The Vaults (21 page)

Frings kept his eyes on his notebook. Avoiding eye contact calmed people who were nervous about talking to him. Puskis had been nervous from the start, down on the street. The way he froze when Frings called his name. The look on his face as Frings approached. He was scared of something, though not of Frings. Puskis was merely nervous about talking to him. Possibly, Frings thought, Puskis was nervous about talking to anyone. So he concentrated on his notebook and asked his questions gently.

“I know you aren’t in the habit of talking to reporters.”

“I’m . . . no, I actually am prohibited from giving information to reporters. A stipulation of my contract. I’m afraid I will not be of much, um, assistance to you.”

“I understand. Let me just ask you what I want to ask, and you can decide whether you want to answer.”

Puskis considered this. “Well, I suppose that is fine. Though, again, I’m afraid I will disappoint you.”

“That’s fine. I’m looking for information on a man by the name of Otto Samuelson.” Frings stole a glance up at Puskis and saw the same look as when this odd man had first heard his name on the street; bewilderment and fear. “Do you know that name?”

Puskis was slow to speak. “Why do you . . . why do you want to know about this man?”

“Because someone I talked to told me Samuelson is the key to a big story I’m working on. Because it is important that I talk to him. Because when I did research into his story I learned that he was convicted of murder but couldn’t find any information on his sentence or where he is being held. I was told you were the person to talk to.”

Frings let Puskis think about this and stared at the rugs hanging on the walls. A smell was in the air. Something that Puskis had cooked in the last few days—spices and meat and maybe rice.

Finally Puskis spoke. “I don’t have an answer for you, though that is information in itself.”

Frings looked up, confused.

Puskis continued. “There are twenty men who were convicted of murder during the years 1927 and 1928 and were not incarcerated.”

“What happened to them?”

Puskis shook his head with a look of profound distress. “I don’t know. Like you, I did research. I have access to the City’s official records. There is no question that it is a complete accounting of the affairs of the City’s legal system. Yet there is no record that any of these men are serving time.”

Frings’s breathing became shallow, his pulse fast. “Do you know the names of these men?”

Puskis recited the twenty names while Frings wrote them down in his pad. The man’s recall was amazing.

When he had finished the list, Puskis said, “At least one of the men is now deceased.”

Frings nodded for him to continue.

“Reif DeGraffenreid. I went to see him. He had been decapitated shortly before my arrival.”

Jesus. “Where did you find this DeGraffenreid?”

Puskis related the story of his journey to DeGraffenreid’s and his discovery of the corpse. His speech came in torrents, both hesitant and fast, like water under great pressure being forced through a small hole.

When the story was done, Frings asked, “How did you know where to find DeGraffenreid?”

“I received . . . it seems so obvious in hindsight . . . I received an anonymous phone call.”

“Do you think it was from DeGraffenreid?”

“No.”

“It was a setup? Trying to scare you off?”

“That would appear to be the case. Yes.”

Now it was Frings who paused. He was slightly high and had to assess what he had just learned. He had a number of questions and hoped that Puskis had already thought to look into them.

“When you did your research, was there anything about these men that seemed strange or that they had in common?”

Puskis scratched his temple. “Beyond what we just discussed?” He thought. “They were all gang murders. They were all part of the, uh, the gang war that was active at the time between the White Gang and the Bristols.”

Frings nodded and wrote, as much to keep Puskis talking as for his memory. “What else? Was there anything else?”

“There was a small thing.”

“Okay.”

“When I first discovered the DeGraffenreid file, it had a sentence notation of ‘life,’ followed by the acronym PN. PN is not an approved acronym and I was puzzled, but assumed that it was a typographical error because PB is an approved acronym and the B and N are adjacent on the typewriter. But as I continued to research these cases, I found that all of these men had received the same sentence notation: ‘life,’ followed by PN. It is clearly more than a coincidence, but I do not know what it means.”

When he was finished taking notes, Frings looked up at Puskis, who was visibly energized by this unloading of information.

Frings asked, “What do you think happened to these men?”

“My first assumption, as you might expect, was that they were executed. Perhaps in an, an extrajudicial manner.”

“But then you found DeGraffenreid alive. Or he had been alive.”

“Correct. He was indeed alive up until the time of my visit. He was living in the country.”

“So, your thoughts?” Frings prompted.

Puskis shrugged sadly. “I am not used to conjecture on the basis of such limited facts. Perhaps they were sent off to exile.”

“But why these particular men, Mr. Puskis? Why them?”

“I don’t know.”

They looked at each other for a minute, Frings sensing some kind of weird bond between them, wanting to give Puskis something in this exchange. Something that would cement this bond, make it possible for him to come back to Puskis later if he needed. Frings recognized a name from the list of twenty. He had information.

“One of the men on the list, Vampire Reid.”

Puskis lifted his thin eyebrows in query.

“Well, you said one of the men on your list is deceased. It’s actually two, at least. They found Reid a few years back out in the sticks somewhere. I
remember it because they cut him up pretty good, like someone really had a thing for him.”

Puskis took this in with a grim expression.

“Just thought you’d like to know,” Frings said.

Red Henry’s driver pulled up to the curb across the street from Puskis’s apartment building. Henry watched Smith as he stood at the corner, chin buried in his coat against the brutal wind now blowing. The driver gave a quick punch to his horn. Smith looked up and jogged over to the awaiting car. Henry took up most of the backseat, forcing Smith to lean hard against the door, and still there was an uncomfortable amount of physical contact. Henry was unperturbed. In fact, he liked other men to experience the power of his body. It was another way to intimidate.

