City of Iron

by Williamson, Chet

  AA: In the sense, then, that you're a conduit for an inner artistic voice?

  PH: No, no, I disappear for hours at a time—don't know where I go, what I do.

  AA: Do you mean, as though you are in a fugue state?

  That was the first Guaraldi had ever heard the term, and from Peder's blank look, he was sure he'd never heard of it either. To the interviewer's annoyance, Guaraldi had jumped in and changed the subject. Peder was wise enough to sense he should speak about it no further, and would not.

  But after the interview appeared, the topic, touched upon only briefly, was the talk of the New York art circle. Many of its members and hangers-on already considered Peder somewhat disturbed, for his work frequently represented crucifixions, impalements, and other unpleasantries. And now it was even whispered that Peder Holberg, during his pretended blackouts, attended orgies, black masses, and even ritual killings.

  It was utter bullshit, Guaraldi knew. In his personal life, Peder was no more violent than a newborn kitten. But Guaraldi would have given much to know where his lover went during those dark hours.

  At the supply house, Guaraldi bought a dozen of the small iron pieces Peder wanted, and ordered a delivery of another gross for the next day. By then the uptown traffic had slackened surprisingly, so Guaraldi hailed a cab to transport his burden.

  It was 4:30 by the time he arrived back at the studio. He fumbled with the keys, juggling the armful of iron, and kicked the heavy door open. "I'm back!" he called as he went in.

  There was no answer. He looked everywhere in the studio, and through all the rooms of the apartment they shared, but Peder Holberg was gone.

  When Adam Guaraldi went downtown to fetch the iron pieces Peder Holberg required, Holberg worked for a few minutes more. But then his movements slowed, as though he were a machine winding down. His features relaxed, his expression grew dull, and he stared straight ahead of him.

  Then he went through the door to his apartment, where he changed his clothes, dressing warmly. He went out into the street and walked to the subway, glancing behind him frequently and mechanically. When the IRT Lexington Avenue local pulled in, he got on and took it north to the end of the line, just over the Third Avenue bridge in the Bronx. As he rode, he stared ahead fixedly, not even looking up when three men stopped in front of him and demanded money.

  "He's a tough guy, ain't he?" said one. "Hey, tough guy, I'm talkin' to you." The man reached a hand out toward Holberg, but the appearance of a transit authority cop prevented any trouble.

  Holberg walked off the train unharmed, and wound his way through the maze of streets until he was standing in front of a massive building—one story, it seemed, but a thirty-five-foot-high story—whose few windows were boarded up. There was a large door in the center of the wider wall, and a smaller door around the corner. It was to this door that Holberg went. He took a ring with several keys out of his coat pocket and proceeded to unlock the two locks. Then he pushed the door open and entered. Only when the door was closed and locked behind him did he walk across a small anteroom in the darkness and flick a switch that turned on the dozens of overhead lights in the huge room.

  The place smelled of rust and mildew. Red puddles dotted the wide wooden floor, and the cement walls oozed moisture. In and among the puddles lay various lengths of iron rods. At one end of the huge warehouse sat a dozen large tanks of acetylene, and several acetylene torches.

  In the center of the floor, taking up nearly the entire warehouse, was an iron sculpture, thirty yards wide and fifty long. In some places it nearly touched the three-story-high ceiling, and in others it hugged the floor, dipping down into the scattered puddles and through the floor, as though descending into the earth.

  The red scale of rust was creeping up the bottom of the rods, but Peder Holberg ignored what would have driven him into paroxysms of rage in his studio. He shed his coat, letting it fall onto the dirty floor, then took an acetylene torch and ignited it so that it spat a blue–white tongue of fire. Then he raised his head, as if listening.

  He grabbed a two-foot length of iron and climbed one of half a dozen sets of portable stairs that provided access to the higher reaches of the structure. He worked dumbly, obediently, fusing metal to metal, descending from time to time to go to a long table and scribble lines and numbers on large sheets of paper, writing down the design whose lines and spaces were whispered to him—not into his ears, but into his brain.

