Us Conductors (21 page)

WE PASSED THROUGH MANHATTAN
in silence. I felt like a trespasser. Amid traffic, it was as if we were penetrating successive circles of guards. We turned corners, plunged forward, braked. It was cloudy. The sun was a murky searchlight. After a long time, we stopped. Out the window—a great revolving door. The air was cool; I could feel it prickling at my arms. But I was still hot inside, sweat at my upper lip. I was still drunk.

“Take this,” said one of the men in front of me. He pushed back a briefcase. There was something inside. The clasps opened in my hands and I saw that it was a pistol. It lay alone at the bottom of the case.

Before I could respond, the first Karl craned round in his seat to look at me. He spoke without mirth. “Don’t get caught,” he said.

The other turned and looked, too. “It’s loaded.”

I swallowed. I closed the briefcase. I went out into the street.

In the lobby of the Dolores Building, a man in a uniform sat behind a desk. “Hello,” I said, slipping my card across the surface, “Leon Theremin for Bert Grimes. At eleven o’clock.” We both looked up at the wall’s great clock, saw the gold minute hand tick to eleven. The man smiled and flipped through his appointment book. Even upside down, I could read my name. It looked the same as all the others.

“You can go right on up, Dr Theremin,” said the man. He held out a cardboard pass. It was bright green and I pinned it to my chest. The security man did not need a pass; he wore a silver star, like a Wild West sheriff. “Number 372. Third floor.”

“Thanks very much,” I said, and I strode across the marble to the elevator. In a leather case by my side there hid a gun.

The elevator slid up the centre of the building. I put the briefcase down; put my hands in my pockets. When we reached the third floor, I smiled at the elevator operator, gave him a tip, took my things, and went out onto the navy blue carpet. Right, left, straight ahead; and through the glass doors of suite 372. The secretary said, “Dr Theremin?” and I said, “Indeed,” and she said, “Mr Grimes is ready to see you now.”

And I said, “Splendid.”

Bert Grimes’s office was not very big. He stood up to greet me, a round man in a tweed suit, extending his hand the way the man at the deli extends a sandwich. “The wonder-worker himself!” he said. “Thanks for coming.”

I called him by his first name. I sat in a comfortable chair across from Bert and for an hour we talked about the factory
applications of teletouch technology. He chuckled and clucked. I crossed my legs at the knee. I said, “Exactly, Bert.” He showed me papers and we talked about numbers and by the front right foot of my chair there was a briefcase containing a gun.

It was 12:07 p.m. when Bert closed the binder on his desk and offered me another salami sub of a handshake.

“Well there we are.”

“Always a pleasure.”

“Joanie and I should have you over for dinner. Bring a lady friend.”

“Yes,” I said, picking up my briefcase.

“You still seeing that blonde? What was her name? Judith?”

I shook Bert’s hand again. He walked me to the elevator. We waited for it to open. There was a janitor at the end of the hallway, sweeping. He kept scrutinizing me. I noticed that despite his dusty coveralls he wore polished leather shoes. He swept the floor like a man who did not often sweep the floor. He had eyes like nails.

The elevator opened.

“Good day,” Bert Grimes said to me.

I said, “Have a swell one.”

The elevator closed. I smiled at the operator, the same one from earlier, a Negro with a birthmark on his chin.

“Hello.”

“Hello.”

“Thank you.”

“Yessir.”

We descended. The elevator did not stop at the second floor. As we approached the ground level I slapped my forehead. “Tarnation,” I said.

“Sir?”

“I forgot something. Back at 372.”

“Wanna go back?”

“Please.”

“Yessir.” The operator pushed a button and pulled a lever and the elevator bucked in the shaft. We began to rise. I was recalling the map of the Dolores Building, the floor plan folded into the pocket of my jacket, imagining its borders expand and rotate.

“It was important,” I said.

“Yessir.”

The air in the elevator felt cool and perfect. The operator was in a good mood. He thought we were travelling companions, co-participants in a misadventure. We were not. When we arrived again at the third floor I nodded to him, told him not to wait. “Good luck, sir,” he said, and I stepped into the corridor, which was empty, and made as if to walk the twenty steps to Bert Grimes’s office: right, left, straight ahead.

