by Toby Ball
“You can drop me here,” Puskis said.
Behind the police line was a crowd, five people deep, straining to see what was happening a couple of blocks down. Puskis excused and pardoned his way to the front, where two imposing officers manned the barricade, nightsticks out and postures aggressive.
“Excuse me,” he said to them, “my name is Arthur Puskis. I’m trying to get to my apartment building, which is around the corner at the end of this block.”
“Yeah, well, nobody’s get—” the officer on the left began, his round, red face a mask of ill-humor.
“Shut up,” the other said. “What’s your name again?” he asked Puskis.
“Ahh, Arthur Puskis.”
“Jesus Christ, Danny, this is Mr. Puskis.” Then to Puskis: “Sir, you say you live on Sinclair?”
Puskis nodded. Sinclair ran perpendicular to the avenue that they’d cordoned off.
“We’d be happy to let you through.”
“Of course,” Puskis said. “What’s happening here?”
“Bomb, sir. Somebody threw a bomb through a window two blocks down. Blew the front off the building.”
“Oh dear. Do you know whose place it was?”
“Yes, sir. Individual by the name of Ian Block.”
Block. The name was familiar. An industrialist, one of the mayor’s inner circle. “Was anyone hurt?”
“Trying to ascertain that at this very moment, sir. Haven’t heard yet. Keep you apprised, though, if you like, sir.”
“No. No, that won’t be necessary.” The two officers moved the barricade to let Puskis through. As he approached his street, he could see a brownstone a block farther down, with a hole like a shotgun wound hemorrhaging blue and black smoke that, to Puskis’s eye, seemed also to contain wisps of red. He stopped at the corner, noticing the ash that had fallen to the sidewalk and the papers that fanned out from the damaged building into the street.
Puskis watched the firemen saturate the smoldering building with thousands of gallons of water while policemen stood around watching or acting menacingly toward members of the public whom they deemed too curious.
He walked down his street, leaving the chaos of the bomb scene behind. Ian Block. Puskis reflected on the consequences of someone bombing Block’s house. The mayor would doubtless take this as a personal affront. The force was going to be under intense pressure from both the mayor’s office and the press. If Puskis clung to one precept that informed his sense of how the world worked, it was that the past was a sentient guide to the present and future if one knew how to evaluate it. That was the crucial importance of the Vaults and the files contained within. The consequences of the bombing did not require the close examination that Puskis prided himself on. Before this affair ended, blood would be spilled.
CHAPTER FOUR
Frank Frings strode quickly through the crowded newsroom of the Gazette, trailed by an assistant named Ed something.
“There was a bomb in the Capitol district,” Ed said, struggling to keep up.
“Shit, you’re kidding.” Frings did not break stride.
“No, a bomb exploded in the district. Details are coming in, but Panos wants you out there pronto.”
“What was bombed? A store, a house, what?”
“Well, we haven’t got anything confirmed . . .”
“Of course not, but what the hell do you know?” Frings spoke quickly, without pauses between words, his sentences pouring forth as single, extended words with a disconcerting number of syllables.
“Reports are that it was Ian Block.”
“Ian Block?” Frings stopped and fixed on Ed, who took an extra step before stopping to face him. “Holy shit. Do you have any idea what that would mean?” Frings was of average height and lanky; still, he could intimidate with the intensity of his gray eyes, the aggressive jut of his jaw.
“Well,” Ed stammered, “I think I—”
“Jesus H., Ed. I don’t believe this.” Frings was back moving again, as if he had springs in his joints, weaving through desks on his way to the editor’s office. Ed was still trying to say something, two strides behind, but Frings made no attempt to isolate his voice from the general din of the newsroom.
Frings pushed through Panos’s office door to find the fat, slovenly Panos smoking a cigar and humming a painfully off-key aria.
“What the hell’s going on?” Frings asked, closing the door before Ed made it to the threshold. Adrenaline was flowing.
“Didn’t that twerp tell you?” Panos growled. He stuck his cigar back into his mouth, under an unruly, overgrown mustache.
“He told me. But, Ian Block’s place? How certain are we?”
“How certain are we ever until we see for our own eyes?”
Frings was used to the warmed-over philosophizing. “Okay. I’ll get down there right away and call it in once I figure it out. You going to hold the presses until you hear from me?”
Panos grunted. The sweat stains blossoming from his underarms would soon overwhelm the dry areas of his shirt. “Don’t screw around Frankie.”
Frings winked at Panos. “Stay by that phone.”
The mayor had a small circle of wealthy businessmen friends. In his columns, Frings called them the Oligarchy. If the membership of this group was somewhat fluid, the core people at least—Ian Block, Tino Altabelli, and Roderigo Bernal—were a constant. They bankrolled Red Henry’s mayoral campaigns and received what to Frings’s eye was a scandalous return on their investment.
So strong was the association of Block, Altabelli, and Bernal with Henry that an affront to one of them could only be seen as an affront to the mayor himself. That was what made labor action against any of their companies a dicey proposition. Effectively, the Oligarchs had the use of the City’s police force if and when they felt they needed it. More important, they could use the Anti-Subversion Unit, which entailed a whole other layer of coordination and firepower. Certainly, the mayor would be using the ASU to track down whoever planted the bomb.
