The City Under the Skin

40. PENULTIMATE THINGS

Wrobleski and Carla Moore passed swiftly through damp, hanging, enclosed darkness. Wrobleski had crammed an oversized miner’s helmet onto Carla’s head, and one on his own. She looked almost adorable. Their feet were wet: dankness soaked into them. At some incalculable distance there was the vast sound of moving water.

Wrobleski told himself he’d been in tougher spots than this. Yes, he was in a sewer. Yes, he was in several kinds of pain, but in the end, pain was nothing, either it went away or you lived with it. And yes, sure, he assumed he would be pursued, and he didn’t know exactly who by or how many there’d be, but in any case nobody he respected.

For now he was prepared to look upon the kid as an asset, although that could change, because looked at in most ways, she was a liability and a total pain in the ass. At least, now that they were down in the tunnels, she’d stopped kicking and biting. She seemed to have realized that, for better or worse, the two of them were in this together. Of course, she could find other ways of being irritating.

“Do you know where you’re going?” she asked, as insolently as she knew how.

“Obviously,” Wrobleski replied.

“Doesn’t seem so obvious to me.”

“That’s because you’re a kid. You don’t know shit.”

She let that hang for a while, as if it might be enough to shut her up, though of course it wasn’t.

“Are we playing hide-and-seek?”

“I’m surprised you even know what hide-and-seek is,” said Wrobleski. “I thought it was all computers and video games for you kids.”

“Oh yeah, I’m very old-school. So how long do we hide for?”

“As long as it takes.”

“We could be down here forever.”

“Maybe you could, if you don’t shut the fuck up.”

“Boy, aren’t we a grouch today?”

“Not only today,” said Wrobleski.

* * *

Billy, Zak, and Marilyn stood in a corner of the compound, under a metal gantry, sheltering from smoke, flames, and cops. The good guys are always slow off the mark. They have to do the right thing, to make sure the victims are okay, which may also include finding out who the real victims are. They have to say something warm and supportive, or possibly cool and ironic. “You actually came to rescue me, Zak?” “Yes, Marilyn, I actually did. Don’t sound so surprised.” Then there’s some explaining to do, to the cops, or the concerned citizens, and in this case also to the fire fighters. Which is to say that sometimes the good guys also have to prove they really are good guys. Establishing an “innocence” that involved blowing up a car with stolen dynamite in Zak and Billy’s case, and in Marilyn’s, opening locked doors, destroying property, and torching the place, might be a time-consuming business. By then Carla and Wrobleski could be anywhere. Maybe they didn’t need to establish their good-guy credentials right there and then.

Billy Moore pulled open the steel trapdoor that led to the world beneath the city, found a cluster of heavy-duty, rubber-sheathed flashlights hanging from hooks at the top of the stairs, and called urgently to Zak and Marilyn, “Are you coming down with me or not?”

“Of course I am,” said Zak. “I’m an urban explorer.”

“And,” said Marilyn, “nobody descends into the underworld without me.”

* * *

“The thing about hide-and-seek,” said Carla, trudging on gamely beside Wrobleski, “is that in the end it’s never much fun. You hide, and then nothing happens. So you get bored, and after a while you start wanting to be found. Is that what you want, Mr. Wrobleski?”

“Even if they find me, that doesn’t mean they’ve caught me. That’s when the fun really starts.”

“Gosh, you sure are tough, Mr. Wrobleski. Tough and grouchy; I’ll bet that makes you a lot of friends.”

“Kid, shut up.”

Then, out of nowhere, there was the sound of a deep, booming explosion, a sustained bass rumble, as though the earth around them was growling. Without thinking, Carla grabbed Wrobleski’s hand, as if he were her protector, but then she immediately threw it aside, ashamed. Wrobleski was almost as surprised. In spite of everything, he actually felt somehow protective toward this infuriating little brat: he didn’t completely hate the touch of her hand.

“It’s all right,” he said as gently as he knew how. “It’s nothing. It happens all the time down here. It’s the new subway line.”

The sounds receded, the tremble diminished, though Carla continued to feel ashamed of herself.

* * *

In a tunnel not so far away, Billy Moore absorbed that same bass sound.

“Looks like the Platinum Line is getting by without that dynamite,” Zak said.

“Quiet,” said Billy. “I’m trying to listen. I’m trying to hear my daughter.”

