The Vaults (16 page)

“Come here to the codeboard. I want you to see how this machine works.”

Puskis walked over to the codeboard box and saw that it was composed of vertical lines of keys marked as either letters or numbers. They were arranged so that the initial column was letters, followed by four columns of numbers, followed by two of letters, then five of numbers. It was, Puskis realized with alarm—though not surprise—the pattern used for the files in the Vaults.

Ricks was talking again. “We just put together a demonstration, so this clearly doesn’t hold even one percent of the amount of information that the Vaults contains, but it does show you how it works. I think you’ll find it quite intriguing. What I want you to do is put in a theoretical file number in the A1000 series. What you do is depress one key from each column so that you end up with a file number. So just make one up and you’ll see what happens.”

Puskis approached the codeboard tentatively.

“Start off by pushing the
A
in the first column and then the 1 and the 0 and so on,” Ricks said.

Puskis depressed the
A
with his index finger; there was a click and the key remained depressed. He then pushed the 1 key in the next column, resulting in a similar click. He continued on until he had depressed the buttons A1000CR21027. When he was done, he looked up at Ricks, who was bouncing up and down on his toes. The Chief stood behind him, smiling benevolently.

“Now pull the switch,” Ricks said.

A switch, perhaps six inches long, was to the right of the columns of buttons. Puskis pulled it down, then jumped back as the machine began to hum and the spools began to spin, pulling the sheets too fast for Puskis to follow what was happening. It took less than a minute of the spools revolving and Ricks bouncing and the men below the stage watching in anticipation. Without warning, the spooling stopped, followed by a whining noise coming from a tall, rectangular box behind the right spool. Four sheets of paper dropped into a collection box just below the codeboard. Ricks picked up the pages and showed them to Puskis. On each was printed A1000CR21027, the code that he had punched into the codeboard.

Puskis looked at Ricks, then at the Chief.

“You’re wondering how it works,” Ricks said, though Puskis wasn’t actually wondering about that at all. “Come over here and look at this. It’s fairly simple, but it’s what makes the whole system work.” Puskis noticed that Ricks was profusely sweating from his forehead and temples. He wondered how important it was to the Chief for him to be impressed.

Ricks beckoned Puskis to the area between the spools where five sheets stretched across the gap. “Look here,” Ricks said, and indicated an area with a pattern of small holes, barely bigger than pinpricks. “This is it. This holds the code and allows the machine to find the correct records.”

Puskis brushed the tips of his fingers lightly over the holes.

“When you punch in the code, it pushes forward steel pins in a specific sequence. The spools spin until the pins all fit into the holes in a sheet. That will be the desired record. Each record has a unique pattern of holes that correspond to the filing system at the Vaults. Or, I should say,
will
have. But not too far in the future. Not as far as one might think.”

“You are going to put the files in the Vaults on this machine?” Puskis asked, talking slowly and precisely.

“Yes, well, no. Actually, let me show you the other side. Actually, you can’t really see it, so let me tell you how it works. See how the type on these sheets is raised? When the correct record is found, the sheets are heated and then pressed against paper that’s treated to turn black where it’s touched by the heated surface. It comes out looking like type on a page. Like the pages that you have in your hand.”

“But how, let me see, how does it work with a normal sheet of paper?”

“It can’t,” said Ricks cheerily. “It needs to be on this special metal. All the information in the Vaults is going to be transferred onto these sheets.”

Heart racing, Puskis looked over at the Chief. The Chief smiled.

“We have fifty machines for typing on these sheets. We’ll have one hundred and fifty people working in three shifts around the clock. We think it will take two or three years to transcribe all the documents.”

Puskis closed his eyes. My God, he thought, they’re trying to destroy the evidence.

Nora’s head rested on the flesh between Frings’s shoulder and his sternum. He gazed down at her tangled blond hair and the smooth back beneath it, rising and falling with each breath. They had made love in semiconsciousness, and she had fallen asleep afterward, and now he was hopelessly awake and wondering how to get out of bed without disturbing her.

The previous night was a reminder of how things had been at the beginning for them. He had returned from his meeting with Bernal to find her asleep on the couch, an open book spine-up on her stomach. She had listened with great interest as he told her about the meeting with Bernal and the impending meeting with the bombers. He watched her face, more beautiful without the makeup, brightening with excitement from the stories. This was the essence of their relationship in its best sense. She, entranced by the intrigue of his work. He, entranced simply by her—her beauty, her aura, the confidence she had as a star.

This morning he lay still, breathing shallowly so as not to disturb her, and wondered what it all meant. Was this the end of a period of discontent in a continuing relationship, or a brief instant where everything was as good as it could possibly be as their attachment eroded? He thought about the reefer in his coat pocket and the appeal of banishing these thoughts with the pleasant haze. He inched slowly away from her, eventually cupping her head in his hand and letting it down gently onto the pillow. She muttered something without actually gaining consciousness, and her regular breathing resumed. Frings rolled out of bed and walked naked to the kitchen to boil water for coffee.

He had finished a full pot by the time Nora came out to the kitchen. She was wearing a lavender silk gown and came over to kiss him at the table with half-shut eyes.

“That was nice last night,” she said, her lips close to his ear.

Frings nodded, and something in his manner made Nora straighten up. “Is something wrong?”

Frings looked up at her. “Don’t you keep your bedroom window locked?”

She nodded, her lips pursed in uncertainty.

“Because it wasn’t locked this morning.”

“That’s queer,” she said. “I haven’t opened it in ages.”

“I crack it sometimes.”

“To smoke.”

“To smoke. But I am absolutely conscientious about relocking it.”

