The City Under the Skin

by Geoff Nicholson

  “You’ve rather eloquently convinced me that I shouldn’t see this boss of yours.”

  She clutched her gold pencil, as though she might use it as a weapon, or might crush it between her tense fingers.

  “Well, that’s not an option, Doc. Neither of us has a choice about it.”

  “We all have choices, William.”

  “You know, I really fucking hate it when people call me William.”

  It all happened very quickly after that. He hit her just once, nothing fancy, and then she hit him back, which meant that he had to hit her that much harder, which knocked the fight out of her and gave him time to drag her from the office, to his Cadillac.

  “I’m sorry I had to do that,” he said, which he knew sounded stupid.

  He also realized she’d pull herself together and be ready to fight some more long before they got anywhere near Wrobleski’s compound, and he didn’t want to have to hit her again to subdue her. He really didn’t want to hit anyone anymore. So he settled the issue by bundling her into the trunk of the Cadillac and locking it. He felt sure that other, more elegant solutions must be available, but he couldn’t think of any, and in any case, elegance was pretty low on his list of priorities just then.

  28. TRUNK

  As Billy Moore drove, he could hear the sounds of muffled banging and screaming from behind him, from inside the trunk of the Cadillac. Fists and feet, and very possibly elbows and knees, and possibly even a head, slammed pointedly and pointlessly against the car’s internal panels. He was glad his car was already a wreck: a man who drove a better vehicle could have gotten really upset about a thing like that. He turned on the radio and found some dull classic rock to drown out the noise. Yes, music had its uses.

  Once the car was inside the courtyard, where Wrobleski and Akim were waiting, the improbable double act, the old firm, Billy popped the latch on the trunk, and Dr. Carol Fermor slowly pulled herself out. Now that there was nothing to kick against, she stood quietly, trying hard to exhibit dignity, looking at all three men, making steady eye contact with each. Perhaps it was a professional gaze, thorough, diagnostic, or perhaps she was simply committing their looks to deep memory, anticipating a time when she might take revenge. Billy Moore stared at the ground.

  “Who are you people?” Carol Fermor said. “What do you want? How do you think this can possibly end?”

  “That’s a lot of questions,” said Wrobleski.

  “I’m a respected professional. I have a husband and a family. I’ll be missed. People will be looking for me. I can’t just disappear.”

  Wrobleski stroked his scalp distractedly.

  “People like you disappear all the time,” he said. “People better than you.”

  He made the smallest gesture to indicate that he was bored, that Akim should take this woman out of his sight. She went reluctantly but without too much of a struggle, though Billy reckoned that might have a lot to do with the syringe in Akim’s hand. Wrobleski took an envelope of money from his pocket and held it out to Billy, but Billy turned away, keeping his hands down, in his pockets, spoiling the lines of his new suit.

  “I don’t need it,” Billy said.

  “What? You’re working pro bono these days?”

  “No, Mr. Wrobleski. Have this one on me. I think I’m done.”

  “Have you found alternate employment?”

  “Well, yeah, I’m trying to run my parking lot, but in any case, I’m the wrong man for the job.”

  “Don’t you think I’m the best judge of that?”

  Billy said nothing. Only a damn fool would tell Wrobleski there was something wrong with his judgment.

  “It’s okay,” said Wrobleski. “I understand your position. You’re confused. You want to know what’s going on. Am I going to hurt these women? How long am I going to keep them? You want to know what the fuck these maps are all about.”

  It was true, Billy did want to know these things, but it had occurred to him that knowing exactly what Wrobleski was up to might be worse than being in the dark.

  “Well, I could tell you, Billy,” said Wrobleski. “But then I’d have to kill you.”

  Wrobleski didn’t laugh or smile, because he never did, and Billy tried to console himself with the notion that all the best jokes are told with a straight face, not that this particular joke explained anything.

  “Billy,” said Wrobleski, “I’m not the worst guy to work for. There are many far worse than me. But I can’t have you picking and choosing, coming and going as you please. I can’t have anybody doing that. You’re working for me, not for yourself.”

