The City Under the Skin (28 page)

“What did the bastard do to you?” said Billy.

With one long, skinny hand, Carla gestured over her shoulder to her own back.

Billy held her by the arms, tenderly turned her around, and raised her shirt again to reveal the bare skin of her back. It was blotched and inflamed. It wasn't immediately possible to make out what Wrobleski had been up to—the marks were so shaky and imprecise—but it was clear that he hadn't been drawing a map. Rather, Carla's back seemed to be written on, signed with a single word, though around it were various blots and rashes, signs of hesitation, false starts. Zak, Marilyn, and Billy peered at the marks. Some decoding was required, and it took a while before they realized what Wrobleski had written there, a name:
AKIM
.

Now the earth began to tremble again, another underground explosion, not so far away this time, a slow crescendo that seemed to come from all directions at once. The fabric around them pulsed, shivered, and trickles of pulverized dirt shimmered down from the tiled ceiling directly above their heads. As they froze, stood perfectly still and silent, a cracking sound echoed from the darkness. It sounded organic, less the noise of masonry than of a great tree tearing at its roots. They turned in the direction of the sound, looked at what was now a long, narrow fissure in the station roof, like a cartoon drawing of forked lightning, with brown ooze seeping from the crack.

“Are we going to be able to get out of here?” Billy said.

“Sure,” said Marilyn, leading the way. “Just follow my butt.”

 

41. THE REVOLVE

There is a psychological condition known as cartocacoethes, in which people see the whole world as nothing more than a series of maps. They look at clouds, rock formations, wallpaper patterns, the stains on a motel mattress, and they see examples of cartography. The puddle of blood looks like Africa, every high-heeled boot is Italy, a woman's pubic triangle becomes the Mekong Delta, before or after deforestation.

Some say this is a form of pareidolia, a condition in which arbitrary pieces of information suddenly take on unwarranted significance in the sufferer's mind. And this in itself may be considered a version of apophenia, seeing patterns and linkages in sets of essentially random data. Others say cartocacoethes is just a fancy word made up by map obsessives to glorify their own obsession. But perhaps we don't need to be suffering from any pathology in order to feel the need for orientation, to long for a method by which we can locate our position in a universe of uncertainties. We read the map, we read the world, we chart environments and faces and bodies. We hope to know where we are. We hope to read a message, a meaning, to work out a direction and a course. Is that so unreasonable? You could also argue that if the world is nothing but a series of maps, it's that much harder ever to be truly lost.

Zak Webster rearranged the items on his desk in Utopiates. The computer mouse suddenly looked like an oversymmetrical island, an antique steel ruler looked like a man-made isthmus, while the swirling patterns in the fake wood of the desk's surface looked like contours, or isolines if you wanted to get technical. It was 6:30 on one of those shortening, restless, end of summer evenings, and he had no intention of closing the store. He was waiting for Ray McKinley to arrive. Zak had told Ray a few simple and plausible lies, chiefly that he'd found a new customer who was about ready to spend some serious money starting a collection, but the guy needed to be coaxed, to have his ego stroked by the boss. It happened often enough, and Ray McKinley was enough of a player to want to be involved in the game.

Ray arrived on time, wearing several layers of unmatched pastel linen and tasseled loafers without socks, looking like a man on a permanent vacation. If Zak had been trying to impress a new customer, he'd have worn something more formal, possibly tweedy, but maybe that was why Zak was just a shop assistant.

“What happened to your face this time?” said Ray. “Is that a rash or something?”

“Yeah, I'm kind of allergic to all kinds of things: cacti, dynamite, you name it.”

Ray was prepared to take it as a joke, and he didn't need to understand his employees' jokes.

“You look like crap anyway,” said Ray. “And this customer of yours is late.”

“Barely,” said Zak, looking at his watch. “Don't worry. He'll be here. He's very reliable.”

There was already one customer in the store, in the back room, a woman in baggy pants and combat boots, a serious-looking camera slung over her shoulder, and her big dark eyes were looking out through ornate tortoiseshell glasses at an early map of America, one that had California depicted as an island, its northernmost part designated New Albion.