Order was beginning to emerge from the chaos at the bombsite. Rivers of water, gray from the ash, flowed through gutters on either side of the street. Smoke billowed from the hole that had been blown out of the brownstone. Most of the building façade was gone, too, so there was no street number. Frings figured the number from the two adjacent houses, however, and compared it to the address he had for Ian Block. It checked out.
He found an officer named Losman, whom he had met on a couple of previous assignments and did not seem particularly busy at the moment.
“Frank Frings with the Gazette,” Frings said, offering the cop a Lucky. “Anybody inside when it went off?”
“No one that we know of. We located Mr. Block at his club, and he said that there might have been a cleaning woman today, but that he didn’t think so. He didn’t have his calendar with him. But we haven’t found a body.”
“What was Mr. Block’s reaction to the news?”
Losman gave Frings a funny look. “I wasn’t there. Why? How’d you take it if someone tossed a bomb through your window?”
“What type of bomb?”
“Sticks of dynamite, wrapped with rope. Found fibers on some of the wrapping down the street. Probably used a long fuse, lit it, tossed the bundle through the first-floor window, and had about a minute to get out of there.”
Frings nodded, taking it in. “Any idea who?”
“Usual suspects, I guess. Don’t print this, of course. Anarchists. Communists. Always the ‘ists’ though, right?”
“No one specific, though.”
“Not yet. You can print that. But we’ll find them soon enough. No doubt there.”
You’d better, Frings thought, or there’s going to be hell to pay with the Mayor. Which, from any remove, was hardly a pleasant thought.
Frings walked back outside the perimeter and talked to a few bystanders, trying to find an eyewitness or anyone with something interesting to say. Failing in this, he thought of Panos growing more annoyed and
began searching for a phone booth.
Frings dictated the story to one of the secretaries back at the paper and thought about trying to get a quote from the Chief or maybe even the mayor himself. But then Frings began to feel its onset: daggers of pain behind his eyes, the feeling of a cold spatula slowly separating his brain from his skull. Soon his vision would begin to go on him, and maybe his balance, too. He scanned the street for a cab, but they were avoiding the area because of the barricade. So he trotted downtown, each stride intensifying the pain in his skull by a small increment. Finally he got to the trolley line at Grand Avenue. He had to sprint to catch one as it pulled away, timing his jump so that his momentum took him through the rear door and into the car. He collapsed into a seat and shut his eyes to the light of the world that was causing him this agony.
CHAPTER FIVE
Red Henry sat at the head of a heavy oak table. To his left sat a cohort of city officials, the people supposedly necessary for this kind of affair. To the mayor’s right was the congregation of Polish businessmen who wanted to open a factory in the Hollows, because this was not a great time to be in Poland, with Germany and Russia restless. At the far end of the table was a translator.
Henry was torn between bemusement and annoyance at the pace of the proceedings. He wanted the Poles in the City with their factory, and they obviously wanted to be here. So shake hands and get on with it, the details would work out. His counsel, though, insisted that the details be worked out first, and some established businesses in the City did not necessarily cotton to these Poles adding yet more options for the labor force. As if Red Henry were going to do any more than let these folks vent. The mayor wanted the Poles here, and rarely did he not get what he wanted.
The Poles, it had finally been decided, would bring their own workers with them on the boat from Poland. Henry glanced down at his huge, misshapen hands that were resting, palms down, on the table. The knuckles were swollen and out of alignment, the result of his driving his fists repeatedly into people’s skulls during a long and successful boxing career. He was just over six and a half feet tall and weighed nearly 350 pounds. Even during his fighting days, when he weighed eighty pounds less, he had dwarfed his opponents in the ring.
The stories that were told might be exaggerated in detail, but they were true in the essentials: how he had been told to throw a fight at the Garden by some made men and had knocked Monty Kreski unconscious with savage blows in under a minute before then crawling through the ropes and thrashing the two thugs where they sat in the second row of the stands. How he had once knocked out both Kid Cuevas and the referee with one ferocious left hook.
By now, the flaming mane that had earned him his nickname was gone, his cranium bald and slightly coned at the back. His face showed all the evidence of his craft: flattened nose, ears so deformed they looked like giant pink raisins, scar tissue around the eyes. But Henry’s mental acuity was uncompromised. And he could still punch. They say that’s always the last thing to go—the force of a punch. Well into his fifties he could still use his massive physical presence to intimidate when he needed to. Now he just sat and stared at his hands, listening without actually hearing as first one side of the table said something, then the translator repeated it in either Polish or English, then the other side responded.
A movement in the far corner of the room distracted him and he saw Peja, his secretary, a squat young man with slicked-back hair and slightly crossed eyes, slip into the room. An intrusion like this was unusual and did not auger well. Peja strode over, avoiding eye contact with anyone but his boss. The conversation stopped.
“Keep going,” Red Henry said, and the conversation resumed awkwardly. Peja was at his side now and whispered in his ear for several seconds, before straightening. Red Henry stared straight ahead, impassive to all eyes. He had learned that skill in his years of boxing, completely relaxing in his corner no matter the amount of adrenaline pumping through his veins or the terrific stress of a close bout (of which there had been few). He kept his body still and his face slack even as his mind dissected the information he had just heard, probing it for cause and impact and consequence.
