The Vaults (27 page)

“Where you going?” Poole asked Mem.

“Pierce and Richmond.”

Poole addressed the hack. “Take her there and wait out front for her. Then bring her back here. Don’t drop her off. Savvy?”

The hack nodded and gave Poole a half smile. The cab sped away. Poole began his walk to the warehouses wondering why Mem had to travel all the way to the East Side to buy her Mary Jane.

An approaching front divided the sky into crystal blue and a dull gray that had consumed the sun. The air here was stagnant and the warehouses were silent. Poole walked along the old train tracks, looking at the dilapidated buildings and listening to his feet grind the gravel underfoot. People were silhouetted in some of the broken warehouse windows. Some ducked when he looked in their direction, others stayed. He expected, even desired, someone to yell down at him—even abuse. But it was silent.

If Carla were here, he thought, she would talk about the cruelty of capitalism and the consequences to people such as these, who were unable to find a place in the system. Right now, that seemed beside the point.

He didn’t enter any of the buildings, instead walking along the row, looking at them as if he could somehow divine Casper Prosnicki’s presence. Occasionally he would yell for Casper, or for anyone who had seen Casper, but his own voice was the only break in the silence. He loathed himself for
not having the courage to enter. He did not fear bodily harm, but rather the chaos he would encounter. His imagination conjured images of disorder and human degradation that he did not have the stomach to witness. So he continued his ineffective reconnaissance.

He kept this up for over an hour. By then the thick cloud covering and the evening’s advance brought a virtual twilight and Poole became uneasy. His retreat from the warehouses was taken at a trot, and now he heard voices echoing from inside the warehouses as if the inhabitants had suddenly awoken. The words were indistinct, muffled, and reverberating upon themselves. As he passed one of the warehouses, he thought he heard the name “Casper,” and it brought him to a stop, staring at the building. Figures silhouetted in the windows stared, motionless, back at him. His unease spiked. The noise from inside increased, the echoes making it exponentially louder. Poole wavered, then continued his retreat. It must have been his imagination anyway. He hated the goddamn Hollows.

Nora was no longer surprised by any of the details that the little man seemed to know about her. He brought her chicken Florentine with rice and cooked carrots and served it with a glass of red wine that clearly was of a good vintage. She had told
Radio World
magazine this meal was her favorite. Her response to the meal was complicated. She was grateful, certainly, but also exhausted. These continuing attempts to make her captivity seem “normal” were, in their own way, disconcerting. She could see in his face that he had perceived her distress and this made him uncomfortable.

She said it without thinking. “Who are you?” She wasn’t sure what she was trying to find out. A name would not reveal much to her.

The little man stared at her, his eyes betraying confusion. She watched him as he thought, wondering what he was struggling with.

He looked at her. “There is nothing.”

Something about this was heartbreaking, and Nora felt tears come. The man saw this and backed slowly out of the room, unable to hide his distress.

Frings was hopped up on painkillers by the time he arrived at the Hound and Fox. He was popping them compulsively every hour or so, enjoying the buzz. Nora was still absent when he stopped by the apartment, and he had found that discovery disconcerting, but in a rather abstract way. He tried to force himself to examine the facts of her disappearance and make a rational decision about whether to be concerned, but it took more effort than he could muster, so he smoked some marijuana to see how it would mix with the painkillers.

He was aware of two separate sensations on his walk from Nora’s apartment to the Hound and Fox. The first was that his head was somehow not attached to his body and was, instead, floating just above it as his body navigated the streets on its own. The other, wholly separate, sensation was of a hyperawareness of the crowd of pedestrians around him. He felt able to quickly scan the crowd on the street and memorize each face. He continued his walk and did another scan and thought he was able to pick out the people who were still walking with him. He took a meandering, roundabout route to the Hound and Fox, hoping to make any tails. By the time he reached the pub, no face from his original scan of the crowd remained.

He ordered a coffee and waited for Poole to arrive, wondering if he felt so certain that he wasn’t followed because of his chemically enhanced sensitivity, or whether he was just too intoxicated to make good assessments of anything—crowds, his perceptions, whatever. He hoped that he would sober up by the time he had to meet Bernal.

Poole arrived on time and slipped in across from Frings. Assessing the bruises on Poole’s face, Frings thought that they must look like a couple of gladiators taking dinner together. Frings’s lip didn’t hurt, but a tightness around the stitches felt odd when he spoke.

“I saw you play a couple times at State. I enjoyed it.”

“The games were fixed,” Poole replied.

“Even so . . .”

Poole just stared at him.

“I got your photos,” Frings said after an awkward silence.

“What’d you think?” Poole was clearly glad to be on to business.

“Well, I don’t doubt they’re authentic. The thing is that I can’t print them. Not right now.”

Poole sighed in frustration. “Don’t give me that bunk. You don’t want to print them, that’s the problem. You can print any damn thing you want.”

It took a moment for Frings to process the hostile reaction. He smiled, despite himself. “No. No, you don’t get it. Listen.”

“Okay.” The waitress returned with coffee for Poole, giving Frings some time to compose his blurred thoughts.

“The man in those pictures . . .”

“Bernal.”

“That’s right, Bernal. I shouldn’t tell you this and I certainly don’t need to tell you this, but since you’re here and you have the pictures, what the hell, right? You see, Bernal is peaching to me. He’s giving me some very important information that is forming the basis of an investigation into City government.” It was amazing how he could slip into this kind of official talk. “I am extremely reluctant to jeopardize my investigation by printing these photographs.”

“What investigation?”

“That’s really all I can tell you. I can’t talk any more about it.”

