by Toby Ball
Just then, as if the workings of the universe were somehow tailored to his thoughts, a man slid into the seat across from Frings. Tall and handsome, his blond hair greased and combed straight back, he wore an expensive suit with bold pinstripes and wide shoulders. He settled in, placing his black fedora on the seat next to him. His expression was benign, but his eyes were intent. “How are you, Mr. Frings?”
Frings had run into this man before. His name was Smith and his job seemed to be keeping people in line for the mayor. In Frings’s experience this meant trying to intimidate reporters into giving the mayor positive coverage. Or at least to discourage the negative.
Frings shrugged. His pulse raced.
“You don’t look so swell from this side of the table.”
Frings snuck a look to see who else was in the diner, both to establish whether the man had brought backup and also in the hope that he could rely on someone for help if things went south.
“The mayor’s been keeping me busy.”
“I’m sure you mean the bombing has been keeping you busy.”
“I imagine it’s keeping both me and the mayor busy.”
Done with the small talk, Smith leaned over the table. “The mayor was wondering whether you would be commenting on the bombing in tomorrow’s paper.”
Frings looked at Smith dully, his high rapidly fading and his headache beginning to reassert itself at the front of his skull. “Sorry. No sneak previews.”
“Don’t be a wiseass with me, Frings.”
“No wiseass. You’ll have to buy a paper, read it tomorrow.”
“Don’t make things difficult for yourself, Frings. This one is personal for the mayor. He’s not going to put up with your bullshit on this. One of his closest friends was nearly murdered.”
“I’m not criticizing the mayor, if that’s what he’s worried about, okay? I just want to make sure they get the right guys and not just the most convenient ones.”
“Yeah, well, you’d better watch your words very carefully.” Smith grabbed the salt shaker between his thumb and index finger and shook it into Frings’s coffee. Amateur tough-guy stuff. Holding Smith’s eye, Frings picked up the mug and took a long sip of the coffee. More stupid tough-guy stuff, he knew, but when you were dealing with stupid tough guys . . .
Smith winked and stood up. Putting down the mug, Frings watched him saunter out the door and into a black Ford idling at the curb. One of these days, Frings thought, I’m going to push him too far.
CHAPTER TEN
Stenciled on the outside of Poole’s door in black-edged gold paint were the words ETHAN POOLE, INVESTIGATIONS AND INQUIRIES. This work was not exactly a steady source of income, but it did augment the money he got from his less legal endeavors. Mostly it consisted of tailing husbands or wives or business partners and either confirming or allaying his clients’ fears. Sometimes he falsely reported good news while blackmailing the disloyal spouse or scheming partner, depending on who the client was. He looked to Carla for guidance in those situations, trusting her to determine where his clients were positioned in the chain of production. This visitor, though, was not his typical client.
The woman was in the twilight of middle age. Her hair was chopped short, haphazardly. Her face and body were puffy and pale in a way that didn’t seem to make sense. Clearly, her features had once been attractive, and Poole saw a dignity even now trying to assert itself on the drooping shoulders and heavy gait. Her eyes, however, were lost and, half-covered by their lids, moved slowly in their sockets.
Poole’s living room served as his office. He gestured for the woman to sit in the chair opposite his couch as he placed a pad on the inner thigh of his crossed leg and pulled a pen from his breast pocket. She sat with her hands in her lap, her gaze directed at his black brogue, which he wagged restlessly.
“I want you to find my son,” she said, her words slurred around the edges.
“Okay. When did he go missing?”
“Seven years ago.”
“Seven years ago?” he asked, confused.
She nodded.
“Have the police been looking for him during this time?”
She shrugged. “I guess so.”
“Wait. You mean to say, you haven’t been in contact with the police?”
She shook her head.
Poole closed his eyes hard to refocus his thoughts. Her son missing for seven years and she doesn’t know if the police are looking for him? And she waits this long before contacting a detective? There was more to it, too. Her manner . . .
“Okay, what were the circumstances of his disappearance?”
“We were separated.”
“How do you mean?”
She shrugged.
“By who?”
She shrugged again, seeming neither impatient nor frustrated by these questions she could not answer.
“How about your son’s father? Your husband?”
“He was killed.”
“When was this? The same time you and your son were separated?”
She nodded. “Around then.”
“Do you have any thoughts about where your son could be?”
She did not. Nor did she have a picture of her son or her husband or any other type of starting point for Poole.
“What’s your son’s name?” Surely she knew this, at least.
“Casper.”
“Okay. Last name?”
“Prosnicki. His father was Ellis Prosnicki.”
When Lena Prosnicki left, Poole uncorked a bottle of red wine and poured a fair amount into a pint glass. He looked at his notebook, open to a page of mostly unanswered questions. She had left saying that there was no way of contacting her, but that her son, Casper, would know how to find her once Poole found him. This made no sense, of course, but then little about her had. Poole would normally have run from such a situation without a second thought, but Mrs. Prosnicki had handed him five hundred dollars in cash and said to do whatever amount of work for her that might cover—and if he had still not found Casper, then he would at least have done his best. She was so odd and defeated and—what?—that he did not expect she would be able to find anyone else to make inquiries for her. So he had accepted and she had nodded in that vague way of hers, seeming neither particularly happy nor satisfied.
