The Vaults

by Toby Ball

  Whiskers stopped and glared at Frings. “Say again, Brother Otto?”

  “He told me something. Something you want to hear.”

  Whiskers’ lip curled up in a sneer. He nodded and walked back to Frings, staring hard. He brought the shotgun barrel up to Frings’s face and began to trace his lips with its cold end.

  “What’d you tell Brother Otto, friend?”

  The barrel found the stitches on Frings’s mouth, and Whiskers applied pressure until Frings could feel the mineral taste of blood in his mouth. Whiskers pulled the barrel away.

  Frings wanted to spit, but didn’t dare. “The families that are supposed to be getting your money; they aren’t getting it. It’s getting skimmed. Almost all.”

  Whiskers pulled his head back, surprised. “You being straight?”

  “You’ve been making money for the mayor. Maybe his friends, too.”

  Whiskers closed his eyes, his mind elsewhere. Though the rain continued to fall, the sun had emerged high and to the east, and the drops that clung to the underside of the leaves looked to Frings like little hanging diamonds.

  Whiskers reached into his coat pocket and came out with a tin flask. He unscrewed the top and took a long pull, put the flask back, and walked over to the three men.

  “You heard that, I expect,” he said with chilling calm. “Fucking Red Henry, that fucking goatfucker.” He laughed and shook his head. Frings felt the fear ratchet up, his chest constricting.

  Whiskers spoke louder now. “You know, I’m done with those little boys and their firecrackers. That was for fun. That . . . was for fucking fun. This is different. That fucking . . . You know, I am in the mood to do some killing. I think that’s about right.” He looked to the three men. “Does that sound right to you?”

  They stared mutely back at him.

  Whiskers took three quick steps and had Frings’s jaw tight in the grip of his left hand.

  Frings winced. “Shit.”

  Whiskers said, “Johnny, bring me your fucking blade.”

  “Wait,” Frings gasped.

  Whiskers dropped his shotgun and held his right hand out, waiting for the knife.

  “I can help you,” Frings said.

  An ugly smile crept over Whiskers’ face. “They all say that. Ain’t never true.” He had the knife in his hand now.

  “You’re going to kill Henry.”

  “I expect so.”

  “You need my help.”

  Whiskers snorted a quick laugh. “I need your help? How you figure that?” He let go of Frings’s jaw, but didn’t give him any space. “Go ahead, Brother Frings, save your life.”

  Frings took a breath. “You’re going to need to get out of the City. You know, after you kill him.” Frings struggled for a rationale, talking without a plan. “I can help you. You’ll need confusion. You’ll need the cops distracted.” Frings paused.

  “That’s all? You think that’s going to save you?”

  “I write the story about the fields. About you and the fields. They’ll come out here looking for you. Either here or in the City. It’s a distraction, you see? That’s how you walk away. Kill Henry and leave. Go anywhere but here. The City is going to be in turmoil. You can get away.”

  Whiskers frowned thoughtfully, nodding. He turned from Frings and walked to the three men.

  “You heard the reporter man. What do you think?”

  None of them spoke, scared to give the wrong answer.

  Whiskers turned back to Frings. “Okay. You’ll live today. You go back to your newspaper and you write your story. You write it real quick, like.”

  Frings nodded.

  Whiskers came up close again. “And let me tell you something, brother. You get back to the City, don’t be thinking that maybe you can go back on your word to Brother Whiskers. Don’t you do it. ’Cause I got something to tell you. Something might give you pause. I know you got that little singer woman. That story don’t run, I’m going to take a trip into town and find her, hear? She most likely provide some real entertainment for me. Real entertainment. That sound about right to you?”

  Frings stared back at him.

  Whiskers picked up his shotgun and shook his head. “I still got that killing feeling. Still do.”

  The three men seemed to shrink at these words.

  Whiskers walked over to a tree, holding his shotgun by the barrel, then assaulted the trunk with the stock, swinging again and again with savage force into the tree until the stock broke off and he was left holding the barrel. He turned to Frings, mouth open, chest heaving, eyes wide, steam rising from his head into the rain. He threw the shotgun barrel into the low bushes.

  Whiskers walked over to Frings and stuck his index finger hard under Frings’s chin. He got his face so close that their noses nearly touched. He whispered, “You write that story, or I swear to God that I will find your girl and she will never be the same.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX

  The Vaults were different now, no longer Puskis’s sanctuary, but an active office. His two minders were present along with the typists and the police officers who showed up periodically to take the used files away. It was, Puskis thought, like returning home after a war and finding someone living in your house. He had always been comfortable in this place, but this was no longer possible.

  He spent all of his time retrieving files as he was now responding to both Headquarters and the typists. One of his minders took responsibility for the logbooks. Puskis had taken great pains to explain how the logbooks worked, but the man did not give Puskis the impression that he understood in even the most rudimentary sense. Puskis would normally have agonized over this type of thing, though in the current context it seemed an almost insignificant detail. He shunted that bit of anxiety to a far corner of his mind.