  Far back in that brain there was enough left of the consciousness of Peder Holberg to ask the question, "What am I doing?"

  And that brain felt terror at this intrusion. As the man worked on, the mind screamed, "Why?"

  There was no answer but commands.

  The intelligence that gave those commands was not far away. As he spoke to Holberg he dreamed of light, recalling, eons ago, the fires of the Andromeda Galaxy as he drifted through it, or the cradles where stars were born, statues of flame hundreds of light-years high; the subtle glow of what they called the Pleiades, the light of its stars scattered by the gases around them.

  He thought of freedom, the vastness of space, the day when he had first looked down and seen the face of Earth.

  With one part of his mind he relived the agony, and with the other, greater part he guided the hands of the man, using the light of the flame to burn open his prison of darkness.

  Chapter 4

  Laika Harris shifted in her seat, trying to get comfortable.

  It was no small trick. 757s were cramped during the shortest flights, and a six-hour trek across the ocean was miserable, especially for a woman whose 5'10", much of it long brown legs, exceeded the comfort level prescribed by whatever boneheads had designed the seats. It would have been nice if the Company had sprung for first class on overseas flights, but the lower-costs bug had bitten every government agency, and the CIA wasn't immune.

  She bent her knees, trying to wriggle her feet back underneath her seat for a while. Achieving a brief respite from paralysis, she adjusted her own headphones, not the cheesy foam and plastic jobs British Air provided gratis, and tried to lose herself in the Solti Traviata playing on her Discman. She wanted to hear it a few more times before making up her mind whether Gheorghiu deserved all the plaudits she was getting or was just another pretty face. From what she'd heard, Laika agreed with the deserving faction, but she wanted to make sure she wasn't getting suckered the way she had with Te Kanawa.

  The first disc ended, and she took it out, catching a glimpse of her reflection in its silvered surface. She looked tired, she thought. Her eyes, looking back at her from skin the color of coffee with cream, were slightly puffy, and she thought if she had any sense she would try and get some sleep. But her mind was too full.

  She looked at the sleeping woman in the next seat, and then, unobserved, continued to look at her own face. The angle made her chin look too full, and she brought up her head and the silver disc and looked at herself straight on.

  That was better. Her face looked thin again—a model's face, with high cheekbones and big eyes, full lips, and a thin, straight nose that spoke of the white blood in her veins. "There's a white boy in the woodpile in yo' background, baby," James had told her, and he was right. Her maternal grandfather had been a white man, but not her grandma's husband.

  Laika loaded the second disc and tried to shake off the past. But it was hard to concentrate on Verdi's music when she had so many other things to think about. If it had been just her mission on her mind, it wouldn't have been so bad. After all, her mission was what was supposed to preoccupy her time and attention. And God knew there were enough questions about this one.

  First, why the hell was she flying to Glasgow? She had never had an assignment in Scotland before. There had been rumors that some of the Scottish nationalists were starting to consider violence as a tactic, but most of those had been planted by Tories, to turn public opinion against the nationals. Besides, that was England's problem, not America's.

  And as far as she kn
ew, there were no undercover activities being carried out in Scotland by America's enemies. Drugs, yes. More than a few South American and Middle Eastern cartels had a finger in the active heroin trade that was a part of every large city, Edinburgh and Glasgow included, she was sure. But bringing in the CIA on something like that didn't make any sense. Besides, she had little experience in drug operations.

  Laika Harris's specialty was running covert ops. In the ten years she had been with the Company, she had handled operations in Turkey, Morocco, and, most recently, Thailand. There she had infiltrated a Chinese spy cell with three other operatives, sending back briefings to her superiors until the cover of one of the three was blown. Laika had had to kill two people then, but she'd had the comfort of knowing that they'd have killed her if they'd had the chance.

