She had been in smaller rooms, lived in smaller rooms than this, and in the future would certainly inhabit rooms as suspect. The street noise returned to them after a few minutes’ reprieve, through the open window, marching across the dirty green blinds: honks, catcalls, collisions. The city’s raspberry. She saw the bathroom and its cold tile: Freeport was drying three pairs of exhausted socks on the shower rod. Freeport darted to the table by the lumpy bed and removed the bottle from its brown bag. Crumpled the brown bag and tossed it to the metal basket beneath the single window. “Like a nip?” he asked. “A little nightcap?” he offered, rubbing his handkerchief across a tumbler rim and holding the glass to the light.
She told him she would undress in the bathroom. The door wouldn’t shut for warping or too many ambitious paint jobs, thus allowing a ribbon of white light at the frame through which she could hear his quick fumbling movements out of fabric, the rasping and squeaking of the tiny bed as he mounted it. Lila Mae hung her pants on the shower curtain next to the man’s socks and laid her jacket and shirt and bra over them. She felt the sweat on her feet make the hotel disinfectant on the bathroom floor tacky. She checked her face in the silver glaze of the mirror: Lila Mae had her game face on, that rigid concoction of hers. Holy, it seemed to her, because that’s how she designed it. It accorded with her own definitions.
He said stuff but she ignored it because it did not pertain to the case. She did not concern herself with his breath, corrosive and slow to dissipate, a low foul cloud. She recorded the details of the investigation, his fingers and kisses, his slow tumble on top of her, which was awkward, as if he were a seal and did not possess arms to steady himself. Her first investigation. Lila Mae made a file for her first investigation and recorded the pertinent details. The language of the report was drawn from the lumbering syntax of bureaucracy. It preserved the details but did not retain the other parts, the ones this language did not have words for. He didn’t wake when she dressed and departed, as she knew he wouldn’t.
* * *
A week ago at this time, the night of the accident, she sat in a rocking subway car, returning from O’Connor’s and staring at a newspaper headline. The late edition carried the Fanny Briggs story on the front page. Rosacea squatted on the face of the man who held the paper, making his skin as rough as tabloid paper. His eyes scanned the cheap print. He turned the pages slowly, moving on to other metropolitan catastrophes, the next mithridatic outrage, the pages fluttered behind the front page but the headline remained the same, in the same place hovering across from her. CRASH.
Now things are quite different. The headline is there, bedclothes for bums, dancing on the plume of a midtown wind tunnel. But she is advancing on it, for it contains her name and she is reclaiming her name.
She arrives a half hour early and parks the sedan across the street from Bickford’s shiny windows. When she makes out Chuck’s distinctive walk (an idiot choreography of shoulders and hips, sockets working overtime), she searches the street for signs of his shadow, the silent men who might be following him. Waits another ten minutes after he sits down in one of the window booths (exposed), then enters Bickford’s: he has not been followed by Chancre or Internal Affairs or who knows.
“So what do you have for me, Chuck?” she asks briskly, squeezing into the booth.
“ ‘So what have you got for me?’ ” Chuck complains. “That’s all you have to say for yourself? I haven’t seen you since last week.”
She imagines this the voice he reserves for domestic mishap. Marcy-tone: whining, angry. “I’m sorry, Chuck. There’s a lot going on right now.” She takes the napkin into her lap. The restaurant has recently upgraded to stiff cloth napkins in an attempt to lure some of the theater crowd. Bickford’s is in a weird place: two blocks east from the warehouses, two blocks west of the Big Houses. Bickford’s humble days as a greasy spoon are waning, the nice money is in family fare, snaring the gullible and aimless tourist crowd as they bumble lost. No more haphazard blue-plate specials, no more handwritten signs describing the cook’s daily whim. Better plates, even-tined forks, opaque globes over the fly-specked bulbs. She doesn’t recognize the menu anymore.
“You look good, at least,” Chuck says, a sucker for an apology. “For someone on the lam.”
On the lam: she is that, she thinks. “What’s the mood around the office these days?”
“It’s been pretty hectic since Chancre’s accident. Hardwick’s really been driving us, which isn’t helping things. Chancre’s still in the hospital so it’s got them worried about losing election momentum. It was a real blow to their morale.”
“I saw it made the papers.” And seeing it cheered her. Bad ink goes both ways.
“It was a pretty spectacular fall,” he says. “They were sitting pretty after Fanny Briggs—put the Intuitionists in their place and all that—but with the Otis routine, Lever’s regained some support. Some people are even saying that Reed and Lever were behind it.” It’s not much of a stretch, Lila Mae thinks, to see Reed taking credit for Natchez’s prank. “With that and the Fulton rumors,” Chuck continues, “the election is up in the air again. Have you heard about the Fulton stuff?”
She can’t remember what face she’s supposed to have on. “The rumors about the black box?” If Reed and Lever have leaked to the rank and file that the box is out there, they must be confident that they’ll find it soon. Or perhaps they already have it. She’d know if she were still on the inside. Lila Mae wonders what their response is to her disappearance from the House.
