The Vaults (35 page)

“How long before they look here, do you think?”

“I don’t know, but we shouldn’t stay long. I don’t want to put Enrique’s wife in harm’s way.”

“Okay. Maybe we eat and go. Did you have your meeting?”

“Yes,” she said, smiling. “It had the effect we wanted.”

Frings watched Ed, the assistant, struggle through the newsroom to catch him before he reached Panos’s office. Frings sped up a little, making Ed practically break into a run.

“You got something for me?” Frings asked.

Ed was clearly annoyed. “You asked me to run those names by Lonergan, see if there was anything in the papers about them in the past five years.”

The names from Puskis’s list. “That’s right. Anything come up?”

Ed shook his head, a little smile creasing his face at the thought of Frings coming up empty.

Frings nodded. “That’s what I thought.”

Ed shook his head and walked away to other business, muttering.

Panos was talking to a young reporter whose name Frings couldn’t remember. He looked up as Frings walked in unannounced, his face turning from annoyance to pleasure.

“Frank. Good to see you this afternoon. I’m briefing Caskin here about the big gala tonight to which I am sending him.”

“That’s what I want to talk to you about, Panos.”

“What? You want to go to the big party and drink some champagne and eat those beautiful little treats that they always have? Is that why you want to talk to me about this thing?”

“I, you know, I apologize, buddy,” Frings said to Caskin, “but I really need to talk to Panos privately.”

Caskin got up from his chair. Frings carried a lot of clout in the newsroom, especially among the new reporters, who were still intimidated by his reputation.

Panos said, “Go get some coffee, Caskin. I’ll talk to you again when I am done with Frank here.”

When Caskin was gone, Frings closed the door and Panos sat forward in his chair with his forearms on the desk.

“What is this, Frank?”

“It’s the big one, Panos. I’ve got the big one. Red Henry could go down within the week.”

Panos’s eyes widened. “What is this you are talking of?”

“Panos, I’m going to tell you. But you’ve got to let me play it my way. Can I trust you on that? There are other factors.”

Panos gave a look of exaggerated hurt. “You know you can trust me, Frank. You get the story, you tell me when it can run. I just make sure that it is okay. Good?”

“Okay.”

Panos opened his desk drawer and tossed a flask to Frings. “Dip the bill, Frank. You look terrible.”

Frings unscrewed the lid and took a pull. It tasted like gasoline and felt like molten lead in his stomach.

“Christ, Panos. What is this?”

Panos took the flask from Frings and had a drink himself, making a funny face and then smiling. “This man who lives in the alley by my house makes this in a still.”

“This is from a hobo’s still?”

Panos shrugged. “With what goes into your body, Frank . . .”

Frings shuddered a little from the lingering effects of the moonshine. “Okay. Have you ever heard of the Navajo Project?”

Panos frowned.

“Go back seven or eight years to the last couple of years of the war between the Whites and the Bristols. This is before Henry’s time. The mayor wanted to do something dramatic to stop all the gang hits. The prisons were filling up with cons on murder raps. The City had to take care of more and more widows and fatherless kids. The situation couldn’t last. So they instituted a secret program called the Navajo Project. What this was, was a system where certain people convicted of gang murders weren’t sent to prison. Instead, they were sent to these farms out of the City where they grow crops to support themselves—and here’s the real point of the program—to support the widows and orphans of the men they had murdered.”

Panos was nodding his head slowly, his eyes closed, concentrating on what Frings was saying.

“Go forward a couple of years to the Birthday Party Massacre. Red Henry has just become mayor. Some Whites think they find a way around
the whole program. They just kill the entire family. No one to support, so if there’s a conviction, the killer goes to prison, which the Bristols and Whites pretty much run anyway. But they didn’t understand Red Henry, and you know the shit that he rained down on them. So that ends any new Navajo Project cases. But there’s still the people they’ve already farmed out.

“So about five years ago, maybe a little bit less, Henry gets this idea that the Navajo Project could work a little more to his advantage. He can make it more profitable by getting more money out of the convicts and spending less on the families of the deceased. So he does two things. One, he puts the widows in a sanitarium and the kids in orphanages. Two, he gets the convicts to grow a crop that will bring in more cash—marijuana.”

Frings expected a crack from Panos about reefer, but didn’t get one.

Frings continued, “Henry has his guy Smith run the program. Apparently Smith put some of the Navajo Project cons in charge of running the day-to-day and keeping the other ginks in line. Some of Smith’s boys go out to the sticks, make a pickup, and bring the reefer to the East Side for sale to the colored folks and whatever whites venture in there to buy.”

“Such as yourself,” Panos suggested.

“Of course. So now, with all this cash flooding in, they can use some of it to bankroll the sanitarium and orphanage and spread the rest out amongst themselves.”

“Who else besides Henry?”

“Who do you think? The usual: Block, Altabelli, Bernal.”

“This has something to do with the bombings, too, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, though here I’m guessing. The kid I met who is sort of the leader of these kids with the bombs is named Casper Prosnicki. His father was killed by Reif DeGraffenreid, who was a Navajo Project convict until he was murdered a few days back, out on his dope farm. I’ve got it on good authority that someone told those kids about the project and they think this is how they can get their story out and also get some payback.”

“You have proof? You know I can’t run this without a lot of proof. A lot.”

“I’ve got proof. But I’ll have more than that.”

Panos smiled. “Oh, shit, Frank. What are you thinking in that brain of yours?”

“I told you there were extenuating circumstances.”

Panos nodded and leaned back in his chair. Sweat stains had blossomed under his arms.

