The Vaults Read online

  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.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  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.

  “While you were down watching the blues giving those strikers the what-for, Frings was actually doing some reporting.”

  Klima turned to Frings with his mangy eyebrows raised. The bottom of his jaw was red with irritation from shaving; dark, puffy bags drooped beneath his eyes. Frings wondered, as he handed his notebook over, if Klima had some kind of chronic disease.

  “That is Frings’s notebook with his notes from his interview with Bernal,” Panos continued.

  “From today?”

  “Yes, from today. Listen, it is today your lucky day. You will use Frings’s interview in your story on the strike. You think you can do that?”

  Klima nodded, confused not by what he was being asked to do, but rather by why he was being asked to do it. He looked questioningly at Frings, then was assailed by Panos.

  “What do you wait for? For the heaven’s sake, beat it and write your story. My God.” Panos gestured with his cigar for Klima to leave, and he did with one last glance at Frings, who shrugged with exaggerated helplessness.

  With Klima gone, Panos smiled a crooked smile, and a thread of smoke escaped from the corner of his mouth. “You wonder what it is that I have for you.”

  Frings nodded.

  Panos opened the top drawer on his desk, removed an envelope, and tossed it across the desk to Frings. It took a chaotic turn in midair, and Frings missed it. He had to get out of his chair to pick it up from the floor. The envelope was addressed to Francis Frings—the name he used in his byline—with the Gazette as the address. No street address, city, or state. It had a canceled stamp, though, so it had come through the mail. It had been opened.

  “You guys opening my mail now?” he asked half-seriously.

&nbs
p; “Only when it’s interesting.” Frings couldn’t tell what Panos meant by that or if he was kidding. “Read it.”

  Frings opened it. On a sheet of plain white paper a short message had been written in pencil.

  FRANCIS FRINGS. WE ARE THE BOMBRS. WE WANT TALK TO YOU. BE ON THE TRAKS BETWEEN KOPERNIK & STANISLAUS, 11 AT NITE, FRIDAY. YOU NO IT IS US CAUS WE BOMBD BLOCK’S HOUSE.

  Frings looked at Panos and shrugged. “It could be anyone.”

  Panos shook his head.

  “It’s a crank.”

  “Postmark, Frank.”

  Frings examined the envelope. It was postmarked two days ago, before the bomb at Block’s house. Frings took in a breath. Panos smiled. “You see now why I am in such a mood that I give you one of my finest cigars?”

  Frings nodded, running through the implications of this letter. For instance, why him?

  “Hey,” Panos said sharply. “You smoking that reefer again?”

  Frings shrugged. “I get these headaches.”

  “I tell you that I don’t want you to smoke that reefer anymore.”

  Frings laughed. “If you want to fire me, Panos, go ahead. I’m sure the Trib would be interested in the letter.”

  Panos laughed, coughing plumes of smoke. “You are a funny man, Frank. You got a funny sense of humor.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Poole sat on a bunk in the cell, crowded with a sweating, ashen mob of union men. He had his elbows on his knees and his hands supported the weight of his head. His cellmates gave him some room because they knew that he was with Carla and that he was in pain. He rubbed the back of his head and felt a knot the size of a lime. His hair was prickly with dried blood. He focused to fight back nausea from the heat and the stink of the cell. Two men next to him were talking in a language he could not identify. He heard the sound of metal scraping on metal and a low squeak as the door to the cellblock was opened, causing a momentary wane in the noise. A sudden increase followed as the jailed men began yelling at the guards in their native languages.

  Poole listened to the footsteps advance down the hall, then stop at the door of his cell. He kept his head down.

  “Everyone away from the door.”

  From the corner of his eye Poole saw the dozen or so other men in his cell retreat from the door and stand with menacing postures at the cell’s perimeter. He heard the sound of the key being fitted to the lock and then the slip of the bolt.

  “Poole.”

  Poole’s pulse quickened and blood ran to his face. He did not look up.

  “Poole.” This time it was more insistent. Poole looked up to see three men, dressed in the distinctive gray uniforms of the Anti-Subversion Unit, their batons out. The one in front was shorter, older, built like a razorback. The two behind him were bookend Atlases.

  “Time to answer some questions. Get up.”

  Poole rose from the bed, and the effort cost him his sense of balance for a moment and he hesitated before shuffling slowly toward the door. His cellmates had been watching with barely controlled agitation. When one yelled out something in Portuguese, it sparked the rest of them. The cellmates shouted and pointed and shook fists, but stayed at the perimeter of the cell. The two bigger men stepped forward with their batons drawn, their expressions set, their body language showing fear.

  Poole walked past the two officers. The older ASU agent stepped aside to let Poole out the door. The other officers backed out of the cell, and the older man shut the cell door and locked it. Poole was cuffed while the other two men watched with nightsticks at the ready in case Poole made a false move. Poole was slightly bigger than the officers and guessed that he could take any one of them in a fair fight. But not all of them and not now.

  They left him to wait in an interrogation room. He sat in a steel chair that was bolted to the floor at a steel table that was also bolted. A single, naked lightbulb burned behind a mesh cage. The floors were gray concrete and the walls painted industrial white. Poole thought he could make out faint stains on the walls and had visions of janitors, on their knees, scrubbing off spattered blood with cleaning solution.

