Invisible Streets

by Toby Ball

  He stepped aside, the lights dimmed, the projector rolled. On the screen, Simon Ledley sat in a chair, a stack of papers on his lap. His speech was stilted, strained.

  “My name is Dr. Simon Ledley. In 1959 and 1960, I conducted an experiment at the Tech using young men selected from our student body. What follows are excerpts from transcripts of interviews conducted during the course of this experiment. During the interviews the subjects were under the influence of lysergic acid diethylamide. Interview number one…”

  91

  THE STATION WAS NEVER REALLY EMPTY, BUT IT WAS LATE, NEARING TWO in the morning, and the cops who were there were occupied with drunks, whores, and the other upstanding citizens that had come to the attention of the law that night. Grip sat at his desk in the empty detectives’ room, trying to clear out paperwork, abandoning hopeless cases with a signature. The room was dim, most lights off. His lamp was on, illuminating his desk like a stage prop.

  Grip heard the door open but kept his head down. He wanted to finish his work, get the hell out of there. He had no interest in talking with whoever had just come in. Someone dragged a chair across the floor toward him, deliberately making noise. Grip reluctantly looked up. Albertsson, wearing his uniform, sat on the other side of the desk.

  “Detective”—Albertsson said—“you’ve been scarce, people are worried.”

  “Yeah? What about?”

  “You.”

  Grip, in truth, had been waiting for this. He’d been avoiding Crippen’s, hadn’t seen Wayne in the two weeks since the Municipal Tower had been bombed. It was the kind of thing that would make Wayne nervous. “I’m fine.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t think that’s what they’re worried about.”

  Grip knew that. “I can’t help you, then.”

  Albertsson gave him a long, hard stare. “You sure?”

  Grip nodded.

  THE NEXT MORNING, GRIP LOOKED OUT THE WINDOW OF HIS APARTMENT and saw Ed Wayne across the street, wearing a military-issue winter coat, a fur hat pulled low over his ears. Wayne stood in the doorway of a German bar—not yet open for the day—staying out of the wind. It was cold outside—frost had formed along the edges of Grip’s window.

  Grip was happy to make him wait, taking a long shower, frying an egg for breakfast. He glanced out every few minutes to see if Wayne was still there; but he knew the stubborn bastard wouldn’t leave. The guy wouldn’t be driven away by the cold or by boredom. He wondered if Wayne was carrying a gun, decided that he probably was.

  He took the stairs down two floors to the lobby, thinking about the next few minutes. He had spent years with Wayne, doing the dirty work in the struggle with the City’s communists. Others had come and gone or shown that they didn’t have the stomach for the unpleasant side of things. But Wayne had been a constant—the unpleasant side seemed to be his only side. Things had changed, though, with the bombing of the Municipal Tower and Phil Dorman’s death. Neither of these had been in the service of anticommunism. That had been the result of wild, imagined conspiracies, and Grip didn’t like it, both for the senseless destruction and for the way it made the cause—his cause—seem less serious, promoted by lunatics. Wayne had taken everything much too far.

  Grip left his building, saw Wayne spot him. Wayne walked across the street, not paying attention to the traffic, forcing a car to brake hard to avoid hitting him.

  “Tor.”

  Grip waited until Wayne had made it across the street.

  “Tor, we’ve missed you,” Wayne said with mock sincerity. “I’ve been lonely.”

  Grip walked, forcing Wayne to speed up a little to catch him.

  “What’s going on in your head?” Wayne said. “I’m sensing that you’ve drifted from the fold, that you are not the contented sheep that you once were.”

  Grip shrugged. “I’m keeping some distance for a while.”

  “I’m not sure that we’re comfortable with that.”

  “We?”

  “Me. Is there a problem? Because I’m trying to figure out where your mind is at right now. Burning Zwieg, sure, I get it. You fucked up our plans a little, but you couldn’t have known. It would have been perfect for Kollectiv 61 to be blamed for the Tower, but not crucial. Zwieg thought he could take down Kraatjes if people thought that Kraatjes had been secretly supporting the people who bombed the Tower. But that was a fucking pipe dream. Too much at once.”

