Invisible Streets

by Toby Ball

  His office was sparse—desk, two chairs, window overlooking the street. He’d hung a map of the City on the wall to his right, and behind him a propaganda poster of Lenin reading beneficently to young socialist children, just to screw with the suits. A mysterious duct ran along the ceiling, in through one wall and out another. It was quiet now, but he often heard the hollow rush of air—he had no idea where it came from or where it went.

  He dropped the notebook that he’d taken to the hearing on his desk, kept the front section of the newspaper. The front-page articles had put him in a foul mood. He stopped in the bathroom on the way to the elevator, his footsteps echoing hollowly on the yellow tiled floor. Let Littbarski wait a few minutes.

  FRINGS SMILED AT THE EDITOR’S SECRETARY, A GORGEOUS CREATURE named Lois, and was rewarded with a smile in return.

  “They’re waiting for you.”

  They?

  Frings found Littbarski, a small gink with sad, bowed shoulders, smoking a cigarette, reading the previous evening’s edition of the Sun. He looked up at Frings and reflexively pasted back the trim mustache that ran along the upper lip of his tight face.

  Across the desk from Littbarski sat Art Deyna, who had started as a junior reporter at the Gazette before it was acquired by the News. Under a new, more conservative regime, Deyna had risen to become the paper’s golden-boy reporter. He was in his late thirties, though he looked barely out of his teens—slender, hairless jaw, delicate face. Even more surprising was the presence of Michael Endicott, the chairman of the News-Gazette board, his position one of a small number of concessions the Gazette had been granted during the merger. He was ten years Frings’s junior, a wealthy man with a wealthy man’s paunch, though still handsome. He wore expensive glasses and his straight hair was slicked and parted on the side.

  Frings wondered why Endicott and Deyna were here. Endicott was an ally, Deyna definitely an adversary. Regardless, he would now have an audience to witness the objections he’d been harboring since reading the morning’s paper before LaValle’s hearing.

  He dropped the front section on Littbarsi’s desk. “What the hell is this on our front page today?

  “Frank,” Littbarski said in a warning tone.

  Frings read from the paper in his hand. “‘An unruly mob in the sway of professional provocateurs turned violent during a ceremony celebrating the next step in the construction of the Crosstown Expressway.’—Professional provocateurs? Do we have any evidence of that?—‘Police responded to crowd incitement with remarkable restraint before the situation became too dangerous and the agitators were dispersed with tear gas.’ Did we let Canada write the goddamn article for us? I didn’t see his name on the byline.”

  Deyna was out of his chair, face crimson.

  “Jesus, Art, sit down,” Littbarski snapped. “You too, Frank. You weren’t there, Art was. His reporting is solid.”

  “Give me the name of a professional provocateur, Art. Just one. It sounds like a great story.”

  Frings looked to Endicott, who watching this scene unfold with seeming indifference, then back to Deyna.

  Littbarski banged his fist on the table. “This paper is not run to please you, Frank. This isn’t the fucking Gazette anymore where every business owner is in league with the Devil and every goddamn radical with a picture of Mao in his wallet is a hero. Things are different now, Frank. You know that. Jesus.”

  Deyna was trying to stare down Frings. Frings ignored him.

  Endicott spoke. “Frank, we didn’t call you up here to get your opinion on the front-page stories, though, to be honest, I share your concern to a degree.” He looked at Littbarski with false benevolence. “We got an interesting leak this morning.”

  “I got an interesting leak this morning.” Deyna settled back in his chair.

  Littbarski jumped in, trying to regain control of the meeting. “Credit where it’s due, Art. Anyway, Frank, Art’s got a source in the Force who gave him some information with the assurance that we won’t publish until we get his—the source’s—okay.”

  “Who’s the source?” Frings asked.

  Deyna shook his head in disgust.

  “You know that’s not how we do things here.”

  “Given his track record—”

  “His track record is excellent, Frank. You don’t have blemishes on your record? Glass houses and all that. Okay?”

  Frings nodded.

  “Art’s source tells us that two nights ago a significant quantity of dynamite was stolen from one of the Crosstown demolition sites.”

