City of Iron

by Williamson, Chet

  "Yeah, it's a hell of a town," Joseph said. "'The Bronx is up and the Battery's down,' but maybe you're right. Actually, I think you are, but I want more than just a few match-ups and gut reactions to make sure."

  "What's your suggestion?" Laika asked, knowing that his reluctance to accept the theory immediately was prudent.

  Joseph started to walk around the sculpture as if stalking it. "Let's make a computerized schematic of this thing. Three dimensions, as detailed as possible. It should take a couple of days. Then we'll lay it down over a computerized map of the city, see how well it really matches."

  "That puts us off Holberg's track even longer," Tony said.

  Joseph turned a jaundiced eye on him. "Think about it. If it is a map of the city, it probably leads somewhere. But how can you read that?" he said, pointing to the iron chaos that surrounded them, "and if you could, how the hell can we follow it or stick it in your pocket without doing what I just suggested?"

  "Joseph's right, Tony. We have to have an overlay." She turned to Joseph. "How do you want to start?"

  "Now we can use the plans—we couldn't before, but Guaraldi filled them in well as he went—and if we're uncertain about anything, we always have the sculpture to refer to."

  "We have the software we need?" Laika asked. "There's imaging software on all the machines," Tony said.

  "And I can download the New York maps once we have our schematic done," Joseph said.

  "Anybody want to go out and get a decent dinner first?" Laika said, even though she knew what their answer would be. "It's the first chance we've had in weeks."

  Tony and Joseph looked at each other, and then at her. Their faces told the story. "I'm not hungry," Tony said. "Let's get working."

  It took four days to create the computerized schematic of the sculpture. When it was completed, they could manipulate it in any way and view it from any angle. It looked, Laika thought, like an early wire-frame computer game, but infinitely more complex.

  Joseph downloaded an extremely detailed map of New York City from Langley and spent another hour juggling the mouse, fiddling with coordinates, and tweaking the program's capabilities until he pronounced it ready to view. "It may slip off the grid every now and then," he said, "so we might have to readjust it, but it's a near-perfect match. You were right, Laika."

  It was uncanny, she thought. The smallest they could get the scale was to have one crosstown block equal an inch on the screen. "It goes beneath the street in some places, doesn't it?" she asked.

  "Yeah. But all I could get on the map is current subway tunnels. Those that aren't used anymore, or basements, or any other tunnels, aren't shown. It only does that in a few places, though."

  They examined it for several hours, jotting down notes of possible locations where the tubes and pipes joined. Some were street crossings, while others seemed more random, but could have been small alleys or walkways not shown even on so detailed a map.

  The longer they worked with the schematic, the more convinced Laika became that Holberg had indicated no ultimate destination, no actual X-marks-the-spot to which they could immediately proceed. Tony agreed.

  "It's not much of a help to tell us where to go specifically," he said, "if that was what it was supposed to do. It's pretty clear that it tells us where not to go—wherever there are no pipes, I guess."

  "Has the thought occurred to either of you," Joseph said dryly, "because I confess it has to me, that this thing isn't telling us to go anywhere at all? That maybe it's just a map of New York that Holberg made the way somebody else would spend months making a ship in a bottle?"

  "People don't generally go into fugue states when they make ships in bottles," Laika said. "And there are a few other reasons against that argument. Holberg was obsessed with this place, and that obsession had something to do with violence, because otherwise, why had he made a bomb? When there are two secrets in your life—this sculpture and a bomb in the workroom—I think there's bound to be some connection, don't you?"

  Tony nodded. "Damn right."

  "She wasn't asking you," Joseph said.

  "Besides," Laika went on, "this thing is a simulacrum of the city that's perfectly to scale. The pipes match up with streets, where it's high, there are buildings—"

  "There are buildings everywhere in the city," Joseph said. "That's why it's a city."

  "All I'm saying is that this thing is too perfect to be . . ." She knew what she was about to say and bit it back, but Joseph finished it for her.

