The Vaults

by Toby Ball

  He considered calling Frings, whom he knew to be sympathetic to the City’s Socialists, but was interrupted by a knock at the door.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Frings woke at nine, his head cleaved into two hemispheres of pain. Squinting his eyes, he took mincing steps to his bureau and opened a small drawer on the top left side, where a small tin held several hand-rolled marijuana cigarettes. He took one, along with a butane lighter, and moved to the window, which he cracked open an inch. He sat with his back against the wall under the window and lit the reefer. He filled his lungs, held the pungent smoke, then exhaled through the side of his mouth, directing the majority of the smoke out the window. It took him five minutes to smoke the entire cigarette in this fashion, and by the time he was done the headache had receded to a level of mild annoyance.

  From his seat on the floor he watched Nora Aspen as she slept. Nothing was more demystifying, he thought, as watching this normally glamorous creature with her mouth ajar, her face pale and swollen with sleep. The crimson silk sheets that she favored lay draped over her famous curves, and the idea that hundreds, if not thousands, of men would envy his situation right that second seemed somehow absurd. He, Frank Frings, the paramour of this jazz-singer pinup. It seemed so odd that he almost laughed. Almost.

  He stood up and wandered into Nora’s expansive kitchen, where he found a loaf of bread and some Brie. He ate quickly, as though she might wake at any moment and take it from him. His tongue explored the contrast between the firm, creamy cheese and the coarser, crumbly bread, and he eventually becoming consumed with fascination.

  He was brought back to the present by the sound of movement from the bedroom, and a moment later Nora appeared in a silk robe over what there was of a nightgown. Her shoulder-length blond hair was muddled, and she looked alluring without arousing in Frings a need to do anything about it.

  “Migraine still bothering you?”

  “It was.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t smoke in the bedroom. I don’t know how many times—”

  “I know, I’m sorry.” He smiled in spite of himself, knowing that it was just going to piss her off. “You know that when I wake up like that I just need relief as quickly as possible.”

  She glared at his grinning face and returned to her bedroom. “Make some goddamn coffee.”

  Nora was in the shower when the phone rang. Frings didn’t answer her phone normally, but somehow found himself with the receiver in his hand without consciously deciding to pick it up.

  “Frings?”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s Merrick at the paper.”

  “Oh. What’s the rumble?”

  “Well, we just got a call from a guy. Wouldn’t identify himself. Says he needs to talk to you and no one else will do. Says he’s at this number for the next ten minutes. I ran it by Panos, but wasn’t sure if it was worth rousting you. Anyway, he said to go ahead, so I tried to reach you at your place and then Ed said to try you here. So, I guess you’ve got maybe two or three minutes to ring him.” Merrick read the number.

  “Francis Frings?” It was more of a rasp than a proper speaking voice—an effective mask.

  “That’s right.”

  “Listen, I need to meet with you. Soon. I know things you might find very interesting.”

  “Who am I talking to?”

  “No. Not now. Listen. I have information about corruption in the mayor’s office. I have information about murders and disappearances.”

  “Any evidence to back up all this information?”

  “When you hear what I have to say, you’ll be able to find your own evidence. The day after tomorrow. You know the Harrison Bridge? Under the City side. Eleven at night. I’ll watch you arrive and then show myself. We can talk there.”

  “I’ll see you then.” Frings sighed. He’d heard this kind of thing many times before. It never panned out, but neither could he simply ignore it. Should even one of these shadowy tips turn out to have legs . . .

  Frings hung up as Nora came into the living room wearing a white terry-cloth robe with her hair up in a towel wrapped like a turban. Drops of water still clung to the skin around her collarbone. Her lips were swollen from the hot shower.

  “Who called?”

  “Nobody. It was for me.”

  Nora swirled the coffee in her cup and tapped her toast around the plate with her middle fingers. She wasn’t eating, and it bothered Frings.

  “Not hungry?”

