Transgressions

by Ed McBain

  The wall opposite the shelves was dominated by a giant blown-up photograph rendered in sepia tones. It was the face of some German or Russian from a bygone age. The man, whoever he was, had a big mustache and a wild look in his eye. I would have said it was a picture of Nietzsche but I knew it wasn’t him because I had just finished reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra for a class called the History of the West and there was a photograph of the German philosopher on the cover of the book.

  “Bakunin,” A. Lawless said. “It’s Bakunin.”

  “The anarchist?”

  “He’s why I’m here today talking to you. And he’s why you’re here today talking to me.”

  “Oh,” I said trying to think of a way into the conversation.

  “Sit down,” the big man said.

  I noticed that there were two tree trunks diagonally across from the swivel chair. Real tree trunks, plucked right out of the ground. Each one was about two and a half feet high with curves carved into them for a comfortable seat.

  I sat.

  “Archibald Lawless Anarchist at Large,” my host said formally. He sat in the swivel chair and leaned back.

  “What does that mean exactly?”

  “What do you think it means?”

  “That you plan to overthrow the government in hopes of causing a perpetual state of chaos throughout the world?”

  “They aren’t much on reality at Xavier or Columbia, are they?”

  I didn’t remember telling him that I did my undergrad work at Xavier but I didn’t remember much before Arrett.

  “What do you do?” I asked.

  “I walk the line.”

  “What line?”

  “Not,” he said raising an instructive finger, “what line but the line between what forces?”

  “Okay,” I said. “The line between what forces?”

  “I walk the line between chaos and the man.”

  3

  Archibald Lawless brought two fingers to his lower lip speculating, it seemed, about me and how I would fill the job opening.

  But by then I had decided against taking the position. I found his presence disturbing. If he offered me a cup of tea I’d take it out of civility, but I wouldn’t swallow a drop.

  Still, I was intrigued. The line between chaos and the man seemed a perfect personal realization of the philosophy he followed. It brought to mind a wild creature out at the edges of some great, decaying civilization. Interesting for a college paper but not as a profession.

  I had just begun considering how to refuse if he offered me the job when a knock came on the front door of the office. Three fast raps and then two slower ones.

  “Get that will you, Felix?” Lawless said.

  I didn’t want to sound off so I went back through the Americana room and said, “Yes,” through the door.

  “Carlos for A L,” a slightly Spanish, slightly street accented voice answered.

  I didn’t know what to do so I threw the locks, kicked up the buttress, and opened the door.

  The man was my height, slight and obviously with a preoccupation for the color green. He wore a forest green three-button suit over a pale green shirt with a skinny dark green tie.

  His shoes were reptile definitely and also green. His skin was olive. He was past forty, maybe past fifty.

  “Hey, bro,” Carlos said and I really didn’t know what to make of him.

  “Wait here please,” I said.

  He nodded and I went back to Archibald Lawless’s office. The anarchist was sitting back in his chair, waiting for my report.

  “It’s a guy named Carlos. He’s all in green. I didn’t ask what he wanted.”

  “Come on in, Carlos!” Archibald shouted.

  The green man came in pushing open the office door.

  “Hey, Mr. Big,” Carlos greeted.

  “What you got for me?”

  “Not too much. They say he was drinking, she wasn’t but she was just some girl he’d picked up at the bar.”

  “Couldn’t you get any more?” Lawless wasn’t upset but there was a certain insistence to his query.

  “Maria tried, man, but they don’t have it on the computer and the written files were sent to Arizona three hours after they were done. The only reason she got that much was that she knows a guy who works in filing. He sneaked a look for her.”

  Lawless turned away from Carlos and me and looked out over New Jersey.

  “How’s your mother?” Lawless asked Hoboken.

  “She’s fine,” Carlos responded. “And Petey’s doin’ real good in that school you got him into.”

  “Tell him hello for me when you see him,” Lawless said. He swiveled around and leveled his murky eyes at the green man. “See you later, Carlos.”

  “You got it, Mr. Big. Any time.”

  Carlos turned to go. I noticed that he seemed nervous. Not necessarily scared but definitely happy to be going. I followed him to the front door and threw all the locks into place after him.

  When I returned Lawless was pulling on heavy work boots. He nodded toward a tree stump and I sat.

  “Do you know what a scribe does?” he asked.

  “I don’t know if I’m really interested—”

  “Do you know what a scribe does?” he asked again, cutting me off.

  “They were monks or something,” I said. “They wrote out copies of the bible before there was printing or moveable type.”

  “That’s correct,” he said sounding like one of my professors. “They also wrote for illiterate lords. Contracts, peace treaties, even love letters.” Lawless smiled. “How much do you know about Bakunin?”

  “Just his name.”

  “He was a great man. He knew about all the gross injustices of Stalin before Stalin was born. He was probably the greatest political thinker of the twentieth century and he didn’t even live in that century. But do you know what was wrong with him?”

  “No sir.”