Instead, when the elevator’s doors closed, I pivoted on my toe. I leaned into the heavy door that led to the stairwell. I unfastened the button of my jacket and I climbed the stairs, briskly, without touching the handrail.

I climbed to the eighth floor.

The walls were painted silver and the floor was made of silver linoleum and the doors were painted in the colours one expects of bank vaults: fiery red, hunter green, lightning silver. I proceeded down a hallway. Each door was marked with a number: 872, 874, 876. Most were closed but through two, wedged open, I saw harmless men eating lunch.

I came to an intersection. I did not need the map folded in eighths in my pocket. I remembered it. I turned left. I held a briefcase concealing a gun. I came to another intersection. I turned right. There were steel doors, glass doors, wooden doors—845, 843, 841. Now the faces behind the doors were of men less harmless-looking. Their eyes flicked up when they saw me pass.
They sat with filing cabinets filled with secrets. I was the wind moving through trees. I turned left and pushed through a door with a decal of the American flag. This corridor was empty. My steps echoed. I walked more softly—826, 824. As I approached 818 I found I was holding my breath. I breathed. With my index finger I brushed a skim of sweat from my upper lip.

I turned a corner and the janitor, the janitor I had seen downstairs, the janitor with eyes like hammered pieces of carbonized steel, was sweeping dust from a clean-swept floor. His head was downturned but when I arrived around the corner his whole body tilted, swivelled, and he was facing me, slightly stooped, with a set jaw.

“Hello,” he said.

His shoes were too fine for a janitor.

“Hello,” I said.

I was standing in front of the door marked 818. It was grey. The key that Lev had given me was in my hand, cold, like a blade. The janitor had still not looked away. I had still not looked away. I smiled primly. I turned the key in the lock and went into room 818 and I shut the door behind me, standing with my back to it. I listened. There was a thin line of light under the door. I waited. I was silent. I could not hear anything. I could not hear breathing or footsteps or the sweeping of dust. It was pitch black in room 818 and if the janitor was an agent, an agent of something, then at this instant he was listening too. His ear was at the same level as mine, on the other side of this door. He was calculating what I was doing, where I stood, whether I was armed. He was the United States of America and I was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. He was reaching into his coveralls and withdrawing a loaded gun.

I crouched in the darkness. The floor tile was coloured by the thin band of hallway light. I placed my briefcase on the floor and
I opened its clasps and they were deafeningly loud and I imagined the janitor kicking through the door and knocking me prone. I imagined bullets. I took the revolver in my hand and I put my hand in my jacket pocket and I stood, and I turned the doorknob. Then I pushed open the door in one swift extraordinary movement and my finger was tensed on the trigger of my gun, concealed in my pocket, and my eyes were trained on the place in the air where I would see a steely stare.

He was not there. The corridor was deserted.

I went back into 818. I turned on the lights. It was a small storage room filled with filing cabinets. There was no way to lock the door from the inside. I picked up the briefcase and I put it on a table in the centre of the room. I placed the gun beside it. I took off my jacket and set my hands flat on the surface of the table, where I stared at them. I stood like that until I had stopped trembling.

Then I raised my head and took the hooked pins from my pocket and read the labels on the locked cabinets whose entrails I had been sent to steal.

SOME THINGS ARE EASY
to break: you throw them against a wall, you murmur a few words. Some things are less fragile. They cannot be carelessly ruined. Locks are like this: to break their purpose you must know them fully, as you would know certain faces. You must understand the flick and tick of tumblers, the swivel of nooks in metal. I did not know how to pick a lock. I tapped the first small silver circle. I peered at it. I wondered how long it would be until someone came into this room and found me tampering with boxes that did not belong to me. I had no time for failures. The lock was just a complicated thing that would come undone, like so many complicated things had
come undone. I tapped the lock again. I imagined other locks I had seen, the greased fit, and I evaluated the size and style of the mechanism before me. In my hand were my two pins, my lock picks—one like a flattened piece of steel, hooked; one like a strong wire, bent. I considered the way these tools could be used. I took the first and I jammed it into the lock. It remained there, wedged. I fitted the second above it. This movement had no sound. I pushed inside slowly, softly, feeling for a skirting touch. Tiny grooves, sensitive places. The tools were loose in my hands. I found the faintest ridges at the top of this channel. I stroked these ridges with needle-tip. I felt hidden and very strong.