“How can you—”

“I am conscientious about it because of who you are,” he said with a seriousness that made her pause. “It’s not locked now. Why isn’t it?”

“I . . .”

“Someone unlocked that window, Nora. It wasn’t me. It wasn’t you. Has anyone else been in here?”

“Oh, shit, is this some jealousy thing? Because, you know, if that’s an issue, then—”

“Of course not. Like you said, it’s queer. You have to be inside to unlock it, and if neither of us unlocked it, that means somebody else has been in here.”

“I think you’re getting all balled up over nothing,” she said. “Maybe it was Clarice.” The cleaning woman.

Frings hadn’t considered this possibility and it calmed him. The reefer was getting to him, he thought. He pulled her to him, his right hand bunched in her hair. They stood that way in silence, and Frings was overwhelmed with the feeling that this might be the last time.

Puskis was in the men’s bathroom at Headquarters. He cupped his hands under the tap and doused his face with the cold, amber water. The drops that stuck to his lips tasted like rust. His hat rested on the sink next to him, and he ran his wet hands through his thin hair, plastering it back against his skull. His skin was stretched tightly over his cheekbones, nearly translucent except for the darkness under his clear, focused eyes. He locked gazes with his reflection in the mirror, staring himself down—finding that a focal point helped him slow the thoughts that were threatening to overwhelm him.

The final fifteen minutes of the Retrievorator demonstration were lost on him. He knew what was happening, and no further explanation was necessary. They were going to take the records in the Vaults and would, by transferring them to the sheets that were used by that odd machine, thoroughly cleanse whatever information they felt was so threatening. The actual sheets of paper would be lost, with the commentary in the different colors of ink, the telltale traces of files that had frequently been handled—the dog-ears, the coffee stains, the unintentional marks with pen or pencil—and the pristine condition of those that had been all but forgotten. These were pieces of information that at times were nearly as valuable as the actual contents of the files. They would be lost forever. Worse, Puskis could see nothing that would prevent files from being falsified without any possibility of detection. Puskis had asked Ricks what would happen with the files once they were typed onto the new sheets, and Ricks had looked at the Chief, who had shifted uncomfortably then mumbled that they would be burned. The Chief said there would be no need for them, knowing that this statement would crush Puskis. And it would have crushed him, had he not already known the answer.

Now he realized that there was greater urgency. Once the conversion began, nothing would prevent them from starting with the most threatening files. According to the vague timetable that Ricks had indicated, Puskis had maybe a week to get what he needed, if, in fact, those files had not already
been altered. He needed to make headway, and the first step would be to talk to a person who might know what was going on. For the first time in nearly twenty years, Puskis did not feel that he could rely on the accuracy of the files, and this realization struck him with the force of excommunication.

For seventeen years Puskis had maintained an indirect relationship with the transcribers.
Transcriber
was not, actually, an accurate description anymore. The transcribers were initially—and this went back fifty years or more—the men who created the official records of trials from the shorthand taken by court clerks. As the technological advances in typewriting machines obviated the need for this step, the transcribers became commentators. They—as a rule, only four of them at any time—read over the transcripts of trials and the content of other sworn testimony and wrote comments on the events or people that they contained or referenced. They also produced the cross-referencing lists for each file that Puskis would then turn into an index with actual file codes to replace the names and cases indicated by the transcribers.

By tradition, each transcriber used a different color of ink, and that color was passed to a new transcriber in the instance of a retirement. The ink colors were black, red, blue, and green. In Puskis’s seventeen years as Archivist, there had been only one black transcriber, but two reds and two greens, and three blues. Puskis felt he had come to know the transcribers to an extent through the mountain of notes that he’d read over the years. The current red transcriber, for instance, was suspicious of names. He apparently harbored a theory that a number of people changed the form of their name based on the ethnicity of the people with whom they were dealing. So, for instance, a man with the last name Brown might be Braun for the Germans and Bruni for the Italians, and Brunek for the Slavs, Bronski for the Poles, and so forth. A name fetishist, the current red transcriber, Puskis thought.

But though the constant analysis of the written commentary on the records and the selection of files requested had rendered each of the four transcribers (indeed, eight total during Puskis’s tenure) distinct and tangible as individuals, Puskis had never met any of them. Staring at himself in the bathroom mirror, Puskis decided that he needed to introduce himself immediately.

The Transcribers’ Room was tucked toward the back of the fourth floor at Headquarters, among evidence-storage rooms. Stepping inside, Puskis felt
a rush of familiarity. It took him a moment to realize that it was because, like the Vaults, this room did not have the stink of cigarette smoke that was omnipresent in the rest of the building. The room was spare—bare white walls and a black-and-white-checkerboard tile floor. In the middle of the room stacks of files were piled on a square oak table. Fanning out from the table were four desks, and at each desk was a man, leaning over papers either reading intently or scrawling comments in one of the four colors of ink.

“Excuse me,” said Puskis. All four men looked up, apparently startled by the unfamiliar voice. “I’m Arthur Puskis.”

The man at the desk closest to Puskis stood up. He was the youngest and corpulent, his shirt untucked and his pants held up with suspenders. “Mr. Puskis?” he asked, the awe in his voice evident.

“Um, well, yes.”

The other three men were up now. Between them they defined the states that a body takes when deprived of physical activity. One, seemingly the oldest, was skeletal and stooped—not unlike Puskis’s own appearance. The second was not particularly fat, but even beneath his suit Puskis could tell that his body lacked muscular definition. He was like a sausage and his suit was the intestinal lining that held the meat together. The last had the frame of a large man but without any extra weight, so that it appeared that his suit was hanging from a rack rather than adorning a body. They all wore black suits and the dazed expressions of people for whom interaction is a rare and difficult endeavor.