The Vaults (41 page)

“Yeah,” Frings said, “I think I do.”

Van Vossen had gone mad. The realization did not come to Puskis as a sudden insight. Rather, it was a product of the accumulation of the thoughts Van Vossen had expressed in their conversation over the past several hours. The Vaults had got him, too. Van Vossen could claim to be indifferent to any conclusions he had reached from the information he gathered and pored over and ruminated about, but he had eventually been overwhelmed by it. Puskis was in no doubt.

Van Vossen put another log on the fire and sat down again. His eyelids drooped over bloodshot eyes, his energy waned. He looked like the children Puskis occasionally saw as he walked home from the Vaults at night, struggling against fatigue to control their thoughts and actions.

“What will you do now that the Vaults are gone?” Van Vossen asked in a rasping whisper. Puskis felt that he could see Van Vossen’s life escaping with each breath.

“I don’t know,” Puskis replied truthfully. He hadn’t even thought about it. It had seemed too abstract until now.

Van Vossen leaned forward, his crimson smoking jacket gapping to reveal his sweat-drenched shirt. “You have the most complete knowledge of anyone living. The files. Not even I know as much as you.”

Puskis nodded, feeling weary.

Van Vossen went on. “There is value to what we know, you and I. There is. Information does not need to conform to patterns or rules or formulae to be of vital importance.”

Was this true? Puskis nodded again, mostly to placate Van Vossen.

“It is crucial that this information not be lost. If it is lost, what was the point of my life or yours?”

And this was the crux of Van Vossen’s madness, Puskis realized. What was the point of his life?

Puskis stared into the fire. Van Vossen stood up from his chair mumbling something about returning shortly and wandered out of the room.

Hours later, Puskis watched the last embers of the fire slowly extinguish. Van Vossen had not returned, as Puskis had felt sure he would not. Puskis felt too weary to move. And where would he go? Eventually, the fire exhausted its fuel and Puskis sat alone. In the dark.

Black smoke plumed from the burning cars, adding to the confusion on the street. An area had been cordoned off around the mayor’s car. Frings stood off to the side with the Chief and the officer from the steps, who held a handkerchief over his face to filter the air.

The Chief was grim, but calm. He took off his hat and rubbed his hand through his thinning hair.

“O’Donnell here tells me you know who it was.”

“That’s right, Chief. One of them was definitely Otto Samuelson.” Frings dragged off a Lucky.

The Chief raised an eyebrow with interest. “Otto Samuelson? Surely he’s in the pen.”

Frings smiled despite himself. The Chief was a lot of things, Frings knew, but he was not a clever bullshitter. He was clearly not in the know about the Navajo Project.

Frings said, “He’s not. You’ll find out more about that. You’ll be surprised by the other name I’m going to give you, too. Blood Whiskers McAdam.”

“Whiskers?” The Chief shook his head. “He’s out, too?”

“Never was in, actually. But they were the two. I’m sure about Samuelson and almost about McAdam. You need to put out a search for them.”

“I guess I’d best. You going to fill me in, Frank? Or would it ruin your story?”

“Chief, I’d be happy to give you the rumble.” They made plans to meet at Headquarters at midnight, giving the Chief time to settle things at the site and begin the search for Samuelson and McAdam. But he would still hear from Frings before the early addition of the
Gazette
alerted the rest of the City.

The Chief offered Frings his hand and they shook. “Thanks, Frank. I owe you one.” The look in the Chief’s eyes, Frings thought, was telling.
There was resolve, knowing the work ahead of him in tracking down the mayor’s killers; but mostly a sense of incredible relief.

As Frings walked past the confusion and smoke and flame, he wondered if he was too cynical for fearing what would fill the void that Henry left.

Frings sat in the back of a cab, watching out the window as the hack navigated through Capitol Heights, avoiding Buchanan Avenue, where he had heard there was an accident. It was the thirteenth day since the death of Red Henry, and the City still seemed in shock. Not from grief, necessarily, but from the sudden demise of a personality who had seemed almost superhuman to many. Red Henry’s absence had never been contemplated, and now, suddenly, it was a reality.

Frings watched as people shuffled home from work or hurried to make a night shift. It was a little past eight in the evening, the City harsh under the streetlamps. Frings hoped this wouldn’t take long. Nora was at the Provençal Restaurant across from the opera house, with her trumpet soloist, Arthur Hall, and his wife, Lillian. Pilar Rossi was singing Verdi that night and he wanted to be back for the opening curtain at nine. Nora and Pilar had met in Paris several years ago and had formed a bond as prima donnas of their separate genres. Tonight Nora and Frings had box seats. It meant a lot to Nora, and it meant a lot to him because it meant a lot to her.

This was not the feeling he would have had even a month ago. But her kidnapping had changed things—for the better. He knew that the dynamics of her escape were largely responsible, somehow settling their roles in her mind. She, after all, had effected her own escape, getting the drop on her abductor when he was attacked by Smith. But this opportunity would not have presented itself without Frings’s pressure on Henry. She had been able to take matters into her own hands because of his actions. This seemed to give her confidence in their relationship, and that confidence had, in turn, rekindled his attraction to her. So now, he wondered, why the hell am I riding in a cab away from her on this big night? Because the Chief owed him a favor and payback did not necessarily come at the most opportune time.