There was a newly framed item propped up on the floor, its face toward the side of Zak's desk.

“What's that?” Ray asked.

“A little something I picked up,” said Zak. “I thought you might like it. It's not really a map, it's more of a blueprint.”

Zak picked up the frame and turned it around so McKinley could see its design, its muted colors, its simple, schematized lines, that might be thought to look like an amoeba and its nucleus, or perhaps a fried egg. Ray made a wet noise deep in his throat to convey disgust, anger, contempt: a whole legend of resentments.

“Why would I want that?” he said. “The Telstar's never been anything but trouble. Every day I own it I lose money.”

“Well, you've done your best, Ray. You got rid of the original architect, you got rid of the mayor's right-hand man. What more could you do?”

McKinley's face suddenly looked rather less carefree. Harshly, but quietly enough that he hoped the customer in the back room wouldn't hear, he said, “I'm going to pretend I don't know what you're talking about. What's this buyer's name, anyway?”

“Moore,” said Zak. There was no need to make up a false name. “I don't know him very well. But he means business.”

“Maybe we can unload the Jack Torry map on him.”

“I doubt it,” said Zak.

“Get it out anyway. We'll have the map case on your desk; that'll pique his interest. Then you can roll it out with a big flourish. Go on.”

Zak hesitated a long time before he said, “It's not here.”

“Where is it?”

Zak could see no point in lying. “I took it to Wrobleski.”

“I told you not to do that.”

“Yes, you did, Ray.”

“And what?” McKinley's face opened up with anger and disbelief. “You let him keep it?”

“No. Wrobleski's not in the market for maps anymore.”

“Why not?”

“Well, he's in a hole in the ground, one way or another.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Wrobleski's gone. Missing in action. His compound burned, his collection too.”

Ray McKinley considered this. It wasn't the very worst bit of news he'd ever received. “But what happened to the fucking map?”

“Well, there was a lot of stuff going on in the compound. You know, women and tattoos.”

“No, I don't know ‘women and tattoos.' What are you talking about?”

“But you do, Ray. You know all about them.”

“What's up with you, Zak? You come off your meds?”

Zak ignored that. He said, “At one time I thought it was Wrobleski who'd done the tattooing, but I don't believe that anymore. And Wrobleski assumed it had to be Akim doing it, which was a reasonable assumption, because Akim was there when Wrobleski did the murders, and he helped him dispose of the bodies, so he had all the information he needed to make a map. So Akim
could
have done it, but he didn't. Wrobleski was wrong. Akim was only the messenger, right?”

Ray flicked a glance toward the customer in the back room. Was she hearing all this? He said, “This isn't the time or the place.”

Zak continued, “Well, it'll have to do. Since Akim knew the details of Wrobleski's murders, he was always in a position to rat him out. And I guess he ratted to you first. He told you all the dirty details so you could make use of them, didn't he? You seen Akim lately, Ray? I think he's another one who won't be around much anymore.”

McKinley folded his hands extravagantly in front of him. He now looked like a man whose vacation had been irredeemably ruined. He said, “You know, I think it might be much better for your future health if you just shut the fuck up now.”

On cue, Marilyn, all feigned casualness, strolled through from the back room of Utopiates. Ray McKinley directed a professional smile in her direction, though it was less than full strength.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “We have to close up the store now. My employee here is having a breakdown or something.”

“Too late for apologies, Ray,” said Marilyn.

He hesitated, looked at her guardedly.

“Do I know you?”

“Well, you put a leather hood over my head, so I can see why you might not remember my face. And you brought me here, didn't you? You brought me to Utopiates, took me down to the basement, did the inking down there. This place gave me the creeps the first time I saw it. Instinct, I guess.”

“I don't know what you two are playing at,” said Ray, “but it's very dangerous.”

Ignoring this, Marilyn continued, “You paid Wrobleski to kill the architect of the Telstar, and then you marked his granddaughter with a map of the murder. That was pretty ugly of you, Ray.”

