by Josh Cook
But data are the weeds of society. You can never kill all of them, and never everywhere.
On the fourteenth search return page of the sixth keyword permutation, Lola found The Jameson Brothers’ Bank Heist.
There were dozens of websites devoted to the robbery and manhunt. None had pictures or descriptions of the sewers, concerning themselves with guns, acoustics, and speculations, but nearly all identified Temporary Moles: The Jameson Brothers’ Bank Heist by Roger Casement as the definitive work. Written eight years after the heist, it included eyewitness testimony, police reports, and complete maps of the city’s sewer system.
According to the library’s online database, as of 11:57 p.m., two copies were available.
At 8:59 the next morning, Lola strode through the freshly unlocked door of the public library.
“He-hello,” the librarian said, not making eye contact as she blazed past him.
“Hello, Mr. Seaman,” she said, noticing his wilted posture. “Wonderful day,” she offered as she climbed the stairs.
Lola double-checked the Dewey number she’d written down. Both copies of the book were exactly where they were supposed to be.
“Now, that is what I am talking about,” Lola said, pulling a copy down.
She flipped right to the plates where the maps would be. They were blank. She flipped around the rest of the book. All the pages were blank. She set that copy down and grabbed the other one. It was blank.
“What the fuck,” Lola muttered out loud.
Then she thought, “If I wanted to make sure nobody found the information in a particular book, I would just check it out. Or steal it. That would be even better. Or, actually, the best way to get rid of these would be to just shelve them in slightly the wrong spot. Put them in fiction, they might stick out, but just move them to a different history section, and they’d be impossible to find for anybody actively looking for them. But even if I couldn’t find them, I could probably still find a used copy somewhere.”
Lola held the blank book in one hand and put the other fist on her hip. “But I can still find a used copy somewhere,” she continued thinking. “Checking out, stealing, re-shelving, or replacing with blanks all lead to the same subsequent action, so why go through the effort of making them, putting the Dewey sticker on them, and sneaking them in? A ton of extra effort for no tangible benefit. Really fucking weird. Should take a copy to show Trike.”
Lola brought both books down to the desk. The librarian looked away as she approached.
“Mr. Seaman, these books are blank,” she said.
Mr. Seaman looked at his hands. His fingers drummed on the desk. His feet fidgeted under it. “Were they in the right location?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Were the indicated number of copies there?”
“Yes.”
He cleared his throat. “Then I have met my, um, uh, my, ah, the full requirements of my position.”
“What?”
He focused on a point over Lola’s shoulder. “As a librarian, a, um, systemic maintenance person, my responsibility is to ensure the proper functioning of the library system, which is composed, in its entirety, of the indicated number of copies of the book in the proper location.”
“Why are you talking like that?”
“I cannot be held responsible for the, um, content of said books as such con-considerations fall outside the functioning of the system I oversee. Their content is only relevant in initially establishing their proper location.”
“Aren’t you concerned that someone was tampering with your books?”
“Yes. Um. Yes. This is clearly a sumptuous and stagnant, uh, exaggeration of murder, and steps will certainly be taken. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I am locked in a death feud with entropy and cannot be further detained.”
He turned his back on her. Frantically scanned in returned books.
Lola leaned forward and put her hands on the desk.
“I can see you’re nervous, Mr. Seaman, that you have been asked to do something you are not comfortable doing,” Lola said in a precise tone her father taught her. “I’m not going to pursue this matter, because I know that whatever bribe you received to look the other way while the books were switched, and to recite that script when the switch was discovered, was probably in the form of an anonymous donation to the library. It’s hard for me to be mad about that. It’s hard for me to be mad at a librarian at all.”
She stood up. Slid one of the books across the desk. Mr. Seaman had not turned.
“But this could change,” Lola continued, “and I might find myself required to get mad at a librarian. If I do, that donation will not remain anonymous and your involvement will not remain a secret. Now, I would like to check out this blank book.”
Mr. Seaman slowly turned around. Started to say something. Stopped himself. Checked the book out to Lola.
THE HARE COURSES THE DOG
Trike felt as though he had fallen through a trapdoor, the ultimate absurdity; pantomimic, bathetic, grotesque. An alteration in strategy was required. Since the actions of the intellect are profoundly influenced by the state of the body, and the content and trajectory of thought is guided, if not determined, by the words that compose it, Trike, still in bed, resolved to change both his typical detecting bodily orientation and lexicon. He would lie in bed all day and channel his own synthetic Alan Grant.
His non-emergency-case-update phone beeped a text from Max. He prospected it from the layers on the floor. “Van ready,” it read.
Trike texted back, “At home, channeling the force majeur in being. Consult.”
“The problem,” he spoke, dropping the phone, “is that The Joyce Case is a warped Centre Pompidou, in which all the context has been perverted. The museumgoer must seek meaning in opposition to the construction of the galleries themselves. What I need …” Trike paused while the appropriate reference arrived, “is something earnest and statistical. Tsetse flies, or calories, or sex behavior.”