Zak Webster, Billy Moore, and Marilyn Driscoll moving through the underworld: brains, brawn, good looks, not necessarily in that order, and not evenly or discretely distributed. They plodded along a storm drain, the flashlights modeling yellow-gray cones through the darkness ahead of them. They were not exactly lost, but they had no clear notion of where they were heading. Sometimes they thought they heard voices and footsteps, but they knew it might be their own echoing back at them. Certain spaces and constrictions seemed more inviting than others, but to what were they an invitation? The darkness simultaneously beckoned and repelled, the air was thinner and colder than any surface air, and unidentifiable smells wafted through the tunnels, often foul, but sometimes surprisingly, incomprehensibly sweet.

“I suppose there must be maps of this place,” said Marilyn.

“Sure,” said Zak. “I know collectors who are only interested in maps of sewers, catacombs, subway systems.”

“You hang with a really interesting crowd, don’t you, Zak?” said Billy.

Zak didn’t react to that one. Instead, he said, “Did you ever kill anybody, Billy?”

“No,” Billy admitted, “but some people probably think I did, and that has its advantages.”

“How about Wrobleski? Does he think that?”

“By now Wrobleski will have realized he knows absolutely nothing about me. Or about you either, Zak. That’s good. He won’t know what he’s dealing with. We could have more dynamite. We could have tear gas and stun grenades. We could be armed to the teeth.”

“But we’re not, are we?”

“No,” said Billy. “But he doesn’t know that.”

“I think he might have a suspicion,” said Zak.

* * *

Wrobleski was taking Carla to the one place he knew well belowground, the abandoned subway station. It was by no means a sanctuary, but it was where he had done some of his best work, where he had functioned with grim efficiency. He was familiar with its spaces and enclosures. He could lie in wait. He could face whatever he had to face.

They came to the low masonry of the arch that led through to the long, straight subway platform. Wrobleski shunted Carla inside, nodding his head, turning it, so that the light beam on his helmet moved steadily and with purpose, revealing the tilework, the benches, the rails, the darkness beyond.

“What is this?” Carla said. “Your own private train set?”

She wandered to the edge of the platform, and Wrobleski said, “Be careful, don’t get too near.”

She laughed at him. “What? You’re scared something might happen to me?”

“Damn right,” he said. “You’re no good to me broken.”

He stood beside her and looked down, so that his helmet light shone between the twisted rails, into the deep, shapeless cavity below them.

“What’s that?” said Carla.

“It’s a sinkhole.”

“What’s that?”

“A wonder of nature. Either that or a collapsed sewer. Good place for stashing things, just so long as you don’t ever want them back.”

Carla took a couple of slow steps away from the edge, her curiosity hardly satisfied.

“So how is this going to work out exactly?” she said. “We’re just going to hide down here until they get bored and go away?”

“That’s one way it might work.”

“Not very likely, though, is it?” she said. “Or there’s a big shoot-out? Or you say, ‘Give me free passage, otherwise the kid dies’?”

“There are worse ideas.”

“And then what?” said Carla. “They give you a helicopter and a suitcase full of money?”

“A suitcase full of money always comes in handy.”

“Or,” she said, “you could just turn yourself in. Say you’re sorry. Make a confession. It would be good for your soul.”

“I don’t have a soul,” said Wrobleski, “and neither do you.”

* * *

Marilyn, Billy, and Zak pressed on ever more uncertainly. Zak thought he heard rats; at least he hoped it was rats. The tunnel diameter was narrow; the sides were caked in soft, loamy residue, a few inches of water slopped around their feet. Then the diameter reduced even farther, like a large intestine becoming smaller, with black fronds of what looked like half-digested seaweed hanging from the walls. Zak felt as though he were inside the city’s gut. He wondered when and where he would be excreted.

They turned a corner and came to an abrupt dead end, a stretch of ragged tunnel blocked solid by debris. The roof had caved in, recently it appeared, a distant fallout from the subway line excavations. Concrete, earth, sections of ancient pipe, miscellaneous chunks of rock and ore had sunk down from above and were now filling the whole tunnel, side to side, top to bottom. Only a monstrous piece of machinery would be able to dig a way through. They would have to go back, pick a different route, start again.

“This is okay,” Zak said, looking desperately, unconvincingly on the bright side. “At least we know they didn’t come this way. We’re narrowing the possibilities.”

“No, we’re not,” said Billy. “The possibilities are pretty much endless. This is fucking hopeless. We don’t know where we are, we don’t know where we’re going.”

“Well,” Zak hazarded, “getting lost is a form of mapping.”

“Form of mapping, my ass,” said Billy.

* * *

Carla Moore and Wrobleski sat together on a bench on the empty subway platform, backs resting against the curved tile wall behind them, commuters waiting for a ghost train that would never come. She was tired and scared, and she would have been tearful if she’d allowed herself to be, but she wasn’t going to show any of that. Wrobleski kept watch along the length of the platform so he could see the entrance arch through which any new arrival would have to come, if they ever did. He told himself he was ready for anything they could throw at him, regardless of who “they” were, but there was no denying (much as he’d have liked to deny it) that he was feeling very weary; he realized he was also feeling very old.

