The Vaults (18 page)

“He’s okay,” Carla said. “Enrique’s an organizer at Bernal’s plant. We’re just meeting about our next step.”

Poole’s head throbbed. Carla had spoken of Enrique in the past, but
Poole had never actually met him. A stalwart, Carla said. Poole’s mind was starting to clear.

Carla anticipated his first question. “They dropped you at our doorstep. Just pulled a car to the curb, opened the door, and pushed you out.”

“Who?”

“Don’t you know?”

“ASU?”

“That’s our guess,” she said, indicating Enrique. “We don’t know for sure.”

“Do I look . . . ?” Poole began, then felt the room move beneath him, his eyes rolling in his head. His thoughts fractured into irrationality and he again lost consciousness.

Enrique was gone. He and Carla had finished their meeting as Poole slept. Now Poole and Carla sat at the kitchen table, the photographs of Bernal and his lover strewn messily about. Poole fought to focus through the pounding in his head. There were many things to figure out and not much time.

“Enrique and I talked,” Carla said. “We need to get the photos to a newspaper.”

Poole tensed the way he always did when he disagreed with Carla. He had blackmailed close to a dozen people over the years, but they had always come through with the money, and he’d never had to follow through on his threats. The photos were his only leverage. Once they were public, he could do nothing to threaten Bernal—or protect himself.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“We have to. Don’t you see? Either way, we lose our leverage. If we don’t get the pictures into a paper, then he thinks we’re bluffing and ignores us. If we do get them printed, well, that puts more pressure on him, doesn’t it?”

Poole conceded the point. She was right, and anyway, arguing would get him nowhere. It bothered him, though, that Enrique was suddenly taking part in the decision making. Not the least because Carla was Enrique’s ally in this, not his.

“We need to get back at him,” Carla said, leaning across the table. “We can’t let him and those goddamn ASU cops walk all over us. We need to respond. This is all we’ve got.”

“Okay.”

“Are you worried because you got picked up? Was Bernal behind it? Pulling in a favor from the mayor?”

“No, actually.” Poole was still bewildered by this. “I thought they pinched me because of Bernal, but that wasn’t what they were asking me about. They asked me about Casper Prosnicki.”

“Well, what the hell could you tell them about him?”

“Nothing.” He hesitated.

“What?”

Poole sighed with exasperation. “There was one thing I did know. They asked who hired me.”

“You didn’t tell them.”

“I did.” Poole anticipated the coming judgment. “I wasn’t able . . . They worked me over pretty good. I wasn’t thinking . . .”

Carla shushed him and stared at the table.

Poole tried again. “I—”

Carla held up a hand and Poole knew to let her think.

“You have to find her,” she said finally. “She needs to know.”

Poole knew this was coming. “Call your people. See if you can get an address for her. I’ll go talk to her.”

Carla closed her eyes and Poole saw the terrible strain in her sunken cheeks and downturned mouth. He made a motion to reach across the table and touch her hair, but the movement made his head swim, and by the time he recovered, she was gone. He heard her voice from the other room, inquiring over the phone as to the current address of Lena Prosnicki.

Carla made several phone calls in the next two hours before returning to the kitchen. Poole slept in his chair, using his forearms crossed on the table for a pillow. He awoke to her gently massaging his shoulders. At another time he would have found this arousing. He wondered if he had been kicked in the genitals, but they didn’t hurt, so he decided that maybe his lack of response was from the stress and pain.

“Baby,” she said, “I’ve got bad news.”

His pulse quickened. “What?”

“No address for Lena Prosnicki in the City or any towns around here.”

Poole nodded. “So she’s either in from out of town—which I don’t buy—she’s homeless, or she lives somewhere without an address.”

Carla saw where he was going. “Like a hospital.”

“But people in hospitals usually have a home to go back to. An address. I’m thinking more of an institution, probably an asylum. I remember she was queer, like maybe she was doped. Maybe she’s at an asylum and they’ve got her on something.”

Carla nodded. It was a place to start.

Dawlish, the elevator operator, greeted Puskis with a serious look. Puskis, still shaken from the Retrievorator demonstration at Headquarters, assumed that Dawlish was reacting to some physical manifestation of that shock. He stepped into the awaiting elevator and was surprised to see Dawlish do a quick, surreptitious glance around the lobby before closing first the gate and then the elevator door. He hesitated before beginning the descent into the Vaults.

“Mr. Puskis, sir, I wanted you to know that I am through with your pen but not yet able to return it.” He then pulled the lever, and with the distant whirr of metal gears, they descended.

Puskis squinted at Dawlish, realizing this cryptic statement was significant. Through great concentration he suppressed his worries about the future of the Vaults and thought about Dawlish’s words. The signal had been to return the pen when someone went into the Vaults. What did it mean that he was finished with the pen but not ready to return it?

The elevator came to a stop, and Dawlish opened the door, then the gate. As Puskis exited, Dawlish touched his arm—perhaps the first time they had ever made physical contact—and stared at him with panicked eyes. Puskis stood staring at the elevator as Dawlish closed the door, then listened as it made its short ascent.

I’m through with your pen but not ready to return it.
The implication was that the conditions for return had been met but the time was not proper.
Conditions and time.
The required condition was that someone go into the Vaults; and this, if he understood Dawlish correctly, had happened. The timing then—Puskis took a step back so that he was pressed against the wall—the timing had to mean that the person had not yet left. Someone else was in the Vaults
right now
.

