by Toby Ball
Puskis, as he always did on his rare trips to Headquarters, received a ride back to the Vaults in a police cruiser. Outside the rear window a dismal rain lent a sheen to the road and sidewalks. People hurried, heads down under umbrellas.
“Nasty weather we’ve been having,” said the officer driving. Puskis had not bothered to listen when the man first introduced himself and did not listen now.
“Doesn’t matter down in the Vaults, I guess,” the officer offered. Again, Puskis did not reply. The officer, who had heard all the rumors, sighed and pursued it no further.
In the back, Puskis fingered the hat that rested in his lap. He had not bothered to wipe the raindrops from his spectacles. He thought about being away from the Vaults for an entire week. Eighteen years, the Chief had said, since his last day off. That seemed about right, though he could clearly remember that last aberration in the regular rhythm of his life. He had begun doing crossword puzzles, quickly realizing that he could identify ten key words, then fill in the rest of the puzzle without using the clues. It was just a matter of knowing the letter combinations. When this ceased to interest him, he had begun simply filling his own words into the puzzles, seeing if he could fill every square without revising. He had mastered this as well, then started putting letters at random spots in the crossword and filling in words. That had been Monday and Tuesday. Wednesday he had reported back to the Vaults and had reported every day since, including weekends.
The squad car pulled to the curb in front of City Hall. The Vaults were in the hall’s subbasement. Puskis put on his hat and got out of the car without a word to the driver. He walked up the broad granite steps, the rain soaking his coat and pants. Inside he touched the brim of his hat to acknowledge the four guards posted at the front doors and walked to the bank of elevators. One of the elevator operators, a squirrel of a man named Dawlish, called out to Puskis, who passed through the opened gate and into the velvet-lined elevator.
“To the Vaults, then, sir?” Dawlish asked, as always.
“Mmm,” Puskis said. As the elevator descended, he removed and wiped his spectacles.
“Here we are, then,” Dawlish said, opening first the elevator door and then the brass gate.
“Yes. Yes, indeed.” Puskis stepped out of the elevator, then hesitated.
“Anything I can do for you, Mr. Puskis?” Dawlish’s English accent could still be picked up in certain words, such as anything.
“Mmm. Actually, yes. Yes, there is something you could do for me. I’m, well, I’m going to be away for a week or so.”
Dawlish’s eyebrows rose. “Never known you to miss a day, sir.”
“Indeed. Indeed, that is quite true. But the fact is, well, the fact is that I am not going to be here for a week, and I was hoping . . .” Puskis hesitated.
“You were hoping, Mr. Puskis?”
“Yes, I was hoping that maybe you could keep track of if anyone goes down to the Vaults while I’m gone. I mean except for the courier from Headquarters, of course. And, I suppose, the usual cleaners.”
“I would be pleased to do that for you, Mr. Puskis. I will keep a list, sir. Though, as you know, sir, there’s no one goes down there except you and that courier you just mentioned. And, of course, the cleaners.”
“Are you sure? Are you absolutely certain no one else ever goes down?”
Dawlish, sensing Puskis’s urgency, narrowed his eyes in thought. “Mr. Puskis,” he finally said, “I can not think of a one.”
CHAPTER TWO
Ethan Poole stood at the window of the Fox and Thistle Pub, nursing a scotch on the rocks. He watched the building across the street. The mark generally left at noon for his midday meal. Poole had been there nearly an hour. The mark must be taking a late lunch. A hood whom Poole didn’t know came up to him.
“You Ethan Poole?”
Poole nodded and took a sip of his drink, mostly ice now.
“Jimmy McIntyre, pleased to meet you.” The guy put out his hand. He was little, but Poole could tell that he was tough. Scar tissue above his eyebrows and a bent nose. He was a gangster. Poole shook the offered hand, engulfing it with his own.
“I want to thank you. You made me a mint when you were at State.”
It was this again. His notoriety in some circles. Throwing games on the gridiron and making the mobsters some scratch. All for walking-around money. Every reminder of it was like an abscessed tooth.