  The operation had been aborted and she'd returned to the United States for a commendation and two months of R&R. She needed it. She had found Thailand a beautiful country, and most of the people kind and hospitable, but there had been exceptions.

  Most obvious, of course, were the people who had wanted her dead once they'd discovered who she was. But that was to be expected anywhere there were enemies. What bothered her most about Thailand, and what would not let her go, was the market in flesh that flourished there.

  Whores were everywhere and AIDS was endemic, but what had horrified Laika was the trade in children. Prostituted children were a viable commodity, readily available to those who knew where to look, and a great many did. Child molesters from Japan, Germany, the States—hell, all over the world—flocked to Bangkok to satisfy their dark and unholy tastes, and as far as Laika could see, the government did little to stop it.

  It saddened and appalled her, and when she got back to the United States, she learned that a boycott of Thai goods was under way to force the government to take more stringent steps toward stamping out the problem. She had seen several people wearing "Don't Buy Thai—Ask Me Why!" T-shirts, and would have worn one herself but for her need to remain as invisible as possible. Still, she supported the boycott and told as many people as she could about it.

  Most had been sympathetic, but some, like James, had been cynical. She'd told him that she'd been in Thailand opening up a branch office of the fictitious import–export company that was her cover. That much had been a lie, but the stories of the children had been true. "Listen, baby," he had said, when she'd finished, "they gonna be whores sooner or later, right? So what's the difference if it's sooner?"

  "The difference is that they have no choice, James. And they have no childhood."

  "So you think kids growin' up in this country in the projects have a childhood? You make me laugh—I didn't have no childhood." He said the word with a sneer.

  "No, but you had a choice," Laika answered. They had been having breakfast in her apartment after spending the night together for the first time since her return from Thailand. "And you chose to make something of yourself. You think that would've happened if you'd had to turn tricks when you were ten?"

  "Shit, I sold dope when I was ten."

  "Selling dope didn't give you AIDS," Laika shot back.

  James gave a hiss of disgust, and Laika knew the wiser path would be to change the subject. But she was not used to backing off in the rest of her life, and she didn't back off from James.

  "You don't know whut the hell you talkin' 'bout, bitch," he growled.

  "Why do you always do that?" she asked quietly.

  "Do whut?"

  "Whenever you get angry, you start talking like Dolemite, calling me a bitch. You know I hate that."

  "You act like a bitch, thass whut I call you!" He slammed his coffee mug back onto the table, making the liquid slop over the sides.

  "James," she said in a low, dangerous voice, "you graduated from City College, you've been with a brokerage firm for the past eight years. I've been to parties where you've conversed pleasantly and intelligently. Now why, whenever we disagree, do you act and talk like some stupid ghetto bully?"

  He stood up and slapped her. It was so unexpected, so totally shocking, that she didn't react at all. She only stood there, with her cheek reddening, feeling hot blood rising in her face, and looked at him. "Donchu ever diss me, bitch!" he yelled. "You diss me and I'll whup you, you won't siddown for a week! You get that?"

  She swallowed hard, trying to hold back the anger, knowing that if she wanted to, she could kill him in a matter of seconds, or at least incapacitate him so that he'd never dare raise a hand to her again.

  But she didn't. She only stood there, her hand to her aching cheek, feeling herself shake worse than she ever had in her life.

  "You get that?" James asked again.

  "Yes," she said softly. "I got that."

  She did not know, then or now, why she'd put up with it. Maybe, she thought, she felt sorry for James Winston. He'd had a rough childhood, but hard work had bought him an easier adulthood. He was well-off enough to have a nice apartment on the East Side and drive a vintage Jag that he kept garaged most of the time. When she'd first met him, he'd seemed cultured and polite, a younger version of Harry Belafonte, and his voice betrayed little of his inner city upbringing.

  But there was still a lot of anger in him, and that blow, the first of many that would ultimately separate them, had brought it out for her to see in all its nakedness. James was a black man angry at a white world that in his view had given him everything he had—as long as he played according to its rules and gave up the one thing most precious to him: his black soul. In retrospect, she knew she should have seen the change coming. His bitter comments had been increasing, and his temper would flare more and more frequently.

