The Municipalists

by Seth Fried

  As the city’s premier luxury hotel, it was certainly an improvement from the converted utility closet he had expected me to stay in a few hours ago. Yet I couldn’t help but wonder what folks in Suitland would think when a five-star hotel showed up on an expense report. I didn’t look forward to explaining why I had stayed at a hotel that Zagat’s described as “a little slice of Dubai right in Center City Metropolis.”

  As we pulled up between the series of faux Persian columns leading to the hotel’s bright glass entrance, OWEN told me we could come back to his paper later—he had just been in the middle of describing “the synthesis of Kikuchiyo and Katsushiro into Chico”—and explained that he had booked us one of the villas on the top floor. According to him, it was a necessary extravagance. The suite would come with its own security detail, and since lying low in Chinatown hadn’t worked out he felt our only option was to place ourselves in the care of professionals. He read aloud a paragraph from the hotel’s website boasting the number of foreign leaders who had stayed in the Eldrit’s villas while they were in the city.

  “It’ll be safe as mansions,” OWEN said.

  “The expression is ‘safe as houses,’” I said, pulling my bag and our stolen briefcase from the backseat.

  “I have access to all of the crime statistics currently available,” he said. “‘Mansions’ makes more sense.”

  He did most of the talking once we were inside, flirting with the AI clerk on the slender monitor at the front desk, an image of a young woman whose hazel eyes and dark hair swept up in a loose bun were clearly not lost on OWEN. I watched as he made himself gradually taller and handsomer as he arranged to pay for the suite with another wire transfer. She seemed to find him charming and laughed when he abruptly interrupted their transaction to try to impress her with some close-up magic. When she laughed and asked him how he had turned a deck of cards into an egg, he admitted that if he told her it would ruin it.

  Meanwhile I was holding on to a nearby kiosk of travel brochures in an effort to keep weight off my right leg. OWEN had insisted on disguising me and so I was wearing dark sunglasses, a leather duster, and a long, dirty beard. My appearance seemed to be cause for concern among the Eldrit staff. While I waited for OWEN to finish checking us in, I was asked to leave the building by two different hotel employees. Each time, OWEN turned from the front desk to explain that I was with him, and the employee in question would shoot me one last unfriendly look before reluctantly walking off.

  The clerk must have noticed me staring impatiently at OWEN, because she eventually asked him in a half whisper if I was all right, to which he replied, “He has his moments.”

  OWEN called me over to register my thumbprint on the counter’s scanner. As I did so, he asked the clerk if we could have a first aid kit sent to our room.

  She looked concerned but said only, “Certainly.”

  She might have been about to say something else, but was stopped when we turned to leave and I accidentally tripped over a luggage cart and toppled down with it. Unable to help me up, OWEN instead bent at the waist and shouted down encouragement while I struggled to get back to my feet. When we made it to the elevator, the clerk was watching us with her mouth hanging open.

  “She seemed nice,” OWEN said as the elevator doors closed. He then whistled for the rest of our ride up to the thirtieth floor.

  In a testament to the Eldrit’s level of service, a first aid kit was already waiting outside our room when we arrived. I picked it up and touched my thumb to the door’s biometric lock, which caused the room to open automatically. Inside was a massive suite with marble floors and a south-facing wall that was all glass, offering a panoramic view of the city. Just off the foyer was a large open kitchen and a lounge area with modern-looking furniture and an indoor pond complete with water lilies and ornamental koi. A recording of a woman’s voice welcomed us to the Eldrit while I put down my bags.

  “OWEN, how much did this cost?”

  “A lot,” he said, admiring the winding staircase that led up to the master bedroom. “I had to fudge the agency’s budget a little. If anyone asks, this money went toward a community center in Little Rock.”

  There was a lot about this statement to give a conscientious agent pause. For the time being I was comforted by the knowledge that OWEN’s continued financial breaches were not being reflected on my expense account.

  Near the kitchen was a small guest bathroom, where I brought the first aid kit, placing it on the white quartz countertop next to the sink’s raised ceramic basin.

  OWEN appeared behind me, sitting on the closed lid of the toilet with his legs crossed and his hands folded over one knee as if he were there to help me get fitted for a tuxedo. He said he had a wealth of medical information at his disposal and that he was there to assist. I even found his presence comforting until I stripped to the waist and he seemed to blanch at the sight of the large splinters in my back. I then lowered my pants carefully, revealing a piece of wood in my calf roughly the size of a pencil. I turned to OWEN to get the benefit of his medical advice, but he just looked unhappily down at my leg and said, “Yuck.”

  With no expertise forthcoming, I yanked the wood out of my calf without a problem. More difficult were the splinters in my shoulders, which I had to dig out with the first aid kit’s tweezers while looking behind me into the vanity mirror over the sink. By the time I was finished, my back and leg were running with small rivulets of blood. OWEN was sitting with his hands covering his face. The tie clip on the counter was making a whirring noise and his projection began to flicker.

