The Short Takes

by James Grady

  Today is what you got. And what’s got you.

  What got him, he never knew—a sound, a tingling, a corner-­of-his-eye motion, whatever: he whirled left to that wall of shelved books, slammed his palms against half a dozen volumes so they shot back off their shelf and knocked away the books shelved in the next aisle, a gap blasted in walls of books through which he saw …

  Mustached and eyes startled wide Rich Bechtel.

  “Oops!” yelled Condor. “Guess I stumbled again.”

  He flowed around the shelf, a combat ballet swooped into the aisle where Rich—suit, tie, mustache—stood by a jumble of pushed-to-the-floor books.

  Condor smiled: “Surprised to see me here?”

  “Surprised, why … ?”

  “Yes, why are you here?”

  The mustached man shrugged. “It’s a cut-through to go get good coffee.”

  “Did you cut through past the balcony of the reading room?”

  “Well, sure, that’s a door you can take.”

  “So why were you hiding back here?” said Condor.

  Rich shrugged. “I was avoiding call me Fran.”

  Confession without challenge: As if we were friends, thought Condor.

  “A while back,” continued Rich, “I was over here in Adams working on a Congressional study of public policy management approaches. One of the books I had on my desk was a rare early translation of the Dao De Jing, you know, the …”

  “The Chinese Machiavelli.”

  “More than that, but yes, a how power works manual that Ronald Reagan quoted. Fran mistook it for something like the Koran. She walked by my research desk, spotted the title and went off on me about how dare I foster such thought. Things got out of hand. She might have pushed my books off the desk, could have been an accident, but …”

  “But what?”

  “I walked away. When I see her now, I keep walking. Or try not to be seen.”

  Condor said: “Nobody could make up that story.”

  The caught man frowned. “Why would I make up any story?”

  “We all make up stories. And sometimes we put real people in the stories in our heads. That can be … confusing.”

  “I’m already confused enough.” Rich laughed. “What are you doing?”

  “Leaving. Which way are you headed?”

  Rich pointed the way Condor’d come, left with a wave and a smile.

  The chug chug chug of a train.

  One aisle over, between walls of books, railroad tracks ran through a lush green somewhere east of Eden, steel rails under a coming this way freight train and sitting huddled on top of one metal car rode troubled James Dean.

  Condor left that cavern of stacks, walked to the Gallery where he could see the empty researchers’ desks on the floor of the reading room below. Checked his watch. Hoped he wouldn’t need to pee. Some surveillances mean no milk cartons.

  What does it mean when you smell almonds?

  Don’t think about that. Fade into the stacks. Be part of what people never notice.

  On schedule, Kim with her silver lip loop and a woman wearing a boring professional suit walked in to the reading room. The roommate left. Kim settled at her desk. He gave the counter-surveillance twenty more minutes, went to his office. No coffins waited outside against the yellow wall from a delivery by Jeremy: Watch for that.

  So Condor left his office door open.

  Sank into his desk chair.

  Footsteps: outside the open door in the hall, hard shoes on the concrete floor of the yellow underground tunnel. Footsteps clacking louder as they came closer, closer …

  She glides past his open door in three firm strides, strong legs and a royal blue coat. Silver-lined dyed blond hair floats on her shoulders, lush mouth, high cheekbones. Cosmic gravity pulls his bones and then she’s gone, her click click click of high heels turning the basement corner, maybe to the elevator and out for mid-morning coffee.

  Don’t write some random wondrous woman into your story.

  Don’t be a stalker.

  But he wasn’t, wouldn’t, he only looked, ached to look more, had no time to think about her, about how maybe her name was Lulu, how maybe she wore musk—

  Almonds.

  Up from behind his desk, out the lock-it door and gone, up the stairs two at a time, past the guards on the door to outside, in the street, dialing that number with the CIA cell phone. A neutral voice answered, waltzed Condor to the hang-up. He made it into his blue townhouse, stared at his closed turquoise door for nineteen minutes until that soft knock.

  Opened his door to three bullet-eyed jacket men.

  Emma showed up an hour later, dismissed them.

  Sat on a chair across from where Condor slumped on the couch.

  Said: “What did you do?”

  “I called the cops,” answered the silver-haired man who was her responsibility.

  “Your old CIA Panic Line number. Because you say you found C4 plastic explosives. But you don’t know where. You just smelled it, the almond smell.”

  “In the Library of Congress.”

  “That’s a lot of where. And C4’s not as popular as it used to be.”

  “Still works. Big time boom. Hell of a kill zone.”

  “If you know how to get it or make it and what you’re doing.”

  “You ever hear of this thing called the Internet?”

  She threw him a change-up: “Tell me about the dirty books.”

  “You know everything I know because I told those jacket men, they told you. Sounds crazy, right? And since I’m crazy, that’s just about right. Or am I wrong?”

  Emma watched his face.

  “They aren’t going to do anything, are they? CIA. Homeland Security.”

  “Oh, they’re going to do something,” said Emma. “No more Level Five, they’re going to monitor you Level Three. Increase your surprise random home visits. Watch me watching you in case I mess up and go soft and don’t recommend a Recommit in time to avoid any embarrassments.”

