by Toby Ball
Outside they were confronted with a cutting wind, and the two men hustled as best they could through the door. It was warmer inside, but not as warm as Frings would have expected. Men in construction helmets and work clothes moved about, increasing their pace and sense of purpose when they saw Canada.
“We’re installing the electrical wiring, the heating system, that kind of thing, in the lower towers,” Canada rasped, lighting a new cigarette. “The upper building isn’t as far along.”
A workman strode over to them, carrying two hard hats. “Hello, Mr. Canada. You and your friend should wear these while you’re inside.” He handed a hard hat to each.
Frings put his on and watched Canada do the same. Canada’s helmet seemed too big. He would have looked ridiculous, but the seriousness of his demeanor, his determination not to concede the embarrassment of his appearance, made him seem sinister.
“Thank you, Mr. DiIulio. I’m taking my guest to the observation deck.”
“I’ll let them know to clear out, sir.” With that, DiIulio walked away, speaking into a walkie-talkie.
Canada led Frings to a single elevator set apart from the larger bank of elevators further down the hall. There was only one button inside, labeled “12,” and Canada pushed it. He talked as they ascended.
“Not that you’ve ever written about it in one of your columns, but this building is the product of the type of arrangement—government–business partnership—that is the future of the City. As I know you are aware, the City put up 60 percent of the funds needed for construction, and private business contributed the other 40. In return, they will have space in the crown jewel of the New City Project—the best address, proximity to important government agencies that will be headquartered in the other tower, a dedicated exit from the Crosstown directly to the underground garage. This building represents the future of the City, both figuratively and in actuality.”
They arrived at the twelfth floor and walked down a narrow corridor.
“The elevator we took was the tourist elevator, which lets out only onto this hall, which leads to the observation deck elevators.”
They walked by an empty room. “This will be a souvenir shop. Bring something back to your home in Bumfuck, Wisconsin, to remember your visit to the City by.”
The next elevator took them up the center of the spire to the observation deck.
“I had to be talked into this building, Frank. I wasn’t sold on it initially. But the Council, they insisted, and, while I have my doubts about their intentions, I believe they were, in this instance, correct. People like boldness. Hell, they like brazenness. That’s what this building is.”
The elevator doors opened to a narrow lobby that led to the deck. A sign reading NO SMOKING was posted opposite the elevator, and as he walked by it, Canada lit a fresh cigarette from the butt of the one he’d been smoking. He dropped the butt and stepped on it, absently.
The observation deck was a ring—a fifteen-foot-wide circular corridor—the outer wall of which was constructed mostly of thick glass. A walk around the deck afforded an extraordinary 360-degree view of the City, most of it well below the height of the Tower.
“It’s spectacular,” Frings said, looking east, to where Capitol Heights bled into Praeger’s Hill and the suburbs beyond. And gashing through it all, the signs of the Crosstown construction—cranes, rubbled buildings, road sections at various stages of completion.
“It’s so close. You must feel like you’re this close to winning.”
“I’m not close. I’ve already won.”
Frings let that go. “Why are we here, Nathan?”
“Because, I wanted you to see this, Frank. I thought that if you saw it for yourself, you’d realize: it’s over. You can harp all you want, but it won’t change a fucking thing. You and those Kollectiv 61 shitfucks—it’s time to concede. Use your pull with these people. Tell them to stop. Nothing’s going to change. They’re just wasting the people’s money now.”
It was, Frings thought, more or less what Littbarski had told him—not even all that different from what Panos had said. In their minds, the project wasn’t just necessary, but a fait accompli. The time for arguments against it were over. Frings subconsciously clenched his jaw, envisioning the Crosstown cutting a swath straight through to the new City Center, imagining the bleak new cityscape.
He thought about the subtext to this meeting—the reason, presumably, why Canada had brought him here in particular. His words hadn’t conveyed a threat, because they hadn’t needed to. Just by choosing this spot for their rendezvous, Canada was sending a message. It had all happened five years ago, four hundred feet below them, in the Tower’s shadow.
