by Mike Cooper
“One of the perks,” she said, gesturing at the workspace. “I shelve books for eight-fifty an hour, every Friday. But I can sit here as long as I want the other days.”
“It seems…quiet.”
“I have roommates at home. This is better.” Clara opened her laptop and waited for the screen to light up. “Here we go.”
“What?”
“I already published the story.” She turned the computer my way. “Want to see?”
“That was fast.”
“Maybe not fast enough. StreetWire’s had something up since eight this morning.”
“York Hydro, all that?”
“Yes. Marlett’s death—someone really did make a killing on the killing.”
“So to speak.”
She grinned. “By the time the sellers realized they’d been taken, it was too late.”
I thought about Johnny. “Who was it, then?”
“You don’t know?” Clara looked surprised. “That was going to be my next story.”
“Sorry.”
“I was counting on—wait, I get it! You were trying to get me to do your job for you.”
I had to laugh. “Just like you.”
The athenaeum was as still as a bomb shelter. Sound died against the massive stone walls. We could have been in the Fed’s gold vault, eighty feet underground and dug into bedrock.
“How do you stand it in here?” I asked.
Clara stood up. “Want to see where I work?”
We went through a narrow door between glassed-in shelves holding old—really old—leather-bound books. Behind it a corridor of disappointingly mundane style led deeper into the building.
“I don’t know where Kimmie is,” Clara said. “Probably out on the fire escape.”
“Kimmie?”
“She does her buying right down in Union Square, even though I’ve told her the prices are totally ponzi there. But it’s her money, right? Come on.”
Down the hall were two rooms, both with metal shelves, some carts parked higgledy-piggledy and books everywhere. No people.
“Lockerby might be out there with her,” said Clara. “They both like their blaze.”
In the rain? “Isn’t that kind of…unprofessional?”
“Days get long in the shelving room. You need to liven it up. Speaking of which—” She moved some paper and uncovered an iPhone on one shelf, docked between two speakers. A few taps and Ninja Angel suddenly blared forth, echoing in the hallway.
I had to raise my voice. “Won’t that music bother your patrons?”
“No, the soundproofing’s good. Two-foot walls.” She cut some dance moves coming out.
Library science might have more going for it than I thought.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
I turned, fast. Saw wild hair, a glare, a rumpled jacket—and a long wicked knife, point up, gleaming.
“Yaaa!” A combat yell, automatic. In a half second I went low and kicked sideways, snapping my heel back as it extended.
Never go for a blade with your hands.
My foot struck his forearm, not the knife itself—luck probably, but hey, I’ll take luck any day—and it went flying. The man looked astonished and jerked backward, out of range.
“Stop it!” Clara’s voice cut through. “Stop! Lockerby!”
I kept moving, away from the knifeman, trying to watch him and Clara at the same time.
“Hey.” My attacker was rawboned and knobby, frowning as he stared first at me and then the knife on the floor. “What the hell was that about?”
For a moment the hallway was still. Ninja Angel hammered some power chords.
“Yeah, Christ, Silas,” said Clara. “What the fuck?”
I straightened up. “You, uh, know each other?”
“Lockerby’s the library’s restoration specialist.”
“Oh.”
She picked up the knife, holding it carelessly, like a folded umbrella. The thing looked designed to disembowel sharks. “I think he cuts leather with this.”
“Sorry. I’m, ah, kind of on autopilot around weapons like that.”
“No problem. I guess.” He looked at me dubiously, then took the knife back from Clara. “I was working at the bench, and when that pissant boy band started up all of a sudden, I about took my thumb off.”
“What?”
“I hate Ninja Angel.”
We sorted out introductions. Lockerby’s handshake was firm, not the bone-crushing assault I’d expected. I apologized, he apologized.
“Hang on,” he said, and went into the shelving room. The music stopped midchord, and a moment later something rawer and less intelligible came on, even louder. Bass thumped through the door.