  "Natural? Too perfect to be natural? Which implies that there is something unnatural about this sculpture . . . dare I say, even paranormal? What we can't immediately explain naturally has to be the result of some strange powers, right? I mean, we couldn't assume that Peder Holberg—who was, after all, an artist—might have those talents of perspective and depth and measurement and spatial relationships that would allow him, given several months, to create something like this. It's much easier to assume that he was affected by a strange curse or an alien or dead Elvis, right?"

  "Wrong," Laika said coldly. "All I'm saying is that this thing has a purpose. It wasn't a . . . a folly of some sort to kill time. You don't risk your life coming up to this neighborhood for something like that . . . and that's something else I have to wonder about."

  "What?" Joseph said, with more than a trace of scorn.

  "How did he get up here and stay up here unharmed? Why wasn't he hassled, beaten up, even killed?"

  "It's like he was protected," said Tony.

  "Angels now?" Joseph asked.

  "I don't know, Joseph, and there's something else I don't know. Have we found any other map of New York City in Peder Holberg's possession?" Tony didn't wait for an answer. "No, we haven't. So even if he was this super-duper genius that you suggest, how did he achieve this kind of accuracy without any guide at all?"

  "So he had a spirit guide?" said Joseph. "Look, I'm just trying to be logic's advocate, since I don't believe in the devil, either. I don't go along with any supernatural theory, but I can almost agree with you that Holberg might have been trying to tell us—or somebody—something with this monstrosity. The question is what."

  "And who," Laika said. "We can be sure he didn't build it to show three CIA operatives where to find his vanished body."

  "Yeah," said Tony, "who the hell was it for? Only people he hung around with were Adam and the goths. Could it have been for them?"

  "Maybe," said Joseph. "Remember, he stopped disappearing once he broke with them. Could be that this was his gift to them."

  "Or," said Laika, "his offering to whoever it was they worshiped."

  "The Holy One," said Tony. "Or maybe Cthulhu."

  Joseph snorted. "Oh, yeah, right, the fictional octopus god. How could I have forgotten? Well, whatever the reason for it, this is a map. And the only way we're going to find out if it leads anywhere is to follow it somehow."

  "Where do we start?" Tony asked.

  "Why not start where Holberg possibly intended us to?" said Laika. "We're at X, and everything else is beyond here." She smiled. "Including the monsters. Let's just follow the pipe across the Third Avenue bridge and see where it takes us. Can we chart a path of sorts on the computer?"

  Joseph nodded and turned back to the screen. "Problem is, there's no telling which way to go at the junction of the pipes, which are the junctions of streets, for the most part."

  "Well," said Laika, "maybe we could examine the anomalies, the places where the rods meet but there are no corresponding streets on the map. Those could be certain buildings or locations where Holberg thinks there's something important."

  "Or where he just measured wrong," Joseph said.

  "Possibly. But we won't know until we go there." Laika gestured to a place on the structure where an iron rod passed into the shattered floor and then up again. "And we'll see what's beneath the city, too."

  "Wonder what we'll find," Tony said, looking at the darkness into which the iron sank. "Maybe Holberg?"r />
  "Or his body," Laika said.

  "Or a hole in the ground, or nothing," Joseph added. "I'd just like to find out how the hell he got out of that room."

  "Me too," said Laika. "And so would Skye."

  "Skye, you sonofabitch," Quentin McIntyre muttered as he went over the latest report intercepted from the CIA. It had originally been sent by Richard Skye to his superiors and had been filed weeks before the previous report McIntyre had read on Anthony Luciano's assignment to Azerbaijan.

  This current but older interception explained the reason for Luciano's activities in Scotland.

  There were two other agents involved as well, Joseph Stein and Laika Harris. McIntyre had copies of their dossiers in front of him, too, another welcome example of Alan Phillips's anticipation of McIntyre's needs. McIntyre had heard of Stein, but not of Harris.

