The Company Man

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  “The link is your company. That’s what the link is.”

  “It isn’t. Or it isn’t just that.”

  “You want to talk about stunning bombs and gases, who do we know who makes that?”

  “I’m telling you, Brightly has no idea what’s happening. Evans, either. I’d know.”

  Garvey looked at him coldly. “Would you?”

  Hayes sat up in his linens. He leaned forward and glared at him. “What?” he asked. “What’s that?”

  “Would you actually know?” Garvey said. “Are you still that under control, even?”

  “Oh, here we are. Here, I know why I must have misheard you,” Hayes said, and he ripped the bandages from his ear. “There, now.” He cupped one hand to the bloodied side of his head and said, “All right, what was that, Donald? What was that you said to me? Because I know it wasn’t what I thought you said, I know it had to be-”

  “Be reasonable!” shouted Garvey suddenly. He got to his feet, fists at his side. “You’re having fainting spells! Swilling opium at every chance you have! You forget to give me Skiller, you fucking forget, and now I’m stuck chasing more bodies and I missed something that may have helped keep my whole damn Department from looking like common thugs for your company! For your company, for your fucking company!”

  “All right, you want something?” said Hayes, sitting further up in his bed. “You want to look at something? Look at Tazz! Look at the unions! If the papers are saying you’re thugs, why isn’t Tazz? Why hasn’t the figurehead for this whole damn movement weighed in on what’s happening? Or have I missed something? Has he piped up?”

  A nurse rushed in, drawn by the commotion. She raised her hands and clasped the air as if she were trying to strangle out the noise itself. “Gentlemen, you have to-”

  “Have I missed something in the past two days? Have I?” asked Hayes.

  “-You really must-”

  “Hayes…” said Garvey.

  “Come on, Garv, tell me. Tell me that.”

  The nurse pressed on Hayes’s chest, murmuring to sit back, to please sit back.

  “Come on, Garv,” Hayes kept on. “Go on, tell me I’m wrong.”

  Garvey shook his head. “All right. No. He hasn’t. He hasn’t said a damn word.”

  “Not a word!” shouted Hayes. “Not a fucking word! How’d I know? Huh? How did I know that one?”

  “ Please be quiet,” pleaded the nurse. “You absolutely-”

  “All right,” said Hayes to her. He put his hands in the air, surrendering. “All right. We’ll be quiet. We’ll be good little boys. Now run along. Run along and go cut on someone for me, would you?”

  The nurse glared at him, then turned around and stormed out. Garvey and Hayes sat back down and they both stared into their laps.

  “What did you find on Tazz?” asked Hayes finally. “Tell me that. You went to Savron, didn’t you? Went up to the Hill and tugged on your guard friend’s coat, right?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I did.”

  “And what’d you find there? What’d you dig up?”

  “Almost nothing,” admitted Garvey. “Which wasn’t what I wanted.”

  He had gone there the day Hayes and Samantha had seen Mr. Skiller’s lodgings, he said, just before the new murders. He’d surprised Weigel, who said he never thought he’d see Garvey again. They’d once worked Robbery together, way back when Garvey was just cutting his teeth and they both thought being a cop would be grand fun. But Weigel had found the realities and complexities of police work a little too daunting, and so had taken up a job as a guard for the state, as he found that work much more direct and satisfying. According to the records, Weigel had been stationed at Savron when Mickey Tazz first got thrown in.

  Which is where the problem came in. Weigel had heard of Tazz, naturally. Everyone knew a little about him. But he’d been stunned to hear any news that Tazz had been at Savron at all, let alone when he was keeping watch. If anything, Weigel had said, Tazz was there before him, years before him, before anyone here, because that’d be something you’d hear about, wouldn’t it?

  Garvey had agreed and then produced a bottle of whiskey, and the two men sipped and bullshitted each other. Eventually he’d persuaded Weigel to check and they both walked down to the records in the basement. Weigel, slightly drunk and dubious of Garvey’s suspicions, reluctantly began digging, and after a little less than twenty minutes they found what Garvey was looking for, to Weigel’s amazement. Michael Tazarian, a happy denizen of Savron Hill from 1912 to 1917, South Sector C, Cell 145, under Corporal Dobbs. Who, of course, Weigel barely knew of. The man had retired two years ago, he said. He had no idea where he’d be, they weren’t exactly buddies.

