The Vaults

by Toby Ball

  The sergeant motioned for his officers to follow him as he walked farther into the station. He asked a couple of other officers about Martens before someone pointed toward an open door off the squad room. The sergeant led Poole through the door into an interrogation room, where three men sat around a metal table in a haze of cigarette smoke. One, a small man with a receding forehead and a weak chin, was doing the talking. He stopped as Poole followed the sergeant into the suddenly cramped room. The small man turned, glaring, to face the two newcomers. Poole noticed the military mustache.

  “What the hell is this?” the small man said with undisguised annoyance. The two officers stayed outside. The room was too crowded as it was.

  “Ethan Poole,” the sergeant said significantly.

  “Why is he here?”

  “He claims that someone is out to assassinate the mayor tonight.”

  The little man, who Poole assumed was Martens, looked thoughtful for a moment. “Poole, yes. The name . . . we were looking for you . . .” His voice trailed off, then he found himself again with a start. He barked, “There’s not time for this tonight.” He ground the lit end of his cigarette into the table.

  “The mayor . . . ,” the sergeant said.

  Martens turned to Poole. “What is this? Someone is trying to kill the mayor tonight? Who? Who’s trying to kill him? For God’s sake, how do you know?”

  Poole had been thinking about which answer to this question would be most likely to get him back on the street as fast as possible. Nothing better than the truth had presented itself. “Whiskers McAdam.”

  Martens coughed out a laugh. “Whiskers McAdam? He won’t see the outside of a cell for another twenty years. My God. What do you take us for?”

  Poole shrugged. He had to play this out a little further; make it look as if he were really trying to convince them. “It’s what I’ve heard. People say they’ve seen him on the street.”

  Martens regarded Poole as he might have a dumb and intransigent child. “I don’t know what your angle is on this, Poole, but it’s a bunch of horseshit.” Martens turned to the sergeant, waiting.

  “I should lock him up?” the sergeant suggested.

  “Christ.” Martens was reddening. “Are you suggesting that you spend tonight at your desk typing up a report that you brought Poole in because he claimed that Whiskers McAdam was going to kill the mayor tonight? Is that it? While the rest of the goddamn unit is out complying with a direct order from the mayor? Is that what you’re suggesting? Whiskers McAdam?”

  The sergeant looked back miserably.

  “Let him go,” Martens growled. “Let him go.”

  CHAPTER NINETY-SIX

  Frings watched the big man run through the possibilities in his mind. He knew that Red Henry was smart and that self-preservation would be his first priority. But Henry was drunk, and Frings knew that this was unusual. It added an unpredictability that Frings had not anticipated coming into the confrontation. As the options were laid out, the rational thing for Henry to do was to give up Nora and save his own skin. But this would only be true based on some assumptions that Frings was not at all certain Henry would make. The first was that Frings would, indeed, not run the article if Nora was released. Henry had good reason not to trust him, since Frings fully intended to run the article regardless. The second critical assumption was that Frings would be able to substantiate his allegations in the face of Henry’s denials. This, in Frings’s mind, would be a close one. But people were willing to think the worst of their leaders, and Henry would most likely not be given the benefit of the doubt. But would Henry make the same calculation?

  Another critical assumption that Frings was making as well was that he knew all the cards that Henry had to play.

  Henry looked at Frings with furious, drunken eyes. Frings maintained his air of self-assurance, trying to intimidate Henry with his attitude because there was no hope for it physically. Henry’s next action had him wondering if he had miscalculated. The big man picked Frings off the ground by the lapels of his suit, Frings sinking so that the coat bunched up around his neck. Henry turned him and propped him against a wall, holding him up with one hand by the chin. Frings stared at Henry with bulging eyes. Half the room turned to them and the band stopped. Frings felt helpless and humiliated. Henry leaned forward and put his lips next to Frings’s ear.

