The City Under the Skin (4 page)

“It confuses me too,” said Wrobleski. “And I don't like to be confused.”

There was a fat golden barrel cactus, the size of a basketball, in a black enameled planter positioned next to the sofa. Wrobleski absentmindedly pressed his index finger against one of the hooked spikes, as if he were trying to draw his own blood.

“Knowledge is power, right?” Wrobleski said. “But there are two kinds of power, as I see it. There's one kind where you can make other people do what you want. That's what most civilians think of as power. But there's another kind, where nobody can make you do anything you don't want to do. That's better, if you ask me. But right now I haven't got either.”

Billy Moore was surprised by this admission. It suggested that Wrobleski wasn't quite the swirl of deranged impulses and killer instincts he was reputed to be. That he was prepared to admit to a degree of weakness and powerlessness only made him stronger in Billy's opinion, though he was well aware that his opinion counted for absolutely nothing.

“I've got a job for you, Billy,” Wrobleski said. “Or for someone like you.”

“What's the job?” Billy asked.

Wrobleski offered a deep sigh as his first attempt at a job description.

“It seems that Laurel here isn't the only one with these tattoos. And okay, I know every slut in the world's got tattoos nowadays, but not like these.”

Billy stopped himself from asking, “Like what?” He couldn't tell what the tattoos' defining characteristics were, but maybe that wasn't his business. Instead, he said, “How many women are we talking about?”

“You ask all the right questions, Billy. And I wish I knew the answers. The job is open-ended for now. But if I give it to you, it'll happen like this. You'll get a phone call from my man Akim. He'll tell you there's a tattooed woman who needs to be brought in. He'll tell you where she is. He'll have found her. He's good at finding things. You'll go get her and bring her to me. I'll do the rest.”

“It sounds too easy.”

“Yeah, doesn't it?”

“Will these women want to come?”

“Not necessarily,” said Wrobleski. “That's where it might get less easy.”

He looked away again, out through the glass of the conservatory, at a soft, broad, fading indigo sky, and at the city beneath, at an office block in the process of being demolished, at an Erector Set skyscraper rising stealthily beside it. Billy looked in the same direction and tried not to jump to conclusions.

“Is something bad going to happen to these women?” Billy asked.

“Something bad has already happened to these women.”

Billy was mystified. He knew he was supposed to be mystified.

“Look,” said Wrobleski, “unless you're a complete maniac, killing people really takes it out of you.”

He said it carefully, as though it were something he'd discovered only recently and hadn't completely understood as yet. He got up, walked out of the conservatory onto the roof terrace. Billy followed. He didn't want to be left alone with Laurel and the cacti and the relief map of Iwo Jima.

“I hear you're not a complete maniac, Billy, and neither am I, despite what you might have heard. Trust me. Or don't. It's all the same, really.”

Wrobleski fell into silence.

“So what happens next?”

“You go away,” said Wrobleski, “and if I decide you're the right man, then you'll get a phone call, and if you want the job you'll say, ‘Yes, I'd love to work for Mr. Wrobleski.' And if you don't want the job you'll say, ‘I'm going to have to turn down Mr. Wrobleski's kind offer.' But I don't think you'll turn me down, Billy. Any more questions?”

“Money?” said Billy.

“Money won't be a problem,” said Wrobleski.

“And why me?” Billy said.

Wrobleski didn't quite have an answer to that.

“Maybe I like the cut of your jib,” he said dismissively. “Or maybe you remind me of me. Isn't that the kind of shit people say in interviews?”

“Sure,” said Billy. “People will say anything in interviews.”

And then it was over. Wrobleski had no more to say, and he led Billy Moore down to the courtyard where his Cadillac was waiting for him. It had obviously been given some attention, since it was still wet and there was water on the ground surrounding it, and yet as Billy looked at the car, it didn't appear to be any cleaner than before: if anything, it looked dirtier. Was that possible? Was it intentional? Meanwhile, the SUV was so clean, so densely black, it seemed to suck in the light.

