The Company Man

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  “There’s no going back, is there?” Samantha asked suddenly.

  “Huh?” said Garvey.

  “Oh. I’m sorry. It’s just… something I thought of.”

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “There’s no going back. It’s what I said. What I said when I first came here, on the airship. I’d never ridden one before. And as I got off another one came into the cradle. It was like seeing the sky open up. It shone like a shield with a little glass button on its belly, only the button was full of people. Then its engines turned all around and it lowered itself into the trusses. Workers came forward and looped the lines around its nose. And it floated in. Lowered itself down between the buildings. Like a tiger in the jungle.”

  “I’ve seen it,” Garvey said. “Never been on one. But I’ve seen them dock in.”

  “There’s no going back, I said. The world changed right underneath my feet. And I almost didn’t notice it happening. But now there’s no going back.”

  “No,” said Garvey. “There isn’t.”

  “And to think all this came from a fisherman,” Samantha said. “Thought up decades ago.”

  “Kulahee? Yeah. He’s worshipped like a god in some places around here. People have spent lives trying to figure out how he did what he did. But whatever the secret is, McNaughton isn’t telling.”

  Samantha watched as they passed by a pneumatic mail post, its dark glass chutes sprouting up from the cement. The brasswork around its nozzles was done in intricate leaves and vines, and each nozzle was unlocked and open, ready to devour whatever canister the next citizen was willing to feed it. “It’s almost like men could never make these things at all,” she said as it disappeared behind them.

  “Yeah,” said Garvey. “Sometimes I feel that way, too.”

  He dropped her off at her apartment. She stood below the awning and turned to look at him. “Thank you for the ride,” she said.

  “Not a problem. Sometimes I need an excuse to see the nice parts of town, you know?”

  Samantha laughed. “I suppose.”

  “Sleep well,” he said.

  “I will.”

  He drove away. She stood and watched as the headlights faded and disappeared into the night.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The story of the murders spread quickly. The southeastern areas shouted it first and then it leaked to the outer districts. It was a steady build, like a storm piling clouds up on the mountains. When it had finally gathered enough momentum the rumble became a scream and the city filled up with wild questions.

  The mystery and vagueness of the murders brought the police into question immediately. Either they were fools for not knowing enough or crooked for keeping information repressed. Badges were bought with money, everyone knew, and it didn’t matter where. Down in the Docks where brothels and dens paid to keep the patrols strolling, or up in Newton and Westbank where the police kept only the laws the locals approved of. And McNaughton men were gods to the police, that everyone agreed. The very name became an even dirtier word in Dockland and the Shanties in the wake of the Bridgedale trolley. The overseers at McNaughton were untried war criminals in a city where the war had not yet begun. Surely they had somehow engineered this, everyone said. After all, hadn’t they been the architects of the trolley lines? Could any trolley line be trusted, now that they could be turned into slaughterhouses the second anyone entered them?

  McNaughton’s Bridgedale Inquiry seemed to die at birth. Several times a day Samantha was handed a list of names, locations, and dates, and sometimes she accompanied Hayes to the interviews and sometimes he went alone. On the days when she went with him each hour was a chain of enormous blank facilities honeycombed with tiny rooms, filled with silent, sullen people who answered questions with questions. The company had gone frigid and suspicious in the aftermath. Most of the time Samantha stayed either on her feet, running between Hayes and Brightly or Hayes and Evans, or buried up to her neck in research. She logged hours in the company’s Records floor, a dark, labyrinthine cross-section of the Nail that seemed to be mostly locks and doors. Samantha was granted one of the highest-clearance light keys for this work, and she soon learned that Brightly and Evans were logging its use, matching the daily tally with the number of records she pulled. It was unnerving and exhausting work for her, especially under such scrutiny. She prepared the most bare-bones accounts for each of Hayes’s interview subjects, just enough for him to be ready. He sat with most of them for hours and caught no whiff of deceit. Only terror and anxiety. To try and prepare more would have been a waste of time, he said.

