The Shaft (13 page)

    We have standards to uphold here, Mr Crooze. Fergus had not said this out loud. Cruz would have herniated from laughing.

    Cruz's room-plus-bath had been designated a 'studio.' The floor covering was to carpet what a scab is to healthy flesh. He had gotten the refrigerator he requested. It now crowded a doorless alcove that had once been a bedroom closet. Two big casement windows overlooked Garrison Street from three stories up. When the steam heater wheezed on, the windows usually clouded up. It was a sweatbox, even in winter, sifting the rising heat from lower floors in a structure built long before insulation.

    Unexpectedly, the bathroom had been recently retiled and all the faucets worked without dripping. The toilet did not gurgle. That part, at least, was basic but civilized.

    Cruz had been duly unveiled as Bauhaus' new runner. The Oakwood boys were a yuppified zoo of blond-on-blond palotnitas with firm handshakes, PR grins and Aryan eyes like video snow. All bound for med school or law degrees. You could sense the zippers on their girlfriend's vaginas. Cruz pushed Bauhaus' 70 per cent cut another ten with ground-up aspirin; the Oakwood dildoes never caught wind and the extra income was always welcome. Cruz accumulated a backstock of the prime cut, the middle pile, for personal use.

    Within a week his ass was bored fartless. He had hit Chicago head-on, in combat mode, and outfitting himself in two days had proven no strain. Downtown he picked up a ghetto blaster and forty tapes, boots, new clothes, and winter gear including a crisp fatigue jacket in nightfighter black with an Arctic zip-in liner. He fantasized Schwarzenegger, suiting up. Tough interior music footnoted every move.

    And then a whole lotta nothing happened.

    He had powered up on pink Peruvian flake and decided to start cleaning his bathoom like a maniac. That was the first time he had heard the building's ghost, moaning.

    One-thirty in the morning. There had been a riot of peripheral noise tonight in Fergus' three-story firetrap: Battling stereos, slamming doors, angry Hispanic voices doing doppler riffs in the corridors. Cruz heard a high shriek that meant the black-and-tan newlyweds in 314 were re-engaged in slapping themselves toward court or jail. Some derelict old white mofo lumbered down the hall, bitching about, how the Jews were infesting our great land. Cruz had first seen this occupant down by the mail gangbox. He always seemed to wear the same outfit - argyle socks and bedroom slippers, trousers hoisted high, shirt and tie. His face was mapped with drinker's tattoos, organized around harsh, mint-blue eyes and topped with lush white mad scientist hair. When the mail ran late, it was the fault of the Jews. When it came, it was only bills from Jews hungry for his money. When it was junk mail -you guessed it - Jews again, plotting to flood the country with advertising to brim their coffers. The mailman was undoubtedly a Mossad assassin. Cruz had been advised of all this hot poop when he had off-handedly answered no to the old man's first and only question.

    
Are you now or have you ever been a…?

    Miniature stokers in Cruz's brain pan sent down an urgent request. Cruz express-delivered a load for their tiny shovels, one Left, one Right, a little extra for Left to balance. The staging area was the back of his hand. He used the leftovers to work his gums. Sneeze and relax at 78 RPM. He chased each nostril clear with a pinch of tap water, and every tile in his bathroom kaboomed into lucid deep focus.

    He had known righteous blow monkeys who suffered hallucinations with what doctors called a 'clear sensorium.' That meant whatever the mind created for you to look at seemed deathly correct because it was not overtly strange or psychedelic, like when you did a tab too many of sophomore lab blotter and the room filled up with cheeseburger-breathing Jell-0 dragons doing the frug. Cruz had forgotten

    Spiderman's real name, but his fate stood as parable. The dude had gotten it into his head that there were little spiders crawling all over his skin. Normal little spiders. Lots of them. It was perfectly believable, from his chemically-enhanced viewpoint. When he found he could not brush them away - he had some kind of bug phobia in general - he tried to burn them off his arms and legs with a propane torch.

    Spiderman later died in a bum ward, his lungs collapsed and fried by freebasing. That trip had taken seven days.

    Spiderman was past tense. Cruz knew an object lesson when one was thrown at him, and so at first lent the sound of Kenilworth's ghost no serious attention.

