Invisible Streets

by Toby Ball

  They stood facing each other for a moment, Grip surprised that Linsky was standing his ground.

  “We’re done with this,” Grip said, dropping Linsky’s satchel by his small, battered loafers.

  Linsky didn’t bend to pick it up, instead holding Grip’s eyes. They stared at each other for a few more moments. Grip could not quite believe the balls Linsky had on him. For once, he wasn’t sure of his next move.

  Linsky’s voice, when he finally spoke, was slightly effeminate, but calm and strong. “Don’t come my way again.”

  Grip bit down on his rage. Linsky picked up the satchel with his free hand.

  “Detective,” he said, nodding, as he walked past Grip toward the door to his building.

  21

  THE BODIES OF THE MISSING SECURITY GUARDS HAD BEEN DISCOVERED at night, and the police had set up lights at the scene, which were now being powered down as the gray dawn turned to morning. Dorman nodded at the pair of uniforms who stood guard by a barricade that they’d put up to keep the gawkers off the scene. Someone had arranged a curtain of tarps to hide the bodies from the sidewalk.

  “It’s not pretty back there, sir,” warned one of the uniforms, a guy who must have had twenty years on Dorman.

  “Three bodies, right?”

  The uniform nodded with an expression suggesting that that wasn’t the half of it.

  On the other side of the curtain, Dorman saw crime-scene guys kneeling around the corpses, which lay on an embankment leading down from a weathered sidewalk to a drainage ditch grown over with weeds. He could see from the angle of their feet that all three bodies were on their stomachs, having fallen forward from the sidewalk.

  “Mr. Dorman.”

  Dorman turned to find Detective Grip, hands in pockets, looking tired.

  “Good morning, Detective. You’ve got this case?”

  Grip shook his head. “It goes to Homicide, but I thought I’d have a look as it might be related to …”

  Grip had the good sense not to mention the stolen explosives. Dorman nodded that he understood what Grip was talking about.

  “What happened to them?”

  Grip looked over at the bodies. “What, you haven’t seen?”

  “Not the whole thing.” The dew from the grass was working its way through his shoes. His feet stung with the cold.

  “Hey, move aside for a second so the big shot can have a look.”

  The crime scene guys turned to Grip and then stood, backing away.

  “Oh, shit.” Dorman fought back nausea. The men’s heads had been crushed, their hair wet with blood and other things at which Dorman didn’t look closely enough to identify.

  “Thanks,” Grip yelled to the crime-scene crew, who returned to their work.

  “What the hell happened?”

  Grip pulled a pack of cigarettes from his coat pocket. “We’ll know for sure after the autopsy. They’ll probably find fragments of whatever it was those guys were hit with. My guess, baseball bat, maybe a pipe.”

  “Each guy in the back of the head?”

  Grip shrugged. “That’s the way it looks.”

  “How do you pull that off? There must have been three guys, or the other two would have run after the first guy got hit.”

  “It could work a bunch of ways. Maybe three guys took out the vics all at once. Maybe someone kept a gun on them and they just didn’t have it in them to move. Things like this don’t always play out in a way that makes much sense when you look at it afterward. There’s no way to be sure what happened unless we catch the guys that did it.”

  Grip took a cigarette and offered one to Dorman, who held up a hand, no.

  “You think it has anything to do with the explosives?” Dorman asked.

  Grip thought about this for a moment. “Look, the way these guys were killed, it was an execution. No question. I went looking for them a couple of days ago when they’d first disappeared, and they’d been at some kind of underground casino. Maybe it had something to do with that. Who knows?”

  “You going to find out?”

  Grip sucked on his cigarette. “Not my case. I’ll keep in touch with the homicide dicks who pick it up, see what they come up with, if it relates to the explosives.”

  Dorman was dubious. This didn’t fit Grip’s rep. “What’s your angle, detective?”

  “All due respect…”

  Dorman nodded. He hadn’t really expected an answer.

  “Why are you here?” Grip asked.

