by Toby Ball
He searched through the few folders that were left on the table. He found blank log sheets, blank expense forms, a couple of well-fingered smut magazines. He sat, stiff at first, but his body quickly relaxed. The warmth in the room and the hum of the lights seemed to suck the consciousness from him. In less than five minutes he was asleep, chin on chest.
69
WHEN HE’D AWOKEN, DISORIENTED IN THE BRIGHT, WARM ROOM IN THE basement of Ben Linsky’s building, it had crossed Grip’s mind that he could stay there for a while, use it as a sanctuary. It was tempting to keep his head down, think things through, get some relief from the moment-to-moment anxiety. But he’d checked his watch, found that it was nearly ten in the morning, and faced an unpleasant reality: yes, this place was probably safe, but he couldn’t afford to let time pass. He had a sense for these things, and that sense was telling him that everything was about to start unfolding quickly. The longer he waited, the more he risked falling behind.
Now he sat on a bed in a grim room in the White Rhino, drinking a cup of stale coffee floating a healthy dose of whisky. Ed Wayne sat in one of the ratty orange chairs, drinking his whisky straight. The wig that he often wore was gone, replaced by the porkpie hat, his head looking enormous over his narrow, sloping shoulders. The light of the bare ceiling bulb seemed to highlight his grayish yellow teeth. Grip couldn’t keep his eyes off them, stealing glances. He again asked himself what was wrong with Wayne.
“You’ve really stepped in it this time,” Wayne slurred, his smirk pissing off Grip. “I don’t see you getting out of this one.”
“Yeah, we’ll see.”
“I don’t know where you have friends, ’cept for maybe me, and you don’t seem to be exactly nurturing that one as we speak.”
“Fuck off.”
Wayne laughed, drew in a wet breath. “See what I mean, Tor?”
Grip shook his head, bit down on his anger. He shifted his gun around in his pocket, rubbed the safety with his thumb. He saw Wayne watching the movement in his pocket and took his hand out. Grip wondered if he was nervous. He didn’t think so, but he sure as hell wasn’t sure what he was doing.
Wayne kicked back his whisky and stared across at Grip with filmy eyes. Grip handed him the flask. Wayne poured himself another drink. When they weren’t talking, the sounds of the whores and their johns were audible. Grip felt the adrenaline rise with his annoyance. He would have kicked down every one of those doors, braced the johns, maybe taken their licenses, fucked with them in some way. The toilet ran ceaselessly in the bathroom. He shook his head.
“Troubled mind?”
Grip sneered, trying not to let Wayne wind him up. But he was on a knife’s edge, and Wayne knew it.
The knock came out of nowhere. Wayne’s eyes darted to the door, about as startled a reaction as Wayne was capable of. He walked over and put his hand on the knob.
“Albertsson?”
Grip could hear the voice from the other side. “Who the fuck do you think it is? Open up.”
Wayne let Albertsson in and locked the door behind him. Albertsson stood motionless, trying to make sense of Grip’s presence. Grip moved quickly, pulling the gun from his pocket, training it straight at Albertsson’s forehead.
“Ah shit, Tor,” Wayne said. “Why does everything have to be hard with you?”
Grip ignored him. “Pull out your gun with your left hand and put it on the floor.”
Albertsson did as he was told, grinning uncertainly, and Grip nodded him to the bed. Grip took a step back, leaned against the wall, his gun still on Albertsson, but where he could also see Wayne.
Albertsson looked at Wayne, who shrugged: “I told you Tor was a little dim, but he makes up for it with unthinking aggression.”
Albertsson turned back to Grip, his eyes moving from the gun to Grip’s face and back again, unhurried, as if checking to make sure he understood the situation right.
“We’re on the same side, Detective. You don’t need the piece.”
“That right? What side is that?”
Albertsson didn’t say anything. Grip gave him credit for keeping his composure.
“You know where I was last night?”
Albertsson shrugged. How could he know?
“Ben Linsky’s building, down in the basement.”
