by Seth Fried
My eyes were still adjusting as I was pushed through the door. The space was filled with the din of many people hard at work and I was eventually able to make out a large bullpen of desks under a high white ceiling. Men and women in identical black suits were gathered around large computer monitors and dry erase boards, handing printouts back and forth, and calling out to one another in Esperanto. As I was led around the bullpen by Laury and the two men, I passed a series of classrooms where Kirklin’s agents sat at school desks loudly reciting phrases in Esperanto. It was difficult to tell if their booming recitations were grammar exercises or loyalty oaths until I heard an instructor call out enthusiastically, “Jes! Tre bona!” From another room I heard the sound of someone groaning in pain, while just outside, a young man with bandaged fingers sat flipping through a magazine under a sign that read DENTISTO.
I was led into a long corridor with windows looking out onto firing ranges where men and women were shooting handguns and rifles at moving targets. The glass was soundproof and the flashes of gunfire were noiseless. We passed windows looking in on large gymnasiums where people were rappelling from the ceiling while, down below, others practiced hand-to-hand combat. One particularly troubling room contained a group of men hollering to one another as they used flamethrowers to attack a replica of a National Guard truck. They stood in a half circle spraying its cab with flames. Fifty yards away, a man hoisted an RPG onto his shoulder, then shouted something to the others, who scattered. The bed of the truck, I noticed, was loaded with two dozen mannequins all dressed in fatigues.
We turned into a small passageway with a series of windowless doors. Laury picked one seemingly at random and punched in the code to open it. Inside was a small closet filled with cleaning supplies and a few pieces of office furniture. She nodded and the two men pushed me inside. They forced me into an office chair and tied me to it with some extension cords they found on a shelf.
“You’ll have to forgive us,” Laury said, as one of the men made a final knot in the cords around my chest. “As you’ve seen on the news, we’re not really in the habit of taking prisoners. But Terry wants to see you before you’re dealt with, so this will have to do.”
The men filed out of the room and stood behind her.
“Anyway,” she said, pulling the door shut, “you won’t be with us long.”
The door locked itself with a buzz and I sat there in the dark for what felt like hours. There was little to occupy me in that time except for the throb in my nose and a general sense of dread. It was with no small sense of relief that I greeted the sound of a distant crackle in my ear, followed by a bright spotlight shining out from between the gaps in the extension cords cinched across my chest.
OWEN stepped into the spotlight, looking a little disoriented.
“Did you save the day?” he said. “Did I miss it?”
Before I could answer he approached me and began examining my face.
“What happened here?”
“I was beaten up.”
OWEN shook his head, not even trying to hide his disappointment.
“Let me get a better look at you,” he said, leaning in closer.
He seemed pleasantly surprised by the degree of my injuries. “Hey, you look horrible!”
“You don’t say.”
“You’re a mess—isn’t that great?”
“You’ll have to walk me through it.”
“My patch,” he said. “I made some adjustments when I was rebooting back in Suitland. It must finally be working. Now I can see you get injured and it won’t bother me.”
“I’m happy for you,” I said.
“Really? Because you look miserable.”
Deciding it might be more productive to change the subject, I gave OWEN a rundown of everything that had happened since he fainted. He seemed almost impressed with how quickly our plan had deteriorated in his absence.
“OWEN, they’re going to kill me.”
“What? Oh, no, no, no. Don’t worry about that,” OWEN said before adding, “Well, I mean, yes—they probably are planning to kill you at some point, but according to you, Laury said Kirklin wants to talk first. That’s an amazing opportunity to gather intelligence. We can’t even think of escaping before then.”
I was about to protest, but the door buzzed again and began to open. OWEN winked as he disappeared.
A young woman entered the room, pushing a handcart. She had a bleached pixie cut and was wearing a black jumpsuit. On her neck, there was a tattoo of a gas mask. Behind her was a heavyset man with a shaved head and a matching jumpsuit. He was holding a bucket and a handgun.
The woman stepped to one side and waited without expression while the man put the bucket on the ground and pointed his gun at me. He nudged the bucket toward me with his foot and there was the sound of water sloshing inside.
“This will only take a minute,” he said. “And if you’re thinking of turning into a giant clown or a dick with wings, I’m going to start shooting at anything that moves. Understand?”
I nodded and he placed the handgun in the canvas belt of his jumpsuit. He retrieved a butterfly knife from his pocket and cut through the extension cords and the restraint around my wrists. Then he took a towel from the cart and tossed it into my lap, telling me to wash up and get undressed.
While I wiped the blood from my face, I noticed a handheld metal detector sitting on the cart. Sarah Laury’s description of OWEN’s projections must have reminded Kirklin’s people of our run-in at the museum so now they were on the lookout for some technology. OWEN must have spotted the metal detector even before I did. When I went to pull off the tie clip, he’d already camouflaged it to my tie. I managed to slide it onto the second knuckle of my pinky finger, where it camouflaged itself again.
