The Company Man

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  Garvey returned with a glistening plate of eggs and sausage and rolls. He put down a mug of water and pushed it over to Hayes, who lifted it up and maneuvered it through the lapels of his coat to his mouth. He sipped it once, then sipped again, deeper. “Ah,” he said. “That’s better. That’s just what I needed.”

  Garvey carefully watched as Hayes placed the mug of water back on the tabletop.

  “What?” said Hayes.

  “So,” said Garvey. “You’ve quit drinking but you’re still hitting up the tearooms.”

  “Well. Yes,” said Hayes, nettled. “I can’t give up everything at once. I need a few vices. Just to function. Just to keep my head on.”

  “How long have you been dry?”

  “Centuries, it feels like,” he moaned. “Ages. Ages and ages and ages. Civilizations have risen and fallen in the time I’ve been dry. But I would guess a month, really. Two, at most.”

  “That’s pretty good, for you.”

  “Mornings are the hardest. Mornings like this, especially. I need a little fire in my belly to stay on my feet.”

  “What’d you think of it, anyways? This morning?”

  “I don’t know,” Hayes said, turning back to the window. “Do you want me to be honest, Garv?”

  “Sure.”

  “I won’t tell you anything you don’t already know.”

  Garvey nodded, sawing through a sausage with slow, silent care. Grease poured from its mealy cross-section to pool around the eggs.

  Hayes waited a moment. Then he said, “If you want me to be completely frank, Garvey, I think you’re fucked. Very fucked. I don’t have any tricks to play here.”

  Garvey stopped sawing. “You can’t at least check and see if he’s one of yours?”

  “If you can get a name, sure. I can check him against the factory rolls. But that’s if you get a name, which I’ve got to think is pretty unlikely. Even though he wasn’t dressed, he didn’t exactly seem like a socialite. Not a well-known out-and-about-town sort. And even if you do get a name, there’s been a lot of flux among the loaders and workers since the whole union business started. It’s less organized than ever. It’d be… Well. It’d be impossible to nail it down.”

  Garvey’s grimace subtly hardened. His limited range of facial expressions bordered on an inside joke among his fellow detectives in the Evesden Police Department. To the unobservant his face would seem to never move at all, his words just barely escaping his slight frown, yet to those who knew him the slightest twitch of his broad, craggy forehead spoke volumes. Garvey could tell you if he thought a body would file just by slowly lifting an eyebrow or pursing his lips. But his eyes never moved, permanently buried in the shadow of his brow. They were eyes that plainly said they had seen it all, or at least enough of it to feel they didn’t really need to see the rest.

  “Yeah,” he said, and nodded. “Yeah.”

  “Like I said, it’s nothing you don’t already know,” Hayes said. “I’m sorry you caught it.”

  “You said that already.”

  “I’m still sorry.”

  “You sure he’s union, though?” Garvey asked, half-hopeful.

  “Probably. You do, too, you just don’t want to admit it. I mean, come on, Garv, you can’t tell me you just fished a man who looks like a worker out of a Construct canal and haven’t thought it has something to do with the lefties rattling around.”

  “No. Goddamn, I wish it didn’t, though.”

  “So. How many does that make?” Hayes said.

  “Make?”

  “Yes. Union deaths in all. I’d expect you’re all keeping tally marks over the morgue doors by now.”

  “Hm. Four,” said Garvey reluctantly. “Four in the past five months. And that’s not counting the beatings and other pointless violence that’s been going on. I don’t know how many we’ve had due to that.”

  “But four murders? Four genuine union murders?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Hm,” Hayes said. “Things are heating up.”

  “No doubt,” said Garvey. He began speaking in the toneless cadence of work-speech: “All four were found very, very murdered, all in different but discreet areas of the city. Docks. Vagrants’ cemetery, found one out there, pretty vicious. Most recent one was a union buster. He was found in a canal, like today. No one’s getting anywhere with any of them. Now Collins has us all taking anything that even smells like union and making it high concern. ‘Prioritization,’ they’re calling it. We’re probably going to junk those four, though. I don’t think there’s any headway to make with them. Not with fresh ones coming in today, like this one.”

  “Goodness,” said Hayes. “Your statistics must be terrible.”

  “Yeah. Four hundred and eighty-six. Jesus.” Garvey shook his head. “Last month marked the highest yearly total of the century. The papers were all over it. The mayor’s office is having daily panic attacks.”

  “Well. Nineteen-twenty can’t come soon enough, I’d say. Happy new year, Garv.”

  Garvey muttered his agreement and turned back to his plate, sometimes shooting Hayes sullen looks as though he had personally engineered the foul morning, or possibly the bad year. Hayes ignored him, content to make his water vanish in little swallows.

  Hayes was not, despite the beliefs of several scene-side cops and minor criminals, a policeman. He was often seen with the police or the district attorney’s office and other civil servants, and a lot of the time he acted like a cop, with his constant questions and presumptuous manner, though he did seem to grin more than most. The one thing that really marked him as different was his English accent. But he had no badge, no gun, no pension, and no allegiance to the city or any jurisdiction. Those rare few who concluded that he wasn’t police often wondered why he was tolerated among them, or why he wanted to be there at all.

