The City Under the Skin (8 page)

He looked over to the other side of the room, where Akim was meticulously, if unenthusiastically, polishing the glass on a wall full of framed maps. Wrobleski couldn't trust just anyone with a job like that.

On the TV screen, Brandt was now unleashed. Before long Wrobleski was not so much listening as fighting to stop himself from riddling the screen with bullet holes. He heard Brandt utter formulations about shifting paradigms of urban policy, sustainability, streetscapes, environmental enhancements, social inclusiveness, synergy, metropolitan hegemony.

It was only after this had gone on longer than any sane human being could possibly tolerate that the interviewer decided it was time to bring things to a close. She talked directly, and a little too brightly, to the camera for a few moments, and as she spoke, Meg Gunderson (off microphone, but by no means off camera) looked across at Brandt and mouthed the words “You twat.”

“You know,” said Wrobleski to Akim, “the more I see of this woman Gunderson, the less and less I feel like killing her.”

 

12. IN AND ON THE GRID

The “sleazy watering hole” was named the Grid. Originally it had been a minor outpost of the telecommunications industry, a squat bunker of a building that housed an arcane and obsolete form of telephone exchange. Now it had been “repurposed” into an inky, angular, high-ceilinged bar, with tight pools of blue and purple light, and miscellaneous chunks of antique electronic equipment half-visible in dark recesses. It was the kind of place that casual, uncommitted drinkers would peer into and immediately realize, rightly, wasn't for them. There were TV screens above the bar, but no sports had ever been shown on them. The management preferred to screen classic noir and European avant-garde masterpieces, played in slow motion with the sound off.

In the corner, on a tiny raised stage, an extravagantly muscled, hairless man was playing an electronic keyboard. He looked as if he might have been a biker, maybe a laid-off steelworker, maybe a gay bodybuilder. His repertoire heavily favored Satie, Philip Glass, and Stockhausen. He called himself Sam, though nobody thought that was his real name, and in any case, few people had ever said to him, “Play it again.” He nodded to Zak and to Marilyn, though it was a general rather than a specific greeting.

“That's Sam,” said Zak. “They say he used to be a cop. Whether a good cop or a bad cop, I'm not sure. One of those ‘profiler' guys, I think.”

Otherwise the crowd was a mix of hipster, nerd, and borderline-criminal element. The woman behind the zinc-topped bar looked like a ruined Bettie Page, something both reinforced and contradicted by a tattoo of Bettie Page on her forearm. Zak and Marilyn took up places at the bar and ordered drinks from the “special” cocktail menu. Something celebratory seemed in order. Nothing quite brings people together like being beaten up at the same time, in the same place, by the same guy. The drinks came, in elegant, conical cobalt-blue glasses, though the bases were severely chipped.

“This is where you come for kicks?” Marilyn said.

“One of the places.”

“And what else do you do for kicks, Zak?”

“Oh, you know … I read, I watch movies, I walk. Actually what I like best is urban exploration.”

“Yes?”

She didn't seem as impressed by that as she had been by his knowledge of maps. He tried to explain.

“Urban exploration: investigating the city, creative trespass, going where I'm not supposed to, getting into abandoned structures, factories, closed-down hospitals, derelict power stations. You know?”

“So you spend all your workdays dealing in representations of places, and you spend your free time exploring actual places.”

“Does that sound weird?”

“Not to me. What do you think I was doing the other night when I found Utopiates? Walking, looking at the city, taking pictures.”

“A woman after my own heart,” Zak said, and immediately felt like a fool. At least he hadn't used the word “soulmate.”

Without being asked, the bartender delivered two bags of ice, suitable for the care and treatment of black eyes. Zak remembered why he liked this place so much.

“Yeah,” he continued, “on my days off, I get in the car, go to some disused flour mill or iron foundry or whatever, and you know, just poke around.”

“You have a car? You don't look like a car owner.”

“How do car owners look? It's just a company car, a big brown station wagon, good for hauling stock and not much else.”

