The Company Man

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  “Fuck’s sake,” said Garvey. “Leave me alone.”

  The patrolman kept tapping. Garvey swore and pulled out his badge and slapped it up against the glass. The patrolman shrugged and Garvey rolled down the window.

  “What? What the hell do you want?” he said.

  “Detective Garvey?” asked the patrolman.

  “Yeah?”

  “My name’s Clemmons. You’re needed, right away.”

  “By who?”

  “Lieutenant Collins. He needs you in the Shanties. Something’s happened.”

  “Collins?” said Garvey. “Why does he need me?”

  “He just said to find anyone. Anyone.”

  Garvey blinked the sleep away and squinted at the patrolman. He couldn’t have been older than twenty-two. He was pale and clammy and Garvey noticed his lips and fingers were trembling. He smelled faintly of vomit.

  “What happened?” asked Garvey.

  “I can’t say, sir. You’d have to see it for yourself.”

  “Something bad?”

  “You’d… you’d have to see it for yourself,” he said again.

  “How’d you know I’d be here?”

  “I didn’t. I’ve been driving around for an hour in this neighborhood. I just happened to find you. You want to follow me?”

  “Where to?”

  “On Bridgedale. It’s the trolley station, sir.”

  “All right.”

  The patrolman started walking back toward his little car. Garvey stuck his head out the window. “Can’t you at least give me a hint?” he called. “Something? Anything?”

  The patrolman did not seem to hear him. He climbed into his car and it shook as it started and Garvey followed it down toward Bridgedale.

  Three blocks in they came upon the crowd. Throngs of people stood in the street, gawking down toward the corner at the trolley station. Garvey and the patrolman tried to nose their cars through but gave up and got out to push through on foot. Eventually they came to a fence of patrolmen with batons and truncheons, nervously handling their weapons and calling to get back. Garvey pushed past them to where the trolley station steps yawned open. Down on the station floor a half-dozen uniforms and detectives were pacing back and forth, looking off at something Garvey could not see.

  As he went down the stairs the stench of the trolley tunnels embraced him, a scent of sewage and coal-tinged smoke. The strange, dry breezes that always surged through the lines played with his hat and tie, prodding them this way and that. He clapped his hat on his head and spotted Collins standing under one of the stark white station lamps, nodding as a patrol sergeant gave him a bad rundown. Garvey had always hated the trolley station lights, specifically how they looked just like street lamps but somehow misplaced here, far under the earth. It was as though the designer had tried to make this strange underground normal and in doing so had made it even stranger. An average street scene, but trapped in eternal night.

  When Collins saw him he said, “Oh, thank Christ.”

  Garvey approached, worried. His lieutenant rarely expressed gratitude or fondness for any of his detectives. “You called for me, sir?”

  Collins waved away the sergeant. “I called for anyone. But it’s a damn good thing they found you. I could use someone decent around here.”

  “Why? What’s happening?”

  Collins considered it. There was a queer look on his face. It took Garvey a moment to realize he was terrified. “Well,” he said. “I suppose you’d better come and see for yourself.”

  Collins led him left, down through the empty station and past the deserted ticket booths and newspaper stands. It was like some subterranean ghost town, yet there at the far end was a ring of officers standing clear of something dark and still at the end of the platform. After a while Garvey realized it was a trolley. He had never seen one without its lights on.

  All of the other officers were watching it silently. They kept their electric torches off as though the thing were asleep and they feared its waking. A low rumble filled the tunnel end, the faraway passing of other trolleys and trains. Garvey felt blood pumping in his ears as they walked toward it. He could see shapes and forms slumped up against the glass of the trolley, but he could not make them out. As he neared he smelled an electric copper scent that stuck to the back of his throat like a film. Blood, he figured, very fresh.

  One of the uniforms shook his head as Garvey and Collins walked by. “Just came out of nowhere,” he said. “Sailing out of the dark, like a ghost ship.”

  “What is it?” said Garvey. “Who’s on it?”