  Grip stopped, forcing Wayne to stop as well. He looked up into the taller man’s small, mean eyes. “You’ve gone over the edge, Ed. The Tower. Phil Dorman’s dead, and your fingerprints are all over it. That little puke Fache couldn’t find me fast enough to let me know that he’d pointed you out to Dorman. The noose is tightening; you must know that. What do you think you have? Another day? Maybe two? Zwieg’s not going to take the fall alone if there’s anything in it for him. So, is there a problem? Yeah, I’d say so. You’ve lost it.”

  Wayne laughed. “You’ve gone soft, have you? The Municipal Tower was a goddamn triumph, Tor.”

  “A triumph? It’s still standing, Ed. You put a hole in it, but you sure as hell didn’t knock it down.”

  Wayne reddened. “You think too small. Your mind is not capable of seeing the bigger picture, the larger dangers. You think the New City Project will ever seem safe again?”

  “And Dorman?”

  “He had a choice. He made the wrong one.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m choosing to step away.”

  “That’s a problem, then, Tor.”

  Grip started walking again. “Not for me, Ed.”

  Wayne wheeled on Grip. “You don’t understand,” he growled. “You have a big fucking problem.”

  Grip had his gun out, pushed the barrel against Wayne’s forehead.

  Wayne laughed. “You going to shoot me, Tor? Right here?”

  Grip reached into Wayne’s pocket, pulled out his gun, stuck it in his own pocket. He took a step back. “You know what this is?” He opened his jacket, unbuttoned the top of his shirt, revealing the wire sneaking down toward his pants. This was another task he was performing to placate Kraatjes, prove his loyalty.

  “You son of a bitch,” Wayne said, shaking his head, half-smiling. “You…”

  Grip turned to watch two squad cars ease down the street, flashers on, sirens off.

  “You know, Tor, that you’re dead. There’s nowhere you can hide. I’ve got guys on the Force, on the street, everywhere. You’re fucking dead.”

  Grip pursed his lips, cocked his head, looked at Wayne through narrow eyes. He was, Grip thought, probably right.

  92

  KRAATJES LEANED CASUALLY AGAINST THE GLASS WALL OF THE RESTAURANT of the Hotel Leopold II smoking a thin cigarette, the lights of the City spread out below him. Frings sipped a gin and tonic where he sat at a window-side table. The place was empty, save for a waiter who stood at a distance, attentive but discreet. The lights had been dimmed, the chairs tipped up against the tables. It was well past midnight, but Kraatjes seemed able to look fresh no matter the hour. He wore a fashionable suit, dark-framed glasses. His body was relaxed, but Frings saw the tightness in his jaw. He had struggled to bring Kraatjes here, eventually resorting to the only type of threat that seemed to bother him—exposure.

  “You going to tell me what you want, Frank?”

  “I don’t know. An explanation, maybe, go from there?”

  Kraatjes thought about this. “You’re calling the shots.”

  “Why the experiments?”

  “Which ones?”

  “Vilnius Street. Ledley’s studies with the kids.”

  Frings followed Kraatjes’s gaze out the window. The City looked impossibly vast from here, a galaxy of lights, beautiful and distant. For a fleeting moment Frings thought about how far he would have to travel to escape this place, the neighborhoods he would need to traverse. That, in a way, was what the Crosstown was all about. Escape.

  “Take a look at the size of this place,” Kraatjes said, exhaling smoke agai
nst the glass. “I’m in charge of keeping the City under control, Frank. They say the cop’s job is to protect, but it’s to control, at least here. You can’t protect everybody. It doesn’t work. A stupid, infeasible goal. We’ve tried so many things over the years, different chiefs, but in the end all our efforts are overwhelmed by the sheer size—the numbers, numbers I can recite, but which are impossible to hold in your head. Too big.

  “So when I was assistant chief, we started looking into ways we could control the City. Not the whole City, of course, but certain places, certain elements. Where do you have the least control, and how can this be remedied?

