Triptych

by David Castlewitz

  "Here," Baumgarten handed Potter a folded sheet of paper covered in minute handwritten characters. "Give this to the messenger."

  The report -- shorter than any previous -- was another of the accountant's contributions to Stern's intelligence-gathering operation. How many other operatives wandered the Promenade, Potter didn't know, and didn't care. Most likely, they obeyed the same rules of secrecy that he and Baumgarten followed. They didn't contact Stern directly. They didn't share information with one another. They lived in pairs for mutual protection. They pretended to be what they weren't.

  Potter slipped on a white shirt, a handmade product he'd acquired to replace the thin one he'd worn when he started the project. He still had his heavy duty boots and denim trousers, along with a jacket that he'd stopped wearing once the August heat took hold. The pants, especially, would need to be replaced soon. Worn thin in the seat, torn at the knees, they stank of spilled coffee, grease from when he wiped his hands, and stains just from sitting on concrete benches and wooden benches in the Promenade.

  Late afternoon brought only a few visitors to the sprawling park sandwiched between a wide avenue and the lake's beach front. A slab of concrete, like a thick finger pointing to better times in the past, extended into the murky waters from a stretch of sand bordered by several fat dunes. A mile long, Potter guessed, the platform once supported a building that took up most of the slip of concrete. Now, everything lay crumbled, roof gone, walls shattered, with large steel doors hanging from hinges attached to old frames. Sometimes, naval ships patrolling the lake tied up to a clear section of the concrete slab; sometimes they spent the night and their crews came ashore on leave, always accompanied by military police in starched white uniforms.

  The smell of meat simmering on a grill, the smoke rising in thin columns, and the tinkling of glasses and plates peppering the air preyed on Potter's senses. Waiters and waitresses scurried from the kitchens in pits in the ground, up ramps and stairs to multi-leveled restaurants. Soft conversation buzzed in the background. A tall man in a red-white-and-blue suit, complete with old-fashioned tie and multicolored top hat, advertised the restaurant's menu, shouting out the night's specials as he paced back and forth on the edge of the Promenade.

  A habit had formed for Potter and Baumgarten early in their assignment Outside. They went to the park, to this restaurant, always paid the required premium for a table on the topmost level, the fourth, and enjoyed a leisure couple of hours eating, drinking a beer imported from Canada, and spent their day's monetary allowance freely, sometimes going over their limit, which Stern didn't seem to mind. He kept increasing their per diem.

  Baumgarten jotted down everything they spent. What they spent it for and why. He kept a notebook, which Potter found annoying as well as dangerous. As they sat at a small table near the guard rail on the edge of the fourth floor, Potter pointed it out again.

  "Anybody sees you doing that, they're going to ask why. And if they find that book, they're going to ask why. And when they -- "

  "I account for everything," Baumgarten said in a soft, conspiratorial tone, leaning across the small table, shrinking the already narrow space between them. Sweat dripped from his pointed nose. His high forehead glistened. His soft shirt, stained at the armpits and across the lower back, testified to how readily he perspired in the summer heat.

  Potter stretched his short legs, sipped his beer, and gazed at the people filling the walkways below. A trio of flutists clustered in a grove, their straw hats on the ground. A crowd formed and members of their audience stepped forward to drop clip-bits -- pieces of an ogre token cut along a perforation -- into the hats. A woman wearing a sandwich board advertising exchange rates hovered on the edge of the grove and two boys stood near her, ready to escort customers to a money-changing booth where ogres as well as other currency could be traded.

  Finished with their meal, and after Potter enjoyed a second glass of beer, they split the bill, each leaving ogres in a pile in the center of the table, the flimsy Mylar tokens weighed down by an empty glass.

  "Those crazy roach races again?" Potter asked. They'd surveyed that concession several times in the past two weeks, with Baumgarten particularly interested in the less technically savvy racing pit. Potter liked the elaborate setup where drivers sat at a console and directed the roaches through a maze that served as a race course. Those were exciting, with surprises when an insect balked at its instructions and tried to flee up a wall. Anguished cries rose from the bettors backing the errant roach, with yelps of disappointment mixed with shouts of "Fraud."

