The Company Man

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  “They do?”

  “Sure. Moves things away from McNaughton. Puts it in terms everyone can handle. I mean, it’s just gang wars again. And it comes from a veteran, everyone loves a veteran, and all the vet says we have to do is start raiding the opium dens again. And now everyone’s seeing careers in it. Collins, Morris. The captain. Everyone sees a bright future for the boys who bust this new gang war.”

  “And you?”

  Garvey was quiet for a long while. Then he said, “No. They don’t like what I’m saying. They’re trying to treat this like this is normal, like it’s just another murder. It’s not. They still can’t explain how it happened. They’re not even trying. But there are politics in play. And I’m already dirty to them,” he said. “Because of Hayes. Because of fucking Hayes.” He shook his head. “What the fuck happened. What happened to this damn town.”

  Then he turned and looked at her. “I didn’t want to be there anymore. At the Department.”

  “I know.”

  “I didn’t want to think about things no one wants me to think about. I just wanted to leave it. I just… I just wanted to see you.”

  “I’m here,” she said.

  He put his coffee down and kissed her, weakly at first but then more strongly. Then she took his head in her hands and looked at it, all the wrinkles and the bags under his eyes and all the bruises, a face hard and worn by the things it’d looked into. Then she kissed him, on his chin and eyes and brow, and then finally his lips. Then they stood, lips still touching, and she led him to the bed. As she did, one of his hands ran down the front of her body to pull up her skirt and go hunting between her legs.

  She was not certain if it came from genuine affection or if it was some kind of desperation, a kindred sense of being lost, like two ships passing each other on a foggy sea and calling to one another, blindly recognizing each other’s plight. But she felt that it was, at its heart, both an escape, and real. As if each time he held her she was following him down another one of the underground tunnels to be greeted by wonders that took her away from all of this, to some waiting treasure that had been there all along if only you had the eyes to see it, and she hoped that perhaps it did the same for him.

  As night came they watched the spotlights drift across the ceiling of her bedroom. She sat with his head cradled in her lap, and she cracked the curtains so they could see out and watch the sky strobe soft white.

  “It’s not how I remember it,” he said.

  “Remember what?”

  “The city. It’s changed so much, from when I was little.”

  “How old were you when you moved here?”

  He looked up at her. “I didn’t. I was born here.”

  She blinked, then said, “Do you know, I think you may be the only native Evesdener I’ve ever met.”

  He laughed. “I’m not surprised,” he said. “This is a mutt city, made of other cities and other countries. But it used to be a city. A real city.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know. When I was a kid, I guess.” He struggled to describe it to her. How the city had once been something new, genuinely new, new with promise, not new with perversion, as this late Evesden was. It had been the foundation of something, not a tumorous buildup of growth. It was difficult for him to say exactly when he had realized that it had failed, though.

  She found he kept returning to one particular day, the day his father closed his carpentry shop. Like all the buildings in Evesden the shop had been relatively new, he told her, but in comparison to everything else his father’s shop seemed a great old thing, solidly built of huge shafts of wood, with dark, polished eaves and an eternal scent of polish and smoking timber. It had seemed larger than a church back then, dark and cavernous with strange tools standing among the shadows. And somehow his father had seemed bigger then, too. Garvey still remembered him as a huge man, taller than any other he had ever seen, with a broad back and knobby, darkened hands, hands that were a plum-red like they had been soaked in wine. His father and the shop seemed like emissaries of an older age then, silent and wordless except for the sounds of work and progress. Even when the home-building companies began to take hold and started choking out the little shops his father had soldiered on, indifferent to the rise and fall of those strange, abstract companies. Yet they did not fall, only rise. They rose until they ruined the shop, eating up customers until the gnarled old church went silent, tool by tool, voice by voice. And on the day his father had locked up and doomed the shop, both he and the shop seemed to have lost something. It was not a great, mysterious building made of dark timber. In fact it seemed little more than a shack then, and a shoddily built one at that. And his father no longer seemed so large and mysterious. He seemed like a working man who had not been smart enough to realize when the world was eroding beneath him. And then his father had gone home and uncapped a bottle of whisky and sipped it down inch by inch, watery red eyes fixed on nothing, and he’d shaken his head and said, “It’s gone now. It’s all gone.”

  And that was when Garvey had known. Had realized he had known all along. That sometime in the blossoming progress of this city there had come a wound that had sent it all awry, and it could only throw on messy layer after messy layer, like a mad pearl growing within the lips of the sound, until it ate itself alive.

  He often got that feeling. That once something had happened that had sent the whole world reeling. Some great violation or change, long ago. Maybe even before Evesden. He wasn’t sure. But he had felt all his life that he was struggling in the wake of it.

  As he described it to her she suddenly remembered the letter Hayes had read to her in Skiller’s apartment, and the little lost boy and his dead father, and she wondered what Garvey saw in his case with the man in the canal. Perhaps he saw that same familiar wound that had sent his life in the direction it’d come, only now there was a chance, however slight, to correct it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Hayes slept in five-minute bursts. He had trained himself to do it long ago, and there in the empty cold shop the gift returned slowly. For the past two days he had lived in a swimming dreamworld, fatigue eroding every one of his senses. But still he watched. And, in a way, the silence and loneliness were pleasant. His mind had not been so clear in weeks.