Poole leaned forward so that his shoulders were over the table. “I will send those photos to the goddamn
Trib
and the goddamn
News
if you don’t print them. Don’t tell me you can’t talk. If this really is going to put the kibosh on your plans, then you need to give me the full story.”

Frings blinked a couple times. “Why are you so hot to get at Bernal?”

“Why the hell do you think?”

Frings nodded and remembered now the other things he knew about Poole: He was the private dick with the Red girlfriend. It was about the strike. He had no illusions that Poole was bluffing, so he spilled, hoping that Poole would see the larger picture and the greater advantage to him and to labor if he went along with Frings.

“Bernal’s turned on the mayor. He’s feeding me information about corruption in the mayor’s office.”

“I need more.”

“I don’t know much more. He’s taking it slow. But from what I know already, it’ll be big.”

The waitress came to refill their coffee cups. Frings waited for Poole to speak. When he did, it was not with any evident satisfaction or dissatisfaction with Frings’s explanation.

“What happened to your face?”

Frings touched the stitches. “Shaving.”

Poole stood up.

“Hold on. I got cut by one of the mayor’s ginks. You?”

Poole sat back down. “Here’s a story for you.” He lowered his voice and leaned across the table. “I was pinched at the strike, along with a lot of other people.”

“I was there. I saw it. Not you, but I saw what went on.”

“Well, after I was brought in, they took me from my cell and brought me to an interrogation room. This guy, I don’t think he was police, he asked me questions while some cop braced me whenever I didn’t give the right answers. But the point of it, I guess, was that they wanted me to stop an investigation that
I’m
in the middle of.”

This had Frings’s attention. “What investigation is that?”

“Missing person.”

“Who’s missing?”

“I don’t know if—”

“Why would you even bring this up if you don’t want to tell me who’s missing?”

This seemed to make sense to Poole. “It’s a kid. A kid named Casper Prosnicki.”

The mention of Casper Prosnicki brought life to the reporter’s eyes. Poole wasn’t sure what to expect from Francis Frings, big-time reporter and Nora Aspen’s lover. Until that moment, he had not been impressed. But the name Casper Prosnicki had sparked something, and Poole felt for the first time that he was seeing the Francis Frings who was something of a legend in the City.

“You know that name?” Poole asked.

Frings paused. “You’ve been honest with me. I met him last night.”

Poole leaned back in his chair, his leg vibrating with excitement. “Where?”

“The warehouses down by the old tracks in the Hollows.”

It was confirmation of what Alice had told him. He had been close to Casper. All signs had pointed to it, and he had not had the courage to take the steps necessary to actually find him.

“What were you doing in the Hollows?”

Frings shrugged. “I can’t tell you that. But he’s down there. Or at least he was.”

“Jesus Christ. Okay, thanks. I appreciate that piece of information.”

“Well, I’ve got another piece of dirt that might interest you.”

“How’s that?”

“Lena Prosnicki, his mother, is dead.”

Poole rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms, feeling that the further along this went, the less he liked it. “How did she die?”

“They pulled her out of the river.”

Poole nodded. “So they put me through the ringer and then they kill his mother. They don’t want this kid found. Why?”

Frings shrugged, playing it cagey. “Could be any number of reasons.”

Thanks, Poole thought. He said, “The guy that cut you. Did it have to do with Casper Prosnicki, your meeting with him?”

Frings’s hesitation was his answer.

Poole continued, “Big guy. Blond hair. Scar on his lip?”

Frings nodded.

This was spiraling out of control.

“I’m going to find that kid,” Poole said. “You think he’ll be down in the warehouses tomorrow?”

“Could be.” Frings’s eyes were dead again, though this time Poole guessed it was a ploy. Frings seemed to have reached his limit. He wasn’t going to divulge any more.

“I’ll hold on to those photos for a while,” Poole said.

“Appreciated.”

“You played straight with me. I’ll do that for you. For a while.”

Frings frowned and nodded his head. “I don’t need long.”

Poole got up from the table and did not shake Frings’s hand. “What if I need to get in touch?”

“Call me at the paper. We can set up a meet. I’m not going to give you up. I start giving up sources and I’m through.”

So Poole was a source now. “All right.”

He found the night considerably colder than when he had arrived. The sidewalks were empty. The streetlights illuminated bright circles in the hard pavement and asphalt. A lorry rattled by and a hack slowed to see if Poole was a fare. He shook his head and the cab crept on. He pulled his collar up against the wind and started the long walk home.

Frings sat alone at the table contemplating and trying to sip his coffee with the good side of his mouth. Why didn’t they want Casper Prosnicki found? It didn’t make any sense. Did they know that he was the bomber? Wouldn’t it make more sense, if they did know, to catch him and show that they had the City under control? And if they didn’t know he was the bomber, why did they care if anyone found him? Frings was missing something, some deduction or some information.

Was the key in Casper’s bizarre claim that the mayor’s cohorts owed him money? Did this destitute boy had some leverage on the most powerful men in the City? If Casper Prosnicki had such knowledge, why didn’t he spill it last night? Frings wondered if Casper could communicate well enough to tell
anyone
his secrets.

Frings finished his coffee and ordered a bourbon on the rocks. Prosnicki. Bernal. Samuelson. Twenty murderers free. What did it mean? Prosnicki and Bernal. Bernal and Samuelson. Prosnicki and Samuelson? Was that the key? Wasn’t Casper Prosnicki’s father murdered by someone on that list of men who weren’t in prison? Was this all of one piece or was Bernal a common factor in two otherwise unrelated issues?