Once I’d taken off my clothes, the man pulled out a tape measure and started taking my measurements, calling them out to the woman as he did so. Meanwhile, she was busy placing my individual articles of clothing into plastic evidence bags. She made sure each bag was sealed before picking it up and waving the metal detector over it. My wristwatch and belt buckle both elicited sustained beeps and she frowned as if this might be significant, making notations on their respective bags with a red marker. Just to be safe she also ripped off the heels of my shoes, before bagging them, and used a penknife to cut out the lining of my blazer.
When the man was finished with my measurements, he grabbed the metal detector and told me to hold out my arms. As he started to wave the device over me I flicked the tie clip off my finger and coughed to cover the sound of it pinging against the cement floor.
“Hold still,” he said.
He moved the wand slowly over my body before clicking it off and tossing it back onto the cart.
“All right, he’s clean.”
He gathered up a pile of fresh clothes his partner had placed on the cart and handed them to me.
“Put this on.”
It was a black suit just like the ones Kirklin’s agents wore.
When I was dressed, the man removed an adhesive bandage from his pocket and applied it carefully to the wound on my nose. He straightened my tie and looked me up and down. He smiled approvingly, then punched me in the stomach and shoved me back down into my chair.
The two left and OWEN sprang up out of the darkness.
“This is perfect,” he said. “Kirklin’s going to interrogate you, which will finally give us some evidence to relay to the authorities. Then we escape, save Metropolis, and return to Suitland as heroes. And on top of all that, you’ll be walking out of here with a brand-new suit. Not bad.”
I grabbed the clip off the floor and slid it back onto my tie, where it became invisible against the black silk. I was trying to come around to OWEN’s optimistic point of view, when he suddenly vanished and the door opened again.
A man holding an assault rifle ordered me out i
nto the hallway. There was a whole tactical assault team standing behind him.
“This is so flattering,” OWEN said in my ear as I exited the room. “Look how many guns they brought.”
One of the men put a bag over my head and I was walked through more tunnels and up stairways. The air grew cooler and our footsteps began to echo until eventually I heard the sound of a grate being lifted and I felt someone pull me up into the open air. When the bag was removed, we were in a fenced-off lot filled with construction equipment. Among the dump trucks and backhoes were dozens of large items, covered in canvas drop cloths, that looked an awful lot like artillery guns. I stared up at them until one of the men jabbed me in the back with the muzzle of his gun and told me to start walking. Four more of Kirklin’s men were waiting for us outside the lot. They weren’t holding weapons, but it was easy enough to spot the bulges under their jackets. The men with rifles exchanged a few words with them in Esperanto as they handed me off, then fell back.
OWEN told me we were in the Lower South Side, though I could have guessed as much by all the newly renovated industrial lofts. After the country’s manufacturing decline, the once industry-heavy LSS had managed to thrive thanks to the Hispanic and African American families who settled there along with a healthy number of Korean and Middle Eastern immigrants, all of whom were eventually priced out as Metropolis transformed into a consumer city. The term “haute industrial” had become an enduring phrase in real estate development thanks to the popularity of the neighborhood. And since the rich were famously insular, the streets now looked more abandoned than they had after the factories first closed. With no eyes on the street, it was the perfect neighborhood for whatever Kirklin had in mind.
The night was quiet except for the distant sound of traffic and the occasional murmur of Esperanto among my captors. I was taken to a large brick building with an unmarked door illuminated by a floodlight.
Through the door was a carpeted hallway lit softly by brass sconces. Turning a corner, we entered a finely decorated room filled with Victorian furniture. A young man in a tuxedo and white gloves was standing behind a host’s station. My escorts were now hanging back, as if they didn’t want to interfere with the interview that was about to take place.
“Saluton, sinjoro. Are you the prisoner that is expected?”
I looked back at my escorts, who all nodded.
“Yes,” I said to the man.
From behind him I heard live music and people conversing.
“Excellent,” he said, taking a pen to the guest book resting open in front of him. “It looks like you will be joining your party in the Bernard booth.”
He bowed gravely in my direction before turning to open a heavy door. The music and conversation grew louder. Suddenly, I was looking out on a large restaurant filled with Kirklin’s agents. The man who I now recognized as a maître d’ extended his gloved hand out toward the dining room.
“This way please, sinjoro.”
“Do me a favor,” OWEN said in my ear. “Pretend to sneeze if this is already weirder than you thought it’d be.”
When I did, the maître d’ offered me some short blessing in Esperanto.
He led me to a deep, high-backed booth in a dimly lit corner. Hung on the wall over the table was a large oil painting of Anaximander Bernard. The sight of that mad old anarchist with his fez and characteristic scowl was so severe and unexpected that for a moment I almost didn’t notice Kirklin sitting in the booth. He was writing in a leather-bound notebook, his free hand idly turning a glass of what looked like whiskey on the tablecloth. His dark goatee had been replaced by a full beard with some gray in it that came to a Mephistophelean point. The intensity he had been known for in Suitland now had a quiet menace to it, like a storm between claps of thunder. The maître d’ cleared his throat, then apologized for interrupting as Kirklin looked up from his writing. Kirklin smiled and thanked him in Esperanto before inviting me to have a seat.
