The Vaults (13 page)

“Mr. Bernal, my name is Frings. I’m with the
Gazette
.”

Bernal colored momentarily, his mouth gaping to reveal little, yellowed teeth. And as quickly, the expression was gone.

“Mr. Bernal, I won’t take much of your time. I just wanted to get your comments about the strike and today’s police action.”

Bernal was wary. “Yes. Of course. Why don’t you come to my office and we can talk.”

The woman was now staring out the window with the others, and Bernal led Frings to a corner office, encased in glass. When they were safely inside and seated, Bernal said, still smiling, “What are you doing here?”

This caught Frings a little off guard since it seemed the answer was obvious. This brief pause seemed to unnerve Bernal for some reason, and he kept talking. “You’re here about the strike today, correct? The strike?” His expression was relaxed, even pleasant, but Frings would see sweat beading on his brow and glistening in his mustache.

“Yes, Mr. Bernal, the strike.” Frings wondered why Bernal needed to clarify Frings’s intent. Was there another story here, somewhere? “This is big news. Every paper will be covering it. I came up here to see if you wanted to give a statement. Pretty standard practice.”

Frings saw the tension leave Bernal’s posture, and it sent up flares inside him. Bernal started in on a statement about his company’s policies regarding the resolution of strikes. Frings dutifully took notes, his mind working on the puzzle of Bernal’s strange behavior. It was almost as if Bernal had been expecting a different . . . And then it made sense.

He interrupted Bernal midsentence. “You rang me the other day. We have a meeting—”

“Good Christ,” said Bernal, coloring again.

“This is balled up.”

Bernal nodded, running the fingers of his right hand back through his hair. He was keeping his face calm, but his eyes were wild.

“Listen,” Frings said, “we just go through with the interview. Then we forget the other part that just happened.”

“We don’t meet tomorrow.”

“Of course we do. Jesus. I interview people all the time. No way they trace anything back to this meeting.”

“But . . . ,” Bernal sputtered. It was hard to keep a smile while panicking.

“But nothing. Look, in a strange way this might actually work in our favor. Nobody’d ever think that I would be such a sap as to visit you in public if you were grassing. Might actually be the perfect cover.”

Bernal considered this unhappily. “Okay. I see there is a point to what you say.”

Poole and Carla stood in the shadows of an alley looking out on the chaos of the same street that Frings and Bernal watched from above. A layer of gray ash collected on Poole’s hat and the shoulders of his coat. Carla wore a scarf around her head and another covering her nose and mouth to filter the air. Poole had come here after his interview with Polly, expecting to have a quick lunch with Carla. Instead he had found her staying out of sight, watching as the strike she had organized was crushed by the police. They were both aware that the police here were mostly from the ASU and that the ASU took their orders from the mayor rather than the Chief. This, however, made matters worse if anything. The mayor was taking a personal interest.

“I can’t leave,” Carla said.

Poole could see only her eyes, but that was enough to tell him that she wouldn’t be convinced otherwise.

“You have to. They’re going to round your people up and toss them in jail. Someone needs to be outside, to get them out.”

She understood the logic, but Poole could tell that she was reluctant to abandon her people. They had talked about this before, about her willingness to put herself in harm’s way for the unions. “You have to have something you are willing to go over the top of a trench for.” She had that something. Poole wasn’t sure that he did.

“Don’t be stubborn. They need you to be smart.”

Two officers appeared at the mouth of the alley.

Shit
. “Go,” Poole whispered, and gave her a gentle push toward the opposite end of the alley. She ran, nimble, a good athlete. Poole stepped out to detain the officers, but they were not interested in Carla.

“Ethan Poole?” The officers had their sticks out. Poole nodded slightly, his eyes on their hands.

“Come with us, Mr. Poole. They want to talk to you at the precinct.”

Poole felt his pulse quicken with panic. How dim could he be coming right to Bernal’s front door? He had no doubts about what would happen
to him at the precinct. He raised his hands to shoulder height, showing his palms in acquiescence. The smaller of the two officers looked down at his belt, reaching for his handcuffs. With a boxer’s quickness, Poole snapped a punch, shattering the other cop’s nose. As the bleeding cop fell to his knees, his partner flicked his wrist, bringing the nightstick hard into Poole’s side, cracking a rib. Poole pulled his left arm close to his body to cover the point of pain and grabbed the front of the officer’s shirt with his right, pulling him forward and down to the ground. He kicked hard at the cop’s stomach and heard him groan. Then Poole felt a sharp pain in his spine as the cop with the broken nose cracked him in the back with his stick. He felt consciousness ebb momentarily. Turning, he moved closer to Broken Nose to cut off his swinging radius and caught a forearm in the mouth. Tasting blood, he leaned back, then brought his forehead hard into the officer’s damaged nose. The cop crumpled to the ground, unconscious. Poole turned now to the other cop, who was on his hands and knees. Poole reached down and grabbed the back of his shirt, then felt a sharp pain at the back of his head.

Leather chairs and desks were scattered at five points in the Vaults. Puskis always sat at the desk facing the elevators, using it as a barrier between the files and anyone entering the Vaults. Not that anyone ever came down except for the courier from Headquarters, and he—or they, since there had been several of them during Puskis’s tenure—never proceeded beyond the desk, where the files were dropped off and picked up.

The other four desks were placed in locations in the Vaults that, presumably, someone had thought would be convenient for some reason. One was more or less in the middle of the C section, where files on most homicides were kept. Another was in the Stable. The third was in the A section, where files on open investigations were kept. The final desk was in Q section, that eclectic mix of financial crimes, arson, and election fraud. Q section was the farthest from the elevators, probably the reason for the desk’s placement there.

