“Let’s surprise him with the truth.” I winked, which she didn’t like, but I didn’t care. “I’m a graduate student at Xavier University studying architecture. I find Drax absolutely fascinating. I want to know everything about every Drax project. You should too.”
I wanted to warn her to beware her employer, that Drax money funded humanity’s greatest crime, but such words would tell Rudolph too much. I also wanted her to understand, for only a second, the dust and yellow paint and stillness that clouded my dreams.
She stared back at me.
I let my gaze drift to the model of the missile silo, like an unmarked grave. My heart sank further. What was I trying to prove and to whom? Rachel Nolan wasn’t a Drax loyalist; she simply had no reason for disloyalty. Barely out of school, she needed a paycheck, and Drax probably had an opening for a pretty woman. Not her fault for being pretty.
“You helped me once,” I said. “You have a conscience. Don’t let Drax steal that from you.”
She peered as if trying to see behind my eyes. “They won’t back down.” Something in her face softened, and she spoke quietly. “You know that.”
“Neither will I.” I checked my watch. “I’ve been here long enough.” And I had, long enough for Tricia to get safely belowground.
. . . . .
From a bench across the street, I killed another hour in plain sight of Drax, a safety cushion of distraction to give Tricia ample time to exit Alpha Portal and fade into the woods.
We would meet at a café near the studio to share news of her progress, but not for a few hours. I welcomed the delay, a chance to depressurize. The memory of the silo model fresh, my rage bubbled and nagged and owned my thoughts.
I ambled halfway through downtown before swinging south and crossing the Roebling Bridge over the Ohio River. I paused under the north tower and stared up, remembering when Reuben and I barely made it to the top. The last few feet required us to turn our heads sideways and drain our lungs to squeeze through a slit in the brick superstructure. But our efforts paid off. By the time it was dark, downtown had spread before us like a black carpet studded with jewels, and Riverfront Stadium glowed electric white after a doubleheader.
On the Kentucky side, I dropped down into Covington and burned up time dodging litter on a riverbank footpath. I rehearsed a verbal assault on Rudolph for publicly displaying the missile silo without acknowledging, let alone honoring, my father. You callous son of a bitch, I said in my fantasy, and Rudolph replied, You floating piece of river trash. I tried to shove the thoughts from my mind but they crept back. Even my imagination could be cruel.
Around eight p.m., I stepped off a northbound bus and into the agreed-upon café, but Tricia wasn’t there. I returned to the street as an ambulance raced by, its siren Dopplering and red emergency lights bouncing off shop windows and apartment buildings. I quickened my pace. In a block, I smelled the smoke. In another block, I saw it rising beyond a strip mall.
I rounded the final corner and spotted Tricia standing with her back to me, shoulders slumped, staring straight ahead at an unbelievable sight. The fears I’d tried to trivialize roared into reality. Two pumpers and one hook and ladder surrounded Blumenfeld Photography, the squat white building alive with flames at one end and dead with char at the other. One fire truck blasted water into the front lobby, and I imagined blackened desk photos of the receptionist’s kids blown to bits by the high-pressure jets, the old magazines with Alfred’s best work as a photojournalist shredded and soaked. The other fire truck attacked the brightest blaze with a drenching shower from above, the roof likely collapsed. Above the flames, the apartment building on the rear block swayed and shimmered in the radiating heat. I felt nauseous.
I watched for signs of life but saw only firemen keeping a safe distance and chasing flare-ups with arcs of water. No one entered the building and no one came out.
CHAPTER 21
It must’ve been around three a.m. Tricia’s living room had no clock and if I were to glance at my watch, she might think me impatient, which I wasn’t. I would stay as long as she wanted me there.
Over the past six or seven hours, we’d spoken with doctors and firemen and EMTs—each encounter draining us. My limbs felt jellied and my sinuses stuffed with cotton wadding.
Tricia’s one-bedroom apartment smelled of sweat and smoke, the sweat from the two of us, the smoke from the pile of debris on the floor between us—all that remained of Blumenfeld Photography.
No one witnessed anyone rescuing the items from the burning building, and by the time the firemen arrived, the gathering was done. But Alfred must’ve been involved because I recognized the envelope of negatives from my train station photo shoot, and only Alfred knew the combination to his wall safe.
I broke a minute of silence. “A couple of years back, a fire whipped through the hills south of LA, burning a neighborhood one house after another. The authorities allowed residents only time enough to salvage what they could carry by hand in one trip.”
Tricia stared at me with red-rimmed and sunken eyes, too exhausted to show either interest or irritation at my monologue.
“Some researcher interviewed each resident to find out what they grabbed.” Tricia’s eyebrows raised a smidge. “Some people took crazy worthless things, like old stuffed animals—”
“Worthless to you, maybe.”
I knew what she meant. I’d gladly rescue my dad’s landscape paintings from an inferno, though they’d be dispensable to someone else. “But some people became machinelike with what they grabbed—birth certificates, passports, family photo album, Grandma’s handwritten recipe book.” I examined my hands, sooty from unloading the debris pile from Tricia’s car. “The researcher asked if they’d thought it through ahead of time, or made a list.”