  Head pounding, he leaned forward and rested it awkwardly on the tabletop. It was not comfortable, but he nevertheless managed to fall asleep—or was it lose consciousness?—in this position. He knew this because he awoke to someone pulling his head up a couple of inches by the hair and then, without too much force, pushing his face down onto the steel table. His eyes watered and his nose went numb. A hand jerked his head back and then planted itself in his chest to keep him upright. Poole felt warm liquid flowing across his mouth and down his chin. He tasted blood.

  “Mr. Poole,” said a man who now came into focus, leaning against the wall on the opposite side of the table. Tall and thin, he had the smooth face of a matinee idol and short blond hair. Poole couldn’t figure why he wasn’t wearing a uniform. He had a charcoal suit with dark blue pinstripes. His hat sat on a chair by the door. He held a cigarette carelessly between his ring and middle fingers.

  The man sighed, then repeated, “Mr. Poole,” as if to make sure that he was, indeed, talking to the right man. Poole started to nod, felt a wave of pain, winced, then grunted something affirmative.

  “Mr. Poole, you are getting yourself into a world of shit. You sent two officers of the law to the hospital. Do you follow?”

  Poole looked at the man without expression, trying to keep his eyes focused. How could they have found out about Bernal so quickly? Had Bernal really been able to identify him through the stocking? He felt a dull yet excruciating pain in his side as the man behind him jabbed his baton just below Poole’s ribs. He coughed meekly, then nodded.

  “Two in the hospital,” the man repeated slowly as if only now realizing the significance of this fact. “That is a world of shit to be in, Mr. Poole. Usually, police don’t treat ginks who have assaulted police—put them in the hospital—with the delicate care that you have received. You with me?”

  Poole choked out a “Yes” to avoid another shot from the nightstick.

  The man smiled. “I’m sure you are. Yes, you’re probably aware of that.” If the man gave a signal, Poole didn’t see it. The nightstick was not jabbed this time, but swung so that it hit the third vertebra down from his skull. He felt consciousness slip away and then, to his intense frustration, return.

  “But, you see, this thing with assaulting the police, that’s not even remotely the beginning of the shit you are in. Do you understand what the problem is, Mr. Poole?”

  Poole stayed silent and braced himself for another blow.

  The man took a deep drag on his cigarette, held it for a beat, then exhaled through his nose, sending twin jets of smoke past his mouth. “Why are you looking for Casper Prosnicki?”

  Poole just stared at him, stunned. Was that what this was about? How could this man know? Only one possibility came to him, and he wondered if he was thinking clearly through the pain.

  “Can you hear me?” the man asked, stepping away from the wall and squatting down to look at Poole from across the table. “Why are you looking for Casper Prosnicki?”

  “Someone asked me to. They hired me.” His lips felt swollen and clumsy as he talked.

  “Who hired you?”

  “A twist. Didn’t give a name.”

  The man straightened up and walked around the table behind Poole. Poole tried to crane his neck around to see what the man was doing, but the man with the nightstick held his head firmly in place. Poole felt his sleeve being pulled up and then a searing pain on the inside of his biceps as it was burned with a cigarette tip. Cold sweat beaded on his face as Poole bit through his lower lip and blood flowed into his mouth. The pain was relieved only somewhat by the removal of the butt.

  The man walked slowly back to his previous spot across the table and squatted down again. “Who hired you?”

  “Her name was Lena Prosnicki.”

  The man’s eyes narrowed. “That’s not possible.”

  “She said h
er name was Lena Prosnicki,” Poole said, weary with fear and pain.

  The man closed his eyes and made a subtle motion with his head. Poole felt his hair being pulled taut.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Puskis poured his tea slowly, careful to prevent any leaves from flowing into the cup. The air in his apartment smelled of tea, mint, and orange rind. He walked carefully from the kitchen into his sitting room, holding the cup by the handle with one hand and the saucer beneath with the other.

  He sat, surrounded by hanging rugs. Their colors—reds, oranges, yellows, browns—though muted, retained some of their former brilliance. Their geometric patterns were framed by lighter borders with abstracted scenes from the Serbian past: the Battle of Kosovo, the overthrow of the Ottoman Turks. They were as much a history text as any of the tomes on his bookshelf.

  Tonight he was not going to read. Nor was he going to contemplate the rugs, an activity that he often spent hours doing, reflecting on this abstract method of marking the past—a stark contrast to his rational practice. Even the geometric patterns, he felt, contained historical information. He had at times agonized over them, trying to divine their meaning, without progress. But he had his eyes closed tonight, turning his thoughts to 1929 and the Birthday Party Massacre and the furor that had followed.

  Puskis was usually isolated from the occasional bustle of police activity following a high-profile crime. But even in the Vaults the repercussions of the Birthday Party Massacre were felt, the first sign being a stack of file requests, all with the notation EU for “extremely urgent.” EU requests were not made lightly, and eighty-six at once was, in Puskis’s considerable experience, unprecedented.

  The second sign had been the phone call from Mavrides—the Chief’s assistant at the time—who had never called the Vaults before. The strain in his voice evident, he’d checked to see how the file requests were coming. They were coming along fine. They always came along fine. The only thing preventing Puskis from continuing to fulfill requests was the phone call. Puskis hadn’t said this, of course. He had said that they were coming along well and that he was moving with the greatest haste. Mavrides had said, “Good, good,” without actually seeming mollified.