  From there the file was nothing but framework. Nothing but scraps and locations. Behavior reports, none. A bare handful of appeal hearings and even those pretty skinny. Physical reports, nonexistent. Tazz’s stay in the Hill had been a quiet one.

  “No one’s that clean,” said Garvey. “No one passes through Savron and leaves that tiny of a paper trail.”

  “No,” said Hayes, thinking. “No one ever does. Think there was anything missing?”

  “I can’t say. Had all the essentials. It was weird, though. Weigel asked the other guards if they remembered him. Some said they did, a little.”

  “But they weren’t sure.”

  “Not sure, no.”

  “Hm. I’ll want those records, if you can get them. Give them to Sam for me. We’ll store them somewhere for further examination.”

  “Why?”

  “Skeletons in the closet,” said Hayes. “Everyone has a few misdeeds in their past. And if those records turn out to be lying, then Tazz’s must be pretty sizable, wouldn’t you say?”

  “How are you going to come at it?”

  “By asking him,” Hayes said simply.

  Garvey laughed. “He’s in hiding. You said it yourself. No one knows where he is. How do you plan to crack that?”

  “You leave that to me. What are you going to do?”

  “Get what I can on Skiller from Samantha. She’s going to be turning it in at Central later today. Then I’ll work that and I’ll keep working the trolley and the tennie murders. Just keep working it until I’ve worked it to death and then I’ll take the corpse apart. And yeah, I’ll catch other murders in the meantime. Pile them up if I have to. Can’t work them, this is priority.”

  “What will your squad think of that?”

  “What they usually think. That I’m fucking odd. For working alone and working with you, and working directly under Collins. And they won’t like me for it, but what are you going to do.”

  “Hm,” said Hayes contemplatively. “You know, I remember the first time I was quite impressed with you, Garv.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Yes. That rifle robbery down close to Blanton. Old man had been shot three times and someone spotted a boy running away with an ancient Winchester. Fucking cowboy gun. But you had no other witnesses and nothing to go by. So you trawled every gun shop in town, legal and otherwise. Took you a few weeks, and I don’t know how you kept it as quiet as you did, but you did. So you got word of a Winchester belonging to some wharf rat down at the docks, something he had taken out to show off to the other firearm fans, and when you couldn’t win a warrant you sat on the house in the freezing cold, day and night, for four days. And then the little bastard tried again. Caught kicking in the door of some old biddy’s house, cowboy rifle in hand. He folded like a wet napkin once you sat him down in the cells. Then you caught a cold and were bedridden with a fever for a week after. I thought you wouldn’t make it. Remember that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That was good. Good police work. Just working it to death, something always shakes loose, yes?”

  “Sometimes. Other times not.”

  “Think something will shake loose here?”

  “I don’t know.” He took his hat and ran a finger along the brim. Then he said, “Thanks, by the way
.”

  “For what?”

  “For identifying my John Doe. For finding him and his boy. I appreciate that.”

  “All part of the fun.”

  Garvey stood and made to leave, then he stopped and looked back at Hayes from the edge of the curtain, eyes hooded and wounded all at once.

  “What?” said Hayes.

  “You know, if you stopped chasing the dragon for a while you’d do a better job,” he said.

  “Fuck you,” said Hayes. He turned his face away.

  “You would, you know.”

  “If I didn’t take my medicine I wouldn’t be able to work. My head would burn up.”

  Garvey nodded, thinking. Then said, “No. It’s not that.”

  “Fuck you. What do you know?”

  “I know that you were going to the dens long before you ever had an attack,” said Garvey. “So it must just mean you don’t care about the work that much.”

  Then he walked away and left Hayes to sit in his bed. It may have been his ears but the sound seemed to die away until everything was silent.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  At the end of the afternoon Samantha finished compiling everything she had on Skiller, having turned the man’s story into a hard, stable little pile of sanity in the center of her cluttered office. It had taken less time than she’d originally imagined, yet she’d been somewhat disappointed by how unremarkable his life was. After all this time of Garvey thinking of Skiller as his sad little Grail she had expected his story to be more dramatic, more meaningful. But she found he was just a man after all, his least important moments laid down in the McNaughton records like everyone else’s.

