The Intuitionist (28 page)

“They have to do what they can to keep your story under wraps until they have it.”

“Otherwise they’re screwed. Chancre can spin it any way he wants. Even from his hospital bed. The rumor escaped anyway. ‘Another Intuitionist hoax.’ My sources tell me he’s already got a press conference scheduled for Monday. ‘If my opponents have the black box, let them show it to us.’ Put up or shut up.”

“Where is it?”

“Exactly.”

“Your hand.”

“They nabbed me right outside the office,” Ben Urich says, wincing for a moment in recollection. “I put up a fight, I did my
darndest but the next thing I knew they had me in the back of a car. They started to break my fingers one by one. It was two guys, two blockheads. Trying to come off like mob guys, but I knew they weren’t mob. Could tell by the shirts. They were corporate boys, wore the downtown uniform right down to their cotton oxford shirts. Mob guys, Shush’s boys, they got their own style. Buy the same expensive suits their bosses wear, with the same tacky lapels, and their shirts are cheap blended fabrics. Get them all from the same store—Finelli’s on Mulberry.”

“They broke your fingers.”

The pink fingertips at the end of the cast wiggle. “Last Saturday. They got me right outside this office and got tough, telling me to lay off the story or else. Messed up my hand—my writing hand, mind you—and dropped me off at my apartment like I was their prom date. To send me a message. But then I remembered the shirts and started doing some legwork.”

“You found out they were Arbo.” Of course, of course.

“I got out some old surveillance photos I took a few years back. When they started selling their new undercarriage brakes to overseas firms, bumpkins who didn’t know that they hadn’t been approved in the States yet.” He places the dime on the desk and rummages through another drawer. “The pictures are here somewhere,” he says. “Here they are.” He flips through a stack of glossies. “I found the men pretty quickly. That’s them leaving the office with the rest of Arbo’s muscle. Right there.”

She is afraid to look. It is a grainy black and white photograph capturing one minuscule segment of city. Five solid men stand around a dark sedan. She angles the photo beneath the lamp, sees her hands are shaking and commands them still. “Jim and John,” she says.

“You know them?”

“They were in my apartment last Friday. Searching it.”

“Makes sense, considering what’s in the Fulton pages our anonymous mailer sent to them.” He juggles the dime in his good
hand, gathering his courage for another go at his favorite pastime. “Jim Corrigan and John Murphy. On the Arbo personnel files, they’re listed as ‘consultants,’ but the police have jackets on them. Breaking and entering, aggravated assault, industrial espionage, what have you. United has Shush’s boys and Arbo has these guys. Jim’s even got a murder charge under his belt, but Arbo’s lawyers got him off. You remember the LaBianco case a few years back?”

“Who’s this?” She taps the photo. Her hands do not shake.

“That’s Raymond Coombs. Another ‘consultant.’ Mostly does strongarm work for them because he’s a big colored guy and intimidating. Wait a minute—I think I have a better shot of him.” He shuffles through the photos. It is a head shot. The man’s eyes look off to the left, soft and lost. “You know him?” Ben Urich asks.

“He told me his name was Natchez.”

“Wouldn’t want to meet him in a dark alley, from what I’ve read. One tough customer. Guess he’d have to be—a colored man working in a white outfit. Like you, I guess.” The dime is in his hand, inviting, taunting. “But I don’t know why I have to tell you all this. With what you appear to know, I would think this old news.”

She can’t think. Asks Natchez’s photograph a question.

“Because your name is in his notebooks. You’re the link.”

“I don’t …”

“Look back in the drawer. From my photos of the Fulton pages sent to Arbo.”

Underneath the pinup calendar are more photographs. She holds them under the lamp. Her head hurts.

Ben Urich decides to go for it: tosses the dime into the air. “Wasn’t easy getting these, let me tell you. It’s on that page, in the margin,” he says. His hand darts. It snatches the dime.

She sees her name.

“Heads,” Ben Urich says.

Lila Mae Watson is the one
.

“Now maybe you can tell me what that means,” Ben Urich says.

“Hey, can we get in on this?” John Murphy asks. “Or do we need, like, an engraved invitation?” Jim and John stand behind them, just a dime’s throw away. Jim leers at them, John has his hands on his hips as if mildly vexed. He says, “Because we’ve come a long way and it would be downright rude for you to turn us away.”

