Square Wave (21 page)

Further back, there were a couple of pocketless carambole tables for defunct games like straight rail and balkline. The entire area had been shielded from the common eight-ball tables by a frosted glass partition, though Stagg could only see the indeterminate remains of it, and would have to confirm the fact later, with Emile, the Jenko who owned the hall.

The Jenkos were Slovenian transplants, but several generations past now, first to London in the 1920s, then to Boston and Halsley in the 1960s. They were an educated clan, mostly in law and medicine, though they were businessmen at heart. Emile himself had taken an LLB at Imperial, in London, where the broadest branch of his family remained. He never practiced, though. After returning to the States, he passed up the LLM or JD and went into business, with money his grandfather had made with a series of snooker halls in North London: Jenko halls, as they came to be called.

He opened one downtown, in this space, which originally housed a small factory. As a child he’d enjoyed the antiquated table games, dead like Latin, especially carambole, where the balls were few and even then unsinkable. He’d first learned them in the small London halls that carried those embalmed traditions forward. Cue-sport connoisseurs were their custodians.

Thanks to Jenko’s efforts, Halsley was home to a cadre of well-heeled enthusiasts, one already familiar with billiards. The glass partition, though, hadn’t been their idea.

Emile’s father, a doctor but also a businessman in medical supplies, had gotten some of his friends to frequent his son’s club. But the humble clientele jarred them visibly, so much so that they would rent out the entire hall for the night.

Emile put the partition in thinking they might come more often that way, since the whole hall would not have to be rented. They could treat it as a private club of sorts downtown, which was close to the banks but somewhat far from the best recreation. But even the mute, blurred presence of the eight-ball players turned out to be unbearable to them; they kept renting the whole hall for a single table.

The glass was functionless, then, except as decoration. Jenko had commissioned the frosting at some expense, for the way light refracted through the etched pattern: a coat of arms slashed with Habsburg quills, the only nod to Slovenia in the building. Lit from behind, it produced a vague illumination sharply articulated only along the clear shafts of the arrows, which gave them the look of being on fire.

The curtain that ran along the partition was almost always left open, mostly because both sides of the hall were rarely occupied on the same night, but also because when they were, the carambole enthusiasts would be of less benighted origins, and they felt no need for distance from the common eight-ball players. On nights when the common hall became particularly rowdy, though, the curtain was closed to discourage curiosity, which drink had a way of darkening.

Stagg was the first of the extended intelligence forces to arrive. The police had taped off the basement staircase and given the hall a first look, making note of potential evidence, dusting for prints. At the top of the stairs they stationed two men to watch over the place. They IDed Stagg and left him to examine the hall. Through the blown-out windows behind the stairs, he couldn’t make out the specifics of the damage. But its complexion was heavy.

The door was cold and damaged at the hinge. He wrenched it open. The room tasted of smoke, its wood base made acrid by phenolic resin. He stepped past the centerline of the hall, scanning the floor. Ambient sunlight fell from the street above, through the long narrow window frames set high against the wall. It was the only light there was.

He counted at least a half-dozen balls in various states of abjection. One was melted away into a hemisphere that had recessed itself into one of the long floorboards lying atop the concrete factory floor. Some of the boards were burned away, but many remained, at least in fragments, especially on the far side away from the bar. The “2” on the ball was partly effaced, the resin presumably subjected to extended and extreme heat.

Three other balls were similarly deformed, having been liquefied to varying degrees, one nearly completely, so that it was only a smudge on the floor, and another, a green one, only fractionally, so that it was like a standard ball with a flat spot, a bruised apple. There was also one that seemed abraded, as if something had scraped at it viciously, or immense jaws had seized it. Though the innards of the ball were rough, looking of raw marble, portions of the surface remained lustrous and perfectly enameled.

There were also those that were more than deformed, that neither a forensic worker nor the imagination could reassemble. Shards of resin, and flakes too, like arrowheads, were clustered where the pool cues and racks once hung but now lay crushed. This, near a pool table that was itself in shards and flakes. Green tangles of cloth were strewn across the mess of wood and metal like bandages, and it was only by the quality of the cloth, the fineness of the nap, that one could say it had once been a pool table at all.