  Why was he here? He hadn’t given it any thought. He’d heard that the bodies had been found, and he’d come out.

  “I think someone needs to look after the New City Project’s stake in this. It’s important that if this does relate to the thefts that the killers be caught.”

  “That’s my job.”

  “That’s right, of course.” Dorman flashed on the case of money at St. Stanislaw’s. “You’re watching out for the Project,” he said, vaguely. “You and me.”

  22

  FRINGS SAT FACING CAFE?’S GLASS STOREFRONT, MORNING RAIN TURNING the view outside into an impressionist painting—a confusion of colors—giving the reefer a kick in the pants.

  “You don’t look so good, Ben.”

  Ben Linsky’s hair was unwashed and lank, his eyes bloodshot with exhaustion. His words came fast. “The heat ever get on you, Frank? I mean recently? It’s the kind of thing I’d expect from thirty years ago, you know, your time.”

  Frank winced a bit. “Slow down. What’s going on?”

  Linsky kept his chin down, eyes on the table, told Frings about his run-ins with Grip. “I’ve thought about it a lot, Frank. It seems to me that it’s got to be political. You see what I mean? What, maybe I smoke some grass. But does that warrant taking my satchel?”

  Frings frowned, thinking about how the Force had been used for political ends when he was Linsky’s age—mostly rousting Reds and unions. Now the standing assumption seemed to be that the police had moved on, weren’t involved in that anymore. But Frings harbored doubts that the police force could ever really be friendly to radicals and, with the decaying central control, wasn’t surprised that cops might take the opportunity to intimidate Reds, heemies, and queers.

  “Did you catch the cop’s name?”

  “Grip.”

  Frings nodded, said, “I know him some. You say he gave you back your bag?”

  Linsky nodded.

  “So, what aren’t you telling me?”

  “There’s nothing else to it.”

  Frings shrugged, waited for a moment for Linsky to volunteer something more. He felt sure the poet was holding something back, but when Linsky remained silent, he let it go.

  The rain had diminished in force. The window had cleared enough so that Frings could make out shapes through the glass behind Linsky. It was a little hard to tell, but there seemed to be someone standing in the doorway across the street. Or maybe it was just the way the doorway looked with the rain’s distortion.

  Catching Frings’s distraction, Linsky turned in his chair. “What are you looking at?”

  “Nothing.” Frings returned his attention to Linsky. “Why would Grip have kept this thing?”

  “To annoy me, maybe? I don’t know, but you can imagine …”

  Frings nodded, looked beyond Linsky again, but the figure that he’d seen was gone. Probably nothing.

  He wondered if there could be a specific reason why Grip would be harassing Linsky and was struck by how soon this followed his having seen Sol on film. Was there anything to this? Sol reappears, and so does the cop who never bought his story. Or was there no connection to speak of? A shot in the dark: “He ask you about Kollectiv 61?”

  “This again? Why would he ask me about that?”

  From Linsky’s reaction, Frings was sure he was being coy.

  “Same reason that I did—because of the manifesto you ran in Prometheus.”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  Frings sighed, not convinced that there wasn
’t more to this, somehow, but conceding that Linsky wasn’t going to be forthcoming. “Let’s talk about the magazine.”

  “I think we’ll have a good issue. There is some pretty solid writing, both poetry and fiction. Also some film criticism.”

  “Anything else? Any non-fiction? Any reporting?”

  “Not in this one. To be honest, Frank, most people I talk to? They tell me they don’t even read those pieces. I’ve been thinking that we might want to move away from that completely, maybe bring in more photography and art.”

  “Well, you know how I feel about that, Ben. You’ve run some important stuff over the years—stories no one else would have published.”

  “Like the manifesto.”

  “That’s one. But I was thinking of others: the piece on squatters in the Hollows; that hustler’s diary you ran last year. Those were great pieces—you can’t tell me they were any less valuable than the fiction or the poetry.”

