The City Under the Skin

29. THE SKIN UNDER THE CITY

Sunrise on a landscaped slither of real estate, formerly nameless, now Columbia Park, a canal-side house of cards, a public and private partnership: shiny, flimsy new buildings, office blocks and apartments in unequal numbers, built by developers who’d been given an easy ride on planning regulations in exchange for cleaning up the chaos of territory alongside the canal. Ray McKinley had been one of the first. Now there was a bike path, a pedestrian walkway, some fanciful lampposts and benches, a laughably small “green space” containing an even more derisory “nature trail.” At lunchtime this place would be densely populated with office workers, but now, with the sky barely light, it was deserted, static, and Wrobleski sat in the passenger seat of his SUV, Akim at the wheel, waiting.

Wrobleski had never made the mistake of thinking he was free. He knew he was scarcely even independent. He always operated for other people, did their dirty work: that was the cleanest way of working, nothing personal about it, no motive, no anger, no connection. But it also meant that he had to wait for a call, just the way his man Billy Moore did. And if Ray McKinley wasn’t exactly the best or most considerate employer, at least they went back a satisfyingly long way: McKinley was the devil Wrobleski knew, or hoped he did.

When the call came, McKinley said, “Okay, so you won’t deal with the main woman for me, but you’ll have no problem dealing with her ‘advisor,’ will you?”

“Who?”

“Brandt. The one Meg Gunderson called a twat on live TV. Remember?”

“I remember.”

“Seems that our mayor is a very good judge of character. Mr. Brandt and I had a meeting. I said it would be worth his while to decide that the mayor’s plans were unworkable, that we should start again, demolish the Telstar, get back to a clean slate.”

“And how did that go down?”

“Seems our man has integrity. He threatened to call the cops. Then he threatened to set his dog on me.”

“Big dog?”

“Dalmatian.”

Wrobleski stared into the SUV’s wing mirror and at last saw a man and his dog approaching along the canal’s former towpath. Brandt looked older than on TV, but taller and leaner too. He was wearing a different pair of elaborate eyeglasses, like goggles, and he was dressed as though for some exotic and nameless sport, in something black and red, and all-enveloping, somewhere between a leotard and a space suit. The dog was a particularly restless and energetic example of his breed.

There were security cameras along the towpath, but Akim had been along last night and thoroughly vandalized them. Wrobleski watched man and Dalmatian as they went past the SUV, then he got out and started following. Brandt’s progress was constant, faster than a power walk, slower than jogging. Wrobleski had to extend his stride in order to keep up. They’d gone no more than fifty yards when Brandt, without stopping, turned his head and glared at Wrobleski.

“Can I help you?”

That accent again: another country, or continent, or planet.

“No,” said Wrobleski.

“Is there a problem?”

Wrobleski let his jacket hang open to reveal the leather strapping of a holster. He took out the gun. Brandt’s face took on an expression that Wrobleski had seen often enough before, a confusing and contradictory alloy of disbelief and growing realization.

“Yeah. I can’t decide whether to kill you first or the dog first.”

While Brandt was trying to fathom that remark, perhaps hoping it was just a joke in very, very poor taste, Wrobleski had his problem solved for him. The dog bounded toward him, reared up, and though it looked more like neurotic enthusiasm than actual aggression, in general dogs disliked Wrobleski as much as he disliked them. The fucking animal sank his teeth into Wrobleski’s left hand, between the thumb and forefinger. That settled it: dog, then man. He pulled the gun from its sheath, fired just two shots, and then that part was done with; from here on, it was business as usual.

The park remained static and empty, and the surface of the canal was slick as glass. Wrobleski wondered if a dead dog would float or sink: only one way to find out. He nudged the Dalmatian off the towpath into the water. It sank slowly. By then Akim had driven up alongside in the SUV and stopped. He got out and opened the back door, glaring consistently at Wrobleski.

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” said Wrobleski. “This isn’t making the best use of your talents. Duly noted.”

Akim was aware that his complaint was being mocked even as it was being acknowledged. With as much dignity as he could manage, he took hold of Brandt’s feet, leaving the shoulders for Wrobleski, and together they hefted the body into the vehicle. The bite on Wrobleski’s left hand was starting to hurt like a son of a bitch.

