by Toby Ball
Dorman extended his hand and Reuther shook it. No harm in starting things on a friendly foot. “What brings you here, Stan?”
“Thought maybe we could talk. You got a few minutes?”
Dorman resisted checking his watch. “Sure.”
“Why don’t we go for a walk?”
Dorman detected a hint of self-satisfaction in Reuther’s tone and he was suddenly on his guard. “Why not.”
Reuther had a slouching posture, which made it seem as if his feet were well out ahead of his body when he walked. This was just one of many things about him that Dorman found mildly annoying.
“So, I thought you’d—”
“You’re not wearing a wire, are you Stan?”
Reuther looked so taken aback by the suggestion that Dorman decided that he didn’t need to pat him down.
“Well, let’s see,” Reuther said, unnerved. “I was going to … well, let you know that I’ve had a meeting with people from Pickett East and Pickett West, Monkton Heights, and also the Italians on Luxembourg Avenue.”
Dorman’s mind began racing. These four neighborhoods, along with Corsican Square, where Reuther lived, were the final neighborhoods in the footprint of the planned City Center. Dorman had been working on agreements with each of these communities separately for months. He had people on the payroll in each neighborhood, people who were supposed to let him know if something like a group meeting ever took place. He rubbed the back of his neck to ease his annoyance.
“I see that I have your attention,” Reuther said, feeling smug again. “We realized that while each of our pieces are important, the New City Project is really dependent on all of us accepting terms to leave our neighborhoods. We realized that our interests were similar as regarding the process, so we got together to compare notes, as it were. It was a very interesting meeting, I must say.”
Dorman was sure it was.
“We were quite surprised,” Reuther continued, “at the variation in the terms that are being offered. We spent quite some time trying to determine the criteria by which you, for instance, are offering Pickett East nearly twice as much as you are the Italians. We couldn’t figure out how you came to that calculation—whether it was based on population, property values, square footage, or what. Nothing seemed to account for the differential. So, as a group, we are going to approach Nathan Canada with a proposal to restart negotiations, but with us as a conglomeration of neighborhoods instead of separately. I’m coming to you beforehand as something of a courtesy, because we have dealt with you for a number of months and will now be bypassing you to negotiate directly with Nathan Canada, and I felt it only fair that you were given some kind of forewarning.”
Dorman kept his eyes on his shoes as they walked. He knew that if he looked at Reuther at that moment and saw what had to be a look of triumph on his face, he might not be able to keep his anger in check. They continued in silence for a few moments.
The break in the conversation eventually got to be too long for Reuther. “Phil?”
“Just a moment,” Dorman said. He saw an alleyway a dozen yards ahead and focused on it. When they were at the entrance, he grabbed Reuther hard by the arm and hustled him twenty feet into the alley. A few pedestrians watched this happen as they walked by, but no one stopped or said anything. Both of them were dressed professionally. Surely nothing untoward would happen.
Dorman backed Reuther against a brick wall and stood close enough that he had nowhere to move. “How fucking stupid are you? Do you know what you’re doing?”
Reuther’s eyes were wide in confusion and fright. Dorman could imagine how he looked to Reuther—the anger and the black eye would make the potential for violence seem greater than it was.
“You want to know what criteria I use to figure out what to pay the different neighborhoods? Do you? It’s called: whatever I think I have to pay to get the fucking job done. You know what the other factor is? It’s how much money I have to work with.
“Do you know what a zero-sum game is, Stanley? It’s a situation where there’s a set amount of things—let’s say dollars—and there are several people who want some of that thing. Every time that one of those people gets a dollar more, someone else gets a dollar less. Do you understand how that works?”
Reuther seemed to think it was a rhetorical question, but Dorman waited until he nodded.
“So this is my situation. I have a certain amount of money that I can use to settle with the five neighborhoods. There’s no more money that’s going to be coming. I’ve divided it all out. Now, I divided it up so that every neighborhood felt good about their deal.”
