Invisible Streets

by Toby Ball

  Without thinking, Frings stepped into the doorway, distracting Ledley from his reading. Sol turned toward him, smiled. Macheda turned around as well, not seeming too surprised to see Frings.

  “Sorry, Frank”—Sol said—“I went to see Ebanks to have a talk, and he made a pretty good case that my anger toward him was misguided. It’s really Dr. Ledley and people like him who are the problem, he says. They are the ones using the instruments of revolution against the revolutionary. I came here with Ebanks to have a talk with Dr. Ledley and thought I’d bring Andy with me. Do you know Andy, Frank?”

  Frings nodded.

  “Frank, call security. End this madness.” Ledley was pale, his eyes shone with desperation.

  Sol slowly shook his head. “We’re being nice to you, Dr. Ledley. Don’t push it.”

  “Frank,” Ledley implored.

  “What exactly is going on here?” Frings looked to Sol.

  Sol nodded toward Ledley. “Ask him.”

  Ledley made to stand, but Sol held his gun up.

  “Will came with these two. They forced me to take LSD and brought me back here. Will left.”

  Frings looked from Sol to Macheda.

  “We’re filming,” Macheda said. “This is the crucial piece, the most important piece.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Ledley screamed, “aren’t you going to do something.”

  Sol laughed. “Did you shut the door behind you when you came in? The one at the end of the hall?”

  Frings shook his head.

  “You mind getting that, Andy? I can say from experience that with that door closed, it doesn’t matter what you do, no one will hear.”

  Macheda left the room to close the hallway door. Ledley slumped in his chair, his brief moment of hope gone. Its passing seemed to have drained him of the fight. Frings couldn’t summon any sympathy for the man, but he was troubled by what Sol might do. How was this going to end? Down the hall they heard the steel door closing.

  Sol was up now. “Tell him what you’re reading into the camera.”

  “They’re making me read transcripts from the study.”

  “You can do better than that.”

  “Transcripts from the dyadic interviews where—”

  “Where you gave us LSD and tried to destroy our minds.”

  Ledley shuddered.

  Macheda returned. “It’s funny how we were living in the middle of it and we totally missed it, you know what I mean?”

  Frings didn’t.

  “I was making this movie, you know, and the Films, they were kind of like the sketch pad, trying things out. The whole time, I didn’t get it, man. I thought it was all about the New City Project, how they were going to rearrange the City and people were going to lose out, you know, to capitalism, business. But that’s just a part of it—a big part of it, but just a part.”

  “A part of what, Andy?”

  “A part of what?” Sol said. “I thought you would have figured this out by now. You were on the right track. You showed a lot of us where to start. But we made the mistake of thinking that there were all these different problems—the New City Project, the people they let in and don’t let in at the Tech, the Vilnius Street experiment, this project. All these things, Frank, all these bad things. But something dropped in our laps and we thought about it a little.”

  “Do you—” Ledley started.

  “Shut up,” Sol yelled.

  Frings held up a hand to Ledley, trying to both quiet and reassure him.

  Macheda said, “Looking back on it, I think Andre LaValle must have figured it out, which is why they keep him drugged at City. That’s why he must have killed the chief, because he figured it out.”

  “What fell into your laps?”

  “One of Ben Linsky’s roommates gave me a letter that Ben had written about his friends and meetings and who was where when.”

  Frings felt the dread rise up in him.

  Sol returned to his perch against the table. “It was a snitch report, Frank. Ben Linsky was a snitch, though I guess that’s not exactly a secret now. But it got us thinking about Ben, you know? What does he do? What does he think?”

  “What effect does he have?” Macheda said.

  “Effect?”

  Sol was up and walking again. “Ben Linsky, the champion of abstraction, of muddling the message.”

  “Art can’t be straightforward or it isn’t art,” Macheda said, quoting Linsky. “Everything needs to be obscure.”

  “Ben wasn’t being paid for his information,” Sol continued. “He was being paid for his beliefs, to keep him influential. Did you know that the police fund Prometheus? It’s their baby, their way of making sure that Ben’s message gets out—to keep radicals at bay.”

  “I’m not sure—” Frings began, though he saw that they were right.