Albertsson nodded.
“You guys had a decent set-up down there.”
“It worked alright.”
“Why were you guys running bugs on Linsky?”
“I don’t know. I’m a soldier. I do what I’m told, Detective, you know that.”
“Right. So who’s the lead on this? Ving?”
“That’s right,” Albertsson said eagerly, “Ving.”
The conversation stopped for a moment and the sound of a whore with her john was suddenly audible through the ceiling. Grip raised his gun to the ceiling, jaw clenched, and just stopped himself from firing. He brought the gun back to Albertsson.
Wayne chuckled. “You got to get a hold of yourself, Tor.”
Grip glanced sideways at him, heart pounding. Back to Albertsson. “You do any other stakeouts for Ving?”
“Like Linsky? No. I do some pickups, though. Get reports passed to me by some of the other grasses.”
“Like who?”
“Fucked if I know. I don’t look at the stuff. I wouldn’t know Linsky except I had to listen to him all the time. He’d bring men back to his apartment, and I’d have to listen to that, too. You think the shit upstairs gets aggravating, you should—”
“I get it. So where do you get these reports?”
“Different places. It’s not as secret as you’d think. I just meet whoever it is in a park or on a corner or whatever and they give me a package and I walk away. Not a big deal. Either that or they put an envelope in the crook of a tree or a trash barrel, something like that. I pick it up. I do it all the time. I’m doing one tonight, if you want to come along.”
Grip wasn’t sure what to make of this. Albertsson certainly seemed sincere.
“Listen, Detective, I appreciate that you think you need to have the gun on me and all that. I’ve heard the rumors at the station. But you don’t need it with me. I’m happy for somebody to take those motherfuckers down. I’m serious. You and me and Ed, here, we’re all on the same side, man. You think I like dealing with these fucking heemies? You want to take them down, I’ll help you out, long as you keep my name out of it, you know? Still got to pay the bills.”
Jesus, this kid was stupid. Where the hell did Wayne find these guys? But there was a possibility here. Find a second snitch, maybe figure out what Kraatjes was up to, and why Zwieg thought it made him vulnerable.
70
THE BLOCK SEEMED STRANGELY BARREN. THE TREES HAD LOST ALL OF their leaves, standing now like scarecrows in neat intervals along the quiet street. An elderly woman walked a small dog wrapped in a red tartan sweater. Frings smiled at her as he walked by and received an elegant bend of the head in return.
The City was a fast place, and Frings was acclimated to that rhythm—hadn’t, in fact, known any other. But at times like this it seemed uncontrolable. So many things going on, so many contingencies that he needed to navigate.
Sol’s appearance had changed things. Frings had now done, technically, what Panos had asked. Sol was alive. Frings had made contact. He could report back to Panos and everything would be finished. But seeing the nervous, unstable kid the previous night had convinced Frings that there was more to all of this. Sol was involved in something.
FRINGS FOUND THE BROWNSTONE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE BLOCK, A PLACE he hadn’t visited in more than a decade. He walked up the steps, pushed the doorbell, heard the clang inside, waited. He was about to ring the bell again when he heard the bolts slipping open, and the door opened in. An elderly man appeared, skin pale and thin, his face nearly hollow beneath his cheekbones.
The man smiled quietly. “Mr. Frings.”
“Hello, Mr. Puskis.” Puskis, Frings figured, must have been in h
is late eighties or even nighties, and had been living alone in this house for the past thirty years.
Puskis opened the door wider to let Frings in to the dim hallway. The air was stagnant, smelled of decaying leather and steeping tea. With short shuffling steps, Puskis led him down the carpeted hall and through a door to what had once been a living room, but was now a kind of study—elegant old tables neatly stacked with reams of paper and an improbable volume of newspapers. Puskis offered Frings a seat in an upholstered easy chair and sat down opposite him.
“Tell me the reason for my good fortune.” Puskis’s voice was faint but clear. Frings felt self-conscious as he thought how long it had been since he’d paid a visit. And just as last time, he was not here for social reasons—he needed information.