  As before, Billy was inclined to ask, “Why me?” but he knew it was far too late for that. He had been selected, perhaps for a good reason, perhaps on a whim, but once Wrobleski had made his selection, there was no room for further bargaining.

  “But I’m not going to be a cunt about it,” Wrobleski said. “So how about this? You do one more and that’s it. Then you’ll have picked up your last tattooed woman. You’ll be your own man again. That’s fair, isn’t it.”

  It wasn’t a question, and it would have made no difference whether Billy thought it was fair or not.

  “Okay,” said Billy. “One more and then it’s over.” But he didn’t believe his own words any more than he believed Wrobleski’s.

  29. THE SKIN UNDER THE CITY

  Sunrise on a landscaped slither of real estate, formerly nameless, now Columbia Park, a canal-side house of cards, a public and private partnership: shiny, flimsy new buildings, office blocks and apartments in unequal numbers, built by developers who’d been given an easy ride on planning regulations in exchange for cleaning up the chaos of territory alongside the canal. Ray McKinley had been one of the first. Now there was a bike path, a pedestrian walkway, some fanciful lampposts and benches, a laughably small “green space” containing an even more derisory “nature trail.” At lunchtime this place would be densely populated with office workers, but now, with the sky barely light, it was deserted, static, and Wrobleski sat in the passenger seat of his SUV, Akim at the wheel, waiting.

  Wrobleski had never made the mistake of thinking he was free. He knew he was scarcely even independent. He always operated for other people, did their dirty work: that was the cleanest way of working, nothing personal about it, no motive, no anger, no connection. But it also meant that he had to wait for a call, just the way his man Billy Moore did. And if Ray McKinley wasn’t exactly the best or most considerate employer, at least they went back a satisfyingly long way: McKinley was the devil Wrobleski knew, or hoped he did.

  When the call came, McKinley said, “Okay, so you won’t deal with the main woman for me, but you’ll have no problem dealing with her ‘advisor,’ will you?”

  “Who?”

  “Brandt. The one Meg Gunderson called a twat on live TV. Remember?”

  “I remember.”

  “Seems that our mayor is a very good judge of character. Mr. Brandt and I had a meeting. I said it would be worth his while to decide that the mayor’s plans were unworkable, that we should start again, demolish the Telstar, get back to a clean slate.”

  “And how did that go down?”

  “Seems our man has integrity. He threatened to call the cops. Then he threatened to set his dog on me.”

  “Big dog?”

  “Dalmatian.”

  Wrobleski stared into the SUV’s wing mirror and at last saw a man and his dog approaching along the canal’s former towpath. Brandt looked older than on TV, but taller and leaner too. He was wearing a different pair of elaborate eyeglasses, like goggles, and he was dressed as though for some exotic and nameless sport, in something black and red, and all-enveloping, somewhere between a leotard and a space suit. The dog was a particularly restless and energetic example of his breed.

  There were security cameras along the towpath, but Akim had been along last night and thoroughly vandalized them. Wrobleski watched man and Dalmatian as they went past the SUV, then he got out and started fol
lowing. Brandt’s progress was constant, faster than a power walk, slower than jogging. Wrobleski had to extend his stride in order to keep up. They’d gone no more than fifty yards when Brandt, without stopping, turned his head and glared at Wrobleski.

  “Can I help you?”

  That accent again: another country, or continent, or planet.

  “No,” said Wrobleski.

  “Is there a problem?”

  Wrobleski let his jacket hang open to reveal the leather strapping of a holster. He took out the gun. Brandt’s face took on an expression that Wrobleski had seen often enough before, a confusing and contradictory alloy of disbelief and growing realization.

  “Yeah. I can’t decide whether to kill you first or the dog first.”

  While Brandt was trying to fathom that remark, perhaps hoping it was just a joke in very, very poor taste, Wrobleski had his problem solved for him. The dog bounded toward him, reared up, and though it looked more like neurotic enthusiasm than actual aggression, in general dogs disliked Wrobleski as much as he disliked them. The fucking animal sank his teeth into Wrobleski’s left hand, between the thumb and forefinger. That settled it: dog, then man. He pulled the gun from its sheath, fired just two shots, and then that part was done with; from here on, it was business as usual.