  “How did you keep them from taking me away now?”

  “I told them you might have imbibed early and contra-­indicated with your meds.”

  “Imbibed?”

  “Tomorrow’s St. Patrick’s day.” She shook her head. “I believe you believe. But you’re trying to be who you were then. And that guy’s gone into who you are now.”

  “Vin,” he said. “Not Condor.”

  “Both, but in the right perspective.”

  “Ah,” said Condor. “Perspective.”

  “What’s yours? You’ve been free for a while now. How is it out here?”

  “Full of answers and afraid of questions.”

  She softened. “How are the hallucinations?”

  “They don’t interfere with—”

  “—with you functioning in the real world?”

  “The real world.” He smiled. “I’ll watch for it. What about Kim’s stalker?”

  “If there’s a stalker, you’re right. She should call the cops.”

  “Yeah. Just like I did. That’ll solve everything.”

  “This is what we got,” said Emma.

  “One more thing we got,” said Vin. “At work, I can’t take it, packing coffins.”

  “Is it your back?” said Emma. “Do you need—”

  “I need more carts to go to Preserve. I need to be able to save more books.”

  Emma probed. Therapist. Monitor. Maybe friend. “Those aren’t just books to you. The ones at work. The novels.”

  Condor shrugged. “Short stories, too.”

  “They’re things going to the end they would go to without you. You act like you’re a Nazi working a book-burning bonfire. You’re not. Why do you care so much?”

  “We sell our souls to the stories we know,”
said Condor. “The more kinds of stories, the bigger we are. The better or truer or cooler the story …”

  His shrug played out the logic in her skull.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” said Emma. “About the cart.”

  “Carts,” corrected Condor.

  “Only if we’re lucky.”

  She walked out of his rented house.

  Left him sitting there.

  Alone.

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

  Next morning, he dressed for war.

  Black shoes good for running. Loose black jeans not likely to bind a kick. His Oxford blue shirt might rip if grabbed. He ditched the dust master’s sports coat for the black leather zip-up jacket he bought back when an ex-CIA cocaine cowboy shot him in Kentucky. The black leather jacket let him move, plus it gave the illusion of protection from a slashing knife or exploding bomb.

  Besides, he thought when he saw his rock ’n’ roll reflection walking in the glass of the Adams building door, if I’m going down, I’m going down looking like me.

  Seven pine wood crates waited stacked against the yellow wall outside his cave.

  Condor caressed the coffins like a vampire. Inhaled their essence. Lifted their lids to reveal their big box of empty: smooth walls, carpentered bottoms of reinforcing slats making a bed of rectangular grooves for books to lay on and die. His face hoovered each of those seven empty coffins, but only in one caught a whiff of almonds.

  He tore through his office. The computer said nine coffins waited outside against his wall. Desk drawers: still empty, no weapons. The DOSP’s fountain pen filled his eyes. Use what you got. He stuck the pen in his black leather jacket.

  Two women working a table outside the Adams building reading room spotted a silver-haired man coming their way. They wore green sweaters. The younger one’s left cheek sported a painted-on green shamrock. She smiled herself into Condor’s path.

  “Happy St. Patrick’s Day! You need some holiday green. Want to donate a dollar to the Library and get a shamrock tattoo? Good luck and keeps you from getting pinched. How about one on your hand? Unless you want to go wild. Cheek or—”

  The silver-haired stranger pressed his trigger finger to the middle of his forehead.

  “Oh, cool! Like a third eye!”

  “Or a bullet hole.”

  Her smile wilted.

  He stalked into the reading room. Clerks behind the counter. Scholars at research desks. There, at her usual place, sat Kim.

  She kept her cool. Kept her eyes on an old book. Kept her cell phone visible on her desk, an easy grab and a no contact necessary signal. He kept a casual distance between where he walked and where she sat, headed to the bottom of a spiral staircase.

  Playing the old man let him take his time climbing those silver steel steps, a spiraling ascent that turned him through circles to the sky. His first curve toward the reading room let him surveil the head tops of strangers, any of whom could be the oppo. The stairs curved him toward the rear wall that disappeared into a black and white Alabama night where a six-year-old girl in a small town street turns to look back at her family home as a voice calls “Scout.” Condor’s steel stairs path to the sky curved …

  Fran.

  Standing on the far side of the reading room. Condor felt the crush of her fingers gripping the push handle of a blue smock covered cart. Saw her burning face.

  As she raged across the room at silver lip-ringed Kim.

  You know crazy when you see it. When crazy keeps being where crazy happened.

  Obsession. Call it lust that Fran dared not name. Call it fearful loathing of all that. Call it outrage at Kim’s silver lip loop and how Kim represented an effrontery to The Way Things Are Supposed to Be. Call it envy or anger because that damn still young woman with soft curves Fran would never be asked to touch got to do things Fran never did. Or could. Or would. Got to feel things, have things, be things. Lust, envy, hate: complications beyond calculation fused into raging obsession and made Fran not a twittering brown bird, made her a jackal drooling for flesh and blood.

  For Kim.

  Kim sat at her desk between where Fran seethed and where Condor stood on spiral silver stairs to the sky. Kim turned a page in her book.