“How’s your hand?” Carla asked.

“It hurts,” said Wrobleski.

“And how’s that gouge in your face?”

“How do you think?”

“And the cactus spines?”

“Give it a rest, kid.”

Something slithered and twitched down in the gloom at the platform’s edge, something with too many legs, something the color of dust and shed skin. Wrobleski had to make quite an effort to stop himself from shooting into the darkness.

“Don’t you have a first-aid kit down here?” asked Carla.

“Never needed one.”

“Anything to eat or drink?”

“I didn’t come down here for a picnic.”

Carla turned and looked at him with what he couldn’t quite believe was sympathy, but she didn’t sound as though she was altogether mocking him when she said, “I’m sorry I broke your map. The one of Iwo Jima or whatever.”

“Are you really? Well, that makes everything all right then, doesn’t it?” he sneered.

“I wasn’t the only one doing the breaking, was I? Why were those women so angry? Why did they want to smash everything?”

“I guess they just hate maps.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” said Carla. “Nobody hates maps. I can see a lot of people don’t care one way or another, but nobody really hates them.”

Was she fucking with him? Or was she just being a kid? He held his silence.

“Why?” she insisted. “Tell me. Don’t treat me like a child.”

“Okay,” said Wrobleski: he could see she had a point. “Those women hate maps because they have maps tattooed all across their backs.”

“Why did they have them done if they hate them?”

“They didn’t choose to have them done. Somebody did it to them.”

“That’s creepy. Did you do it?”

“No, I did not.”

“Then who?”

“I don’t know, but I have one or two ideas.”

“Want to share?”

Wrobleski didn’t answer. Carla had noticed that adults often behaved like this. They thought that if they didn’t answer, then you’d forget you’d asked the question. Carla never forgot.

“So what kind of maps?” she persisted.

“You don’t want to know.”

“Yes, I do.”

What did it matter? Maybe he could freak her out a little, scare her into silence, if not submission.

“Murder maps,” he said. “Maps that show where certain murders took place, and where the bodies were stashed. Are stashed.”

“But who did the murders?”

“That’s something else you don’t want to know.”

“It was you, wasn’t it, Mr. Wrobleski?” His silence told her what she needed to know. “Boy, you really are a bad guy.”

He couldn’t understand why he needed to defend himself, but he said, “There are worse than me. Far, far worse.”

* * *

“That’s it,” said Zak. “That’s it. You finally got it, Billy. You finally became a cartographer.”

“You’re out of your mind. I’m trying to save my daughter and you’re fucking around talking about maps.”

“No. The thing you just said about mapping and asses. That’s what it’s all about. Wrobleski only uses one route down here.”

“How can you possibly say that?” said Billy.

“Because I’ve already seen the route he takes. And so have you.”

“That explosion fried your brains,” said Billy.

“And we have a version of the map with us. It’s on you, Marilyn. It’s in the tattoo. It’s in all the tattoos. That’s how the maps work. Above the waist they’re all different. They show different parts of the city, and more than that, each one shows where Wrobleski committed a murder, then the route he followed through the city, and where he brought the bodies, which in every case was to his compound. Then he brought them down here. The parts of the maps below the waist show what he did with the bodies, which is why the tattoos all look kind of the same in that area. He was always taking the bodies to the same single location, belowground, somewhere down here. We were half right about the compass rose marking the spot, but it’s not marking buried treasure, it’s where the bodies are buried. And that’s where he’s going now.”

Billy Moore said, mostly to himself, “And he’s taken my daughter to the place where he dumps the bodies.”

“Does this help us any?” Marilyn asked.

“Oh no,” said Zak. “It doesn’t help us in the least. I’d love to be able to look at your ass and work out the route … but you know, it’s a lousy map by a lousy mapmaker.”

“So you’re saying Wrobleski did the map?”

“I don’t know,” said Zak. “I don’t know if I’m saying that or not.”

* * *

“I think you’re kind of screwed, aren’t you, Mr. Wrobleski?” said Carla. “You’re sweating. I can’t tell if it’s a hot or a cold sweat, but you’re soaked, Mr. Wrobleski.”

“Shut up.”

“You’re just a big cowardly lion.”

“Shut up.”

She didn’t shut up. She said, “Your collection’s ruined. Your home’s on fire. The cops are all over the place. And meanwhile you’re hiding in a hole in the ground with a really annoying kid. And you can’t kill me because I’m your little human shield.”