    Velvet hammerblows to each temple eased the tension headache he was getting from grinding his teeth. He made a mental note to score some Librium from Bauhaus. His brain promptly misfiled the memo; it dropped into a convolution, lost. The stokers shoveled merrily away, grunting and heaving spadeloads of Great White into the open furnace door of his cerebral cortex. Mister Heartbeat notched from bugaloo to slam dance and Cruz's bathroom got more spit-shined by the microsecond.

    Past the building's ambient chaos, his ears were able to vacuum in the errant sound and dissect it, pronto.

    A moan?

    It rose and fell, anti-rhythmic, with enough caesurae to render it almost imperceptible amid the banging doors and blasting salsa music. Cruz knew the coke had fine-tuned rather than stupefied him. He froze like a hunting dog on point and waited. The moan teased the periphery of his notice. Each time he thought he heard it, he flash fed new info through his mental channels. Eager neurons gobbled it up. Synapses were discharged. The first equivalent that reeled out on his mental ticker-tape was that this might be a street sound, more a groan than a moan, deep in the gut, a belly-hugger, the sort of digestive lament a back-alley grapehead makes after blowing a quart of Mad Dog out of an empty stomach.

    Somebody flushed a toilet and Cruz heard the intruder noise no further. His dark eyes glinted with a spark of reflex hostility. He was revving just high enough to punch a stranger. Badge or no badge.

    Ghost, the busy worker bees in his head ventured. More likely some brain-dead junkie, circuits toasted, adding rainbow puke to the floor patterns in the hallway. Typical Saturday night action.

    Outside he could now hear that guy Velasquez's brat yowling and galloping up and down the hallway. Cruz wanted to shove the little diaper-fuck down a long flight of metal stairs. The high pitch of baby screams made his teeth throb.

    He had seen Velasquez's wife and litter his third day at Kenilworth. They lived close to the dysfunctional elevator. On the same day he discovered his refrigerator was schizophrenic. It could change its batty freon mind without any sort of malfunction noise or warning, and shift internal gears from chill to roast. This tended to happen whenever Cruz laid in supplies like ice cream or cottage cheese or anything else that reeked like a decomposing corpse when inadvertently heated. He gauged the bullshit potential of trying to wrangle a better box out of Fergus Le Pusbag, and decided that he had probably already been assigned the best fridge the basement storage had to offer.

    A trot downstairs, past said storage rooms, through two creaky doors and along an outside corridor, brought the erstwhile tenant to Kenilworth 's pathetic excuse for a laundry room. One coin-op washer and one dryer, one of which was usually out of order. It was open to the weather. Total loss, there.

    Tonight the upper floor clung to the stink of cheap whitefish. Cruz's brain pictured some pollution-poisoned aquatic casualty, dragged from Lake Michigan with oilslick intact, plunked into a hot skillet to cremate. Phew.

    He pulled a bottle of Quietly Beer from the fridge and found to his relief that it was frosty. Quietly Beer did not have twist-tops. He took care not to slam die door of the fridge and perhaps bring on the curse. If it malfunctioned again, he could always chill his beer in the snowdrifts piled high against the windows on the outside ledges… provided the windows were not frozen shut. After two long, wet, lifegiving pulls on the bottle, he dabbed up the lees on his coke mirror with the pad of his middle finger. Devil dust for the gums. Finger-lickin' radical.

    His ears strained for the sound of the ghost but got only the Velasquez brat. Then the page beeper clipped to the pocket slash of his jeans went off. It would have trilled, but the knob was cranked to eleven and the abrupt summons nearly launched him to cling from the light fixture on the ceiling… which was rusty, cobwebbed and bare-bulbed, and totally incapable of supporting his weight, freaked out or not.

    
Fucking Bauhaus.

    Time and convenience had been subjugated by the vicious Chicago winter. Availability was akin to Russian roulette. So Cruz was presently the on-call victim of a procedure concocted by his Midwest mentor. That fat baby-groper. At the call of the pocket pager Cruz was to tromp three blocks north, to the Oakwood post office. There, in Drawer 100, he would find a surprise. A callback to one of Bauhaus' tap-proof numbers from a payphone in the post office would verify delivery and clarify special ops instructions. Until Cruz scored a more secure address or got a telephone, that was to be the drill. Bauhaus enjoyed the control this gave him. Payphones were SOP when you were security conscious. Cruz's digs, no matter how upscale they might become, would never be as paranoid as Bauhaus' little Nazi fortress. And a US postal drawer was one of the safest drops to be had in a place like Oakwood.

