The Short Takes

by James Grady

  He turned left, the longest route that let him look back and see where he’d been. Floated each stepping foot out in front of him empty of weight like Victor’d taught him in the insane asylum: aesthetically correct T’ai chi plus a martial arts technique that foiled foot-sweeping ninjas and saved you if the floor beneath your stepping shoe vanished.

  Footsteps! Walking down that intersecting tunnel.

  He hurried after those sounds of someone to ask for directions.

  The footsteps quickened.

  Don’t scare anybody: cough so they know you’re here.

  The footsteps ran.

  Pulled Condor into running, his heart jack hammering his chest.

  Go right—no left, twenty steps until the next juncture of tunnels.

  Whirr of sliding-open doors.

  Dashing around a yellow brick walled corner—

  Elevator—doors closing! He thrust his left arm into the doors’ chomp—they bounced open and tumbled him into the bright metal cage.

  FIST!

  Without thought, with the awareness of ten thousand practices, his right forearm met the fist’s arm, not to block but to blend with that force and divert it from its target.

  The fist belonged to a woman.

  And in the instant she struggled to recover her diverted balance, the palm of Condor’s left hand rocketed her up and back so she bounced off the rear wall of the elevator as those metal doors closed behind him.

  The cage groaned toward the surface.

  “Leave me alone!” she yelled.

  “You punched me!”

  His attacker glared at him through black-framed glasses. Short dark hair. A thin silver loop pierced the right corner of her lower lip. Black coat. Hands clenched at her sides, not up in an on-guard position. She had the guts to fight but not the know-how.

  “You chased me in here!” she yelled. “Don’t deny it! I finally caught you! Stop it! You keep watching me! Doing things!”

  “I don’t do things!”

  “Always lurking. Hiding. Sneaking. Straightening my reading room desk. KNOCK IT OFF! Weeks you’ve been at this—not gonna take it next time I’ll punch—”

  “Weeks?” he interrupted. “I’ve been doing whatever for weeks? Here?”

  The elevator jerked to a stop.

  Doors behind Condor slid open.

  He loomed between the glaring woman and the only way out of this cage.

  The elevator doors whirred shut.

  The cage rumbled upwards.

  He sent his right hand inside his sports jacket and she let it go there, confirming she was no trained killer. Pulled out his Library of Congress I.D. Showed it to her.

  “Activation Date is today, my first day here. I can’t be the one who’s been stalking you.”

  The elevator jerked to a stop.

  The doors behind Condor slid open.

  “Oh.” She nodded to the open elevator doors. He backed out the cage. She followed him into a smooth walled hall as the elevator doors closed. “Um, sorry.”

  “No. You did what you could to be not sorry. Smart.”

  “Why were you chasing me?”

  “I’m trying to find an exit.”

  “This is a way out,” she said and led him through the castle. “I’m Kim.”

  He told her he was Vin.

  “You must think I’m nuts.”

  “We all have our own roads through Crazytown.”

  She laughed at what she thought was a joke, but couldn’t hold on to happy.

  “I don’t know what to do,” said Kim. “Sometimes I think I’m imagining it all. I feel somebody watching me, but when I whirl around, nobody’s there.”

  “Chinese martial arts say eyes have weight,” Vin told her.

  “I’m from Nebraska,” she said. “Not China.”

  Kim looked at him, really looked at him.

  “You’re probably a great father.” She sighed. “I miss my dad and back home, though I wouldn’t want to live there.”

  “But why live here?”

  “Are you kidding? Here I get to be part of what people can use to make things better, have better lives, be more than who they were stuck being born.”

  She frowned: “Why do you live here?”

  “I’m not ready to die,” he said. “Here or anywhere.”

  “You’re a funny guy, Vin. Not funny ha-ha, but not uh-oh funny either.”

  They walked past a blue-shirted cop at the metal detector arch by the entrance. The cop wore a holstered pistol of a make Vin knew he once knew.

