Backward-Facing Man

by Don Silver

  As unsettled as he was by the day’s arrival, he was wholly unprepared for what he saw. The rain had stopped, at least temporarily, though the sky was opaque. Instead of a parking lot full of beat-up old cars and a cluster of workers surrounding the breakfast truck, smoking and talking to one another, it was empty and quiet. There was no life, no sign that the shop was open, no indication even that a business had ever operated there. Chuck raced down the steps and faced the loading dock, cupping his hand around his eyes and peering in the tiny windows. It was pitch black inside.

  As he strained to see, a man called to him from behind. “Charles Puckman Jr.?” he said stiffly. Chuck turned and squinted. A tall man with a ruddy complexion hauling a large black case reached into his suit jacket and shook open a single sheet of paper, holding it chest high for Chuck to read. “I’m Agent Keaton with the Environmental Protection Agency, Region Three, Criminal Investigation Division. This is a search warrant for the factory and offices of Puckman Security.” As he spoke, he waved to the first of three vans that were idling in front of the gate. “By order of the U.S. Attorney’s Office, these offices and its contents belong to us. Until our investigation is complete, remove nothing. No files, computer or paper, no raw materials, no work in process, no computers, faxes, office objects, equipment, tools, loose pieces of paper, written notations of any kind. Do you understand?”

  A half dozen men in what looked like moon suits emerged from the vans and began unloading equipment—coolers, toolboxes, and devices that looked like fishing spears, robotic arms for lifting things. “Unit One,” Keaton said, making a bullhorn with his hands. “Take the rear; Unit Two, the southern side; Unit Three, the tanks, including groundwater; Unit Four, soil; Unit Five, office and records. Mr. Puckman,” he said, still yelling, “I’d appreciate it if you’d accompany me.” He lowered his voice. “We’ve got a lot of work to do, and I could use your help.” Keaton’s teams dispersed to the different sections of the plant. As instructed, three men in suits went to the back of the factory and into the yard. Others with cameras, sketch pads, and tool kits headed toward the paint-spray booth, taking photographs from different angles, studying the flow of air to and from it, and scraping paint samples from the sides and the floor. Two of the men took yellow tape and cordoned off an area so that another, more heavily outfitted, could climb inside the dip tank—the one that Gutierrez went down in—depositing samples into a large yellow container, which he carried outside. For the better part of an hour, there were flashes of light every few seconds as the men took pictures of every conceivable object from every conceivable angle, particularly the drainage areas under the tanks.

  Inside the office, Keaton and two assistants held up items for Chuck to identify while an assistant scribbled answers on yellow Post-its until every filing cabinet, drawer, computer, and loose piece of paperwork was labeled. By noon, they’d loaded everything in the office, including computers, into large anvil cases, which they wheeled across the floor, through the overhead doors, and outside into one of the vans. They took no more than ten minutes—the HAZMAT teams and photographers—to eat lunches from little coolers they’d brought, leaving the guy in the lunch truck shaking his head, wondering what he was going to do with the sandwiches he and his wife had made the night before.

  While they ate, Chuck went upstairs and left a message for his insurance broker asking about his business interruption policy. He called the hospital to check on Gutierrez, who was unchanged, and then left a voice mail for Fat Eddie Palmieri, Charlie Puckman’s old friend and the family lawyer. After a few minutes pacing his apartment, he took ibuprofen and some more antianxiety medication and went back downstairs.

  There wasn’t much for Chuck to do for the rest of the afternoon. Periodically, he walked outside or paced the shop floor, but wherever he went, the strange swaddled figures poked their heads up or raised their respirators and rattled off measurements or regulation numbers, requests for authorization to use special equipment, and estimates of the time required to complete what they called subtasks. Frequently, Keaton would walk by, nodding or shaking his head. By three P.M., the teams had dusted, pried open, sampled, photographed, and diagrammed every piece of equipment as well as disassembled the tank-drainage system, piece by piece. The office was eerily neat—empty of accounting records, purchase orders, invoices, shop drawings, and supplies. By four o’clock, the men in the moon suits had siphoned chemical samples from drums, paint from cans, soil from the yard, concrete from under the dip tanks, and handwriting samples from the brothers’ desk blotters. Before leaving, Keaton presented Chuck with a list of what his men had taken.

