The Vaults (9 page)

“I didn’t bring the police.”

“Okay.” Poole showed Bernal his Luger. “I have one, just so you know.” He replaced it in the shoulder holster. “You wearing?”

“No gun.” The man’s face was expressionless. He did not seem scared, though he was certainly tense.

“Mind if I check?”

Bernal spread his arms and legs, keeping silent. Poole, patting up his sides and legs and finally his back, found nothing.

“Okay, open the case.”

Bernal got down on one knee and sprang the two latches. Then he slowly lifted the lid to reveal the stacks of twenty-dollar bills.

“Pick one out from the bottom and show me.”

Bernal dug his hand into the case and removed a packet of bills. He flipped through them, showing Poole that they were all twenties. The wind gusted now, and the trees made a soft noise like fire on wet wood. It would be harder now to hear an approach.

“You know that if you’re short—”

“It’s all there.”

“Okay. The other thing you are going to do for me is, you’re going to meet the union’s demands and end the strike.”

Again, Bernal remained silent, but now his face betrayed him.

“Savvy?” Poole prompted.

“I don’t think you understand,” Bernal began, then thought better of it and tried again. “It’s not something I can just do.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You can believe me or not. I can’t do it.”

The wind was constant, the scent of phosphorus overwhelming the Christmas smell of the pines. The ripples on the water below began gathering into tiny waves.

“You have two days to make it work. I don’t care what you have to do.
I don’t care what excuses you have. Two days. Forty-eight hours. Then the photos go to press.”

Bernal shut his eyes, and picking up the great tension in the man’s body, Poole realized that Bernal would hunt him dead were he ever to suss out his identity. Poole felt a sudden chill and with it the first stirrings of panic at all the sounds that would not be audible beneath the wind.

“Close the case.” His words sounded shrill.

Bernal opened his eyes, his gaze locking on Poole’s. Poole wondered just how effectively the stocking was managing to disguise his features.

“Close the
goddamn case
,” Poole shouted, his nerves rioting.

Bernal dropped to one knee again, closed and latched the case, and then stood up.

“Turn around and walk to the wall.”

Bernal turned his back to Poole and took two steps until he was leaning against a wall overlooking the stirring pond.

“The girl in the apartment,” Poole said, “she wasn’t in on this, got it?”

Bernal shrugged.

“If she’s hurt, it will make things more difficult for you.”

Again Bernal shrugged. Poole grabbed the case with one hand and with the other grabbed Alice’s arm, jerking her up with more force than he intended.

“What time do you have?”

Bernal checked his watch. “Five after eleven.”

“Wait until ten past.”

Bernal nodded.

They half-walked, half-trotted down the path, the wind blowing pine needles and dead leaves around their ankles. Poole pulled the pillowcase off Alice and the stocking from his face and stuffed them in a coat pocket. He had left the bag at the gazebo, but it would not be of any use to the police.

He parted with Alice, giving her one hundred dollars for the night and telling her to go home and keep her head down for a day or two. Then he walked home, every passerby sending his adrenaline spiking. Some actions you can’t backtrack on, and he was now committed to chiseling one of the most powerful men in the City. Poole was about to find out if Bernal’s ruthlessness in business translated to other facets of his life.

He saw a tower of blue smoke rising into the blue and yellow neon of the Theater District across town, but it did not register in his preoccupied mind as anything of significance.

Red Henry sat in his favorite leather chair, feet on the matching ottoman, reading the
Gazette
. Occasionally, when he read something particularly annoying, he snorted in disgust or took quick, deep breaths to calm himself. It was not that the
Gazette
actually ran anything untrue—they were a respectable paper. It was not even their seemingly insatiable need for sniffing around City Hall trying to catch the scent of corruption. Scandal sells papers, and he certainly understood the profit motive. No, what left him particularly aggrieved was that they did not seem to see that when the City did well, the
Gazette
did well. And the City did best when Henry was given some goddamn latitude to make things work.

“That shit-ant Frings,” he mumbled half-audibly.

“What’s that?” His mistress, Siobhan, was stretched across his couch reading Nietzsche or some such crap. She was wearing a green silk sleeping gown that a previous mistress had left. It was alluringly snug and accentuated her long red hair.

Henry looked at her; then decided it was worth answering. “Frings. He wrote a column, thinks he’s going to tie my hands.”

Siobhan returned to her book. “Nobody ties your hands, sugar,” she said evenly.

Henry gave her a heavy-lidded look, then put the paper down, and rose out of the chair, wearing only his slacks from the day, his suspenders hanging loose around his knees. His bare upper body was massive without being particularly fat or muscular. There was simply a lot of him. He stood at the window, taking in his fourteenth-floor penthouse view of the City. Actually, it was the thirteenth floor, but the elevator skipped straight from the twelfth to fourteenth floor. It disgusted him, indulging people’s ridiculous superstitions. Still, one must pick one’s battles and he had plenty.

Henry pressed his palms against the window, slightly farther apart than his shoulders. It looked as though he were holding the City between his hands.

The phone rang, and Henry turned slowly to watch Siobhan’s body moving beneath the silk as she went to the set. She answered, listened, then held out the phone as if she were offering him a martini. He walked slowly across the room.

“Yeah,” he grunted, taking the phone.

“Sir, there’s been another bomb.”

Henry didn’t answer.

“Sir?”

Henry remained silent.

“It was Altabelli’s apartment.” Altabelli ran a meat-processing factory. Along with Block and Bernal and a few others, he was part of Henry’s inner circle.

“Was he there?”

“Sir, yes, he was. But he’s okay. He was in the john, I guess, and now he’s at the hospital, but they said it was only a precaution.”

