The Company Man

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  “But I never go there,” said Teddy. “I never go to the Records floor.”

  “I don’t care. You’ll be going there now, won’t you? If you want to keep this quiet.”

  “They’ll know. They’ll know I was there. There’ll be questions.”

  “You go in with this key,” said Hayes, tapping it. “It’s not matched to you. It’s not yours. And they won’t question you being at the Nail. You’re a big man, Teddy. Big and important. You go in. You get what I want. Then when you’re done you throw the key away. Throw it down a storm drain, throw it in the ocean, I don’t care.”

  “But they’ll find all those missing files!” whispered Teddy desperately. “They’ll find them and they’ll know it was me! How do I do it without them knowing?”

  Hayes looked him up and down, face taut and cruel. “Well. That’s your problem, isn’t it? I don’t care how you do it, so long as you do it. I just want what I need. The rest is up to you.”

  “They’ll catch me.”

  “Maybe. Would being fired be worse than being prosecuted for buggery?”

  Teddy choked. Then he shook as though he was about to vomit.

  “Not here,” said Hayes quickly. “Run to the washroom if you’re going to do it.”

  Teddy shook his head. He took a breath and got himself under control. Then he looked at Hayes with those weak little eyes and said, “I don’t have a choice, do I?”

  Hayes shook his head.

  Teddy nodded. “All right.”

  Hayes did not return to the safe house with Samantha that night. He did not want to risk attracting attention to her if he could. Instead he stayed in the attic of a condemned home he’d found. It looked as if it wouldn’t be of use for much longer, as it was now roped off for demolition. Once there he lay down on a musty old mattress and slept shivering in the dark.

  You never did know which way they’d jump, the boys you burned. Ferguson had leaped out a window. Others had suddenly turned patriot, willing to die for their country or company. And Teddy might still find a way to muck everything up, blundering in there and fooling about. But Hayes suspected he wouldn’t. He had watched Teddy. He knew him. He was a careful man and a talented engineer, and he’d somehow managed to nurse an abominable perversion for years without cracking or letting anyone in on it. If anyone could do it, it’d be old Teddy.

  But nothing was for sure. And sometimes when he burned them Hayes wondered if he did something to himself as well. If handling their sins tainted him in places deep inside himself.

  The next evening Hayes rose and waited under the Brennan Street Bridge. It was the second largest bridge in the state, after the Kulahee, which spanned the Juan de Fuca. Rickety apartments on stilts rested up against its massive curve like barn swallows, their little windows glowing like tiny eyes. As the cold grew the grates on the street belched roiling clouds of steam, like enormous furnaces below the city were working to the point of destruction.

  Hayes feared he’d never show, yet then he did. A trim, proper figure slowly walking through the grip of the steam, briefcase in his hand, not in a hurry by any means. Hayes stepped out from his hiding place along the bridge and Teddy’s eyes slid over to him, wide and curiously blank. Then he stopped before him and held out the briefcase.

  Hayes took it. It was large and very heavy. “This all of it?” he asked.

  Teddy nodded, still silent.

  “You sure? You’d better be sure, dear Ted. I’d hate to intervene again.”

  He nodded again.

  “Good,” said Hayes. “Then I’ll be gone.”

  He turned to leave when he felt a hand on his shoulder. He looked back at Teddy and stared into those terrified eyes.

  “You know I couldn’t help it,” said Teddy.

  “Get your hand off me.”

  “You know I couldn’t.”

  “Get your fucking hand off me.”

  He did so, then stood there shaking.

  “I’m not your fucking priest,” said Hayes softly. “I’m not your doctor. I don’t care about your obsession or whether you live or die. I’m just gone.”

  “Will He forgive me?” asked Teddy suddenly.

  “Who?”

  “God. Do you think He will forgive me?”