  “No one,” said Collins. “Or at least, no one anymore.” Collins flicked on his torch and kept the beam on the dusty platform floor as he braced himself. Then he lifted it and let it glance over the trolley door. It did not show everything, but it showed enough. Garvey saw human forms slouched on the seats, red tongues sprouting from their backs or heads and running down in tendrils to spread across the seats or floor, other corpses curled around the trolley bars. Some were slumped against the glass, their skin as pale as sea foam. His eyes traced over where the crimson and rust-colored pools melted with the shadows, where the fingers and arms became motley tangles. It felt impossible to tell them apart, to distinguish where one ended and the others began. Trapped in that little trolley car, their ruined faces and figures seemed to blend into one another until they were one red-and-white mass laid out on the creaking seats. Then Collins switched the light out and they were shrouded once more.

  Garvey could not imagine their numbers. To his eye they had seemed limitless. Still no one spoke. Then Garvey turned around and walked over to a bench and sat.

  When the message came to Samantha and Hayes they were on their last interview of the day, awaiting a McCarthy, Franklin. The man from the front desk walked in and handed a telegram to Samantha, who read it and handed it off to Hayes and began quickly putting on her coat.

  “Where are we going?” he asked.

  “Bridgedale, apparently,” she said.

  “Oh? Why?”

  “To meet a Mr. Shroff. Any idea who that is?”

  “One of Brightly’s men. Newspaperman, usually tips us off about things going on in the city.” He scooped his scarf off the floor and added, “Which probably doesn’t bode well at all.”

  They hurried out to the street, where Hayes tried to pay a cabbie an enormous amount of money to take them across town. With some persuasion Samantha managed to convince him to try a trolley for a fifth of the cost, yet when they began to enter the trolley lines the ticket vendors and conductors turned them away.

  “No rides today,” one said. “No trolley today.”

  “Why on Earth not?” said Samantha.

  “All lines are down. No platforms taking any passengers.”

  “Yes, but why?”

  He shrugged. “Can’t say. Official broadcast came through about an hour or so ago. We’re all shut down. You’ll have to take a motorcab, or walk if you can.”

  “This is the first time in my memory, short as it is, that the trolleys have been wholly shut down,” said Samantha as they walked back to the street. “What could have happened?”

  Hayes simply shrugged, irritated to have been made to walk so far.

  They took a cab to Bridgedale and the address specified in the message, yet they found it surrounded by a thick, babbling crowd that shielded everything from view. The police had made a large clearing at the front, cutting off the street at either end and shutting down one intersection. Horses and purring cars bucked back and forth as they tried to negotiate their way out, swears and shouts ringing over the buzz of the crowd. People huddled close to one another in the chilly air, bobbing where they stood to glimpse through brief cracks in the groups in front of them. Steaming breath unscrolled up from the crowd in a hundred places, giving it the strange impression of a ticker tape parade.

  “What in hell is this nonsense?” said Hayes as they climbed out.

  Bystanders couldn’
t tell him, shrugging and shaking their heads. Soon he was flagged down by Shroff, who was so short he had to jump to make his hand seen over the crowd. Hayes worked over and pulled him close and said, “What the hell is going on?”

  “Trouble,” Shroff said. “Big trouble, down in the underground. Someone’s dead.”

  “Dead? Who’s dead?”

  “Don’t know, really. Cops have the entire area cordoned. They beat the hell out of one ass who tried to push through. Pardon my language, ma’am,” he said to Samantha, and tipped his hat. “I bet there’s a lot of them, though.”

  “A lot of who?” asked Hayes as he slipped through the crowd. Shroff and Samantha struggled to keep up.

  “The dead,” said Shroff. “But no one knows how many or who.”

  When they finally got through they found they faced the trolley station entrance, the big rusty tin T hanging over the steps. They could see nothing down below except for the faint lights of the station.

  “Looky there,” said Shroff, and pointed. “There’s your detective friend, eh?”

  Garvey was standing at the top of the steps, speaking to another officer who was leaning against the railings. He looked paler and grimmer than usual. He kept his face at a sharp angle to the underground station, like he did not want to look inside or perhaps smell its curious breeze.