  Linsky shook his head. “We’ve got something going here, Frank. This is a real movement, and Prometheus is the vehicle. It stands for a certain aesthetic, and I think that gets diluted with the non-fiction. I think we need to narrow the focus, to spotlight the new art emerging from the City.”

  Frings held his hand up in surrender, not sure that he disagreed with Linsky anyway. And if he did, it certainly wasn’t worth the struggle.

  23

  FRINGS HELD HIS CANE IN ONE HAND AND AN OPEN UMBRELLA IN THE other as he limped toward a lot surrounded by a twelve-foot chain-link fence. A light but steady rain stung the sidewalk, and the damp, along with the cold, had Frings’s bad knee throbbing. He was in a gray section of the City, anonymous blocks of low-rise apartments like hundreds of others. A minor adjustment to a pencil line on a map in a back room at City Hall, and these homes would have met the wrecking ball instead of those just to the west, which were giving way for the Crosstown’s twelve asphalt lanes. As if troubled by the narrow escape, the buildings here were buttoned up, windows closed and curtained, doors shut, sidewalks empty. Only the occasional cafe was open, and even these seemed to Frings to discourage unfamiliar visitors.

  He crossed an empty Buchanan Avenue and walked into the neighborhood that had not been saved. The difference was stark. He limped past a mountain of rubble guarded by fencing and tarps, and then another—both the remains of buildings demolished in the past week or so. Feral dogs had found their way in, sniffing around the piles. Seagulls hovered, screeching. Backhoes stood dormant.

  Frings located the next standing building in the line. A small number of workmen, maybe a half-dozen, padded around it in bright yellow rain jackets, laying wires, stringing cordon tape, making preparations for its demolition. About fifteen yards from the building, still within the fence, stood a small canopy, and under it a tall man hunched over a film camera resting on a tripod. He seemed to be setting up a shot of the building, the camera tilted up to catch the top of the façade and the roof.

  Frings found the door through the fence and stepped into the construction zone. A worker walked over to him, burly under his coat, several days’ growth covering his broad jaw.

  “I help you with something?”

  Frings shifted his eyes to the man under the canopy, then back to the worker. “My name’s Frank Frings. I’m with the News-Gazette. I wanted to speak with Mr. Macheda over there.”

  The worker frowned. “Frings, huh?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I got to say I’ve got a big problem with a lot of what you write.”

  Frings nodded, keeping the man’s eye. “That shouldn’t keep me from talking to Mr. Macheda.”

  “No, I guess not.”

  Frings waited the man out. Finally, he stepped aside, and Frings hobbled toward the canopy.

  Macheda was absorbed in his camerawork and didn’t hear Frings approach. Frings waited quietly for a break in his work.

  When it came, he said, “Andy Macheda?”

  Macheda turned, startled. He studied Frings for a moment, squinting. “Do I know you, man?”

  “Frank Frings, News-Gazette.”

  “Oh shit. I thought I recognized you. Wow, what are you doing here?” He wiped his hands on his corduroy trousers, stepped into the rain to shake with Frings. There was an awkward moment as Frings leaned his cane against his leg and switched the umbrella into his left hand so that he could shake with his right.

  “Come on in, Mr. Frings.”

  Frings stepped underneath the canopy, now crowded with the two men and the film camera setup. Macheda, he saw, had a weird energy, his face manically expressive, his words coming in spurts.

  “It’s an honor to have you here, Mr. Frings. I … You’re why I’m doing what I’m doing now; why I’m doing this.” He spread a hand toward the building before them.

  “What exactly are you doing?”

  “Filming ‘progress,’ the march toward alienation. My film, it’s trying to show visually what you described in your book.”

  Frings took this in, thinking about Film 12 and the woman walking alone in the crowd. “I’m flattered,” he said carefully.

  “Don’t be. Please. I’m flattered that you’re here.” His eyes brightened as he thought of something. “Listen, I don’t know if I should ask, man, but it would be great, I mean it would really make this part of the film something else if you could … If I could get you to maybe stand in front of the building, you know, on camera, and maybe recite a few lines from your book. I really … I hesitate to ask, but it would just be, well, this could be the pivotal moment, you see?”