His front door opened. Someone strode resolutely through the house. The length and lightness of the stride told him a laden Lola lugged substantiated evidence toward his inspection.
“In the bedroom,” he shouted, “being arch about vice.”
Lola graced into the room. She unslung her backpack as an actress might gesture offstage.
“Ah,” Trike said, gaze fixed on the ceiling, “at last, sewer maps. An avenue of further investigation will be opened or closed.”
“Actually,” Lola said, “the book is blank from cover to cover. There were two copies of this at the library and both were blank.”
“Both books blank?”
“Yep.”
“It’s a technique from which some works of literature would greatly benefit. They would sit on shelves assuring everyone of the progress of literate society, while containing none of the twaddle that so easily dazzles contemporaries.”
“Sure. Whatever. And Mr. Seaman was bribed to recite a script for when the books were discovered. Which is even weirder than I thought at first, because there was no reason to involve him at all.”
“Mr. Seaman recited a script?” Trike asked.
“Better than you’d expect,” Lola answered.
“So, at this point in the investigation into the sewers, either Arthur continues his aggressively passive-aggressive assault on your ability to succeed or steps were taken at the Hall of Records, you were followed by someone remarkably able to mace themselves, the Water Department is newly secretive, and now books purported to contain sewer maps have been replaced with blank replicas. I dare say, it is a slightly odd state of affairs.”
“Trike,” Lola said out of patience with the sober reception to her broadside, “this is a breakthrough. This tells us specifically that whoever did this doesn’t want us to know about the sewers, which tells me, the sewers are exactly where we need to look.”
Trike considered quietly for 223 seconds. There were no sparrows to talk today. Only the soft sound
of rain against the window, again.
He said, “The sewers are of no consequence in this martial moment.”
“So what is of consequence in this martial moment?” Lola asked. Each word a sharpened shiv.
In response, Trike delivered a soliloquy Lola knew was more productive than communicative, designed to impart energy to his intellect, rather than a message to his listener.
“Every human action, from the grandest to the most mundane, produces signal and noise, broadcasting both its intentions and unintentional, irrelevant, and random data. When you bring lilacs to a friend convalescing in the hospital, you express emotions of comfort and your opinions about the comforting properties of lilacs. Sometimes the signal-to-noise ratio of a specific action is of vital importance and sometimes it is just a fact of interaction, but there are two realms of human activity that have quite different relationships with their own signal and noise, both of which, you, Lola, have intimate knowledge of.
“Crime and art. Though art is not at issue here, it should be noted in this consideration that, unlike perhaps any other human action, in art, sometimes the noise is as important or even more important than the signal. It is not a specific idea or emotion or expression that gives a work of art its ability to endure across cultures and generations, but the meaning others find in the noise that coexists with the signal. Artists, you might say, work in the signal, but live in the noise. In contrast, the fundamental goal of the criminal is to produce neither signal nor noise. A crime is perfect when no one knows it occurred. In general practice, this means doing as little as possible. If one lock could be picked instead of two, the criminal will choose the course of action in which only one lock is picked.
“And yet, here, with the sewers, the criminals are broadcasting. Of course, they would have wanted to obscure the fact that they used the sewers if they did, but this radical expression of data does nothing to any potential evidence surrounding that potential fact. If they acted on information, it would be on the information in the basement, which we are not allowed to see anyway.”
Trike laced his fingers behind his head. “Fuck the sewers. Don’t need them.”
He finally looked at Lola. “Don’t look so astonished,” he said with a smirk, “it isn’t tactful.”
“I’m not really sure how I should look.”
Trike turned back to the ceiling. “That is not my department at the Yard. However, my department at the Yard would like to know more about the real-estate angle.”
“The real-estate angle?”
“If I know anything about real estate, and as with most things, I do, it’s that real-estate transactions require the kind of attention to detail that often leads to believing that the CIA uses dust to record your dreams.”
“You really know how to sell a project.”
“Legitimate real-estate transactions are already vastly complex, and any way one might try to obscure such a transaction would only increase that complexity. With that increase in complexity comes an increase in the potential for a mistake.”
“Should I look for a particular mistake?” Lola asked.
“No. Assume that everything about what you find will be utterly, profoundly, horrifyingly weird, but be aware of anything that is weird in a different way from the newly normalized weirdness of the entire endeavor.”
“And if I don’t see anything like that?”
“Then I look forward to one of your terrifying accordion folders of absence. You have a written report for the sewers?”
“A list of all the places that maps should have been but weren’t. It’s in the book.”
“Excellent. Good luck on your newest quest,” Trike said.
“What are you going to do?”
“Continue apace,” Trike replied.
“You’re going to lie in bed all day. While we lose another fifty thousand dollars.” Poison-tipped shivs.
“That is an ocular-centric description of the observed phenomena, but, in truth, I will be engaged in the most heroic of intellectual endeavors.”
“And that would be?”