The fire apparently hadn’t reached it, as there was no hint of soot or char. Stagg imagined the force that would have had to visit it, exert itself upon it, the outsize impact it would have had on this part of the room. Looking over the surrounding tables, the force’s vector—its destructive signature—was obvious.

The arrangement of the damage suggested a single detonation. He’d visited over a dozen venues like this now, which equipped him to make such diagnoses reliably. It would have altered atmospheric conditions for only an instant. The air would have been still immediately after. But the fleeting change had transformed every object within the walls. Fire finished the job, consuming the shattered tables, bottles, benches, and balls at a rate that was always accelerating, each object that succumbed to the flames increasing the odds and speed with which the rest would.

The firefighters managed to defeat the blaze quickly, which explained why much of the room’s contents were, if hardly intact, not ashes either. No one had died here. The officers confirmed this later, but Stagg knew by his nose. The air had much wood, resin, plastic, even glass in it, but not a trace of denatured flesh, or the iron of blood. Nor was there any of the usual visual evidence, no chunks of femur, pelvis, and skull; no encrusted circles of burnt fluid; no crimson spatter or mist on the walls.

The hall was struck at night, the fire put out in the morning, the investigation conducted at noon. The evening prior had been a busy one, Jenko would say. The tables had all been pushed up against the walls, so the room looked like a rectangular slab bounded on all sides by tables: in other words, a larger table, dwarfing the snooker table behind the glass.

Two hundred builders filled the space. The sliding glass doors of the partition were open, and on a small podium, Javier Celano, recently elected leader of the largest labor union in the state, spoke in resolute tones. Emile provided kegs of cheap lager gratis at these biweekly meetings, but on this night, they would not be tapped till after.

It was the substance of the talk, and equally Celano’s measured cadences, that kept them from the treacly beer. He was not himself a laborer, unskilled or otherwise; nor had he ever been. He was also not an American, but a Spaniard, and an Old Rosean, if dropouts could be counted. His father was a construction magnate based in Seville, with concerns extending as far north as Denmark and as far east as Russia. Jenko and Celano had become close in London, both scions, both sympathetic, genuinely so, to the swaths of people they felt their money had compromised.

Celano spoke in an English not of the workers, and his accent had an inscrutable transnational quality to it. He tried to limit the more ornate syntactic constructions, the rarified diction he was given to, but in moments of greatest concentration—as his mind was consumed limning a Gordian thought, and lacked the resources to dress it simply too—he would drift toward the baroque language natural to his station. When he was not probing in this way, though, and merely telling what he knew, what he’d settled on, his language was limpid and plain. By register alone, then, one could hear where his mind was.

Even when they turned tortuous, though, the urgency of his words was usually enough to win the workers over, however alien they found Celano in these moments, however little success they had in so much as parsing the grammar of his ideas. More than that, it was his grasp of construction in its global dimensions, the niceties of the trade, and indeed the joints where it might come undone, that overcame their bemusement and earned their interest.

On that evening, Jenko later revealed, Celano had urged them to make their ancient grievances visible by new, still-forming means, that this was the lesson in the air, the meaning of Halsley’s rot. The security they lacked, the static wages, the uncompensated injuries, the part-timing, the lack of training programs—by being pressed in familiar ways, these concerns barely registered as having anything like the gravity they did. There was protest, of course, and for a time that could hold the attention of the media, which could in turn hold a nation’s. But no one can stay attuned indefinitely. Protest becomes noise. In any case, given the rigors of redress—no less than the remaking of a country’s self-conception—it couldn’t happen at any speed. It let their case be tabled.

Strike could have had more bite than protest. But hadn’t it lost its teeth to the old cowboy, Reagan, in a battle over air traffic decades ago? Their own situation was even worse, since Celano’s workers were mostly unskilled. It was nothing to replace them. So the pain they could induce, the attention they could command, was also nothing.