Henry said, “Why am I here?”

It was only a seven-block drive from City Hall, but Smith had insisted that it needed to be a face-to-face and that it needed to be here, on the street. Henry was torn between annoyance at being dragged from his office and interest in what was so goddamn important that Smith would dare to insist that Henry take this trouble.

Smith came straight out with it. If he had screwed up by bringing Henry out here, delaying would only exacerbate the situation. “That’s Arthur Puksis’s building. I’m eyeing him, just like you told Peja to tell me. He comes walking up to his door, you see, and out of nowhere comes Frankie Frings. They chin for a second and then they go inside together.”

Henry sat absolutely still, thinking. This might be a good sign or it might be a terrible one, Smith knew.

“Are they still in there?”

“Yeah, pretty sure. I was gone for maybe—what?—a couple minutes calling you. I don’t think I’d have missed him in that time.”

“You have any idea what they might be talking about?”

Smith shook his head.

“Okay. Good work. Stay here and keep an eye on Puskis. What building is this?” Henry indicated the building where Smith had been standing.

“The Bangkok Hotel.”

“Get yourself a room where you can watch the street. No use in you catching goddamn pneumonia out here.”

It was the most compassionate thing Smith had ever heard Henry say.

Feral was in Red Henry’s office a half hour later, watching Henry smoke a cigar and pace. Feral could comfortably wait almost indefinitely—a skill that was valuable with Henry, who didn’t like to be rushed.

“Sit down,” Henry said, billowing smoke as he talked.

Feral sat. Out of habit, he placed most of his weight on his feet and on his forearms, which rested on the arms of the chair. He could do this without significant physical strain.

“For once, Smith actually did something useful. He was watching Puskis—that troll who runs the Vaults—and saw Frankie Frings talking to him. They went up to Puskis’s apartment. Might still be there.”

Feral nodded. This situation was fraught with possibility.

Henry continued, “As you no doubt realize, this is a very bad development. Mr. Puskis has been expressly forbidden to talk to the press, but things have been a little dicey for him recently and he may be moving in his own direction. The catch is that we can’t deal with this situation in the usual ways. Puskis is too valuable in the Vaults. There’s no one who has any idea of what goes on down there. This new system that Ricks is putting together will be fine, but we have to have Puskis to shepherd the process. We need him, as strange as it seems. Frings, on the other hand, is a whole different problem. If anything happens to him, there will be an investigation, public pressure, all holy hell. So we come to our earlier plan.”

“Nora Aspen.”

“That’s right. As soon as possible.”

What passed for the intersection of Kopernik and Stanislaus streets was in a desolate part of town at the northernmost reaches of the Hollows. It was hard to believe that such a barren, empty place existed in the City. The tracks here had been abandoned nearly two decades ago when the railroad was rerouted south and east at the behest of some member of the City Council who stood to profit from the new route.

As the letter instructed, Frings stood on the tracks. He was exposed out there, with at least a two-hundred-yard sprint to the nearest cover. Kopernik and Stanislaus streets were themselves largely abandoned, unpaved and scarred with ruts and potholes. It was a strange place to meet, the one advantage being that the bombers could easily see if Frings had brought anyone.

Frings stood with his hands in his pockets and his back to the wind, which cut through his jacket as if it weren’t there. He had made a call to the newsroom on the way here, instructing Panos to run the version of his column for tomorrow that contained the phrase
golden age,
the signal to Bernal that Frings was ready to meet. He wondered if what he had learned from Puskis would be enough to satisfy Bernal. He had a huge piece of the puzzle: that Samuelson was one of a couple dozen murderers who didn’t go to prison after their convictions. He hoped that Bernal could tell him why they were never incarcerated.

The cold was uncomfortable and the wait indeterminate, so Frings pulled a reefer from his coat pocket. The sweet, green smoke felt good in his lungs, and his sensation of the cold went from its being consuming to an odd, vaguely irritating feeling on his skin. The purple light above the City was interesting. And those searchlights beaming from the top of City Hall . . .

Frings’s muscles were stiff from the cold by the time a lone figure approached down the tracks. He was fifty feet away when he called out, “Frings?” The voice was high and tense.

Frings waved. The figure beckoned Frings with an arm motion and Frings followed, maintaining a constant fifty-foot distance, intuiting that this was his contact’s safety zone. They walked the tracks, past abandoned warehouses with the smoke of squatters’ fires filtering out through broken windows. Occasionally Frings saw a person lying at the bottom of the track-bed berm, either asleep or dead—it was impossible to tell in that light.

They arrived at a warehouse emitting smoke and even some light from its windows. Frings’s escort came to a stop by the front door and waited for Frings to catch up. Up close, Frings was surprised by how small his companion was—maybe just five feet. His escort knocked an intricate beat, and with a scrape of metal on concrete the door opened from within.

Inside, seven fires burned at various spots throughout the vast warehouse, illuminating oases in what was otherwise an indigo void. A fire near the door backlit a group of five standing figures. Like his escort, they were small as well, and it dawned on Frings that they were children.

“You Frings?” one of the boys asked, stepping forward, apparently the leader.

“I’m Frings.”

“We did them bombs.”

Frings wondered if he heard correctly. “You did those bombs?”

The leader grunted in the affirmative.

“Okay. If you are the bombers, what’s the point? What are you trying to prove?” Frings heard the doubt in his own voice.

“You don’t believe me.” From his position it was hard to get a sense of what these kids looked like—they were merely silhouettes.