  Hayes looked at him. His breath caught in his throat and he felt the awful fear rise up in Teddy, the sick magnetism that drew him to Dockland twice a year or more, and the desire to run, to hide from the fear, to hide anywhere, maybe even in death. But as the rush of thought poured into Hayes he realized Teddy feared death even more than being exposed, for then he could no longer hide, not from God Himself, and he would be seen for what he was in his deepest heart.

  “No,” said Hayes. “No, I don’t.” Then he walked quickly away and left him there.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Samantha was just wandering the borders of sleep when the door of the safe house slammed open and a dark figure toppled in. She snapped awake and cried out, then reached below the bed for the little knife she’d hidden there. Then the figure coughed and said, “Christ, Sam, calm yourself. It’s only me.”

  “Mr. Hayes?” she said. She reached for the light. It snapped on to reveal Hayes struggling with the door, sopping wet, with arms full of boxes and briefcases. He managed to get a toe behind the door to shove it shut, then dumped the files down on the floor and sat beside them, breathing hard.

  “God, that was a long ways,” he said.

  She stood to help him. “What are you doing? What are those?”

  He grinned, still breathing hard, and laid a hand on the stack with a flourish. “These? These are our keys, Sam. These are our tickets in. In to what, I’m not sure. That’s why I brought them to you.”

  Samantha looked down at the files. Her eyes traced over the red tabs and the olive-green sheaths with black lettering stamped down the side. “Those are McNaughton files.”

  “Yes indeed.”

  “How did you get those?”

  “It doesn’t matter how. I got them, that’s enough. They’re the financial records for Local Securities for the last sixteen months,” he said with a groan as he stood. “Local Securities being those who keep watch at home and pay single characters rather than companies. Shady people on the payroll. Informants.”

  “Informants?”

  “Yes. Are you surprised?”

  “Well, no, honestly. I can’t believe we kept records for that sort of thing, though.”

  “Oh, I can. Very easily. It’s a business, after all. The right hand may not want to know what the left hand is doing, but they do want to know how much they’re paying for it.”

  “You want to blackmail McNaughton with that?”

  “Not with that, no. I want you to look through these,” he said, fingering the files and briefcases, “and these,” and he touched the boxes.

  “And what are those?”

  “Those are prison records. From Savron Hill, and Garvey. You’re going to use that marvelous mind of yours to look there first.”

  “Look for what?”

  “Disappearances. And similarities.”

  She rolled up her sleeves and began laying out the files on the floor, as there was no room on the desk in Hayes’s safe house. After glancing through the McNaughton files she saw that many of them were heavily coded, seeming to rely on the use of some sort of cipher, which Hayes concluded they didn’t have. Sighing, she set the files in order of simplicity, with the prison files close to her and the densest McNaughton files at the other end. Then she began reading, starting with prisoner records from three years back and looking for any gaps in the information, prisoners who had gone missing without any warning or notation at all. It was extremely difficult work, as the prisoner records were often either incompetent or incomprehensible. It was hard to discern if a gap was a mistake or an intended omission. Hayes was of no help at all; this sort of work bored him to tears. At first he hovered over her shoulder, asking questions and getting cigarette ash all ove
r the papers. Then he gave up and passed the time bouncing around the room, wandering the corners and sometimes going out to the canal to watch the waterfall swell and shrink.

  After three hours of work she felt she had found someone. A Mr. Gerald Crimley, once a prisoner of South Sector C, imprisoned there for land fraud. Apparently he got caught getting people to invest in properties that didn’t technically exist. Wound up stuck with a five-year sentence, and disappeared with less than a year of it served. Samantha checked and rechecked the death rolls, which were both long and appalling, but among all the names Crimley never appeared. He never reappeared, either, not anywhere else.

  “Hm,” said Hayes once she told him this. He finally sat down on the bed, his eyes half-shut as though he were sleepy. “Well. We’ll need to find out where he went.”

  “Am I looking for Crimley in the McNaughton files now?”

  Hayes opened his eyes and smiled slightly. “Yes. If you would be so kind.”