Henry’s skin prickled with heat. “Call the Chief. Tell him my office in an hour.” He hung up the phone.

“What was that?” Siobhan asked, without looking up from her book. Henry ignored her and walked into his bedroom, where he had a better view of Altabelli’s neighborhood. Sure enough, a spire of smoke was rising up over the Theater District. He watched the smoke for several minutes, its undulations focusing his thoughts somehow, as he considered just how furious his response would need to be to maintain order in the City.

At this very hour of the night, in an airless sitting room illuminated by the flickering light of an oil lamp, Joos Van Vossen flipped through page after page of his tight, meticulous script. Something he had come across needed attention; a detail that had eaten at him throughout the afternoon and evening, its implication unclear. Only as he prepared to retire for the night did the context finally come to him, and now he found the pertinent passage, several hundred pages back.

Typical of a certain type of criminal known colloquially as a “block boss” is Reif DeGraffenreid, who held sway over four blocks on Delft Avenue between Trafalgar and Wellington streets. As with others of his particular type, he collected protection money, kept book, and served as an intermediary for residents who had some concern to take before the gang bosses. The block boss would pay the gangs, either the Bristol Gang or the White Gang or sometimes both, a percentage of his takings and would make himself scarce when they sent their hard men in to do some of the heavy business.

DeGraffenreid’s career was unspectacular when compared to those of his fellow block bosses, though the standard they set was, of course, high. He was purportedly the lover of Janey May Overstreet—known as Queenie—who owned the Bull Ring Saloon, a favorite among hoodlums and roustabouts. This claim is subject to some suspicion as the sum total of her reported assignations and the jealousies they would have inspired surely would have raised the City’s homicide rate noticeably. Nevertheless, this rumor puts in perspective his reputation as a peer of such notables as Jimmy McQuaid in lower Capitol Heights, Hamish Berry (who, in fact, was himself briefly married to Queenie Overstreet), and Johnny Acton, and, in deed, though not style, of Trevor “Vampire” Reid.

As was the case with all block bosses, DeGraffenreid was compelled to tread a careful line during the escalating violence between the Bristol Gang and the White Gang. Initially, as was the case with so many others, he endeavored to ingratiate himself to both sides by performing small tasks unlikely to upset either one too much, such as his alleged arson of the restaurant owned by the Hungarian named Praeger—who had endeavored to run a book without paying either gang its “vig.”

In the end, he fell in with the Bristols, ended the flow of cash from his blocks to the Whites, and performed menial services. His call to greater action, and the eventual end of his criminal career, came when he was ordered to murder the husband of a cousin, Ellis Prosnicki, who was suspected of being a police informant.

DeGraffenreid shot Prosnicki in an alley off Delft Avenue and was arrested within forty-eight hours on the evidence of several eyewitnesses after they were assured by Bristol thugs that they would not be subject to retribution. DeGraffenreid was convicted and thus ends his story for our purposes.

Dipping his pen into a well of green ink, Van Vossen took out a fresh sheet of paper.
The case of Ross Carmargue,
he wrote,
who was running prostitutes on DeGraffenreid’s blocks, confirmed that Prosnicki had received money from the police in exchange for information. However, Prosnicki’s informing did not, ironically, extend to the books being run out of several Bristol-associated restaurants, the transgression of which he actually stood accused.

Finishing this, Van Vossen marked the appropriate sentence with a footnote and put away his work for the night.

Puskis returned to work to find three full pages of file requests. In a deviation from his normal routine, he spent several minutes reordering the slips so that he could make a single, efficient trip to fulfill the requests; he wanted some time between completing this round and the next that would surely come in the midmorning. The second bombing would increase the force’s work exponentially.

As he began his circuit, pushing the squeaking cart before him, he thought about the sensation of fear that he had experienced the previous night. Fear. In his twenty-seven years at the Vaults, he had not once felt fear. Anxiety, pressure, fatigue—all disagreeable states, to be sure—had visited him at one time or another. But never fear. Even now, with the experience so recent, he found he could not summon up the actual feeling, could not remember precisely what it had felt like. This may have been why the blood-etched warning to desist had little effect on him. If anything, it only served to drive him forward.

Having collected the files, Puskis returned to his desk to reorder them in the sequence in which they had been requested. This done, he placed the lot in a box labeled
OUTGOING
and returned to the shelf holding C4583R series, subseries A132, where he had earlier that morning returned the two DeGraffenreid files. Removing the DeGraffenreid file that contained the picture of the real DeGraffenreid, he placed it into the wire cart and headed to the southeast corner of the Vaults, where institutional records were kept.

Unlike the files—which were full of loose sheets of paper and were constantly added to—the institutional records were hardbound tomes that served as official records of criminal-justice activity in the City. Puskis pulled a heavy, black-leather-bound edition from its shelf. The spine read, in gold inlay,
Criminal Court Verdicts—1927
.

The janitors treated the leather bindings of these books on a rotating basis to ward off any cracking or deterioration, so that the entire southeast
corner smelled of leather and protective oils. Abramowitz had called this area the Stable. Puskis himself had never been in a stable, but assumed that Abramowitz had been correct in his association.

The first half of
Criminal Court Verdicts—1927
was composed of indexes that organized the verdicts by last name of the defendant, last name of the judge, charge against the defendant, City district in which the crime took place, and so forth. The second half of the book was a chronological list of the verdicts, including the charge(s), names of prosecutors, defense lawyers, defendant, judge, courtroom, and any additional minutiae that could be of possible interest. The only pieces of information missing from the listings were the names of jurors, who were kept anonymous for their own protection.