She runs. Jim lunges for Ben Urich, who has been jerked out of his suave recline. As he falls back on the desk, he aims one foot at the back of his chair and launches it, skidding on its wheels, at the legs of John, who stumbles in his pursuit of Lila Mae and smashes his head into the corner of a desk. Which leaves Ben Urich pinioned on his desk with Jim’s fingers on his neck. Ben Urich takes his lumps. Ben Urich always takes his lumps.

The elevator’s door opens, conjured from tranquil quiescence, the vehicular ether, by Lila Mae. She slams her palm against the Lobby button (black mottled with gray, sure and firm plastic, Arbo Floor Button, Motley Black, City Series #1102), sees John emerge, rubbing his head, from around the partition, she reaches for the Door Close button (initiating a signal to the selector in the machine room a hundred feet above through the amiable copper of the traveling cable inside the Arbo Router, City Series #1102) and leans against the dorsal wall of the Arbo Executive. John does not pick up the pace. He sees the black rubber lip of the elevator door start its progress across the entrance of the cab. He nods at Lila Mae and pivots towards the fire doors.

* * *

It is not difficult to outrun an elevator if the competition is only a few floors. The elevator moves deliberately through the shaft at a speed approved, after tense summit hours, by both the Department
of Elevator Inspectors and the American Association of Elevator Manufacturers. The box is safe, but the box must also feel safe when the passengers observe the doors slide shut and they dematerialize into the nether space of the shaft. As they lose their world and gain another. But Lila Mae does not see her pursuer when she runs out into the bright fluorescence of the ground floor. It is not difficult to outrun an elevator, but a recent head injury can make it difficult, particularly when careering down from cockeyed landing to cockeyed landing.

Lila Mae jumps over the legs of Billy the night watchman, who is out cold on the clean white tile, a navy-blue porpoise. She gains the street. Behind her, she hears the stairway doors slam open. On the other side of the street is the Department sedan. She would have time to get in the car—the keys are in her hand right now, cool and solid—but the automobile is boxed in by a large van, out of which hunched colored men ferry clean tablecloths into the service entrance of Ming’s Oriental. Instinctively she jets right, and makes it a few steps before she realizes that left is where the populated avenues are, the theater crowds and cops. But she’s already committed. Calculates her lead on John: not much. She jumps right, into a doorway that opens up to steps. Wants to get out of plain sight before he reaches the street. Too bad it’s only a few doors down from the
Lift
building and an obvious refuge. Unseen above her head, elegant loops of red neon declare,
HAPPYLAND DIME
-
A
-
DANCE
. She’s up the stairs.

Lila Mae hears music.

She pushes against the scratched swinging doors at the top of the dirty staircase and lets the music out.

She walks slowly, like one who emerges from a downpour, acclimating herself to sudden warmth and the receding storm. She barely sees the two bouncers, two gorillas in lime sports jackets, who perch on metal stools by the door. Thick black mustaches shrub beneath their nostrils, intrepid vegetation on petrous faces.
They nod at Lila Mae and do not speak. Their elbows rest on their knees, they stare at the crack between the doors. There is no need to keep her out.

On a round wooden platform at the far end of the room, so distant as to be a distant city on the horizon, the conductor’s arms glide. His back is to the dancers, and all are left to imagine his face from the stringy gray hair drooping unruly over his jacket collar. The tails of his tuxedo jigger. He waves his hands through humid air and the musicians’ eyes flit between the sheet music and his rapier’s tip, the incisions he makes in the humid air. They do not look at the dancers either, at their languid movements, the inevitably perverted manifestations of their work. For they understand that the dancers are flesh and weak and can never live up to what the musicians deliver from their gravid instruments. Understanding that something is always lost when it comes to human beings.

The men who do not dance sit along one wall, in a line of red seats that have been retrieved from the rubble of a demolished theater. In opera seats, one seat or two or three between them, they watch the dance floor, regretting incidents. The women here have been instructed against aggression, the hard sell. There is no need—these men, in their threadbare suits, choking on fat neckties, with their broken postures, are easy sells. The management knows that they scurry here out of the rain with ideas and will approach, in due time, the women when their moldy ideations have settled on a suitable vessel. The women have sifted through bargain racks in bargain districts, chosen polka-dot prints and obscure flower patterns. Fat arms and thin arms, swollen thighs and emaciated necks. The men choose from the bargain racks. The music urges and a man chooses a woman and they dance for a dime.

