Invisible Streets

by Toby Ball

  They eventually arrived in a small room toward the back right corner of the house. Joss turned on a floor lamp by the door, and the room was bathed in the soft light that filtered through a heavy lampshade. A card table was set in the middle of the room, with two chairs pulled up on opposite sides.

  “We use this room as sort of the headquarters for the Drift,” Joss said. “And this is the Drift Map. We’ve compiled all of the observations made during all of the Drifts onto it.”

  Frings took a look at the map on the table. Some of the City’s prominent buildings were represented by small drawings, parks were depicted with token trees, and so on. The map had been heavily marked. Many streets were blacked out with pen, and some sections of the map—whole neighborhoods in some cases—had been cut out, leaving holes in the paper. Pieces of paper with notes were taped to various spots.

  “So, the streets that have been inked out …” Frings said.

  “We’ve taken out the places that we’ve found to be antithetical to the human need for individuality and creativity.”

  Frings nodded, and as he examined the map more closely, the pattern revealed itself. The Drifters had eliminated entirely neighborhoods that were dominated by large office buildings, and stripped away the City Center, with its new, generic high-rises. Areas that had given way to the Crosstown and the Riverside Expressway—really any part of the New City Project—were also gone. He felt as though he could have created this map himself, following the ideas he’d written about in Alienation and the Modern City. It seemed to Frings to be something of an empty exercise.

  “I guess,” Frings said, “that I don’t understand what the point of this is.”

  “It’s evidence. Evidence of what they are doing to the City, transforming it from a place that was built for people into one that is specifically designed for the needs of capital and machines.”

  Frings nodded. It sounded like she was repeating an explanation she’d rehearsed. He found it depressing, especially because he didn’t disagree with her assessment.

  “What are you going to do with it when you’re finished?”

  “Publish it. We were going to put it in Prometheus. But now that Ben’s …” She paused for a moment, and it seemed to Frings that she wasn’t sure what euphemism was appropriate for Linsky’s murder. “Well, I think maybe you’re the person to be in touch with about that right now.”

  Frings hadn’t given the future of Prometheus any thought since Linsky’s death, though he was sure that he didn’t want to take on responsibility for it. He nodded noncommittally. She seemed to find this encouraging and leaned her head back so that her hair fell away from her face, and then tucked it behind her ears. Frings looked for the blocks that he remembered from the list Conroy had made of locations from Macheda’s Film 13. Most, as would be expected, were not on this map. He found one, though, that had been inked out, and another that had been left untouched. He also noticed that what he had at first registered as a misplaced pen mark or a tiny piece of thread from someone’s shirt, was, in fact, a single block marked in red ink. He followed the street with his eye until he found the name: Vilnius Street.

  “What’s this?” he asked, pointing to the spot.

  “Oh, that. That’s Vilnius Street. That block, we kind of have an understanding that it’s off-limits.”

  “Do you know why?”

  The question seemed to make her uncomfortable. “From what I’ve heard, there were some bad things that happened on that block. People thought that it might not be a great place to go when you’re on LSD.”

  • • •

  64

  FRINGS PATIENTLY SAT THROUGH THE EDITORIAL MEETING. IT WAS A KIND of weekly penance, Frings thought, a discussion of recent events and future plans with an ideological tint that, in most cases, he couldn’t agree with. Nobody listened to him, and he couldn’t blame them. His suggestions and views were not consistent with the News-Gazette’s outlook. Littbarski had long ceased having to tell Frings to save his opinions for his column.

  So he sat, listening to the rush of air through the vents, hidden by drop-in ceiling tiles, the mysterious starts and stops. It was pissing rain outside, the ever-shifting complexion of the gray mist providing Frings with a stoned fascination.

  He thought about a conversation he’d had earlier that day with Eva Wise, the councilor, walking through Frings’s neighborhood, bundled up against a wind that announced the immminent rain. The pedestrians after the morning rush were mostly wealthy women, doing errands or walking to have tea with friends.