  The park remained static and empty, and the surface of the canal was slick as glass. Wrobleski wondered if a dead dog would float or sink: only one way to find out. He nudged the Dalmatian off the towpath into the water. It sank slowly. By then Akim had driven up alongside in the SUV and stopped. He got out and opened the back door, glaring consistently at Wrobleski.

  “Yeah, yeah, I know,” said Wrobleski. “This isn’t making the best use of your talents. Duly noted.”

  Akim was aware that his complaint was being mocked even as it was being acknowledged. With as much dignity as he could manage, he took hold of Brandt’s feet, leaving the shoulders for Wrobleski, and together they hefted the body into the vehicle. The bite on Wrobleski’s left hand was starting to hurt like a son of a bitch.

  * * *

  Charlie opened the gate of the compound, and Wrobleski reversed the SUV into a tight, cluttered, neglected corner of the courtyard. He got out, and he and Akim opened the rear of the SUV. On the ground, cut into the tarmac, was a flat metal hatch, a trapdoor made of steel diamond plate: he’d had it fitted specially. Akim lifted the door to give access to a set of descending concrete steps, narrow with steep risers. There were various hard hats and flashlights hanging on the wall, and they both jammed on miner’s helmets. That always felt pretty stupid to Wrobleski, but the helmets had lamps on the front to light the way as they went down, leaving their hands free to deal with the body, which, with Akim’s grudging assistance, Wrobleski now lifted onto his own shoulders. They had got this down to a crude but efficient art.

  Wrobleski always had a sense of the figure he was cutting, something monstrous yet also unavoidably comic: the Phantom of the Opera, Quasimodo, one of the mole people, a Morlock, accompanied by a sulky, rebellious assistant. As they negotiated their way down the steps, Wrobleski felt the rising coldness, detected the smell of dilute ammonia and maybe spoiled meat, and heard a thick roaring sound that grew louder with each step, as if he were entering the mouth of a gigantic seashell. Suddenly there was a muffled boom, something grand but far away inside the earth. There were noises like that down here all the time these days, muted blasts as they worked on the Platinum Line. Wrobleski refused to let it bother him.

  Wrobleski and Akim pushed on, went deeper, through ash-gray concrete chambers, bunkers, rusted spaces that might have served as industrial bear pits, into a coarse intermeshing of tunnels that led ever farther into varieties of receding darkness. Wrobleski knew his way down here well enough, knew how to get in and out, how to get where he needed to go, but he didn’t know what most of these masses and vacancies around him were, what they did, had no idea how they related to the world above. And he was content to keep it that way.

  It was cold, and yet he was sweating, from exertion and adrenaline. The tunnel they were in changed its direction, ran away in a taut, vaulted curve. The lights on the helmets picked out a broad, deep, semicircular arch, simple, functional, its apex and keystone scarcely higher than a man’s head, an entrance of sorts.

  They stepped through the arch and out the other side, into a long, straight, white-tiled space, with a low ceiling, regularly placed pillars, a few broken benches here and there, some peeling advertising posters, a tattered map on the wall. They were standing on the platform of a long-abandoned subway station, the ground scattered with coils of wire and lengths of pipe, rat droppings and discarded paperwork that somebody must have once considered really, really important. The first time Wrobleski came down here, years ago now, the place had seemed infinite and unfathomable: now it was simply the place where he finished the job.

  A part of him was struck by how absurd it was for the city to be building a new subway line while this old station lay disused and apparently intact and serviceable. And yet the reason why it had been abandoned was obvious enough. As the rails left the station and disappeared into the tunnel mouth, they were twisted as if mauled by some giant, casually destructive hand. There had been a deep settling in the floor of the tunnel, a shift in the earth, a subsidence: a sinkhole had appeared beneath the railroad ties, black, wide, jagged-edged, and although it was obviously not literally bottomless, it was cavernous and capacious enough for his ongoing needs. You could lose a whole army of dead bodies down there: Wrobleski had only accounted for a small platoon. They never came back, never reappeared elsewhere, and the pit was deep enough that even the stench of death seldom made it up to the level of the station. Akim shivered, waited.