  Just past the security line waited a plastic tub beneath an earn­est hand-inked sign:

  OLD CELLPHONES FOR CHARITY!

  Funny guy Vin pictured himself tossing the CIA’s flip-phone into that plastic bin. A glance at the dozen cellphones awaiting charitable recycling told him that would be cruel: His flip-phone was so uncool ancient that all the other phones would pick on it.

  Condor and not his daughter stepped out into March’s blue sky chill.

  She buttoned her black cloth coat. “Would you do me a favor? You’re new, so you can’t be whoever it is. Come by my desk in the Adams reading room around noon tomorrow. Go with me to my office. See what I’m talking about, even if it’s not there.”

  Standing in that chilly sunshine on a Capitol Hill street, Condor heard an echo from the DOSP: “Rescuer is not in your job description.”

  Sometimes you gotta do what you do just to be you.

  “OK,” said Condor.

  Kim gave him her LOC business card, thanked him and said goodbye, walked away into the DC streets full of people headed somewhere they seemed to want to go.

  “Remember how to get home?” Emma’d said.

  An eleven-minute walk past the red brick Eastern Market barn where J. Edgar Hoover worked as a delivery boy a century before. Condor strolled past stalls selling fresh fruit and aged cheese, slabs of fish and red meat, flowers. He found himself in line at the market grill, got a crab cake sandwich and a lemonade, ate at one of the tall tables and watched the flow of mid-day shoppers, stay-home parents and nannies, twenty-somethings who worked freelance laptop gigs to pay for bananas and butchered chickens.

  Where he lived was a blue brick townhouse on Eleventh Street, N.E., a narrow five rooms, one-and-a-half baths rental. No one ambushed him when he stepped into the living room. No one had broken the dental floss he’d strung across the stairs leading up to the bed he surfed in dreams. A flat screen TV reflected him as he plopped on the couch, caught his breath in this new life where nothing, nothing was wrong.

  At 8:57 the next morning, he snapped on the lights in his work cave.

  Counted the coffins: Seven.

  Checked the computer’s spreadsheet: Nine.

  Crazy or not, that’s still the count.

  Sometimes crazy is the way to go.

  Or so he told himself when he’d flushed the green pills down the blue townhouse’s toilet at dawn. Emma’d report his adverse reaction, so probably there’d be no Code Two Alert when that medication wasn’t seen in Condor’s next urine test.

  His thirteen other pills lined up on his kitchen counter like soldiers.

  Condor held his cooking knife that looked like the legend Jim Bowie carried at the Alamo. Felt himself drop into a deep stance, his arms curving in front of his chest. The Bowie knife twirled until the spine of the blade pressed against the inside of his right forearm and the razor sharp cutting edge leered out like he’d been taught decades before by a Navy SEAL in a lower East Side of Manhattan black site.

  Condor exhaled into his here-and-now, used the knife to shave powder off five pills prescribed to protect him from himself, from seeing or feeling or thinking that isn’t part of officially approved sensible reality. Told himself that a shade of unapproved crazy mig
ht be the smart way to go, because standing in his office cave on the second morning of work, it didn’t make sense that the approved coffin count was (still) off by two.

  He muscled a cardboard box full of books onto a waist-high, brown metal cart, rolled the burdened cart over to the seven empty coffins and lost his virginity.

  His very first one. The first book he pulled from that box bulging with books recycled from a closed US air base near a city once decimated by Nazi purification squads and then shattered by Allied bombers. The first volume whose fate he decided: The List of Adrian Messenger by Philip MacDonald.

  Frank Sinatra played a gypsy in the black and white movie.

  That had to make it worth saving, right? He leafed through the novel. Noted only official stamps on the pages. Put that volume on the cart for the Preserve stacks.

  Book number two was even easier to save: a ragged paperback. Blue ink cursive scrawl from a reader on the title page: “You never know where you really are.” That didn’t seem like a code and wasn’t a secret, so no security breach. The book was Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. Sure, gotta save that on the cart.