That wasn’t quite right. Nobody actually felt good about their deal. He’d made offers that could plausibly be accepted, given that they had no other real choice.
“Now what you’re doing is this: you’re taking that same amount of money, and you want to renegotiate how you split it up. And that’s fine. I am perfectly happy to deliver it all in a bunch of canvas bags and you guys can split it up among yourselves. But you cannot fucking stay. One way or the other, we will be taking those neighborhoods. Do you understand?
“I had this thing worked out so that each neighborhood walked away with a deal that it could live with and now you, with this meeting of yours, have screwed it up. Now the neighborhoods that are getting less money are going to be dissatisfied with their take. And I don’t blame them, to be honest. I was the one who screwed them, so that the other neighborhoods could get more. And now that these screwed neighborhoods want a fair deal, where is the money going to come from? The neighborhoods that I looked out for in the negotiations. Neighborhoods such as yours, Stanley.
“And, just so I’m clear, all those neighborhoods will be cleaned out and there will not be any more money allocated to your compensation. You are more than welcome to bring all of this to Mr. Canada’s attention. But I think you are aware of his reputation when it comes to negotiations. He has asked me to handle the negotiations because he appreciates that I can be reasonable. He also knows himself well enough to understand that in these types of negotiations he is constitutionally unable to be reasonable. So, again, I am perfectly happy for you to take this up with him. My fear is that all of you come away the worse for it, instead of just some of you.”
He pulled back from Reuther, who was sweating heavily from his brow. He felt like driving his fist into Reuther’s gut, but this instinct, he knew, was more about the pressure coming at him from so many angles than it was about Reuther, who was the least of his worries. He was, in fact, barely a worry at all.
39
GRIP DROVE AIMLESSLY, THINKING. HIS ADRENALINE WAS JACKED, HIS anxiety threatened to overwhelm him, but his hands were steady at the wheel, his feet relaxed on the pedals. His mind, though, was all over the place.
Something was fucked up, terribly fucked up. Grip ran through what he knew. Nicky Patridis—a career loser, snitch, nobody—had lied to his face, told him that his cousin had seen the explosives heist, had pointed him toward Kollectiv 61, and now Zwieg was protecting him.
Why had Zwieg put Patridis up to this? Why hadn’t he simply told Grip to look into Kollectiv 61 to begin with? He could have flashed the photos then if necessary. Instead, he’d gotten Patridis involved. The thing Grip kept coming back to was this: Zwieg had had him look into Kollectiv 61 because he didn’t want to do it himself. It was too dangerous—so dangerous that Zwieg had kept himself at a distance. He’d used Patridis to point Grip in the right direction, and he hadn’t shown his hand—or a part of it, anyway—until the whole thing seemed in jeopardy. Grip tried to piece it together: Kollectiv 61 meant Linsky, and the thought of Linsky brought him back to Ving—the top cop’s unlikely arrangement with the queer poet. But how was it all connected?
EARLY AFTERNOON AT CRIPPEN’S SAW A COUPLE OF OLDER DRUNKS already leaning hard against the bar. The radio in the back room blared the usual anti-communist station through a hail of static. Only one table was occupied—Ed Wayne, looking like he�
�d been pulled from the grave, drinking a whisky on the rocks, reading the latest Freedom’s Call. He wore a porkpie hat and a shirt with a loud tropical print, unbuttoned a bit to show the pale flesh of his formless chest. Grip waited for the bartender—himself drunk—to pour him a beer. The old-timers nodded at Grip, then returned to their desultory conversation.
Wayne continued to read, sucking on his teeth, as Grip sat down. The chair wobbled slightly side to side. Grip read the back of Wayne’s newspaper, saw a headline about communists in the State Department, knew exactly how the article would unfold. The papers seemed to print the same articles every week with only the slightest of variations. But Wayne, he knew, would read them all, using them as fuel for his hate. Grip hated Reds too, but not with the same kind of all-consuming intensity. The anger seemed to be literally rotting Wayne’s body. A guy who came in here sometimes, some kind of professor, had said that Wayne was like Dorian Gray, but in reverse. Grip didn’t know what he was talking about, but found the book and, after getting over his surprise that Dorian was a guy, caught the prof’s meaning. It seemed like the hate worked on Wayne like a disease.