  Baumgarten thought the more primitive racing concession better suited to true fraud, the kind of skimming that robbed their employer of his cut. Every night that they spent watching roaches race from the center of a saucer-shaped platform, scurrying to get away from a bright light, Baumgarten recorded the time it took to run the race, the winner of that race, and a guess as to the ogres raked in by the organizers.

  #

  Barrington noticed the two men who watched so intently and never placed a bet. He'd seen them several times over the past few weeks. The short one with the fringe of gray hair surrounding his otherwise bald head frightened him. Beady eyes. Muscular build threatening to go flabby any day now. Bulldog looks.

  The older man, who made notes using an old-fashioned mechanical pencil and a thick paper notebook, might be the more treacherous, Barrington thought as he watched as the pair stroll around the pit, taking in the races from different vantage points, shrugging off entreaties from the bettor-girls sent around to solicit wagers.

  Barrington's partner in the scheme to skim the profits, Hawks, didn't seem aware of being watched. He continued to record eight races for every ten, not even being careful to short the official count only by those races with the smallest gain. Hawks cheated in the simplest way possible, a practice that Barrington couldn't induce him to change. A lumbering ox of a man, Hawks wasn't one to take suggestions.

  Stern had to be aware of the plot by now. That's who'd sent the two odd looking men -- Bulldog and Pointy-nose -- to the Promenade. The pair sniffed everywhere, Barrington surmised, but now they'd settled on giving this concession all of their attention. The Big Wheel, the dice games, the two-card Monty table -- none of these warranted as much scrutiny as these simple insect races.

  "No," Hawks rasped when Barrington raised the idea of putting an end to the skim. "You forced your way in," he continued. "Okay. So you caught me. Okay. So you're a part of it now. Okay. But I'm not stopping because you've got the fear of Stern in you."

  Barrington sat with Hawks on a bench on the cement sidewalk. The night's work was over. A few drunks lay on the grass. A teenager swept the gambling pits. Early morning's gloom bathed the Promenade. Elsewhere, clean-up crews tended to their tasks. A lone girl with a near-empty tray suspended by a rope looped around her neck swayed as she walked, like a dancer.

  "I got some chewies left if anyone's interested," she called.

  Hawks motioned the girl over. The "chewies" were Stern's latest introduction. Made of a licorice-like concoction, they were part candy and part medicinal. Some sort of synthetic stimulant embedded in the chewable six inch long stick imparted a sense of energy and euphoria. In the past, Barrington mused as he watched Hawks complete his transaction with the girl, kick weed and other intoxicants had played an active role in his life. In the two years since his exile, with access to recreational drugs limited, as was the money to purchase them, he'd learned to do without.

  Hawks gnawed on the end of the dark brown candy stick. His eyes wandered, a look of distraction on his wide face. He seemed like a child just then. A big, lumbering kid, his large arms and thick thighs having lost their muscle and gone to flab. Partnering with him had been a mistake, Barrington realized. He chided himself for getting involved. He should have gone to Stern with his suspicions. Should have turned Hawks in instead of joining him.

  Barrington pondered his predicament throughout the morning. He left Hawks to nibble
at his candy, get giddy-high or however the synthetic drug affected him, and wandered out of the Promenade. Dawn spread across the lakefront, lapped at the city walls, and filled the horizon. A pedicab and a three-wheeler taxi waited at a flag station on the edge of the park. He waved them off. Usually, he took one or the other, alternating the slow rhythmic pedicab ride with the vibrating three-wheeler's puttering engine that always smelled of corn and potatoes, its discarded-grease tank emitting fumes where a badly engineered gasket held the fuel line in place.

  He walked. He'd been a Stern employee long enough that people recognized him. Nobody would dash out from behind a wall or rise from beneath a tomb-like pyramid of debris. Nobody would come after him. Stern took care of his people, Barrington assured himself, and felt protected and secure. When he first came Outside, the dark streets, whether in the early morning or the late night, frightened him. No more.

