The Vaults (5 page)

He smiled with empty warmth at the Polish congregation as the translator spoke his words in Polish. The Poles nodded and smiled back to him, then stood as he shook hands with each of them in succession, their hands like so many children’s in the grip of his gigantic paw.

He left the room to find Peja waiting for him in the hallway. “Get the Chief for me. My office in an hour. And call Feral. I’ll meet him tonight by the bridge. Ten thirty.”

“Who is this?”

“You know who it is.”

“What do you want?”

“We need to meet.”

“Okay.”

“You know that phone booth across the street from your office?”

“Yes.”

“Be there in three minutes. I’ll call you.”

Poole left the phone booth and strode two blocks to a different one. He was not worried about being watched. Yet. The danger would come later. Just now he was worried about people listening in on the other end of the line, specifically the cops. Or tracing the call, which he’d heard that the police could now do with the help of an operator.

The streets were alive with people rushing about on this weekday morning. The sky was obscured by low, gray clouds and the City seemed to reflect its narrow range of hues. People walked with their shoulders hunched and heads down against a cold wind that swept through the canyon of buildings like a glacial river. Leaves and litter danced crazily in the street and around the legs of seemingly oblivious pedestrians.

He arrived at the second phone booth and entered, pulling his gray fedora down to hide his face, then dialed the number for the phone booth outside Bernal’s building.

“Yes?” Bernal was breathing hard. Poole guessed that he had taken the stairs down.

“Listen carefully because I am not going to stay on the line long. We need to meet face-to-face. Do you know Greer Park?”

“Yes.”

“The pond in Greer Park. On the west side there’s a gazebo.”

“I know it.”

“Tomorrow night at eleven p.m. You will bring five thousand dollars in
small bills. We’ll talk for five, maybe ten minutes. Then I’ll blindfold you and leave you with a timer set for five minutes. When the timer goes off, you will take off your blindfold and go home. I have people who will be watching the area, so if you’re not alone, they’ll know and the pictures will be sent to every newspaper in the City and to your wife. If you leave before the timer goes off, the same thing will happen. Do you understand everything that I have told you?”

“Yes.”

Poole hung up.

Carla was not home when he returned to the apartment. She was at Bernal’s factory helping organize the strike that had begun that day. As always when she was out on these endeavors, he worried about the City’s leading capitalists’ capacity for violence and, perhaps more to the point, that of the mayor and the police. It gnawed at him.

Carla had found him at the end of their time at State, a time when everyone was either vilifying Poole or indebted to him for actions that he himself found repugnant. Carla was oblivious to all of this, however. She didn’t follow football. She was a Red, spending her free time selling ads to keep the City’s underground Communist paper in production or trying to organize workers who did not even share a common language.

Poole liked her because she had a clear vision of right and wrong. She could assess a situation and make the kind of confident judgments that he found he could not. And there was something else. A moral fierceness. A commitment to making things change married to a sense of how they should be. It was a daunting example.

Why had she chosen him in the first place? he sometimes wondered. Some women liked to have the initiative, maybe. Certainly, Carla drove their relationship. That was the way she wanted it and that was the way he wanted it, too. Then there was the physical attraction . . .

Poole walked through their living room, sidestepping the books and newspapers stacked around the worn leather couch and chair that sat facing each other across a coffee table made from an old door. The kitchen was small but had an alcove at the end with a wooden table and two chairs. The window looked out on an alley that, over the past few years, had become the nocturnal domain of a clique of young prostitutes. Poole felt as though he had watched these girls grow up.

Today’s paper lay open on the table with an article circled in red pencil.
He sat down. The headline read “Bomb Blasts Block’s Building.” Next to the headline was a picture of the building, with a ragged hole with smoke billowing out from it. The press had not set the ink accurately, and the picture was a double image.

The article itself was short, nothing much to report. The reporter, Francis Frings, wrote that the investigation would be a priority for the police department. Poole knew what that meant and knew, too, that the danger to Carla had just dramatically increased. Whenever the City’s capitalists were victimized, the suspects were always the same; at the top of the list were the Socialist union organizers.

He considered calling Frings, whom he knew to be sympathetic to the City’s Socialists, but was interrupted by a knock at the door.

Frings woke at nine, his head cleaved into two hemispheres of pain. Squinting his eyes, he took mincing steps to his bureau and opened a small drawer on the top left side, where a small tin held several hand-rolled marijuana cigarettes. He took one, along with a butane lighter, and moved to the window, which he cracked open an inch. He sat with his back against the wall under the window and lit the reefer. He filled his lungs, held the pungent smoke, then exhaled through the side of his mouth, directing the majority of the smoke out the window. It took him five minutes to smoke the entire cigarette in this fashion, and by the time he was done the headache had receded to a level of mild annoyance.

From his seat on the floor he watched Nora Aspen as she slept. Nothing was more demystifying, he thought, as watching this normally glamorous creature with her mouth ajar, her face pale and swollen with sleep. The crimson silk sheets that she favored lay draped over her famous curves, and the idea that hundreds, if not thousands, of men would envy his situation right that second seemed somehow absurd. He, Frank Frings, the paramour of this jazz-singer pinup. It seemed so odd that he almost laughed. Almost.

He stood up and wandered into Nora’s expansive kitchen, where he found a loaf of bread and some Brie. He ate quickly, as though she might wake at any moment and take it from him. His tongue explored the contrast between the firm, creamy cheese and the coarser, crumbly bread, and he eventually becoming consumed with fascination.