McIntyre was still talking in that weird, high-pitched voice some tough guys had. “You had moxie, chum. All those other fellas, they did what they were asked to do, but you had goddamn moxie.”
Poole smiled out of politeness. He hadn’t enjoyed throwing games. He’d even resisted the idea at first. But with half a dozen others already on the take, why shouldn’t the star running back cash in on a lost cause? It made sense at the time.
McIntyre droned on about games that Poole had tried to forget. Finally, Poole saw the mark emerge through the glass double doors. He was talking to another man, who, at that distance and through the rain-streaked window, was nearly his double—tall, fat, slightly hunched with age. They both wore dark suits. The mark made a gesture with his hands, then put on his hat and trotted over to a waiting cab. The other man put on his own hat, opened an umbrella, and walked down the block. Poole blurted a thanks to McIntyre, handing him his nearly empty glass, then ran to his car, parked at the curb.
Poole had the Ford running as the cab pulled away. Traffic was sparse. He followed the cab across town, through block after block of brick row houses in Capitol Heights, then the claustrophobic streets of Chinatown—where he momentarily lost them behind an electric trolley, and finally down to the Hollows. As always, the Hollows made Poole uneasy. Blocks of warehouses were occasionally interrupted by a bleak brick-and-cement apartment building, inevitably with broken windows and bars on doors. Most eerily, and Poole found this to be true even when the weather was more agreeable, no life was to be seen. No one on the sidewalks. No grass lawns. No trees planted in boxes on the sidewalk. Just asphalt, brick, and cement.
Few cars were on the streets, which made tailing the cab more difficult. Poole hung a few blocks back and kept his fingers crossed that the hack would not lose him with a quick succession of turns. He didn’t. Eventually, the cab stopped at a nondescript, eight-story apartment building. The mark got out of the cab and paid his fare, not waiting for change. The cab drove off. The mark walked briskly toward the building, shoulders hunched against the drizzle. Poole parked his car a block away, waited until the mark had disappeared inside, then jogged—the collar of his trench coat pulled high around his neck, his hat pulled low—to the building’s entrance.
The glass in the front door was a web of cracks from where someone must have smashed it with a brick or a rock. Food scraps, old newspapers, and broken glass were strewn across the lobby’s threadbare brown rug. Cockroaches scuttled along the walls. The two elevators wore OUT OF ORDER signs pasted on their doors. The paint was old and cracked. Poole located the door marked STAIRS and headed up.
A rhythmic thumping came from above. Poole took the stairs by twos. On the landing for the third floor he found a kid, maybe early teens, sitting with his back to a wall, tossing a rubber ball at the opposite wall and catching it on the rebound.
“Fat gink come up these stairs?”
The kid gave Poole an assessing look and nodded. Poole was big—six foot five inches, a few pounds over 220—but the kid did not seem intimidated.
“Know where he went?”
The kid shrugged and returned to his game with the ball. Poole reached into his inside jacket pocket and took a dollar bill from his wallet. He folded it lengthwise and tossed it into the kid’s lap.
“Miss Baker’s.” Poole got a look at the kid’s mouthful of rotten teeth.
“Number?”
The kid hesitated.
“You’re not getting any more money.” Poole moved slightly closer to him, casting his shadow on the kid’s body.
�
�Six oh two.”
Poole nodded and continued up the stairs.
“Hey,” the kid called after him, “what you got in that bag?”
Poole put his bag down outside apartment 602. He fished out a bandana, which he tied around his nose and mouth. He pulled out the camera and attached a large flash. Then he extracted a flat strip of tin half the width of a dollar bill that he slid around in the crack of the door until he found the lock. He jiggled the tin with a practiced hand and the door opened. Silently he bent down and brought his bag across the threshold, then took the camera and closed the door behind him.