  “Yeah,” Hayes said. “There he is.” Then he tugged off a glove, stuck his fingers in his mouth, and whistled piercingly.

  The police and some of the crowd looked up. Garvey blinked and did the same and saw Hayes standing in the front. His grimace deepened and he strode over and said, “What are you doing here?”

  “Same as you, I think,” said Hayes. “Only there’s truncheons in the way.” By now he was flush and grinning with excitement.

  Garvey thought for a moment, then said, “I guess it’d be worth you seeing.” He nodded to the patrolman, who let Hayes pass but kept Samantha behind.

  “Who’s that?” asked Garvey, gesturing to her.

  “My assistant,” said Hayes.

  “Your assistant? You have an assistant?”

  “Sure. She’s new. Secretarial duties and such.”

  “God. I got to pity you, lady. Come on then,” he said, and helped her through.

  “Thank you,” she said to him. She stood up and readjusted her hat and blouse.

  “Don’t mention it,” he said. He stopped halfway down a step and turned to extend a hand. “Don Garvey.”

  Samantha awkwardly shook and introduced herself breathlessly, still fighting past the dour stares of the patrolmen.

  “So what’s going on, Garv?” asked Hayes.

  Garvey began to lead them down the steps of the station. “I don’t know,” he said. “I really don’t.”

  “Rumor has it people are dead.”

  “Rumor has it right.”

  “Was it an accident?” asked Samantha.

  Garvey stopped and looked at her. “A what?”

  She faltered under his sharp eye, then rallied. “An accident. A trolley accident. Like a derailing.”

  “Oh,” he said. “No. Not an accident. That’d be the reasonable conclusion, wouldn’t it? But no.”

  “Then what?” said Hayes.

  Garvey said nothing. He just motioned them farther down into the tunnels. Hayes glanced to the side and saw bile and chunks of half-digested beef drying and curling on the station floor.

  “Bad one?” he asked.

  Garvey said, “The worst I’ve seen.”

  They walked down the platform, ignoring the curious glances of the other officers. Then a shout rang out: “No. Not him. No.”

  They turned. Collins was striding toward them, a half-dozen officers in tow like furious ducklings. Collins pointed at Hayes and said, “Will someone please explain to me what in God’s name this little shit is doing back here? It had better be plenty impressive, too. I mean it.”

  Garvey stepped forward into Collins’s path. Even though Garvey was tall in his own right, Collins loomed over him like a storm cloud. He glared at Hayes over Garvey’s shoulder, but Hayes dawdled on the platform and looked down the tunnel with a mildly interested eye. Samantha gripped her briefcase and looked to him for some excuse for their intrusion, but he was barely aware of Collins’s furious outburst, let alone her frantic looks.

  “I invited him here,” said Garvey quickly. “I gave the order to let him through.”

  “I guessed that,” Collins said. “What in hell did you think you were doing, bringing a mad thing like that into a scene like this?”

  “I thought he could help.”

  “Help? Help with what?”

  “Unions. He might know something. He almost always does.”

  Collins turned to Hayes. “And? Do you know anything?”

  “I don’t even know what the hell is going on yet,” Hayes said. “Did you say this is union stuff, Garv?”

  Collins gave Garvey a warning look. Garvey winced. “I think it is,” he said slowly, reluctantly. “I think it’s got to be.”

  “Don’t go stirring up shit you can’t shovel, Garvey,” said Collins. “Don’t go doing that now. Not at a time like this.”

  “Let’s at least show them to him,” Garvey said. “Just to see.”

  “See who?” asked Hayes.

  “Our passengers,” said Garvey. Then he grabbed Hayes by the arm and dragged him down the tunnel to where a darkened trolley car sat in the shadows. Behind them Collins shouted at Samantha and the other officers to stay back. Garvey hauled him through the broken bronze doors of the trolley, Hayes fumbling with the steps, and suddenly he was aware that there were people in the darkened trolley car with them, sitting silently in the seats or lying on the floor. The coppery taste of blood filled his nose and mouth and he suppressed a gag. Then Garvey flicked the light on and Hayes saw the trolley car fully.