She looks at the door. John has not stabbed the bouncers yet. The bouncers stare at the doors, their backs to the dancers. They reserve their attention for manic bruisers and juiced-up hopheads
who do not understand the nature of this particular establishment. She can envision John mangled at the bottom of the stairs, where all the rough trade ends up. Unless, she thinks, he kills the gorillas or incapacitates them, distracts them with two slabs of raw beef.

He is the only colored gentleman waiting to dance. He watches the dancers, the aloft couples, through fixed eyes. His suit is shiny, returning light in patches on his elbows and knees. It is an old suit. He does not see her until his dry hand is in hers and his arm sockets surrender to her tugging. He is up on his tentative feet, led by her to the dance floor.

The first song, caught halfway through, swiftly indoctrinates them. They are new to each other. Stiffly, gingerly, he places his arm around her waist, the other clasps her hand. She is rigid. Their feet obey the music and she fears he will fall, he is so frail. His gray and black hair is glued to his scalp by punctilious application of grease, a stream of static waves. She understands it is the style he has preferred for years, decades. His hair gradually falling into gray, as if age were the beckoning bottom of the shaft. Dust and mice. He smells dimly of smoky cologne. His pinstriped suit is patterned with crimson lines alternating with gray lines. Her partner is thin and disappearing. A ruby flash of handkerchief pokes from his chest pocket, perhaps at one point the same color of the suit but it has not faded, now a flare in her eye, an echo of finer times and better circumstances.

She does not know this song. The other dancers do, or pretend to, marshaling limbs and hips in a way she has never understood. Like the rest of her brethren in the Department, she does not like to dance. He leads. His arm braces her back. His hand is rough in hers, a working man’s hand, crenellated by toil. She remembers her childhood chores, running out with a bucket to the outside pump. It has been a long time since she worked with her hands. He looks up at her. His skin has a reddish tinge, maybe some Indian in there, maybe he’s from the Caribbean. First generation.
Around them the dancers are balloons, directed by unseen currents, slow and bright in this dry refuge, a panoply of trajectories. They are loose, cut a rug. The women are pros, the men driven. The men think, this is the last night on earth and I am spending it in the arms of a beautiful woman. The women are not necessarily beautiful, but anything is possible. The women count dimes, ponder the bills waiting on top of the icebox. The bills are gratified a dime at a time, steadily.

Her face is not painted like the other women’s, but he doesn’t seem to mind. His teeth are amber and cracked. He leads, she follows his lead and looks at the bouncers, who have not moved. The bouncers stare at the doors like she stares at her partner’s scalp: into blankness. His ears are brown and pink, a baby’s ears, and him so old. Hairs stick out.

The first song ends. He looks up at her and then digs in his pockets for coins. The fare. She shakes her head. The next song begins and he holds his hands open to her: Shall we? Her partner likes this slower tempo. His step is more confident, his grip a pinch. It reminds him of another song.
It’s our song
, calcified by incident into pure memory. It’s a powerful substance, pure memory, it irradiates. (She does not hear the commotion at the door. The bouncers have beaten an interloper, someone who did not understand what this place is.) Who is she now to him: his wife, his daughter, that old sweetheart, all lost now. What remains of them is this, this song. Over his shoulder, the other dancers reenact their elemental dramas. Arguments over nothing. Incandescent lovemaking. Who are they to each other, the women who work here (blistered feet, down payments on better futures), the men who come here with loose change (what is lost will be regained). The conductor’s back is turned, his arms sprites.

Who is he to her? A ghost. She asks her partner, who is not her partner now but someone who is dead and will not answer except in what remains of him, his words, “Why did you do it?”

“You’ll understand.”

“I’ll never understand.”

“You already do.”

Another mid-tempo number begins. The ballroom is appreciative. Without knowing when, she has taken the lead from her partner and now she guides their steps. His eyes are closed and she sees the small brown bumps on his tight eyelids. It is safe in here in the eye of the storm. Outside, down the stairs, out on the street, the city retreats under angry wet assault, high pressure. Low spirits out in the city tonight. It came unexpectedly. The news said a little rain, that’s all. Not this. The sewers are full, the gutters are drowned and disgorge litter, doctor’s bills and bank statements, they float higher, to the sidewalk levees and over them. The citizens pull the shades back and wait for the end. Lobbies and delicatessen floors wet now.