This time her interest seemed real, and I was glad to provide a distraction from our troubles.
“But they hadn’t,” I said.
“Spontaneous?”
“Yeah.”
She looked down and shook her head. “I don’t think I’m that… put together.”
“Yes, you are. That’s your grandfather through and through. It’s in the genes.”
She met my eyes again, the sadness back. “Smith too?”
I glanced at the heap. “Sure looks like it.” The sooty pile included the corkboard panels and notebooks from Smith’s war room.
“Who’s next of kin?”
Smith had a son, now long gone. “We’ll find out. His real name was Angelo Russo.”
When rescuers had first arrived, they found Alfred outside on the gravel, unconscious but breathing, his retrieved keepsakes strewn nearby. He showed signs of smoke inhalation—singed hair, facial burns, swollen eyes, soot around lips and nostrils. Rescuers found Smith in a hallway. Attempts to revive failed. “Had he been carrying anything?” I’d asked the fireman, but he didn’t think so.
“Maybe Mr. Smith got out all the important stuff,” I said to Tricia and braced for What’s the fucking point?
But she said nothing. After all, what was the fucking point? Our boondoggle to bring down Drax had never seemed so hopeless.
I eased from my chair and sat cross-legged on the floor. Alfred had used a waste bin as a last-ditch collection container. I flipped through the contents, favoring each item like a museum piece. There were a half-dozen file folders—insurance, contracts, client listings—and a thin envelope of cash. I found no awards, but he’d included the framed photo of himself and the reporter receiving their trophy cups. “That man’s disappearance really haunts him, doesn’t it?”
“Day and night.”
I pulled out the coffee table book of Ansel Adams photographs and scrunched up m
y face. “I don’t get it. He called it calendar art.”
Tricia sighed. “Sentimental value.”
I remembered what Alfred once said about the book, that it was a remembrance of a trip he took out west with an old friend. And the inscription. I flipped open the cover and reread the elegant handwriting in blue fountain pen. Great places, great times.—R.B.
Alfred’s personal life had always been enigmatic to me, but the first full name that came to mind fit the initials. “Richard?” I said, confused. “Richard Baumgartner? The reporter who disappeared?”
Tricia showed me a weary, knowing smile, her lips pressed together.
“They took a trip west together?”
She pinched the bridge of her nose and peered at me over the steeple of her fingers. “Lucas, you can be a little dense sometimes.”
Apparently so. In an instant, a dozen puzzle pieces settled from random orbit into a revealing picture. “They were more than business partners. They were…”
“In love,” she said, leaning in, teasing, eyebrows high. “It’s okay to say the word.”
“Hey, I’m not a homophobe.” My mind scrambled to reinterpret past conversations. No wonder Alfred never believed the rumors that Richard ran off to South America with an Argentinian bombshell. He knew Richard’s heart like his own. A fresh sadness settled low in my chest. “He could’ve told me. You could’ve too! How long have you known this?”
“Forever. Like I said, my family wouldn’t have anything to do with him.”
“But your dad—your dad’s mother—I mean, your grandmother. Alfred had a wife.”
“Of course he did. That’s what gay men did back then. They buried their feelings, married a woman, and pretended they were normal,” she said, infusing her last word with derision. “But Alfred couldn’t pretend anymore, and when he stopped pretending, my family treated him like a leper. Especially my dad, Mr. Macho.”
We fell silent. Every time I’d asked Alfred about the subway project, he dispensed just enough information to keep me strung along. I never would’ve learned about the missing reporter if I hadn’t threatened to quit. “He thought I would judge him?”
“He was afraid,” she said with resignation. “Whenever anyone found out he was gay, they turned their backs on him.” But Tricia hadn’t. She’d stuck by him. Maybe she had no choice, or maybe she had some other reason.
I dropped my gaze to the sooty stack. “I might abandon him for being a condescending jerk, but not for being gay.”
“But he couldn’t know that, couldn’t risk it. He needed you for the subway. Still does.”
“Still?” I asked, hopeful. Or maybe I was trying to find a fucking point when none existed.
Her chair squeaked and I glanced up. She was already standing, her back to me. “I’ll pass out if I don’t get some sleep.” She shuffled toward her bedroom.
“You said he still needs me to do this.” I was teetering between hope and defeat, fishing for resolution. “He was hurt really bad, you know.” I paused, not sure what could be said out loud. “He might not make it.”
She turned toward me only partially, but enough to reveal tears pooling in her eyes. “Do it for him, or for me. Whatever works.”
The relationship between Alfred and Tricia Blumenfeld baffled me, and probably always would. She resented her dependence on him and called him a pain in the ass, and my parole officer, yet she seemed to study his every move. Why? But before I could formulate a way to ask, she’d gone to her bedroom and closed the door.
I arranged stray blankets and throw pillows into my makeshift mattress on the floor and tried to sleep but couldn’t. I flopped between wakefulness and harsh half-dreams of Tricia’s living room on fire, and Mr. Smith faltering and collapsing a few feet shy of the front door. I imagined more long wooden crates, one with Tricia inside, her eye sockets vacant. During a wakeful period, the sound of her muffled crying penetrated the paper walls.
