The Company Man

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  “It’s a long way up. But it goes by fast.”

  They took the elevator up and she led him to her apartment. It did not yet feel like home to her, but it was a warm, dark place, with honey walls and a carpet a deep shade of red. Yet everything was covered in papers, every surface stacked with khaki reports and files, reams of parchment and miles of writing. She felt she should have cared about this, and wanted to clean up, but that urge was strangely absent.

  “You take your work home, huh?” Garvey asked.

  “I do.”

  She walked over to a cupboard, where she pulled out a bottle of port and poured two glasses without asking. He walked to the balcony and looked out at the buildings across, their faces spectral and luminescent in the night.

  “You know, some people would have a thing or two to say about a divorced man being unaccompanied in a woman’s apartment,” he said.

  “You’re divorced?” she asked.

  “Oh,” he said, sheepish. “Yeah. Yeah, I am.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  He nodded.

  “People would probably have a lot more to say about you being divorced,” she said, bringing him a glass.

  “Yeah. They probably would.”

  “But this is the twentieth century, and this is the city of the future, isn’t it?” She sat beside where he stood and crossed her legs. As she did her dress rode up, revealing most of her calf, and the tips of her toes brushed the back of Garvey’s knees.

  “I guess.” Suddenly he seemed to falter, and he looked at the glass in his hands, then up at her. “Think this is a good idea?”

  “What is?” she asked.

  He didn’t say anything. Just stood there handling the little glass of wine.

  “Oh,” she said. She blinked and sat up. “I… I suppose I didn’t really think about it.”

  “This could fuck a whole lot of stuff up.”

  She sighed and put down her glass. “It could, couldn’t it.”

  “Yeah.”

  They were quiet for a long while, their drinks untouched. Then Garvey said, “It’s snowing.”

  They rose and went to the balcony. Small white flakes were spinning down through the air to the street. It looked nothing like the show at the club. Currents formed between the buildings and they could see where the air turned into waves and horns and spheres and slants. As if the atmosphere itself were made of clockwork, telling time or some glyphic truth to only those who would look up and watch. Or perhaps the message was meant for something else. To something external. Invisible and waiting.

  “Look,” said Samantha, and pointed up to the tops of the buildings. They could just make out the conduits sitting on the edge of the building crowns, fat and black and round, like strange rooftop fruit. Steam poured out of the cracks in their housing in thin strings that whipped wildly in the flurries.

  “They say they glow blue when a storm comes near,” said Samantha.

  “I’ve heard that. It’s not true.”

  “No?”

  “No. But if it’s a really bad storm they will dance and wriggle. And get fucking hot.”

  They watched as a small airship trundled down out of the sky and made a slow pass of the rooftops. A spotlight stabbed down and illuminated the conduits for a moment before blinking out. The little ship had to fight the wind and they watched as it nosed along the rooftops, furiously trying to make its way, like a beetle caught in the ocean tide.

  “Checking the conduits,” he said. “This must be the first part of a pretty bad one, then.”

  “It must be.”

  “I suppose I should go.”

  “I suppose so.”

  He moved away and said, “I had fun tonight.”

  “I did, too.”

  “Can I see you again?”

  She looked at him. “I thought it wasn’t smart.”

  He shrugged. His face was painfully motionless.

  “I suppose it couldn’t hurt, could it,” she said.

  “No,” he said. They went to the front door and she let him out and he bade her goodbye and went back down to his car. She watched from the balcony as he crossed the street. He stopped before the car door, as though struck by a thought, and she wished he would look up at her. But he did not, and climbed into his car, and drove away.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The small storm lessened as the dawn came, and with the last few flakes Hayes rode the elevator up to Samantha’s office. He had expected some smart remark or a chilly silence when he arrived, but instead he found her patiently waiting for him with a sketch of the dead man and, more impressively, the last known address of Peggy Kennedy, the girlfriend of Naylor that McClintock had rhapsodized over.

