by Ed McBain
“Just his name.”
“He was a great man. He knew about all the gross injustices of Stalin before Stalin was born. He was probably the greatest political thinker of the twentieth century and he didn’t even live in that century. But do you know what was wrong with him?”
“No sir.”
“He was a man of action and so he didn’t spend enough time writing cohesive documents of his ideas. Don’t get me wrong, he wrote a lot. But he never created a comprehensive document detailing a clear idea of anarchist political organization. After he died the writing he left behind made many small-minded men see him as a crackpot and a fool. I don’t intend for my legacy to be treated like that.”
“And that’s why you need a scribe?”
“Mainly.” He turned to watch Jersey again. “But also I need a simple transcriber. Someone to take my notes and scribbles and to make sense out of them. To document what I’m trying to do.”
“That’s all?”
“Mostly. There’ll be some errands. Maybe even a little research, you know—investigative work. But any good journalism student should love doing some field work.”
“I didn’t tell you I was a journalism student.”
“No, you didn’t. But I know a lot about you, Felix Orlean,” he said, pronouncing my name correctly this time. “That’s why I put that old doll of mine on the door, I wanted to see if you were superstitious. I know about your father too, Justin Proud-foot Orlean, a big time lawyer down in Louisiana. And your mother, Katherine Hadity, was a medical student before she married your father and decided to commit her life to you and your sister Rachel who now goes by the name Angela in the part of London called Brixton.”
He might as well have hit me over the head with a twelve-pound ham. I didn’t know that my mother had been a medical student but it made sense since she had always wanted Rachel to be a doctor. I didn’t know that Rachel had moved to England.
“Where’d you get all that?”
“And that’s another thing.” Lawless cut his eyes at the laptop on the tiny desk. Then he held up that educational finger. “No work that you do for me goes on the computer. I want to wait until we get it right to let the world in on our work.”
“I’m not w-working for you, Mr. Lawless,” I said, hating myself for the stutter skip.
“Why not?”
“I don’t know what you do for one thing,” I said. “And I don’t like people calling me at any hour of the night. You have your doors boarded up and you call yourself an anarchist. Some guy who looks like a street thug comes in to make some kind of report.”
“I told you what I do. I’m an anarchist who wants to keep everything straight. From the crazed politico who decides that he can interfere with the rights of others because he’s got some inside track on the truth to the fascist mayor trying to shut down the little guy so he can fill his coffers with gold while reinventing the police state.
“I’m the last honest man, an eastern cowboy. And you, Mr. Orlean, you are a young man trying to make something of himself. Your father’s a rich man but you pay your own way. He wanted you to become a lawyer, I bet, and you turned your back on him in order to be your own man. That’s half the way to me, Felix. Why not see what more there is?”
“I can take care of my own life, Mr. Lawless,” I said. “The only thing I need from a job is money.”
“How much money?”
“Well, my rent which is five-fifty a month and then my other expenses … .”
“So you need forty-two thousand, before taxes, that is if you pay taxes.” I had come up with the same number after an afternoon of budgeting.
“Of course I pay my taxes,” I said.
“Of course you do,” Lawless said, smiling broadly. “I’ll pay you what you need for this position. All you have to do is agree to try it out for a few weeks.”
I glanced at the blow-up of Bakunin and thought about the chance this might be. I needed the money. My parents wouldn’t even answer one of my letters much less finance my education.
“I’m not sure,” I said.
“About what?”
“The line you’re talking about,” I said. “It sounds like some kind of legal boundary. One side is law abiding and the other isn’t.”
“You’re just an employee, Felix. Like anyone working for Enron or Hasbro. No one there is held responsible for what their employers may or may not have done.”
“I won’t do anything illegal.”
“Of course you won’t,” Lawless said.
“I have to put my school work first.”
“We can make your hours flexible.”
“If I don’t like what’s happening I’ll quit immediately,” I said. “No prior notice.”
“You sound more like a law student than a news hound,” Lawless said. “But believe me I need you, Felix. I don’t have the time to read every paper. If I know you’re going through five or six of the big ones that’ll take a lot of pressure off of me. And you’ll learn a lot here. I’ve been around. From the guest of royalty in Asia to the prisons of Turkey and Mexico.”
“No law breaking for me,” I said again.
“I heard you.” Lawless took a piece of paper from the ledge on the window behind him and handed it to me. “Over the next couple of days I’d like you to check up on these people.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing questionable, simply check to see that they’re around. Try to talk to them yourself but if you can’t just make sure that they’re there, and that they’re okay.”
“You think these people might be in trouble?”
“I don’t worry about dolls hanging from doorknobs,” he said. “They don’t mean a thing to me. I’m just looking into a little problem that I picked up on the other day.”
“Maybe you should call the police.”
“The police and I have a deal. I don’t talk to them and they don’t listen to me. It works out just fine.”
4
I wanted to talk more but Lawless said that he had his day cut out for him.