  He had Jake Stern to thank for this. He reached the squat two-story house built from the remains of a much larger building. Four apartments, two on each floor, sheltered three large families as well as himself. He liked having space to move around, a room dedicated to sleep and for himself only; another room for viewing shows on a flat screen he'd purchased from Stern's electronics store; and a room where he ate his meals when he wanted solitary time. The building's electric generator provided close to ten hours of daytime power for a single tank of petrol made from human waste and other refuse. Barrington chipped in his share of the cost, which kept the fuel coming each morning. At night, he relied on batteries to power the small refrigerator, electric stove and flat screen. In comparison to his neighbors, he was rich. He never lacked for the necessities of life. When battery power ran low, he hoisted a blue flag out his front window and a boy delivered a new unit and took away the old for recharging.

  It saddened him to think how his dismal day-to-day existence now passed for luxury. If Stern found out about the cheating, things would only be worse. He'd lose this house, all his conveniences, and be back to living in a dorm room with forty or more other men, and working in the pits shoveling refuse, or breaking concrete and carting it away.

  Teaming up with Hawks had been a mistake. One he'd correct as soon as possible.

  #

  The summer heat didn't let up. This was worst than Jamerson thought it could be. In past summers, no matter how hot and humid the weather became outside, he lived inside. In a cocoon. In an apartment. With well-regulated air conditioning. He traveled to work in comfortable surroundings, kept cool by clothing designed to fight off the hot weather. His office provided an even flow of cold air. Sometimes, in the depths of a hot summer day, he turned up the warmth on his jacket when he sat at his desk because the surrounding air was too cold. Now, the sweltering heat punished him. He perspired. He panted for breath. He hated having to pedal across the river to the edge of Grant's Promenade to the luxury buildings on the other side of the river, a distance of several miles that taxed every bit of energy he could muster. All made worse by the fact that he chanced getting caught violating the limits of his work permit whenever he picked up a fair south of the river's branch flowing out from Lake Michigan. Any fine imposed by the drivers' guild wiped out a day's profit.

  He hated his work, but he did it anyway. He didn't think he had a choice. He imagined Katie Shaw laboring in the Water Works. The prison used the heat of summer and the cold of winter to make life more miserable than need be. It excelled at this, he thought, remembering his scant few months at the Works. And he'd been in the low security section, where work was minimal, though he worked seven days a week. Katie, he imagined, labored from twelve to sixteen hours every day, battered if she faltered in her task, humiliated if she failed to meet whatever demands were placed on her.

  Jamerson wiped the sweat out of his eyes. He forced himself across the Michigan Avenue bridge, imagined the watchful eyes of a spotter paid by the union to find violators like him. Only this time he violated nothing. He didn't deliver a paying customer from the no-go zone. Instead, he picked up a fare near the hovels alongside the city wall, not far from the sally port where he'd been intercepted a couple of weeks earlier.

  He hadn't seen the striped-trouser clad security people since, as though they'd been deployed for one reason only and now that the reason had passed they were on to new assignments. But he looked for them. He looked for drones in the sky. He looked for telltale signs of watchful eyes everywhere he went.

  The tall and stately woman he found at the flag station settled into the spacious rear seat. He'd stripped down to a loose pair of briefs to fight the heat. His passenger wore a long gray gown with a hood which covered most of her head, and all of her forehead. Loose brown-red curls stuck out near her ears and lay alongside a severe jaw line.

  He waited for her to tell him a destination. When she didn't speak up, he said, "I can't get going if you don't tell me where."

  "Fair enough. The Water Works. Public gate."

  Jamerson didn't think his fare looked like the typical day-worker with a short stint at the Works. Those were usually burly men, rugged types who veered towards construction jobs. Sometimes, an older woman went to work at the prison. Sometimes, he saw teams of workmen digging ditches. Or were they graves? Sometimes, he saw them supervising prisoners on outdoor assignments, augmenting the staff of guards and other Water Works personnel. When he'd been an inmate he worked for a week laying pipe to a treatment tank located downhill from the prison. Several old women acted as nurses, cooks, and water carriers. He thought they were inmates like himself. Only later did he learn that they were hired help.