  “She’s the most likely connection to the man in the canal, if there is one,” she explained. “She was romantically involved with Frank Naylor, who seemed to be the de facto leader of their little group, and she was practically one of the boys. She saw everyone and spoke to everyone. In a social setting, of course. I doubt if she was involved in anything more unsavory than grousing about the company from time to time. And she’s apparently a very pretty girl,” Samantha said. She sniffed. “She was very… popular.”

  “Very good. But how are you ahead of me?” he asked as she stood.

  “Never mind that,” she said irritably. “Do you want to go or don’t you?”

  “Well. Sure?”

  They took a trolley down to the edge of the Shanties and then caught a cab the rest of the way in to Peggy’s apartment. The people there told them Peggy had moved out weeks ago and was now staying with a Turkish jewelry salesman, rumored to be a ferocious loan shark. They found the man’s shop not far away. It was run-down and full of cheap baubles and the stench of soggy tobacco. Peggy was tending the counter, and Hayes sent Samantha out while he pretended to browse.

  He found Peggy was indeed a very pretty thing, and she knew it, flashing her eyes at him as she tried to pitch him some cheap paste jewelry. She was far less willing to help with the missing man, so Hayes presented himself as an affiliate of a well-known religious charity, the Saint Catherine’s Foundation for Deprived Children. Concerned about the man’s child, he told her smoothly. The boy had been by their establishments several nights in a row and had left a fake name, Hayes said. For some reason the boy had listed Mr. Naylor as a contact, but he was not to be found and they were redirected to her. They had managed to get a rough sketch of the father, and presumably the boy would be with him.

  Peggy looked at the sketch of the dead man sadly. “What was he deprived of?”

  “Sorry?” said Hayes.

  “You’re the… the Foundation for Deprived Children?”

  “Oh. Oh, yes. Deprived of social and maternal figures. That’s why most of them come. For the community. For the friends.”

  “I see.”

  “Did you or Mr. Naylor know the boy or his father?”

  “Frank’s dead,” she told him.

  “I’m sorry?” said Hayes.

  “Frank’s dead,” she said again, then realized his confusion. “Oh, no. No, no, no, not the boy or the father. Frank. Frank Naylor. You know the papers? That thing in the paper?”

  “Yes?” He affected surprise. “Oh, my goodness, you mean…”

  She nodded but did not say anything or take her eyes off the sketch. “The father’s name was John. John Skiller. The boy’s name is Jack. I remember that.”

  He asked her if she knew the boy’s address. She told him that once when Frank was roaring drunk they had swung by a tenement where Skiller lived. Skiller had been livid to see Frank so wild and coming into his home in the middle of the night with his boy there. Tossed them out cold. The place wasn’t much to speak of anyways, she said, and certainly didn’t warrant such pride. She gave him the directions and he thanked her and left.

  Samantha was down the street having a cup of thin coffee. He grinned at her and said, “We have a name. A name and an address. Garvey will be delighted, do
n’t you think?”

  “Yes,” she said simply, and stood up and made to go.

  “You all right?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You sure?”

  She nodded but said no more. They went back out on the street and headed off to the address.

  Skiller. Mr. John Skiller, thought Hayes as they walked. Strangely dead long before his friends. His death was no less grisly than theirs, but perhaps the same man or woman who had killed him had also killed everyone in the Bridgedale trolley. But how or why was beyond him.

  Garvey had once said that most crimes were never solved by the why. Ask a cop why someone killed another person and he’ll probably tell you that he doesn’t give a damn, and he’ll mean it. And he’ll be right. You don’t find them by the why, because anyone can kill any person for any reason. One of the defects of the species. But another defect of the species is good old-fashioned stupidity, and that means you can almost always catch them by the how. How they went in, what they used to kill with, how they got it and where it went, and who they talked to and what they did afterward. You can almost always catch them by that. This is a finite world of a limited amount of matter, Garvey would always say, and on their way to and from a murder they probably fucked up plenty of shit.