“Discovering what is known but not yet articulated in languaged thought.”
“That’s heroic?”
“It’s got to be a real doozy to be unlanguaged in my brain.”
Lola nodded at the point.
“Okay, then,” she said, “I’ll get in touch with you if I find anything urgent. Otherwise, I’ll drop the feared folder at the office.”
“Sounds like a plan. You are welcome to augment it with a preceding passage of prone-with-Trike time.”
Lola slapped her forehead. Her transcendental poise. Like a queen. Like a nun. Like a head nurse. “With all the practice and that big fucking brain, you are still terrible at hitting on me.”
“That is a defensible conclusion.”
“Good luck with your heroic endeavors.”
“And good luck to you, Lola.”
Lola left. A lasting lacuna.
The substance of intuition is the unconscious, not the unconscious of drives, demons, hauntings, and past lives, but the utilitarian unconscious of data storage. “Stored” and “silent,” however, are not equivalent. The stored data can whisper, imparting vague sense, atmosphere, and impression. The data give us, in the expressive parlance of American detective vernacular, a hunch. For Trike, however, most of that unconscious information was conscious, if sometimes tedious to retrieve. But most is not all. Hunches then, he still had, but drawn from such esoteric and obscure sources as to be violent affronts to the functions of reason.
In searching for his hunch, itself a paradox, Trike analyzed the character of Joyce’s face. The face, when properly observed, is a font of intuitive data. What hunch lurked in Joyce’s face?
The bench or the dock?
Neither. Joyce had the face of a middle manager with a good sense of humor. A high school math teacher just this side of inspirational. An excellent customer-service rep.
Max showed up forty minutes later.
“Max,” Trike said while Max walked through the hallway, “judging by Joyce’s face, would you put him on the bench, or on the dock?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’ve seen the portrait of Joyce or a representation thereof?”
“Yeah.”
“If you knew he was involved in a trial and had to guess whether he was the judge or the defendant, would you put him on the bench or on the dock?”
“Ah. I would put him … on a diet,” Max replied.
“Yeah. That’s pretty much what I came up with. Probably afraid of dogs. Which is something. I guess.”
“Is this the … consultation, boss?”
“As you well know, Max, detecting is a process of drama removal. One arrives at the drama of a blood-soaked carpet in the study and in the end it is all a matter of estate taxes. The story is only told in grand sweeps of notable action once journalists, novelists, and screenwriters claim it, for it actually resides in an advertisement in the paper, the sale of a house, and the price of a ring. The detective is distinguished by the ability to see past the drama to the grocery receipts and credit-card bills.
“However, up to this point, we have only found ghosts of those bills, receipts, and ads. We have been left with evidence of their creation, but not with the things themselves. We are finding as much drama in the banal as in the blood. The hare is coursing the dog. I have now cast some hope in Lola being able to find what we seek in the real-estate transaction of the house. But … to reiterate, the real history is written in forms not meant as history.”
“You’re nervous about the case,” Max said.
“What generates that conclusion?”
“You’re … referencing something.”
“I don’t think references work for me the same way they do for everyone else.”
“I’ll add that to the list.”
“Pull my desk chair over, Max. Consult in comfort.”
Max dragged the chair th
rough Trike’s domestic detritus. He sat down with the air of an Englishman sitting down to his port after the women have left the table.
“Lola take the maps?” Max asked, seeing no maps.
“Hall of Records didn’t have them, Water Department wouldn’t let her look at them, books purported to contain them were blank, and pictures of them have been removed from the Internet.”
“Wow.”
“Indeed.”
“So they must have used the sewers.”
“The sewers are a red herring.”
The look on Max’s face was audible in the next room.
Trike responded. “The initial hope was that an investigation of the sewers would reveal an extraordinary action, such as digging a tunnel, and though we did find an extraordinary action, it is in relation only to the information about the sewers. One would not be imprudent in concluding that the extraordinary action taken on the information implies extraordinary action taken in the sewers themselves, but that fact ensures that it does not do what it would not be imprudent to assume it does do. The very extraordinariness of the information efforts imply an act of misdirection.
“And once we factor in what a sewer investigation would consist of, it is almost certain they want us in the sewers. With no other data besides a strong suspicion that something happened, we would wander around for who knows how long, never certain whether or not we have found what we sought. Of course, one could begin the absurd process of reasoning sometimes thrust upon even and odd, and conclude that this direct implication was designed to keep us from inspecting the sewers by leading us to exactly what I have concluded, but it would have been much easier to do nothing to the information at all. No, Max, although you are more than welcome to spend whatever free time you possess scouring the sewers in the hopes of discovering evidence, I shall not endorse it as an official investigation strategy.”
Max sighed. “What’s next, boss?”
“In the distant future, even the particles of dust born from our decayed bodies will be dispersed into the essential nothing at the end of all things. In the immediate future, you’re going to have to listen to me talk through some of what’s going on in my head to ensure that it makes sense to someone who cannot concurrently process multiple systems of analysis.”