Puskis seemed to intuit these thoughts from Frings’s hesitation. “I don’t seek company, Mr. Frings, but it is a pleasure to see you when you do visit.”
The wall behind Puskis was hung with masks—African, Chinese, American Indian. Through the windows, Frings could see to the backyard, where plants done in by a killing frost lay fading in a garden plot sited on a small mound.
Frings nodded. “I thought that maybe you could help me with something.”
Puskis opened his hands as an invitation to explain. He had at one time been the archivist for the City’s mammoth repository of criminal files. After the madness of 1935, he’d retreated to this house, where he kept on with his obsessive accrual and organization of information as best he could, given his current resources.
“Vilnius Street. In 1958 there was a disease scare. They quarantined the 5800 block for two days. Do you remember that?”
Puskis scratched at his temple with a yellowed talon of a fingernail. “I do. Interesting, that block.”
Frings perched forward. “How so?”
Puskis pushed himself out of his chair, walked to a stack of papers. Frings noticed that they’d been arranged neatly, their edges carefully squared.
“I’ve been continuing my work”—Puskis said—“chronicling the City’s affairs, though I’ve found it necessary to change my methods. I have only the newspapers and other public records now, but this has still proven fruitful.” As Frings watched, Puskis sifted through a pile of handwritten papers, flipping the pages face-down after he’d looked at them. “Vilnius Street. Curious the correlations.” He found a sheet that he picked up to examine more closely. He replaced it on the stack, pulled it along with four or five other sheets and returned to his chair. Puskis read through the information on the sheets, his face grim.
“The correlations?” Frings prompted.
Puskis seemed distracted. “Mr. Frings, I fear my manners have atrophied during my hermetic existence. May I offer you a drink? My predecessor, Mr. Van Vossen, left me with a liquor that produces an interesting intoxication.”
Frings shook his head. “Thank you, Mr. Puskis. But the correlations?”
“Yes,” Puskis said, showing the slightest hint of disappointment. “I have collected and organized obituary notices, news stories, government reports. As you say, there was a two-day quarantine followed by a statistically anomalous series of events that I have documented in these pages.”
“What kinds of events?”
“Suicides at five times the rate of the rest of the City. Six counts of spousal murder. I don’t have official figures for consignment to mental hospitals, but the anecdotal evidence suggests that they, too, are at surprisingly high levels.”
“It’s like after the quarantine they all went mad.”
Puskis shrugged. “While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that they all went mad, I agree that, as a whole, something seems to have affected the psyches of those people.”
Frings nodded, rubbed his face with his hands.
“Another thing”—Puskis said—“Andre LaValle, the man who murdered the chief of police in 1960? He was from that same block.”
Frings nodded. “Yes. I’ve heard that.”
“The City”—Puskis brushed his lips with a thumb—“the City is a composite of anomalies, Mr. Frings. Any generality that you make breaks down as you apply it to more specific populations. Suicide rates, incarceration rates, anything like that, you don’t expect smaller samples to conform. But in this case, the deviation is highly pronounced and seems to apply to the full range of pathological behavior. And these anomalies begin with the brief quarantine.”
“The quarantine is the key.”
“That is, I think, a valid conclusion.”
THERE WAS SOMETHING ELSE HE WANTED TO ASK PUSKIS, BUT, FEELING self-conscious, he’d waited until the pair had shared a pot of strong, smoky tea. Puskis had asked him about various conflicts within the City’s government, many of which didn’t make it into the papers. Frings was happy to help—the merger was now many years old, but he still felt affronted by the collapse of a newspaper that had once been so great, and so honest. Puskis, he knew, was savvy enough to know that he couldn’t rely on what was on the page, so Frings filled in as many details as he could.
“Mr. Puskis,” he said as he stood to leave. “I was wondering … I was wondering if you might know about something else.”
“What would that be?”
“I was talking with a friend the other day, and he made a comment that Will Ebanks—you know who he is?”