  And so it went. He found a bathroom outside his cave, a trip he would have made more often if he’d also found coffee. Books he pulled out of shipping boxes got shaken, flipped through and skimmed until the Preserve cart could hold no more.

  All seven pine wood crates were still empty, coffins waiting for their dead.

  Can’t meet Kim without dooming—recycling—at least one book.

  The black plastic bag yielded a hefty novel by an author who’d gone to a famous graduate school MFA program and been swooned over by critics. That book had bored Condor. He plunked it into a blond pine coffin. Told himself he was just doing his job.

  Got out of there.

  Stood in the yellow cinderblock hall outside his locked office.

  If I were a spy, I’d have maps in my cell phone. I’d have a Plan with a Fallback Plan and some Get Out of Dodge go-to. If I were a spy, an agent, an operative, somebody’s asset, my activation would matter to someone who cared about me, someone besides the targets and the rip-you-ups and the oppo(sition), none of whom should know I’m real and alive and on them. If I were still a spy, I’d have a mission.

  Feels like forty years since I was just me.

  Terrifying.

  No wonder I’m crazy.

  Outside where it would rain, the three castles of the Library of Congress rose across open streets from Congress’s Capitol Dome and the pillars of the Supreme Court because knowledge is clearly vital to how we create laws and dispense justice.

  And yes, the swooping art decco John Adams castle where Condor worked is magnificent with murals and bronze doors and owls as art everywhere.

  And true, the high-tech concert hall James Madison LOC castle that looms across the street from the oldest fortress of the House of Representatives once barely kept its expensively-customized-for-LOC-use edifice out of the grasp of turf hungry Congressmen who tried to disguise their grab for office space as fiscally responsible.

  But really, the gem of the LOC empire with its half-billion dollar global budget and 3,201 employees is the LOC’s Thomas Jefferson building: gray marble columns rising hundreds of feet into the air to where its green metal cupola holds the “Torch of Learning” copper statue and cups a mosaic sky over the castle full of grand marble staircases, wondrous murals and paintings, golden gilt and dark wood, chandeliers, a main reading room as glorious as a cathedral, and everywhere, everywhere, books, the words of men and women written on the ephemera of dead trees.

  Down in the castles’ sub-basement of yellow tunnels, Condor walked beneath pipes and electrical conduits and wires, past locked doors and lockers. He rode the first elevator he found up until the steel cage dinged and left him in a cavern of stacks—row after row of shelves stuffed with books, books in boxes in the aisles, books everywhere.

  He drifted through the musty stacks, books brushing the backs of both his hands, his eyes blurred by the lines of volumes, each with a number, each with a name, an identity, a purpose. He circled around one set of stacks and saw him standing there.

  Tom Joad. Battered hat, sun-baked lean Okie face, shirt missing a button, stained pants, scruffy shoes covered with the sweat dust of decades.

  “Where you been?” whispered Condor.

  “Been looking. How ’bout you?”

  “Been trying,” said Condor.

  A black woman wearing a swirl of color blouse under a blue LOC smock stepped into the aisle where she saw only Condor and said: “Were you talking to me?”

  The silver-haired man smiled something away. “Guess I was talking to myself.”

  “Sugar,” she said, “everybody talks to somebody.”

  He walked off like he knew what he was doing and where he was going, saw a door at the end of another aisle of books, stepped through it—

  BAM!

  Collision hits Condor’s thighs, heavy runs over hurts his toes—Cart!

  A metal steel cart loaded with books slams into Condor as it’s being pushed by …

  Brown bird Fran. Pushing a metal cart covered by a blue LOC smock.

  “Oh, my Lord, I’m so sorry!” Fran hovered as Condor winced. “I didn’t see you there! I didn’t expect anybody!”

  She blinked back to her balance, sank back to her core. Her eyes drilled his chest.

  “Vin, isn’t it? Why aren’t you wearing your I.D.? LOC policy requires visible issued I.D. The DOSP will not be pleased.”

  She leaned closer: “I won’t tell him we saw each other if you won’t.”