He stood in the hallway, listening to the muffled voices until the talking ceased. He listened now to groans and sighs and heavy breathing. Then came the squeaking of the bedsprings, and he moved quickly and quietly through the apartment to the bedroom. He stepped through the open doorway and had taken the first shot before they knew he was there. The woman—Miss Baker, presumably—made a funny kind of braying noise and felt around for sheets that were inconveniently wadded up at the foot of the bed, while the mark, absurdly, covered his genitals with his hands and stared at Poole. Poole efficiently wound the film and took another shot. He wound again and got another shot before the woman finally found the sheets and crawled beneath them. He took a last shot of the mark.
“You’ll hear from me,” he said in his deepest voice, then left the room, picking up his bag midstride, and exited the apartment.
“He doesn’t have much to hide, that one,” Carla Hallestrom said, looking at the prints that Poole had just brought from the darkroom.
“It disappeared pretty quick.”
Carla was wearing one of Poole’s undershirts, and it hung to her knees. She was a slender woman, with walnut skin, courtesy of her Greek mother, and blue eyes from her Swedish father. Striking rather than beautiful, she wore her raven hair shorter than was the fashion. This allowed her to wear wigs when she wished to avoid notice.
“His life is beginning to get complicated,” she said, looking at the man’s face, frozen in panic. The man, Roderigo Bernal, owned a company called Capitol Industries and was, if not the richest man in the City, then one of them.
“And you’re about to make it worse,” Poole said, watching her as she framed the woman’s face with her fingers.
“Do you know who she is?”
Poole shook his head. “Her last name is Baker. That’s about it. Does it matter?”
“No. I just hope that he doesn’t think she was involved. That she helped set him up.”
Poole shrugged. “I’ll mention that to him when we talk.”
“Which is when?”
“When’s the strike?”
“Tomorrow. You know that.”
“Tomorrow night, then.”
Carla smiled.
CHAPTER THREE
Puskis had never been to the Hollows. He had never, until now, even considered going. He watched without much interest as the lifeless neighborhood drifted past the back window of his taxi.
The cabbie brought the taxi to a stop at a block of row houses. No lights were on. No one sat on a stoop, though it was the first day that it hadn’t rained in nearly a week.
Puskis handed the driver a five-dollar bill. “Could you wait a couple of minutes?”
His eyes on the bill, the cabbie nodded, and Puskis unfolded out of the backseat. He approached the steps leading up to number 4731 E. Van Buren Street. Hearing a noise behind him, he turned to see the taxi pull away from the curb and head down the street. This brought disappointment rather than irritation, and Puskis labored up the twelve steps with his shoulders stooped.
To the right of the door were three buttons, labeled 1, 2, and 3. The address in the files had no apartment number, and Puskis wondered if the house might not have been turned into apartments since the file’s creation. He pushed the button labeled 1, on the theory that if DeGraffenreid had split the house into apartments, he would probably have made his own apartment number one. Puskis heard the bell ring faintly from inside. He waited a minute, then pushed the button a second time, again without response. He progressed to number two. This time Puskis heard a window open above him. He looked up to see a woman with an enormous head looking down at him.
“My name is Puskis,” he called up to her. “I’m looking for Reif DeGraffenreid.”
“You’re looking for Mr. DeGraffenreid?” Her voice was somehow both deep and shrill.
“That’s correct. Reif DeGraffenreid.”
“Well, you’re about seven years too late.”
“What’s that?”
“You’re too late,” she repeated, louder. “He left about seven years ago. Haven’t seen him since.”
“I was wondering if, perhaps, I could speak to you for a minute.”
There was silence for a moment and Puskis’s neck was beginning to get sore from looking up.
“What did you say your name was again?”
“Puskis. Arthur Puskis. Listen. I won’t take more than ten minutes of your time.”
“Okay. You look harmless enough.” Her head disappeared from the window, and Puskis watched the front door expectantly, waiting for the woman to open it. Instead, he heard her voice from above him.
“Catch.” She dropped a key from the window. Puskis was not able to react in time, and it fell to the stoop by his feet. He bent and picked it up.