Pins trembled. My hands moved. I sensed precise small changes; pressure, movement. I pressed sideways on the first, larger pick, and the whole lock seemed to quiver. Once more, and a click, and the cabinet’s whole deep drawer shuddered out into my chest.

A long row of folders, a thousand sheets of paper.

I worked quickly, searching for the twelve files among reams of typed pages, acetate, mimeograph. There were patents, memos, lists of addresses and employees. There were plans for bridges, the schematics of turbines. Each folder seemed to be marked with a different seal, as if these were the archives of nobles. I wondered who had typed or scrawled in each dossier’s code. 1223-BO-1A10E. Was this the riddle of a spy, a bureaucrat, or an engineer? And what was I, now, rifling through a foreign ministry’s documents? Had I relinquished something, or gained it?

Four of the files on my list were within the first cabinet. They were slender manila folders, unexceptional. They now lay in a stack beside my loaded gun.

I walked to a second cabinet. Again I inserted my tools into a tiny lock. I listened with my fingers, such a sensitive burglar. I could not help but look back over my shoulder. Every
second second I seemed to be looking back over my shoulder. Staring at the closed door, the almost imperceptible line of hallway light. Waiting for shadows or footsteps or the silhouette of an enemy, framed at the doorjamb. The second cabinet opened. Again, a drawer filled with papers. 2988-TY-0H76C, 5297-TY-1T43P, 8196-TY-3U42I, all these untold tales, and finally 3102-TY-1O49B, one of my needles in the haystack. 3102-TY-1O49B was an envelope, not a folder. There was no one to see me; I looked inside. A sheaf of postage stamps. Just postage stamps. I stared at these orange stamps, 3102-TY-1O49B, wondering their secret, wondering whether they tainted or elevated the letters on which they were affixed.

The stack of stolen files got taller. I opened a third cabinet, a fourth. I heard footsteps from the corridor, and I froze—the footsteps moved across the doorway and away. I felt the ventilated air against my rib cage. I left my sweated thumbprints on a creamy carton folder. In this drawer there were thin leather satchels filled with documents. PERS 01, PERS 02, PERS 03. But no PERS 07, the object of my quest, the final file on my list. PERS 04 through PERS 06 were also missing. Had these dossiers been removed? Were they concealed in another cabinet? Again, I scanned the labels of the unopened cabinets. I heard footsteps from the corridor. I froze. The footsteps moved across the doorway and away. I opened a fifth cabinet, tricking the lock with my silver pins. PERS 07 did not hide there either. I opened a sixth cabinet, heard footsteps in the corridor, froze. I looked back over my shoulder and waited. Nothing, nothing. Nothing, and then, as if there were a ghost in the room, the steel drawer of one of the other cabinets slid closed. The sound had a terrifying finality, thundering and also neatly small, like the tick mark on a bureaucrat’s checklist, like the cocked hammer on a revolver. A fissure that slides across an airship’s engine.

I looked down. PERS 07 lay in the drawer before me. A notebook in white.

I was taking the notebook from its place when the door of room 818 blasted open. It was like the landfall of a cyclone. I jerked around, bumping the drawer with my hand, scraping my knuckle, hearing the mechanism’s violent clasp. My gaze was lifting to the doorway, across polished leather shoes but not to the face of the solemn orderly, the adversary I had imagined. Instead, square in the light, like the first figure of an illuminated manuscript, stood Danny Finch. His jacket was unbuttoned. He had blond hair and pale blue eyes and there were no binoculars at his neck. His chest was rising with inhaled breath and my chest rose with inhaled breath, and I did not smile at this man, I did not greet him; I looked at him as if he had already wronged me.