He was brought back to the present by the sound of movement from the bedroom, and a moment later Nora appeared in a silk robe over what there was of a nightgown. Her shoulder-length blond hair was muddled, and she looked alluring without arousing in Frings a need to do anything about it.

“Migraine still bothering you?”

“It was.”

“I wish you wouldn’t smoke in the bedroom. I don’t know how many times—”

“I know, I’m sorry.” He smiled in spite of himself, knowing that it was just going to piss her off. “You know that when I wake up like that I just need relief as quickly as possible.”

She glared at his grinning face and returned to her bedroom. “Make some goddamn coffee.”

Nora was in the shower when the phone rang. Frings didn’t answer her phone normally, but somehow found himself with the receiver in his hand without consciously deciding to pick it up.

“Frings?”

“Yeah?”

“It’s Merrick at the paper.”

“Oh. What’s the rumble?”

“Well, we just got a call from a guy. Wouldn’t identify himself. Says he needs to talk to you and no one else will do. Says he’s at this number for the next ten minutes. I ran it by Panos, but wasn’t sure if it was worth rousting you. Anyway, he said to go ahead, so I tried to reach you at your place and then Ed said to try you here. So, I guess you’ve got maybe two or three minutes to ring him.” Merrick read the number.

“Francis Frings?” It was more of a rasp than a proper speaking voice—an effective mask.

“That’s right.”

“Listen, I need to meet with you. Soon. I know things you might find very interesting.”

“Who am I talking to?”

“No. Not now. Listen. I have information about corruption in the mayor’s office. I have information about murders and disappearances.”

“Any evidence to back up all this information?”

“When you hear what I have to say, you’ll be able to find your own evidence. The day after tomorrow. You know the Harrison Bridge? Under the City side. Eleven at night. I’ll watch you arrive and then show myself. We can talk there.”

“I’ll see you then.” Frings sighed. He’d heard this kind of thing many
times before. It never panned out, but neither could he simply ignore it. Should even one of these shadowy tips turn out to have legs . . .

Frings hung up as Nora came into the living room wearing a white terry-cloth robe with her hair up in a towel wrapped like a turban. Drops of water still clung to the skin around her collarbone. Her lips were swollen from the hot shower.

“Who called?”

“Nobody. It was for me.”

Nora swirled the coffee in her cup and tapped her toast around the plate with her middle fingers. She wasn’t eating, and it bothered Frings.

“Not hungry?”

She gave him a long look.

“What’s wrong?”

She shook her head. Light from the kitchen window illuminated half of her face, and Frings saw the concern there and thought it made her look only more . . . desirable. Something about the angle of her mouth, maybe, pursed slightly with anxiety.

“Come on. Spill.” He wondered if she was still angry with him for smoking the reefer.

“I don’t know. It’s nothing.”

Frings waited her out, watching the coffee do circuits inside her cup.

“It’s . . . It’s a feeling I have. Nothing in particular. You know I’m working with Dick Riordan’s band right now, and he’s such a creep. The way he looks at me, and I can
hear
the things he says to the boys.”

Frings nodded sympathetically. Riordan considered himself a rake, he knew, but was harmless. That wasn’t what Nora wanted to hear from him, however, so he kept his mouth shut.

“And I’ve been getting more hate mail. Marty won’t let me see them, but he told me all about it. I get a lot of mail, Frank. Most of it is really nice, but some of it is so vile . . .”

There wasn’t much to say to that, but he tried. “Look, there are unpleasant people in the world. They see someone like you and they want to take you down a peg. Only they don’t have the guts to do anything, so they send you a letter blaming you for all their problems.”

He knew she needed more from him, though she gave him a sad smile for his effort.

After too long a pause he tried again. “I—”

She cut him off. “It’s okay, Frank. It’s nothing. I’m tired is all. I just have tonight and then I’m off for a few days, so I can get some rest. My voice needs a break. Things always seem worse when I’m tired.”

Nora returned to staring into her coffee. Frings wondered who the man on the phone was.

Puskis had not used his home phone in years. It had been even longer than that since he had actually received a call. Which made it all the more unusual that he would receive three phone calls in a single morning.

Puskis lived in an efficiency above a bakery seven blocks from the Vaults. His furnishings were sparse, a single bed in the corner, a small dinner table with one chair, and the easy chair that he now sat in. The floor was bare, but the walls were hung with rugs that his mother had brought from the old country, their colors muted by age. Puskis appreciated the fine logic and order of the symmetrical patterns. He often stared at them from his bed at night, the half-light washing away the color so that only the designs remained.

Puskis was reading the newspaper when the first call came.

“Yes?” he inquired tentatively.

“Mr. Puskis?”

“Yes?”

“Mr. Puskis, this is Lieutenant Draffin. I hate to have to tell you this, sir, but the Chief needs you back in the Vaults. Everyone’s being pulled in.”

“I expect this is about the bombing.”

“I expect it is, sir. Anyway, the Chief says not to come in today. Take this one more day off, sir, but be at the Vaults tomorrow morning. Can you do that, sir?”

“Yes. Yes, that should not be a problem.”

Puskis hung up with a sense of relief and the first feeling of surprised happiness that he had had in a long time. For without the stimulus of his work in the Vaults, he was, frankly, at a loss. With nothing to occupy his mind, he spent his time going over past issues—the difficulty he had faced, for instance, when classifying a recent string of rape/murders on the East Side. Crimes of sexual deviance or murder? In reality, both of course, but which of the two, for the purposes of the Vaults, should be the primary classification? Eventually he had decided on a primary classification of sexual
deviance, due to Abramowitz’s treatment of a similar string of crimes forty years earlier.