  “When do I get my business back?” Chuck asked.

  “It depends,” Keaton said casually. “We intend to talk to some of your workers.” They stood in the parking lot. The wind had picked up, and Keaton held a thick manila folder against his chest. “It would be a bad idea for you to do or say anything that would impede our investigation.” Keaton opened the folder and thumbed through it. “You have a brother, Arthur, don’t you?” The sun was setting over the portion of the factory where Chuck lived. Chuck squinted. The men in the white suits had loaded their trucks and were milling around. Ghostbusters, he thought. A white Ford pulled up alongside the gate. “We’re gonna want to talk to him.”

  Chuck shrugged. “Suit yourselves,” he said, and then smiled. Funny thing to tell a HAZMAT guy.

  “There may be an opportunity for you to cooperate with our investigation,” Keaton said, staring at an area just above Chuck’s head. “I have two suggestions for you. First, if and when that opportunity arises, take advantage of it.” He paused, putting the folder in his briefcase. Chuck had his hands in his pockets and was shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “In the meantime, get yourself a good lawyer.” As he spoke, a burly guy in a leather coat and shiny black shoes got out of the sedan and headed across the yard.

  “Friend of yours?” Chuck asked.

  “He’ll be watching the building tonight,” Keaton said matter-of-factly. “Nobody goes in—nobody comes out.” He looked Chuck up and down. “It’s against the law to remove or tamper with anything inside. Am I making myself clear?” The guard appeared to be in his early sixties, built like a fireplug, with a bulbous nose and a handlebar mustache. He set a small lunchbox next to a little stool he’d brought and sat down. Keaton got into one of the white vans, which pulled out of the parking lot and crept down the street. Several of the neighbors watched the procession from their porches.

  For Chuck, as far back as he could remember, dusk was an inhospitable time of day. He would sit in his bedroom by a window as the sun set, familiar objects fading, their lines losing definition, becoming grainy until they disappeared. It was suddenly impossible for him to stand where he stood or to go upstairs. Ignoring his neighbors, Chuck walked across the yard, turned right outside the gate, and started walking south. As he walked, he felt the gravity of his situation, like sand in his pockets.

  It took him a little over an hour to get downtown to the mid-rise at Thirteenth and Juniper. In the vestibule, he pressed a column of buttons until someone buzzed him in, and then he made his way to the cluttered waiting room that Eddie Palmieri shared with two other retired lawyers. It was close to six, which meant Fat Eddie might already be at the Union League, but Chuck rapped on the door anyway. From inside he heard the old man. “Yeah?” Eddie wheezed. Chuck opened the door.

  The office looked as though its owner had stopped working and started an elaborate project stacking files until they were perilously close to spilling over. “You look like shit, you know that?” Fat Eddie said. “You want a drink?”

  Chuck nodded.

  “So you’ve got the EPA looking up your ass,” Eddie said, referring to the phone message Chuck had left earlier. Fat Eddie had only recently retired his rust-colored toupee, long after the hair on the sides of his head went gray; his neck looked a lot thicker than it needed to be to support his head. Fat Eddie Palmieri had never be
en very successful practicing law. Now, in retirement, he lived off his wife’s teaching pension. He came to work only to get away from his own stink.

  “Maybe this is just a routine investigation…” Chuck said, his voice cracking. For some reason, he felt even worse in front of Eddie than he had looking at the newspaper headlines yesterday. He reached inside his pocket for the vial.

  “If this kid dies, Chuckie,” Eddie said, blowing air out, “they’re gonna be after you for workplace safety, environmental shit, who knows what else? What’s Arthur doing? He must be shitting himself.”

  “He didn’t come in today.”