  Fran’s eyes flicked from her obsession—spotted Vin. Saw him see the real her. Snarled, whirled the cart around and drove hard toward the reading room’s main doors.

  Cut her off! You got nothing! She’s got a knife!

  Condor clattered down the spiral steel stairs, hurried across the reading room. He had no proof. No justifiable right to scream “HALT!” or call the cops—and any cops would trigger jacket men to snatch him away to the secret Maine hospital’s padded cell or to that suburban Virginia crematorium where no honest soul would see or smell his smoke swirling away into the night sky.

  He caught his breath at Kim’s desk: “Not a mustache, a her!”

  Kim looked to the main door where he’d pointed, but all she saw beyond Vin charging there was the shape of someone pushing a cart into the elevator.

  Vin ran to the elevator, saw its glowing arrow: i

  Over there, race down those stairs, hit the basement level—

  He heard rolling wheels from around that corner.

  Rammed at Condor came the blue smocked cart.

  That he caught with both hands—pulled more. Jerked Fran off balance. Pushed the book cart harder than he’d ever pushed the blocking sled in high school football. Slammed her spine against a yellow cinderblock wall. Pinned her there: Stalker had a knife and a woman like Fran with knife-tipped shoes once almost killed James Bond.

  Condor yelled: “Why Kim?”

  “She doesn’t get to be her! Me, should be her, have her, stop her!”

  The fought-over cart shook between them. Its covering blue smock slid off.

  Books tumbled off the cart. Books summoned from heartland libraries to our biggest cultural repository where they disappeared on official business. Condor registered a dozen versions of the same title banned in high schools across America because.

  “You filled the coffins! Tricked libraries all over the country into sending their copies of certain titles here to the mothership of libraries! You murdered those books!” Condor twisted the cart to keep Fran rammed against the wall. “You’re a purger, too!”

  “Books put filth in people’s heads! Ideas!”

  “Our heads can have any ideas they want!”

  “Not in my world!” Fran twisted and leveraged the cart up and out from under Condor’s push. The cart crashed on its side. He flopped off his feet, fell over it.

  Wild punches hit him and he whirled to his feet, knocked her away.

  Yelled: “Where are the coffins?! Where’s the C4?!”

  “I see you!” She yelled as the book she threw hit his nose.

  Pain flash! He sensed her kick, closed his thighs but her shoe still slammed his groin. He staggered, hit the stone wall, hands snapping up to thwart her attack—

  That didn’t come.

  Gone. Jackal Fran was gone, running down the basement tunnel.

  Cell phone, pull out your cell phone.

  “Kim!” he gasped to the woman who answered his call. “Watch out, woman my age Fran and she’s not a brown bird, she’s the jackal after you!

  “Don’t talk! Reading room, right? Stay in plain sight but get to the check-out counter … Yes … The library computer … Search employee data base— No, not Fran anybody, search for Jeremy somebody!”

  A ghost of Fran whispered: “I used to have your job working with him.”

  Over the phone came intel: an office/shop door number, some castle hole.

  The DOSP’s pen tattooed that number on the back of his left hand.

  He hung up and staggered through the underground tunnel.

 
Scan the numbers on the closed doors, looking for numbers with an SB prefix whatever that— Sub-basement! Like my office! One more level down.

  At a stairwell, he flipped open his ancient phone and dialed another number: “Rich it’s Vin, you gotta go help somebody right now! Protect her. Tell her I sent you. In Adams Reading Room, named Kim, silver lip loop … I thought you’d noticed her! And that’s all right, you just … OK, but when you couldn’t find the right words you walked on, right? Go now! … Don’t worry, nobody knows everything. Play it with what you’ve got.”

  He jogged through yellow tunnels like he was a rat running a maze, I’m too old for this, staggering to a closed brown metal door, its top half fogged glass.

  Condor caught his breath outside that door. The door handle wouldn’t turn. He saw a doorbell, trigger-fingered its button, heard it buzz.

  The click of a magnetic lock. The door swings open.

  Come on in.

  Jeremy stands ten steps into this underground lair beside a workbench and holding a remote control wand. The door slams shut behind Condor.

  “What do you want?” said a caretaker of this government castle.

  Caretaker, like in the novel Fran tried to murder, some story about sex and an insane asylum and who was crazy. Stick to what’s sane. Condor said: “The coffins.”

  “They’re here already?”

  Scan the workshop: no sign of the two missing coffins. A refrigerator. Wall sink. Trash tub of empty plastic water bottles. The back of an open laptop faced Condor from the workbench where the tech wizard of this cave stood. Jeremy tossed the remote control beside an iPhone cabled to the laptop.

  “Oh,” said Jeremy. “You meant the crates for the books.”

  He took a step closer. “Why do you care?”

  “There’s something you don’t know you know.”

  “I know enough.”

  Off to Jeremy’s left waited the clear plastic roller tub holding half a dozen cell phones and its color printer sign proclaiming OLD TELEPHONES FOR CHARITY!

  One heartbeat. Two.

  “I didn’t know you were the one collecting charity phones.”

  “What do you know?” Jeremy eased another step closer.