  When the storm rolled in he piled blankets about himself on his perch. He ignored his shivering and hunkered down more and sucked on the end of a pencil. He badly wanted a cigarette but would not risk the flame.

  He was not sure when he noticed the man. Time had become strange to him as the sun shifted behind the overcast. But he had been staring at the pattern of the crowd for hours and had come to know the traffic and the loitering places, so when one man walked out of one alley and crossed before the building face and walked into yet another alley to examine something on the ground, Hayes knew there was something wrong. Through the fog and the condensation of the glass Hayes saw he was short with a gray coat and a smudged bowler, but could make out nothing more.

  He watched the gray coat. Saw him look closer at the thing on the ground, then look at the street and the buildings above and pick the thing up and toss it away. It was half of a shoe, sodden and wet. The man wiped his hands on his coat and stood in the shelter of the alley and put his hands in his pockets and casually rocked back and forth.

  “You,” said Hayes from his perch, “are fucking terrible at this.”

  He gauged that the man in the gray coat would stay in the alley for a little less than five minutes. He slipped down to the bottom floor of the shop and watched him from behind a ragged sheet that had been left hanging. The gray coat sidled out toward the lip of the alley and huddled below an awning in the sleet. Then he walked out quickly, crossing to Hayes’s warehouse and dodging through the cars and the cabbies and the streams of soaking people. He slowed as he came to Hayes’s door, where he turned about and walked backward the rest of the way, eyes roving and clouds of breath forming a trail like the smokestack of a train. The
n he ducked down and slid something below the door and hurried off west.

  Hayes put on a thick black coat and boots and a riding cap and headed out into the rain after him. He marked the gray coat carefully in the street and strained to keep hold of him. Crowds swarmed about them as his quarry headed north on Embrage and then west on 112th and then south on Dowers. The figure slipped among street criers and huddled bands of the homeless and once a train of passing nuns, black and white like the keys of a piano. He paused at every other corner to inspect something on the ground and sneak glances over his shoulder. Each time he went through this inept process Hayes would pull his face down into his collar and merge with the nearest group of people. If they noticed him they did not say so. Perhaps on rainy cold days such as these the water blended people together until they could not tell themselves apart.

  The gray coat came to a trolley station and he swung himself down the twisting iron staircase to the tunnels below. Hayes ambled up to the stairway and passed by while looking down. He did not see the man waiting so he quickly bought a newspaper and pretended to read it to hide his face. Then he walked to the stairwell and descended in a brisk trot and turned sharply left at the floor and kept going. Warm air and the roar of a distant trolley swallowed most of his senses. A vagrant sat by the foot of the stairs, hands cupped for change. He reached out to Hayes, saying, “I am a messenger, sent from afar. Please, you must listen to me. You must listen. You must…”

  Hayes ignored him. His eyes stayed vaguely fixed on the print of the newspaper, scanning the crowd for that streak of light gray. He walked around in a quick loop and spotted the man walking east along the tunnel, then over one of the trolley bridges and down west to Westbank. Hayes followed and let the newspaper fall as he did so. It would be hard to lose him now. The trolley stations were mostly abandoned in the wake of the Bridgedale slaughter.

  The gray coat came to a trolley stop and stood there waiting. Hayes passed him by, just a few feet away. The man did not notice Hayes taking in his black-smudged face layered with burst veins, the skin heavily lined around the eyes and lips. Probably from fumes of some sort. A unioner, almost certainly.

  Hayes kept walking down to a sausage stand. He bought one and shambled down farther to where the maintenance tunnels began. He leaned up against a bright red pipe and chewed his sausage slowly and watched the gray coat. He squinted to read the trolley map. There was the D line and the G4 line and the C38 line and it seemed like thousands more. He badly wished Samantha were there. She was much smarter when it came to things like this.

  “Come on, bastard,” he muttered as he watched. “Come on. Go on home for me, just real quick.”

  The gray coat looked back at the platform numbers, then began to walk farther down. Hayes waited for him to pass, then matched his pace, not willing to put any more distance between them.

  As they moved a faint sound rumbled through the trolley station, a low groaning that blurred into a hum as some massive burst of pressure was shifted from one system to another. The other people in the station seemed not to notice, but as the noise increased Hayes became aware of something else. There was something crawling in the back of his mind, building tension with the noise until it was a white-hot needle burning into him, right behind his ear.

  He stopped, gasping, then muttered, “Oh, no,” as the attack began to take grip.

  He stumbled to the side, clawing at the wall as he fell before the tunnel. The guttering sounds from below him clacked and shivered, filling up his ears, and somehow the attack strengthened with it. Anger and fear and morose boredom flooded through him, pounding his brain with each wave. He looked up through tear-filled eyes and saw the maintenance tunnel ceiling above him. He thrashed about, the world around him blurring.