  “Look around you, Frank. You remember when you were writing that book of yours, how this neighborhood was? You wrote about it: businessmen, artists, bums, shopkeepers, Negroes, whites. What do you see now? Any Negroes? Artists? Poor people of any sort?”

  Frings looked around and saw that this she was right. The neighborhood had always been changing, from its earlier days as a rough, racially mixed place, when gangs controlled whole blocks of group flats, and prostitutes plied their trade openly at all hours of the day and night. Over the years, the more intrepid of the almost-wealthy began to buy the old walk-ups, and blocks had been, depending on your viewpoint, won or lost. At some point, maybe ten to twelve years before, some critical mass had been reached—the process had accelerated, with more wealth advancing and more poverty retreating, until Frings saw the neighborhood as it was now.

  “Cities change, Frank, not always the way you and I like them to, but they change. There’s nothing to be done about it.”

  “There’s a difference between changing and being changed, Eva. You don’t have to preserve the City in amber. You have to let it happen. What we’re doing now … the planning …”

  “I know, I know. But the die is cast. It’s happening. You want to turn back now, waste all that effort and money, spend more to undo it?”

  Frings had shaken his head. He liked Eva. There’d been a time, he thought, when they’d shared a political philosophy, a vision of how you could effect change. Now, he felt, she’d compromised on both—even if her arguments remained strong, her positions defensible. But what really bothered him was her assumption that he was no longer as influential as he’d once been, and that this might have been the result of an inflexibility on his part, his ideology not changing with the times. Frings didn’t care about the trappings of influence—he never had—but being able to shape the way the City thought about issues? This meant as much to him as anything.

  “I’ve been in a new role,” she continued, “one where I have to form policy, not just express my political views. It affects the way you think about things. I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but it is true. But you, you’ve continued on as you always have—and I commend you for that. You’ve become our radical, Frank. The establishment’s radical who writes all these things that we would have said thirty years ago. You give us that little thrill of righteous anger.”

  She was so sharp on everything else that he couldn’t help but find her assessment troubling—running, as it did, so counter to his sense of himself. He wondered if he, too, saw some truth in what she said, but decided that he didn’t, that her words were mostly intended for herself, to allay her own unease about the compromises she’d made.

  BACK IN HIS OFFICE, FRINGS WROTE “VILNIUS STREET” AT THE CENTER of a sheet of yellow legal paper. Andre LaValle had lived on Vilnius Street, and when questioned at his trial did nothing but repeat his address on the 5800 block. That block was marked in red on the Drift map and was considered off-limits. And Andy Macheda, he now realized, had included it as a location in his film. Did it all come back to LaValle?

  Andre LaValle of the People’s Union assassinates the police chief. This leads to the dissolution of the People’s Union and, out of its ashes, the creation of Kollectiv 61. Was this Vilnius Street’s significance? Was this why Macheda had included it in his film?

  He’d needed to find Macheda again, and this time it would be much harder. After the last encounter, Frings co
uldn’t imagine that Macheda would be eager to talk with him—that he’d be any more forthcoming about LaValle or Vilnius Street than he was about Sol.

  And what about Joss’s comment that bad things had happened on Vilnius Street? LaValle had murdered the chief far from the block where he’d grown up, so this, at least, couldn’t be about him. All of these connections, and yet nothing seemed to cohere. It didn’t add up. Still, as he exhaled, he could feel his pulse racing with the familiar predatory excitement: he knew he’d gained a toehold.

  Frings took the elevator down to the second floor, riding the three stories with a janitor who’d come back damaged from Guadalcanal—twenty years of flinching, blinking, nerves. Frings told him a joke about a priest and a camel in the desert and left the elevator to the sound of the janitor’s wheezy laughter.