• • •
THAT DAY, THE DAY THAT HIS KNEE WAS SHATTERED, HE WAS MEETING A union gink named Laz Wolinak at the spot where the Tower now stood—though at that point construction had barely begun. The plan had been for Frings to meet Wolinak at the on-site foreman’s office. He’d found the trailer sitting isolated amid a chaos of broken rock and stacked building materials. Frings saw a cluster of rats swarming on something in a patch of weeds. He climbed the three steps to the trailer door and gave four raps, as Wolinak had told him to.
Wolinak answered, sweating ferociously, cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. “Come inside.” He practically pulled Frings across the threshold, closing the door quickly. The trailer was dim, claustrophobic, and smelled like an ancient ashtray. Three desks, three file cabinets, and a couple of chairs by the entrance were the extent of the operation, except for the girlie shots taped to the walls. The place hummed with Wolinak’s anxiety.
“I didn’t get the papers yet,” he whispered hoarsely. “I didn’t want to have them out if someone else showed up first.”
Frings nodded, thinking just get the papers, I’ll take a few photos, we’ll get the hell out of here. Wolinak’s nerves were starting to play on his own.
Wolinak walked to one of the file cabinets, keys jangling in his shaking hands. Frings could hear Wolinak’s labored breathing as he struggled to get the key in the lock, seeming impossibly tense. He finally managed it and pulled open a drawer. He paused for a moment, then started pawing through the files with increasing alarm.
“Shit.”
“What is it?”
Wolinak grunted a reply, slammed the drawer shut, opened the one above it. Again he pawed through the files, again he slammed the drawer shut. Down to the bottom drawer—paw, slam.
Wolinak’s face lost all color. “We’re fucked.”
Frings’s pulse began to race. “Where are the files, Laz?”
“Not here. Somebody moved them. We’re fucked.”
Frings felt the adrenaline. “Okay, calm down, Laz.”
“Fuck calm down. We need to get out of here.”
“Okay. Okay. We’ll go.” What had happened? Someone must have known. From outside, he heard the sound of a car approaching the trailer.
Wolinak leaned over and vomited. “Fuck,” he said, spitting.
Frings opened the door, hoping irrationally that maybe it was the cops. It wasn’t. A black Buick pulled up a dozen feet from the trailer. Three men got out, stockings over their heads, their faces distorted. Frings looked for the license plates, but they’d been removed.
The men approached, big ginks, looking at Frings, guns in their hands. Frings heard Wolinak retching again.
One of the men motioned backward with his head. “Get out here and bring the other one too.”
Frings didn’t turn, said, “Okay, Laz, we’ve got to go out.” Frings descended the steps cautiously. The men held their guns casually by their sides, but their postures were alert. Frings stepped to the side to let Laz, his chin and shirt wet with bile, step out. The man who’d talked before motioned for them to move away from the door and stand against the wall of the trailer.
The men lined up in front of Frings and Laz, a sense of anticipation now palpable. Frings’s breaths were shallow.
The man
doing the talking said, “Jesus, Laz, look at you, shit all over you. You really balled this up. You really did.” He raised his gun and buried three shots in Laz’s chest. Laz collapsed, lifeless. Frings started shaking with panic.
“You, Frings, I’m supposed to give you a message.” The gink with the gun brought his aim down a little, put a bullet in Frings’s knee. Frings dropped, pain overwhelming him, consciousness ebbing.
“I’m supposed to tell you to stop being an asshole.”
Frings curled up into the fetal position, his knee hurting more than he thought anything could hurt, watching the three sets of feet as they walked away. He heard the car start and pull away, crunching over the broken rock and cement. He turned his head so that he could see Wolinak, who’d landed on his chest, his lifeless eyes cast in Frings’s direction. In the last moments before he lost consciousness, he wondered if Wolinak had a family; if his decision to help Frings meant that a child—or children—had just lost a father, a wife a husband.
• • •
CANADA WAS STILL WAITING FOR A REPLY. FRINGS TURNED TO HIM. HE registered that Canada, for the first time in Frings’s experience, was disconcerted by what he saw.