“I’ve got to go out but you can stay,” he said. “The room next door will be your workplace. Here let me show you.”
My new employer stood up. As I said, he’s a big man. There seemed to be something important in even this simple movement. It was as if some stone monolith were suddenly sentient and moving with singular purpose in the world.
The room labeled STORAGE was narrow, crowded with boxes and untidy. There was a long table covered with papers, both printed and handwritten, and various publications. The boxes were cardboard, some white and some brown. The white ones had handwritten single letters on their fitted lids, scrawled in red. The brown ones on the whole were open at the top with all sorts of files and papers stacked inside.
“The white ones are my filing cabinet,” Lawless said. “The brown ones are waiting for you to put them in order. There’s a flat stack of unconstructed file boxes in the corner under the window. When you need a new one just put it together.” He waved at a pile of rags set upon something in the corner.
“What’s that?” I asked, pointing at a pink metal box that sat directly under the window.
“It’s the only real file cabinet but we don’t keep files in there.” He didn’t say anything else about it and I was too busy trying to keep up to care.
Through the window an ocean liner was making its way up river. It was larger than three city blocks.
“The papers are all different,” Lawless said. “The legal sheets are my journal entries, reports, and notes. These you are to transcribe. The mimeoed sheets are various documents that have come to me. I need you to file them according to the way the rest of the files work. If you have any questions just ask me.”
The liner let out a blast from its horn that I heard faintly through the closed window.
“And these newsletters,” he said and then paused.
“What about them?”
“These newsletters I get fro
m different places. They’re very, very specialized.” He was holding up a thick stack of printed materials. “Some of them come from friends around the world. Anarchist and syndicalist communes in America and elsewhere, in the country and the cities too. One of them’s an Internet commune. That one will be interesting to keep tabs on; see if they got something there.”
The big man stopped speaking for a moment and considered something. Maybe it was the Internet anarchist commune or maybe it was a thought that passed through his mind while talking. In the weeks to come I was to learn how deeply intuitive this man was. He was like some pre-Columbian shaman looking for signs in everything; talking to gods that even his own people had no knowledge of.
“Then there are the more political newsletters. The friendlies include various liberation movements and ecological groups. And of course there’s Red Tuesday. She gathers up reports of problems brewing around the world. Dictators rising, infrastructures failing, and the movements of various players in the international killkill games.”
“The what?”
“How do you kill a snake?” he asked grabbing me by the arm with a frighteningly quick motion.
I froze and wondered if it was too late to tell him that I didn’t want the job.
“Cut off his head,” Lawless informed me. “Cut off his head.” He let me go and held out his hands in wonder. “To the corporations and former NATO allies this whole world is a nest of vipers. They have units, killkill boys Red Tuesday calls them. These units remove the heads of particularly dangerous vipers. Some of them are well known. You see them on TV and in courtroom cases. Others move like shadows. Red tries to keep tabs on them. She has a special box for the killkill boys and girls just so they know that somebody out there has a machete for their fangs too.”
He said this last word like a breathy blast on a toy whistle. It made me laugh.
“Not funny,” he told me. “Deadly serious. If you read Red’s letters you will know more than any daily papers would ever dare tell you.”
I wondered, not for the last time, about my employer’s sanity.
“She’s crazy of course,” Lawless said as though he had read my mind.
“Excuse me?”
“Red. She’s crazy. She also has a soap box about the pope. She’s had him involved in every conspiracy from that eyeball on the dollar bill to frozen aliens in some Vatican subbasement.”
“So how can you trust anything she says?”
“That’s just it, son,” Lawless said boring those pinpoint eyes into mine. “You can’t trust anyone, not completely. But you can’t afford not to listen. You have to listen, examine, and then make up your own mind.”
The weight of his words settled in on me. It was a way of thinking that produced a paranoia beyond paranoia.
“That sounds like going into the crazy house and asking for commentary on the nightly news,” I said, trying to make light of his assertions.
“If the world is insane then you’d be a fool to try and look for sanity to answer the call.” Archibald Lawless looked at me with that great heart-shaped face. His bright skin and crown of thorns caused a quickening in my heart.
“The rest of these newsletters and whatnot are from the bad guys. White supremacist groups, pedophile target lists, special memos from certain key international banks. Mostly it’s nothing but sometimes it allows you to make a phone call, or something.” Again he drifted off into space.
I heard the threat in his voice with that or something but by then I knew I had to spend at least a couple of hours with those notes. My aunt Alberta was right about my curiosity. I was always sticking my nose where it didn’t belong.
“So you can spend as much time as you want making yourself at home around here. The phone line can be used calling anywhere on the planet but don’t use the computer until I show you what’s what there.” He seemed happy, friendly. He imparted that elan to me. “When you leave just shut the door. It will engage all the locks by itself, electrically.”
As he opened the door to leave my storage office, I asked, “Mr. Lawless?”
