The Company Man

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  “A bit too nice?”

  “Maybe a little. I’m not really used to such treatment.”

  “Oh, it’s nothing. Evans is just fond of young girls in the most boring way possible. Thinks they’re his children. I’d ride it out, if I were you.” Hayes sloshed down more beer and said, “Where did you live in Cairo, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “In my father’s house,” she said.

  “Do you miss it?”

  “Yes. Yes. Very much.”

  His eyelids fluttered. “Would you tell me about it?”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because I’m curious, I suppose. I have you watching over my shoulder all day. I thought I might learn a bit about you. Can’t I order you to tell me, or something?”

  “You are not my direct superior,” she said.

  “Well. You’re my assistant. Just assist me with it, then.”

  She sighed. She looked at Hayes and saw that familiar light in his eyes she’d seen in their interviews, that hunger to take a person apart and learn their story, like studying and dating a fossil found deep in the earth.

  “My house?”

  “Yes.”

  “It was small,” she said. “Very small. We lived on the second story. I did, I mean. Below us was a large family. Their father was a tradesman. He dealt in spice, and downstairs it always smelled strange. Strange but beautiful. People sang in the mornings and throughout the day, calling people to prayer. I never prayed with them, it wouldn’t have been appropriate. But I often wish I had. I don’t know why.”

  Hayes shut his eyes. He took a deep breath as though he could catch that same exotic fragrance. “It sounds very nice,” he said.

  “It was. Very nice.”

  “What did your father think of your transition to here?”

  “My father has been dead for ten years.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “It’s all right. It was ten years, after all.”

  “If it was all so nice, why did you accept this position?” he asked.

  She put her spoon down as she considered the question. “Well. It would have been impossible to say no.”

  “Why?”

  “Because… because this is Evesden. This is the most famous city in the world. I mean, I’ve worked for McNaughton for a few years, but never here, never at the main office. At the Nail. I had been looking for a chance to go further, and when this came along I couldn’t refuse.”

  “Yes. I suppose I forget how this city seems to the outside,” he said. “Do you regret it? Taking the position, I mean?”

  “No. Should I?”

  “Well, you seem like a capable, career-minded young woman. It’s lucky you’re working for one of the more liberal places around, but you could really get a leg up if you did something else here.”

  “This is a leg up,” she said.

  Hayes lit a cigarette and spat smoke out the side of his mouth. “No it isn’t.”

  “This is a position of extreme importance, operating for some of the most powerful people in the country. Of course this is significant.”

  “Oh, all right, but beyond that? Beyond wanting a pat on the head from the fogies upstairs?”

  Samantha glared at him. “I don’t want a pat on the-”

  “I apologize,” he said, immediately and insincerely. “Very sorry. Totally out of line. But honestly. What do you want, beyond the prestige?”

  “It’s also putting things to right,” she said, trying to believe it. “Keeping things safe. Protecting people. Prosecuting the murders in the lower ranks.”

  Hayes was quiet. He swilled his beer around at the bottom of his glass, watching the slick muddy tide wash up and down the sides. “There was a man once,” he said. “A man named Teddy. Teddy Montrose. This was a few years ago, mind. Engineer. Worked in Telecommunications, Teddy did. Teddy handled a lot of high-security designs. Oversaw a lot of important information being passed back and forth. Then one day Brightly calls me up and says, Hayes, my boy, we think there’s something amiss with our dear friend Teddy. In fact, we think he’s running something on the side. There’s a lot of Russian traffic up north along the coast, and there’s talk that someone in Telecommunications is going to pass some information about trade agreements on to them. Teddy’s our weak link, my boy, the chink in our armor. The likely spot, yes? So why don’t you look into Teddy and make sure everything’s tip-top. And of course I say sure, Larry. Sure thing.”