“Don’t be so sure. Get up. Turn your back to me.”

“You’re going to shoot me in the back?”

“If I feel like it. Loosen your shirt.”

“Why?”

“You heard me.”

“You want me to take it off?”

“Fuck no,” he said. “What do you think I am, some kind of pervert? Just loosen your shirt and lift it up.”

“All right,” Carla said, frightened into compliance, and she gingerly turned her back to him, raised her shoulders a little, slowly untucked the rear of her shirt, hoisted it up as best she could. Goose bumps bubbled on her skin. A smell of rotting vegetables drifted along the platform. Wrobleski got to work. She could feel something pressing into her back, though she didn’t know what.

“What are you doing?” she asked, though she thought she already knew.

He didn’t reply. He was engrossed, serious. She could hear him breathing deeply, making a low, inarticulate humming sound. Her shirt kept rolling down her back, falling in the way of his handiwork. He pushed it up, got on with the job. And then he stopped, let the shirt fall back into place. It hadn’t taken long. She didn’t turn around: she didn’t want to see his face.

She sensed him move away. There was silence, nothing, a lake of dead time, and then came the explosion, the slam, the gunshot. She only knew that’s what it was because she’d heard Wrobleski fire his gun while they were up in the compound: more than a bang, more than a crack, very loud but brief and short-lived, like a radio being abruptly turned off. Here belowground the sound was louder still, but also more intimate, darker, more compressed by the narrowness of the station tunnel.

She felt something hot and wet running rapidly, thinly, down the insides of her thighs. She couldn’t tell what it was at first, which part of her body it was coming from. But she did know that she wasn’t in pain. She had no precise idea what it felt like to be shot, but not like this, surely. She was on her feet. Her body felt intact. And then she realized she’d peed herself with fright. But that was okay, right? If Wrobleski had really shot her, then she wouldn’t be able to feel herself pee, would she? Would she? Whatever Wrobleski had been shooting at, it wasn’t her.

* * *

Well, who needs a map on flesh when you have the sound of a gunshot to guide the way? Actually, Zak could have said that “sound mapping” was a growing field among the edgier kind of cartographer, but he knew this was not the time. The noise reverberated wildly, came and went and came again, but there was no mistaking its direction. Billy, Marilyn, and Zak moved toward it as rapidly as they dared, though they didn’t dare imagine what they might find when they got to the source. Billy called out, “Carla,” but there was no reply, nothing except his own boomeranging voice. He shouted, “Wrobleski,” and the absence of response seemed even more profound. They moved faster, dashing through the sodden dark, and at last came to the strange, low arch that looked like the improbable entrance to a station.

“What the hell is this?” said Billy.

“Oh man,” said Zak, “it’s the old subway line; this is the mother lode for urban explorers.”

“Later,” said Billy; and then he called, “Wrobleski,” again, and once more there was only silence in reply. With infinite trepidation Billy led the way, taking the first determined yet dreaded half-step through the arch. He expected to be shot at; he expected worse, and then he heard his daughter’s voice.

“It’s okay, Dad, it’s over. Come get me.”

What could that mean? Still ready for the worst, Billy took a bold, reckless stride onto the subway platform and saw Carla standing just a few yards in front of him, her feet in a pool of liquid, her head drooping forward, the oversized miner’s helmet still on her head, its lamp glowing weakly. She seemed not so much calm as inanimate. Her face was pale and still, and it conveyed absolutely nothing.

“It’s all right now,” said Billy, trying to console himself as much as her, moving in for a moment that was supremely natural and supremely awkward. “I’m here.”

“Yes,” Carla said, her voice drained of feeling and, despite herself, pulling away from him.

“Where is he?” said Billy. “Where’s Wrobleski?”

“I don’t know,” said Carla. “I had my back to him.”

Billy Moore shone his flashlight up and down the bare station platform. He saw nothing. It was still and empty. There was no trace of Wrobleski, and he surely wasn’t a man to hide, to skulk in corners. Billy saw the tunnel entrances at either end of the platform. Yes, it was possible that Wrobleski had decided he could move more quickly without Carla, and had simply abandoned her and disappeared into one or another of those black mouths. If so, despite everything, Billy had no intention of pursuing him. Let the darkness swallow him.

Billy also saw the gaping sinkhole between the buckled rails. Was it conceivable that Wrobleski had decided to take the ultimate form of control and throw himself into the void? And the gunshot? Why that? A bullet in his own head before making the leap: the final anesthetic? Or something else, something that might almost be construed as compassionate — not so much a warning shot as a signal before he disappeared, the establishing of coordinates, a sound standing in for an x marking the spot.

“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.”