  They stood at the platform edge, and Wrobleski heaved Brandt’s body off his shoulders like an outsized sack of coal or potatoes, something that had already once been in the earth. Akim again took the feet, Wrobleski the shoulders, and they swung the corpse until it had enough momentum to carry it forward, away from the platform, down between the distorted rails, then away into the silent void.

  Wrobleski took a breath, but not too deep: there were plenty of things you wouldn’t want to inhale down here, quite apart from flesh rot. He stood listening, heard only the usual sounds of the earth. He nodded to Akim, not exactly in thanks, but in recognition that for better or worse he needed him and his talents. The second part of the job was done too. Now he was ready to go back aboveground, to spend some time with his maps, the ones on paper rather than on flesh.

  30. MARILYN GIVES AN INCH, ROSE SCARLATTI TAKES A FOOT

  “Thanks for coming with me,” said Marilyn.

  “Thanks for calling,” he said, and realized this sounded a bit weak. “I’d have called you, but I didn’t want to seem … whatever.”

  “You did the right thing. After a night like the one we had, I needed a little space.”

  “And now you need me again.”

  “I need you to be supportive, anyhow.”

  “I don’t feel very supportive. I really don’t know what you’re doing here.”

  “Yes, you do, Zak. I’m going to get Rose Scarlatti to tell us more of what she knows about the compass rose tattoos, and why she reacted the way she did.”

  Yes, he did know that, of course.

  They were standing outside the lobby doors of the Villa Nova apartment building, waiting to be let in. Rose Scarlatti was being a little slow to answer the bell, though in Marilyn’s eagerness they were a little earlier than the agreed time.

  “And you really think that getting a tattoo from her is going to help?” said Zak.

  “That’s what she said last time. And if you can’t trust an old lady tattooist, who can you trust?”

  The lock on the building’s front door buzzed and opened at last. The apartment door was already open when they got to Rose’s floor, forbidding as much as inviting. Rose did not greet them. She was all business: her tattoo equipment—old-fashioned, workad
ay, looking like a gangly robot arm—was set up next to a hard, narrow daybed that had been moved to the very center of the living room. Her latex gloves were already on, the inks and needles laid out on a marble-topped table; a freshly lit clove cigarette was lodged tightly in the corner of her mouth.

  “This is Zak,” said Marilyn. “He’s here to be supportive.”

  “Fabulous.” Rose looked at Zak the way she might have looked at a suspicious stain on the bathroom floor, then said to Marilyn, “No second thoughts?”

  “No,” said Marilyn.

  “And you only want a compass rose?”

  “Right.”

  “Nothing more ambitious, more tribal? A mandala? A burning lotus? Scenes from the life of Elvis?”

  “No,” said Marilyn. “As agreed. Just a compass rose.”

  Marilyn seemed more nervous, more tense, than Zak would have expected. While she carefully, anxiously arranged herself on the daybed, he tried not to wear his resentment too conspicuously, tried not to alienate Rose still further, tried not to get in the way. He looked around the apartment, and despite himself, he could see the fascination of the clutter, of all the souvenirs and exhibits. If things didn’t work out in the map business, he wondered if there was a living to be made buying and selling antique tattoo memorabilia. No doubt there was, though probably not for him. He reckoned you’d need some extensive ink on your body before customers took you seriously.

  “How about your man there?” Rose said to Marilyn. “Does he need one too?”

  Zak thought it best to speak for himself.

  “No thanks,” he said. “I had a grandfather in the navy. He had a ship tattooed on the back of his hand. He said it was the worst decision he ever made in his life.”

  “Must have led a very tame life,” said Rose; then to Marilyn, “And you’re dead sure you want it on the top of your foot?”

  “Certain,” said Marilyn.

  “And which way do you want north to be?” Rose asked. “Pointing up the leg or down?”