  “I will let your quiff go. But if you publish that article, I promise you that you will be killed soon, and you will be killed painfully. And then the same will happen to your girl. Don’t doubt that I can make that happen.”

  Henry let go of Frings’s jaw, and Frings fell gasping to the ground. Henry turned to the onlooking crowd and smiled a terrifying smile. “Please return to your goddamn drinks,” he bellowed. “The Poles are not coming tonight. They’re leaving town tomorrow and they’re not coming back. Through treachery and dealing in bad faith, they have whetted our appetites for their presence and then withdrawn it at the last hour. It is my greatest wish that they leave the City safely because I know that there will be great anger among our citizens.”

  Frings watched from the floor, recovering. Henry was absolutely in the bag. Henry swayed slightly as he ranted. The guests looked on nervously. Frings noticed men at the fringes of the crowd who seemed amused but kept their mirth quiet. No one wanted to be the target of the mayor’s wrath.

  Peja materialized from the crowd and spoke into Henry’s ear. Henry pushed him aside, then turned back to loom over Frings, who was still sitting on the floor.

  “Don’t forget what I said. Kill that goddamn story,” Henry slurred. “You can find Nora Aspen at Draffert’s Pub in an hour.”

  Henry lumbered toward the entrance, Frings watching as the crowd parted in front of him. The attention of the whole room was on the big man. The band had begun to play again, this time at a dirgelike pace that might just have been mocking Henry’s slow progress.

  Frings stood up and pushed through the crowd after Henry.

  CHAPTER NINETY-SEVEN

  Nora was still reading when she felt the room’s atmosphere change, turning electric. The small, dark man was listening intently, his head cocked to something she could not hear. She began to speak but was hushed by a wave of the man’s hand. He was up, moving silently across the room. He turned the knob of the door with two fingers, inching it open. From her bed, Nora could not see the hall, but the man’s demeanor did not indicate any trouble. Then, without seeming to move, he was gone and the door was shut.

  Odd, she thought, returning to her book. She heard sounds from the hall and put her book down. Voices. Too muffled to be understood. This was the first time since her incarceration that she had known of another person in the apartment except her captor.

  There was a thud and the floor shook, the motion magnified by the springs in the mattress she reclined on. She sat up on the side of the bed with her feet planted on the floor, her heart racing. She prayed for it to be the police. The alternative scared the hell out of her.

  Footsteps approached in the hall. Not the little man, who did not make any noise when he walked. Nora fought back nausea. The door swung open hard, the knob banging against the wall and the door rebounding back. Through it came a big man, his face a mask of determination under his fedora as he advanced on her. He held a pistol by the barrel, brandishing it like a club. She had seen plenty of actors simulate a pistol-whip on the screen. She lay back, bracing herself for the real thing; pulling her knees up to her chest and putting her arms out to protect her face. He was standing over her now, trying with his free hand to knock her hands out of the way so he could get in a clean strike with the pistol.

  She didn’t scream, but flailed with her arms and kicked out with her feet, trying to fend him off. He was patient, working to clear himself for the first, solid blow that would enable him to inflict the rest without resistance. Behind him, his grace belying the brutality of his intentions, the little man struck. He came into the room with speed, his arms crossed at the elbows and
a thin rope dangling from his hands. He flipped the rope around her assailant’s neck, then pulled his hands apart so that they uncrossed, pulling the cord tight around the bigger man’s throat.

  The big man’s eyes went wide and he staggered backward, turning slightly. From this angle, Nora could see her captor with his knee in the big man’s back, giving him leverage to pull the cord tighter. The big man clawed at the rope around his neck with increasing desperation. With his free leg, the little man kicked hard into the back of the big man’s knee, and he went down on his face, the gun slipping from his grasp. The little man now was on top. The effort he was putting forth did not show on his face, but the banded muscles of his arms were fully tensed.