  After he read their dossiers, he concluded that a team of the three would be most formidable. Skye's memo stated that the three had performed the Scottish exposure of Helmut Kristal as an experimental preface to a mission designed to investigate government-controlled psychics in Eastern Europe. All three were part of the same team but had been assigned to different locales in the region.

  McIntyre didn't believe a word of it. This was a cover if McIntyre had ever seen one. It said nothing about Luciano's presence in New York State, and McIntyre would have been willing to bet that the unidentifiable woman in the Inner Eye photo was Laika Harris.

  McIntyre had wasted no time in sending a team of his own to Plattsburgh, but by the time they got there, the three "doctors" from the "Division of Special Investigations," whatever the hell that was supposed to be, were long gone. McIntyre's people had gotten descriptions of the three from the doctors who had worked with them, and he saw this morning that they matched perfectly the physicals on Harris, Luciano, and Stein's dossiers.

  The evidence was overwhelming that these three were in the country on a black-ops mission orchestrated by Skye. Maybe it had something to do with paranormal occurrences, and maybe it didn't. Maybe that whole psychic crap was just a cover for something else.

  Unfortunately, the search in New York hadn't landed a thing. No one reported spotting Tony Luciano, or, after Phillips sent out the descriptions, his two companions. But that didn't mean they weren't out there somewhere. New York was a big city.

  Still, it wasn't worth putting a whole shitload of agents on this thing. There were already enough crimes to keep every goddamned FBI agent in the country working round the clock, so it didn't make much sense to bust anybody's balls tracking down a trio of rogue spooks, especially since the only thing they had done so far was investigate what might have been a mass murder or a Jim Jones—style mass suicide. After all, it wasn't like Luciano, Harris, and Stein were the killers, if murder was indeed involved.

  Still, with Richard Skye at the helm, you never knew what might happen next. McIntyre's agents wouldn't dedicate their lives to the search, but they sure as hell would keep their eyes open.

  And McIntyre would keep reading the newspapers.

  Chapter 32

  It took another long day to chart what the operatives considered to be anomalies on Peder Holberg's bizarre map of New York City, but when they left that evening, they had a list of places they'd investigate. Some seemed obvious, since certain buildings were marked on the map, but there were other locations at which they had no idea of what they might find.

  By the time they got back to Manhattan, it was nine o'clock, and they had steaks and beer at a small tavern, where they relaxed and talked about their private interests. Joseph brought up fantasy and horror movies, and mentioned Carnival of Souls, which Tony had seen, but which Laika had never heard of.

  "I've watched it several times," said Joseph. "Very weird. Like a nightmare."

  "Could we get a copy and watch it?" Laika asked, looking eagerly from one to the other and back again. The apartment was equipped with a VCR.

  After dinner, they stopped at a Tower video store where Laika found the movie for $14.99. Back at the apartment, they made microwave popcorn, opened three more beers, and sat on the couch and watched Carnival of Souls.

  Joseph and Tony had been right: the film was scary, despite its obvious low budget and less-than-stellar acting. It had the ambience of a bad dream, and at the end, when Laika found out the reason why, she felt slightly sick, but attributed it to the beer and popcorn.

  "You guys were on the money," she said. "That was weird, all right."

  "The weirdest," said Tony. "There's something that's almost too real about it. Brrr. . . ." He pretended to shake it off. "I'm gonna have to watch something else to get my mind off it. Anybody want to see who's on Letterman?"

  But Joseph begged off, saying he was tired. Laika wondered if it wasn't something more than that, if, despite the anticipation of tomorrow's hunt, he was still bearing the guilt of the woman's death in the townhouse. He had seemed all right at the tavern, but when they'd started watching the movie, a change had come over him. He hadn't eaten any popcorn, nor had he drunk more than a sip of his beer. Now he went directly to the bedroom he shared with Tony and closed the door.