Wayne put down his newspaper. “You know, Tor, that they’re making the roofs of the new downtown skyscrapers big enough to land three two-prop helicopters?”
Grip shook his head. “That right?”
“Yeah, that’s fucking right. Know why?”
“So they can land three whatever-it-is on the roof?””
Wayne spat an ugly laugh. “Funny, Tor. Troop transports. Dropping troops right into the heart of the City. The Municipal Tower, it’s for air traffic control. It’s all being laid out in front of us. That’s the goddamned genius of it.”
“You’re on this again?”
Wayne smiled, showing Grip his diseased teeth. “Damn right.” He looked at Grip’s beer. “What, you’re not on duty, Tor?”
Grip shrugged. He was, technically, on duty, but he needed some time to figure out his next move. The investigation hadn’t really changed—only his reason for pursuing it. He needed to sort it out, though. Who could he trust? What, now, were the right questions to ask? Zwieg had him trapped—he couldn’t not investigate—but he knew that this was trouble.
“What’s the problem?” Wayne’s tone was more mocking than sympathetic.
“No problem.”
Wayne laughed in disgust.
Grip said, “What fucking tragedy happened that has you so happy?”
Wayne smiled. “I’m just thinking about things.”
“What things?”
“You know me, Tor. Plans. Making things happen.”
Grip rolled his eyes. Since he’d left the Force, Wayne had planned, ruminated, schemed, but never acted. He was always on the verge of the Big Event, but nothing ever came of it. “You going to tell me about it?”
“I don’t think so, Tor. I’m not sure that I trust your commitment to do what is necessary. I think if you knew, you’d try to stop me somehow.”
“Okay, fine.” Grip drank half of what was left of his beer. He’d ordered the beer to get his bearings, but chatting with Ed Wayne was just making things worse.
Wayne was still at it. “But when it happens, it will be big. Everyone will know.”
“Sure they will, Ed.” Grip drank the rest of his beer and stood. “I’ll keep my eye on the front page.”
Outside, someone had dropped a newspaper, the wind scattering it in the street. A prowl car rolled past. Grip made eye contact with the cop riding shotgun, felt the first twinge of panic tighten his chest.
40
EBANKS’S FRIENDS HAD TURNED OUT TO BE COLLEGE KIDS, TWO GUYS AND a beautiful young woman. Frings met them where construction of the new City Center was furthest along—a half-dozen square blocks of building either completed or mostly so, surrounded by skyscrapers in various stages of construction. Occasionally visible between the buildings—or through the skeletal upper floors of those in early construction—was the Municipal Tower, at once bizarre and ominous. The two guys—introduced as Sebastian and Augie—stood close to each other. They wore sunglasses and were looking around, moving their heads at what Frings decided was LSD speed, as if they were just waking up and hearing their names called from everywhere at once.
The woman, whose name was Joss, was tall and wore a wool cap over her shoulder-length auburn hair. She was very excited to meet Frings, going so far as to give him a hug. Augie and Sebastian smiled at him, but seemed too far inside their own thoughts to really understand who he was. Joss seemed familiar to Frings, though he couldn’t put his finger on why.
She had a map. She explained to Frings that they were about to undertake the drift, which involved two people dosed up on LSD or something like it, while a third, in this case Joss, followed them, taking notes on their impressions of the surroundings. This was part of a project, she said, to canvas the whole City in this way, to determine which places were “human-friendly” and which were not. The end result would be a “drift map,” a kind of drug-facilitated psychological map of the City.