• • •
FROM Alienation and the Modern City by Francis Frings (1958)
City Planning is, in part, about making predictions in both near and distant terms about all manner of things municipal. In conjunction with statistical analyses, population projections, and geographical maps, the Planners must also attempt to anticipate the mindset of future residents.
In addition to this prognosticative task, the Planners must also attempt to circumscribe the future behavior of residents through planning decisions. It is here, I believe, that the New City Project has gone seriously awry concerning transportation plans, and the effect will be of increasing the aloneness, the alienation, of the very workers the New City Project aims to benefit.
Let us be very clear: with the plans laid out in the New City Project Master Plan, the City has decided that urban travel will be dominated by personal automobiles. This may result from some anticipation of the future desires of commuters, particularly those in sub-urban areas; but it is also—and this is inherent in this infrastructure decision—proscriptive to a vast increase in the number of automobiles on the road and a vast decrease in the use of such modes of transport as buses and trains, where riders are part of a community of commuters.
Picture the City at 8:30 on a weekday morning, a decade hence, and you are confronted with a stream of individual automobiles, most presumably containing a single occupant, heading from the suburbs to the City Center. Commuters are thereby physically segregated from one another, locked in metal boxes where they not only will be unable to interact with one another, but will not even see one another save in passing and through two sheets of glass. How this does not inevitably lead to the alienation of the commuter from both his community of residence and his community of work is beyond my comprehension.
20
BEN LINSKY’S APARTMENT WAS ON THE THIRD FLOOR OF A MODEST building five blocks from the Tech campus and three from Cafe?, on the edge of a working-class Irish neighborhood called Donegal Town, at the foot of Praeger’s Hill. Grip, in a pool of light, leaned against a lamppost on Ben’s block, smoking one Camel after another. He carried a tin flask in his pocket and took occasional tugs, feeling the warmth in his chest as the whisky went down, his muscles relaxing into fighting condition.
Grip enjoyed the street flow—the Tech kids moving with nervous energy, knowing that they’d left the campus neighborhood and crossed into territory where their safety was no longer assured. The Irish kids moved furtively too—they were outside the boundaries where their neighborhood laws were observed; not scared, but unsure where they stood, and streetwise enough for Grip’s presence to keep them moving until they were out of his orbit.
Ben’s satchel lay on the sidewalk by Grip’s feet. He took another nip off the flask. Deputy Chief Ving. Jesus. Grip had never worked under Ving, but used to see him around, knew his rep as one of those squeaky-clean cops that usually pissed off the rank-and-file who resented feeling tainted by comparison. But he’d been a cop’s cop as well, earning respect on the street. Grip actually liked the clean ones, felt his morale lifted by the occasional exception to the corrupt norm. Grip had never taken cash or favors himself, but he knew he didn’t carry the rep of a clean cop. Even before Morphy took the bullet he was known as a guy who set his own priorities, pursued his own objectives both on- and off-duty. With Morphy’s death, his notoriety solidified until it was cast in iron.
There were maybe—what?—a couple dozen things he’d done that had him mired at the rank of detective, no shot at a promotion. But, really, how bad was his record? It was his reputation that was beyond the pale. That, and Morphy.
He knew he couldn’t change this about himself: he would never be comfortable with the restraints the badge put on his actions. In Grip’s estimation, when you had a chance at justice with a capital J, you seized it. The times he’d followed this instinct to action were the ones that got him into trouble, forcing him now to suck up to assholes like Zwieg. Call it indiscipline, call it policing by your gut—whatever it was, it wasn’t rewarded.
Ving wasn’t an asshole. But he’d more or less disappeared when Kraatjes took over as chief. Grip would see Ving ghosting around headquarters, doing this or that for Kraatjes. But nobody could get a handle on what he was trying to do. Ving had become Kraatjes’s man—the chief’s conduit to the world—and now he was in Grip’s mug about bracing Ben Linsky, which meant that Kraatjes himself wanted Linsky left alone. What did that mean? What the fuck could they be doing with Linsky? Grip might have pegged Linsky as an informant, maybe, but the shit in that letter he’d found? Half of it made no sense and the rest—who met with who? Who was friends with who? Who went to what fucking poetry reading?—what could that possibly be worth to Ving and Kraatjes?