He continued to write as I did so, finishing a thought before capping his pen and closing the notebook. He gave me an appraising look and was about to say something just as our waiter dropped off our menus, going over them briefly in Esperanto and bowing as he left. Kirklin looked over his for a moment before finally addressing me.
“Sarah says you know the language,” he said. “But let me know if you need any help with the menu.”
After a cautionary silence OWEN risked whispering in my ear.
“See if they can do a stuffed pepper.”
“I should be fine,” I told Kirklin.
“Okay,” he said. “Have whatever you like.”
“I mean I’m not hungry.”
Kirklin looked up, concerned.
“It’s your last meal,” he said. “You should get something.”
He didn’t seem to be threatening me as much as simply acknowledging both that his killing me was a given and that he honestly felt it would be a shame for me to die on an empty stomach.
“Get the octopus salad,” said OWEN, who had apparently read the menu. “It sounds weird.”
I waited for him to tell me what else was available, but as Kirklin stared at me expectantly, OWEN began to chant, “Octo-pus! Octo-pus! Octo-pus!”
“I guess I’ll take the octopus,” I said.
Kirklin smiled and waved the waiter over. He ordered for me in Esperanto, then pointed to something on the drink menu, indicating that we were both to have one.
“Jes, kolego,” the waiter said, bowing again.
He watched the waiter depart and said, as if he were remarking on the weather, “He’s one of my best agents.”
“Is that why you have him waiting tables?”
“He’s only here two nights a week. This club is a place where we all pitch in. When I have time, I run the kitchen. Sarah even comes in once a month to play her trumpet with Larry and the boys.”
He gestured toward the head of the room, where a jazz combo was currently occupied with a light, splashy riff on “Yankee Doodle.” Kirklin finished his drink, tilting his head back and closing his good eye as he savored it. Just then the waiter set down two tumblers in front of us.
“We’re expecting a long transition period,” he said, handing the waiter his empty glass. “We don’t know when any of us will be able to enjoy this sort of civilization again.”
He picked up the fresh glass in front of him and held it out to me.
“Cheers, Henry,” he said.
I reluctantly clinked my glass against his.
“You know who I am?”
“There was a wallet in your suit. Though I probably would have recognized you from the picture in your personnel file after all those requests to work in Metropolis. A few of your proposals weren’t bad. But when I checked in with some of my eyes and ears in Suitland they advised against bringing you in. You should know that you have a reputation as the biggest milquetoast bean sorter in the history of the United States Municipal Survey. And if you consider the nature of the organization, that’s saying something.”
“I hope you’re listening to this,” OWEN said through his laughter. “This is valuable feedback.”
He would have laughed harder if he had known Kirklin’s words had left me feeling oddly flattered.
“It was never personal,” Kirklin said. “I’m sure now you can probably understand why I didn’t think you’d be a good fit. The problems facing this nation’s cities can’t be solved with infrastructure reports and development projects. They need something more radical.”
“Like being blown up?”
“My point exactly,” he said. “You wouldn’t recognize progress if you looked it in the face. You risked your life to save a museum, but for years you’ve worked for an agency that throughout its history has systematically destroyed entire communities. Even these days ‘urban renewal’ is USMS code for helping cities carry out glo
rified landgrabs. Don’t get me wrong, you Suitland people are smart and hardworking and I’m sure you’re all trying to solve problems the only way you know how. But you never stop to ask why the city council you’re collaborating with wants the highway to run through a particular part of town. You don’t ask why they’d rather put funds toward parking garages than better bus service. Every four years, Garrett allocated $2.5 million of the agency’s budget to help preserve the exterior of the Metropolis Museum of History, but when I asked for a quarter of that to help bolster the city’s system of homeless shelters, he had the gall to tell me that the homelessness problem wasn’t in my remit. The USMS has no interest in making cities more livable for its most desperate citizens, but it will spend a small fortune to polish the exterior of a tourist trap.”
Kirklin maintained his outward calm, but his speech betrayed the same pontificating bully he was known to be back in Suitland. I sipped my drink, which turned out to be a strong, oaky bourbon, and decided to needle him.
“Well, if it’s any consolation,” I said, “before your toothless goons shot it up, the exterior of the MetMoH looked great.”
Kirklin smiled, apparently unbothered by my tone.
“Tell me something, Henry. What was the last project you proposed to Garrett that he rejected?”
Kirklin was so sure that I was as good as dead that our conversation had a certain freedom to it. I didn’t see any harm in telling the truth.
“I wrote a plan to help promote commercial diversity in Cleveland.”
Kirklin nodded.
“Cleveland, Ohio,” he said. “Median household income, $26,000.”
“He said the mayor’s office wouldn’t go for it.”
“Garrett usually has you guys give him proposals in batches. Did he approve any of the others?”