Invisible Streets

by Toby Ball

  “I’m looking for Zanev, Malakov, or Petrov. You seen them?”

  “You a cop?”

  “What tipped you off?” He followed the bartender’s glare to the big doorman who scowled back at them.

  “Why you want to know?”

  “Just some questions, see if they know some things. I went by their job site but they weren’t there. So here I am. No big deal. But a place like this … why not just help me out, get me on my way.”

  The bartender thought this over. A jukebox was blaring unusual music—the notes crashing into each other in a kind of whirling madness—a lot of accordion. Grip pulled on his beer, looked at it, threw it past the bartender into the line of booze bottles, where it shattered. Grip could feel the room’s attention shift to him.

  The bartender’s eyes narrowed. He was angry, not intimidated, but understood that he needed to get Grip out of there. “Petrov was here with Zanev, playing craps. Malakov came later, pulled them off the table. They left together.”

  “When was that?”

  “Two hours ago. Something like that.”

  “You know where they went?”

  “How would I know that?”

  Grip shrugged. “Look, those guys come back, can you give them something for me?”

  The bartender raised his eyebrows. Grip dropped another five on the bar along with a business card. The bartender picked up the card, looked from it to Grip.

  “Look, Ivan, you really want to make a stink about this, make me bring in backup, put you on the police map? You want the beat cops showing up every week, knocking on your door?”

  “My name’s not Ivan.”

  “The hell it’s not,” Grip said. “All of you’re named Ivan.”

  The bartender scowled, pocketed the card, dropped the five in the tip jar, and moved off to another customer. Grip turned his back and leaned against the bar. The collective attention in the room returned to the tables, and Grip watched the adrenaline-fueled action from a distance. A prostitute—young, skinny, slightly cross-eyed—approached him.

  She touched his arm. “I know you from somewhere?”

  Grip shook his head. “I’m a cop.”

  “Buy me a drink?”

  Grip wasn’t sure what to make of this—stupidity or moxie? He pulled yet another five from his billfold, handed it to the girl.

  “Have a drink. I’ve got to go.” He walked out past the fat man at the door, patted him on the stomach, emerging onto the street wondering where the hell the three security guards had gone to.

  10

  THE RESTAURANT OF THE HOTEL LEOPOLD II WAS SITUATED ON THE TOP floor, taking advantage of its location on the crest of Capitol Heights. From the window where Frings sat, you could see more than half of the City. Skyscrapers rose in the downtown to the west, and the residential neighborhoods and smaller business districts filtered into the northern blocks, which had begun to be slashed to make way for the Crosstown, running relentlessly, neighborhood after neighborhood, toward downtown. Once you began to think about it, the New City Project’s footprints were everywhere: the Riverside Expressway, hugging the contours of the river; a narrow concrete band separating the City from the water now that cargo no longer came up on barges; the Garibaldi Bridge over the northwest bend in the river, connecting the City to the northern suburbs, cutting commuting time to a quarter of its previous duration.

  The restaurant was maybe two-thirds full, the ambience not quite what it was at night when the lighting was dim and the full spread of the City lights dazzled. Now, apart from the view, the place was just a fancy restaurant with tuxedoed waiters, fine linens on red tablecloths, expensive wine on the tables. Businessmen discussed deals; high-priced lawyers consulted with their wealthy clients; gangsters shooting for respectability tried to look comfortable among the real elite. There was more power in this room, Frings thought, than in all of City Hall. A jazz trio played softly in one corner. He washed down a solitary lunch with a glass of water, thinking about Sol Elia, Panos’s troubled grandson.

  EIGHT YEARS AGO, FRINGS HAD BEEN IN PANOS’S OFFICE WHEN THE CALL had been patched through from the police. Urgent. Frings had read the grave lines of his editor’s face and stood to leave, but Panos held out a hand as he listened to the other end of the line. This was before the merger, and Panos’s office stank of stale cigar smoke and leather-bound books decaying on the dusty shelves. Frings watched Panos’s eyes—surprise, realization, then, slowly, profound dismay.

  His grandson, Sol, had come home to find Panos’s daughter Iliana and her husband Tom shot to death in the living room of their apartment in a high-rent neighborhood in upper Capitol Heights.