“Nice ride, I know,” said Wrobleski. “I've got a lot of nice things. I was serious about showing you my map collection sometime.”

“Great,” said Billy, and he hoped he managed to disguise his lack of interest. Maps: who cared? He got in his car, ready to drive back to where he belonged. He knew Wrobleski would offer him the job, and he knew he'd accept it, because he needed the money, and he already recognized that this might force him to accept much more as well. He also realized this might not be everybody's idea of staying out of trouble.

 

5. ZAK WEBSTER PUTS HIMSELF ON THE MAP

It was 6:30 on one of those long, restless city summer evenings, a time when Zak Webster could justifiably have closed up the store. Chances were there'd be no more customers today; there were few enough at the best of times. In fact, he could have opened and closed pretty much whenever he liked. Nobody was breathing down his neck. Ray McKinley, his boss, the owner of the business, and of much else besides, prided himself on a hands-off management style. He trusted Zak, which was perhaps only to say that he was well aware of Zak's overdeveloped sense of responsibility; and since the sign on the door said the opening hours were 10:00 till 7:00, those were the hours Zak kept.

The store was named Utopiates, a name that by no means said it all. It was an oblique reference to an Oscar Wilde quotation: “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.” But as Zak would tell anybody who'd listen, there were in fact a great many maps of Utopia, starting with the version in the 1516 edition of Thomas More's book, as well as any number of later engravings, woodcuts, prints, and so on.

That was the business Utopiates was in: selling cartographic antiques—maps, atlases, globes, navigation charts, the occasional mapmaking instrument, folding pillar compasses, snake-eye dividers. Some were no more than decorative curiosities, but the best of them were rare, exquisite, expensive, perhaps “important,” maybe even “museum quality.” It was a specialist market, perhaps too special by half, it sometimes seemed to Zak.

The store was a small, brown, oaky, two-roomed space with a basement for storage, in a quiet backwater of what was now known as the Arts and Crafts Zone, previously the red-light district, but transformed by population shifts, property development, and marginal gentrification. Neighboring businesses included an outsider-art gallery, a seller of French horns, a designer of one-off wedding dresses. None of these enterprises were conspicuously thriving, and neither was Utopiates.

For the time being, that was okay with Ray McKinley, who regularly made it clear to Zak that the store was the most minor and most trivial of his many, many business ventures. He had a mild enthusiasm for maps and antiques, so he'd bought the store on a whim, when he'd seen how desperate the previous owner was and how much he'd lowered the asking price. The deal included the premises, the stock, and Zak, the store's single, poorly paid employee; though Zak had no idea how long the current arrangement would last. For now the store remained open, but Ray McKinley insisted the value was in the site not the business. Before long the area's gentrification would peak, then he'd sell up and make a killing. Exactly where this would leave Zak had never been discussed, but the chances were that he'd be left jobless, and homeless too.

Zak lived above the store, in a small apartment made smaller by the excess stock kept there. This was the stuff that wasn't remotely collectible or important—mostly things they'd got stuck with while acquiring genuinely desirable items. There were boxes of out-of-date road maps, a job lot of school atlases, a few dozen cheap and cheerful illuminated globes. Zak made the best of living with the store's leftovers.

Having to find another job and another apartment would hardly be a novel experience for him, but he was tired of it, and in many ways this was the best job he'd ever had, probably the best he could hope for. He wasn't enjoying precisely the life or career he'd imagined for himself, but then he'd never been overburdened with ambition or specific goals. His education had been a patchwork of only marginally related courses: anthropology, nineteenth-century history, avant-garde film, museum studies, archival management, and, of course, cartography in various forms, including historical, critical, planetary, and radical.

It was hard to see what this had, or could have, prepared him for. Despite a certain scholarly manner, he wasn't any kind of academic; his interests were way too eccentric and personal for that—Leon Battista Alberti, eighteenth-century “dissected maps,” the debates surrounding “information primitives.” He wasn't going to study for a Ph.D. or write a book, and he was certainly never going to teach. And although there were days when he imagined himself as curator or custodian of some magnificent, highly specialized, and possibly clandestine map collection, he also realized this was pure fantasy. Most days he was content to think of himself as a map nerd, and map nerds ended up working in map stores—if they were lucky.