  WHEN THE NEWS HAD BOUGHT THE GAZETTE, THEY’D MERGED THEIR two archives, two newspapers now for each date since 1941, when the News had come on the scene. A few years ago, when he had some time on his hands, Frings had gone through the dates of a few major events, reading accounts through the two papers’ ideological slants. The result had been even less enthusiasm for Littbarski’s leadership.

  The archives were overseen by a woman named Maude Riordan, as odd as she was efficient, who could seemingly recall the date of anything of note that had happened in the City, though she was oblivious to most other subjects. Rumors about her were pervasive enough that they’d even filtered down to his office. She’d been the mistress of Hastings Bridgewell, the owner of the News back in the ’30s and ’40s; she’d put her unusual mind to work for Bletchley Park during the War; she was Bridgewell’s illegitimate sister; and so on. As far as Frings knew, none of these was remotely true, but their persistence among the News-Gazette staff spoke to the intense fascination she provoked within the building.

  Frings found Maude Riordan, as he generally did, writing in a black ledger, her handwriting upright and fastidious. He’d snuck a peek at the ledger once when she was back in the newspaper stacks, finding to his pleasure that she was writing in some kind of cipher. He’d have been disappointed, he thought, if this hadn’t been the case.

  “Hello, Miss Riordan.” He gave her a slanted grin, trying to intimate that he didn’t consider her part of the wretched community of the newspaper. She was, as always, inscrutable.

  “Mr. Frings, yes.” Her eyes roamed furiously around her barren desktop.

  “I was hoping you could maybe help me with something. I’m working on a story and I keep coming across Vilnius Street. Do you know Vilnius?”

  She looked to the ceiling, her thinking tick. “Vilnius Street. Sure. Of course.”

  “I don’t know anything about it, but I’m trying to find out if something happened there, probably around the 5800 block and before 1960. You have any ideas?”

  She crooked her index finger, gnawed on the second joint, another sign that she was very focused. “1958. 1958. July or August.” She was mumbling to herself, ignoring Frings’s presence. “July or August. July. Late July.” She took in a deep, sudden breath. “Late July, but the story ran in early August? July 29?” She snapped suddenly back to the present, fixing Frings with a satisfied, somehow unsettling stare. “I think I know. Give me an hour?”

  65

  WHEN FRINGS RETURNED TO THE NEWSPAPER ARCHIVES AN HOUR AND A half later, Maude Riordan was drinking something that smelled like tea made with kerosene. Frings blinked at the odor.

  “Something in your eye, Mr. Frings?” Maude asked, her face not betraying any humor.

  Frings smiled weakly at her and took a seat.

  She sipped her tea, looking at something over Frings’s shoulder like a cat staring out a window. She was going to make Frings ask.

  “Miss Riordan, did you turn up anything?”

  She puckered her mouth, dabbed her lips with a napkin that she then folded and placed neatly on her desk. “There were a few interesting days at the end of July 1958 on the 5800 block of Vilnius Street.” She waited again.

  “How so?”

  “The article ran in both the News and the Gazette on August 2, so I’m fairly sure that somebody asked the press to hold off on the story. When the stories did run, they were essentially the same—they were probably taken from a written statement sent out by the Department of Health.”

  “Department of Health?”

  She smiled the way she often did when she was privy to a piece of interesting knowledge. “The 5800 block was quarantined for three days: July 29, 30, and 31. The quarantine was lifted on August 1.”

  “Quarantined for what reason?” He heard the scuttling of tiny feet in the ducts above them.

  She slid him a newspaper folded open to a middle page, an edition of the News. “An unspecified virus.”

  He skimmed the article, finding nothing beyond what she had told him. No mention of the reason for concern about the virus—no one infected, no contaminated water, nothing. The block had been quarantined for three days, the quarantine was over, that was it.

  “Not much of a story.”

  She shook her head.

  “And there wasn’t any follow up?”

  “On that? Would you spend your time on it, Mr. Frings? Would you even remember it three months on?”

  Frings frowned, conceding this point. “But you don’t seem so convinced about it.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “I don’t?”