“But still,” said Marilyn, “it creates possibilities.”

Zak took a moment to consider what these might be.

“You got any tattoos, Zak?” Marilyn asked.

“No.”

“Ever thought about it?”

“Not really,” said Zak. “I wouldn't know what to get. It's a big commitment. Not that I'm afraid of commitment.”

“How about a tattooed map?” Marilyn suggested.

“Even bigger problem. Of where?” he said. “Atlantis? Pangæa? The Batcave? And I definitely never thought of having one on my back.”

They suckled on their drinks.

“We got beaten up,” said Marilyn, “just because of something we saw.”

“I don't think the guy even knew that you saw it until you told him. In any case, I reckon you got beaten up because you hit him with your backpack.”

“It seemed like the right thing to do,” she said. “So I guess we're not going to call the cops, are we?”

“No,” Zak agreed. “Calling the cops would involve telling them what I saw, and according to the guy who beat me up, I didn't see anything.”

“But doesn't that kind of make you want to tell everybody everything?”

“Not really,” said Zak. “And I still don't know what I saw.”

“Not quite true,” said Marilyn. “We know what you saw, we just don't know what it means.”

“Now you're starting to sound like me.”

“And where do you think that poor woman is now?”

They both knew it was an impossible question to answer, but Zak suspected it wasn't quite a rhetorical one. He felt she was testing him, seeing how his imagination worked.

“Oh, I'm sure she's living a life of quiet contentment somewhere in the countryside,” he said dryly.

“Or maybe she's lying dead in a ditch,” said Marilyn. “Either way it would be good to know.”

“Would it?”

“Yes. Don't you feel some responsibility?”

“Not really,” Zak admitted.

“Some basic human concern?”

“Well yes, okay, maybe a little of that.”

“Then don't you feel we ought to do something?”

“Like what?”

“Maybe track down this guy and his Cadillac, see where he lives and who he is. Find out what he did with that woman.”

“Are you serious?”

“Well, do you have a better idea?”

Zak had several, and none of them involved tracking down a Cadillac and its violent driver, to who knows where, in order to find a tattooed homeless woman who might not want to be found. He didn't see how this could lead to anything other than another beating. At the same time he didn't want to destroy the feeling of connection he had with Marilyn, and he certainly didn't want her to think he was a wimp.

“Look, Zak,” Marilyn said, “you could help me on this. You know about maps, you know parts of the city that I don't. I could really use your help.”

The idea of being a help to Marilyn, even the idea of being “used” by her, did have a certain appeal.

“I like to help.”

The muscle-bound keyboard player was tinkling some unexpectedly conventional cocktail piano, a little Sinatra, and he was even singing, in a surprisingly sweet, light baritone. The lyrics insisted that love is the tender trap, and Zak was happy enough with that sentiment, but the line that really spoke to him was the one about hurrying to a spot that's just a dot on the map. Most places are a dot on some map or other; some dots are bigger than others, and sometimes the size of the dot bears no relation to the importance of the place. In any case, there are very few you really need to hurry to. He wondered if the universe was sending him a message, and if so, what it said. He was pretty sure the sensible thing to do was go home and stay out of trouble. And after a couple more drinks he did go home, alone. No surprise there; and besides, Marilyn said she had to get up early the next morning. She had to see a woman about a tattoo.

 

13. SUIT

Billy Moore's parking lot, early morning, the air pigeon-gray with haze, the lot empty except for his two trailers. There were no cars there because a dump truck was currently depositing a load of white one-inch pea gravel at the lot's center and a small gang of day laborers were waiting with shovels and rakes. Billy Moore stood in the street watching, next to his Cadillac, with his daughter beside him: a man in a leather jacket, a girl in a camouflage hoodie and graffiti-patterned sneakers. Quite the family group, he thought. Billy Moore: landowner, entrepreneur, patriarch. Carla Moore: heiress.