  Hayes tended to agree. But he found it to be a very boring way of looking at the world. Garvey was forever inspecting every little item and every line of dialogue, trying to arrange the murder in his mind. Hayes found people more interesting, and especially getting them to tell him what he wanted to know. Investigation was as much a con game as it was a science. You lied and wheedled and smiled until finally people found themselves giving you the truth bit by bit, against every ounce of their better judgment.

  “Is that it up ahead?” asked Samantha.

  Hayes peered up the street. He saw a soaking wreck of a building, four stories tall with broken windows dotting every floor and uneven streams of smoke pouring out of the roof. Men in stained shirtsleeves loitered on the front walk and they eyeballed Hayes and Samantha as they approached.

  “Hey, Princeling!” called someone across the street. “Hey! Hey, it’s Princeling!” They laughed.

  “Who’s Princeling?” said Samantha.

  “I have no idea,” Hayes said calmly.

  They came to the front door of the tenements. Inside children cried and moaned by the dozens. The wallpaper drooped down around them like petals of a dying flower, its folds stained coffee-brown by the leaky ceiling. Hayes and Samantha stepped around the dripping spots and walked up the stairs to the second floor. Some doors to the rooms were open, others were missing entirely. One couple argued in the hall in some garbled patois, throwing their hands up in the air and sometimes making to strike one another, but never doing so. Hayes smelled shit somewhere, not the scent of rot or stagnation but genuine human shit.

  They walked to the next flight of stairs. As they passed by the rooms the people within took no notice. Inside one room a man lay asleep on a pile of newspapers and dishrags, cigarette butts trailing across his chest like droppings. In another a dog watched them from the shadows of a broken kitchen cabinet and whined piteously but did not emerge. And in another room five children lived in unadultered squalor, none of them older than six, their mouths toothless and their eyes bright and their clothes stained with shit and sick. In the corner were three wooden buckets full of excrement, and above them a forest of flies twitched and shuddered. One child pounded on a back door, calling for someone. Her head was covered in flies, blue-black backsides crawling around her ears. She brushed them away absentmindedly as though they were barely there.

  “My God,” whispered Samantha. “My God, Hayes, they’re just children.”

  “Come on,” he said gently. “Come on. Up the stairs we go.”

  “No, we… we can’t leave them here. There’s got to be something we can do. Someone we can call. An orphanage. Something.”

  “Yes.”

  Samantha shook her head. “We have to call them, Mr. Hayes. Have them come and take care of this.”

  “Yes,” he said, his voice still gentle and soothing. “Yes, we will. Of course we will. Now come.” Then he padded up the stairs. He waited at the top and watched as Samantha stared into the room. He needed no special talent to understand she was trying to reconcile her life in Newton with a place such as this. How could people live this way with machines performing marvels only miles away? But as he watched a queer sense of unease grew in him. It had been a long time since he’d ever looked at anything as sadly as Samantha did now. He could not remember the last time he’d matched her sorrow, or her horror. He often forgot how young she was. She had to be several years shy of thirty, he remembered, and as he did he felt terribly old. Eventually she turned and made her way up the stairs, shoving tears away from her eyes as she did.

  “Are you ready?” he said. “It’s possible it may get worse.”

  She shook her head, thought, then nodded.

  “All right.”

  Near the top of the building cold drafts ran through the rooms in invisible rivulets and they clutched their coats about them. Hayes searched among the room numbers and found Skiller’s at the end. He knocked, waited, knocked again, then tried the knob. It was unlocked and he pushed the door open a crack.

  “What are you doing? You can’t just walk in!” Samantha whispered to him.

  “Keep a lookout,” he said.

  “What? I can’t-”

  “Keep a lookout. I don’t think anyone will notice or care, but keep a lookout.”

  She stood down the hall from him, clutching her hands and fretting. He opened the door, motioned for her to stay there, and walked in.

