by Toby Ball
If there had been any doubt—written requests and a voice on the phone were not fully reliable indicators—the appearance of the pale, exhausted courier (Puskis could not now recall the name, though he felt sure it was Polish) confirmed his suspicions that something big was happening. Puskis found his condition surprising, as couriers did not generally encounter much stress. If the courier was in this state, the rest of the department must be under siege.
“What has happened?” Puskis asked. He had discerned certain things from the files that were requested. Organized crime. Crimes at restaurants. Shotgun murders. Child murders. The sum of these factors was not pleasant, but enough to cause this type of commotion?
“A, uh, mass homicide. At a restaurant.” The courier’s voice had been faint. He had seemed an apparition. Puskis felt that if he closed his eyes, the courier would be gone when he opened them again.
“There were children killed?”
“A lot of children. Gunmen walked in on a birthday party and killed everyone. Children, women, and the men, of course. The mayor wants this taken care of immediately. No one on the force is getting a break until this one’s solved.”
“Who were the victims?”
“Members of the Bristol Gang. Gunmen and their families.”
This made the problem clear. Puskis and the courier stared at each other briefly, knowing that there would be no peace until the culprits were found. The courier left and Puskis busied himself gathering the next stack of file requests.
The obvious suspects were members of the rival gang, the Whites. The Whites and the Bristols had, for many years, engaged in a brutal struggle to control certain parts of the City, but especially the Hollows, where the warehouses offered myriad entrepreneurial, if not quite legal, opportunities. The death toll, Puskis remembered, had been alarmingly high in the decade or so leading up to the Birthday Party Massacre. High enough that Puskis at times wondered who could be left in these gangs when you subtracted both those who were killed and those in jail for the killings. But they continued on—until June 11, 1929.
That incident was so barbaric and so unnecessary that the newly elected Red Henry felt compelled to do what previous mayors had not—end the gang war once and for all. If the Whites had thought that this show of brutality would intimidate, they had sorely miscalculated. Photographs of the corpses of young children ran above the fold of the two major dailies for days. Socially minded reporters and editors called for drastic action from City Hall. Puskis remembered a reporter named Frings being particularly vehement in his demand for steps to be taken. This same Frings would later be the loudest voice in condemning the mayor when he put an end to the Whites for good through the efforts of a previously dormant division of the police force known as the Anti-Subversion Unit.
As with everything that happened in the City, Puskis had learned about the crackdown partially from the newspapers but mostly from the stream of files that came in and went out of the Vaults. This was the first time, too, that files began to return with material removed rather than added. At least it was the first time that he noticed this happening, and he felt sure that no previous doctoring of the files would have escaped his attention.
The first time he noticed one of these files was less than a week after the massacre. The file for a White-family lieutenant named Trevor “Vampire” Reid came back light. He had been dubbed Vampire because he was sucking the lifeblood from businesses on the south end of the Hollows. Reid had liked the name so much that he had filed his front four upper teeth into points. He displayed these teeth proudly in the mug shot in his file. The photo was still in the file, but most of the appendix to the trial transcript had been removed. Only the first page of the appendix, which included the end of the actual trial transcript, remained. The appendix text on the bottom half of the sheet had been blacked out with ink. Angered by this breach of protocol, Puskis took a blank sheet of paper, placed it over the blacked-out text, and rubbed lightly with a soft-lead pencil that picked up the depressions made by the typewriter keys. The result was what appeared to be the beginning of a list of names. Puskis recognized them as other hoods in the White family and disposed of the paper so as not to arouse suspicion.
While thinking of the men whose names he had coaxed from the paper—Teddy “the Leper” Smithson, Otto Samuelson, Fat Johnny Acton, and Sam “Blood Whiskers” McAdam, among others—Puskis fell into a deep sleep in his chair, head back and mouth open to the ceiling.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
As instructed, Frings arrived at the riverbank first. It was cold, the breeze blowing from the north. Frings decided that smoking the hand-rolled juju he had in the breast pocket of his coat would help. So he leaned against a thick timber that had at one time served as a post for a jetty and with his collar up and hat down inhaled the sweet, moist smoke and felt the cold become a more-interesting-than-uncomfortable sensation on his skin. In the darkness, he closed his eyes and listened to the lap of the water against the river bank.
As he waited for Bernal, he thought about Nora and what it would be like without her. It was useless trying to think of specifics while high, but it was interesting to think about what it would feel like if he did not have her to go back to that night—or any night. It was a strange exercise and he was thinking about the difference between not having somebody in general and not having her in particular when he heard footsteps on the hill above him. Frings strained to hear other sets of footsteps above the low noise of the breeze, but without result. Bernal, as promised, seemed to be alone.
Frings watched Bernal’s cumbersome figure, silhouetted by the City’s lights, make its way down the slope. At one point Bernal put a hand down for balance and then righted himself. When he finally reached the bottom, his breathing was heavy.
“Frings?” Bernal’s voice was strained; maybe from exertion, maybe from nerves.
“That’s right.”
“Christ, it’s cold tonight.”