Now he sat at his desk and stared out the window into the street, his gaze as idle as a gaze ever gets, and when he saw what looked like a bundle of rags moving along the sidewalk, he needed a moment to realize what he was looking at. Naturally he knew the bundle wasn't moving under its own steam, that there must be somebody inside it, crawling along. There was still a small population of tattered street people in the area, but that didn't seem to be quite what he was looking at here. For one thing, these rags had obviously started out as fine fabrics, perhaps as a cape or velvet curtains. They were dirty and matted now, but they still had an air of ruined luxury.

The bundle came to a halt, was still for a moment, and then began to rise, as the person inside stood up. A head emerged, a woman's head, the face young but not youthful, drawn, with long hair the color of wet newspaper: she might have been beautiful once, but not recently. Her eyes looked up at the
UTOPIATES
sign and saw something hopeful there. She hugged the rags to her and walked toward the store.

Instinctively Zak got up from his desk. His first thought was to block the entrance, to keep out an undesirable, but he opened the door just a little, so he could speak to the woman, tell her—with as much emphasis as was required—to keep walking. But as he looked her in the eye, something small and compassionate stirred in him, and he felt he ought to do just a little more than that: give her some money, for instance.

The woman stared back at him hesitantly, suspiciously, but then she detected something benign and trustworthy in his face, and said, in a clotted, deliberate voice, “Would you help me? Can you?”

Zak assumed she too was thinking about money, and he felt around in his pockets, only to discover that he had an insultingly small amount of change.

She spoke again. “What is this? A clinic?”

“No,” he said. “It's a store.”

She looked horribly disappointed, though not surprised, as though this was only the latest in an endless series of disappointments. In fact, there was an emergency room not far away, and Zak was about to give her directions, but he never got that far.

The rags were evidently in place only because she clutched them to herself. The news that Utopiates wasn't a medical facility caused her to slacken her grip, and they fell all the way to the ground. Zak suddenly had a naked woman standing on his doorstep. She had a lean, pale body, grubby at the edges, the ribs prominent, the skin loose, but Zak hardly had time to take in the sight before the woman swiveled, turning her back to him.

Her back looked less naked than the rest of her. It was marked with tattoos: wild, incomprehensible lines and symbols that Zak first read as a meaningless accumulation of ink, a savage scribbling, and yet there was something compelling about it, something that suggested it wasn't entirely haphazard. He wasn't sure, but he thought it might just possibly be a kind of wild, ramshackle map, but the glimpse was brief, and then the woman turned again to face him, quickly pulling the rags up over herself. She'd allowed him a glimpse of something precious and secret, and that was as much as he was entitled to.

Unsure of what he'd seen, and why he'd been shown it, and to a large extent wishing he hadn't seen it at all, Zak stuttered that he could close up the store and take her to the emergency room if that was what she really wanted. She said nothing, but shook her head sadly.

Zak had no idea what to do next. He feared the two of them might stay like that for the rest of the night, perhaps for all eternity, without words or volition, but then he noticed a battered metallic-blue Cadillac parked a little way down the street: perhaps it had been there the whole time. Now it moved, traveling a hundred yards or so until it pulled up directly in front of the store.

The driver, a man in a beat-up leather jacket, pushed open the two front doors of the car before he got out. Zak watched him move swiftly and determinedly toward the woman, place one hand firmly on her arm, the other on her waist, and push her inside the car. It wasn't violent, it wasn't even rough, but it seemed irresistible. Certainly the woman didn't try to resist. Once she was inside, the driver slammed the passenger door shut after her, then looked up for a second and caught sight of Zak staring at him. Zak turned away, avoided eye contact, pretended lamely that he was checking something in the window of the store. He didn't dare watch as the man got into the Cadillac and drove away.