  “Not from where I stand.”

  She thought about this for a minute. Frings wondered what she was weighing, whether she was factoring in some assessment she’d made of him.

  “It seem right to you, Mr. Frings?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Quarantining a block? Ending the quarantine and the problem’s gone away? I don’t know that I’ve heard of a block being quarantined in the City. If there was one, I expect there’d have been a good reason, not the kind of thing where they say ‘sorry, excuse me, it’s over’ and that’s that. That’s what I mean, Mr. Frings.”

  Frings nodded, thinking along similar lines. “You have any ideas about what was going on?”

  She shook her head in frustration. “I poked around some, tried to get the scent”—she demonstrated by inhaling deeply, her whole face scrunching with the action—“but I didn’t find anything.”

  “We’d need more information.”

  She nodded. “From where I stand.”

  Frings thanked her.

  “I expect”—she said—“that you should feel welcome down here if you find out anything more about this.”

  “I expect so.”

  66

  THE NIGHT HAD GONE VERY COLD WITH THE SETTING OF THE SUN, AND Frings’s knee ached as he made his way home. His fingers were stiff inside his glove where they grabbed the head of his cane. People passed, blowing clouds of steam, shoulders hunched against the chill. He thought about the three days of quarantine on Vilnius Street, kept coming back to the same thing, but it seemed far-fetched. He must, he thought, be missing something.

  As he ascended the dozen steps to his door, he felt suddenly old. He wanted a drink and then sleep, to wake up in the morning with a clearer mind, more energy.

  He unlocked his door and heard Le Nozze di Figaro on the record player wafting in from the living room. He froze, instinct telling him to step outside to the street, find a cop. But whoever was in there had announced his presence, was trying not to surprise him. He hesitated, felt both scared, and dumb for feeling scared. The latter overwhelmed the former, and he walked through the short hall and into the living room. Sitting in one of the high-backed upholstered chairs was a young man with his hair cut very short, hooded eyes, clothes that he seemed to have borrowed from someone considerably heavier. On the coffee table lay a gun.

  “Sol.” He was thinner, exhausted, his hair shorn, but Frings recognized him.

  Sol got out of his chair, keeping close to the gun on the table. “Frank.” They shook hands. “I’ve been waiting for a while. You have some gr
eat records.”

  “You like opera?”

  Sol nodded.

  “How’d you—”

  “Is this really what you want to talk about, Frank? Right now?”

  Frings nodded, accepting the point. He normally didn’t babble—nerves. “I’m getting a drink. You?”

  Sol shook his head. Frings fixed himself a whisky on the rocks.

  “I heard you were looking for me,” Sol said, no malice in his voice.

  Frings took a sip. “That’s right. Your grandfather’s been worried.”

  Sol sighed. “Papouse. I thought about getting in touch with him a few times, sending a postcard or something. Never got to it.”

  “Where’ve you been?”

  “Here. The City.”

  “Doing?”

  Sol shook his head.

  “Okay, Sol. I’ve done what I was supposed to do, found you and you seem okay, though you could stand to put on some pounds. Why don’t you meet with your grandfather? Have dinner or coffee or something? You owe him that, don’t you think? Put his mind at ease?”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not.”

  “I love him, Frank, but I don’t know if I can trust him.”

  “Trust him to what?”

  “Not set me up.”

  “Sol,” Frings said, exasperated. “Set you up for what?”

  In Sol’s stare Frings could see the manic intensity that he’d possessed even as a little boy, taking in everything with a startling concentration.

  “Okay,” Frings said. “Can I ask you about something else.”

  “You can ask.” Dubious.

  “When you were at the Tech, you volunteered for a study run by Simon Ledley.”

  Sol’s body tensed at this. “I’m not sure I’d call it volunteering.”

  “Why’s that?”

  Sol stood, took the gun, walked to the window but didn’t look out. “I was asked to participate. Me, several other kids.”

  “Kids you knew?”