  Hayes sat up and hunched over his glass, blond head crooked on his shoulders. “So I did. I did look into Teddy. I followed him for about a month. Spent a lot of time in empty rooms, staring out the window. Spent hours watching his family. He was a nice fellow, Teddy. Two kids, Honoria and Jessica. They liked the river market, I remember that. Nice wife. Sort of dull, though. Elizabeth, I think her name was. Liked horses. I told Evans that, said he’d get along with her. Jim’s a horseman, you see. And I keep following him and following him, and I keep telling Brightly that there’s nothing here. This man’s straight as an arrow. Pure as the driven snow. Waste of time. But he just tells me to keep sitting on him. So I do.

  “Eventually it breaks. Teddy told friends and family he was going on some business trip overnight, but I had no record of it. Instead he went east. East to Dockland, suitcase in his hand. To a little building. Next to where the painted women walk, the daughters of joy. But there were no women in that place. I checked, you see, went inside once he had done his bit and left. No. No, they just had a line of little boys. About seven years old, I’d say. All lined up on the wall in nice clean smocks. Bare legs, hands clasped before them. Heads bowed like they were waiting for teacher. The man in the front told me I could take my pick.

  “I left. Thought about it for a while. And told Brightly.”

  He licked his lips. “Brightly seemed satisfied by this. Very satisfied. Said I did a good job, and thank you for your discretion. But I found out later that there was no Russian connection. No leak on Teddy’s part at all. I asked Brightly about it. He got all shirty with me. Said that didn’t matter. When or if the time came that Montrose’s devotion wavered, he said, well, they had the stuff to get him in line, and now fuck off and forget about it. So that was that. And I never heard more about it.

  “We still have Teddy working for us. I don’t think he knows we know. And it’s not my job to care, I guess. After all, this is what we do for a living, you and I. It’s a dirty game, but it’s the winning game.”

  Then Hayes looked at her, eyes thin. “But we have our own game, too. Some of the things we’ve dug up in the interviews are very valuable. There are things I need to keep to myself, or give to my contact in the police.”

  “The police?”

  “Yes. Favors are pretty important in my business. Your business, now. Are you all right with that?”

  “What would you give them?”

  “Those boys McClintock talked about. I have someone who’d like to know about them. A detective. And we’re not taking any action on them, so someone might as well give it a go. So is that all right, Sam?”

  She thought about it. She didn’t feel it was appropriate to contact the police, but then it didn’t seem like their investigation had done much at all so far, nor was it going to. It had been a sad thing to record horrible crimes but never act on them, and she was secretly desperate for it to end. And after hearing what Hayes had said about the nature of their position, she wasn’t sure if their investigation had much to do with justice in any way.

  She nodded.

  “All right,” he said. Then they stood and walked out to the street. It was raining again, a cold, soft sting that tickled the neck.

  “I was wrong about you,” he said. “I thought you wouldn’t last, at first. But you might.”

  “What makes you say that?” she asked.

  “Because you’re not stupid. Not by a long shot. But this isn’t a desk job anymore, Miss Fairbanks. This isn’t an ordered world of archives and hier
archies, no matter what you’d like. We don’t live for the approval of our betters, no matter how happy it may make us feel. And the truth here is soft and runny. I know you’d like to stay in the back room, reading and writing and hunched over a desk, but that’s not the way now. See?”

  “I see.” Then a thought came to her and her skin went cold. She peered at him and said, “Mr. Hayes, are you trying to turn me?”

  “What? Turn you?”

  “Yes. Like you do everyone else I’ve seen you speak to. Make them your friends, even though they hardly know you. Tell them whatever lies they need to hear. Is that what you’ve just tried to do, to me?”

  He stared at her, and somehow he seemed to grow even smaller and older in his coat. “No, Sam,” he said softly. “No, I haven’t tried to do that with you. You’d know, wouldn’t you. Since you’ve seen me do it so often.”

  She still watched him suspiciously. “Was anything you told me the truth?”

  “Yes,” said Hayes. “It all was, actually.”

  “Even Teddy Montrose?”

  Hayes nodded.