  John Neil Skiller, born 1882 in Lincoln, Nebraska. Hired by McNaughton in 1902, one of the very first members of the Air Vessel Foundry, back when the alloys were still experimental and no one was entirely sure how they’d behave when cooled. No supervisor complaints or acclamations for him, nothing more than “adequate.” Sometimes if the supervisor was feeling particularly generous he was also “punctual.” He seemed to be a quiet man, always in the background, yet never catching any attention. Rarely commended, never promoted. Just had his wages cut down year after year, dollars shaved off bit by bit. Suddenly she thought of Garvey, sitting beside him in the dark morgue of the Department, and she could think of no one better to shepherd the man’s memory to justice.

  She picked up the file and went down to the front to hail a cab. She was interrupted by one of the company limousine drivers, who waved her down and told her a gentleman was waiting for her. She approached the limousine cautiously. Then her heart sank when she saw Evans seated in the back of the limousine, knees together and hands quaintly in his lap. He smiled wide when he saw her and said, “Miss Fairbanks! Please, come closer and let me get a look at you.”

  “Good day, sir,” she said. “Are you doing well?”

  “Oh, well enough. It’s very good to see you up and about. Are you hurt? Or ill?”

  “No, Mr. Evans, I’m fine.”

  “That’s good to hear. Excellent to hear, really, it is. Would you care to take a ride with me today?”

  Samantha hesitated, then said, “Certainly, sir.”

  Evans leaned to the left to speak to the driver as she climbed in. “Cheery and Fifth, Willie?”

  “Yes, sir,” said the driver, and shut the partition. The car spun up and soon they eased off down the street.

  “I was aghast to hear what happened to you, Miss Fairbanks,” Evans told her once they began moving. “Just stunned. It’s hard to believe such things happen in this city. It really is, isn’t it?”

  She nodded.

  “That strange apparition. You saw it?” he asked.

  “Yes. I suppose I did. Though I’m not sure what I saw.”

  “Certainly, certainly. Have you… adjusted, though?”

  She attempted a smile. “I’m alive and working. It’s easier not to think.”

  “I suppose I can understand that. And how is Mr. Hayes?”

  “I’m not sure. When I left him in the hospital he was alive and well but still asleep. Have you seen him?”

  Evans shook his head. “Mr. Hayes’s health is being taken note of. Just not by me, personally. I was somewhat surprised, however, to find your investigation had taken you out into the city,” he said. He frowned a little. “Especially so far as the Porter neighborhoods. Unless I’m mistaken, I believe at the time you were supposed to be speaking to Mr. Ryan? Of the Vulcanization Plant?”

  “Yes… yes, well, Mr. Hayes had discovered that there was another link between McNaughton and the Bridgedale. A previous homicide being investigated by one of the detectives working the murders.”

  “Detective Garvey, I presume.”

  “Yes,” she said, uneasy. “I know you said you wanted to keep this in-house, sir, and away from the police investigation, but-”

  “That I did.”

  “Yes, but when something that concrete comes along you have to check it. Our orders were to check everything, if I recall. And Detective Garvey is an honorable officer.”

  Evans laughed. “My dear, I hadn’t planned on going so far as to suggest Mr. Garvey was a danger to anything.”

  “Oh. You hadn’t?”

  “No. On the contrary, Mr. Garvey is one of the most trustworthy men I’ve ever met. No, no, what I’m worried about is you.” He took off his glasses and began polishing them on his tie, watching her sadly.

  “Me, sir?”

  “Yes. Miss Fairbanks, you know we brought you here to, well, to stabilize Mr. Hayes’s investigations. To bring them to heel. What you did the other day damaged your reputation with your superiors. With my superiors. Those above even Brightly. They no longer know if they can trust you, you see. And that worries me. You are a promising young lady. It would be terrible if your career were to become irreparably damaged after coming so far. And we need you.”