  Of greater concern was the fate of the files once the typists were done with them. Where did the officers take the files when they left the Vaults? Puskis had asked his minders about this and they had pleaded ignorance, but Puskis felt sure that they did know. One of the uniforms had been more forthcoming.

  “We take them to the incinerator down in the Hollows.”

  Puskis’s chest had contracted at the news that they were burning the old files. There would be no record except for what the typists were entering onto those odd sheets. The uniform, barely more than a boy, had sensed Puskis’s unease and tried to make friendly conversation.

  “You must be excited about this new machine, Mr. Puskis. It will make your life much easier.”

  Puskis had managed a neutral grunt, aware of the boy’s meaning even if he had been too distracted to catch the exact words. How could he explain the impact of this machine on him? Could this boy understand the plight of the newspaper artist who is replaced by the photographer? That this loss takes one layer of humanity away from the information that people receive? That a photograph does not convey an essence that can be shown in illustrations? And even if the boy understood this, would he be able to make the leap from there to Puskis’s own case? Would he be able to understand that through a combination of logic and intuition Archivists had, purely through organization, transformed an impossibly large trove of facts into a system that was, in and of itself, information? How many people understood this? How many would understand if Puskis tried to explain it?

  In these beginning stages of the process, the typists were busy with the files from the years 1926 to 1931, or from the first of the PN files through the brutal dismantling of the White Gang after the Birthday Party Massacre. This was particularly troubling because Puskis knew that the source material for at least some of the files, which was supposedly being typed in verbatim, was faked. Therefore, the fake information would now become the official file in that wretched machine, and the file with the faked papers would be burned, the evidence of the senses now gone. There was no longer any way to detect the subterfuge. Puskis could not call attention to the obvious freshness of paper supposedly nearly a decade old; could not point out that the
handwriting on the papers did not match that of any of the transcribers during that period. The machine would have the “official” facts and there would be no way to refute them.

  Puskis wondered about the other files. Were the files that were not already faked being changed in any way during the typing? It wasn’t possible to read what was being typed. Only one line of words was visible at a time, the rest hidden within the typing machine. The question was of vital importance to Puskis. He spent the morning planning a way to find out.

  Before lunch, he paused out of view of his minders and read the file on a White gangster named Lezner. He then took the file, along with the others he had collected, and gave them to the typists.

  At noon, he told his minders that he was not interested in eating lunch and that he just wanted to rest, as the day had already been more physically taxing than an entire normal day. The minders didn’t seem to care, and they sent a guard from the lobby to fetch them lunch to eat in the Vaults. Puskis collapsed in a chair at the desk in the Stable—where the reference tomes were kept—with a blank white piece of paper and a pencil. On the sheet he drew a diagram of a typewriter keyboard. Then, with his fingers on the paper, he determined what movement was made by which finger in order to type a particular letter. Right index finger up is a u. Right index finger up and left is a y. Right index finger down is an m. And so on.

  Puskis sat back in his chair with his eyes closed in complete concentration. From afar he must have looked asleep. In his mind he spelled out words in finger movements. Left index finger right; right index finger up; right index finger down and to the left. That spelled gun. Right pinkie up; right ring finger up; right ring finger; right middle finger up; left middle finger down; left middle finger up. Police. He made the words more complicated and began to formulate sentences. When he felt comfortable with this, he sped it up, his goal to process fifty words in a minute. It took him twenty minutes of intense mental effort before he could do this consistently.

  The challenge, he knew, would be in trying to interpret what someone else was typing.

  He used the fatigue excuse again to take a break for a cup of tea. It was not much of a stretch. He was both mentally and physically exhausted, and the prospect of the brief but intense mental challenge ahead seemed to sap him even more. He leaned against the wall behind the two typists and watched as the Lezner file rose to the top of the pile.

  The typist on the left took it and opened it on a stand. For the first few seconds Puskis merely watched her type, getting used to the cadence of her fingers. The key, he determined, was to watch the space bar. That indicated a change of words. When it came time to actually “read” her fingers, he found that she moved too fast for him to identify both the letters and the order in which they were typed. Instead, he was getting anagrams. He would remember these and decipher them later.

  He wanted to memorize three paragraphs in the first section of the report, potentially the most damaging section to someone in City government. The case involved a construction company that had been giving favorable rates to some of Red Henry’s cronies, then receiving no-bid contracts with the City.

  He watched and memorized the three paragraphs’ worth of anagrams. One sentence was committed to memory like this: The ssucpet was bsorvde meetngi with two kownn rbitslo ssaocaties and xehcaginng tsaclehs in a amnner sgguesitgn secrecy. Finished, he left his cup at the front desk and retreated into the aisles to where he had left himself paper and a pen. He wrote quickly. When he had all the acronyms down, he found that he could read the paragraphs without spending time to decipher the words on paper.

  It was as he had feared. These new files were being altered. This one had subtly shifted the language so that the construction company was involved with the White Gang instead of the City government.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN

  Sirens in the distance stirred Poole from his moment of thought. He didn’t like his options. Knowing that police reinforcements would shortly arrive, he had to get off this block. But making a run for the far end was suicidal.