  Sounding frustrated, Sol interrupted him. “His purpose was to obscure the message. Make it hard to understand, only accessible to a small group of people. It’s how they control the radicals.”

  “One of the ways,” Macheda said.

  “It seems crazy,” Frings said.

  “Does it?” Sol said. “How about this—how about your friend Will Ebanks. What do you think about him?”

  “What about him?”

  “He’s on the payroll, too, right? Why do you think? You think it might be that the mayor, the police, whoever it is that’s calling the shots—that they don’t mind people looking for revolution inside their own heads? Think about it. Look at it from another point of view: that this is all about controlling people. Tell me it doesn’t make sense.”

  It did make sense, but only after making some big assumptions that Frings wasn’t sure he could make.

  “Did you kill Ben Linsky, Sol?” Frings asked.

  Sol’s face darkened. “And what if I did?”

  86

  SOL HAD GROWN MORE AGITATED, PACING AROUND THE ROOM. LEDLEY looked terrible, and Frings had to remind himself of the students who’d been subjected to far worse. Macheda leaned against the wall, staying out of Sol’s way. They seemed reluctant to resume filming with Frings in the room. This concerned Frings, though he wasn’t scared for himself. He didn’t believe that Sol would harm him. But the question hung in the air: what would he—Frings—do when he walked out of the room? Would he call the police? It left Sol, he knew, in a difficult position.

  “Look around you, Frank. This is where it all happened, where this bastard”—he turned ferociously to Ledley—“conducted his study. This is where they tried to break down my psyche, leave my mind in rubble. And I can’t forgive that. I really can’t.

  “But what I want you to realize before you leave here is that the enormity of this is not what happened to me or to any of the other guys who were involved. No, this was just one part of a bigger effort, a consuming effort to control people in this city.

  “So, when you ask me if I killed Ben Linsky, my response is—if I did, I had every right to do it. He was part of this, Frank. At least Dr. Ledley doesn’t pretend he’s something that he isn’t. Linsky took money to keep artists from using their art to communicate with the people. He was a malevolent presence in the radical community. He was a part of the effort to control us. He was one of the people responsible for what happened to me.”

  Frings could follow the logic, but again couldn’t quite endorse the assumptions. “Even if that were true, it’s still murder. His not being who he said he was, even being a malevolent presence, doesn’t change that fact.”

  “You know what I’m interested in, Frank? I’m interested in your moral arithmetic. I think we agree on most things, am I right? What’s happening in our City is destructive to the vast majority of people who live here. That people who see this are morally bound to oppose the New City Project, the Crosstown, the way the Tech keeps the rich rich and the poor poor, all these things. How many people are negatively affected by these things? Hundreds of thousands? Millions? And then we have people working within the community of resis
tors, people who have assured us that they are working for the same things that we are, and it turns out they are undermining our efforts, that they’re on the payroll of our enemies. How can we not respond to that? How are drastic measures not called for? One man, Frank. One treacherous man versus the well-being of the City. You think I’m wrong?”

  Sol was becoming more and more agitated. Frings snuck a look at Macheda and saw that he didn’t seem overly concerned, which he took as a good sign. Sol had always oscillated between amiability and anger.

  “I don’t”—Frings said cautiously—“think that killing Linsky, or anyone, is the best choice, the moral choice, for dealing with this kind of issue. Expose him, use the outrage when the public catches wind of it to your advantage.” As he said this, he was thinking of Ledley, catatonic in his chair, as much as Linsky. “Get the people on your side; don’t force them away from you with violence.”

  “That’s always your answer, isn’t it? Expose the truth and things will right themselves. How did that work with your book? Did that stop anything? You wrote it and left the action to others. What does that get you? I don’t see anything.”

  “And yet—”

  “We’re making the movie. Yes. We’ll try it because that’s the best we’ve got right now. Your book, visionary as it was, was a tract. You don’t get huge numbers of people to read tracts. This is art. Maybe it will inspire people. If it wasn’t dangerous, why would they be so concerned about it, pay Ben Linsky to undermine it?”

  Why indeed, Frings thought. “I’m going to leave now. But I need to know that you’re not going to harm the professor.”