None of these chairs had, as far as Puskis knew (and nobody would have a better sense than he), ever been sat in. He had never used one, and his predecessor, Abramowitz, had claimed to have never used one. That accounted for four decades or so of the chairs sitting empty. Yet the cleaning crew was just as diligent about keeping the chairs and virgin desks spotless as they were the files, so they looked as if they could have been purchased yesterday.

In some ways, the moment that Puskis fully comprehended that he was entering into an unfamiliar and potentially hazardous endeavor was when he took the files in the C4571 series to the desk in the C section and sat down in the green leather chair, which hissed with escaping air as, for the first time, it encountered human weight.

The earlier phone call had been from the Chief’s secretary, reminding him of the next morning’s scheduled meeting. He had wanted to ask several questions, but he had merely assured her that he would be there and hung
up. Then, because he had been more content during the years when the phone never rang, he pulled the cord from the phone.

The mystery surrounding the subject of this meeting with the Chief worked at the edges of his mind as he leafed through the files, the contents of which he knew by heart. His looking was merely a way to allow the information contained within to form into something more tangible and profound than his memories of things read at some points in the past.

The pictures, as upsetting as any of the thousands that he had seen, commanded the most attention. These matter-of-fact black-and-white documents chronicled the depths of human behavior. The bodies of men and women and, mostly, children, scattered among the tables at a small restaurant, blood pooling by each corpse. There was no question about their sleeping, Puskis reflected, because their bodies were in poses that clearly indicated fatal trauma. Other photographs showed the restaurant with the furniture now removed but the bodies undisturbed so that they looked as if they had been dropped out of the sky and come to rest, shattered, like baby birds. Close-ups showed the bodies and then the faces, many with their eyes open, staring without sight at the camera.

Looking at the head shots jarred something in Puskis’ memory, and he stood up from the desk and hurried down the aisles between the shelves toward his desk. Once there, he unlocked the center drawer of his desk and removed a folder that he brought back to the desk in C section. He opened the folder, and inside were the two photos that had been in the two DeGraffenreid files. He took the one that he knew to be DeGraffenreid and put it aside. This left the photo of the spectral man with sunken cheeks and the sideburns and the odd stare. He put it among the head shots of the victims he had before him. In this context it was so obvious that Puskis might have felt foolish if he were prone to assessing himself in such a way. This man clearly belonged in the company of the subjects of these other photos. It was the face of a corpse. Ellis Prosnicki, he thought. DeGraffenreid’s victim.

This realization did not seem to provide any particular insight other than that, if it was indeed Prosnicki, the person who had doctored the files had an agenda that Puskis ought to be able to deduce. It was a matter of ordering his thoughts correctly.

That evening, when he was ready to return to his apartment for the night, Puskis summoned the elevator. It arrived quickly, and Dawlish opened the door and stood in the threshold, waiting for Puskis to enter.

“Through for the day, sir?” Dawlish asked, as always.

“Mmm, yes, I suppose I am. Listen. Mr. Dawlish, I was wondering if I might ask you, well, yes, how should I say this? Mr. Dawlish, has anyone come down to the Vaults while I have been absent? Except for the courier of course. But anyone else? Anyone who you might have dropped off and left here for a period of time, perhaps?”

Dawlish stared at him miserably but did not speak.

“If you did, well, if you did drop someone off, I certainly would not blame you or consider you neglectful in your duties.”

These conciliatory words seemed to have no effect on Dawlish, who continued to stare at Puskis.

Puskis produced a pen and proffered it to Dawlish. “If you would, Mr. Dawlish, would you return this pen to my desk the next time someone comes down here while I am absent? Other than the courier, of course.”

Dawlish took the pen from Puskis’s hand and dropped it into the inside pocket of his uniform jacket. He was uncharacteristically silent during the short ride to the lobby.

Panos’s office reeked of sardines and his mustache glistened with oil. Crumbs littered the front of his wrinkled blue shirt, collar open, tie loose down to the second button. From some quality to his expression, something in the clear brown eyes, Frings knew things were afoot.

“What in the heaven happened to you?” Panos said, looking with distaste and amusement at Frings’s ash-covered clothes.

“I was at the strike.”

“I heard about that particular thing. You find the story there, ah?”

Panos played the idiot sometimes, usually when he was sitting on something big.

“I talked to Bernal. I think that’s got everyone beat. Everything else you could get by watching from the street.”

Panos smiled. “You took notes?”

“Of course.”

“Give them to Klima. He was down there, too. Doing what, that is what I don’t know. He can write the story from that and use your notes, too.” Panos focused his eyes carefully on Frings’s face. Frings knew that Panos thought he was going to throw a fit for losing a story that big. But he was high enough that it didn’t really seem to matter, and thinking about Panos waiting for him to get mad gave him a goofy grin that he couldn’t suppress. Panos’s eyes narrowed and he yelled to his secretary, “Woman, get me Klima.”

While they waited for Klima to arrive, Panos pulled two cigars out of his desk. Panos smoked a lot of cigars, but rarely offered one of his prized Cubans. It was a sign that he was in a particularly good mood. Frings watched as Panos sliced one end off each cigar, then made a thinner slice at the opposite end with a mock guillotine that sat on his desk. Frings had heard a story that Panos had used the guillotine on the pinkie of a guy named Cantor for reasons that were unclear. Frings had run into Cantor and had noticed a missing pinkie, but didn’t get confirmation on how he had come to lose it.

Panos leaned back in his chair, sucking on his cigar, then letting the smoke rise out of his mouth as if he were some sort of overfed dragon. Frings watched this, slightly dazed from the cigar on top of the reefer. Klima came in, looking frail and bald in a too big suit and food-stained tie. He had done his best to wipe off the ash from the strike, but he was still a mess.

“Qué pasa?”
he asked Panos.