  Behind him, concrete steps led down to the door of a basement apartment. He tried the knob. Locked. He pulled off his jacket and pressed it against the pane of the door window. He made a quick movement with his elbow, shattering the glass. The noise was not as loud as he had feared. Certainly not loud enough to be heard down the street over the sound of the wind. He reached through and opened the door from inside.

  This accomplished, he walked back up to see what was happening on the street. The eight ASU officers marched tentatively up the street in a fan formation with their guns drawn. He descended the stairs again, slipped through the door, then quietly closed it behind him.

  Inside it was pitch-dark and smelled of animal feces and decomposing garbage. He gagged. Spitting, he crept through the apartment, keeping his hands out to avoid walking into a wall and lifting his feet high as he stepped, so as not to trip. The sounds of rats scuttling away preceded him as he walked. He met a wall and moved along it to his left, hit another wall, and crept sideways to his right until he found a doorway.

  He heard the scrape of feet outside. Not in the well by the basement entrance, but up on the street level. He froze and listened. The steps moved on.

  If he were conducting the search, he would walk the street first. If that came up empty, he’d search the houses one by one until there was success. He wasn’t surprised that they weren’t checking the houses now, but he knew they would be back. His hope lay in there being a second exit opening onto a parallel street. He walked through the doorway and into another room, mostly pitch-black. But light filtered in from a doorway to the right, and Poole hurried to it. Through this door was a small foyer leading to a door with a barred window.

  He unlatched the security chain. This door opened onto street level. He cracked it and looked out onto an empty street. He couldn’t hear sirens anymore and wasn’t sure if that was because the cars had already arrived or because they had been heading elsewhere.

  Poole took off his shoes, opened the door, and sprinted across the street and then to his left, away from the warehouses. He ran silently and shoeless for five blocks, his feet aching, becoming soaked and frozen, as they pounded on the concrete. Finally, he determined that he was at a safe distance and stepped into an alley to catch his breath. He was wet, his hand throbbed from the burn, and the bottoms of his feet were bruised. He leaned back against the brick wall and closed his eyes, making his mind blank for a few seconds. Then he pulled his shoes back on and struggled to his feet for the journey home.

  Two cabs ignored him before a jitney picked him up, despite Poole’s drenched clothes and the way he held his injured hand. The cabbie was ancient, wearing a golf hat. He used to be tough, Poole thought. Something about his voice and the way he held his now frail shoulders. He was certainly entertained by Poole’s story.

  “You running from those cops?”

  Poole nodded to the man’s eyes in the rearview mirror.

  “What you do?”

  “Nothing.”

  The cabbie gave an unattractive laugh. “Yeah, nobody does nothing.”

  Poole sighed. “I was looking for somebody and they were looking for the same person. I think they figured that they had issues with me because of that.”

  “So you ran even though you didn’t do nothing.” Skeptical.

  “What’d you have done in your day if a dozen cops came running at you?”

  “I would have given them a good one-two.” Even from behind, Poole could tell the cabbie was smiling.

  “Of course you would have.”

  “You know what?” the hack said after a while. “I been looking at you in my mirror here, and I’m thinking I must know you, but you know what? You’re Ethan Poole from the U.”

  Poole nodded.

  “It’s a pleasure to have you in my humble flivver.”

  Poole nodded again. “It’s right up here.”

  They were on Poole’s block, but something
didn’t seem right. Two men stood in front of Poole’s building, looking casual, doing nothing. Something was wrong with the street’s rhythm. Too few people. Too many of them doing nothing. Waiting.

  “Here?” the hack asked.

  “Keep driving.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Keep driving,” Poole said louder, and slid back in his seat.

  The cabbie eased past Poole’s building and continued on to the next block.

  “Something wrong?”

  “Yeah, something.”

  “Where we going now?”

  “Keep driving. I’ve got to think.”

  The cabbie shrugged and continued on into Capitol Heights. People were out on the street, hurrying to get to this place or that. The contrast with the abandoned Hollows was striking.

  “You know Little Lisbon, uptown?”

  “Of course.”

  “Okay. Head up there.”

  “You got an address?”

  “Just get me up there.”

  Enrique Dotel would be known in Little Lisbon. Poole prayed that Carla was with Enrique. If not, he feared she was in custody, and that brought with it a whole different set of problems that would be difficult to negotiate.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT

  The Palace did not open until five, so Frings and Floyd sat at the mahogany bar while the early shift set tables and swept and prepped for the evening. It seemed like a different place with the houselights turned up and the air free of smoke. With the essential elements of atmosphere missing, the club lost its glamour and instead looked merely like a big room.

  Floyd drank whiskey on the rocks while Frings choked down a cup of muddy black coffee.

  “Cuban,” Floyd said.

  “It’s pretty goddamn strong.”

  “You need it, bo.”

  Frings wasn’t going to argue that point. “You know how you said you were lousy with reefer these days?”

  “You’re out already?”

  “No. That’s not it. When you say ‘these days,’ you mean that it used to be harder?”