  “He was a man of action and so he didn’t spend enough time writing cohesive documents of his ideas. Don’t get me wrong, he wrote a lot. But he never created a comprehensive document detailing a clear idea of anarchist political organization. After he died the writing he left behind made many small-minded men see him as a crackpot and a fool. I don’t intend for my legacy to be treated like that.”

  “And that’s why you need a scribe?”

  “Mainly.” He turned to watch Jersey again. “But also I need a simple transcriber. Someone to take my notes and scribbles and to make sense out of them. To document what I’m trying to do.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Mostly. There’ll be some errands. Maybe even a little research, you know—investigative work. But any good journalism student should love doing some field work.”

  “I didn’t tell you I was a journalism student.”

  “No, you didn’t. But I know a lot about you, Felix Orlean,” he said, pronouncing my name correctly this time. “That’s why I put that old doll of mine on the door, I wanted to see if you were superstitious. I know about your father too, Justin Proudfoot Orlean, a big time lawyer down in Louisiana. And your mother, Katherine Hadity, was a medical student before she married your father and decided to commit her life to you and your sister Rachel who now goes by the name Angela in the part of London called Brixton.”

  He might as well have hit me over the head with a twelve-pound ham. I didn’t know that my mother had been a medical student but it made sense since she had always wanted Rachel to be a doctor. I didn’t know that Rachel had moved to England.

  “Where’d you get all that?”

  “And that’s another thing.” Lawless cut his eyes at the laptop on the tiny desk. Then he held up that educational finger. “No work that you do for me goes on the computer. I want to wait until we get it right to let the world in on our work.”

  “I’m not w-working for you, Mr. Lawless,” I said, hating myself for the stutter skip.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know
what you do for one thing,” I said. “And I don’t like people calling me at any hour of the night. You have your doors boarded up and you call yourself an anarchist. Some guy who looks like a street thug comes in to make some kind of report.”

  “I told you what I do. I’m an anarchist who wants to keep everything straight. From the crazed politico who decides that he can interfere with the rights of others because he’s got some inside track on the truth to the fascist mayor trying to shut down the little guy so he can fill his coffers with gold while reinventing the police state.

  “I’m the last honest man, an eastern cowboy. And you, Mr. Orlean, you are a young man trying to make something of himself. Your father’s a rich man but you pay your own way. He wanted you to become a lawyer, I bet, and you turned your back on him in order to be your own man. That’s half the way to me, Felix. Why not see what more there is?”

  “I can take care of my own life, Mr. Lawless,” I said. “The only thing I need from a job is money.”

  “How much money?”

  “Well, my rent which is five-fifty a month and then my other expenses. . . .”

  “So you need forty-two thousand, before taxes, that is if you pay taxes.” I had come up with the same number after an afternoon of budgeting.

  “Of course I pay my taxes,” I said.

  “Of course you do,” Lawless said, smiling broadly. “I’ll pay you what you need for this position. All you have to do is agree to try it out for a few weeks.”

  I glanced at the blow-up of Bakunin and thought about the chance this might be. I needed the money. My parents wouldn’t even answer one of my letters much less finance my education.

  “I’m not sure,” I said.

  “About what?”

  “The line you’re talking about,” I said. “It sounds like some kind of legal boundary. One side is law abiding and the other isn’t.”

  “You’re just an employee, Felix. Like anyone working for Enron or Hasbro. No one there is held responsible for what their employers may or may not have done.”

  “I won’t do anything illegal.”

  “Of course you won’t,” Lawless said.

  “I have to put my school work first.”

  “We can make your hours flexible.”

  “If I don’t like what’s happening I’ll quit immediately,” I said. “No prior notice.”

  “You sound more like a law student than a news hound,” Lawless said. “But believe me I need you, Felix. I don’t have the time to read every paper. If I know you’re going through five or six of the big ones that’ll take a lot of pressure off of me. And you’ll learn a lot here. I’ve been around. From the guest of royalty in Asia to the prisons of Turkey and Mexico.”

  “No law breaking for me,” I said again.

  “I heard you.” Lawless took a piece of paper from the ledge on the window behind him and handed it to me. “Over the next couple of days I’d like you to check up on these people.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing questionable, simply check to see that they’re around. Try to talk to them yourself but if you can’t just make sure that they’re there, and that they’re okay.”

  “You think these people might be in trouble?”

  “I don’t worry about dolls hanging from doorknobs,” he said. “They don’t mean a thing to me. I’m just looking into a little problem that I picked up on the other day.”

  “Maybe you should call the police.”

  “The police and I have a deal. I don’t talk to them and they don’t listen to me. It works out just fine.”

  4

  I wanted to talk more but Lawless said that he had his day cut out for him.

  “I’ve got to go out but you can stay,” he said. “The room next door will be your workplace. Here let me show you.”

  My new employer stood up. As I said, he’s a big man. There seemed to be something important in even this simple movement. It was as if some stone monolith were suddenly sentient and moving with singular purpose in the world.