  Laika said good night to Tony and went down the hall to her room, where she undressed, slipped into a robe, and went to take the first long, relaxing bath she'd had in weeks. After she'd slipped into the bubbles that came to nearly the top of the tub, she put on her portable headset and started to listen to the second disc of Sir Thomas Beecham's recording of Puccini's La Bohème, her favorite performance, the one with Bjoerling and Merrill and de los Angeles. She could never listen to the fourth act's "Ah, Mimi, to piu non torni" without chuckling at Beecham's answer as to why he wanted to record Bjoerling and Merrill's duet again when the first take was perfect: "Because I simply love to hear those boys sing it!" So did Laika, and she hit the repeat button and listened again.

  Joseph lay alone in the darkness. He had taken off most of his clothes, but by the time he got down to his underwear and T-shirt, a heavy lassitude had come over him so that he lay down on top of the single bed's blankets and let his head drop down onto the pillow. He was afraid he would dream.

  He wished he had not viewed the movie they'd just seen.

  He had forgotten how haunting it was, how the dead man's blackened eyes looked like the deep-set eyes of the woman he'd killed. He had dreamed about her before and several times had awakened sweating on the cot in the warehouse anteroom.

  Now he was afraid she'd fill his dreams again, running at him with that hatchet raised over her head, holding something else that he could not identify until it was too late, until his pistol had fired, splitting the poor little creature she held, then killing her, the lead dragging the child's death into the mother's body.

  Oh, Christ, he wished he could just stop thinking about it. For a while tonight, he had. The camaraderie of his colleagues, the thought of getting out of that damned filthy, dusty warehouse and onto the streets tomorrow, the good food and drink had made him feel almost human again. And then they had watched that movie.

  He rolled over, feeling half sick, and buried his face in the pillow. A few minutes later, he thought he was asleep.

  He thought he was asleep because he thought he was dreaming. When he became conscious of an existence beyond the waking world, Joseph felt terrified, but when he found that he was not shuffling sideways through the walls of Clarence Melton's townhouse, the terror faded, replaced by awe.

  Joseph found himself high in the air. There was a blue-black sky above and to either side of him. Below there was nothing—an inky, palpable blackness into which, if he fell, he knew he would vanish completely, and cease to exist. A black hole, a dark star, death, nothingness.

  He was standing on a dark red bridge, the color of rust or dried blood. It was rounded, and there was nothing to keep him from falling off to either side except his balance. As he shuffled forward like a tightrope walker, afraid to lift a foot for fear that it would unbalance him, the surface beneath his
bare feet felt gritty and dirty, and then he knew that the bridge was the color of rust because it was actually coated with it.

  Joseph was walking on a bridge of iron.

  It arched up so that he had to lean slightly forward as he walked, and he held his arms out and up for balance, as though he were being held at gunpoint. When he paused and looked ahead of him, he could see nothing but a light brighter than the blue-black that surrounded him, and the nonreflective rust on which he walked. And then he heard a voice. It was a man's voice, but the sweetest, the purest, the most melodic voice he had ever heard.

  Find me, it said.

  Only that, only two words, but they moved him to his very soul. He shivered at the sound of them, and an instant later was struggling to maintain his tenuous balance upon the iron rod on which he stood. When he felt secure once more, he breathed a sigh of longing. Then he said, "Yes, yes, I'm coming. . . ."

  Suddenly, the most important thing in the world, or wherever he was, was answering that summons that had spoken inside his head, inside his dream. He shuffled forward faster, thrilling to the voice as it spoke again: Come. Seek me. Find me.

  "Yes," Joseph said louder. "Yes, I'm coming. I will find you."

  Chapter 33

  After Mimi had coughed herself to death one last time and Rodolpho had cried her name, Laika rubbed a tear from her eye and took off her headset. As she did, she heard another sound over the gurgle of the water whirling down the tub drain.

  It was Joseph's voice. She couldn't make out the words, but she recognized the tone. It was impassioned, almost desperate, and she wondered what had been going on while she was engaged in the musical tragedies of the Paris Bohemians.

  She quickly got out of the tub and slipped on a terrycloth robe without drying herself first. Then she opened the door and edged into the hall. Tony was already standing outside the bedroom door, listening.