“Yeah, son?”
“I don’t get it.”
“Get what?”
“With all this Red Tuesday, pedophiliac, white supremacist stuff how can you know that you should trust me? I mean all you’ve done is read some computer files. All that could be forged, couldn’t it?”
He smiled and instead of answering my question he said, “You’re just like a blank sheet of paper, Orleen. Maybe a name and a date up top but that’s all and it’s in pencil. You could be my worst nightmare, Felix. But first we’ve got to get some words down on paper.” He smiled again and went out of his office. I followed.
He threw the bolts open and kicked up the buttress. Then he pulled open the door. He made to go out and then thought of something, turned and pointed that teacher’s finger at me again.
“Don’t open this door for anybody. Not for anyone but me. Don’t answer it. Don’t say anything through it. You can use this,” he tapped a small video monitor that was mounted on the wall to the right of the door, “to see, but that’s it.”
“W-why?” I stammered.
“The landlord and I have a little dispute going.”
“What kind of dispute?”
“I haven’t paid rent in seven years and he thinks that it’s about time that I did.”
“And you don’t?”
“The only truth in the bible is where it says that stuff about money and evil,” he said and then he hurried out. The door closed behind him, five seconds later the locks all flipped down and the buttress lowered. I noticed then that there was a network of wires that led from the door to a small black box sitting underneath the cushionless couch.
The box was connected to an automobile battery. Even in a blackout Archibald Lawless would have secure doors.
5
I spent that morning inside the mind of a madman or a genius or maybe outside of what Lawless refers to as the hive mind, the spirit that guides millions of heedless citizens through the aimless acts of everyday life.
The mess on my office table was a treasure trove of oddities and information. Xeroxed copies of wanted posters, guest lists to conservative political fund raisers, blueprints of corporate offices and police stations. Red Tuesday’s newsletter had detailed information about the movements of certain killkills using their animal code names (like Bear, Ringed Hornet, and Mink). She was less forthcoming about certain saboteurs fighting for anything from ecology to the liberation of so-called political prisoners. For these groups she merely lauded their actions and gave veiled warnings about how close they were to discovery in various cities.
Lawless was right about her and the Catholic Church. She also had a box in each issue surrounded by a border of red and blue crosses in which she made tirades against Catholic crack houses paying for political campaigns and other such absurdities. Even the language was different. This article was the only one that had misspellings and bad grammar.
At the back of every Red Tuesday newsletter, on page four, was an article signed only in the initials AAL. Everything else was written by Red Tuesday. This regular column had a title, REVOLUTIONARY NOTES. After flipping through about fifteen issues I found one column on Archie and the rent.
Never give an inch to the letter of the law if it means submitting to a lie. Your word is your freedom not your bond. If you make a promise, or a promise is made to you, it is imperative that you make sure the word, regardless of what the law says, is upheld. Lies are the basis for all the many crimes that we commit every day. From petty theft to genocide it is a lie that makes it and the truth that settles the account.
Think of it! If only we made every candidate for office responsible for every campaign promise she made. Then you’d see a democracy that hasn’t been around for a while. My own landlord promised me whitewashed walls and a red carpet when I agreed to pay his lousy rent. He thought the lie would go down easy, that he could evict me because I never signe
d a contract. But he had lied. When I took his rooms for month to month he needed the rent and told me that a contract wasn’t necessary. He told me that he’d paint and lay carpet, but all that was lies.
It’s been years and I’m still here. He hasn’t painted or made a cent. I brought him to court and I won. And then, because a man who lies cannot recognize the truth, he sent men to run me out …
Never lie and never lie down for a lie. Live according to your word and the world will find its own balance.
I was amazed by the almost innocent and idealistic prattle of such an obviously intelligent man.
The thought of a landlord sending up toughs to run me out of the rooms stopped my lazy reading and sent me out on the job I had been given.
The first person on my list was Valerie Lox. She was a commercial real estate broker on Madison Avenue, just above an exclusive jewelry store. I got there at about eleven forty-five. The offices were small but well appointed. The building was only two floors and the roof had a skylight making it possible for all of the lush green plants to flourish between the three real estate agents’ desks.
“Can I help you?” a young Asian man at the desk closest to the door asked.
I suppressed the urge to correct him. May I, my mother inside me wanted to say. But I turned my head instead looking out of the window onto posh Madison. Across the street was a furrier, a fancy toy store, and a German pen shop.
“Yes,” I said. “I want to see Ms. Lox.”
The young man looked me up and down. He didn’t like my blue jeans and ratty, secondhand Tibetan sweater—this college wear wasn’t designed for Madison Avenue consumption.
“My father is thinking of opening a second office in Manhattan and he wanted me to see what was available,” I further explained.
“And your father is?” Another bad sentence.
“JP Orlean of Herman, Bledsoe, and Orlean in New Orleans.”
“Wait here.” The young man uttered these words, rose from his chair, and walked away.