“Oh, that’s much better,” said Clara. “Swedish death metal?”
“At least he’s old enough to tie his own shoes.”
Lockerby had his own room—a well-lit space, with a long worktable and racks of projects in various states of completion. I was surprised how many sharp, dangerous tools bookbinders apparently required: awls, knives, even small saws and a spokeshave.
“What’s going on?” A woman in her twenties looked in, carrying a heavy volume in both hands. She wore a dark blazer with brass buttons, a tie-dyed cotton blouse underneath.
“Hey, Kimmie.” And Clara went through the introductions again.
Kimmie set her book down and looked me over. “How do you know Clara?”
“Business connections.”
Lockerby filled two paper cups with water from a cooler by the door and offered them around. Kimmie and Clara shook their heads, so I took one.
“What business would that be?” he asked.
A buzzer sounded, painfully loud, saving me from answering. Kimmie sighed loudly and went out. I looked at Clara.
“Someone needs a book,” she said. “They’re waiting at the desk. Kimmie’ll find it for them in the closed stacks.”
“Ah.” I turned back to Lockerby, who dropped into a worn leather chair. He shrugged out of his jacket, tossing it onto the bench, and below the sleeve of his T-shirt I noticed a tattoo of two Chinese characters: .
“I’ve seen that before,” I said.
He nodded. “Uh-huh.”
“‘Firepower,’ right?”
“Yeah.”
“A sniper I knew once, he had the same tat.”
“Marine?”
“No.” I shrugged. “Was that you? A jarhead?”
“Eight years. Yourself?”
“Truck mechanic.”
He studied me, then laughed. “Right.”
“Really.”
“You don’t have that fobbit look, somehow.”
“Mostly I dug holes,” I said. “Then when the shooting started, I jumped in.”
“I wish I’d had that kind of sense.”
Clara got her own cup of water and leaned against the bench, next to me. “Silas is in finance, too. CPA and everything.”
“Yeah?” Lockerby looked interested. “Investments?”
“Mostly auditing,” I said. “Statement oversight. Compliance verification. Like that.”
“But you understand all that money stuff.”
“Well—”
“Because I’ve been wondering.” He leaned in. “You know, I follow the news and all, but—let me ask you something.”
“Sure.” I suppressed a sigh.
See, I knew what to expect. Tell someone you’re a doctor, they’ll ask about this funny rash I have on my stomach; can I show it to you? If your job is to deliver soda to movie theaters, they’ll tell you it’s total robbery Adam Sandler wasn’t nominated for an Oscar; what’s up with that? And if you work anywhere near Wall Street, it’s always what do you like? Got a tip?
“What I don’t understand is why would anyone ever put their money anywhere except a lowest-fee index fund?”
I blinked. “That’s a good question.”
“Everything else just seems like you’re letting some asshole sk
im.”
“Well…yeah, that’s about right.”
“Lockerby wants to understand Wall Street,” said Clara. She patted him affectionately on the head. “Unfortunately, he’s taken his understanding to the logical extreme: the market is completely rigged, so it’s pointless to participate.”
“You’re all in what, then,” I asked. “Gold?”
“In?” He laughed. “Rent, mostly. And food. And bicycle parts.”
Kimmie wandered back in. “It’s still raining,” she said.
“Slow day,” said Clara. She glanced at Kimmie, then at an old-fashioned clock on the wall above Lockerby’s bench. “It’s after noon.”
“Yeah?”
“You got anything left?”
It looked like chasing down Ganderson’s avenger was going to wait a while.
CHAPTER NINE
“I can’t believe you’re out here in the rain.” I still didn’t have a hat, and water seeped steadily through the collar and down my back.
“The fish bite better.”
“What do they care?”
Walter shrugged. “It’s true.”