  Close and dusty and dark. Chambers and passages splintering off, indecipherable signs written on each of them. The roar of the trolleys filling every moment. And somewhere in it was a voice, begging for him to listen.

  Then something changed. Suddenly he could hear something new. But that wasn’t possible, he thought. Surely he had to be wrong…

  Things went black. Then lights flashed before him, soft blue ones that were somehow at the edges of his sight. He felt there was some message in them, some signal like Morse code, but before he could pay attention to them they faded and he saw he was no longer in the trolley system at all. Instead he found he was in the bone-like ruins of a city long gone. Pockmarked ribs of ancient gray buildings lay broken on the paths before him. Everything smelled of ashes. Down the remains of one street he could see the husk of a tall building leaning against the dark sky. At the top its steeple had been reduced to shards, but he could see it had once been jade-green, and below it a few metal letters still clung to the building’s side, an M and a C and an O.

  As he looked he saw there was something beyond it. Something out on the edge of the city, something enormous and white, rising up to the sky…

  Someone was shaking him. “Hey, buddy. Buddy?”

  The vision faded. He took a breath and smelled the urinal tang of the trolley stations and knew he had not gone anywhere. He opened his tear-blurred eyes and saw he was lying in the mouth of the maintenance tunnel. The sausage stand vendor was prodding him with the toe of a shoe as curious onlookers gathered around him.

  “You all right, buddy?” asked the sausage vendor.

  “What the hell was that?” gasped Hayes.

  “You fell over. Just fell over and started shaking. You hit your head or something?”

  Hayes sat up and looked around. The man in the gray coat was gone. “How long have I been here?”

  “Sorry?” asked the vendor.

  “How long have I been here?”

  “Oh. I don’t know. A good couple of minutes or so.”

  “Shit,” said Hayes. He got to his feet and staggered back a little but soon steadied himself.

  “It wasn’t the sausage, right, buddy?” asked the vendor warily.

  “Fuck off,” said Hayes, and darted off into the station.

  He sprinted through the platforms, looking high and low for that smear of gray he’d marked, but found nothing. The man had either gotten spooked or made his connection. Either way, he’d be on the other side of the city by now.

  Surrendering, Hayes limped back up to the streets. Dawn was crawling over the building tops. He made his way home, shivering and confused.

  It was almost like something under the city had spoken to him. Spoken to him and caused his attack. And as strange as the vision had been, what disturbed him more was what had come just before it, because for one second Hayes had not heard whispers from the minds of those nearby but almost a loud shout from a single mind, one that was vaster than any other he’d ever encountered. An enormous and strange consciousness, somehow buried under the city, and waiting for him, imagining a ruined Evesden underneath a dark sky.

  Something was changing in the city, that was for sure, and perhaps these murders and the unions were just the barest hint of things to come. Hayes shook himself and tried to forget it.

  Underneath his front door the man in the gray coat had wedged a small letter. Hayes pawed at it with useless, icy hands and forced the door open and stumbled in. He had no wood so he built a fire in the brazier of books, history and poetry and versions of the Bible. He knelt before the blackening pages and felt warmth return to his bones. Then he opened the letter. On it were a time and a place, no more.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Samantha and Garvey continued their affair erratically, meeting at odd hours, often at her apartments but sometimes his or a hotel room, if it was cheap enough. It seemed time had stopped for both of them. Hayes had not returned, so Samantha’s current task was to produce enough information to make it appear as though he were still there, which was easy enough. And Garvey’s role in the Bridgedale investigation had all but vanished. He was just chaff, waiting to be thrown out, he said. He often felt perfectly willing to do the throwing himself.
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br />   One day he took her west to where the hills and the mountains began. There was a sanitarium there, with natural springs and boiling hot saunas. When they parked she walked to the edge of the lot and looked out over the valley to the city in the distance. From here it was no more than a haze of smoke and the hint of angles and forms resting somewhere at its base.

  They spent the day in escape, forgetting about the countless machinations waiting for them at the city, and enjoying the peace and quiet. As evening fell they ate at a nearby diner and returned to their rooms, and after they made love their sweat softened the sheets and the moisture chilled in the evening air until everything was cool and clean.

  As night deepened Garvey asked, “How long do you think this will last?”

  “For as long as we need it to,” she said. “For as long as we want it to.”

  “No. Not this. Not us.”

  “Then what?”

  “The investigation. The city. Everything.”

  Samantha was quiet. She did not know what to say to that.

  “How long do you think we can keep going at this rate?” he asked in the darkness. “How long do you think this place we’ve made can last?”

  The minutes dragged on, and she asked him what Hayes believed. He told her not a damn lot. Then she asked him what he believed. “Whatever I can afford to,” he said. “Which is enough. Sometimes.”

  “It’s killing him, isn’t it,” she said.

  “Hayes?”

  “Yes. His talent.”

  “Maybe,” said Garvey. “Probably. I think he knows it, though.”

  “And he doesn’t care?”