  He pedaled slowly, grinding alongside the city wall, past more makeshift shelters built with the wall as an anchor for a lean-to. Children played in a pit full of water, splashing and laughing, tossing pebbles at one another. Several Rounders controlled a mob taking water from an array of spigots connected to a large pipe that emerged from underground. Pushcarts, a small cafe with a few large tables outside, and a single wagon where a half-dozen boys lounged in harness comprised a marketplace that Jamerson often passed. A few hawkers shouted out their wares and prices. At the wagon, which offered a variety of odd goods -- blankets and shawls and mass-produced plastic beads and spools of thread along with needles -- a small crowd bartered with the merchant.

  Everything seemed subdued today. Perhaps the heat had an impact on everyone. Too much sweat. Too much humidity. Better to rest and conserve energy. Something he wished he could do.

  A gate made of black metal bars loomed not too far ahead. Jamerson rose in his seat, as though to give his pedal power a bit more of his flagging energy. The barbed wire-topped cyclone fence to his left annoyed him. It was a reminder of his short incarceration. He recognized the recreation field where he'd be sent to walk or run or otherwise exercise for an hour each day. He recognized the squat pale yellow buildings with barred windows. They housed workshops, two mess halls, and several barracks, with underground rooms containing small punishment cells and snaking corridors providing an interconnecting concourse linking every part of the complex.

  Deep inside the fence, within an inner wall of forbidden-looking yellow stone, rose the main tower housing a fiendish wheel where most prisoners spent time walking inside its huge interior, the contraption designed to bale water out of the lake and into treatment ponds built along the shore. A laborious method, better suited to mechanization, the human-propelled wheel was an exercise in punishment and nothing more, nothing less. Lifted from a medieval text on torture.

  Jamerson stopped at the gate. A guard in the tower watched him. He didn't wave. He turned back to the woman behind him.

  "Keep going," she said. "I just wanted to see."

  "Go where?"

  "That way. Straight ahead."

  "That's the military road. I can't cross it."

  "There's a side road you can take. Parallel."

  "I'm not going to Fort Sheridan," he protested.

  She laughed. "I guess not. To North Lakeshore then. B
y way of the side road. I want to see the beach."

  Jamerson started to protest, but the woman pressed a ten-ogre token into the palm of his hand and a smile brightened her chiseled features.

  "I want to make sure no one sees us talking," she whispered with an upward glance, as though indicating the drones that sometimes circled overhead. "I'm just out for the adventure of seeing the sights and you're my driver for the day."

  Jamerson pedaled in the direction she indicated. He rode alongside the fence-enclosed avenue. Here, a small drone dipped close and followed overhead for a minute, but then zipped off and rose high in the sky.

  The narrow road branched in several directions. Jamerson took the one leading to North Beach, where public access to the sand dunes fronting a narrow beach, and the rippling water further on was regulated by one of Jake Stern's concessions. A white picket fence surrounded the area, with more fences inside sectioning off a wading pool for children from a wider beach for adults and families. Unarmed guards patrolled along the fences. At a gate, three women took ogres from the beach-goers and pressed ID emblems onto the tops of their right hands.

  A steady buzz rose from the water's edge; children's cries mixed with adult voices. Jamerson stopped for a moment on a hill overlooking the beach. He knew, if he waited too long, a guard would bicycle over and tell him to leave or pay a sightseeing fee. He started to tell his passenger, but she interrupted him.

  She pointed at a small park below the hill, away from the beach. "That's free. We can sit there and no one's going to bother us."

  "Sit?"

  "Who do you think I am, Jonnie?"

  Jamerson swallowed.

  "Our friend sent me. Oliver Griffin." She handed Jamerson a small Mylar token, an ogre with the number 10 printed in the large space reserved the value. The other side was blank.