  “And he’s… he’s still working for us?”

  “He’s climbed a few ladder rungs at Telecommunications now. Gone up a pay grade or two. But yes.”

  She thought about that. “Why are you telling me this?” she asked.

  He shrugged hopelessly. “Because they’re keeping things from us. From me, and from you. And because I don’t want Naylor and his boys to go unpunished or to do anything more, and I don’t think the unions will be spooked by the police nabbing a few thugs. I’ve seen organizations like theirs before, they’re too disparate. Their reactions are too slow.”

  “Is that all?”

  He stared at her for a moment longer. With his wet hair and soaking coat, he suddenly seemed like a lost child. “And because I want you to trust me, I suppose.”

  “What? Why?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose I just know you now, Sam.” Then he bid her good day, turned, and disappeared into the crowd.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Garvey paced up and down the canal bank, clambering over hills of soft wet loam and crumbling cement. He had been roving up and down the canal for four hours, scanning the water and the sludge. There were disturbances, plenty of them. Footprints and cigarette butts and strange scores in the mud. None of them were very distinctive and none of them told him anything. It had been too long.

  Garvey eyed the half-finished structures of Construct in the distance, the skeletal tenements and cement pillars standing up like monstrous fenceposts. A many-segmented crane sat hunched in their center, a hibernating predator in a distant, alien land. Garvey knew that somewhere on the northern side of Construct were the foundations of the Lady of Industry, Evesden’s once-intended answer to the Statue of Liberty. She’d been meant to stand along the shore, holding up a great gear that would glow a soft pink at night, the luminescence visible for miles down the Strait. It’d generally been felt that the placement couldn’t have been better, since Construct was right next to the Kulahee Bridge, which reached all the way across to Victoria, so northern visitors to Evesden would have seen the rosy gear slowly cresting the horizon as they approached. But the planners had gotten only so far as casting her feet and putting up her supports when the troubles with Construct began, and they’d been forced to abandon her along with the rest of the project. Now two enormous gray feet sat out by the waters, the waves just licking the toes, as though some giant had gone diving into the sea and left its curiously anatomical slippers behind. Garvey had seen the pictures. They’d run in all the papers when Construct had first started sinking.

  Garvey shook himself and returned to the work at hand. If they’d had a body in tow they would have gone through Construct, he decided. Almost certainly. Much of it was abandoned now, and there would be a thousand places for a quiet murder in Construct. Excavated basements and foundations, collapsing canals and office sheds. But they wouldn’t have lived there. They would have gone over the Royce Bridge, or somewhere nearby. It was the only dependable route.

  Garvey climbed back into his car and drove to Royce Street and surveyed the shopkeepers and homes. He took out a small photo of the dead man and began approaching the cabbies and the newspaper stands, the late-night cafes and the morning bakeries. None recognized him. But then, they said, it was tough to remember. Most nights seemed the same as any other. Garvey wrote down what they could tell him. Then he showed them a sketch of the tattoo on the man but none of them recognized that either.

  “What you looking for?” asked one man at a newspaper stand. “Somebody dead?”

  “Somebody’s always dead,” said Garvey.

  “Yeah, yeah. But who is it this time?”

  Garvey walked away and did not answer.

  He moved outward in a spiral, hitting the row homes and the slums, flashing his badge and the picture and asking if there had been any disturbances or sightings of the man. The people came to the door with their eyes meek and watchful, like rabbits approaching a wolf at the entrance of their den. In many homes the reek of shit and urine and rotting wood hung in the air. Sometimes a child cried from somewhere in the depths of the house without ceasing. They knew nothing.

  At one home a dog was chained up in the alley beside, panting as though delighted with the day. Garvey knocked on the door and an elderly woman with cataracts the color of oyster shells answered. When he asked her about the picture she had to pull it close and peer at it with one eye as though she were looking at it through a microscope. Then she said, “Oh, yes! I’ve seen him.”