“Right,” Chuck says. “Apparently Lift was supposed to run a story on it this week, but it didn’t appear. There’s all sorts of speculation about that, of course, but the bottom line is that some of us have hope in Lever again, and some of the fence-straddlers are coming around to our side. Do you think it’s true, Lila Mae? That it’s out there?”
“It could be.”
“Just think of it—Fulton’s black box. Do you know what it means? The second elevation is coming. Everything around us, all that out there, will come down. All of it,” animated, looking at Lila Mae for a companion in his romance of the future. She is, to say the least, subdued. Chuck slides his finger into his coffee cup and withdraws a long black hair. “Some of the guys were mumbling that the perfect elevator might put us out of work, but there are always maintenance issues and all that. It should be pretty interesting come Tuesday night. Are you going to vote?”
“I’ll have to see how things are faring. Has Forensics come back yet?”
He shakes his head. “No autopsy yet. You know how they are—they’re so happy to get some work that they got to milk it and keep everybody in suspense. But it looks like they’re going to release their findings on Monday morning.”
Monday morning is perfect for her, is what she thinks. By that time she should have what she needs from Pompey, and that, coupled with the forensics report, should clear her. Forensics is capable of being bought off—they work for the city—but they report to the Mayor’s office, and no matter what else the Mayor and Chancre have cooking, the Mayor knows better than to mix with the elevator inspectors’ election. The election is a family matter, and the inspectors take family matters very seriously. “What about this man Arbergast?” Lila Mae asks. “How’s his case going?”
“That’s the bad part, Lila Mae,” Chuck frowns. “He’s got nothing from what I can tell. Not with you gone. Nobody’s talking. When Forensics comes back with their report—and I think we both know it was sabotage—you’re still the number one suspect. You haven’t been heard from in a week.” His voice squeaking. “After that report comes in, he’s going to have to bring in the cops because it officially becomes a criminal case. And you look guilty, Lila Mae. You look guilty.”
“I was guilty before. Now they just have an excuse to get the rope.”
“Why don’t you come in, Lila Mae,” Chuck says. Almost pleading.
“Let’s not start that again.”
“I can help yo
u. Talk to Arbergast. He’ll help you out. You’re one of us.”
She considers, for a second or two, if they’ve gotten to Chuck. It could be any number of parties. But she has called him because she trusts him, and she needs that trust. She’s ready to accept the consequences. “It’ll all be okay come Monday,” she says, believing it to be true.
“You’re not going to let me in, are you?”
She trusts him: just look at him now. Nobody’s gotten to him. She wishes she could let him in, but there will be time next week to share all she has learned … No. Not all. She knows she’s not going to tell him about Fulton. She can’t. It is in his face now: that faded look, the uninteresting flatness of a background object in a photograph. Their friendship, so real a moment ago, is remote. She’s left him behind. She won’t be telling him anything. “It’ll all be over in a few days, Chuck,” she says. “Then I’ll tell you everything.”
“And the police?” Chuck asks.
She purses her lips, then remembers. “One more thing, Chuck—what do you know about 366 Eighth Avenue?”
“366 …” He presses out his cheek with his tongue, a habit Lila Mae has always found vaguely repulsive. “I know that building,” he says finally. “I saw it on the Board this morning. I think it’s set up for inspection next week. Marberley has it.”
“It’s a new building. No one from the Department has seen it yet?”
“No, it’s a checkup. Marberley wrote it up for some violations a few weeks ago.”
She’s in her car five minutes later, uptown in her room at the Friendly League Residence half an hour later. This is the smallest room yet. Liverpool’s “moving drawing rooms” of the turn of the century, steeped in Victorian largesse, spacious enough for a hundred passengers and decorated with smoked mirrors and yielding cushions, could have fit three of this room inside (an elevator in an elevator, an elevator-passenger). The basement coffers of the Friendly League Residence, unofficial repository of the city’s outcast furniture (rescued from the dump, rescued from burned-out tenements), have outfitted this room with one chair of leprous upholstery and a writing table more than suited for the sober composition of suicide notes. Tall brown cabinet doors hide the Murphy bed, up now, tilted in its hinges and half-stuck after years of wrangling by haggard guests.
She has not seen any of the other guests but can imagine them. The city’s tidal forces wash the weak-treading citizens out here, to the edge, to pitiless crags like the Friendly League Residence. Old men in gray clothes with beards like dead grass, stooped and shuffling. The alibiless. Jagged coughing haunted the halls last night, stealing out of multiple rooms, a sodden death-chorus. It kept her awake, to say the least, manifested in her dreams when they finally came as thunder and wet rain over her childhood home. She couldn’t go outside for the rain, in her dreams. She shook the night off quickly this morning, after finding the sun peeking over the low rows of tenements, which trooped off to the far north of the island, into the black river. Not a lot of elevators in this neighborhood. This is the place verticality indicts, the passed-over flatlands, what might as well still be forest and field. No, Chancre and Lever will not find her here. The other guests’ invisible shuffling-out-of-rooms ended around ten this morning and she waited another hour before venturing out of her box, figuring then it was probably safe. The manager downstairs did not look up from the comics as she pushed aside the front doors and let them slam behind her. He has seen many things.