  “How significant?”

  “He didn’t specify,” Deyna said. “But he was clear that it was very big.”

  Frings shrugged, looked to Endicott. “Okay. I assume they’re keeping it quiet, don’t want the bad publicity for the New City Project, don’t want people panicking.”

  Endicott gave a barely perceptible nod.

  Frings turned to Littbarski. “So, what are we going to do?”

  “Get a jump on the story. Have things in place for when we can run it.”

  This all made sense, but Frings still wasn’t sure why he was here. “What am I missing?”

  “Kollectiv 61,” Deyna said in the tone of a man gleefully relating bad news.

  “Is that something you know or is it a guess?”

  Littbarski stepped in again. “What we’ve been told, Frank, is that they left one of their little aphorisms.”

  Deyna looked at his notebook. “The creation of capital is not the highest goal of civilization.”

  Frings nodded. Stolen explosives, the New City Project, radical aphorisms delivered via spray paint—all Kollectiv 61 hallmarks. When Kollectiv 61 had first appeared, they’d been vandals, starting small—sand in the gas tanks of construction vehicles, torched lumber stocks—before moving on to more ambitious subterfuge, mostly explosives stolen from construction sites. They’d blown up on-site trailers, construction supplies, and equipment, though never when anyone was present. Property damage without fatalities. And always, painted somewhere nearby, a signature. The first one: “As technology progresses, freedom regresses.”

  “Okay,” Frings said.

  Endicott said, “You’re here because we’re hoping that you might receive another message.”

  “They don’t get in touch with me very often.”

  “We’re aware of that. But at the moment it’s our best hope.”

  In the past, Kollectiv 61 had communicated with the press by sending letters to Frings—words cut from the News-Gazette, pasted to paper. Frings, they’d explained, was an inspiration. His book, Alienation and the Modern City, a full-blooded philosophical critique of Nathan Canada and the New City Project was, they claimed, one of the touchstones of their movement. They had taken his ideas and created something different, something destructive.

  “I’ll let you know if I do.”

  Endicott nodded.

  “Is there something else?”

  “Art is on the story. If you hear anything …” Littbarski stopped there, looking for Frings’s reaction.

  “I’m not going to hear anything.”

  Littbarski seemed to contemplate saying something else, glanced at Endicott, decided against it.

  NILES, FROM THE PHOTO DEPARTMENT ONE FLIGHT UP, DELIVERED THE blowups of Macheda’s film frame to Frings’s desk. He fanned them out, five in all. The first was an enlargement of the whole frame, the four men looking at the camera; all young, maybe college, maybe a little older, the image crisp but too far away to discern much. Then four close-ups of the individual faces, the definition completely lost in the magnification, the features barely more than dark patches on white faces. He could just make out Sol Elia with his dark hair and dark eyes, his expression too blurred to read, but all the more unsettling for it. A crude mask. The other three were the same—probably just clear enough if you knew who you were looking for, otherwise it was just a sense, a description you could give in a few words: blond, square jaw, close-set eyes.
>
  “Sorry, Frank, that’s the best I could do.”

  “That’s great, Niles. I appreciate it.”

  Frings watched him retreat down the hall and wondered if the prints would be of any use.

  6

  DORMAN STRODE THROUGH THE CITY COUNCIL GALLERY TO THE PRESS section, where a small clutch of rumpled men were engaged in muted conversations, while the councilors shuffled papers and muttered to one another behind their long, curved table. The chamber had been recently renovated at great expense, the detailed molding painted metallic gold, lush against the powder-blue walls. A bronzed sculpture of a riverboat hung gleaming from the center of the domed ceiling. Who had actually financed the renovation was the topic of some speculation—Dorman had once asked Canada about it, receiving a dismissive grunt in reply.

  At some point in the past, the City Hall beat had come to be seen as a backwater, a dead end for ambitious young reporters. So the men that were there, day in and day out, were jaded vets whose ambitions had long since been frustrated.

  “Good morning, fellas,” Dorman said brightly.