The other point that left him uneasy was her sheer lack of understanding or concern about what had happened to her son. They had been “separated.” Her husband had been killed. But she was unable to supply even a hint of the circumstances of these events. Nor did she mention them with any attendant emotion.
The one thing she had supplied him with was the address where they had lived at the time. It was, at least, a starting point.
These thoughts were interrupted by Carla’s return from the picket line at Roderigo Bernal’s plant. Poole was, as always, relieved that she had come back safe.
“How was it?”
She gave him a thin smile. “It was fine.”
“Fine?” The wine had relaxed him.
“We shut down the plant. The cops came and watched.”
“But?”
“Too quiet. The cops, management, everybody. Nothing happened. It worries me.”
“You think they have something in the works?”
“Wouldn’t surprise me.”
“Spill.”
Carla shrugged, her eyes narrowing with worry. “I have no idea.”
“You’ve faced these things before. I’m sure it’s nothing that you haven’t seen or that you can’t handle.”
“That’s true if they’re planning some kind of action against the union. What I’m worried about is whether Bernal is holding off until he can do something about you.”
Poole sat back, pondering this. “I’ve done this before, Carla.”
“Just listen for a second. I was thinking about this on the line today. On the same day that Block gets his building blown up, Bernal gets burned. I’m concerned that maybe the mayor sees two of his little pal
s get pressured—”
“And figures maybe it’s coordinated,” Poole finished for her.
“So, if Bernal tells Henry, and Henry thinks it’s some kind of plot against his inner circle, he’ll be very anxious to get his mitts on the blackmailer.”
Poole nodded slowly. “Maybe. But would Bernal go to Henry with this? Normally, I would say not a chance. He doesn’t want to show that kind of weakness. But with the bombing, I don’t know, like you said . . .”
Carla shrugged. “I have no idea if he would tell Henry or not, but you need to be very careful tonight, okay?”
Poole had the feeling he had stepped off a precipice with no idea of the distance to the bottom.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
He’s a scary little bastard, Red Henry thought, which was as high a compliment as anyone was likely to receive from him. Henry leaned against a concrete stanchion, sucking on an unlit Cuban, casting an enormous shadow in the empty warehouse deep in the Hollows. Facing him, standing relaxed, with his feet shoulders’ width apart, his knees and shoulders loose, was Feral Basu. Feral was fully a foot and a half shorter than Red Henry and a third of his weight, but if the mayor didn’t fear anyone, he also didn’t relish the thought of Feral coming after him.
“Know who Arthur Puskis is?” Red Henry asked.
Feral shook his head. His skin was dark and smooth, and even in the dim light of the warehouse, his eyes were somehow arresting.
“Everyone on the force does,” Henry explained. “He’s the police Archivist. Works under City Hall. Something of a legend, in truth.”
Feral waited.
“He’s trying to find Reif DeGraffenreid.”
Again Feral said nothing, though Henry noticed a subtle tensing in his slender frame.
Henry said, “So, we tipped him as to where DeGraffenreid is.”
“You did?”
Henry was always perplexed by Feral’s accent. He thought he detected a trace of the Carpathians or maybe the Muslim south of Russia, which might have explained his coloration. He looked as if he might be from India.
“Yes. We need to discourage him from continuing this line of inquiry.”
“What do you mean, exactly?”
“I mean that you need to make him understand that looking for Reif DeGraffenreid, or any other actions he plans to take regarding DeGraffenreid and/or Prosnicki, is folly.”
“Don’t kill him?”
Red Henry had considerably more patience with Feral than with anyone else. “No. Don’t kill him. Two things are important. The first is that he understands that his pursuit of this inquiry will have consequences for him. The second is that he does not talk to DeGraffenreid. That something you can take care of?”
“Yes.”
With that, Henry knew that it would be taken care of, that he did not need to think about it further.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Puskis turned the unmarked Nash borrowed from the police pool off the pitted road that ran through what there was of Freeman’s Gap and pulled into a petrol station. Three men sat on folding chairs around a card table playing rummy. Their clothes and skin were the color of the dust that blew through the street. They were war vets, Puskis thought.
He got out of his car and approached them. A perimeter around the table was discolored with tobacco spit. Two of the men projected streams of the brown juice and looked up from their cards.
“Excuse me. I was wondering if you could tell me how I could get to this address.” He read them the address the caller had given him. The men exchanged brief glances with each other, then looked back at him.
Puskis tried again. “Do you know where this address is?”
The man closest to him, whose hair had come out in patches and whose hands could have belonged to a man forty years his senior, tore a piece from the pad they were using to keep score. He drew a map with a grease pencil, his filthy hands staining the paper where they occasionally touched it. When he was done, he handed it to Puskis and let out a wheezing cough, his lungs ravaged by gas. The map was precise and easy to read.
“Thank you. Thank you so much,” Puskis said, and retreated to his car, never quite turning his back fully on the three men. As he drove off, he noticed that they were once again engrossed in their game.