  “Not to worry. As long as he cooperates, we’ll leave the bastard at his desk with a cup of coffee.”

  Frings nodded.

  Sol looked to Macheda, back to Frings. “The question is, what are you going to do? You going to turn us in?”

  They stared at each other.

  “Because, Frank, this is the test, right? Are you an armchair radical, or are you willing to let your people do what they need to do?”

  Frings shook his head. “I don’t know.” He turned to leave.

  Ledley suddenly snapped back to the present. “My god, Frings, don’t leave.”

  Frings looked to Sol, who gave him a reassuring smile. Frings took a last look at Ledley and walked out of the room.

  • • •

  FRINGS SAT IN LEDLEY’S OFFICE WITH HIS FEET ON THE DESK, SMOKING A reefer. He looked at the pictures of Ada Hauptman staring back at him, wondered what it said about Simon Ledley that this was his lover.

  After a while he used Ledley’s phone, got passed around headquarters, until he was patched through to Grip, the sound distant, fading in and out, occasionally interrupted by a burst of static. Frings pictured an operator holding the phone receiver to a police radio, getting Grip on the street somewhere..

  “Detective Grip, I’m at Simon Ledley’s office at the Tech. Sol Elia’s here, too. You were right about Sol. You were right all along.”

  “What is this, Frank?”

  “It’s Sol. He’s here for you. Come get him.”

  87

  GRIP PULLED HIS GUN AT THE TOP OF THE STAIRS AND DESCENDED SLOWLY, trying to work out what to expect. He didn’t like Frings, but he trusted him. The man was in many ways an adversary, but one who confined his actions to his columns and politics, not violence—at least as far as Grip knew. He didn’t think this was a setup.

  But still, it was hard to figure what was going on. At the bottom of the stairs, he pushed the door open and led with his gun. The hallway was empty. Light came from an open door to his right.

  “Detective Grip.”

  Grip recognized Frings’s voice. “You alone?”

  Frings emerged from the room. “They’re in there.” Frings nodded toward a closed door at the end of the hall.

  “Is that right? What are they doing?”

  “They’ve got a professor in there—Simon Ledley. He’s drugged. I don’t think they’re going to hurt him physically, but I’m not sure. Sol’s got a gun.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “I was in there.”

  “And they let you go?”

  Frings nodded.

  “You know why?”

  “They didn’t think that I would call the police.”

  Grip thought about this. “Why wouldn’t you?”

  “Sol thinks we’re on the same side. He doesn’t think I’d turn him in.”

  Grip shook his head. “That’s a crazy risk.”

  Frings shrugged.

  “You say he confessed to killing his parents?”

  “No, he confessed to killing Ben Linsky. I’m pretty sure he also tried to kill Will Ebanks. He didn’t say anything about his parents—but I don’t doubt that he did it, not anymore.”

  Grip barely registered the second part of what Frings said. Sol Elia had killed Linsky. He—Grip—had planted the letter in Linsky’s apartment, it had ended up in Sol’s hands, and Sol had killed Linsky. He realized that he was grinding his teeth. Frings had seen his agitation as well.

  “You said he has someone else in there?”

  “Yeah, Andy Macheda.”

  Grip nodded. It made sense. “Door locked?”

  Frings shook his head.

  GRIP OPENED THE DOOR SLOWLY, SAW THE DARKNESS THAT LAY BEHIND it. A splash of light came from a room about halfway down on the left. He heard voices, sensed the agitation. He forced himself to move slowly, trying to contain his anger, be sure that the adrenaline wouldn’t cause him to make a mistake. Morphy had moved too quickly down in the tunnel.

  At the doorway, he glanced in. Sol Elia stood with his back to the door, reading from a piece of paper, a gun in his other hand. In a chair, facing him, was Simon Ledley, also with a clutch of papers, looking terrified. Ledley looked toward him and Grip thought that they’d made eye contact, but the professor’s eyes didn’t seem to register his presence. He couldn’t see Macheda, but guessed that he was to the left, because both Ledley and Sol were angled in that direction. He took three quick, deep breaths and followed his gun into the room.

  “Drop the fucking gun, Sol.”