  Figuring out exactly who Hayes worked for would have been difficult for anyone. At the moment his paycheck came from a minor canning factory on the wharf-front, partially managed by a San Francisco shipping firm, which was owned by a prominent Chicago real estate corporation, which was in turn owned by a high-powered merchant bank overseas whose primary stockholder was, at the end, the famous McNaughton Corporation, linchpin of the city of Evesden and, according to some, the world. Hayes made sure to route how McNaughton paid him every once in a while, just to check. If he had done his work right, they changed its path once every six months.

  Precisely what Hayes did for McNaughton was a mystery to most everyone. His chief overseer was James Evans, deputy director of securities at McNaughton, who often said Hayes’s job was to be “a backroom boy, someone to make sure everyone follows procedure and that sensitive matters do not become unfavorable for the company’s interests.” Brightly, who was above even Evans as chief director of securities, chose to say that Hayes was “a fixer” or “our man in the field, but here at home.” That was if he said anything at all, which he usually didn’t.

  Hayes thought of his job in very simple terms: it was his job to find out the things no one wanted him to find out and know the things no one else knew, all in the name of McNaughton Western Foundry Corporation. It often put him in many interesting situations. For example, this was not the first time he had been involved in a murder investigation, and while this one in particular didn’t promise much interest for McNaughton as a whole, Hayes was always willing to help Garvey whenever he could. Garvey’s high position in the Department and similar line of work made him an invaluable resource for Hayes, and after their working together for so long he’d also become the closest thing to a friend Hayes had.

  “So I’m fucked,” said Garvey to his near-empty plate.

  “Maybe not,” Hayes said cheerfully. “You could turn something up. You often do.”

  “Maybe. You say maybe. Maybe isn’t probably.”

  “No. But if you keep at it long enough, it’ll drop.”

  “Hm. Well. Give me a second while I pay,” said Garvey, standing up.

 
; “I’ll be outside,” said Hayes, and he gathered his coat about him and worked back through the throng.

  It seemed to be even colder now that Hayes had felt a second of warmth. He huddled by Garvey’s car, breathing deep and trying to stuff his hands ever farther into his pockets. There was a sour film on the back of his throat. His thoughts returned to the soft, white face rising up out of the river. Something mutinous began happening down in his belly, some minor organ pitching and yawing with a foul tide. He resisted it at first. Then began swallowing. A rumbling belch came up, followed by something that should have stayed down, and he instinctively flipped his hair and scarf out of his face before falling to his knees and retching. The hot clear fluids sent up thick clouds of steam as they spattered onto the icy stone. For the next few minutes he was wracked with the dry heaves, rattling burps that bubbled up from his deep inner recesses to come burbling out with festoons of spit and mucus.

  Garvey emerged from the diner and stopped short at the sight. “Jesus Christ. I thought you said you’d quit drinking.”

  “I did quit drinking,” Hayes said, wheezing and hiccupping.

  “That’s the classic drunkard’s morning pose to me. Careful not to get any on the car.”

  “I did quit drinking,” Hayes insisted.

  Garvey took in Hayes’s pale skin and the small puddle of thin, clear vomit. Then he sighed and scratched his head and said, “God. I know what this is. You gave up drink so you’ve been hitting the pipe double time. Is that it?”

  “Fuck you,” Hayes said, gasping for breath.

  “The shakes in your hands agree with me.”

  “It’s cold out.”

  “But not that cold.” Garvey took out a handkerchief and handed it to him. “Here. Clean yourself up.”

  Once Hayes had wiped his mouth Garvey helped him to his feet and leaned him up against the car hood. They watched as a horse-drawn cabbie clopped around the corner, its lantern shuddering on its rooftop. A dark shadow passed over it, draping the cart in darkness, and Hayes and Garvey craned their heads up to see an airship crossing the clouds and blocking a rare shred of sunlight. It must have been very far up, Hayes thought, as he could not hear or feel the engines. That or he had become accustomed to the low buzzing in the ears and teeth you felt whenever a ship came near.

  “How often do you do it?” asked Garvey quietly.

  “Do what?” said Hayes. He wiped tears from his eyes.

  “Go to the tearoom.”

  “Oh. I don’t know. Every once in a while, I suppose.”

  “Why? Is it the voices?”

  “I don’t hear voices. And no. It’s not. I suppose it’s just something to do.”

  “Something to do,” echoed Garvey.

  “Yes.”

  Garvey had come to get him at four in the morning that day. Hayes hadn’t been in his apartment, not the crummy little corner of the warehouse allotted to him by the good Mr. Brightly. But Garvey had known where Hayes would be. Tucked into a booth at the Eastern Evening Tearoom, far in the gloomy back passage lit only by blood-red Oriental lamps and the candles carried by the sickly girls in robes from table to table. But it wasn’t tea they brought to their customers. Herbal maybe, but not tea.

  The place was well known to the police. They’d tried to shut it down ten years ago, before Evesden had lost interest in a war on the opium trade. By the time Garvey had found him that morning Hayes had just been coming back from his little inner jaunt, his mind swimming with the peaty smoke of the tar, faintly cognizant there was a world going on around him.