“How's it going, Sanjay?” Billy shouted to a young man in a short-sleeved pink shirt with a crimson bow tie, black suit pants, shoes glossy as a freshly buffed eggplant, who was supervising the laborers and largely being ignored by them. Sanjay raised two overoptimistic thumbs.

“Who's Sanjay?” Carla asked.

“He's my employee,” Billy said, pleased though not yet comfortable with the term. “The world's best-dressed parking attendant. He's from one of those loser countries that had to change its name, used to be a student back home, now he's here trying to better himself, paying his way through college. Eventually I'll get him a little hut with a chair and a baseball bat in case of trouble. He'll collect the money, keep an eye on the cars, and he can read his textbooks or whatever when things get quiet.”

“Like all great plans it's really simple,” said Carla.

“You know, sarcasm is really unattractive in a twelve-year-old.”

“I don't do it to be attractive.”

A part of Billy was still fretting gently about having hit the guy and the girl at the map store. It had been necessary, sure, but it hardly fell within the boundaries of keeping out of trouble, let alone going straight. And behind that, there was a more shapeless kind of fretting about what Wrobleski was going to do with Genevieve and maybe Laurel, and the other women he might be told to haul in. It was better to be concerned with something practical and uncomplicated: the graveling of a parking lot.

“You really think you're going to make a fortune in the parking business?” Carla asked.

“Yes and no.”

“Then why?”

“Let me explain,” said Billy, thinking it was no bad thing for a man to explain himself to his daughter. “Look, I know this isn't the most desirable bit of land in the world. But that's the whole point.”

“Yes?”

She walked deliberately along one edge of the lot, as though she were pacing it out. Billy found himself trailing after her, explaining.

“Yeah, see if you own a nice piece of land, something with grass and trees on it, or a nice old building, and then you want to develop it, put a big new building on it, well then, people get all upset because they think you're screwing up the environment or something. But if you own a parking lot, well, everyone thinks the environment is pretty screwed up already. Everybody says, ‘It's just a parking lot; anything's better than that.'”

“Maybe,” said Carla, less than convinced.

“So that's what I'll be doing. I'll run this place as a parking lot for a while, but then at some point I'll sell it on to a developer who wants to build some butt-ugly apartment block, and it'll be easy to get planning permission because everybody says, ‘Well, it's a butt-ugly apartment block, but at least it's not a parking lot.' And then I take the profit from that deal, buy another parcel—”

“Parcel?”

“Yep. That's what they call it, a parcel of land. Then I'll make another parking lot and start again.”

“So we'll be moving?” said Carla, a flare of alarm in her voice.

“That's the beauty of a mobile home,” he said, as reassuringly as he could. “In the meantime, I'm trying to make it a really good, secure parking lot. There's a crew coming this afternoon to put up a fence. And I've got a chance of a city contract. A subcontractor wants to park his trucks here while they're working on the Platinum Line. How about that?”

“Kudos,” said Carla blankly.

A fast-food box blew across the street toward the lot. Carla stomped on it, then picked it up, doing a little light housekeeping.

The dump truck was ready to depart. Sanjay was shouting something incomprehensible to the driver, and Billy watched the guys with the shovels and rakes as they began to spread the gravel. They were working a lot harder and with a lot more enthusiasm than he'd have been able to muster.

“And does this all lead to riches and luxury and world domination, Dad?” Carla asked.

“It leads to me being able to live with my daughter,” said Billy. “That's the main thing.”

She looked at him with a seldom-seen sweetness.

“You know, Dad,” she said slyly, “if you're going to be an entrepreneur, you might want to lose the leather jacket.”

“Yeah?”

“You don't want to be less well-dressed than your parking attendant.”

He could see her point.

“Yeah. I can see you in a really nice suit,” said Carla.

“Pinstripe?”

“No,” said Carla, “pinstripe is way too obvious. I see you in elephant gray, exposed stitching, two-button, notched laps, front flap pockets, side vents, vermilion lining.”

“You really see me in that?”

“Yeah.”

“You sure you don't just want a different kind of dad?”

“I want the same dad, I just want him to look good.”