  Garvey did not fare much better. As he had suspected, he and Morris were appointed to the detail, with Morris working as the primary detective. Morris was a relic, a supporter of the fine old days when effective police work usually meant beating confessions out of whoever seemed most suspicious. They were usually foreign or black. He was a towering man with a puffy, Welsh face and beady, furious eyes. Ironically enough, he was also a devout Christian who refused to tolerate any foul language, which turned any conversation with Garvey into short, clipped sentences that barely made sense.

  Morris’s approach to the murders was similar to McNaughton’s: they looked for extremists, both religious and philosophical, a term Morris and Lieutenant Collins interpreted as referring to all socialists and unioners. But if Hayes met a brick wall it was nothing like what Morris met. Whole neighborhoods of people stayed dead silent on the subject of unions, and especially Mickey Tazz.

  Mickey Tazz, the people murmured to each other. Tazz will set us right. Tazz will set everything right. The working-class messiah, suited up in overalls and brogans. Out there in the slums somewhere, and strangely silent.

  Garvey had better luck with one of Walton’s ex-girlfriends. When she came in to view the body he sat with her in the Central’s lobby, passing her cigarettes and sandwiches. Eventually he asked her about the tattoo.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Just idle curiosity. They all had them.”

  “Yeah. Mikey and Frank and them all got them.” She shook her head. “Idiots. All the guys at the Third Ring. It was like they were part of a gang. Said McNaughton could never flush them out.”

  “Flush them out?”

  “From the lines. Pay kept dropping and they kept firing people, but Frank and them had been working there for years and said they’d be the fly in the ointment. The sand caught in the gears. Said they’d never leave. It was a guy thing. A stupid thing.”

  Then he showed her the picture of his canal John Doe. She did not know him. Another unknown body, falling through the cracks.

  Garvey then compiled a list of things he’d found in the trolley and began trying to account for each of them. Most of them seemed random. A set of keys. A ball of yarn. A medallion. A pair of scissor handles and a book collection, lost by God knows who. Giving up, he returned to the one thing he’d found during his trawl through the tunnels: the little white garbage can. He sat it on his desk and stared at it, chin in hand, as if they were opponents in a chess game. He turned it around in his hands, feeling its battered indentations. Then he realized something.

  He returned to the Third Ring Pub, but this time did not enter. Instead he took the garbage can and matched it to the ones found outside the diner across the street. When he asked the diner’s employees about it they identified it as the one that usually stood outside the front door but had gone missing, though they were unsure when. Garvey went and stood at the front door of the diner, looked back at the pub, and smoked and thought. Then he drove to where the trolley was being held in a police impound lot, looked at the broken door of the trolley, and held the garbage can up to its crumpled front. The two fit.

  “So what the hell does that tell us?” asked Collins when Garvey told him and Morris.

  “It shows us that, whoever it was, they busted into the trolley with a garbage can, of all things,” Garvey said. “One taken from right across the street from the bar the union
ers had left. Which means that the assailant had been watching them just minutes before the murders. Which suggests that this all was… well, improvised, at least as far as I can tell.”

  “How does that match with the deafness and the four minutes and all?” asked Morris.

  “It doesn’t. Not yet. I’m explaining what I can and taking the stuff I don’t know and leaving it hanging. For now.”

  “Great,” said Morris. “Just beautiful.”

  “It’s all I have,” said Garvey. He shook his head. “All I could find.”

  Collins nodded, chewing his pipe to the point of dissolution. “What do we have on the street level?”

  “Not much,” said Morris. “No one likes to talk about unions. Especially to a cop. There’s a few boys I know who are reliable snitches but they don’t know anything. But we’re working it. Slowly and surely, we’re working it.”

  Afterward Garvey went down to the morgue, which had become chaotic in the wake of the murders. Gibson and his attendants were working triple shifts to handle the incoming family of the Bridgedale. When Garvey arrived he found three corpses laid out on the floor rather than in the cabinets. He gave Gibson a disapproving look.