  Frings nodded. He couldn’t see any harm, and it might be useful to have Macheda owing him a favor when it came time to ask about Sol Elia. “Do you have a copy of my book here?” Frings asked dubiously.

  “Oh, no. Do you need it? I was thinking, maybe that passage about how the commuter is alienated from both his work and home. You know the passage I’m talking about?”

  “Sure, but I don’t think I can recite it word for word.”

  “You can’t?” Macheda considered this, perplexed. The rain picked up, sounding like buckshot pinging off the canopy. “Maybe you can just talk about it, like an interview.”

  Frings shrugged. “Okay.”

  “Yeah, that will be great. You can take your time, take a second if you want to think. I can do jump cuts, break it up a little.”

  Frings walked out into the rain, holding his umbrella. Macheda wanted Frings to have his cane with him, liked that look. Macheda fiddled with his camera, lowered it to take in Frings and the building behind. Frings felt his pant legs getting wet as he waited.

  “Okay, I think we’re set. We’ll make it short. Maybe just talk about that chapter? Anyway, you know the one?”

  “Sure,” Frings said.

  Macheda extended a microphone on a pole out into the rain to within a couple of feet of Frings. Film 12 had been silent. Frings wondered if this was a new direction for the next version, or if this was for another film entirely.

  “Okay. So, I’m going to roll the camera now. Okay. You’re on.”

  Frings started. “Many problems of the current trend in urban planning here in the City can be essentially divided into two categories.”

  As he talked, the words came back to him, like reciting music. He felt he could recall the passage almost exactly. “The first is the conscious arrangement of urban areas by function—such as residential or commercial—or by social class.”

  Frings saw Macheda nodding along, smiling.

  “The second trend is the increasing practice of creating infrastructure and buildings that are constructed to the specifications of machines, particularly the automobile, but machines within buildings as well.”

  “These two categories can themselves be summarized as holding human constructs—social, economic, or physical—in higher regard than humans themselves. We are purposely recreating the City as a place that is literally no longer structured for people.”

  Frings stopped. Macheda s
hut down the camera.

  “Wow, this was really unbelievable you showing up like this. I really, I can’t thank you enough. This is really great.”

  Frings nodded and ducked under the canopy again. “Andy, can I tell you why I’m here?”

  This seemed to take him by surprise, as though he thought it entirely within the realm of possibility that this—walking around a demolition site—was the kind of thing that Frings generally did with his time. “Shoot.”

  “I saw your film at the Underground the other night.”

  Macheda’s eyes widened. “You did? What’d you think?”

  “Well—”

  “Because it’s not really a movie, you know, it’s more like a performance I guess. A performance of images. You know, I change the scenes all the time. This must be something like the twelfth or thirteenth version. I lose track. But it’s kind of what I’m thinking, like right now. I get rid of this piece or that piece that doesn’t seem quite true to me anymore, and then I’ll add something that I dig more, like right now, you know? What’s true, it changes. It’s like jazz musicians. You go see them, it’s something different every night, even if they’re playing the same songs. But you can dig it every time.”

  “That’s interesting, Andy. And I liked the movie. It really had me thinking,” he said, a considerable stretching of the truth. “But there was one scene where there was a girl, a pretty girl, and then behind her were four boys—men, really—and they started throwing rocks at the camera. You know the one?”

  Macheda nodded, and for the first time Frings sensed some hesitation.

  “I’m interested in one of those men. I’ve known him since he was young. He’s the grandson of a friend.”

  Macheda nodded again, suddenly less enthusiastic.

  “Sol Elia.”

  “Sol?”

  “That’s right. You know what he’s up to?”

  Macheda shrugged, shook his head. “I’ve only seen him a couple of times since shooting that scene. We weren’t friends or anything like that.”