The apartment building was technically in the Hollows—it was one block north of Bolivar Street—but in an area that was slowly being annexed into
the working-class blocks of Capitol Heights. Cops in blue uniforms guarded the front door, though no one was on the streets.

“I’m—”

One of the cops interrupted that they knew who he was and gestured him through the door.

“Third floor,” the cop called after Frings as he started up the stairs.

The building had partly been reclaimed from its abandonment. About half of the apartments had functioning front doors, which Frings took to mean that they were occupied. He didn’t hear any noise coming from the apartments. In this type of place it made sense not to call attention to yourself.

More cops were on the third floor, standing in the hallway, smoking and talking in low tones. One of them beckoned Frings down the hall.

“He’s in this one,” a muscular officer said, and nodded through the open door. “Back in the bedroom.”

The police had set up bright lights in all of the rooms in this small apartment, and the effect was a stage set of abject squalor. Refuse, broken glass, empty liquor bottles, a broken couch, yellowing newspapers.

In the bedroom, a uniform watched as two men in suits knelt over something by a stained bare mattress, a ragged blanket bunched at the foot.

“Mr. Frings,” the cop said, and the two kneeling men turned and stood. Frings recognized them as Detectives Olshanski and Korda. They shook hands, and Frings saw that the man lying on the floor, his head in a pool of blood, was Otto Samuelson.

Frings and Korda sat on the stoop outside the building, smoking.

“We talked to the other residents on the hall. They say Samuelson and another guy—they all mention his red hair—were squatting here for the last week or so. People on the hall weren’t happy about it either. A woman told Olshanski that she told her kid to come back in the apartment if he ever saw either of them. Anyway, it’s likely that the second man was Whiskers McAdam.”

An ambulance pulled to the curb, and Korda sent the crew up to Samuelson’s squat.

Korda continued, “Our best guess is this: They have an argument—the neighbors heard shouting, but that isn’t so unusual in this building according to them—probably over money. You figure that’s why they’re still in the City if they know that they’re the main suspects in the mayor’s assassination.
Anyway, they have some kind of argument and for some reason Samuelson turns his back to McAdam, and McAdam hits him in the back of the head with a baseball bat or a club or some other blunt instrument. Samuelson bounces face-first off the mattress and ends up on his back on the floor next to the bed. It all seems pretty clear from the physical evidence.”

“You say you figure it was over money,” Frings said.

“That’s conjecture,” Korda conceded. “The force was crawling the City looking for these guys, so there must have been a damn good reason for them to stick around. Maybe they had some money stashed somewhere. Maybe they were grifting. Who knows? But we’re working on the theory that they got the money they wanted, McAdam got greedy, killed Samuelson, and blew town.”

“You think he’s gone?” Frings asked, though it made perfect sense to him.

“I would be.”

“So would I,” Frings agreed.

An hour later he eased himself into the box and took a seat in the shadows behind Nora. Pilar Rossi was singing an aria, and Nora did not notice Frings until he brushed her arm. She turned to him, startled, and gave an inquiring look. Frings winked and smiled, and Nora grabbed his hand and they settled back to enjoy the night.

Fog crept into the Hollows, encircling buildings and obscuring roads and alleys. Standing in the square across from St. Mark’s, Carla watched as the boys were led out of the crumbling building by groups of adults. The City at least had the sense to send nurses along with the police. The boys seemed so small as they traversed the short distance to the wagons waiting to take them across town to City Hospital.

She smoked a cigarette and thought about Poole and the way he had died. She felt vaguely uncomfortable that she had not grieved more. Losing him was hard on her, but as a fellow soldier lost in a war, not a lover. She wondered why this was and couldn’t quite find the answer in herself.

She had, of course, arranged this rescue. Her greatest weapon was always her ability to spot weakness and opportunity, and she had put this insight to work at City government, reeling after the mayor’s death. The deputy mayor, whom Henry had successfully marginalized during his reign, floundered to take control of the government. Carla had sent word that she wanted a meeting, or the press might start wondering why the ASU had killed an unarmed private citizen while botching an assassination attempt on a couple of union organizers.

When the meeting was granted, she explained that through some error of omission or commission, the boys of St. Mark’s had been separated from their mothers, who were being kept at All Souls’. A perfunctory investigation followed. The orphaned girls were found in a shabby nunnery attached to a lunatic asylum in the Hollows. The administration of drugs to the women was to be stopped, and plans were made to move them out of All Souls’ and into ordinary life. First, though, they would be reunited with their children. To prepare the women, City health officials gradually reduced their drug dosages, until they were deemed capable of normal interaction. Then the officials went to bring the children in.

In the end, this was Poole’s legacy, Carla thought. These kids were going back to what remained of their families because Poole had sacrificed his life for her and Enrique. This brought tears to her eyes, and she dropped her cigarette and ground it into the sidewalk with her shoe.

Puskis sat amidst piles of paper in Van Vossen’s study. Shafts of morning sun lit particles of floating dust in the air. Puskis drank tea and read. Van Vossen’s manuscript was part factual representation of material that had been in the Vaults’ files, part credulous reporting of rumor and innuendo, part partially developed analysis, and part conjecture and speculation. Puskis read, fascinated, with a pen in hand, annotating the pages with additional information he knew or connecting related incidents. He began an organizational system. Not a filing system. A system to organize these pages into a linear book.