I lay on my side until I drifted off. I half-woke when I felt a warm body against mine. Tricia had slipped soundlessly into the room and spooned herself to my back. We were a perfect fit, her arm around my middle. I wanted to roll over and kiss away her tears, but I knew she wouldn’t want that. So I lay still and lost myself in her warmth, and pushed away thoughts of murdered lovers and secret tunnels and ash that would bury you if you closed your eyes too long.
. . . . .
I felt her pull away. The light of the new day breached my eyelids but I kept them closed. She moved quietly through her morning rituals and out the door without a word. I figured she wanted it that way.
I got up, splashed my face at the kitchen sink, dried with a threadbare dishtowel, and noticed what she’d left behind for me: one of our subway maps. But this map included a tiny hand-drawn X in red ink. I knew she’d found Drax’s secret portal, but in the tumult of the fire, I’d never asked.
One glance told me I’d been right. The access point was located under Drax headquarters.
I unfolded a floorplan of the downtown complex I’d copied at the county’s building permits department. Urban adventurers loved to brag about their physical skills as subterranean gymnasts, but their success had more to do with public records than muscles and balance.
I compared the documents and marveled at what I saw.
CHAPTER 22
Since our earliest days of urban adventuring, Reuben and I had challenged each other to bullshit our way past gatekeepers at hotels, office buildings, performance venues, and government bureaus. The trick was to play a convincing enough part to dispel suspicion.
In the lobby of the building where Reuben worked, I approached the receptionist’s desk looking sheepish and a little peeved. I held up a brown paper bag containing a cream cheese bagel purchased minutes earlier from next door. “My wife left her lunch in the car.”
The receptionist smiled her sympathy and pushed the lobby phone toward me.
“She’s eight months preggers. Can I run it up? Won’t take five minutes.” I said this with a tiny grimace, as if I was responsible, which I was in my fictitious scenario. The receptionist waved me through to the elevators.
It was an empty victory. Unlike Drax, Midwest Surety had no big secrets to protect.
I arrived at Reuben’s cubicle on the eleventh floor. He was hunched over printed sheets of tedium in rows and columns. “We’ve got to talk,” I said.
Unsurprised by the sound of my voice, Reuben laid down his pencil and gazed up. “My boss, who’s probably watching you right now, expects me to actually work. The gall.” He became serious. “I tried to reach you last night. Where were you? Did she find the portal?”
At Tricia’s apartment, in the wee hours, I’d decided not to call Reuben about the fire. He couldn’t have done anything, and I wasn’t ready to recount—my thoughts too fractured. “Checked out the morning paper yet?” I asked.
Reuben shook his head. “I’ve been racing ever since the alarm went off. Why?”
“Mr. Smith was killed last night.”
Reuben’s face contorted with shock and pain. He scrambled to his feet. “Let’s talk in the cafeteria.”
On the first floor, we found a small table near a noisy kitchen and hunched on opposite sides. I told him everything.
“How’d they do it?”
“There’ll be an arson investigation, but it’ll be obvious. I bet someone wearing a mask splashed gasoline and struck a match. They’ll never pin it on anyone.”
A kitchen worker carried a foil-wrapped tray past us and beyond earshot. “And Alfred won’t recover a dime.”
I nodded. Reuben had long complained about Alfred’s cheesecloth insurance protection
. Years of makeshift walls and corridors, never code compliant, would give any insurance company ample reason to refuse coverage. “After seeing the look on Tricia’s face,” I said, “I didn’t have the heart to mention it. That shop was everything to her, and it’s gone forever.” Maybe worse, the terms of her release required working for Alfred in the family business. Was her fate back in the hands of a judge?
I gave my head a little shake, overwhelmed. Too much had changed. I sought refuge in the immediate. “She found the other portal.” Reuben didn’t react. “Don’t you want to know where?”
“Sure.”
“Right under the museum. I cross-checked Tricia’s mark against the floorplan.”
“Ironic that you were just there.” But his voice was flat. He was holding back.
“Smith salvaged all of his materials. If I can’t replicate the calculations, I’ll find someone who can.”
Reuben said nothing, worrying me.
“We’ve got to go back down, through the Drax building.”
“They killed Smith. I never signed up for that kind of stuff.”
“Smith and Alfred chose to go back into a burning building.”
Reuben narrowed his eyes. “What are you saying?”
“If Drax had wanted to kill, they would’ve done something else. They wanted to destroy evidence, and that means we’re on the right track.”
“Completed measurements don’t guarantee a guilty verdict.”
I kept my eyes on him. “If the measurements point to fraud, the prosecutor will open Drax’s books, and the people will realize they were duped. Drax lawyers can befuddle a jury, but they can’t scrub Drax’s reputation.” Reuben avoided my gaze. “Smith gave his life to save his methodology.” I dropped my words on the little table like a ten-pound stone, but it wasn’t easy to do. Our ragtag army was suffering battlefield casualties—injury and now a death. “He can’t have died in vain.”
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