  Nora slid from the bed and picked the gun off the floor. She knew how to use one, a requisite part of growing up in the sticks. She stepped around the two men. The fight was gone from the bigger one, and her captor continued to pull on the rope, dropping his ear to the man’s back, listening for his heart to stop beating. When at last the little man judged his job finished, he straightened up, and for the first time saw Nora, holding the gun confidently, the barrel aimed at his chest. The head, she had been told, was too easy to miss.

  The little, dark man who had been her captor for nearly two days; who had kept a vigil, watching her as she read, for God’s sake; who had reminded her of Tino, the gentle man who practiced the savage art; the little dark man sat, deflated, on the bed. His mahogany eyes showed not fear but hurt. Had he really thought that he’d been courting her?

  “I’m going to walk out of here, and if you follow me, I’ll kill you. I’m a good shot.”

  The man nodded. “I believe you. I will not attempt to keep you here.”

  If he thought his acquiescence was going to lower her guard, he was mistaken. She took a last look at the room that had briefly been her prison. It was not, from her perspective now, an imperfect model of her room, but a parody. All the details were right, but the whole was wrong.

  “What’s your name?”

  The man did not answer. He had retreated within himself.

  She leveled the gun at him. “What’s your name?” she asked louder. Something about this detail was important. She didn’t want to live the rest of her life without even knowing his name.

  He looked up at her with sleepy eyes, considered for a moment, and said, “Feral.”

  Minutes later she was on the street, hailing a cab, the hack’s jaw dropping when he realized who she was. She hadn’t experienced the adulation—Feral’s spooky attentions were not the same—for almost two days, and she realized that for all the lines she gave the magazines about intrusion into her private life, she loved it.

  CHAPTER NINETY-EIGHT

  Red Henry, the mayor of the goddamn City, lumbered unsteadily out into the night air, pausing at the top of the steps to survey the lines of cars, looking for the black Packard Phaeton that came with his office. The guests queuing for taxis looked up as he emerged, and he realized that he was cursing aloud. He smiled at the queue, reminding himself that they were voters, and finally located his car. The driver was chatting with two men, their hats hiding their faces. The drivers tended to socialize with each other while they waited, but the men his driver was talking to clearly weren’t fellow drivers. Something about the way they held themselves. And their fedoras. Henry wondered who the hell they were. He took the steps slowly, careful not to reveal the extent of his inebriation with a stagger or hesitation.

  He needed to get back to his office. He needed to get Feral to take that singing bitch to Draffert’s. He needed to find out exactly what the fuck had happened to the Poles and decide whether he wanted to give them the scare of their lives before they left the City. He had a reputation to maintain. He needed to hear about the fire in the goddamn Vaults, though as he thought about it, it might not be the worst thing that had ever happened. But it infuriated him because it had not been part of his plans. Someone would have to be held accountable.

  He needed to figure out a new strategy for Frings. He’d always assumed that it would be counterproductive to have him bumped, but now he wasn’t so sure that Frings was more trouble dead than alive. He was too drunk to assess it clearly.

  He needed to get Smith out into the country to find out where those Navajo Project psychopaths had disappeared to. Come to think of it, where the hell was Smith? He hadn’t seen Smith as he left the gala. Smith was usually the type to be right there, ready to cause whatever mayhem Henry would allow. Then he remembered Smith’s leaving the hall with a sense of purpose about him, and he wondered if he shouldn’t have his driver take him directly to Feral’s place.

  A panhandler came up to him and rattled the coins in his cup. Henry stopped and glared at him. The panhandler backed away, mumbling slurred, semicoherent curses.

  His driver was no longer talking to the men from before and had the door open for him. Henry remembered that he had a question to ask him but could not, for the life of him, recall what it was. Fucking alcohol.

  “Feral’s. Quickly.”

  “Feral’s, sir?”

  “That’s what I said.” Was it a complicated request?

  “Of course.”

  Henry rested his head on the leather seat back and let his lids drop, willing himself to sober up. Willing himself to consider his problems one at a time rather than deal with the flood of anxiety that was threatening to overwhelm him.