The logic behind this deduction was not foolproof, yet Puskis knew he was right. He stood motionless, listening—hearing the ambient noise as if for the first time. The humming of lights. The hiss and clink of the heating
system. Distantly, the noise of the street through the thick walls. He felt fatigued from the fear and from the unaccustomed physical activity. He eased over to his desk on stiff legs and sat, straining to hear a noise beyond the usual.

Seventeen years since another person had been back in those stacks. More accurately, it had been seventeen years since someone had been back in the stacks while he had been in the Vaults and known it. He had already established that someone—or some people—had been there while he was absent. And the cleaners came when Puskis was away. He had never actually seen them, but their work was apparent.

It came almost as a relief when the sound that he strained so hard to hear was finally audible. A step, like the click of a pen on a wooden desk; followed by another. Someone was walking back in the Vaults. Puskis struggled with a range of reactions: fear, anger, curiosity, dismay. He felt a quick surge of energy as adrenaline coursed through his system. Fight or flight. He had never before faced that choice. Even at Reif DeGraffenreid’s there had been no one to fight. Fleeing from the old blind man was a result of his general panic, not because he felt physically endangered. He straightened up, knowing that this was the first step in any possible reaction. Without making a conscious decision to do so, he began to walk into the stacks.

He had forgotten, over time, just how hard it was to determine the direction of noise in the Vaults. Sound bounced around the shelves and ceiling, sometimes seeming to come from four or five distinct points at once, and other times sounding as though it came from a vast general source. It was the aural equivalent of a house of mirrors.

Puskis tried to search efficiently, walking down the wide center aisle, attempting to determine which side the footsteps were coming from. He would take four or five steps, then stop, listening. Hearing nothing, he would move on another four or five steps. Occasionally he heard a footstep while he walked and would instantly stop, but no more footsteps would come. As he progressed, the shadows cast by the intermittent lights seemed to move, an effect of his changing perspective.

Nearly halfway down the center aisle, he heard another sound, like a rug being pulled across the floor. As a result of some fortuitous arrangement of aisles and shelves, the direction of this sound was more easily determined. It came from his left and in front—farther into the depths of the Vaults.

He shuffled forward to where another wide aisle bisected the Vaults at a perpendicular angle. He repeated his earlier method, taking a few steps and then listening. He heard a footstep that sounded as if it came from behind him, and he questioned his initial impression of the source of the sound. But soon he heard a burst of four footsteps confirming that he was cornering the intruder in the far-left reaches of the Vaults, a backwater of fraud and number-running files.

To this point the challenge of trying to home in on the source of the footsteps had distracted Puskis from the danger that he might be facing. But now he detected an unfamiliar odor, a cologne of some sort, though not one that Puskis associated with anyone in particular. He took it as a sign he was closing in on the intruder and was confronted with the question of what, exactly, he would do if he was successful in his search. He stopped and pondered the wisdom of confrontation until the footsteps started again. This time they were rapid and no attempt was made to move quietly. Puskis could not determine their exact direction, but the increasing volume signaled that the intruder was headed toward him.

He froze momentarily, then, with short, hasty steps, fled into the stacks in a direction that would not intercept the intruder if he was trying to get to the elevators. When Puskis felt he was far enough to the left that the intruder would not happen upon him by accident, he stopped, gasping for breath. He stood behind the end of a row of shelves and looked back toward the main aisle. The intruder was taking the wider aisles back to the elevators. Puskis could follow the steps now and caught a quick glimpse of a man in a dark suit, his fedora pulled low as he flashed across Puskis’s aisle. The moment passed too quickly for an identification, even if Puskis knew who the man was.

He waited where he stood until he heard, in the distance, the elevator door open and then close again. He thought he heard muffled voices, but in the end he was not sure. He stayed for several more minutes in the unlikely event that the intruder had used the elevator as a deception and was, in fact, waiting for him by the desk. Finally collecting his nerve, he made a cautious journey back to the front of the Vaults. He crept to a position in the stacks where he could get a good view of his desk. Seeing no one, he returned to his station and collapsed into his chair. On the top of the desk, next to a short stack of file requests, was the pen he had lent Dawlish.

The nun working reception at St. Agnes’ Asylum on a forgotten street in Capitol Heights was as gray, peeling, and cracked as the building itself. She peered at Poole through dirty bifocals, a grimace of distaste on her face. Poole could imagine the picture he presented with his swollen face and limp.

“I’m here to see my aunt.” He struggled with his swollen tongue, slurring his words. “Her name is Lena Prosnicki.”

She continued to stare at him.

“Ma’am, I’m here to see Lena Prosnicki.” He carefully enunciated the words this time in case his slurring had confused her.

She turned from him and walked through a wooden door behind her desk, leaving Poole to wonder whether she was reacting to his query and, indeed, if she had even heard him. He leaned over the counter that partitioned the room into the public and the official halves and scanned the reception desk for anything of interest. A filthy registry book was open among scattered sections of newspaper. A coffee mug contained only mold, and two plates had the crumbs of earlier meals.

Wincing with the pain in his knees and ankles, Poole pushed through the swinging gate and examined the registry. The most recent entry was from two weeks prior. The place did not get much traffic—at least officially. The names on the open page were not familiar, and he flipped back a page.

Poole had expected to hear the nun’s footsteps returning, but either the door provided remarkable soundproofing or she moved quietly because the door swung open without warning and the woman reappeared with a younger, worn-looking nun trailing. Finding Poole on the wrong side of the divider, the woman scowled, walked to the desk, and slammed the registry shut.

“Sister Prudence will take you back to Dr. Vesterhue.”

Sister Prudence kept her eyes down, acknowledging Poole by looking at
his stomach. She turned and pushed open the wooden door through which she had arrived. With an uncomfortable look at the older nun, Poole followed.