The Vaults (23 page)

McAdam disavows any knowledge of his parents, and, indeed, many of his victims have questioned whether such a man as McAdam could actually spring from human loins. The speculation of experts on matters such as these suggests that he was the child of a prostitute named Ada Toddle. The father could have been nearly any of the men who worked the river wharfs and visited the professional ladies who plied their trade there. Limited time spent in an attempt to identify anyone named McAdam working on the wharfs during the appropriate period—approx. 1885–87—has been unsuccessful.

Regardless, Whiskers McAdam was one of the legion of street urchins who haunted the Hollows and upper Capitol Heights before the Turn of the Century. His first City incarceration occurred at the age of eleven, though the file from this incident—the robbery and beating of a man by a gang of six young boys—indicates that he was well-known to the police even at this tender age. His first murder is thought to be the stabbing death of a procurer named St. Jean when McAdam was thirteen. There began an unmatched campaign of violence that led to McAdam’s control, personally and without thugs, of twenty square blocks in Little Lisbon and the western Capitol Heights. We have previously attended to the deaths of many of the figures that McAdam removed on his way up the ranks: Cerone, Coehlo, Kaladze, Bauer, and others. A greater number were maimed or simply intimidated by McAdam’s violent and unpredictable nature.

The nickname Blood Whiskers is commonly thought to refer to his pronounced, red whiskers. This may account for the duration of this moniker, but the truth behind the story is more sinister and appalling than commonly believed. It stems from an incident in which Gheorge Kaladze’s brother and three other hoods from deep in the Hollows had ambushed McAdam in an alley behind the pub run by Sally Bannard. The four had at him with chains and pool sticks, eager to exact revenge for Gheorge’s murder. Witness accounts varied, due to the astonishment and horror that common citizens feel when observing such a spectacle, but it is clear that McAdam brutally dispatched all four men with the use only of his hands, feet, and mouth. The blood from his savage bites, according to witnesses, poured from his mouth and dripped from his saturated sideburns. Hence the name Blood Whiskers.

Morning light filtered through the blinds, illuminating strips of Poole’s naked body as Carla applied salves to his lacerations and ice to the bruising around his ribs and groin. As she worked, he told her about the previous day’s work and the impossibility of getting into All Soul’s and the abandoned boys at the orphanage. She listened patiently, reacting occasionally when he flinched from some sudden pain.

“You think you’re going to find Casper Prosnicki?”

Poole took in a sudden breath as the ointment stung a raw spot on his shoulder. “I guess I am. But I’ll tell you, I’m worried about his mother.”

“Why is that?” Carla was kneeling above his head, rotating his shoulder, probing for a catch in its motion.

“That place. All Souls’. She got out of there somehow. But I have no idea how she could get back in. That place is locked tight. It’s crawling with ASU bulls.”

“I wonder,” Carla said, stopping her work. “Do you think they always have all those cops there? Because if they do, you have to wonder why. At a women’s asylum? It doesn’t make sense. And if those cops aren’t always there, it means that they’re putting up extra security because she escaped. Why do they care so much?”

“Maybe the boy knows something.”

“Or maybe the idea of people escaping from that asylum scares them. But it can’t be because they are dangerous. Lena Prosnicki could barely tie her shoes, much less hurt anybody. There must be something else.”

“Maybe she knows something,” Poole said.

“Maybe they
all
know something, Ethan. The point is, what could it be?”

Poole grunted as she got back to work. To change the topic, he asked, “Did you drop the photos off at the
Gazette
?”

“Of course.”

“Maybe I should give him a call.”

“Maybe.” She jerked his head, eliciting a crack in his neck that sounded like a substantial tree limb breaking.

In some ways, Poole reflected, this was worse than his time at Headquarters.

For some reason, this kind of doctoring made Carla affectionate, and Poole rolled over on his stomach and refused to move because the pain was too intense for him to enjoy any physical pleasure. She tickled under his ribs, finding the few spots on his torso that weren’t bruised. He gritted his teeth but was about to give in to her when the phone rang. Her voice told him that something was wrong.

“Say it again, Angelina, I can’t understand when you talk that fast.” Poole could hear the buzzing of a voice through the earpiece.

“Taken by who? Taken by the police?” Carla talked slowly and deliberately, as if to a child. “Listen, Angelina. Could those police have been ASU? Did they wear gray shirts . . . Gray? . . . Yes. . . . Yes. . . . They said the mayor wanted to see him? . . . Okay. All right. Listen, Angelina, you stay exactly where you are. I’ll take care of this. He’ll be okay.”

Carla hung up, staring blankly at the table.

Poole saw her chest heaving, breathing hard as she approached panic. “What is it?”

“They’ve taken Enrique to the mayor.”

Poole didn’t understand. “What does that mean?”

She turned to him, “Jesus, Ethan, think for a second. What do you
think
it means?”

Taken aback, Poole said, “The strike?”

Carla shook her head impatiently, as if trying to come to terms with some deficiency of Poole’s. “Of course it’s about the strike.” She was moving around the apartment now, gathering a sweater and shoes, all the while talking. “There’s a group of businessmen—Poles—looking to open a factory here. It’s a big deal for Henry. We thought maybe if we timed the strike right, when the Poles were here, it’d put some extra pressure on Bernal and Henry. Get things settled quickly.”

“But that’s not what’s happening,” Poole said, searching the living room for his wallet.

Carla stopped and looked at him. “No. No, it’s not. They’re taking a different approach. I just wonder what that bastard Henry is thinking.”

She was at the door. “Jesus, Ethan, come on. We need to go.”

Puskis could have followed a route to the brownstone of the transcriber Van Vossen that avoided City Hall. But Puskis, a man for whom visceral pleasure was a feeling as foreign as, until recently, fear, thought he might find some odd satisfaction in walking his normal route to work, then continuing on instead of ascending the granite steps.