Toward dusk Puskis rumbled down the dirt road where he would find Reif DeGraffenreid. The low sun shone red, turning the tops of the seemingly endless fields of corn an orange, and the wind moved the plants in waves so that it looked like acres of inferno. It was, Puskis thought uneasily, like traveling through a maze of fire. The withered corn was too high to see over, and he had been traveling for several miles with the plants encroaching on the road from both sides, only occasionally broken by a clearing in front of a decrepit farmhouse.
The Nash rattled ominously as the wheels found potholes. Even as he approached the farmhouse that was DeGraffenreid’s, Puskis was becoming nervous about driving back to the City at night. He pulled into DeGraffenreid’s dirt driveway and parked behind a rusting pickup truck. The wind through the corn sounded like a light but persistent rain. The sun was no longer visible beyond the close horizon. A rhythmic knocking came from the small, two-story house before him. Probably a shutter out back. Puskis hesitated before walking toward the front door. Each footstep made a complex sound as rocks and gravel were rubbed together under the soles of his shoes. It was a country sound, one he could not recall ever having heard.
The steps to the porch were bowed in the middle and groaned under his weight. Behind a much patched screen door, the inner door stood open. The interior was too dark to peer into.
He hesitated for a moment. “Mr. DeGraffenreid,” he ventured. He waited for several seconds, then tried again, a little bit louder. “Mr. DeGraffenreid.” When this again drew no answer, he eased the screen door open and crossed the threshold. Coming from the twilit outdoors, he had to wait for his pupils to dilate in the dark interior. He called out again, “Mr. DeGraffenreid,” but knew now that he would get no response. As his eyes began to adjust to the darkness, he became aware that he was in a large, rather bare room, and that a pile of something lay in the center. There was a strange, sweet smell, too, that he knew right off, even if his mind at first refused to acknowledge it. In an act more of denial than courage, he approached the pile.
When he was close enough, he saw what, in fact, he had understood was there all along. The knees were tucked under the body, which was bent over so that the shoulders touched the ground and the arms were splayed, as if frozen during some Islamic prayer. But the head was missing, and what might have been a misshapen prayer rug was, in fact, scarlet blood pooling out from the open neck.
The head, Puskis now saw, was propped on the windowsill, its hair almost completely gone and its eyes bulging. But there was no mistaking that crooked nose from the picture in the file. Puskis had not felt fear in so long that he did not recognize it now in his accelerated heartbeat and the sweat on his upper lip and brow and his shallow breathing. He knelt next to the headless body and felt one of the hands. It was still warm. DeGraffenreid had recently been alive. Maybe as recently as thirty minutes before.
Then Puskis heard a sound from outside. A shuffling on the dirt along with a clicking noise. He looked up from the body, concentrating on the noise, and saw that something had been written on the wall. It was too dark to make out from where he was, so he straightened up and walked across the room. The message contained only two words, written in DeGraffenreid’s blood: PUSKIS DESIST.
He stared at it, thoughts racing, for once, incoherently. He reached out to touch the letters, then stopped himself before actually making contact. He shook his head slowly and let out an involuntary moan.
The noise from outside again penetrated his consciousness, as the strange shuffling and tapping sounds were now close, then replaced by the creak of the front steps and a new tapping sound of wood against wood. Puskis turned to face the door. The only other points of egress were the windows and a door to hi
s left. He didn’t go for them though, and a silhouette appeared in the door.
“Mr. Reif . . . Mr. Reif, you there?” The man waited for an answer. Puskis worried the man could hear his breathing.
“Mr. Reif, you there?” The man opened the door and Puskis saw an old black man in overalls and a straw hat. A farmer. He was blind, with blackout glasses and a cane. Puskis stood still, trying to control his breathing.
The blind man walked forward, tapping ahead of him with the cane. “Mr. Reif?” He took two more steps and his cane hit DeGraffenreid’s body. He stopped and probed the body with his cane. Then he bent down and touched the body. “Mr. Reif,” he whispered as his fingers came away wet. He stiffened and craned his neck, searching with his ears rather than his eyes.
“Who’s there?” he said sharply. Puskis stood transfixed. “I know there’s someone there,” the blind man said again, his voice edging toward hysteria. “Something terrible’s happened here. Who’s there?”
The blind man rose and began advancing toward Puskis, his cane tapping in semicircular sweeps. Puskis retreated to the back wall, and the sound of his footsteps stopped the blind man short. Puskis started to edge his way toward the door to his left, but the blind man, hearing him, made a move to intercept him. Puskis stopped and began to circle the room the other way, but the blind man followed his footsteps, cutting off the room the way a boxer cuts off the ring.
“Who is that?” the old man rasped.
Puskis circled faster to his right and the blind man made a move to beat him to the front door, only to trip over DeGraffenreid’s prone body, his cane skidding across the floor toward Puskis as he fell. Puskis seized his moment, moving as quickly as he could out the front door. He took the three steps down to the ground, then trotted, clumsy and out of breath, to the car. To his relief it started on the first try.
He turned to the house and saw the blind man on the porch without his cane. “What has happened here?” the man yelled out. Puskis reversed out of the driveway onto the road and sped away into the maze of cornfields, now turning purple with the onset of night.