  “Sure,” he said. And thus is a conspiracy born.

  “That’s better.” She straightened the blue smock over the books it covered on her cart. “You should wear it anyway. If you’re showing your I.D., you can go anywhere and do darn near anything. For your job, I mean.”

  He fished his I.D. from inside the blah blue sports jacket issued him by a CIA dust master who costumed America’s spies. Asked her how to get to the reading room.

  “Oh, my: you’re a floor too high. There’s a gallery above that reading room back the direction I came. You can’t miss it.” She tried to hook him with a smile. “How soon will you out-process the next shipment of inventory?”

  “You mean pack books in the coffins to be pulped? It’s only my second day.”

  “Oh, dear. You really must keep on schedule and up to speed. There are needs to be met. The DOSP has expectations.”

  “Must be nice,” said Condor. “Having expectations.”

  He thanked her and headed the direction she said she’d come.

  Went through the door labeled “Gallery.”

  That door opened to a row of taller-than-him bookshelves he followed to one of six narrow slots for human passage to the guardrail circling above the reading room with its quaint twentieth century card catalog and research desks.

  Nice spot for recon. Sneak down any slot. Charlie Sugar (Counter Surveillance) won’t know which slot you’ll use. Good optics. Target needs to crank his or her head to look up. Odds are, you spot that move in time to fade the half-step back to not be there.

  Condor moved closer to the balcony guardrail. His view widened with each step.

  Kim sat at a research desk taking notes with an iPad as she studied a tan book published before a man in goggles flew at Kitty Hawk. Kim wore a red cardigan sweater. Black glasses. Silver lip loop. A glow of purpose and focus. She raised her head to—

  Condor eased back to where he could not see her and thus she did not see him. He walked behind bookshelves, found the top of a spiral steel staircase.

  You gotta love a spiral steel staircase.

  That steel rail slid through his hand as the world he saw turned around the axis of his spiraling descent. The reading room. Researchers at desks. Kim bent ov
er her work. A street op named Quiller from a novel Condor’d saved loitered by the card catalog with a bespectacled mole hunter named Smiley. The stairs spiraled Condor toward a mural, circled him around, but those two Brits were gone when he stepped off the last stair.

  Kim urged him close: “He’s here! I just felt him watching me!”

  “That was me.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Two tactical choices,” he answered. Her anxious face acquired a new curiosity at this silver-haired man’s choice of words. “Maintain status or initiate change.”

  “Change how?”

  Condor felt the cool sun of Kabul envelop him, an outdoor marketplace café where what was supposed to happen hadn’t. Said: “We could move.”

  Kim led him into the depths of the Adams building and a snack bar nook with vending machines, a service counter, a bowl of apples. They bought coffee in giant paper cups with snapped on lids, sat where they could both watch the open doorway.

  “Oh, my God,” whispered Kim. “That could be him!”

  Walking into the snack bar came a man older and a whiff shorter than her, a stocky man with shaggy brown hair and a mustache, a sports jacket, and shined shoes.

  “I don’t know his name,” whispered Kim. “I think he tried to ask me out once! And maybe he goes out of his way to walk past where I am! When I feel eyes on me, he’s not there, nobody is, but it could be, it must be him.”

  The counterwoman poured hot coffee into a white paper cup for Mustache Man. He sat at an empty table facing the yogurt display case. At the angle he chose, the refrigerated case’s glass door reflected blurred images of Condor and Kim.

  Life or luck or tradecraft?

  Condor told her: “Walk out. Go to your office. Wait for my call.”

  “What if something happens?”

  “Something always happens. Don’t look back.”

  Kim marched out of the snack nook.

  Mustache Man didn’t follow her.

  Call him Vin. Call him Condor.

  He thumb-popped the plastic lid loose on his cup of hot coffee.

  Slowed time as he inhaled from his heels. Exhaled a fine line. Unfolded his legs to rise away from the table without a sound, without his chair scooting on the tiled floor.