  Fat Eddie pushed his chair back so he could open a drawer, a set of motions that left him out of breath. “I’d handle it myself for you, of course, but I don’t do this kind of work anymore. Too complicated.” He pulled out a beat-up black book with business cards sticking out of it. “I don’t have the staff, the computers, the support, know what I mean? You’re gonna need a lawyer who knows how these pricks work….”

  “There’s another problem, Eddie,” Chuck said.

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m broke.”

  “Take a draw. What’s the big deal?”

  “There’s nothing to draw from.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “We didn’t ship enough this week. We barely made payroll.”

  Eddie put a cigar stub in his mouth and struck a match. He squinted at his old friend’s son and remembered how he and Charlie Puckman had worked a Ponzi scheme on members of the Philadelphia Athletic Club back in the fifties. How Charlie had taken the rap so Eddie could still practice law.

  “Listen to me, you dumb fuck,” he said, exhaling. “Your father may be pissing in a diaper, but he’s got a chit from me, you understand?” Fat Eddie set the cigar in an ashtray and stood up. He put his hands on his hips and turned his body toward several quick-fold cardboard file boxes, one stacked on top of the other. “Besides, he has a stash—a safe loaded with cash, securities, bonds, maybe some gold.” Leaning over, he read the labels on the sides of the boxes. “Gimme that one,” he said, pointing to one in the corner.

  Chuck lifted one of the boxes and set it on a radiator next to the window and then handed Eddie a stack of papers that he sorted, one by one, letting several fall to the floor, until he found what he was looking for. “We’ll get you one of them hot shit lawyers who’s connected.” Fat Eddie took a separate sheet of paper out of his desk drawer and scribbled a series of numbers. “There’s a safe in your dad’s offfice beside the refrigerator. Put whatever’s in there in a briefcase and meet me tomorrow night at the Union League.”

  Flush with hope, Chuck treated himself to a taxi. He entered the fire escape from the side and climbed the steps quietly, peering from the missing brick at the guard, who hadn’t moved. In the kitchen, he took a bottle of vodka from the freezer. The key to functioning under this kind of pressure was substance management. With the radio playing, he looked in the kitchen drawer for his master keys. Soon, everything would be fine. His faith in his father was restored. He was sorry for every ugly thing he’d wished, every mean thing he’d ever said. It was a damn shame about Gutierrez, but with the money, he would hire Artie and himself a fancy lawyer with connections. They’d get on with their lives. He’d buy inventory and start selling again with renewed vigor, hit the road again, even give Rahim a pool next Christmas from which to dole out bonuses. Who knows—maybe he’d upgrade his father to a suite at the nursing home. When Chuck could barely feel his fingertips, he got a flashlight out of the hall closet and took the elevator downstairs.

  It had been more than two decades since anyone had used the inside entrance to the shop. Years ago, when Chuck was a kid, Charlie Puckman used to let himself into the factory this way in the dead of winter. A blast of cold air gripped him. Chuck kept the flashlight off. A yellowish haze—streetlights—leaked through the windows above the dip tanks. When Chuck could see the outline of rivet guns and tack-welding machines, he began making his way, one step at a time, toward the center of the factory.

  In the early sixties, Charlie Puckman had built the little office on weekends out of mismatched wood paneling nailed to angle iron stolen from construction sites. Above the frosted glass door was a small bracket with a wrought-iron man fishing, and at the end of the pole was a steelhead twisting in the air. The roof wasn’t a roof at all, but ceiling tiles laid between more angle iron welded together. Chuck let himself in and turned the flashlight on, keeping it pointed at the ground. Artie’s desk, which was usually stacked with paper, Post-it notes, paper clips, pens, pencils, and extra supplies, was almost clear. He picked up a piece of paper. An old to-do list Artie had made. Except for their handwriting, beaten into them by nuns, the two of them were so different it was hard to believe they were brothers. Chuck walked to his father’s desk and fingered the objects on the blotter—letter opener, ashtray, and paperweights Charlie had collected. Chuck looked up at a sailfish his father had mounted, taken as payment from a customer. He hadn’t even caught the thing himself.