  He put his glasses back on and stared out the window as the building faces slipped by. “Our company has accomplished very great things in its time,” he said. “Very great. But the greatest things are still to come. They are still being made. I can personally attest to that, and I know only of a handful of them. And all of them, all of them are being made right here, here in this city. And yet here is where we find the most opposition. In our home. Where we have brought wealth and industry. These are grave times for us, my dear. We are building the frame around which the future will be constructed, and yet here at the height of our powers everything threatens to collapse. But I still believe we can do good. I do. Do you believe this?”

  Samantha hesitated.

  “Go on, my dear,” he said. “You can be frank. I may be a sentimentalist, but I’m no fanatic or idealist, or anything so distasteful.”

  “I don’t know,” she said finally. “I don’t know anymore. When I first heard of where I was being sent I was overjoyed. But now that I’m here and I’ve seen these places… I don’t know. It’s not what I thought it would be.”

  He nodded, his face tired. “I know. I felt the same way.”

  “You did?”

  “Why, yes. No reasonable person could feel different. But I find it difficult to think of another way this city could have been built, another way we could have made what we made. It’s said by men far smarter than I that the most efficient way to organize progress is through business, to harness our own desires, and… and, well. I don’t know what to say. There are casualties, I suppose. Effects. Like the slums. Like the unions. But tell me of a way that we could hire everyone we wanted and pay them all what they wanted and not handicap our own goals, our own dreams? I know that sounds cliched, that those are arguments you’re sure to have heard before. Patronizing ones as well, arguments anyone can poke holes in. I thought so, too. But after being here and seeing what we can make, they stopped being so cliched to me. I spent all four of my years here trying to think of a way to reconcile them. I’ve given up.”

  “Four years?” Samantha asked, sur
prised.

  “Yes,” said Evans.

  “You’ve only been here four years?”

  He smiled. “How long did you think I’ve lived here?”

  “I don’t know, sir. Longer than that.”

  “I guess you think I’ve spent a lifetime here. I mean, I’ve been longer with the company, more than forty years. But no. I’ve only been at the heart of things for four.”

  He reached below his seat and pulled out a small silver tray and two small glasses with a little bottle of gin. He poured himself one and sipped a little, then drank the rest in one gulp. He offered her a glass, apologizing as he did as though he would never wish to watch a lady drink, then replaced the set when she refused.

  “I believe that was one of Mr. Hayes’s innovations,” he admitted. “The traveling bar.” He paused and considered something. “Do you know how I came to be here, Miss Fairbanks?”

  She shook her head.

  “I am here for the same reason you are here, really,” he said. “My transfer took place a little over four years ago, as I said. Through Brightly, actually. I was in Pakistan. Far, far away. Working as McNaughton’s chief negotiator for mining claims in the mountains. I was a civilized man in what I thought was an uncivilized land. I had gone there looking for adventure but found more bargaining and more talk and more money. Same as always. Business as always. Then one day I got a telegram. Emergency telegram, with the executive emergency access code at the end. Had to dig out the rule book to even figure out what that meant. It was from some man I’d never heard of, man by the name of Brightly. Said to get in the saddle and head due east, to Nalpur.

  “So I did. I rode and I rode and I rode all day, to Nalpur, and there I was summoned to the town prison. Nasty place. Most of it was underground, the cells were pits with bars over them. It was like a crypt. And inside I found at least a dozen men in suits, like they had come right out of New York or Chicago or Evesden. McNaughton men, you see.

  “I was directed to Brightly, in the back. I’d not heard of him before, but he was quite enthusiastic to see me. I asked him exactly what his position was and he smiled and told me he operated under a lot of different hats, but the hat of the day was Personnel and Acquisitions and he was here to get a man and he needed some executive backup. My backup, he said. Said I was the premier agent in the region and, somehow, I had negotiated for jurisdiction over our own employees in the country. Like we were our own nation. I didn’t recall that but I went along with it and asked what sort of employee we were here to get. And he said, ‘A man of talents and knowledge.’ Just that, and he said I was to hire him. This seemed strange, he wasn’t our boy yet so how could we have jurisdiction, but Brightly waved that aside and said all I needed to do was interview the fellow. I balked and he said, ‘No, no. No, no. He’s a harmless little thing, an Englishman, civilized and sophisticated like you or me.’ And he showed him to me. Took me to one of the cells and had me look in.