She spent the afternoon on the city’s turf. In the Hall of Records downtown, on the other edge of the island, right across from the Fanny Briggs building. She walked quickly through the shadow the new building spat across Federal Plaza, eyes away from that structure, quick into the revolving door of the Hall of Records. Lila Mae offered her badge to the clerk, a short old crone who did not even bother to check her identification, so preoccupied was she on stamping, with a gleaming steel device, the seal of the city on a heathen mound of paperwork. Lila Mae could clearly discern, upside down, the holy seal convert that bureaucratic rabble. If the Department had issued a warning out on her badge, it had not reached this office yet. When she was finished with the broad ledgers of the Hall of Records, she went to meet Chuck at Bickford’s, and Fanny Briggs’s long shadow had seeped into the air, indistinguishable from night.
In her room at the Friendly League Residence, she reads Theoretical Elevators, Volume Two. Reads, The race sleeps in this hectic and disordered century. Grim lids that will not open. Anxious retinas flit to and fro beneath them. They are stirred by dreaming. In this dream of uplift, they understand that they are dreaming the contract of the hallowed verticality, and hope to remember the terms on waking. The race never does, and that is our curse. The human race, she thought formerly. Fulton has a fetish for the royal “we” throughout Theoretical Elevators. But now—who’s “we”?
She is teaching herself how to read.
At the pounding on the door, she closes the book (the pages resist each other, so jealous and protective are they of Lila Mae’s touch). She is expecting Natchez, who is to deliver his update on his search for Fulton’s journal pages (and perhaps more). But it is not his knock, nor his low voice heard now croaking, “Amy, Amy baby, I’m sorry,” that last word trailing away, dripping down the door like spittle. “I’m sorry I did it. Open up and I’ll show you. It’s just that sometimes when I get in that place … it’s so low, so low and I can’t see up out of it.” This incident is over. The man slaps the door with his hand, and she can hear him walk down the hallway, slowly, soft clothes, a bathrobe maybe, sliding on the dirty tile behind him, a tail or a broom.
When Natchez’s knock finally rattles the old door, she does not need to confirm through the peephole. She withdraws the chain, opens up and he’s staring off down the hallway with distaste and—she sees Fulton’s profile there, the lightly angled brow, knob chin. He wears a light blue suit of plain cut, the kind of suit she associates with the men of colored town, a church and wake suit, probably the only one he owns. Out of the House servant uniform. He says, turning to her, “Nice hotel you picked, Lila Mae.”
“You’re a sight for sore eyes,” she says.
Natchez plucks nervously at his lapels. “I didn’t bring much up here. I don’t know why I brought this along,” shrugging, looking up at the yellowed ceiling. He prestos a bunch of flowers from behind his back, a splash of violets. “I saw these on the way. I thought you might be needing something for the room, and it looks like I was right.”
No, she can’t remember the last time someone … has anyone ever? She can’t recall at all. She locks the door behind him and surveys her tiny room. Doesn’t take long. “Thank you,” she says. “You can put them on the sill. I haven’t anything to put them in.”
He places his hat, a dusty black homburg, on the sill next to the swaddled violets. Natchez drags the chair away from the table with a long screech, sits. “You could have done better than this. Even my room’s better than this and I didn’t have no money for a decent place. I mean—I didn’t have any money for a decent room.”
“You don’t have to act any way for me, Natchez.” He’s taken the only chair in the room. She struggles with the Murphy bed and glides it to the floor. “We come from the same place,” she adds, sitting on the atoll lumps of the mattress.
He looks nervous, rubs his palms across his knees. “Did you find anything today? I mean when you went downtown.”
Perhaps he really is a bit nervous, Lila Mae thinks. She has never thought of herself as an imposing person (that’s how little self-perception she has), but he is new to the city and maybe that explains it. “I think I know why Pompey went to that building last night,” she says. 366 Eighth Avenue, where the two of them tailed Pompey after he left Pauley’s Social Club. “The building is owned by Ponticello Food—they own a tomato canning factory across the river. I’m pretty sure it’s a Shush front. I have enough to confront him, anyway. With the pictures we took. Maybe I can get him to admit he sabotaged
the Briggs stack.”
“I’ll go with you,” Natchez responds. “What time?”
“I don’t need your help—I mean I can do it myself. I work with him. I know him—inside and out. I can handle it.”
“What time? I’m coming with you.” His hands are folded across his chest.
“You have your own errands to do.” His motives are good, but she is no child. “How did it go at the House today? Did you get it?”
“Man, they didn’t think nothing was up. I waited until Mrs. Gravely went out to do her shopping for dinner. Reed and old Lever were out all day. Took all of five minutes to find his notes. For people who think they pretty smart, you think they would keep that drawer locked—it was right in the drawer where you said it would be.” He pulls out the small black camera from his jacket and shakes it in the air. “Once I recognized his handwriting on it, I took the pictures.”
Lila Mae leans forward, excited. “Can I see them?”
Natchez replaces the camera. “I haven’t taken them to the drugstore to get them developed yet. I was going to wait until I got the ones from the Department and the ones from that elevator magazine.”