“They’ve got my girl.”

“Not the beautiful Nora Aspen?” Panos said, shocked.

Frings nodded. “They left a note. Said to drop this investigation or they’d hurt her.”

“But you continue.”

“Where would it end, Panos? If I cave, when do they let her go? When are they ever satisfied that I won’t just pick up and begin again once I get her back?”

Panos nodded. “That’s a tough one, Frank. That’s shit tough.”

“That’s why I need to go. I need a bargaining chip. I tell Henry what I’ve got. I tell him to let Nora go and I’ll let it pass. She gets hurt, he goes down.”

“So you come to me with this story and now we won’t be able to use it?”

“Come on, Panos. Of course we’ll use it. After I get Nora, we print the whole thing.”

“That is not so honest.”

“They kidnapped my girl. I’m supposed to be a goddamn saint? You joking?”

Panos let out a grim laugh. “I see, Frank. And it is my humble guess that you want to confront our esteemed mayor at his big fancy gala party tonight?”

“That’s right. I want to get him tonight, in a public place, where he doesn’t have time to think. I don’t want Nora being held any longer than necessary.”

“Just so. Okay, Frank, you go to the big fun party tonight. You just be careful, okay? For you and your lovely Nora.”

On his way out, Frings saw a note written on a restaurant check at the top of a stack of papers o his desk.

Dear Mr. Frings,

I am a prisoner. There are two men watching me at all times. They (I know that you know who I mean) are destroying the evidence held in the files. I write you this note so that you will know the reason for events that may follow. They can not destroy the past, but they can edit our memory.

A.P.

Frings frowned. If they were destroying the evidence in the files, then only one other thing could expose the Navajo Project and that would be the convicts themselves. Red Henry would send his thugs after them, then all the loose ends would be tied up. No more evidence. He thought back to his time with Otto Samuelson and his meeting with Whiskers and wondered if they hadn’t already come to that same realization.

They knew Feral at the morgue and regarded him with the same combination of curiosity and fear that most City employees who knew him did. It wasn’t clear exactly who he was or what type of authority he held, but he had the backing of the mayor, and they knew to accede to his requests.

The morgue was a bright, sanitary place. Shining white-tiled walls provided a weird, near heavenly environment for the corpses spending their brief time there. None of the three steel autopsy tables were currently in use, and a large metal door led back to the refrigerated corpse room. The chief examiner was a small, portly man named Pulyatkin. He had huge hands and a face that took up a surprising amount of his head.

“Nice to see you today, sir,” Pulyatkin said to Feral.

“And you, Mr. Pulyatkin.” Feral had his hands in his pockets, and his right hand played with the handle of a short knife.

“What brings you here?”

“I’m looking for a missing woman.”

“Oh?”

“That’s right. White woman. On the younger side, late twenties, early thirties.”

“Is that it? Is that all you have?”

“Last three or four days.”

“Come.” Pulyatkin led Feral into the corpse room. The room was kept at a constant thirty-five degrees, and Feral pulled his collar up around his neck. The corpses—perhaps forty in all—were laid out under sheets on bunks stacked four high.

“Over here is where we have the John and Jane Does,” Pulyatkin said, leading Feral to the far left corner. “I think we have two women. Let’s see.” He drew back the corner of the sheet from a corpse and found the mostly missing head of a man. “Not that one,” he said, laughing nervously.

He found the two unidentified women and left the sheets pulled back to reveal their faces. “Is one of these the one you are looking for?”

“I will have to make a closer examination to be sure.”

Pulyatkin frowned and gestured for Feral to inspect.

“I need a minute to myself,” Feral said.

Pulyatkin had heard this request from Feral before, and as in the past, he acquiesced with a small nod and retreated back to the examination room. Feral looked at the two faces and picked the one that looked most like Nora, though it was not a close resemblance. The face would have been gaunt even in life. Pulling the sheet away so that he could get to her right hand, he fished the knife from his pocket and used it as a saw on the corpse’s right pinkie. The bone provided some resistance, but he soon had it off. He wrapped it in a handkerchief, tucked it into his coat pocket along with the knife, and pulled the sheet up over the corpse.

It was a toss-up whether Pulyatkin would notice that the finger had not been missing before. If he did notice, it seemed unlikely that he would do anything about it. In the past when Feral had been alone with the corpses, it had been to alter them in some way to protect someone from the evidence that might be found on or in the body. The two men had an unspoken agreement that these incidents would not be reported. If Pulyatkin did notice the missing finger, he would assume that it pointed to someone whom the mayor didn’t want identified.

Pulyatkin was at a sink, scrubbing scalpels, when Feral returned.

“You find your lady?”

“No,” Feral said.

“That’s good news. She might yet be alive.”

Feral nodded. “I wasn’t here of course.”

Pulyatkin laughed. “You never are.”

Puskis had his mostly full cart in the farthest corner of the Vaults, a section that he had rarely visited in all his years as Archivist. It held records dating back nearly three-quarters of a century. Some of the crimes described by the files were not even crimes anymore, the people in them either dead or long past the point of causing any mayhem.

Puskis pulled a box of matches from the interior pocket of his jacket and contemplated it in his hand. He had thought a lot about this moment in the previous twenty-four hours; about the implications of what he was about to do. Was no memory better than a false memory? For that was what the Vaults were—the City’s official memory. Puskis had based half of his life on the notion that this memory was of vital importance to the City’s proper functioning. Now that this memory was being tampered with, now that the information was no longer pure, was its destruction the only moral choice?