  Samantha then began the laborious job of digging through the cryptic budgetary records. They were conveniently arranged by date, but often referred to events or figures whose names were no more than letters and numbers, such as RD232 or WJR34-1-1. She guessed these were the names of other files, and if they had the cipher then she would have been able to make sense of them. Numerous code words were used as well, such as Seaworthy or Easterner or Pilgrim. After looking at all the entries and logs, she guessed that Seaworthy was almost certainly some sort of senatorial contact, while Pilgrim had to be a shipping contractor for a minor-league rival firm. Easterner was all over the records, yet she could see no pattern there. But exactly what they all did for McNaughton was never mentioned; just their costs and financial matters. Bank accounts and payment amounts and dates. It was just one long receipt.

  One file name began appearing very often around the time Gerald Crimley disappeared: SP-0417. She noticed it because three weeks after Crimley disappeared from Savron a five-thousand-dollar payment was made to a bank account in San Francisco, referencing that file name as the owner of the account. Frowning, she made the tenuous leap that, provided Hayes’s vague hunch was not wrong and the two files were indeed connected, SP-0417 was Crimley.

  “If he’s alive,” added Samantha. “And if Crimley is involved in McNaughton at all.”

  To this Hayes said nothing. Just nodded again with sleepy, distant eyes.

  She kept looking through the financial activity under SP-0417. For a long time there was nothing. No deposits or withdrawals whatsoever, not for nearly three months. Then, finally, another payment was made, this only one thousand, but to the same account. From then on one thousand dollars were paid monthly to the account, starting eleven months ago. Almost immediately after this SP-0417 began to be associated with something called Craftsman. Craftsman didn’t seem to be a person, as far as Samantha could see, but a project of some kind. The nature of Craftsman was never made clear, and the few details about it were carefully blacked out by some record auditor who had deemed them too explicit for the budgetary files. Eventually there was some sort of warning about financial deposits made to SP-0417 while Craftsman was underway, giving a number of other accounts and stocks to route the payments through before they arrived at the original account for SP-0417. It was some tricky financial math, but apparently whatever SP-0417 was doing necessitated dead secrecy and generous pay.

  Until, finally, the payments were no longer made through an account or a series of cleaning fronts. This had happened abruptly, merely two months ago. From then on it was notated that the payments would go through a single person who would handle them himself on the behalf of SP-0417, that intermediary identified directly as one J. Colomb.

  Samantha stared at this once she read it. Trembling, she read this aloud to Hayes, who shut his eyes fully.

  “Colomb is the man who helped Mickey Tazz,” said Samantha softly. “Wasn’t he?”

  “Yes,” said Hayes.

  “And if I’m right, then… then he’s helping Crimley here.”

  Hayes nodded.

  “Then that means… That could mean that Crimley is Tazz, and…”

  “And Tazz is company,” said Hayes. “Well done, Sam. Very well done indeed.”

  “But why would they do that?” asked Samantha. “Why?”

  “What better enemy to have than the one you own, lock and stock?” said Hayes. “What better foe to fight than the one you control with every move? They must have seen the union rising in the future and decided to act. They fabricated a union leader, from his past to his pamphlets, then found some poor bastard in prison and said, Hello, friend, we’ll happily give you a way out and pay you generously if you just wear this mask for a while and do what we say, whatever we say and whenever we say it.”

  “How could that happen, though?” asked Samantha, still astounded.

  “Through time,” said Hayes. “And money. My guess is they never intended Crimley to reach the very top. They probably just wanted him to be their agent in the unions, not their leader. But I guess fortune paved the way for him.”

  “But what good would it all do? Haven’t people died because of this union business?”

  “Yes, but there’s never been any big sabotage,” said Hayes. “Don’t you remember? Oh, a few have gotten killed, sure, but I bet it’s hard to control the hand of every man who pledges himself to the union, like Mickey himself said just a few days ago. But they’ve never done anything big, have they? Because someone at McNaughton told Tazz to keep them on a leash.”