Both tactics, strike and protest, had their place, Celano granted. They’d done much good for labor. But their own historical moment, he said, seemed to ask them to reach further, to discover what lay beyond. Or before, primordially.

Their problems might not be exclusively, or ultimately, with the
substance
of the law. They might be with the very manner of its making, the mechanisms of the state they’d been taught to call democratic. It was no longer clear, if it ever was, Celano intoned, that voting your interests and living with the results, come what may, was a conscionable course. Democracy—rule of the people—might not be so simple as majority votes.

That meant shifting the point of attack, or expanding it at least. More than that, it meant a fresh translation of
demos
. Everything would flow from that. Now, the alliances brought with it, the unities created, they would be unfamiliar, unstable. After all, a lot of people were busy reinterpreting
demos
for a new era, each to their own purposes—the rich, the poor, the devout. The liberal, the statist, the autocratic too. Why, after all, should democracy exclude certain forms of dictatorship? But who exactly would count as the
demos?
There were Athenian notions to revisit. It wasn’t so obvious who was what.

These alliances might also be as unavoidable as they were unfamiliar. There was overlap in these redefinitions, yes, but even more discord than agreement, so that wasn’t why. Really it was the act of redefinition itself that arrayed them all against the state, which was itself happy enough with the old understanding and doing its best to stamp out the shifts of meaning the factions were floating. As far as the government was concerned, they were the same. Revisionists.

The particulars were still shrouded, Celano said, but the mist was burning off every day. He said no more. Which was wise, Jenko thought.

Celano’s abstractions quieted the room. There was a coded charge to the words, though the code was neither one he had encrypted nor one he was necessarily equipped to decipher. A murmur came from the workers as Celano stepped down from the podium and re-entered the partitioned space. They clapped with calloused hands. The taps shot beer into chilled mugs. They returned the tables to their places and began to play games of nine-ball, in teams.

The footfalls came on slowly, the soft slapping of leather on stone. Stagg twisted toward the staircase: a descending pair of unshined wingtips, then seersucker trousers, then a heavy wool cardigan a deep green.

“You got that text too, yeah,” Ravan said.

“I did.”

“And what’ve you found?” he asked, surveying the damage casually.

“Looks like a police raid. Same contractors, at least. Same matériel.” Stagg pointed to a charred strip of tempered vinyl that appeared military grade.

These raids were sometimes as destructive as any wrought by the factions they were meant to subdue. The government had already exploded several hives of the agents of opposition and their alleged abettors, on grounds of national security. Of course, political license for this kind of violence wasn’t easy to acquire. It depended on the sustained appearance of sedition.

There were certainly clear-cut cases of it. Lately, though, the basis for these interventions appeared to have grown thinner, more preemptive, even reckless. It was consuming credibility, and questions of this sort were losing their paranoiac ring: How many involved embellished charges, only to justify the tightening of control? Worse, how many of these police raids were passed off as the work of factionalists, for the same purpose?

Jenko’s hall looked to be one of these confidence-eroding cases. As far as anyone knew, alongside more mundane discussions of procedural matters, only Celano’s almost philosophical talks went on at Jenko’s. There was no history of violence to point to, and no manifest incitement to it either.

In the wake of the attack, the government had the usual choices: claim that the evidence of violence, or the intention to it, had to remain classified—this did not ease anyone’s worries, not at this stage—drum up some evidence, or disclaim the attack and count it as internecine warfare between factions.

The angle to be taken on Jenko’s hall was not yet established, or anyway known to the two agents.

“The meetings might have been a bother to the government—to us, I mean,” Ravan said. “They’ll have to make the case for going this far, though,” he said, gesturing at the wreckage. “Or implicate some enemy of labor in this. A pretty sophisticated one, by the looks of it. Anyway, I’ve just come from talking to Emile, the owner, at the station.” He relayed the substance of the workers’ meeting to Stagg, as told by Jenko.