“Oh, yes,” Puskis said.
“My friend claimed that Ebanks is not as wealthy as, well, as I had figured. Do you know anything about that?”
Puskis frowned slightly, as if he was saddened by anybody’s misfortune. “I don’t have any real knowledge, though I remember that his father suffered heavy business losses toward the end. He had real estate throughout the Hollows, and those buildings dropped to almost nothing in value after the Great War. I don’t know how that affected the family wealth, but it must have been damaging. I’m sorry I can’t be more helpful.”
“No, that’s plenty helpful,” Frings said.
71
NOT MUCH HAD CHANGED INSIDE THE PHARAOH’S CLUB IN THE DECADE and a half since Frings had last visited. The library lights were dim, covered in heavy shades, but you could still see the shabbiness of the old chairs—graying with smoke, fraying with age. Cigarette and pipe smoke mixed pungently in the warm room. The youngest person here, Frings thought, was well into his fifties. When Frings had first visited, some twenty years ago, the place had been alive, filled with the young, the wealthy, and the ambitious. Now, in a very real way, it was dying.
Frings watched a well-fed man with a fringe of gray hair wrapped around his skull labor in his direction. The man wore a corduroy jacket and old wool pants above leather slippers. Frings was used to seeing him with a pipe, but he didn’t have it today. The man wove between tables, where men in sweaters played cards, and chairs in groups or alone, their occupants engrossed in books or just staring off into nothing.
Frings stood, shook the man’s hand. “Good to see you, Silas.”
Silas Birchall had owned Pharaoh’s for the last two dozen years. He came from money and possessed the careless charm of someone who had never had to worry about his future.
“And you, Frank.” They sat in chairs placed at angles to a low teak table. “Look at us,” Birchall chuckled. “We can barely get in and out of our chairs.”
Frings smiled, though he failed to see the humor.
“You know we’re thinking of selling the building. Big offers on the table to make this place a nightclub or apartments.”
“Would you buy another building someplace else?” It was hard to imagine the club inhabiting another building—this place had so much history.
Birchall gave a laugh. “Look around. How many years do you think this club has left? Ten? Twenty? Maybe we’ll rent a place, a place for some of the members who don’t have anywhere else to go, but …” He waved his hand around, noncommittally. “It’s the Crosstown, Frank. We’ll be right off it, a valuable location. Sell the property, pay off the Club’s debts, offer some cash t
o the members.” He lowered his voice. “Some of these men could really use it. A lot of these families, their wealth has evaporated over the years.”
Frings nodded. “That might be what I’m here to talk to you about.”
“What’s that?”
“Evaporating wealth.”
Birchall narrowed his eyes, not liking what he’d heard. “Okay,” he said cautiously.
“Will Ebanks.”
“Please, Frank.”
Frings rubbed his nose, feeling weary. “You know how Will is, or was. You just said that there are a lot of people here who seem as though they have money but maybe don’t.”
Birchall sighed.
“I think that Ebanks might be in a situation like that,” Frings pressed.
“You know these things are private.”
“I know. But believe me: this is important. You know Will and I are friends.” He realized, as he said it, that he was no longer convinced this was still true.
Birchall stroked his chin absently. Frings looked around the room, and wondered what the members would do if the club moved.
Birchall sighed and looked down. “I suppose I owe you.”
“Don’t look at it that way.”
“Still …”
“It’s important, Silas. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t.”
“Will joined Pharaoh’s because of his father,” Birchall began, “who was president immediately before me. I don’t need to tell you that Will was a bit out of step with many of the members, but he was not without his charms and was generally accepted as another of the eccentrics here. The reality, though, is that he has never paid dues in his life. He’s been kept on as something of a legacy, you see. Too embarrassing to ask him to leave, in truth.
“The family wealth was tied to real estate in the Hollows and when that entire neighborhood fell apart, they lost the bulk of their money. They lived off some savings and then, little by little, they sold possessions. Did you ever go to the house Ebanks grew up in?”