Frings didn’t know what to say to this. Bernal fumbled in his coat pocket for something and produced a silver cigarette case at the moment Frings realized he could very well be pulling a gun. Bernal held the case open to Frings, who took a cigarette, then Bernal lit both. The flame illuminated Bernal’s face, and even in the orange glow it was pale and perspiring. The authority that he had emanated that afternoon was gone, his hunched body enough for Frings to know he was terrified.
A minute passed in silence, then another. Bernal did not seem ready to begin the conversation, and Frings knew enough not to force the issue. Finally, Bernal coughed into a gloved fist and Frings took that as a cue.
“What are we here to talk about?”
“Corruption in the mayor’s office.”
Frings barked a laugh despite himself. “Thanks for the tip.”
“You don’t understand,” Bernal said wearily, “this is different.”
Everybody always thought that his information was different, and Frings’s experience was that it rarely was. Still, Bernal was taking a big risk being here. “I’m listening.”
Bernal sighed. “Not tonight.”
If he had not been high, Frings would have been angry. But in his current state it merely seemed odd that Bernal would take this risk in order to tell him nothing. “Why are we here then?”
“I do want to tell you things. If all goes well, I’ll tell you more later. But I need to know that I can talk to you. That you’re safe. For me to be sure, you’re going to have to find the information on your own. I’ll point you in the right direction, but you’ve got to find it for yourself. I can help you understand it once you’ve found it. This way, there is no trail back to me.”
“Okay.”
“First, so I know I can trust you and you’re as capable as I believe you are, I’ll point you towards a story. You find it, come back to me, and then we move forward.”
“Why should I take the time?” Frings asked, surveying the silhouette of the hill above them, but finding no observers.
“Because this is worse than you think. You don’t know what has happened—what is happening. The Birthday Party Massacre, the move on the Whites, the Navajo Project, hospitals that are really prisons, the disappearance of whole families. These are all of a whole.” Bernal spoke quietly but with an intensity that startled Frings.
“I don’t know what—”
“You’re right. You’re right. You don’t know. Nobody knows. That’s why I’ve come to you. You can expose the truth.”
It was all melodramatic, but Frings could see that this was Bernal’s personality. “Okay. What do you want me to do?”
“Otto Samuelson. Does that name mean anything to you?”
“No.”
“This I’ll tell you. He murdered someone in 1928. Find him, talk to him, and then come back to me. I’ll be expecting a piece of information. You have it for me, we’ll begin to dig further.”
“Okay. I find Otto Samuelson, get his story, then what, I contact you?”
“In your column, I’ll look for the words golden age. When I see those words, I’ll meet you here the next night at this same time.”
Frings nodded. He’d received this request—a code phrase in his column—from others in the past. It seemed overly complicated. He did not want to scare Bernal off, however, so he acquiesced. With the meeting over, he extended his hand. Bernal looked at it, then at Frings. Frings thought he saw a sad smile on Bernal’s face.
“Why are you doing this?” Frings asked.
“Because there will be trouble when the mayor’s arrangements fall apart, and I want to know when that will happen, as it must. I don’t want to die, Mr. Frings, and people will die before this ends.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
A uniformed officer met Puskis just inside the front door of Headquarters and escorted him down a flight of stairs into the basement. Puskis was aware of officers glancing at him as he walked by. He had not experienced this before, though he attributed it to his heightened awareness rather than any increased interest in him. He was noticing things that he had not previously. That night he had been disturbed by footsteps on the stairs outside his door. Again he had felt fear. He was becoming accustomed to it. The footsteps had continued up to the next floor, and a door had opened as the man who lived directly above him received a guest. Puskis had awoken in the night to the sound of footsteps, trying desperately in the haze of half-sleep to identify the location of the steps. As before, they came from the apartment directly above him. Footsteps in the hall, his upstairs neighbor walking in his apartment—events that had surely occurred in the past, but which he had not noticed.
Puskis followed the officer down a long, well-lit hallway and through a set of double doors into an auditorium. A wooden stage ran along the far wall, and before it several men in suits congregated, talking to the Chief. A curtain was drawn across the stage, and Puskis detected the odors of steel and oil—the smell of machinery.
His entrance broke up whatever conversation the men were having and the Chief strode over, grinning.
“Welcome, Mr. Puskis,” he said, extending his hand.
“I trust that I am not too late.”
“Not at all, not at all. Very punctual.”
Puskis was relieved to hear this as he was truly concerned that he might be late, what with the men waiting on him. Tardiness was an affront to order.
The Chief walked him over to the group of men and introduced each. Puskis, dazed by the blur of activity, shook hands solemnly with each man and in doing so missed their names. The last man introduced seemed the key member of the group, and Puskis did remember his name—Ricks. Ricks, like the others, was dressed in a dark, expensive suit. He was short and slight, almost like a child. His face was pinched, left eye pointed sightlessly up and to the left.
“Mr. Ricks has come up with something that is going to make your life much, much easier,” the Chief said with a bit too much enthusiasm. “We know how you love the new technologies.” He was looking sharp, Puskis noted, his normally disheveled uniform nicely pressed and his shoes recently polished.
“We are very excited about the potential.” Ricks spoke quickly in a high-pitched lisp. “We are, and the mayor is as well. Very excited.”