  As he tried to take in the room around him he felt as if he were in the belly of something alive and malignant and hungry, and there littered on the floor of this monstrous stomach were staring eyes and grasping hands and faces dull and blank and soulless. His eyes adjusted and he tried to count the figures in the dark. There were around a dozen of them, it seemed. More brutalized than in any murder Hayes had seen in years.

  “Oh, my,” said Hayes softly.

  “Yeah,” said Garvey. “Oh, my is right.” He shook out a handkerchief and stuffed his nose and mouth into it. Hayes did not, for even though Garvey was murder police Hayes was far more used to the scent of blood and putrefaction.

  Hayes swallowed and shook off the shock. Then morbid curiosity took him over, an old and not entirely welcome friend, and he began studying the bodies nearest to him. He found their poses were queerly passive, as though they had simply dropped, as if something had passed through the trolley car and pulled the life right out of them. And yet they were so ravaged. One man sat in his seat with his back and neck open in a dozen places, one hand still on his handhold. Behind him a woman sat on the floor, sunk to the ground with her knees and thighs below her, smooth white flesh spattered with arterial spray and her face calmly fixed as though contemplating a troubling question. At the end of the car the conductor lay facedown on his control board, still in his seat. Behind him a group of three men lay in a heap around one of the poles. Had it not been for the wounds dotting their chests and thighs you would have thought they had simply become tired and decided to lie down to sleep.

  There were more. Many more. Propped up in the seats or prostrate on the floor. Each of them serenely drooping as if the little motor that made their hearts beat had simply stripped a few gears and given up. Behind them the windows were lined with hairline cracks, but there was no sign of impact in the car.

  “Do you know anything about this?” said Collins behind him.

  Hayes looked at them. Took in their shattered figures and glassy stares. Then he stooped and said, “Well.”

  “Well what?” said Garvey from behind a handkerchief.

  Hay
es looked into one’s face. He put a finger on the man’s white chin and moved his head up to look into his eyes. The skin sagged at the edges, like he was wearing a mask and his true face was hidden somewhere below the paling flesh. “I know this one,” Hayes said softly.

  “You do?” said Collins.

  “Yes,” said Hayes. “I do. Edward Walton. He works-worked-in the Southern District. Can’t remember what he did. He worked under McClintock. Fellow I interviewed. That’s how I know him. He’s a unioner. Remember, Garv? I sent you some information on him. Just yesterday.”

  “I’ve been out of the office for the past two days,” Garvey said.

  “Damn,” muttered Hayes. “Too late, I suppose.” He stood and moved through the mass of corpses, carefully stepping among them with wobbly, balletic jumps. “There’s Naylor,” he said. “And Evie. And Eppleton. And Craft. They’re dirty, all of them. Only a few are suspected murderers and saboteurs in my book. The others are just sympathizers. I don’t know who the women are. That one’s a whore and no mistake.” Hayes took a seat between two corpses, surveying the mute crowd. “They’re all mine, for the most part. Or were. All McNaughton boys, and all dirty.”

  Garvey and Collins stared around their feet. “Jesus Christ,” said Collins. “Why didn’t I hear about this?”

  “Do you think it’s sabotage?” asked Hayes. “Someone sabotaged the line?”

  Garvey shook his head. “No. The trolley car coasted in like it does every day, right on time. Just odd that its passengers all happened to be dead. How it got in with a dead conductor is beyond me. Scared the hell out of the people on the platform. And besides, look at them, and the trolley. It didn’t crash. No sign of sabotage. But their wounds, it’s like they’ve been…”

  “Stabbed,” finished Collins. “Like someone hopped on board and then ran through, stabbing them all. Stabbed all to hell.”

  Hayes turned one over with his foot. They all had the exact same wound, a thin puncture mark about an inch long. “Maybe someone stopped the car and did just that.”

  “I told you,” said Garvey. “Trolley was on time, almost exactly.”

  “So?”

  “Well, according to the stops from the platform before, the window for the murders is about, oh, a little less than four minutes.”