  She gave him a long look.

  “What’s wrong?”

  She shook her head. Light from the kitchen window illuminated half of her face, and Frings saw the concern there and thought it made her look only more . . . desirable. Something about the angle of her mouth, maybe, pursed slightly with anxiety.

  “Come on. Spill.” He wondered if she was still angry with him for smoking the reefer.

  “I don’t know. It’s nothing.”

  Frings waited her out, watching the coffee do circuits inside her cup.

  “It’s . . . It’s a feeling I have. Nothing in particular. You know I’m working with Dick Riordan’s band right now, and he’s such a creep. The way he looks at me, and I can hear the things he says to the boys.”

  Frings nodded sympathetically. Riordan considered himself a rake, he knew, but was harmless. That wasn’t what Nora wanted to hear from him, however, so he kept his mouth shut.

  “And I’ve been getting more hate mail. Marty won’t let me see them, but he told me all about it. I get a lot of mail, Frank. Most of it is really nice, but some of it is so vile . . .”

  There wasn’t much to say to that, but he tried. “Look, there are unpleasant people in the world. They see someone like you and they want to take you down a peg. Only they don’t have the guts to do anything, so they send you a letter blaming you for all their problems.”

  He knew she needed more from him, though she gave him a sad smile for his effort.

  After too long a pause he tried again. “I—”

  She cut him off. “It’s okay, Frank. It’s nothing. I’m tired is all. I just have tonight and then I’m off for a few days, so I can get some rest. My voice needs a break. Things always seem worse when I’m tired.”

  Nora returned to staring into her coffee. Frings wondered who the man on the phone was.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Puskis had not used his home phone in years. It had been even longer than that since he had actually received a call. Which made it all the more unusual that he would receive three phone calls in a single morning.

  Puskis lived in an efficiency above a bakery seven blocks from the Vaults. His furnishings were sparse, a single bed in the corner, a small dinner table with one chair, and the easy chair that he now sat in. The floor was bare, but the walls were hung with rugs that his mother had brought from the old country, their colors muted by age. Puskis appreciated the fine logic and order of the symmetrical patterns. He often stared at them from his bed at night, the half-light washing away the color so that only the designs remained.

  Puskis was reading the newspaper when the first call came.

  “Yes?” he inquired tentatively.

  “Mr. Puskis?”

  “Yes?”

  “Mr. Puskis, this is Lieutenant Draffin. I hate to have to tell you this, sir, but the Chief needs you back in the Vaults. Everyone’s being pulled in.”

  “I expect this is about the bombing.”

  “I expect it is, sir. Anyway, the Chief says not to come in today. Take this one more day off, sir, but be at the Vaults tomorrow morning. Can you do that, sir?”

  “Yes. Yes, that should not be a problem.”

  Puskis hung up with a sense of relief and the first feeling of surprised happiness that he had had in a long time. For without the stimulus of his work in the Vaults, he was, frankly, at a loss. With nothing to occupy his mind, he spent his time going over past issues—the difficulty he had faced, for instance, when classifying a recent string of rape/murders on the Ea
st Side. Crimes of sexual deviance or murder? In reality, both of course, but which of the two, for the purposes of the Vaults, should be the primary classification? Eventually he had decided on a primary classification of sexual deviance, due to Abramowitz’s treatment of a similar string of crimes forty years earlier.

  In any case, the phone call left him feeling reenergized, and he went to his kitchen to make a pot of tea.

  The second call came as he finished his last cup. This, if anything, surprised Puskis more than the first. A call could conceivably come anytime, he reasoned, and since Puskis was hardly likely to go the rest of his life without receiving an incoming call, it could as easily come one time as the next. Two calls in one morning, however—that was a true anomaly.

  “Puskis,” the voice on the other end of the line said.

  “Yes?”