  “What?” Gibson said.

  “That’s not very respectful,” Garvey said.

  “It would be even more disrespectful to not examine them. Are we not here to investigate, Detective? We need more workers. More room. An actual doctor’s surgery. But we make do with what we can. Right?”

  Garvey sighed and looked at the shrunken, gaunt remains of the prostitute, flecks of makeup still clinging to her drying face. “Right.”

  “I don’t see why I even look,” Gibson said, shaking his head. “It’s the same damn thing.”

  “Which is?”

  “Stabbings. Stabbed all to shit. But from the look of it, it was all done with the same weapons. These ones, in fact.” Gibson picked up a small cloth sack and dumped it out on the table. Inside were two blades with no handles, each about four inches long. One side of each was dull and the other sharp. The sharp sides had several small pieces missing and the tip of one was gone.

  “Found these in Mrs. Sanna,” Gibson told him. “Occupation barmaid, it seems. I suppose whoever killed all these folks got to her last. Must have snapped off in her. They were way the hell up in her back. The tip of that little bit was in Mr. Evie. In his neck.”

  Garvey picked the pieces up, handled them. Then he placed them back on the table and picked up his report and flipped through it.

  “What?” said Gibson.

  “There was a pair of scissor handles in the trolley,” said Garvey.

  “Oh. Jesus Christ.”

  “Yeah. I’m guessing they were there for… Hell. Who knows. I think I saw a ball of yarn in there, maybe someone was knitting on the train. I don’t think the scissors were brought there by the murderer, though.”

  Gibson took what was left of Mrs. Sanna and wheeled her back into her dark little cupboard. “Scissors are usually not the weapon of choice for the prepared assassin, no.”

  “Ignoring all the things I can’t explain, this feels like a crime of passion,” said Garvey thoughtfully. “Whoever went in there was irrational as hell. Just grabbing things and going nuts. Busted in with a garbage can and started killing people with a weapon found on the scene.”

  “But how could they have done that on a moving trolley?” said Gibson.

  Garvey turned the blades over on his palms. He felt the notches in them and wondered whose bones the splinters had found a home in. He thought about who had held them before and what they had done and tried not to imagine the possibility that someone had assaulted and murdered an entire carful of people single-handedly, and in only a handful of minutes to boot.

  “I don’t know,” said Garvey. He put the scissors down. Then he wiped his hands and thanked Gibson and left.

  Christmas in Evesden came and went, though it was more somber than ever before. The Christmas Eve Parade was paltry in comparison to the previous ones, and only a handful of people turned out to watch it trundle along Michigan Avenue. The St. Nick they’d hired to ride the sleigh waved halfheartedly at the few children present, who were skinny things with sunken eyes. They solemnly watched him go by and did not wave back. When the parade finally came to a halt at St. Michael’s it was said St. Nick climbed down from his ride, drank deeply from a bottle he’d hidden in his red coat, cursed the parade and everyone in it, and stormed off.

  Neither Samantha nor Garvey celebrated in any significant way. Samantha tried to attend Midnight Mass at the church down her street, which she felt slightly guilty about since she was in no way Catholic, but it turned into a moot point when she spent too much time at the office on Christmas eve and couldn’t bear to enter the church late. Garvey made one of his rare jaunts to see his family out in the country, and he spent his brief holiday awkwardly dancing around his ex-wife, who made it clear that his presence wasn’t necessary, and his two young girls, both of whom he barely saw these days. He felt very much like an intruder in their home, as he had in the waning days of his marriage when his work had begun eating up every hour; their holiday was their own, separate from him, and he was only an observer. On Christmas day he sat on his ex-wife’s porch and watched the sun set on the chilly countryside, and he thought about the bodies waiting for him back in the city, and what would happen to his career if they went unfiled, and also, very briefly, about the pretty girl Hayes had brought to the trolley station.