  “The chief before me, he was adventurous, he’d take a look at anything. Simon Ledley, I’ve come to realize, has a nose for opportunity. He came to us, said he had this new drug that he thought might be useful for influencing behavior, controlling crowds, whatever—we jumped. Ledley had no idea, of course, what the hell it would do—these were early days—but he wanted money, and what he hinted at, it seemed like it was potentially the grail, the answer. We give him money, resources, tell him what we want, and he’ll work an experiment. So we did Vilnius Street.”

  “Surely it didn’t turn out the way you wanted.”

  Kraatjes exhaled through his teeth. “Of course not. It was a disaster. But we knew all along that it could hit or miss.”

  Frings saw a helicopter hovering at an altitude below them, training a spotlight where the west leg of the Municipal Tower was gashed open, revealing a cross section of floors and rubble. “Andre LaValle.”

  Kraatjes dragged on his cigarette, held the smoke while he thought. “Nothing connected with Vilnius Street went well. We could never figure out how LaValle found out about the experiment, our involvement, any of it. But he did. The way we treated—still treat—him is not consistent with what I value as an officer of the law. But I had no choice.”

  Kraatjes’s tone was dispassionate, as if he were talking about a moderately bad day at the track.

  “But you kept up with the experiments.”

  Kraatjes nodded. “Sure. Using the drug on a population didn’t seem effective, or at least we didn’t know how to do it correctly, so we turned to individuals, to see if it would be helpful in reorienting deviants, keeping them from further trouble.”

  “Another disaster.”

  Kraatjes conceded this wordlessly.

  “So why were you paying Ben Linsky? Why are you paying Will Ebanks? Is this the same program?”

  “Same idea. Look, drugs, coercion—nothing controls people like money and fear. When the chief was murdered, I realized that we had to do something about the radical scene. You couldn’t just round them up, but you needed to keep them under wraps. We contacted Ebanks and Linsky because a lot of the radical kids looked up to them, and we figured out what combination of money and threats we could use to coerce each of them. We put them on the payroll, told them they didn’t really have to change much, just keep things tamped down. Ebanks needed the money, and he didn’t have to do anything different, just keep the kids taking the drugs, looking into themselves—keep them from from being too active in the real world. Linsky—we told him, don’t let things get too belligerent; keep it obscure, aesthetic. He was a little harder. We had to threaten him with morals charges in addition to the cash. Once he started getting the cash, though, he decided he liked it. We had them reporting back to us about the goings on, but that was just to keep them involved, feel some pressure. It wasn’t the point.”

  “Are there others?”

  “In the radical scene? No.”

  Frings sighed. He’d subconsciously held out some hope that he hadn’t fully understood Kraatjes’s operation or misapprehended its goals. But now, hearing it from a man he’d respected, he felt a sudden bleakness.

  “What now?”

  Kraatjes seemed mildly surprised by the question. “Nothing’s changed. The New City Project will get back on track. We’ll remain vigilant with the radical scene.”

  “What about Canada?”

  “What about him?”

  “Weren’t you running something on him, trying to get bribes on tape?”

  Kraatjes shrugged. “It’s nothing. Look, I’m not here to upset the applecart. Nathan Canada is ambitious and he’s got the scruples of a cobra. I need to have something on him to protect myself if he goes after me the way he’s gone after others. He needs to know that I have ammunition I can use against him. That’s all it is.”

  “So the corruption …”

  “Have you been listening, Frank?”

  Frings nodded. Kraatjes wasn’t worried about the corruption in the New City Project, the weight brought to bear on neighborhood bosses, the pervasive theft, the resale of stolen goods. These weren’t threats to order—they were just crimes, and thus beneath Kraatjes’s concern.

  Frings set his drink on the table and walked to the elevators.

  93

  TWO NIGHTS LATER, FRINGS WAS BACK AT THE HOTEL LEOPOLD II. THE occasion was a reception to unveil and celebrate the additions to the New City Project that were being proposed to the City Council, in what seemed a fait accompli in the wake of the Municipal Tower bombing. The dining tables had mostly been removed, creating space for people to mingle and, in the center of the floor, for a scale model of the City. A jazz band played off to the side, the music a little louder and rowdier than what was generally played during the dinner service.