    He chugged the rest of his brew, swallowing foam. He laced up his new boots - leather broken in but not worn, olive canvas sides, good thick cleats. Snow salts and chemicals had already done a job on the shine, but Cruz had sprayed them with water repellant. He husked into his nightfighting jacket and knotted the waist tie to lock out the cold. Clasps were snapped and the zipper run full up. A hood was available from a zippered pouch in the collar and a Velcro flap sealed snug around his neck. Outside he knew it was at least ten below.

    He jiggled the knob of his inside door to make sure it was locked, patted for his keys, and moved into the stale-smelling inner hallway. His neighbor's door faced him. He stepped out the center door of the airlock and made sure it was locked, too.

    He looked down. A thin black cat looked back at him, as though expecting to be let in.

    Cruz neither tolerated nor disliked cats. The only time he had bothered to think about them, he concluded that the only real difference between cats and rats was that cats had learned the art of soft-soap politics in regard to human beings. He wondered if this one belonged to his airlock-mate, Linda something, the fat woman whose locked door was five feet distant from his own inside their makeshift, shared ex-hallway.

    He stepped around the cat, who sniffed the air inside the airlock as though it knew what it was doing. If it lived with Linda, it could fend for itself just dandy.

    He clumped to the narrow, twisting stairwell, knowing full well that Fergus was never going to repair the damned elevator. Velasquez's rug roach rioted around before the door to 314, boisterously lead-footed, thud-thud-thud. Clumsy little dick. Was everyone supposed to tolerate this headache samba because kids were too fucking stupid to know better? The diapered terrorist petrified to assess Cruz, clad in black. They faced off. The kid fled through the open door to 314 with a howl. Good. Cruz imagined using his gaffer's tape on the little fuckwad. Seal his foghorn maw and pin his legs and pitch the whole bundle of joy down the elevator shaft so they could all get more sleep.

    The pedestrian ruts on Kentmore, northbound, had filled with fresh white snow. At this time of night, when there was no traffic, Cruz could almost see the beauty of winter. Swirling twisters of blowing snow threw the street into gauzy soft focus. Ugly buildings were rendered indistinct and Gothic, and clunky, battered automobiles with their clotted wheels and grilles were interred beneath a smooth, flowing, uniform layer of pristine non-color. White, Cruz had been told, was the absence of all color. In the form of snowfall, it bleached away identity, and on Kentmore Street that was a good thing. The streetlamps had become nimbused in blue, like sconces in dreamland.

    He crunched along on Kentmore with emphatically big strides. He had quickly learned how to tread fresh snowpack. Near the El tracks he passed the 7-11 whose dark sign read OPEN 24 HRS even though it closed at midnight. What was the difference when you couldn't buy beer there at any time of the day? It was a block past the El to the post office. The underpass was dark and wet, the stones hashed with graffiti. Cruz was the sole life on an avenue of lightless houses. At the first cross-street a blast of wind rocked his balance and pelted him with snow so cold it did not liquify on contact with the warmth of his skin. It was as hard as sand, or extremely tiny hail; like glass dust or grains of pepper. His eyes teared.

    It seemed colder in the underpass, though windless. Sounds here were hollow and haunted. He thought again of the ghost, his imaginary ectoplasmic pal. While in the shelter of the underpass he snugged the drawstrings on the all-weather hood. His ears felt frozen and brittle.

    The post office in Oakwood was intriguingly old World, all Doric columns and marble floors, sculpted archways and real wrought-iron grillwork dating from the Coolidge administration. The counters were topped in brass sheeting, painstakingly affixed by craftsmanlike rows of brass-headed nails. On the arches were Latin inscriptions, and the vaulted ceilings bounced back your voice in a resonant and mellifulous way. A chamber of the gods… now conscripted into service as one of Uncle Bauhaus' dope drops.

    He ascended the steps carefully. He'd slipped the first time here, almost cracking open his head on the ice and granite. The huge brass-framed door swung ponderously back with a whoof of air. That door was as heavy as it looked, and took a bit of muscle to bully open.

    Heat rushed toward his cheeks. When he opened the inside double doors he saw a woman in a long, burgundy coat striding his way with a wool glove full of fresh mail. He tarried a beat, then decided to hold the door for her. She met his eyes quickly, with a confined, tight-lipped smile, noncommittal but acknowledging the courtesy. You never knew who you might catch lurking around the P.O. at this hour.