  A couple of the reporters muttered “good morning,” but most just nodded or frowned.

  “You’ve got my number if you need to follow up later.”

  The only response came from an older guy named E. W. Lambert—the skin of his face stretched and buckled, like an old pudding. “Something going to happen today that we’re going to need to follow up on?”

  Dorman shrugged. “I have no idea. Just wanted to let you know that, as always, I am at your service.”

  This earned him a general rolling of eyes. Dorman gave them a quick wink and walked back the way he had come, to find a spot at the back of the room from which to watch the proceedings.

  PUBLIC QUESTIONS HAD JUST ENDED. TO THE LEFT OF THE COUNCIL, propped on two easels, was the seemingly ubiquitous map of the New City Project, a huge area of gray surrounding a central core that was checkered in a variety of colors, and, cutting through the whole map, the dark blue line of the as yet uncompleted Crosstown Expressway. The entire plan in shorthand: transform the center of the City into a single, powerful, enormous business district using tax incentives, at the expense of who knew how much current and future City tax revenue; and build a modern network of multi-lane highways—most notably the Crosstown—to link the new, wealthy suburbs with the City center, bypassing the outer neighborhoods entirely.

  Dorman knew he hadn’t missed anything during public comments—only the continued drumbeat of citizens opposing the New City Project. Nobody ever spoke for it in public comments. No one needed to. The whole thing was a fait accompli, the work on the City Center already well along and the Crosstown construction in its early, but irreversibly destructive, stages. Some neighborhoods were being razed to make room for the new highway, while others found themselves suddenly slated for a future in its permanent shadow.

  The New City Project had for months been consigned to the margins of Council debate. There was not, in truth, much to be discussed. Business was on the side of the project; the councilors—nearly all of them—were either bought and paid for or intimidated into cooperation. This corruption was an open secret, but one that seemed to go unremarked upon except by old radicals such as Frank Frings, who, Dorman thought, should realize they were wasting their time.

  DORMAN WATCHED AS THE UNHEROIC FIGURE OF NATHAN CANADA SHUFFLED to the witness table, carrying a folder in one hand, a cup of water in the other. The councilors followed his progress, and their anxiety was palpable, even from where Dorman sat. Canada took his seat, opened his file, and sorted through the papers it contained. For all the notice he paid to his surroundings, he could have been alone in his office.

  This was a Canada tactic, impugning people’s importance by ignoring them. Dorman had experienced this any number of times, beginning the day he’d interviewed for his current job. Being ignored had not bothered Dorman then—he hadn’t been particularly interested in the position, to be honest. But, once they did start talking, something about Canada had intrigued him. His approach seemed different than what Dorman was used to in the military—less direct.

  “They’ve told you the salary?” Canada had asked at one point.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And it is acceptable?”

  “It’s more than adequate.”

  “More than adequate.” Canada chuckled, a response that Dorman later came to associate with calculation. “You know, I spent a great deal of time settling on a number. The person in this job, Mr. Dorman, will be offered myriad financial enticements by people who will want their desires given a sympathetic hearing by my office. Do you understand what I’m talking about?”

  “It sounds like you’re talking about bribes.”

  “Exactly! Bribes. I can’t hire anyone from the City—it’s impossible to be sure where loyalties lie. But someone from outside the City—you, for instance, or someone else—your loyalty would be to the project, unless someone else bought your loyalty.”

  Canada paused, and while Dorman wanted to jump in to assure him that he was predisposed not to accept bribes, he knew it would sound empty, so he stayed quiet.

  “Which brings me back to your salary,” Canada continued. “The trick was to make it generous enough that you could live well with the money you make. But it also had to be low enough so that the position would not be attractive to someone whose ambition is simply to make a great deal of money. That kind of person, in my experience, is prone to accept extra income wherever he finds it—regardless of need—and will put money ahead of goals, such as those of the New City Project.”

  Canada paused again and leaned back slightly, which Dorman took to mean that he was finished.