  The room was not like the rest of the tenement. Although shabby, it was well kept, with clean floors and scrubbed walls. A hole in the glass of the far window was carefully sealed with newspaper and chewing gum. There were two beds, one large, one small. Nightstand between them. An oil lamp with plenty of fuel. An opened envelope lay on the floor, its flap clumsily torn open. A wooden car sat next to it, paint completely peeled off.

  Hayes returned to the door and gestured to Samantha to come in. She was speaking to an ancient old woman, her head bowed and her back stooped, muttering to Samantha through thin lips. Samantha nodded along and hastily bid her goodbye.

  “Who was that?” asked Hayes.

  “Some old woman,” she said. “She’s senile.”

  “What was she saying?”

  “Something about how she was a messenger, and machines making lights in her head. Was there anyone in the room?”

  Hayes shook his head and they entered together. “Check the closets and drawers,” he said. “Check under the beds. Look everywhere.”

  “For what?”

  “Anything.”

  There was not much in the drawers. Trinkets and small knickknacks. Several candle ends, the tallow soft and greasy. The cabinets contained moldering bread and rotting potatoes. More flies whined out of the shadows as Samantha opened them and interrupted their meal. Hanging on the wall cabinets was a calendar. The year was wrong. Above it was a yellowed picture of Christ riding a donkey, with faded, ragged peasants laying palms on the road before him.

  Below the smaller bed Hayes found a tattered box full of newspapers, each of them covered in a child’s drawings done in coal. Drawings of the moon and of the city and of mountains. Men with swords, faces bright and clean. And the sun. Nearly all pictures featured the sun. It was an enormous thing, floating above the small Earth the child had scrawled out, full of promise. Hayes leafed through them, his fingers tracing their folds. It seemed wrong to handle them, to take the dreams of the dead or missing and treat them like no more than articles in a case. When he was done he put them back in the box and replaced it under the bed.

  “What was that?” asked Samantha.

  “Nothing.” He smoothed the bedsheet down. “Look for a letter.”

  “What?”

  “A letter
. Something. There’s an envelope open, look for a letter.”

  “What if they took it with them?”

  “Then they took it with them.”

  After searching for a bit they found it furiously crumpled and tossed into the corner, hidden behind a chair. Samantha opened it up and read it, then shut her eyes and turned away.

  “What is it?” asked Hayes.

  She didn’t speak at first. “It’s a goodbye,” she said after a while. “A goodbye to his son. If he doesn’t return. My Lord.”

  Hayes took it from her and sat down on the bed and began trying to work around the misspellings and the clumsy grammar.

  “To my darling Jack,” he began. “You are a good boy. A very good boy. I know that. I hope you know that. And I hope you know that there are things I must do so you can be a good boy. I love you. Very much. That is so. If you have this then I have not come back and that is okay. It is all right. Do not worry. You must go to Auntie Margaret’s by the sweetshop with the big red sweets and stay there and you must wait for me. I hope I will see you. But I may not. That is okay. It is all right. Do not worry. I love you. You are a good boy. A very good boy. I love you. I love you. Daddy.”

  Then Hayes put the letter down and they both sat in the little empty room and did not speak.

  “Where is the boy?” asked Samantha hoarsely.

  Hayes shrugged and folded the letter up and put it in his pocket. Then he thought and took it out and held it out to Samantha. She withdrew from it as though it were poison.

  “Take it,” he said fiercely. “You’re better at this sort of thing than me. Take care of it. File it away.”

  “I won’t. I won’t file it away. Damn it, Mr. Hayes, it’s-”

  “It’s evidence. It’s useful. File it away and keep it and remember it.”

  She took it and stuffed it into her small briefcase. Then Hayes stood and looked around. Looked at the empty remains of a humble life. He tried to envision the man and the boy sleeping in the beds and eating at the table and reading together and living together, but he could not. This was a dead place, a silent place. Full of nothing but small items, quietly falling into disrepair.