South River. This had been his dull-eyed answer to every question. Initially, commentators had accused him of fakery, but soon even the most cynical among them conceded that LaValle was truly incompetent. Crazy.
According to the decision, LaValle would be given a hearing every three years to determine his mental state. A rumor had since circulated that there existed a legal loophole that—while unlikely in the extreme—could result in his unconditional release upon a finding of mental competence. Nobody wanted that—not the prosecutor, not the police, not even LaValle’s own lawyer, who was better off banking his supposed work on LaValle’s behalf indefinitely. This was the first of the mandated hearings and Frings, who had offered newspaper commentary on LaValle’s trial, was there to chronicle this next step.
The prosecutor, sitting in his chair, tried to engage LaValle. “Mr. LaValle, do you acknowledge belonging to a group known as the People’s Union in the years 1958 and 1959?”
From where he sat, Frings couldn’t see LaValle’s eyes, but the faces of the doctors and the judge indicated that there had not been much of a response.
“Can you describe for me, Mr. LaValle, the goals or intentions of the People’s Union?”
Again nothing. One of the doctors cleared his throat, and a few people in the audience shifted in their seats.
“Okay. Let me put it to you this way. Would you describe the People’s Union as an anarchist organization?”
The lawyer didn’t bother to object. Frings knew that this question was meant to bait LaValle into communication—or not—but the subtext of the question, that belonging to an anarchist organization was somehow an indication of guilt, annoyed him.
In fact, the People’s Union had been pacifists. Their horror at LaValle’s actions had led, eventually, to their quiet dissolution. Graffiti from a group called Kollectiv 61 had appeared months later at the scene of vandal attacks on building projects. The common wisdom—then as now—was that Kollectiv 61 had been formed by the more aggressive members of the People’s Union—the ones more predisposed to action—and in the years since, the attacks had grown progressively more destructive.
The reporter next to Frings, an old hand from the Trib, whispered into Frings’s ear. “I got a source here says they took him off his medication for this show, see what happened. Cold turkey.”
Frings nodded. They’d want him nearly catatonic for the hearing.
He’d seen this prosecutor before, preening in the courtroom in front of the jurors. Now, without the need for an act, he simply read questions from a legal pad without any verbal histrionics.
“Were you aware, Mr. LaValle, that while the People’s Union was critical—some would say harshly critical—of the City’s governance and law enforcement, that they, in fact, publicly and repeatedly renounced your violent actions?”
LaValle sat motionless. Frings rubbed his neck. There was no story here. Nothing today was going to change LaValle’s status. Frings absently spun his pencil around his index finger, wondering what LaValle was like when medicated—if he communicated then. The press had been barred by court order from seeing him, Judge Asplundh uneager to give the man a soapbox.
The questioning continued like this for another ten minutes until it had been established to everyone’s satisfaction that they wouldn’t get anything from the unresponsive LaValle and, in an anticlimax, the audience slowly drifted out of the hearing room. An older woman with her head bent and tears dropping to the floor—Frings assumed this was LaValle’s mother—was escorted by a younger man who resembled the LaValle of four years ago, before his incar
ceration and mania had transformed him. Frings stashed his reporter’s pad in the inside pocket of his jacket, folded the morning’s News-Gazette under his arm, and followed the crowd out.
In the claustrophobic foyer, a boy whom Frings recognized as an assistant from the News-Gazette office stood waiting, an envelope in his hand.
“Mr. Frings?” The words echoed off the walls, seemed almost amplified, and the boy looked mortified.
Frings flashed a quick smile to reassure him. “Yes?”
“This is for you.” He handed Frings an envelope. “I’m supposed to make sure that you got this before you left.”
Frings thanked him and put the envelope in his trouser pocket. For reasons that he didn’t reflect on, he didn’t want to open it in here, this place of madness and despair.
The enormous square in front of the hospital was empty, as if the usual indigents—the ones who gathered in the City’s unclaimed spaces—as if even they found the proximity to so much insanity a deterrent. Frings paused, feeling the warmth of the autumn sun on this cool, breezy afternoon, and opened the envelope. Inside was a note in the hand of his editor at the News-Gazette.
It read, simply: MY OFFICE. 11:30. H.L.
5
FRINGS HAD A SMALL OFFICE ON THE THIRD FLOOR OF THE NEWS BUILDING, a twelve-story box of steel and glass on the edge of Capitol Heights. When the News had taken over Frings’s old paper, the Gazette, and become the News-Gazette, he’d been given this office, supposedly a gesture of respect for his status as the best known journalist in the City. This, like so much else about the News-Gazette, was bullshit. He’d been deposited in this office, two floors down from the news room, to get some distance between him and the young reporters. He’d heard rumors to the effect that the brass had made it clear to the younger reporters: associating with Frings was a bad career move. The News-Gazette wasn’t the Gazette, wasn’t a leftist rag. Management had wanted Frings under their thumb, so they’d kept him on, but he was isolated. He wrote a weekly “dissenting view” column, and he wasn’t sure that anyone would care—or even notice—if he just stopped coming to work.