  There was press here, but that was not why Frings had been invited. Nathan Canada had personally called to make sure that he’d be there. It was an opportunity, Frings thought, for Canada to gloat.

  He was barely through the door when Canada walked over to him, cigarette clasped between two fingers. Canada was in a rare good mood and they exchanged small talk for a few moments. He wanted to show Frings the model, with the proposed additions. But Frings wanted to broach something first, while he had Canada’s ear.

  “I noticed there was no memorial or anything for Phil Dorman.”

  “We sent him home to be buried by his family.”

  “But no acknowledgment here?”

  Canada seemed genuinely confused. “Why would we do something like that? He was a worker. It’s a tragedy, of course.” That seemed to be as much as he was going to say.

  “Do you know what he was doing up on that building in the night?”

  “We’ve looked into that—believe me—but we haven’t made any headway. We may never know.”

  “Maybe,” Frings said, and he saw that Canada heard something in his voice that put him on edge.

  IT SEEMED TO FRINGS THAT CANADA WAS RELIEVED TO FIND A SMALL group of businessmen examining the City model. Frings could see his confidence return. The model was big, about ten feet square—little houses and roads with tiny cars placed on them, green parks with trees not much taller than a thumbnail, the river rendered in blue paint. The Riverside Expressway, Canada explained to the assembled group, was going to be lengthened, following the river further south and east to a new bridge that would connect the City to what was now a fairly rural agricultural zone. Canada gestured to this area on the model, which was colored, Frings noticed, a shade of green very similar to that of dollar bills.

  These tiny, historic towns would be bought up quickly, and bedroom communities would pop up in their stead. One of the things that would happen at this party, Frings knew, was that various businessmen would approach Canada with whatever bribes—or contributions—they were willing to make in order to have the chance to buy some of that land. And so the New City Project would roll on.

  He recognized many of the faces in the room. If you had any doubts that the City was a plutocracy, Frings thought, an hour in this room would dispel them. Wealthy men with their beautiful, aloof wives talked in small groups. Frings saw the mayor sitting at one of the tables at the side of the room with a few of the older men. People stopped by to greet him, pay their respects. But the dynamic personality in the room was Canada, who moved through the crowd like a s
hark, people eager to talk with him but also wary. Nobody was here to do business with the mayor.

  Frings saw Milledge, the Tech’s president, speaking with Rolf Westermann, the lawyer. He saw councilors talking with the men who’d financed their elections. Panos had been invited, he knew, but his health was not great, nor was his desire to attend. Without Panos, in this room full of the people who constituted the Establishment, he had no real allies.

  Eva Wise approached him, carrying two glasses of wine. Frings thanked her, kissed her on the cheek, and took one.

  “I didn’t expect to see you here, Frank.” She wore a conservative dress and a matching felt hat, which made it look as if she’d walked into the wrong party, but the outfit lent her a gravitas that the more glamorous women in their cocktail dresses lacked.

  “Nathan called me himself.”

  She pursed her lips. “Is he still trying to win you over?”

  “I don’t think so. He doesn’t think he needs to.”

  “Maybe it’s time to pick a new battle. You realize you could even take a break—travel, enjoy yourself. The City will be here when you get back.”

  Frings smiled weakly.

  She nodded. “I guess not.” She seemed to regard him with real affection. “It would be so nice to be on the same side again.”

  “I’d like that as well,” he said, wondering whether there was anyone left on his side—what that side even was.

  Past Eva’s shoulder, he saw Canada and Gerald Svinblad walking together in his direction. He nodded his head toward them, and Eva sighed.

  “Frank.”

  “It’s okay. I’ll talk to you soon.”

  “IT’S IRONIC,” CANADA SAID, “THAT, FAR FROM CAUSING AN OBSTRUCTION to the New City Project, this bombing has actually increased our support and allowed us to expand our goals.”

  Svinblad was listening with a smirk, sipping a gin and tonic. Frings could see that he’d been drinking heavily, his eyes watery and a little unfocused.