We stood at an iron fence behind a shuttered warehouse, where a seawall from the nineteenth century crumbled slowly into the East River. A few blocks north the shoreline park started, with mowed lawns and a stone river walk. The Parks Department encouraged fisherman there and on any number of the city’s other, well-policed piers. But Walter insisted the fishing was better farther down, under the remnants of the Lower East Side’s industrial past.
And he wasn’t the only one. A handful of other guys leaned on the rail, stolid in the drizzle, next to their poles and bait buckets and tackle kits.
“The runoff has all kinds of garbage the bluefish like to eat,” said Walter. “And the raindrops aerate the surface of the water, which makes them friskier.”
“Then why haven’t any of you caught anything?”
“We throw them back.”
“What a great hobby.”
Walter was at least fifty but tall and wide, with a thick mustache gone gray. No glasses. He looked like a North Sea trawlerman, not a counterfeiter. “So what’s up?”
Meaning, why had I tracked him down, on his day off, in the one place he deserved to be free of life’s usual crap.
“That guy Hayden,” I said.
“Ah.”
“I’m going to send the copies to the DA.” And the key question: “If it’s okay with you.”
“Hayden didn’t give you what you wanted?”
“He did, actually.”
“So?”
“He’s an asshole.”
Walter considered that. “Most of them are.”
“Who?”
“Your clients.”
“What?—Hayden’s yours, not mine.”
He shrugged. “Wall Street. Listen, photocopy the sheets twice over, and send the final copies.”
I’d met Walter years ago, when I was starting out, so I was forever and always an amateur to him.
“At the library,” he added. “Or Mailboxes USA.”
“I was going to scan it, convert the file to a low-res JPEG and email it.”
“Uh-huh. That might work, too.”
Twenty feet away one of the other fisherman picked up his pole and twitched it, experimentally. The line tautened and jerked. Everyone turned to watch.
“Hayden’s not wrapped up with those dead bankers, is he?” Walter’s voice was quiet, but his eyes focused on me.
“Dead bankers?”
“Three at least. That’s what I hear.”
No use asking where that bit of gossip had drifted up. Clara and her fellow newshounds might not have published the link between Akelman, Sills and Marlett yet, but it wouldn’t be long. Ganderson’s news blackout didn’t have a chance.
“So far as I know, Hayden’s clear,” I said.
True enough—but I wasn’t. A little bad luck could drag me into the official Marlett investigation. The police would be keenly interested in placing someone like me at the scene around the time of his death. Painful though the prospect was, I needed Hayden around as a prospective alibi. “Though, it would be good if he stayed in town for a few more weeks.”
“Might be a lot longer than that.” Walter still didn’t look satisfied. “You sure he wasn’t involved? Maybe just the last one?”
“Marlett?”
“The sniping.”
“He has a rock-solid alibi,” I said. “At the time Marlett got shot, Hayden was three feet in front of me, chatting away.”
“Chatting?”
“You know these guys—can’t stop talking about how smart they are.”
But a small nagging suspicion wouldn’t die, not completely. Hayden one day, Marlett an hour later—too damn close. James Jesus Angleton had it right. Sometimes those odd little synchronicities mean something.
The guy working his line had reeled it almost all the way in. A moment later he flipped the pole up and landed a squirming, silver-gray fish with a dirty back, close to a foot long.
“Striped bass,” said Walter. “Pretty good for the river here.”
“Seems a shame not to eat it.”
“Some of those restaurants in SoHo, you probably are.”
The conversation drifted to business, which, like anywhere, mostly meant sharing invidious and poorly sourced gossip about people we worked with. White-collar enforcement is a small field, like I’ve said. It’s not the rackets, where mobsters are constantly gunning one another down and going to jail and disappearing into WitSec. Hell, even the rackets aren’t the rackets anymore, not unless you speak Fujianese or Lao.
“I’m thinking of getting out,” Walter said.
“You tell me that every three months.”
He shrugged. “I might actually do it this time. I bought a nice condo down in the Keys, did I mention? A foreclosure. And the boat’s almost paid off. Who needs this shit?” He lifted a shoulder toward the river, the rain, and the oil-slick trash edging the shore.