  “The salary is more than adequate,” Dorman said. And it had proven to be more than adequate. He was not the type of person who wanted a lot of things. He lived comfortably, was able to afford to do the things he wanted to do. More than a dozen times people had approached him with bribes, and he had always sent them away. After a while, he’d earned a reputation as incorruptible. Canada’s instincts had again been correct.

  DORMAN WATCHED WITHOUT MUCH INTEREST AS CANADA DELIVERED HIS report in a bored monotone, rarely looking up from the paper he read from. To anyone paying attention, it was clear where power lay in the chambers. When he was finished, Councilor Eva Wise, representing a collection of Negro neighborhoods on the City’s East Side, announced that she had some questions. She thanked Canada for appearing and hurried through the rest of the niceties. Something about her tone, though, left the gallery with little doubt that this would be more than a pro forma exercise.

  Dorman knew this was coming. He’d received a tip from an assistant on the councilor’s staff, to whom he paid a modest monthly stipend in exchange for exactly this kind of information.

  “Mr. Canada, I have a young man on my staff recently graduated from City College with a degree in accounting, and I think—I believe that you will join me in this belief—that his example does credit to City College and makes an argument for the College’s continued prioritization in our budget.” She paused, picking up a sheet of paper. “He spent a couple of days last week going through the budget figures that your office provided, which, to be honest, seem to be intentionally obscure. His conclusion, Mr. Canada, is that the Crosstown is well overbudget at this stage and is on track to be possibly as much as $30 million over budget when all is said and done. My memory is not what it once was, but I don’t recall having heard anything from your office about this.”

  Canada had a tone that he used for responding to the Council’s questions, as if he was responding to a somewhat dim but insistent child. “I’m not sure, Councilor Wise, that this report does deepen my regard for City College, or at least its accounting department. Parks and Transportation accountants have been extremely thorough, and while there have been minor cost overruns, they will be absorbed in later stages of construction.”

  Councilor Wise frowned. “Do you not thin
k that this type of information would be important for the Council to know?”

  Dorman had prepared Canada for this.

  “My understanding is that the Council does not concern itself with the details of departmental budgets.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I notice that there are unspecified discretionary accounts in the Infrastructure and Utilities budgets, and a similar account in the Health budget, and this is without even getting into the Police Department’s black budget.”

  Dorman smiled. His boss was a master of this kind of thing.

  “What is your point, Commissioner?”

  “My point,” Canada said, his voice remaining calm as he fixed the councilor with a glare, “is that if the Council is interested in auditing governmental departments, I believe there are more bountiful hunting grounds than my budget, and I question why the Councilor would ignore those in order to prioritize mine. I wonder if there is a reason beyond the promotion of,” here his voice was heavy with sarcasm, “‘good government’ in her targeting of my department. I wonder if there is not an ulterior—”

  The Council Chair banged his gavel. Councilor Wise attempted to talk over Canada as he continued his harangue.

  Dorman stood, nodded to the cop at the door, and walked out.

  • • •

  FROM THE KOLLECTIV 61 MANIFESTO, Prometheus, FALL 1961

  8. Comfort is the Mortar of our Prison: Historically, totalitarian governments have resorted to the use of threats, violence, and material poverty in order to maintain a subservient populace. In the last half-century, however, we have seen an evolution in the means of population control. The substantial increase in the technology of modern comfort has resulted in a society that accepts, if it even notices, the totalitarian instincts of its government, as long as a certain level of domestic comfort is maintained. People are unlikely to actively oppose government action that doesn’t directly affect their day-to-day lives if those day-to-day lives are experienced at a reasonable level of comfort and the people have an expectation that they will remain so. IN ORDER TO ENCOURAGE RESISTANCE TO TOTALITARIAN ACTIONS BY A GOVERNMENT, MATERIAL COMFORT MUST BE EITHER UNDERMINED OR SHOWN TO BE ILLUSORY. THE USE OF VIOLENCE TO UPSET THE SENSE OF COMFORT IS NOT PREFERABLE FOR ACHIEVING THIS AIM, BUT MAY BE THE ONLY WAY THIS CAN BE ACCOMPLISHED BY A SMALL NUMBER OF PEOPLE.