* * *

Charlie opened the gate of the compound, and Wrobleski reversed the SUV into a tight, cluttered, neglected corner of the courtyard. He got out, and he and Akim opened the rear of the SUV. On the ground, cut into the tarmac, was a flat metal hatch, a trapdoor made of steel diamond plate: he’d had it fitted specially. Akim lifted the door to give access to a set of descending concrete steps, narrow with steep risers. There were various hard hats and flashlights hanging on the wall, and they both jammed on miner’s helmets. That always felt pretty stupid to Wrobleski, but the helmets had lamps on the front to light the way as they went down, leaving their hands free to deal with the body, which, with Akim’s grudging assistance, Wrobleski now lifted onto his own shoulders. They had got this down to a crude but efficient art.

Wrobleski always had a sense of the figure he was cutting, something monstrous yet also unavoidably comic: the Phantom of the Opera, Quasimodo, one of the mole people, a Morlock, accompanied by a sulky, rebellious assistant. As they negotiated their way down the steps, Wrobleski felt the rising coldness, detected the smell of dilute ammonia and maybe spoiled meat, and heard a thick roaring sound that grew louder with each step, as if he were entering the mouth of a gigantic seashell. Suddenly there was a muffled boom, something grand but far away inside the earth. There were noises like that down here all the time these days, muted blasts as they worked on the Platinum Line. Wrobleski refused to let it bother him.

Wrobleski and Akim pushed on, went deeper, through ash-gray concrete chambers, bunkers, rusted spaces that might have served as industrial bear pits, into a coarse intermeshing of tunnels that led ever farther into varieties of receding darkness. Wrobleski knew his way down here well enough, knew how to get in and out, how to get where he needed to go, but he didn’t know what most of these masses and vacancies around him were, what they did, had no idea how they related to the world above. And he was content to keep it that way.

It was cold, and yet he was sweating, from exertion and adrenaline. The tunnel they were in changed its direction, ran away in a taut, vaulted curve. The lights on the helmets picked out a broad, deep, semicircular arch, simple, functional, its apex and keystone scarcely higher than a man’s head, an entrance of sorts.

They stepped through the arch and out the other side, into a long, straight, white-tiled space, with a low ceiling, regularly placed pillars, a few broken benches here and there, some peeling advertising posters, a tattered map on the wall. They were standing on the platform of a long-abandoned subway station, the ground scattered with coils of wire and lengths of pipe, rat droppings and discarded paperwork that somebody must have once considered really, really important. The first time Wrobleski came down here, years ago now, the place had seemed infinite and unfathomable: now it was simply the place where he finished the job.

A part of him was struck by how absurd it was for the city to be building a new subway line while this old station lay disused and apparently intact and serviceable. And yet the reason why it had been abandoned was obvious enough. As the rails left the station and disappeared into the tunnel mouth, they were twisted as if mauled by some giant, casually destructive hand. There had been a deep settling in the floor of the tunnel, a shift in the earth, a subsidence: a sinkhole had appeared beneath the railroad ties, black, wide, jagged-edged, and although it was obviously not literally bottomless, it was cavernous and capacious enough for his ongoing needs. You could lose a whole army of dead bodies down there: Wrobleski had only accounted for a small platoon. They never came back, never reappeared elsewhere, and the pit was deep enough that even the stench of death seldom made it up to the level of the station. Akim shivered, waited.

They stood at the platform edge, and Wrobleski heaved Brandt’s body off his shoulders like an outsized sack of coal or potatoes, something that had already once been in the earth. Akim again took the feet, Wrobleski the shoulders, and they swung the corpse until it had enough momentum to carry it forward, away from the platform, down between the distorted rails, then away into the silent void.

Wrobleski took a breath, but not too deep: there were plenty of things you wouldn’t want to inhale down here, quite apart from flesh rot. He stood listening, heard only the usual sounds of the earth. He nodded to Akim, not exactly in thanks, but in recognition that for better or worse he needed him and his talents. The second part of the job was done too. Now he was ready to go back aboveground, to spend some time with his maps, the ones on paper rather than on flesh.