  After he'd hit her that first time, he treated her differently. He went to her place whenever he felt like having sex, and the preambles grew more perfunctory. He showed little concern for her needs, and when she expressed her discontent, he called her more names and hit her again. Somehow, and for some reason she could not name, she endured it, asking herself as she did, "Why am I letting this man do this to me?" but having no answer. The marks were not permanent, and he never drew blood, but they scarred her just the same.

  Laika Harris had not grown up with violence, though her profession had taught her its intricate practicalities. Her father and mother had never so much as raised their voices to each other, and had loved each other and Laika and her brother with a quiet steadfastness befitting a minister and his wife. Her father was dead, but she went to Maryland when she could to visit her mother. She had never told her mother about James Winston.

  The crisis finally came two days before Laika received news of her assignment. Looking back, even to such a short time before, she couldn't remember what had caused the argument. They were in her kitchen, and she was standing at the stove, cooking a pesto soup for James. He said something that annoyed her, she answered back, and before she knew what had happened, he had yanked a meat knife from its wooden storage block, grabbed her across her chest from behind, and held the knife to her throat.

  "God damn you, don't you sass me, bitch!" he cried, pressing the sharp edge against her skin so that she could feel its coldness.

  What she did then was automatic. It was a movement that she had practiced thousands of times and executed several times before, and it worked more smoothly than ever, because of James's unpreparedness and lack of combat skills. Easily pushing his knife hand away, she crouched and did a spin kick that took his legs out from under him. Then, instead of following up with a knife hand as he fell, she grabbed the handle of the steaming pot of soup and brought it down across his head.

  He howled as the scalding soup splashed across his face, and curled into a ball on the kitchen floor, desperately trying to claw the heat away from his blistering skin. With a sneer, Laika grabbed a wet dishrag from the drainer and tossed it into his face.

  James pressed it against his flesh, his cries reduced to breathy whining. Laika knelt beside him and roughly pulled the rag away. His face was red,
and there was a cut on his cheek where the pan had struck him, but she knew there would be no permanent damage.

  When he saw her face, a look of rage swept over him, and his mouth opened painfully. "You b—" he began to say, but Laika whipped the fallen knife off the floor so that its blade was only inches from his eyes.

  "Don't you ever call me that again," she said in a low, dangerous voice. "Don't ever touch me again. Don't ever let me see you again. I'm through pitying you, you sad little bastard. Now get out of here."

  He saw the killer in her eyes, and she knew he was afraid. Sliding away from her, he pushed himself to his feet and she straightened up as well. He backed away toward the short hall that led to the apartment door, and she followed him all the way, the knife hanging at her side, as though she were too tired to threaten him with it.

  James turned his back on her just long enough to fumble with the locks and get the door open. Then he stepped through it and turned back. "This ain't over," he said, and his voice showed the physical pain the words caused him.

  "You're wrong," Laika said. "It's over like it never was." She smiled. "I don't even remember your name."

  "Well, you'll know it . . . you'll have cause to know it, you . . . you bitch!"

  He backed away several steps as he said the word, and his fear made her laugh. She said nothing more and did not even look at him as she closed the door in his face.

  For the next two days she felt wonderfully free. She did not see James Winston anywhere and lost herself in a shopping trip to Tower Records, where she bought two hundred dollars' worth of new opera recordings.

  One evening on a whim she went to the Met, and landed a single ticket for the new production of Fedora. In truth, she preferred opera on CD and videotape to the real thing, since she always found the audience too distracting. On her most recent visit to the Met, she had been seated in the Family Circle, and during Senta's dream in Der Fliegende Hollander, had begun to hear a slight tic . . . tic . . . tic . . . behind her. When she'd finally glanced around, she'd seen that the woman sitting behind her was actually clipping her nails.