  The investigation was frenzied. Tom was a public figure, a successful and dashing city attorney who seemed destined for a judgeship and, perhaps, even bigger things. Iliana was, in addition to being Panos’s daughter, a frequent subject of the society pages in the lower-brow City newspapers—the News among them.

  The early investigation focused on possible enemies of Tom’s. He’d put plenty of people behind bars, stirred up trouble in the ethnic gangs that had been gaining traction in some neighborhoods. The tip line rang off the hook, plenty of people trying to settle scores by pointing a finger at this person or that, but nothing came of any of the leads. Everyone seemed to have an alibi, and the ones that didn’t had no connection to either of the Ilias. The investigation stalled.

  But Torsten Grip had interviewed the son, Sol, a couple of times early on and come away with a bad feeling. Something indefinable was wrong there, he’d told Frings, who’d contacted Grip on Panos’s behalf. Grip brought the boy back in and ran through his story again. Sol had been four blocks away that afternoon at a friend’s house, hanging out, listening to records. No, the friend’s parents hadn’t been home. The friends vouched for him, but it was a thin alibi. No problem getting lowlife friends like Sol’s to lie to the heat.

  Panos tried to intervene, using Frings to set up a meeting with Detective Grip. Panos made the case for his grandson’s strange attitude and unseemly friends. His father’s first priority was his career. He barely interacted with his son. His mother, Panos was ashamed to say, was a preening narcissist (his words). Was it any wonder the boy was finding his own way? But even as he was saying it, Panos could see how Grip was taking this. Alienated kid, resents—maybe hates—parents, scores a gun from his hoodlum friends and …

  Grip stayed after Sol, but never could get far enough, couldn’t get the big break. The gun never turned up. Sol’s friends couldn’t be shaken off their stories. Sol got used to Grip’s “interviews,” staring dolefully at him and eventually becoming unresponsive. Panos’s lawyer alleged harassment, and Panos threatened to use the Gazette to make public Grip’s seeming obsession with Sol. So eventually Grip had to give it up, move on to other cases. Panos went crazy trying to help the kid, getting him to move into his apartment, sending him to the Tech, protecting him in any way he could from the suspicion that followed him around. Watching it play out, Frings wondered if maybe Panos thought that Sol had done it, and by somehow steering his grandson straight, Panos could undo it. Which was why his disappearance had come as such a blow to the old man. Sol had turned away from his one ally, the one person who loved him. Now Panos had a new purchase on Sol, albeit in a film that might be as much as two years old.

  The waiter came with the check. Frings wondered why Sol had stayed clear of Panos, if reconnecting them was a good idea. And he wondered, as he had since the day of the murders, whether Sol was a killer.

  11

  HIS COLLAR UP AGAINST AN ICY WIND, GRIP WALKED PAST A SMALL FERRIS wheel, maybe thirty feet high, the entire contraption gone to rust. A fairground in miniature: a tiny roller coaster with gently sloping rails; little booths, the signs mostly bleached away but still discernable: “five shots for five cents,” over a deteriorating shed whose contents were long gone. Grip felt the eyes of animals staring at him from the dark gaps—a sign of years of abandonment. His shoes were s
oaked through, yellow-brown puddles standing in every depression in the sandy dirt. He heard a whistle and stopped, tried in the sickly orange light to get a fix on the direction. He heard it again and looked toward a shack. Above the boarded-up service window hung a COTTON CANDY sign, now missing both T’s and the N and D from CANDY.

  The side door was gone, and Grip stepped through the opening into semi-darkness, the place smelling of wet dirt and mold. Leaning against the far wall was runty Nicky Patridis, the stub of a cigarette dangling from his lower lip, smoke wafting damply to the ceiling.

  “The fuck you find these places?” Grip mumbled.

  “Jesus, Grip, you’re always complaining. Don’t worry, what I’ve got, it’s gonna be worth it.”

  “That right?”

  “Sure. You got a fag for me?” Nicky had the hard, wiry physique and tense eyes of people who lived on the City’s margins, surviving from meal to meal, cigarette to cigarette. Grip shook a pack and offered it to Nicky, who took a cigarette and lit it off his stub. The two men were roughly the same height, but Grip probably had sixty pounds of muscle on him.