  Hayes did not realize it was Christmas until after the day had passed, though he did vaguely wonder what all the candles were about.

  Then just before New Year’s McNaughton and Evesden received yet another blow, just when they needed it least. It did not fall in the city, however, but far up the coastline, just off the shores of the Alaskan town of Ketchikan. It came on a dark but clear night, with the stars very visible early on in the evening, but soon a few residents of the town noticed something different about one of them.

  One of the stars was red, it seemed. And it also seemed to be growing.

  As word spread, people were drawn out of their homes to gather and watch as the red star grew until it flared bright and arced across the night sky, never losing its deep red hue. It sailed down to the sea, and though some ooh ed and aah ed, many were disturbed by its sanguine color. It seemed a baleful sight to them, but they could not say why. One local, a photography enthusiast, managed to capture a magnificent shot of the star’s descent, and when the photo was developed it seemed to show that the star was splitting the sky in half.

  Some reckoned that the falling star had landed not far off the coast, and a handful of fishermen decided to take their boats to investigate. It was not hard to find the place that it’d hit, as a thick column of steam was still rising less than a half-hour afterward, but to their surprise the fishermen found that the star had not sunk, as had been expected, but was floating. It was obviously still incredibly hot, as water boiled and steamed around it, and they had to wait some time before they could approach it.

  When they did it soon became apparent that it was not a star at all, but some sort of vessel. It resembled a fat, silver-white tack, and though it had melted in several places they could still see where three engines were attached to its back. It also seemed somewhat incomplete, as though it had disassembled itself as it fell. As the fishermen marveled at this strange thing floating in the waves, another ship began to approach on the horizon, this one no fishing craft but a much larger cruiser of some sort. It began signaling to them to leave the site and return home, but before they paid any attention to it the thing in the water turned over to reveal an insignia on the side-a thick, imperial M.

  By the time the cruiser had pulled up to confiscate the device, several fishermen had already returned to the city to report what they’d seen.

  When the photograph hit the papers and word got out that this craft was man-made, and somehow made by McNaughton, the country was swept up in surpr
ise and outrage. What was it, they demanded. Where had it come from, and why had it fallen? Was it an accident? Was there someone in it? And why had the government not been notified? McNaughton’s delay in addressing the press cost it dearly, and when it finally did answer it did not satisfy much. It was, the company said, a new airship of a sort, but this one was meant to sail higher than any other, and then boost itself up and pierce the outer limits of the atmosphere. McNaughton had launched the unmanned prototype from a station in the north of Alaska, and had not intended for it to fall so far south, or indeed to fall at all. According to their research, said the engineers, sounding more nervous with every minute, if it went high enough then it would simply float, and never come back down. Obviously, they had miscalculated somewhere.

  The public was shocked, and the governments of both America and Canada were furious. How could they risk dropping airships onto civilians’ heads? And for what, simply to see if it was possible to send an airship as high as it could go? The Canadian government was especially angry, saying that the United States had best learn to curb its alpha pup, and most of America agreed. It was a preposterous idea in the first place. How could McNaughton ever have thought it could work?

  This time the McNaughton response was immediate. They knew it could work, the company said coldly. It was just a matter of adjustment. When the authorities asked for some evidence to support this, the McNaughton spokesmen recited the usual litany of private entrepreneurial rights protecting the company’s research, and everyone threw up their hands in frustration. Indictments were drawn up, yet few expected them to get anywhere soon.

  In Evesden the news was received with deep dismay. In the wake of the murders the city could hardly bear the disapproval resulting from the Red Star Scandal, as the press-somewhat enthusiastically-had labeled it. Everyone was overtaken with superstitious dread, interpreting the falling star as somehow connected with the eclipse that had happened earlier in the year, and it was said that this did not augur well for the city at all. Soon an almost medieval gloom spread throughout the streets, and each day people shook their heads as though surprised that the sun had chosen to rise at all.