  The room labeled STORAGE was narrow, crowded with boxes and untidy. There was a long table covered with papers, both printed and handwritten, and various publications. The boxes were cardboard, some white and some brown. The white ones had handwritten single letters on their fitted lids, scrawled in red. The brown ones on the whole were open at the top with all sorts of files and papers stacked inside.

  “The white ones are my filing cabinet,” Lawless said. “The brown ones are waiting for you to put them in order. There’s a flat stack of unconstructed file boxes in the corner under the window. When you need a new one just put it together.” He waved at a pile of rags set upon something in the corner.

  “What’s that?” I asked, pointing at a pink metal box that sat directly under the window.

  “It’s the only real file cabinet but we don’t keep files in there.” He didn’t say anything else about it and I was too busy trying to keep up to care.

  Through the window an ocean liner was making its way up river. It was larger than three city blocks.

  “The papers are all different,” Lawless said. “The legal sheets are my journal entries, reports, and notes. These you are to transcribe. The mimeod sheets are various documents that have come to me. I need you to file them according to the way the rest of the files work. If you have any questions just ask me.”

  The liner let out a blast from its horn that I heard faintly through the closed window.

  “And these newsletters,” he said and then paused.

  “What about them?”

  “These newsletters I get from different places. They’re very, very specialized.” He was holding up a thick stack of printed materials. “Some of them come from friends around the world. Anarchist and syndicalist communes in America and elsewhere, in the country and the cities too. One of them’s an Internet commune. That one will be interesting to keep tabs on; see if they got something there.”

  The big man stopped speaking for a moment and considered something. Maybe it was the Internet anarchist commune or maybe it was a thought that passed through his mind while talking. In the weeks to come I was to learn how deeply intuitive this man was. He was like some pre-Columbian shaman looking for signs in everything; talking to gods that even his own people had no knowledge of.

  “Then there are the more political newsletters. The friendlies include various liberation movements and ecological groups. And of course there’s Red Tuesday. She gathers up reports of problems brewing around the world. Dictators rising, infrastructures failing, and the movements of various players in the international killkill games.”

  “The what?”

  “How do you kill a snake?” he asked grabbing me by the arm with a frighteningly quick motion.

  I froze and wondered if it was too late to tell him that I didn’t want the job.

  “Cut off his head,” Lawless informed me. “Cut off his head.” He let me go and held out his hands in wonder. “To the corporations and former NATO allies this whole world is a nest of vipers. They have units, killkill boys Red Tuesday calls them. These units remove the heads of particularly dangerous vipers. Some of them are well known. You see them on TV and in courtroom cases. Others move like shadows. Red tries to keep tabs on them. She has a special box for the killkill boys and girls just so they know that somebody out there has a machete for their fangs too.”

  He said this last word like a breathy blast on a toy whistle. It made me laugh.

  “Not funny,” he told me. “Deadly serious. If you read Red’s letters you will know more than any daily papers would ever dare tell you.”

  I wondered, not for the last time, about my employer’s sanity.

  “She’s crazy of course,” Lawless said as though he had read my mind.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Red. She’s crazy. She also has a soap box about the pope. She’s had him involved in every conspiracy from that eyeball on the dollar bill to frozen aliens in some Vatican su
bbasement.”

  “So how can you trust anything she says?”

  “That’s just it, son,” Lawless said boring those pinpoint eyes into mine. “You can’t trust anyone, not completely. But you can’t afford not to listen. You have to listen, examine, and then make up your own mind.”

  The weight of his words settled in on me. It was a way of thinking that produced a paranoia beyond paranoia.

  “That sounds like going into the crazy house and asking for commentary on the nightly news,” I said, trying to make light of his assertions.

  “If the world is insane then you’d be a fool to try and look for sanity to answer the call.” Archibald Lawless looked at me with that great heart-shaped face. His bright skin and crown of thorns caused a quickening in my heart.

  “The rest of these newsletters and whatnot are from the bad guys. White supremacist groups, pedophile target lists, special memos from certain key international banks. Mostly it’s nothing but sometimes it allows you to make a phone call, or something.” Again he drifted off into space.

  I heard the threat in his voice with that or something but by then I knew I had to spend at least a couple of hours with those notes. My aunt Alberta was right about my curiosity. I was always sticking my nose where it didn’t belong.

  “So you can spend as much time as you want making yourself at home around here. The phone line can be used calling anywhere on the planet but don’t use the computer until I show you what’s what there.” He seemed happy, friendly. He imparted that elan to me. “When you leave just shut the door. It will engage all the locks by itself, electrically.”

  As he opened the door to leave my storage office, I asked, “Mr. Lawless?”

  “Yeah, son?”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Get what?”

  “With all this Red Tuesday, pedophiliac, white supremacist stuff how can you know that you should trust me? I mean all you’ve done is read some computer files. All that could be forged, couldn’t it?”