  “When?” asked Garvey eagerly. “About three, four weeks ago?”

  “Oh, no. Long before that, I think. Last summer. He had a little boy with him. Little boy, used to play with my dog while I watched. The man asked if it was all right and I said certainly it was.”

  “He had a little boy?” said Garvey, mentally groaning.

  “Yes. He gave Arthur the high point of his day.”

  “Arthur?”

  “My puppy. Arthur’s his name.” She smiled blindly in the general direction of the little dog, who almost seemed to smile back.

  “What was he doing out here? The man, I mean.”

  “I’m not sure. He used to come out here on walks with his boy, I think. There’s a playground nearby. Then they used to go over and look across the waterway at Construct. He said he told his little boy giants played there.”

  “Did you get the man’s name?”

  “No. It was months ago and he only came a handful of times. More than half a year ago. I probably wouldn’t remember if it hadn’t been for Arthur. And it was before my eyes went, you see.”

  “Sure, sure. Any idea where he lived?”

  “Oh, somewhere around here, I assume. I’m not sure where. He always came from up the road,” she said, and pointed.

  “From the Shanties?” said Garvey.

  “The what?”

  “The Shanties. The Porter neighborhoods.”

  “I suppose so, yes.”

  “What did the little boy look like?” he asked.

  “Like a normal boy. About ten. Underfed a little. He was about so high and he had brown hair and brown eyes,” she said, sticking a quivering hand out breast-high. “That’s about all I remember. I think the boy’s name was Jack, but I can’t be sure.”

  “Jack?”

  “Something like that.”

  “All right,” said Garvey. Then he bade her good day and went back to his car and sat, thinking. He looked at the photo of the dead man, then shook his head and said, “Christ. A kid,” and sighed.

  Being a policeman of any type in Evesden meant you saw a lot of things, many strange, some funny, and plenty terrible. You armed yourself with a strong dose of black humor and used it to belittle the sights you saw, to make the tragedies and stupidities trivial and easy to handle. A friendly, joking discussion between average police, or possibly the medical personnel they worked with, would probably shock
or outrage any outsider who hadn’t yet had a taste. One popular joke was to discuss victims as if they were plumbing, noting leaks and broken U-bends and pointing out the areas that needed soldering. Usually the victim wound up being a toilet in these bizarre, comedic metaphors.

  But no matter what anyone had seen, no matter how many bodies they’d filed or marked off, the mere presence of a child changed things. Delivering news to families, and especially about children, aged a man in ways unseen by the naked eye. And cracking the plumbing routine about a dropped child was unthinkable. Any police who dared bandy a joke of any kind about in such a situation would probably wind up with a whaling. A murdered-child case was a curse, the worst possible event, changing the demeanor and very workings of the Department for weeks. The fraternal greetings gave way to furtive nods, and the detective stuck with it was practically considered the victim of a terminal illness. Conversations died when he came near, and he’d find himself receiving earnest condolences and whispers of good luck. One detective, Wolcott, had received a child case as his very first on the job. It had never gotten filed, and Wolcott had been removed from the Department after he was found weeping at his desk a year in, the child’s name still on the bronzed list on the wall. Garvey heard he was working a beat now, dropped back to being a regular uniform. So it went with such poisonous tragedies.

  While Garvey couldn’t say if the boy, Jack, was in any danger or involved in any way, it still left a bad taste in his mouth. The man had been poor, Garvey could tell that just from looking at him, and if the old lady was right he’d made his home in the Shanties, a rough neighborhood if ever there was one. God only knew what would happen if the boy went looking for him when he didn’t come home. Abandonment was common in the Shanties, but that didn’t make it any less brutal. Garvey hoped the boy had a mother out there, and that the John Doe’s murder had nothing to do with his family.

  He rubbed at his eyes and leaned his head back and sighed. After a while he slept.

  He awoke with a start, sitting up at a harsh tapping noise. He peered out the window to see a patrolman standing there, half-stooped and waiting.