  “You’ll find Reif DeGraffenreid at this address.” The caller read an address in a country town called Freeman’s Gap, which was a couple dozen miles from the City’s limits. His voice was slow and honey-tinged with an accent that, to Puskis’s considerable frustration, he was unable to place.

  “Who is this please?” Puskis asked, but the line was dead.

  Puskis hung up the phone with trembling hands. He sat back in his chair and closed his eyes. He tried to see the logic behind the call. What was the caller hoping to accomplish? Was he, Puskis, supposed to journey out to Freeman’s Gap to find DeGraffenreid? Who had called and why did he want him to take this course of action? What would the caller gain?

  Puskis was contemplating these questions when the third call came. By this point, he was beyond surprise. He had pulled out the photograph of the man who was not Reif DeGraffenreid and it sat, faceup, on the pocked dinner table before him. He was staring at it, trying to make sense of the visceral reaction he had to the face; or the expression; or whatever information was being subliminally conveyed to him from that image.

  He picked up the receiver to find that it was Lieutenant Draffin again, sounding apologetic. “The Chief asked me to call you back and tell you that there is a meeting he needs you to attend this Friday.”

  “A meeting?” Puskis asked. Never, in his nearly three decades in the Vaults, had he been asked to attend a meeting. One-on-one chats with the Chief were not unheard of, but never a full-fledged meeting. And scheduled two days ahead, no less.

  “Did he happen to mention, ah, mention what it was about?”

  “No, sir, he didn’t. He just told me to tell you to be at that meeting.”

  “Hmmm. Yes,” Puskis said, thinking. “Lieutenant Draffin, I was wondering if I might be able to, well, let me put it this way: I was wondering if the force had a pool of autos, you know, for use by officers . . .”

  “You mean unmarked?”

  “Yes. Yes, I suppose that would be preferable.”

  “Yes, sir, we do.”

  “Do you think that you could arrange for me to borrow one?”

  “I don’t see how that would be a problem, sir. When would you like it?”

  “Today, actually. Today would be fine.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Back when Frings was starting out as a reporter, the Gazette had an aging, alcoholic reporter on staff by the name of Tomasson, who was something of a legend among the younger journalists; his seediness seemed to hold a kind of glamour. To Frings it had seemed that Tomasson had seen everything, his insight informed not merely by conjecture or personal bias but by previous experiences. Frings had often gone drinking with him at the old Palomino Tavern, before it was torn down, along with half that block, to put up the Havana Hotel. Frings could never match Tomasson and always left him at the bar, ranting to whoever would listen—and people did generally listen. Frings had kept careful track of the wisdom that Tomasson imparted on those nights and still remembered most of it clearly, though as Frings grew in experience, he found that he disagreed to a greater or lesser degree with much of what Tomasson had once said.

  Like most reporters of the time, Tomasson was deeply cynical about the City’s government. There seemed no end to the stream of corrupt mayors who took the City’s helm. Darwin, Tomasson had claimed, explained it all. The most able of the “criminal class,” as he called it, rose to the top and were able to defeat any honest challenge through vote-rigging, bribery, intimidation, and downright theft. The strongest criminal, he said, always prospered.

  Frings agreed that Darwin explained it, but he understood Darwin a little differently. To Frings, it was a matter of innovation: Innovation was required to gain and hold power; thus, old methods of corruption and graft became obsolete quickly, and success depended on being able to quickly and constantly formulate new methods and forms of acquiring wealth and maintaining power. Maybe, in the end, Tomasson’s argument was essentially the same. But to Frings, the nimble mind trumped all other attributes.

  Frings’s desk sat in a corner of the newsroom, part of a maze of desks, topped by black Smith-Coronas and Bell telephones. At the best of times the room buzzed with noise. Inexperienced reporters struggled to concentrate amid the tumult. Today, just a day after the Block bombing, the newsroom had all the intensity of a squadron scrambling for battle. The assistants scuttled around purposefully, answering to the frequent shouts from reporters at their desks. Everyone seemed to be smoking a cigarette or a cigar, obscuring the ceiling in a haze of tobacco smoke.