  Garvey said, “You know, rumor has it this prioritization stuff, that was an order. From Brightly to the commissioner.”

  “Brightly?” said Hayes. “My Brightly?”

  “Yeah. And to the deputy commissioner and God knows who else. Said to junk whatever else we were working at and take any union murders we get and run with them. Sort of brazen, guy from the board of directors of your company telling the Department what to do. I was surprised when I heard. I thought you’d let me know it was coming.”

  “I didn’t know myself,” said Hayes. “They haven’t contacted me in some time, actually.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “Oh, I fouled something up. I think the gods are still mad at me. I’m on the shelf, I suppose.”

  “What’d you do?”

  Hayes pulled a face. “It was an error of judgment.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Well,” said Hayes tentatively, “they told me to look into this one trader, a Mr. Ferguson, to see if he was doing anything shady. And their fears were well-founded. Let’s just say he was dealing from the bottom of the deck. So I decided to… to put the screws to him and ask him about it, and, well, when I did he behaved somewhat erratically.”

  “What’s somewhat erratically?”

  Hayes sighed. “It means he panicked. Thought it was the scaffold for him, or prison, or something idiotic. And he weighed his chances and he… well, he leaped out the closest window when I had my back turned.”

  Garvey stared at him. He opened his mouth to say something but stopped as he did some quick math. “Wait, Ferguson? As in James Ferguson?”

  “That would be the one.”

  “Jesus, you were involved in that? I read about that in the papers.”

  “Yes,” said Hayes softly. “I’d expect you would have. They told me to go careful. I understand he was much esteemed. But I suppose I forgot.”

  “Would this have something to do with why you’re drying out?”

  Hayes smiled weakly at him.

  “So you’re on the outs,” said Garvey. “Just when I need it least.”

  “I’m not on the outs,” he said. He fumbled in his coat and produced a small slip of paper. “They sent me this the other day. Said to come in and speak to Evans. Later this morning, as a matter of fact.”

  “They sent you a telegram? Rather than talk to you?”

  “Yes. I’m poison right now, I guess. Trying to keep me at a distance. Mind giving me a lift?”

  Garvey glared at him. “I guess I can. I need you more than ever these days. I hope they’re not just bringing you in to fire you for good, though.”

  “I hope so, too,” Hayes said mildly, and climbed into the car. Garvey started it up again and wheeled it east, back across the city to the green-topped tower that seemed to dominate the horizon, no matter where you stood.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Each day in Evesden it was estimated that somewhere between two and three thousand people migrated to the city, more than anywhere else in America and possibly the world. This statistic was, of course, just short of a wild guess, since a fair majority of new immigrants came by illegal means, trafficked in from the Pacific in the bellies of immense iron ships, and so went uncounted. The workmen from the plains and the mountains to the east found more reputable passage, coming by train or by car or bus, and only the wealthiest and most privileged traveler came by air, drifting in on one of the many airship channels running that day. Much like the present population of Evesden, they were a motley band of people, coming from many states and countries and for many reasons, but it was always easy to tell new Evesdeners by the way they stared around themselves and the one question they would all eventually ask:

  “How?” they would say, their eyes often resting on the enormous jade tower standing on the western skyline. How had they done it? How had McNaughton made the city and remade the world itself, and in only a handful of years? How had this tiny corner of the Western shore become the center of the globe overnight?

  It was a perplexing question in the rest of the world, but in Evesden itself it was considered silly and naive, a badge of ignorance that marked the rubes. Answering it was thought great sport for most of Evesden’s veteran population, forgetting that they had almost all been new arrivals once. They often answered with lies, or folktales, or silly superstitions, or they claimed some secret knowledge the rest of the city was not yet
privy to. The seamstresses in the Lynn workhouses would often say that the Nail had always been there, that when the sea receded from the land it was revealed to be standing up like a huge spike, with all of McNaughton’s astounding inventions already piled up within it. The trolley workers wryly told the new boys that the company brain trust had found hidden messages in the Bible. Why, they decoded passages of the Old Testament according to some codex, of course, and found the designs for their creations within the first pages of the Good Book itself. And still more whispered that the McNaughton Corporation had been kidnapping brilliant minds from abroad from the beginning, and forcing them to come up with ingenious new innovations. They could not possibly churn out wonders with such speed, they said, unless it was forced.

  But for once, the truth was possibly almost as interesting as the myths. Historians and businessmen who were well versed in the actual story agreed that the origins of the McNaughton Corporation were practically predestined. Fated even. Its birth was so perfectly coincidental it had to be the hand of God himself, working just off the cold waters of Puget Sound.

  It had inauspiciously begun in the summer of 1872 when lumber entrepreneur William McNaughton started scouting the fledgling port cities around the Sound, seeking a way to establish trade to San Francisco to the south. Yet before he could begin, his party soon came under storm and was forced to seek shelter in the house of a nearby fisherman, just outside what was then the tiny fishing hamlet of Evesden, a bit south of Discovery Bay. The old man who lived there was accommodating enough, allowing them to bed down and sharing what little food he had, and he introduced himself as Mr. Lawrence Kulahee.