  “You’re so—vulnerable—I mean—I understood—on an intellectual level—but this—”

  It seemed the films he watched with Klaus had only managed to prepare him for casual violence. He’d barely been phased when Biggs jumped to his death, but now watching me bleed from a few minor puncture wounds in that bathroom seemed to be more than he could bear.

  He stood up and stepped through me toward the door.

  “It looks like you’ve got this covered,” he said. “So I think it’d be best if I just—”

  Before he could finish his sentence, he turned into a French bulldog and fainted.

  He lay there motionless in his dog’s body with his tongue hanging out. Above him in bold white text was a slowly rotating error message. I decided not to try to wake him, in the hopes that I might get out of having to hear the rest of his compare-and-contrast paper.

  I cleaned my wounds with rubbing alcohol, then took off my underwear and stood in the shower, letting the cold water stanch the bleeding. After drying myself off, I applied a large bandage to my calf and grabbed one of the hotel robes out of the linen closet, wrapping it around me as tightly as I could to apply some pressure to my back. I moved into the lounge, where I began to feel light-headed myself. I crawled onto one of the hard, armless sofas and, though it was still early, fell almost immediately asleep.

  * * *

  I was sitting at a desk in the middle of a warehouse. A large open space filled with rows of metal filing cabinets. On the desktop in front of me under the light of a small lamp was a stack of forms I was in the process of filling out, ticking boxes and writing complicated figures into empty columns. Once I had finished the last of them, I pushed the neat stack of forms toward the center of the desk, admiring my work. Then, thunk. A hand reached down and placed a pair of bright white dentures on the stack. I watched with some irritation as a pool of saliva steadily spread from beneath the dentures, making my writing run and become illegible. I looked up and saw a man in a dark suit standing over me. He laughed, showing me his empty mouth. Behind him, the drawers to the filing cabinets had all been opened and their contents were in flames.

  I woke to the sound of OWEN sighing heavily and pouring himself a drink. When I sat up on the sofa, I saw he was standing by one of the villa’s large windows, holding a glass of his dark liquor and staring
out at the skyline. It was morning and the day was overcast, most of the buildings rising straight up into the clouds. I tied my robe and joined him where he stood.

  “I’m working on a patch,” he said as I approached, his voice sounding a little defensive.

  “A patch?”

  “A software update. One that will allow me to withstand the sight of your blood without further . . . incident.”

  “Are you embarrassed because you fainted?”

  “Don’t be stupid,” OWEN said. “I’m a computer. I don’t faint. The interface was just overwhelmed by the intensity of the situation and I inadvertently shut down for a moment.”

  OWEN’s mood seemed to be deteriorating so I chose not to point out that he had more or less just described the act of fainting.

  “Don’t be too hard on yourself,” I said.

  He looked down into his drink.

  “What kind of computer faints?” he said, though now it wasn’t clear whether he was rejecting my choice of words or lamenting his performance.

  I still had what I felt were legitimate concerns about OWEN’s interface, but whatever was happening in Metropolis was beyond anything I’d anticipated. OWEN’s assistance, as erratic as it was, seemed like my only chance to make sense of it. I thought it would therefore be in my best interest to keep him in a positive mind-set.

  “You also stopped those men from killing me with an axe,” I said.

  OWEN turned from the window and regarded me with what looked like gratitude.

  “That’s true. I did do that.”

  “And then you helped me set that car on fire.”

  He chuckled and looked down at his shoes. “You probably could have figured out how to set it on fire yourself—”

  “OWEN, I wouldn’t have known where to start.”

  He was smiling now. “You really don’t mind that I fainted?”

  “Honestly,” I said, “I’m more worried about your drinking.”

  He laughed and downed the rest of his drink, then projected himself around me in a hug. I took a step back, but his image remained fixed to me and I was forced to stand there until he was finished embracing me.

  “This actually reminds me of one of the books I read yesterday,” he said.

  He released me from his hug but kept his hands projected onto my shoulders.

  “The Syntax of Friendship by Dr. Eleanor Pomodoro. She says you have to think of a friendship as a paragraph and that when a friend expresses an insecurity, you should always try to reassure him or her without dismissing the feelings that he or she is trying to express. She says it’s all about acknowledging the content of your friend’s sentence without trying to correct his or her emotional grammar.”

  “Is that what I did just now?”

  “Yes! And you also reassured me by bringing in a subordinate clause that highlighted some of my strengths and caused me to view my failings in a larger context. You made me see myself as I related to the . . .”

  The excitement in his eyes suggested that he expected me to complete the phrase he had in mind.

  I ventured a guess. “The rest of the paragraph?”

  He nodded vigorously.

  “Henry, you have to read this book. I just ordered a copy and had it sent to your apartment. Consider it a declaration of friendship.”

  Just my luck. The first colleague I’d befriended at the agency and it was an alcoholic supercomputer.