He thought about the information that Frings had passed on. Vampire Reid was dead. The system in the Vaults had few flaws, but one was that when a person left the City, he was lost to the Vaults’s files. Information such as Frings had was interesting, but beyond the scope of the files as they were currently understood. Puskis thought about this: people leaving the City and being lost from the files and Reif DeGraffenreid with his head ten feet from his body.

Passing City Hall, Puskis saw a commotion. An ASU car pulled up to the curb and four officers escorted a single man—powerful, swarthy complexion—up the steps. He walked with dignity, but Puskis got a good look at his eyes, and the fear was impossible to miss.

Puskis continued past City Hall, wondering if the frightened man’s file had ever crossed his desk. Why was he arriving at City Hall with that kind of escort? If he were a criminal, surely they would take him to the precinct or even to Stansbury Prison on the border between Capitol Heights and the East Side.

Puskis wove his way along the sidewalk of Government Boulevard, then went right, back into one of the bourgeois neighborhoods composed of block after block of brownstones. Few people were on the street back here, and Puskis took his time, finding an unexpected pleasure in peace without solitude. He noticed things that were common to the point of invisibility to most residents of these neighborhoods: trees in their planting boxes; pigeons neurotically probing for food; and so many squirrels, darting up and down trees and from stoops across the sidewalk. He observed all of this with the hyperclarity of a dream. In this state he arrived at the foot of the
eight stone steps that led up to the front door of Van Vossen’s stately brownstone.

Van Vossen himself answered the door. He was Puskis’s height, but heavy and soft. Long, unruly gray hair ringed his bald dome, and his basset-hound face was framed by thick sideburns that descended to his jaw and then arched above his mouth to form a thick mustache. He stood in the doorway, assessing Puskis.

“Who are you?” he asked with an air of surprise, as if unaccustomed to visitors.

“I am Arthur Puskis, Mr. Van Vossen. I must speak to you about something very urgent.”

Van Vossen held Puskis’s gaze. “Puskis,” he said, his eyes wide.

“Mr. Van Vossen—”

“Come in Mr. Puskis. Please, come in. All these years and we have never met, and now, at last, you show up on my doorstep.” Van Vossen’s voice seemed to hold genuine relief at this turn of events. He led Puskis down an ill-lit hall with pedestals at close intervals displaying vases and urns and busts. The hall opened into a library. At one end was a table stacked with books and reams of paper. A spot was clear and Van Vossen had apparently been working there when Puskis rang the door chime.

“Please, have a seat.” Van Vossen indicated two wingback chairs that faced each other across an ancient Persian rug. Puskis took one and noticed his host retrieving a small tin from where he had been working.

“You are writing a book?”

Van Vossen lowered himself into the seat opposite. “Mmmh, yes. It is both a record and a reflection on the topic of crime. A distillation of my experience as a transcriber. A recounting of criminal activity during my twenty-odd years and an analysis on the causes and patterns of the same.”

“This, um, recounting. You do it from memory?” This work of Van Vossen’s intrigued Puskis. He imagined taking all the information that he had from the files in the Vaults and putting it into prose. Subconsciously, his mind was already organizing this information into trends, categories, chronologies.

“Some from memory. Much more from journals. I wrote about the day’s cases every night. It was, in fact, my reason for taking that job, to create this work. I didn’t need employment, I chose it.” Van Vossen rubbed his
hands together in front of his face, and Puskis noticed that the nails of his pinkies protruded about a quarter of an inch past the tip of the finger.

“Chose it?”

“Yes. My father was Wim Van Vossen. Perhaps you’ve heard of him. He was in shipping. Very wealthy. I was bred to be in the business. But my fascination was crime, and the work of a transcriber offered the best window on this world. Except, perhaps, for your position.”

“Perhaps.”

“My God, Arthur Puskis,” Van Vossen said with a sudden burst of energy, as if just now recognizing the esteem in which his visitor should be held. “I’m sorry, Mr. Puskis, I have been waiting for this visit for such a period of time. I am quite overwhelmed and, as you can see, rambling like a fool.”

“No. No, Mr. Van Vossen, you are hardly rambling. But the reason I came, well, I came to ask you about the DeGraffenreid file.”

Van Vossen turned serious. “So, you found the DeGraffenreid file?”

“Well, actually, I found two. One original file and, I believe, one that you, uh, you copied.”

“Yes. Yes, of course.” In a motion so effortless that it went almost unnoticed, Van Vossen dipped a pinkie nail into the tin that sat on his lap, brought his finger to his nose, and inhaled. “I did copy that file and send it back to the Vaults.”

“Why?”

Van Vossen sniffed. “I needed to get a message out to somebody, but I had to be sure that it could not be traced back to me.”

“I don’t understand. There was no message.”

“You’re here aren’t you? Listen. It was too dangerous to put an actual message in the file. Suppose the file was requested and sent out with the message still inside. Or, God forbid, another transcriber got his hands on it. I couldn’t risk it being traced back to me. I knew that two files would hold great significance for you, but would be dismissed by others as the inevitable consequence of the sheer volume of files in the Vaults. This way you could find me and I would not have to worry about anyone else doing the same.” Van Vossen smiled at the memory of his plan.

“But you did this years ago.”

“Four years. Give or take, of course.”

“Again. Why? What message were you trying to get out?”

“It was a frightening time. Listen. In late 1927 we started to get these
cases of gang hits. These maniacs were going through the judicial process and being convicted, but they were never sent to prison, as far as we could tell. We got the first couple and we thought that perhaps it was some sort of oversight, so we made a note and shipped the files to you. But corrections never came. We got a few more and we called the others back from you. They all had this same notation that we hadn’t seen before.”

“PN,” Puskis said.