Puskis looked at Ricks in confusion. “I’m sorry, Mr. Ricks, I’m afraid I don’t know what you are, what you are speaking of.”
“No. No, of course not. It’s been kept under wraps you see. Until now. Now it is being unveiled, so to speak, to you, Mr. Puskis—the inspiration and greatest beneficiary, if that is the word, of this new machine. I have admired your work, Mr. Puskis, from afar. Yes, I have admired it greatly.”
Puskis simply stared at the little man, processing certain words that seemed to have greater importance—unveiled, inspiration, machine, admired. None of it made the slightest bit of sense, and Puskis became anxious to see what lay behind the curtain not out of curiosity, but out of a desire to bring to an end this sense of disorientation.
The Chief looked at Ricks, who gave a little nod. The Chief yelled, “Okay,” over his shoulder, and the curtain parted with surprising speed. Now revealed was a large machine that Puskis had not previously seen. Two huge spools of what appeared to be paper had numbers printed at various intervals. Each spool contained roughly half the paper, and a portion spanned the six or so feet in between the two spools. By the spool on the right was a box with a grid of buttons, not unlike a typewriter, but with close to ten times as many keys. The spools were about six feet high and the paper about the height of four sheets of regular paper laid from end to end.
Puskis was aware that people were looking at him, gauging his reaction. He looked helplessly at the Chief, who in turn looked toward Ricks.
Ricks cleared his throat and said, “It’s called a Retrievorator,” as if that explained anything.
“I see,” replied Puskis, who unaccountably felt his spirits sinking.
“Well, I don’t think you do quite yet, actually. Not yet. Please, come on up to the stage with me and we’ll take a closer look so you can see for yourself exactly what this thing can do. Up close.”
Ricks walked to the side of the stage where there were stairs, and Puskis followed him with the Chief bringing up the rear. The other men stayed below the stage and talked in hushed voices while watching the action above.
Ricks led Puskis to the box by the right-hand spool. Up close, Puskis could see that what had at first appeared to be paper was actually something much stronger, something thin and, he thought, composed of some sort of metal. The numbers he had seen from below were actually somewhat raised from the rest of the surface. On the edge of each sheet was a collection of seemingly random holes. Puskis tried to determine a pattern, but only five sets of these holes were visible, which was not enough to allow analysis. Ricks waited for Puskis to get a good look before speaking.
“Come here to the codeboard. I want you to see how this machine works.”
Puskis walked over to the codeboard box and saw that it was composed of vertical lines of keys marked as either letters or numbers. They were arranged so that the initial column was letters, followed by four columns of numbers, followed by two of letters, then five of numbers. It was, Puskis realized with alarm—though not surprise—the pattern used for the files in the Vaults.
Ricks was talking again. “We just put together a demonstration, so this clearly doesn’t hold even one percent of the amount of information that the Vaults contains, but it does show you how it works. I think you’ll find it quite intriguing. What I want you to do is put in a theoretical file number in the A1000 series. What you do is depress one key from each column so that you end up with a file number. So just make one up and you’ll see what happens.”
Puskis approached the codeboard tentatively.
“Start off by pushing the A in the first column and then the 1 and the 0 and so on,” Ricks said.
Puskis depressed the A with his index finger; there was a click and the key remained depressed. He then pushed
the 1 key in the next column, resulting in a similar click. He continued on until he had depressed the buttons A1000CR21027. When he was done, he looked up at Ricks, who was bouncing up and down on his toes. The Chief stood behind him, smiling benevolently.
“Now pull the switch,” Ricks said.
A switch, perhaps six inches long, was to the right of the columns of buttons. Puskis pulled it down, then jumped back as the machine began to hum and the spools began to spin, pulling the sheets too fast for Puskis to follow what was happening. It took less than a minute of the spools revolving and Ricks bouncing and the men below the stage watching in anticipation. Without warning, the spooling stopped, followed by a whining noise coming from a tall, rectangular box behind the right spool. Four sheets of paper dropped into a collection box just below the codeboard. Ricks picked up the pages and showed them to Puskis. On each was printed A1000CR21027, the code that he had punched into the codeboard.
Puskis looked at Ricks, then at the Chief.
“You’re wondering how it works,” Ricks said, though Puskis wasn’t actually wondering about that at all. “Come over here and look at this. It’s fairly simple, but it’s what makes the whole system work.” Puskis noticed that Ricks was profusely sweating from his forehead and temples. He wondered how important it was to the Chief for him to be impressed.
Ricks beckoned Puskis to the area between the spools where five sheets stretched across the gap. “Look here,” Ricks said, and indicated an area with a pattern of small holes, barely bigger than pinpricks. “This is it. This holds the code and allows the machine to find the correct records.”
Puskis brushed the tips of his fingers lightly over the holes.
“When you punch in the code, it pushes forward steel pins in a specific sequence. The spools spin until the pins all fit into the holes in a sheet. That will be the desired record. Each record has a unique pattern of holes that correspond to the filing system at the Vaults. Or, I should say, will have. But not too far in the future. Not as far as one might think.”