  He took a quick glance at Macheda to see if he was armed, but the guy had turned his camera Grip’s way and it was clear he was intent on capturing this on film.

  Sol turned. “I’m not dropping the gun, Torsten.” He said Grip’s name mockingly. Grip tried not to let it get him more worked up.

  Grip took a step closer, but Sol raised the gun and he stopped.

  “What’s it going to be, detective? Are you going to wait and let me kill you or are you going to pull the trigger?”

  Grip was still, his hand steady. He wasn’t sure what Sol was trying to do—get himself killed? People did that, committed suicide by provoking cops into shooting them. But this didn’t feel like that kind of situation.

  “I was right about you, Sol.”

  “Were you? I guess you could look at it that way, but you never really got it.”

  “Got what? You killed your parents. Now you’ve killed at least one other person and from what I’ve heard today, looks like you tried to kill Will Ebanks, but you fucked it up.”

  Sol seemed mildly disappointed by this news. “So shoot me then, Torsten. I’m armed and dangerous, right? You have every reason.”

  “You don’t get to make that decision.”

  “Maybe I do.” Sol seemed to lean forward, about to make a move.

  A voice came from behind Grip. “Sol—”

  Sol’s eyes shifted. Grip pulled the trigger, hitting Sol in the shoulder, knocking him on his back. The gun skittered to the corner.

  Sol curled up into the fetal position, moaning, blood soaking his shirt. Frings moved around Grip to kneel beside Sol, put a hand on his undamaged shoulder. Macheda kept the camera rolling.

  “You want to turn that fucking thing off?”

  Macheda shook his head. Grip walked over to Sol’s gun and picked it up. He po
pped the clip.

  Frings looked up at Macheda. “I think you can turn that off, Andy.”

  Macheda put the camera down, looked uncertainly at Grip.

  “Sit down,” Grip said, waving his gun toward a chair.

  Ledley sat silently with his head in his hands, trembling. Sol pulled himself to a sitting position with his back to the wall. His skin was waxy, his shirt saturated with blood.

  Grip watched Frings try to squat next to him, wince, and sit on the ground with him.

  Frings said, “Sol, we need to get you an ambulance.”

  Sol nodded. Macheda took Ledley with him to make the call. Grip leaned against the wall and watched Frings help Sol into a chair.

  “I knew you’d betray me, Frank,” Sol said, his voice strained with pain.

  “Sol—”

  “I knew when I let you go that you’d call the police. You’re not a revolutionary, you don’t have the conviction that it takes to make things happen.”

  Grip resisted the urge to pistol-whip him. “Shut up.”

  Sol turned to Grip, then back to Frings.

  “We talked about it after you left, thought maybe we’d get something good on camera, cops busting in.”

  “You wanted to get shot,” Frings said.

  Sol tried to shrug, winced, and stopped. “I got shot, damnit. Get the fuck out of here, Frank. You … I can’t stand to look at your face.”

  Grip watched Frings nod, use the wall to lift himself painfully to his feet, and, leaning his hand on his cane, retreat from the room.

  “You’re a fraud,” Sol called after him, his voice barely more than a stage whisper. “You’re a scared old man.”

  Grip had heard enough. He walked over to Sol and with a flick of his wrist tapped Sol hard on the head with his pistol butt. Sol’s eyes shifted out of focus and then back in.

  Grip leaned over, putting his face right into Sol’s. “Shut the hell up.” Then he walked over, took a seat in Ledley’s chair, waited for the medics to arrive.

  88

  SPARSELY LIT IN THE NIGHT, THE CONSTRUCTION SITE RESEMBLED A NO-man’s land—gravel, dirt, and in a far corner, their shapes difficult to make out, feral dogs, or maybe coyotes. Dorman wore a scarf under his pea coat, a wool cap pulled over his ears. His back was hunched against the cold wind that blew through the chain-link fence, scattering leaves. Above, the finished part of the building rose thirty stories above Idaho Avenue, before giving way to the steel skeleton, which rose another twenty-eight. Red lights flashed at the corners of the top floor, almost impossibly high. A searchlight perched at the top of the Municipal Tower, ten blocks in the distance, swept the sky, illuminating the scaffolding twice a minute or so.