  Frings, though, was in a marijuana-induced zone, undistracted by the maelstrom around him as he typed a column that would run in the next day’s newspaper.

  A Man of Action

  By Francis Frings

  Provocation will bring out the true nature of the provoked. A man who is by nature contemplative will consider his options and select one that seems to best respond to the provocateur. This is the modus operandi of the chess master, the debater, the general. In short, this is the method observed by men for whom an improper response is irrevocably disastrous. The contemplative man’s opposite number is the man of action. Like a drunken lawyer caught with an ace up his sleeve, the man of action’s response to provocation is to flail out with frenzied violence at the first unfortunate to cross his path. His violence is used as a salve to his own wounds, rather than to punish the offending party.

  I bring forth these two types of men because I fear for the political Left in the City in the substantial wake of the recent bombing directed at the mayor’s cohort Ian Block. Why do I fear? The mayor is, I feel indisputably, a man of action. He is a retired professional pugilist who, by training and nature, responded to insult to his person with immediate, furious, and overwhelming violence. Does anyone doubt that his instincts in the mayor’s office have been the same as his instincts between the ropes? Ask the thugs of the White Gang, who were eradicated like so many culled rabbits in the wake of the Birthday Party Massacre. Draw your own conclusions as to the justice of that remarkable period, but understand that other, less obviously culpable targets may be the next to feel the mayor’s considerable wrath.

  Why do I fear for the political Left? Because when the mayor begins his flailings, the easiest and most obvious target will be the anarchists and communists. Who else would you expect to bear the burden of blame? The Bristol Gang? They are now part and parcel of the mayor’s regime, as much a part of the king’s court as the industrialists who are the public faces of the mayor’s cabal. Who else? I cannot think of one to supplant the anarchists and communists from the top of the mayor’s accounting of conspirators and subversives. And, in this, the mayor may very well be borne out. My point is that the mayor must wait for the uncovering of actual evidence before acting in what will surely be a direct and devastating manner. The mayor is in no danger of losing his opportunity for personal vengeance against those who have dared to cause injury to the property, if not the persons, of his cadre. He must take the course of the contemplative man and identify the transgressors and punish them accordingly.

  Frings pulled the paper from his typewriter and placed it in his empty out-bo
x. Barking out for a newsboy, he then headed for the diner on the ground floor of the Gazette building.

  The coffee was thick and strong, and stray grounds found his tongue as he sipped. He sat alone in a booth, thinking about his column. What was the point in writing it? Partly, he supposed, to provide cover for the people he knew would be scapegoats. Though not a Red or anarchist himself, Frings was outraged by the mayor’s easy demonization of the Left as a means of advancing his business friends’ interests. Workers had legitimate beefs, and tainting them with labels, such as unionist—generally perceived as a euphemism for Communist—was a disservice to the City. If Frings could boldly predict their bearing the brunt of the mayor’s retaliation, then maybe there would be pressure not to target them automatically and, instead, to conduct a proper investigation.

  This was, of course, the nobler of his two reasons. The other was his distaste for the mayor. Red Henry was arrogant, corrupt—a bully. This, in itself, was hardly notable in a mayor. But Henry had entered with so much promise, had been such a strong presence, that Frings and others had dared to hope that he might be incorruptible. Frings himself had risen in prominence during Henry’s campaign and in the early months of that first mayoral term. He had been supportive of Henry in his columns. Briefly, it had seemed as if that faith had, indeed, been well-placed. But then, less than a year into the term, the Birthday Party Massacre and Henry’s subsequent response had felt like a betrayal. The incorruptible Red Henry had, it seemed, chosen to be corrupted. And now he was driving the corruption.

  Frings gored Henry in his columns with the rage of an apostate. Any chance Frings had to antagonize him was taken. None of this was lost on the mayor, who was not, despite everything else, stupid.