  “You going to make me smoke alone?”

  Grip shook his head. “I don’t plan on sticking around that long.”

  Nicky shrugged.

  “Okay, Nicky. What the fuck am I here for?”

  Nicky took a long drag, held it in his lungs and then blew it at the ceiling. “What I heard is: someone hit one of the construction sites, made off with explosives. Lots of them.”

  Grip raised his eyebrows, noncommittal, though not surprised that the word was out so quickly.

  “I know this ain’t news to you. Something like that? The cops are on it early.”

  “You’re a fucking genius. What’ve you got?”

  “What I got is a cousin, works as a floater for the Project security crews. You know they all work for Consolidated, right? They have some guys, like my cousin, they send to different places, fill holes if someone gets fired or sick or whatever. So anyway, my cousin, he says he was on the site last night, working with some Russians or something. Said they see a panel truck pull up to the gate, hit the horn a couple times and suddenly one of the Russians gives my cousin a twenty to go for a walk, have a cigarette. He pisses off, right? But he finds a place where he can get a look at what’s going on ’cause he knows I’m on the payroll occasionally and thinks he might get in on it, too. Two guys, he says, not big. They empty the whole fucking trailer. Took the whole thing.”

  Nicky was taking his time, and it was getting on Grip’s nerves. “There a point to this?”

  “Look, there’s a way this shit goes. You know that. Nobody sits on any of the construction heists, least of all explosives. It’s got to go through a lot of hands before it’s clean to sell back to the project. That’s how it works. So, something this big, people are waiting for the dynamite to get in the pipeline. But it hasn’t shown up.”

  “It’s only been a couple days.” But Grip knew Nicky was right. Something was off.

  “Come on, detective. You’d sit on a haul of dynamite that’d take down a couple of buildings? This shit’s done fast, there’s people need to get it depending on where you nicked it from. If it don’t turn up, people start getting worried. Like now.”

  Grip could see where this was going, but he strung Nicky along, wanting to hear his reasoning. “New operator?”

  Nicky leaned back against a ragged wall, took a drag. “You’d have to be stupid as hell. Like I said, it’s all set up, the whole process. Go through it, take your cut, repeat. It’s easy. Why fuck with a good thing?”

  “You going to tell me?”

  They looked at each other. Nicky blew a smoke ring. It wobbled upward.

  “Any time, Nicky.”

  Nicky shook his head as if he couldn’t believe Grip was so fucking dense. “You been listening? From where I sit, it don’t look like the guys nicked this dynamite plan on selling it back.”

  “Right,” Grip said, as though this was obvious. “They’re going to use it.”

  Nicky seemed a little deflated by this response. Grip decided to have a cigarette after all. Nicky cleared his throat as Grip fished one out. He pulled another. The little bastard could probably use it. Grip lit his own cigarette with his lighter. Nicky pocketed his extra, smirking.

  “Kollectiv 61,” Grip said, exhaling smoke as he spoke.

  Nicky showed his palms. “You said that, not me.”

  Grip sighed, fished out his wallet. Outside, a crow was making a racket. Grip wanted to get out of there. He handed Nicky a twenty.

  “That’s it? Come on, man, this is good information; gets you started on the right foot.”

  “You think I’m stupid, Nicky? You think I haven’t figured Kollectiv 61? You get twenty now, ’cause you’ve probably saved me some headache. This leads to anything, you’ll get what it’s worth. I’ve never screwed you, Nicky. That’s why you called me.”

  Nicky gave a half-smile. “Yeah, I guess that’s right.”

  12

  WILL EBANKS LIVED IN A GRAND HOUSE A COUPLE BLOCKS FROM THE Tech campus. He was a member of one of the City’s aristocratic families, going back four generations to Brewer Ebanks, who’d owned the riverfront docks and warehouses and possibly a few mayors, as well. While the family’s power had faded, the Ebanks name still held the cachet of what passed in the City for noble birth.