“Ah,” said Ray, “I think I'm beginning to see.” It took him a moment or two to grasp the full implications, but it sank in before too long. “Yes,” he said, “that was pretty sick of me, wasn't it?” He did not mean it as an apology.

A car pulled up outside. It was a cheap, clean rental. Billy Moore got out quickly, to distance himself from this piece of junk he was forced to drive while his Cadillac was out of action, having sustained a little fire damage. He was inside the store before Ray had decided what his next move was, before he'd calculated how many moves he might have left.

“Ray,” said Zak, “let me introduce you to Mr. Moore.”

Another customer, another interruption. Ray had no idea if this was good or bad, and then he knew it was the latter. Billy's right fist made dry, brittle, solemn contact with Ray's chin. His head seemed to pull him backward, sprawling on his back across Zak's desk. Then he was viciously scooped up, dragged into the back room, and tossed into a corner, where he landed brokenly, beneath the map of Greenland. Between them Billy and Zak tied Ray's hands and feet with cord, but left his mouth free, to do some talking, no doubt to try to talk his way out of it.

“Come on, Ray,” said Zak, “we've worked out most of the story. Fill us in on the fine print.”

“I can do that,” Ray said. He showed a fine, glib pride as he started to explain. “This tattooing thing, it's always been an interest of mine. I'd been doing it for years in an amateurish way, you know, just a leisure-time activity, cheap thrills, if I could find a more or less willing girl who'd let me work on her. I'm not saying I was any good. I knew I wasn't. And I always had trouble knowing what design to use, but it was no big deal. I had no ambitions.

“And of course I knew Wrobleski—we go back a long way—and I knew what he did, and once in a while he did it for me. When you're in real estate, there's always somebody who needs killing. And in the beginning I thought I was better off not knowing the details, but then along comes Akim, who's got one or two grievances against Wrobleski, and he wants to share, to give me all the chapter and verse about what his boss does. He gets quite a kick out of describing it. You know, I'm not the only sick puppy in this story.

“And then, right, I have my brilliant idea. I like tattoos, I like maps, I especially like coded maps: I've found my subject. Akim describes events and I illustrate them, by putting a lousy tattooed map on the back of some random girl I pull in off the street, though okay, not so random in your case, Marilyn darling. Akim helped sometimes. Akim likes to watch. And that's all it was, no big deal, no different from a couple of guys going out, having a beer, shooting some pool.

“And then I start having problems with Wrobleski. I ask him to do a simple job. And he won't. I don't like it when people say no to me. It's the principle of the thing. I want to fuck with him. And I suppose I could have threatened to give an ‘anonymous tip-off' to the cops, but I didn't need to do that, did I? All I had to do was make sure Wrobleski knew the tattoos existed. And as fate would have it, my little sick friend Akim had been keeping an eye on the women. He knew where they were, knew where to find them again.”

Ray McKinley was not entirely surprised when Billy Moore kicked him a couple of times, once in each kidney.

“How did Wrobleski even find out?” Zak asked.

“Our Mr. Wrobleski had an occasional taste for prostitutes. Akim made the arrangements. Akim and I made sure he got a girl with a map of one of the murders on her back; I think her name was Laurel. He looked: he saw the map. Okay, it was a shitty map, and it was coded. But Wrobleski could decode it better than anybody else on earth. He could read the signs because he already knew what they meant. He realized that somebody knew his business, but he didn't know who or how or why. And that bothered him. I liked it that way.”

“And how was this supposed to end?” said Zak.

“Wrobleski was supposed to kill the fucking mayor. If he'd done that in the beginning, we wouldn't be having this conversation.”

Billy Moore kicked Ray again, in the stomach, just to keep up his own morale. Ray McKinley seemed to be coughing up blood.

“So now you know,” said Ray thickly. “You can all sleep easier now. And where do we go from here? You want to call a cop? No. Why would you? Wrobleski's gone. Akim's gone. Old man Driscoll ain't coming back. You don't want a court case with a missing murderer and no bodies, do you? The real question is, and this is always the
real
question: what exactly
do
you want?”