“This place,” Sebastian said, looking around at the new high-rises, the massive glass windows of their upper floors reflecting the ball of the sun. “I don’t like the buildings, man. They’re like giant boxes, like match boxes that you open up and insert people in and just close them back up again until someone opens them again. It’s like people storage. Or more like an oven where you close the door and all the stuff happens and when you open it back up everything is done. Like an oven.”
“I see that,” Augie said. “You’re right. I don’t like it.”
Joss stepped forward. “Can you explain that?”
“It’s … the buildings, they’re containers, that’s all. You store people there while they work—people and machines. That’s what happens …” He seemed to lose his thought.
Augie nodded. Frings saw his eyes wide behind the dark lenses. Joss made a note of what Sebastian had said.
“Cross this street off?” she asked.
“Oh, yeah.” Augie replied. “Definitely.”
With a pencil, she blacked out the block on her map.
“This is what you do, get a positive or negative response and mark it on the map?”
“That’s part of it,” Joss replied. “There’s also the notes that we add. I’d love to show you the map sometime.”
“I’d like to see it,” Frings said, noncommittally.
To the other man, Joss asked, “Okay. Where to?”
Augie and Sebastian stood in the middle of the sidewalk, turning in circles, looking up at the buildings, at the different directions they could head in. Pedestrians passing on the sidewalk didn’t seem quite sure what to make of it, the two guys with their strange behavior and Frings and Joss so obviously observing them.
Finally, Augie nodded further up the block. “Up there and then let’s go left, get off this street.”
Sebastian nodded. “Yeah, man. Let’s get the fuck off this street.”
Frings and Joss followed them from several paces behind, not interfering with their somewhat addled wandering.
“You look familiar, Joss. Do I know you from somewhere? Or your parents, maybe?” He couldn’t bring himself to say “your grandparents,” though that might have given him his best shot at an answer.
“I don’t know. My dad is Bruce Parmeneter. Do you know him?”
Frings knew of Parmeneter, a surgeon and—Frings thought—a teacher at the Tech medical school. But he’d never actually met Parmeneter, not that he could recall.
“I guess not.” He changed he subject. “So, have you ever done what they’re doing?” He motioned up the block, where Sebastian and Augie were fully absorbed by a department store’s display window.
Joss stopped walking, so as not to get too close. “Sure. I’ve done it a few times. That’s the fun part.”
“What happens?”
“When you’re on the drift? You know, you’re kind of prepared, so you know what you’re trying t
o do, and it kind of focuses you. That’s a little strange, when you think about it, that you get focused so you can drift.” She thought about this for a moment. “Usually, with the drug, your mind can be all over the place. But, on the drift, you’re really paying attention—and I know this sounds flaky or dumb—but you pay attention to the vibe of the place. The drug really helps you pick up on that. It lets you see how sterile so much of the City is.”
“Can’t you pick up on that just by looking around without the drugs?”
Joss cocked her head slightly in thought. “That’s an interesting idea. I guess you could a little. But with the drug—it’s like instead of reading sheet music, you’re actually hearing the song.”
Frings nodded. Nobody seemed to be able to describe the LSD experience except in metaphors.
He saw a man with wild, disheveled hair, and several days’ growth on his jaw stride over to where Sebastian and Augie were now looking around aimlessly. The man wore a heavy pea coat and walked with his hands stuffed down in the pockets.
He began to yell at Augie and Sebastian. “You think you can just stand in the sidewalk, looking around? You think they allow you to examine the block for any sign of life? They won’t let you. They will find out who you are, and you’ll find that your soul has been wrung.”
“Oh, boy,” Joss sighed. She walked toward the men. Frings followed, thinking that, between them, Augie and Sebastian were as confused as any people he’d ever seen.
• • •
From “Invisible Streets: Using Pharmacology to Reveal Urban Micro-Identities
AUTHOR UNKNOWN
…the chemical acts as a deobscurant, removing the identity from the self, allowing for an unmediated perceptual event, revealing the object as what it is, not the programized category assigned it by the identity.”