“Spend your days bonefishing? Sounds nice—for about a week. You’d go bananas.”
“Business is a pain in the ass. And there’s new competition, too. Any punk with an iMac and a digital SLR thinks he can undersell me.”
“If it’s that easy, maybe I should try it. A quiet life, for a change.”
“Is that what you think?”
“Nobody pulls an automatic rifle on the forger.”
Walter laughed. “You’d be surprised.”
“Maybe.” I realized my jacket sleeves had gone a wet, rusty brown where I’d been leaning on the iron rail. “I’ve got competition too, though—if the vigilantes have really started hunting down rogue financiers.”
“Is that what you do?”
“Not exactly. But they’re diminishing the client base.”
The drizzle eased, but the sky was darker than ever.
“Saw Zeke the other day,” said Walter. “He asked about you.”
“Asked about me.” I thought about that for a moment. “In a good way? Or do I need to start carrying an M16 around?”
“Just social.” Walter raised one hand, like, don’t worry about it. “You know. Wondering how you were.”
“Wet.” I tried to rub the rust off one sleeve, and gave up. “But now that you mention it, maybe I should talk to him. Possible subcontracting. Where’s he been?”
“The same as always. Volchak’s, behind about three empty pitchers.”
“I’ll try early in the day, then.”
Down the row one of the fisherman had managed to light up, under his Mets cap. Smoke drifted in the mist.
“Got to go,” I said. “Nice catching up, Walter.”
“Throw Hayden off the sled if you want,” he said. “Okay by me.”
I guess he’d been paid already, too.
CHAPTER TEN
Clara was in the phone book. Too easy.
Not her cellphone, of course. But the Event Risk website had a fax numbe
r on its Contact page. Even modern, all-electronic journalism is still chained to its Pleistocene era. I looked up the number in a reverse directory online and voilà: an address for “C Dawson” on 90th, west of Second Avenue.
No wonder Clara had bothered to find me in person that first day—she apparently lived right around the corner.
It was early evening. Her home was five blocks away. Why not?
Dusk, cool and damp. I wandered along 90th Street at little more than a meander, examining the buildings and cars and faces.
Old brownstones, with a few tearouts mixed in: ugly aluminum and concrete flatfronts from the sixties, before the Planning Commission stepped up. A pizza deliveryman went by on a bicycle, passing a Chinese takeout guy just stepping from his double-parked hatchback. A light breeze drifted up from the river, three blocks east.
Fifty yards away, just as I’d recognized Clara’s building from the Street View image I’d checked earlier, the ace blogger herself emerged. She was dressed in a close-fitting T-shirt over running shorts, her hair pulled into a ponytail.
“Yo, Clara!” I called out, but a truck was passing and she hopped off the steps and took off down the street without looking in my direction.
I didn’t try to catch up. She was headed toward the river. I walked briskly after her, and when she came to the dead end, where the walkway was built above the FDR viaduct, I could see her turn right. South. Good enough. All I had to do was keep moving in the same direction, and eventually, after she turned around to come back, we’d meet.
A steady roar came from the viaduct beneath my feet, the cars clogged in rush hour. Exhaust drifted up. Trees in Carl Schurz Park, which extended several blocks downriver, were at a fall foliage peak, orange and red and yellow.
I went into the park and found an unoccupied bench. Not so many people out. More than the crummy weather, it was the end of the workday, when everyone wanted to get home. Children no longer seemed to have unsupervised time outside. And the nighttime crowd hadn’t emerged yet.
If the mayor still lived at Gracie Mansion, which was in the park, I’d have had plenty of company. But laws preventing the use of taxpayer funds on private citizens meant that unmarried partners could not be accommodated at Gracie, and the current mayor prefers to bunk with his girlfriend. The mansion was available for city functions, but mostly unused. I sat and waited.