  “And that’s how he knew about what you can do,” said Samantha, realizing.

  “Yes,” said Hayes. “I’d expect Brightly or someone told him themselves.”

  “How long have you had this hunch?”

  “Since we met him. The way he talked about being made, and owned. It seemed too familiar, for me.”

  “All right. But then why are we investigating them? Why did they tell us to start tearing down the unions wherever we can? That doesn’t make sense at all.”

  Hayes paused at that, thinking. “No, it doesn’t,” he said. He sighed. “God, I wish I could have caught him while he was here! I’d have put the screws to him and not stopped.”

  “He’s not here?” asked Samantha. “He’s gone?”

  Hayes filled her in on what he had seen the night before last. “Just jumped ship and shipped off,” he said when he was done. “Up and gone, like no tomorrow.”

  “Why would he do that, I wonder?”

  “I don’t know. He didn’t seem too pleased when we saw him. What he said about McNaughton, how they make people and use them… I think he was starting to crack after the murders. That he was starting to give up, or give in. It’s not easy, living deep cover. They start to believe it. You sink them in with people fighting for a cause, and your man starts to turn over time, if you’re not careful with him. I think Mr. Crimley may have actually started to believe the words he was preaching, maybe.”

  “Maybe that’s why he started looking for the machines, down in the tunnels,” said Samantha. “He wanted to give them control. To give the union men something of McNaughton’s. Or to sabotage McNaughton entirely.”

  “Yes. But you can see he gave up on it recently, when he told his company contacts to start sending money through Colomb. That way he can get his hands on fast cash and then get out. When I spooked him he must’ve figured enough was enough, and scarpered.”

  “But do you think this Tazz business might actually be connected to the trolley?”

  Hayes bit his lip. “Maybe. But Tazz seemed frightened, just as much as Brightly. It may not be connected at all.” He thought for a moment, then said, “Here, let’s keep looking through the file. If this Craftsman nonsense is the term for planting Crimley at the top of the unions, then surely we can find out more just by following it.”

  Hayes was right. There was more. As Craftsman rolled along it began to accumulate payments to dock personnel, boat owners, and finally a new character, one r
eferred to as Colonel. Samantha discovered that Colonel had been found through the ever-present Easterner, apparently an old friend of his who had brought him to the city for reasons and through methods unknown. It seemed, Samantha said, that Tazz’s last instructions for the unions had involved bringing something in to Evesden, shipped in by this Colonel from a McNaughton facility west on the Strait. The location of this facility was given more security than anything Samantha had ever seen previously: the word had not just been blacked out, but cut out of the report with a razor blade, and a blank tab of paper had been pasted in. There was a note inked in red in the margins of the paper, saying that all inquiries should be directed to L. Brightly, head of Security.

  “There are no McNaughton facilities west down the Strait,” said Samantha. “None that I know of, at least.”

  “What was Tazz shipping in? Or being told to ship in?”

  “I’ve no idea. It just says ‘shipment’ over and over again and then gives the names for the people attending to it. Buying the boat and whatever.”

  The heaviness returned to Hayes’s eyes again. “Hm,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I’m just wondering if it ever mentions who exactly was supposed to aid in this smuggling.”

  She looked one document over again. “No, I don’t think it ever mentions that. Just who they bought the boat from and who they paid off. Why?”

  “Because they would probably need a team of men. Men that had worked on docks before. Or who were used to manual labor, and were willing to get their hands dirty.”

  Samantha cocked an eyebrow at him, then took a sharp breath. “The Bridgedale trolley?”

  “Yes. I think it’s possible that all those dead men may have been tapped to bring in the shipment for Tazz. Probably did it for free, thinking it was for the union. Them, and maybe Skiller. That’s why there’s no payment record.”

  “And then they were murdered to keep it quiet?”

  “Maybe. This is all just guesswork, Sam. But I think that feels right. It hangs together. I would want to look. What else is there?”