“It’s for the front door,” she called down unnecessarily. Puskis tried the key, found it was upside-down, then managed to get it to work. He climbed the stairs, his footsteps muted by a drab, worn carpet. The door at the second-floor landing was ajar. Puskis stepped up to the threshold.
“Madam?”
“In here.”
He walked through a filthy kitchen that smelled of rotting vegetables, then a dimly lit hall and into the dusk of a sitting room. The curtains were pulled shut, and only a golden light emanated from lamps whose bulbs were covered by heavy amber shades. Puskis found it distressingly hot.
“So you’re looking for Mr. DeGraffenreid.” The woman was easily the most obese human being Puskis had ever encountered, the particulars of her body obscured by a huge, formless garment that was nonetheless pushed to its limits by her startling girth. Her head was big and round with hair pulled back away from her face. She did not so much sit as lean backward in her chair.
“Yes. Yes, I am. I was hoping that maybe you might be able to give me some information that would aid me in, well, locating his current whereabouts.”
The woman looked at him as though he were an amusing insect. “His current whereabouts,” she mused.
“Mmmh, yes.” The air was stagnant. Puskis could see dust motes floating in the amber light.
“I can’t tell you too much about that I’m afraid. Like I said, haven’t seen hide nor hair of him for—what?—seven years.”
“Oh. Oh, that’s unfortunate. Hmmm, yes.” This was torture for Puskis, and his desperation to leave this immense woman’s apartment was preventing him from thinking clearly. “Well, maybe you could, in another tack, you could tell me what Mr. DeGraffenreid did for a business.”
The woman gave a quick sputtering sound that sent a wave of flesh down her chin and below the folds of her dress. “Mr. Puskis, in the Hollows you don’t ask people about their business, and if you find out by accident, you sure as hell don’t go talking about it to strangers.”
Puskis coughed once, then found himself consumed by a coughing fit. The woman watched inscrutably as he fought to recover. “How about acquaintances?” he said finally. “People who came by?”
She frowned and turned her head slightly away from him. He understood.
“Well, I thank you for your time, madam. I truly do.” He turned to go, flustered but also relieved to be leaving the apartment. The heat was beginning to make him light-headed. He noticed for the first time—or had it just now formed?—a sheen of perspiration across the woman’s forehead and wondered if her apparent placidity masked an effort made to control gr
eat pain. This thought changed her greatly in his mind; not eliciting sympathy, exactly, but a mild relief, at least, of his unease. He remembered the last thing he needed to ask.
“I was wondering, could you take a look at two photographs I have with me?”
She didn’t answer, but inclined her chin, which Puskis took as an assent. He produced photos from the two DeGraffenreid files. First he showed her the one from the earlier file.
“That’s Mr. DeGraffenreid,” she said immediately.
“Are you sure?”
She gave him a stare, so he moved on to the next photo—the one with the unnatural look.
“Never seen him before.”
“Could it be someone who visited DeGraffenreid?” Puskis tried. “An associate or an acquaintance?”
“Could be, but like I said, never seen him.”
Puskis had to walk eight blocks before a cab passed by. The effort was exhausting. He sat in the backseat of the cab with his eyes closed, concentrating. A critical mass of information was needed to perceive order. He had not yet acquired that critical mass. But now, at least, he had a face to place with the name Reif DeGraffenreid. Who was the man in the other photograph who so unsettled Puskis? The name Dersch, referred to in the margin notes in the two files, was almost certainly a detective who had retired several years previously. A margin note strongly suggested that Dersch had not actually been involved in the case, but simply offered that piece of information to one of the transcribers, who had dutifully recorded it. But who was Feral Basu? And why was his name worthy of comment when his role in the affair was peripheral at best?
Puskis knew that attempting to force order on random pieces of information would be fruitless. The pattern would come to him only when the necessary information had been gathered. Until then he was left with questions.
Two blocks from his apartment building in the wealthy Capitol district, Puskis’s cab encountered a police roadblock.
“Christ,” the cabbie said through locked teeth. He took a left to circumvent the cordoned-off area and attempted to circle around to Puskis’s block. A right turn, however, brought them to another police cordon.