GRIP FOUND HIS MIND WANDERING TO THE STORY HE HAD TOLD SO many times, to Internal Affairs, guys on the force, lawyers, not to mention Morphy’s wife, Jane, who had bored through him with her dark brown eyes. He’d gone over it in his head hundreds of times, just like he did now, killing time on the street.
He and Morphy were out to pinch a guy they’d made for the murders of a couple of prostitutes, found strangled in off-the-books hotels carved out of abandoned buildings in the Hollows. The dregs. The guy in question was named Tony Oddo, nicknamed, inevitably, Odd Tony. Oddo worked underground construction, and they’d tracked him down to his current site, a mile-long tunnel where the Crosstown would pass forty feet beneath the tony Capitol Heights neighborhood.
They’d discussed waiting until Oddo’s shift was over and grabbing him when he emerged to the street. But this had been a nervous time, and neither of them was comfortable with waiting. So they’d acted.
The foreman gave them a ride down to the shaft level in a makeshift elevator. The guy wasn’t too happy to have cops visiting the site but didn’t want to piss off the police either, invite scrutiny of some of the men who worked for him. It was noisy as hell on the way down and walking into the tunnel, the volume hit with an almost physical impact. It sounded like something was grinding into the rock—it probably was. The noise was violent and metallic. They couldn’t hear each other as they walked down the narrow tunnel. Lights had been rigged along the way, so it was bright, which seemed to somehow amplify the crushing din. Morphy had to duck a little as he walked, the ceiling only six feet high.
They turned a corner to find a group of men twenty yards ahead and, beyond them, extremely bright lights and a shower of sparks. The men wore safety helmets, ear protection, and goggles. Grip followed Morphy on the approach, the men now watching them. Grip stopped ten yards from them, not wanting to be too close to Morphy if things went south. The place was cramped. It would be too easy for them to be overwhelmed in the narrow tunnel.
The sound seemed to fracture Grip’s thoughts, as if they weren�
��t strong enough to withstand the onslaught. It made the scene before him all the more unreal. The noises that he would have expected to come from Morphy’s footsteps, a human conversation—hell, the sound of his own breathing in his head—nothing was audible. For a moment Grip considered grabbing Morphy, waiting on the street for the shift to end, after all. They could have sent the foreman back down to fetch him. But they both wanted to make this hard on Oddo. They’d seen the corpses. Morphy was not willing to wait.
Grip didn’t have a great view. Morphy’s broad back dominated the tunnel. He saw Morphy flash his badge and point to one of the men. He could see a shifting of bodies beyond Morphy, then he thought he saw Morphy take a step back. Everything seemed magnified. Maybe it was the noise. Grip took a step forward and realized that Morphy was going for his gun. Grip had his hand on his gun, and as he was pulling it, Morphy’s head jerked back. Morphy fell to the ground, his face covered in blood. Grip had his gun up as one of the men brought a pickaxe down on Morphy’s chest. Grip fired three times. Two men dropped, leaving at least a half-dozen men standing. More men than Grip had rounds. He turned and ran around the corner of the tunnel toward the entrance. He kept looking over his shoulder, unable to hear any pursuers, but no one was following.
The foreman was waiting with the elevator, and Grip saw the alarm on the man’s face as he ran out.
“What—”
“Up,” Grip yelled, pointing his thumb desperately up. The foreman hesitated. Grip held his gun to the man’s head. “Up.”
AS HE WAS THINKING ABOUT THIS, HE SAW A MAN—SHORT AND SOFT LIKE a loaf of rye—ambling down the sidewalk, a small stack of books held under one arm. Linsky didn’t see Grip at first. In fact, to Grip’s eye, Linsky seemed oblivious to everything. But as he neared, Grip stepped forward and Linsky started, pushing his glasses up on the bridge of his nose with his right thumb.