A bomb at Ian Block’s. While the Poles were here. He could think of a number of reasons why this should be seen as a calculated personal insult to him. Somebody was going to realize that he had just made the biggest mistake that he would ever live to make. Red Henry would make sure of that.
Putting this issue aside for now, Henry refocused on the conversation around the table. After a while the translator said to the Americans, “They are asking if there is some civic need or effort that they could contribute towards.” Red Henry had been waiting for this.
“I have to leave for another meeting,” he said, rising from the chair to his full height. “Dan,” he said to his counsel, “I believe you know how to handle things from here?” Then to the rest of the Americans he said, “Thank you for your time, you may go.” Finally, he addressed the Poles. “We look forward to a lasting and prosperous relationship with our friends from Poland. Please excuse my early exit, but I have a prior commitment to attend to. My counsel will speak for me as the negotiations go forward. Thank you.”
He smiled with empty warmth at the Polish congregation as the translator spoke his words in Polish. The Poles nodded and smiled back to him, then stood as he shook hands with each of them in succession, their hands like so many children’s in the grip of his gigantic paw.
He left the room to find Peja waiting for him in the hallway. “Get the Chief for me. My office in an hour. And call Feral. I’ll meet him tonight by the bridge. Ten thirty.”
CHAPTER SIX
“Who is this?”
“You know who it is.”
“What do you want?”
“We need to meet.”
“Okay.”
“You know that phone booth across the street from your office?”
“Yes.”
“Be there in three minutes. I’ll call you.”
Poole left the phone booth and strode two blocks to a different one. He was not worried about being watched. Yet. The danger would come later. Just now he was worried about people listening in on the other end of the line, specifically the cops. Or tracing the call, which he’d heard that the police could now do with the help of an operator.
The streets were alive with people rushing about on this weekday morning. The sky was obscured by low, gray clouds and the City seemed to reflect its narrow range of hues. People walked with their shoulders hunched and heads down against a cold wind that swept through the canyon of buildings like a glacial river. Leaves and litter danced crazily in the street and around the legs of seemingly oblivious pedestrians.
He arrived at the second phone booth and entered, pulling his gray fedora down to hide his face, then dialed the number for the phone booth outside Bernal’s building.
“Yes?” Bernal was breathing hard. Poole guessed that he had taken the stairs down.
“Listen carefully because I am not going to stay on the line long. We need to meet face-to-face. Do you know Greer Park?”
“Yes.”
“The pond in Greer Park. On the west side there’s a gazebo.”
“I know it.”
“Tomorrow night at eleven p.m. You will bring five thousand dollars in small bills. We’ll talk for five, maybe ten minutes. Then I’ll blindfold you and leave you with a timer set for five minutes. When the timer goes off, you will take off your blindfold and go home. I have people who will be watching the area, so if you’re not alone, they’ll know and the pictures will be sent to every newspaper in the City and to your wife. If you leave before the timer goes off, the same thing will happen. Do you understand everything that I have told you?”
“Yes.”
Poole hung up.
Carla was not home when he returned to the apartment. She was at Bernal’s factory helping organize the strike that had begun that day. As always when she was out on these endeavors, he worried about the
City’s leading capitalists’ capacity for violence and, perhaps more to the point, that of the mayor and the police. It gnawed at him.
Carla had found him at the end of their time at State, a time when everyone was either vilifying Poole or indebted to him for actions that he himself found repugnant. Carla was oblivious to all of this, however. She didn’t follow football. She was a Red, spending her free time selling ads to keep the City’s underground Communist paper in production or trying to organize workers who did not even share a common language.
Poole liked her because she had a clear vision of right and wrong. She could assess a situation and make the kind of confident judgments that he found he could not. And there was something else. A moral fierceness. A commitment to making things change married to a sense of how they should be. It was a daunting example.
Why had she chosen him in the first place? he sometimes wondered. Some women liked to have the initiative, maybe. Certainly, Carla drove their relationship. That was the way she wanted it and that was the way he wanted it, too. Then there was the physical attraction . . .
Poole walked through their living room, sidestepping the books and newspapers stacked around the worn leather couch and chair that sat facing each other across a coffee table made from an old door. The kitchen was small but had an alcove at the end with a wooden table and two chairs. The window looked out on an alley that, over the past few years, had become the nocturnal domain of a clique of young prostitutes. Poole felt as though he had watched these girls grow up.
Today’s paper lay open on the table with an article circled in red pencil. He sat down. The headline read “Bomb Blasts Block’s Building.” Next to the headline was a picture of the building, with a ragged hole with smoke billowing out from it. The press had not set the ink accurately, and the picture was a double image.
The article itself was short, nothing much to report. The reporter, Francis Frings, wrote that the investigation would be a priority for the police department. Poole knew what that meant and knew, too, that the danger to Carla had just dramatically increased. Whenever the City’s capitalists were victimized, the suspects were always the same; at the top of the list were the Socialist union organizers.