  “It sounds to me,” I said, doing my best to keep us on task, “like the sooner we find out what’s going on, the sooner I can go home and read it.”

  OWEN considered this. And while he had already seemed more or less committed to our task, it was not until I suggested it was preventing me from being exposed to the work of Dr. Eleanor Pomodoro that he really came alive on the subject of investigating the attacks. He changed the pattern on his tie to a series of tiny daggers with drops of blood dripping from their blades.

  “I swear to you, Henry, we will find Terrence Kirklin and make him eat his own eye patch.”

  I didn’t know about that sentiment exactly, but the agency I loved was in crisis, my mentor’s career was over, and the previous day I’d seen a coworker fling himself off the roof of a building after trying to kill me. The man at the center of it all was apparently Terrence Kirklin and I wanted to know why.

  I grabbed the briefcase that had belonged to Biggs and dumped it out onto the glass coffee table in the lounge. Together we examined its contents: a roll of breath mints, a silver ballpoint pen, a hardbound book titled Conversational Esperanto, a bottle of prescription pills, and a yellow legal pad that was blank except for its first page, which was covered in some hastily written notes. The book on Esperanto was clean except for a few notations in the margins that looked innocuous enough and a stamp on the inside front cover that read EX LIBRIS SFEM. The label of the pill bottle didn’t reveal much, just the drug name Ketaconazole. I read the name to OWEN in the hopes that he might be able to determine its significance. He was busy examining the notepad and I had to read the drug name a second time before he turned his attention to the bottle.

  “Antifungal pills,” he said. “His dentures must have been new, probably not fitted properly yet. Explains the breath mints.”

  Then, with the gracious tone of an adult who has decided to include a child in a serious conversation, he pointed toward some numbers in the upper-right-hand corner of the man’s legal pad and asked me to take a look at them:

  1000–2100

  1000–2100

  1000–2100

  1000–2100

  1000–1730

  1000–1730

  ————

  When I wasn’t able to make sense of them, he looked pleased with himself and suggested that they were most likely a series of durations written in military time.

  “Ten a.m. to nine p.m., Monday through Thursday. Ten a.m. to five thirty p.m., Friday and Saturday. Null on Sundays. Those are the hours of operation of almost every public building in the city. Now look over here.”

  He pointed to a pair of sketches at the bottom of the page. One was an arrangement of adjacent squares that created a horseshoe pattern while the other was just a progression of intersecting lines marked with a series of Xs.

  “I checked that pattern of squares against the floor plan of every government-owned building in the city. The scale is off, but I’m pretty sure this is the first floor of the Metropolis Museum of History.”

  He pointed to the second sketch.

  “These Xs match the route for the Civic Pride Parade this Sunday, which will be passing one block north of the museum, closing down the surrounding streets.”

  “Yes?”

  “On a day that the museum itself will be closed.”

  He looked at me as if the conclusions to be drawn from this were too obvious to mention. Though, when I asked him what it all meant, he shrugged.

  “Oh, I have no idea,” he said. “But if Biggs was interested in the history museum, then so are we.”

  5 The Metropolis Museum of History, MetMoH for short, is a beautiful ten-story building at the head of Attleman Park in Center City. It serves as the focal point of what is informally referred to as the museum district, a fifteen-block radius containing a dozen of the city’s best cultural centers, home to some of the world’s most beloved displays of art, science, and history. The MetMoH is by far the largest, with over three hundred exhibition halls featuring reconstructions of whole city streets as they appeared in bygone eras as well as a constantly changing array of the museum’s over four hundred thousand cultural artifacts, including everything from Arthur Tyler’s upright bass to the mummified remains of Spanker, a French spaniel that belonged to the city’s first colonial mayor.

  The building itself is also a notable work of art, the last to be designed by that great American Renaissa
nce man Charles L. Webber. Its wide apron of granite steps leads up to a large portico with high vaulted ceilings and columns with neoclassical reliefs depicting prominent citizens of Metropolis throughout history; visages of former politicians and social reformers who had clashed angrily in real life now stand arm in arm, smiling serenely at patrons as they enter the museum.

  OWEN and I were staked out in the natural history exhibit on the first floor, watching the crowds for any suspicious activity. The hall was a large rotunda with its walls covered in smoky murals of ancient forests and marshes. Arranged throughout the space were platforms bearing stuffed elk and mountain lions along with elaborate re-creations of the area’s ancient megafauna. A stampede of life-sized mastodons dominated the center of the room. Nearby a massive short-faced bear glowered at nothing, while toward the grand entrance a six-foot-long giant beaver was frozen with alarm as if it had stumbled upon the museum patrons in a clearing. It was one of MetMoH’s most iconic spaces, encapsulating the grand drama of the place as a whole and reminding visitors of the city’s transformation from coastal forest to cultural epicenter.

  It was also positioned just off the main entrance on the first floor so that all visitors were required to walk through it before branching off into the other exhibits. I had been skeptical about the idea of a stakeout, but OWEN insisted.