  The safe Fat Eddie told him about was well hidden behind what looked like a circuit-breaker panel. Aiming the flashlight down, Chuck pulled out the card with the combination. Maybe his relationship with the old man could be salvaged. Who cared why his father hadn’t told him about it before? The family business was a crypt, full of necessary secrets. Chuck sat on the speckled linoleum floor and ran his hand along the wall, the smell of stale coffee and cleanser around him. It took him a few seconds to locate the tiny notch in the panel, which he pressed and turned with his fingernail, sliding the panel up. Holding the flashlight under his chin, he spun the tumbler. The safe itself was vintage, a relic of ancient industrial Philadelphia. At first, it didn’t open. He tried the sequence a second time. Again, nothing. His heart pounded in his chest. His palms and neck tingled with perspiration.

  It opened on the third try. Directing his flashlight into the small rectangular opening, Chuck felt a glow—the nearness to his needs being met—similar to what he felt moments before orgasm, or smelling an exquisite meal as it was about to be served. His movements slowed. Chuck reached in. Finally, he would see a payday from this wretched business. He leaned down to examine his cache.

  Panic began in his sternum and spread to the inside edges of his skin, the back of his neck, and his temples, as though his blood pressure was rising. Another wave of nausea overcame him as if he had actually fallen from the balcony in his dream. Kneeling forward, he vomited an acidic mix of vodka and mucus. He held himself in that position for what seemed like a long time, his right hand dangling over the small sink, his face contorted. Steadying himself, he looked down in horror, clawing the emptiness.

  Saturday, March 14, 2000

  By the late nineties, the FBI had picked up virtually every fugitive from the sixties with the exception of the Volcano Bomber. It was the case that Special Agent John Russell cut his teeth on and one of the last vestiges of Weatherfug—a thirty-year-plus FBI Special that for all intents and purposes had drawn to a close—that dogged him for his entire career. “This much we do know,” the older agent said, angling a toothpick between his incisors. “The whole frickin’ thing was a fluke.” It was the witching hour inside the Stinger Lounge, just after four A.M., when the shift changed and the clean-up crew, such as it was, began its halfhearted workout, mopping down and scraping the grime and grizzle of Friday night off the brown-stained floors. The two agents sat down just as the last suburbanites, pleased to have dipped their sticks into real life, even if only for one night, even if only through a prescription drug and alcohol haze, turned their BMWs with the online rescue systems toward babysitters asleep in sprawling Tudors with rhododendron hedges and meticulous lawns. A thin man whistling a gospel tune swept the stinking shrimp husks into piles outside the kitchen. A depressing shade of gray pressed up against the little rectangular windows where streetlights illuminated leftover Lotto cards and Burger King bags
and Septa transfers that blew across Broad Street. As they made their way toward the back of the bar, John Russell III remembered what his ASAC had told him about the younger man.

  Eric Dodson was a plebe, one of a half dozen new agents the Bureau had hired in an attempt to upgrade their computer capabilities. He was young, sturdy, and handsome, with fullback features and a neck the size of an ordinary man’s thigh. He wore Clark Kent glasses, which only intensified his good looks by conveying a technical proficiency that was well beyond most people’s. But Eric Dodson was more than a computer jock. He was a dot-commer with no college degree and lots of money. And though he’d spent less than a year at the Bureau, he was the one who’d been assigned the case John Russell had wrestled for over thirty years.

  The older agent led them to a booth in the back—past a woman in her late fifties wearing a slinky black dress and a huge necklace that dripped into her cleavage. She was smoking a thin brown cigarette and talking to a bartender drying shot glasses. If Dodson was uncomfortable here, in the heart of the ghetto, that’d be just fine with Russell; the veteran was pleased whenever young agents called for his advice. Nobody was going to solve this case without help from him. John Russell called for a couple of bourbon and waters.