  The house had once been the residence of a City elder named Heyteveldt, who’d funded the construction of the first Tech buildings. Ebanks had bought it a few years back from Heyteveldt’s great-grandson, or maybe it was the great-great-grandson, Frings couldn’t remember which. A wide front porch sprawled before ornate oak double doors, the available space cluttered by all matter of wood and rattan chairs. The house was painted a sky blue with yellow trim, and the two low towers that rose a story above the house on each side were a bright red. It was a strange looking place. A plaque next to the door read INSTITUTE FOR CONSCIOUSNESS EXPLORATION.

  Frings rapped on the door with his cane, like something from a movie, which was why he did it—to amuse himself. He stood back from the door and waited, watching the pedestrians—mostly Tech professors and their families. He knew that Ebanks wasn’t popular with his neighbors because of the unusual people he attracted, the parties, the strange goings-on at all times of day and night.

  The door opened to a small gink, probably college aged, wearing a frayed green wool sweater.

  “Who’re you?”

  “Frank Frings. Is Will around?”

  “You have an appointment?”

  An appointment? “No, we’re friends.” Technically true, he thought, though they hadn’t seen much of each other over the past decade as Ebanks had pursued his stormy academic career—and now the drugs.

  The man in the green sweater thought about this for a moment, a funny grin on his face. “Come on in. I’ll see if he’s available.”

  Frings followed him in, a little annoyed that this kid presumed to play gatekeeper. The grand foyer reeked of marijuana and incense. A group of college students sat on couches, talking and passing a pipe. Behind them, flanking a set of double doors, a twin staircase wound up to a balcony behind which, Frings knew, were Ebanks’s living quarters. The man in the green sweater gestured Frings to a sofa beneath a print of Dali’s Last Supper, then climbed the stairs.

  Frings took in the room, surrealist prints on the wall, statues of animal-headed Hindu gods perched on pedestals, chairs upholstered in mismatched paisley fabric. The college kids gave him a cursory look and then proceeded to ignore him, talking about people whose names he didn’t recognize. From beyond the double doors, Frings could hear more people talking, a guitar being strummed. There was something indefinably off here. Frings considered it, trying to isolate the cause, but thought that maybe it wasn’t any one thing, so much as a more fundamental dissonance, like an instrument being played in a different time signature from the rest of the band.

  Green Sweater came back,
an aloof expression firmly in place, and told Frings that Ebanks was waiting for him. Frings struggled up the stairs, one step at a time, his knee stubbornly refusing to bend.

  He found Ebanks sprawled across an upholstered chair, smoking a cigarette, talking to a younger man—blond hair down to his collar, thick mustache—sitting in an identical chair and arranged in a nearly identical posture of relaxation. Ebanks saw Frings in the doorway and gave a broad, sincere smile.

  “Frank!” He stood, tall and poised, his body slim like a college kid’s. He was handsome in a patrician way, with sparkling blue eyes and tousled brown hair. He gave Frings a hug that Frings, surprised, reciprocated. This, Frings thought, was a little unusual, even for a free spirit like Ebanks.

  “Will, you got a minute maybe we could talk alone? Then I’ll let you get back to whatever it is you’re doing.”

  Ebanks raised his eyebrows. “Sure.” He turned to the younger man in the chairs. “You mind, Blaine? Maybe get us some coffee from downstairs.”

  The young guy rose—barrel-chested but not fat—not seeming to mind at all. He nodded to Frings as he walked out. Frings was reminded somehow of a cowboy in a cigarette ad.

  “We were talking about this amazing experience that we had yesterday,” Ebanks explained. “Debriefing really, research reporting.”

  The young guy pulled the door shut behind him. Persian rugs covered the floor and two of the floor-to-ceiling windows had been paned in stained glass, lending the room an unnatural light—at once heightened and subdued.

  “What kind of experience?” Frings asked, because Ebanks seemed to want him to be interested.

  “Oh, LSD. Have you tried it, Frank? Lysergic acid diethylamide? I actually don’t believe you have or I would know.” His eyes were alive and bright. “But you should, you really should. It’s … it’s hard to explain what it is, but I guarantee you won’t look at things the same way again. It opens up the spiritual world. It opens it all the way up, shows the connections between things, Frank. Very heavy. You realize that you don’t see the half of it, not even a tenth.”