  There was a crash, maybe a foot away from his head, and he opened his eyes to see glass shards littering the seat, reflecting the streetlights like tiny stars. Hands appeared from outside, tossed a package on the seat next to him, then disappeared. He heard the sound of footsteps running away.

  CHAPTER NINETY-NINE

  Poole hailed a cab and, after wading through a snarl in traffic caused by the mass deployment of ASU squad cars, headed toward Little Lisbon. He stared out the window, exhausted and concentrating. He needed to continue to take things in order, just as he had done in the ASU station. The primary thing now was to find Carla—and Enrique. He was going to Enrique’s apartment first because that was where Carla was headed when Poole went to St. Mark’s. He was not confident she would still be there, but it was a place to start.

  He forced himself to put off thinking about the next step. It seemed too dependent on the circumstances when he finally found her.

  He had expected it, but was still dismayed to find a dozen or so ASU officers on the sidewalk as the cab pulled up to Enrique’s building. The officers were conferring, not in a hurry, getting their plan straight before heading in. Poole walked past them, head down, and through the front door. He took the stairs three at a time up to Enrique’s floor, heart racing. His mind was getting ahead of him, thinking about where they could lose themselves in this neighborhood. The obvious places were out, since that was where the ASU would look first.

  He pounded on Enrique’s door with his elbow. No one answered at first and he yelled, “It’s Poole.” Footsteps sounded in the apartment, and the door opened to Enrique, wearing slacks, a white shirt, and an anxious look.

  “Enrique, is Carla here?”

  Enrique nodded.

  “Where?” Poole nearly shouted.

  Carla emerged from a back room looking unkempt, her hair askew, her face flushed. “Ethan?”

  Poole closed his eyes briefly in relief. He looked to Enrique. “Where’s your wife?”

  “She’s at her mother’s,” he said carefully.

  Poole nodded, understanding. He closed his eyes for a moment, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Listen, the ASU are here for you. Orders direct from the mayor. A group of them’s down on the street. We need to get out of here.”

  Enrique and Carla exchanged a glance. Some of the tension seemed to drain from Enrique as his shoulders relaxed.

  “It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been brought in.”

  “It’s different this time. Any means possible.”

  Carla spoke. “What does that mean, Ethan?”
r />   Ethan shrugged impatiently. There wasn’t time for this conversation. “Dead or alive.”

  Enrique looked at Poole. “You still have my gun?”

  “No. I was picked up by the ASU. They kept it.”

  Enrique nodded. Poole was impressed with the man’s nerve.

  Enrique said, “There are three ways out. The front door.”

  “Too many men out there.”

  “Fire escape.”

  “Too visible. They’d be waiting for us before we got down.”

  “Then the service entrance out back.”

  “Let’s go.”

  Carla said, “You don’t think they’ll have that covered?”

  “Of course they will,” Poole said. “But there’s nothing else.”

  They took the back stairs, Poole in front and Enrique last. At the ground floor they found the service entrance and Poole put his ear to it. He couldn’t hear anything, but that wasn’t surprising. He looked back at the other two. “You ready?”

  Carla and Enrique nodded. Poole grabbed Carla’s hand and gave it a squeeze. He pushed open the door to a landing three concrete steps above an alley. Dirty light shone in from the street. Two ASU men, hands on their holstered guns, leaned against the far wall. Poole thought about turning back into the building, but this alley remained their best hope. The three of them walked down the stairs as the ASU officers walked toward them, guns out.

  One, a tall, thin kid, walked up to Enrique. “You Dotel?”

  Poole watched, wondering how Enrique would play it; looking for an opening.

  Enrique nodded. “I’m Dotel.”

  The officer lowered his voice. “My brother, Victor, is in the union. We need to get you out of here. I don’t think you’ll make it back to the station alive.”

  Enrique looked over at the other officer.