The Company Man

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

When she returned to work the next day Samantha prepared the agenda and waited for Hayes to arrive. The world seemed to float by her as she entered her office, and she was unable to focus on any one thing. She was still living in the night before, she knew, how she had had to coax him as though he were no more than a teenager, and how after they had sat in comfortable silence, allowing the morning hours to slip by without a word. As she waited for Hayes she realized her every second was geared toward seeing Garvey again, and the murders and the many conspiracies seemed to fade to a murmur around her.

After an hour of waiting she figured Hayes would just show up late, claiming some injury or feebleness from his hospital stay. After three she called Evans, explained what had happened, and went by Hayes’s warehouse. She pounded on the front door for a good half-hour before she heard a cough. She turned and found a telegram boy standing behind her, looking awkward.

“Yes?” she said.

“Are you, um”-he checked his telegram-“Sam?”

“What? I mean, yes?”

“Message for you,” he said, and handed it to her.

She opened it up and scanned it. OFF A-QUESTING STOP ENJOY YOUR FREE DAY STOP

She read it again, then looked up and scanned the streets and windows around her.

“You cheeky little shit,” she said. “Where are you?”

“What?” said the telegram boy.

“Nothing. Oh, here,” she said, and tipped him. “Now go on.”

She called Evans, and he groaned when she told him the situation. “I’ll try and keep it under my hat, my dear,” he said. “But I’m getting a little tired of making excuses, especially under these circumstances.”

Samantha agreed and said she would send him all the information he needed to make their inquiry look productive, provided he spread it a little thin. She returned to the Nail and sent her work up to the forty-seventh floor, then checked the time. She had four hours left. She cleaned her office for another twenty minutes, then told Evans she was leaving for the day and caught the trolley back to Newton, not sure what she was going to do.

She went shopping at Earl Street and bought some nice bread, then sat on the benches in front of the museum, eating and watching people walk by. She wondered if she should be out trying to find Hayes. Then she wondered if that was even possible. If Evans was right, Hayes wasn’t the sort of person you found unless he felt you should.

She went back to her apartment with a bottle of wine and a good piece of chicken, deciding that a nice meal and a long soak in the tub was in order. She passed through the mezzanine and then found Garvey there again, seated in the same chair and wearing the exact same suit he had worn before. He grinned at her, but his face was strained and she knew he was carrying something awful with him this time. She walked to him and put one hand on his face, feeling his stubble. “You look terrible,” she said.

“I look terrible,” he agreed.

They went back to her apartment and he asked if there was a chair he could destroy. She guided him toward some overstuffed red affair and he dropped himself down gracelessly. She wanted to ask how he was doing, to search him and see how he felt about what had happened between them, but his mind was obviously elsewhere, and so instead she made coffee and poured two cups.

“How is it?” she called from the kitchen.

“How is what?” he said.

“Oh, please.”

There was a pause. “Fucked,” he said.

“Oh?”

“Yeah. Fucked. Fucked sideways. Fucked in the ear. Pick a fuck, this case is fucked.”

“I see,” she said, carrying the coffee back over. Garvey took the little cup and tossed it down, dribbling some onto his shirt.

“Mayor went and gave a speech at Bridgedale today,” he said.

“Did he?” She sat down on the floor beside his feet.

“Yeah. Something about solidarity. How this is all one city and we’ve all got to stick together. Then he turned around and vaguely accused the Department and McNaughton of a few things. So I guess it is one city, excluding your guys and my guys. And they’ve added a shitload more people to the detail,” he said with a sigh. “Simons and Meyer. From High Crimes Division. Corralled in on the commissioner’s say-so.”

“How are they?”

“They’re bastards. Think they walk on water. High Crimes is used to details, sure, long investigations with plenty of manpower and resources. They’re the dashing heroes of our goddamn shit department. Today they came into Murder and they managed to piss Morris and Collins off in minutes.”

“And you?”

“I was already pissed off.”

“Well. At least you’re proactive.”

“Morris has sold everyone some serious horseshit,” said Garvey with another sigh. “Some serious, serious horseshit. Looking to impress. This is a career case, you know.”

“Oh, I know.”

“How do you know?”

She paused, pursing her lips over her cup of coffee. “Well, at the start of this I thought if Mr. Hayes handled this union business particularly well then I might secure a better position.”

“And now?”

“Now I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it for some time. Tell me what Morris did.”

“Hm. Well, he waded into the Shanties and before you know it he’s got these two little tennies swearing they heard some denner putting a price on Denton and Huffy’s head. Serious bounty. Morris has worked it and managed to whip up some amazing conspiracy for everyone, referenced some gang wars he worked way back when. His most touted of all touted theories right now is that the union surge has started a new den war. Morris says the unions have links to the den-runners, and now everyone in Dockland is hitting the mattresses again, just like back in ’92. We just don’t have enough street-level information to figure out which gang is warring with which, he says. Everyone loves it, of course.”

“They do?”

“Sure. Moves things away from McNaughton. Puts it in terms everyone can handle. I mean, it’s just gang wars again. And it comes from a veteran, everyone loves a veteran, and all the vet says we have to do is start raiding the opium dens again. And now everyone’s seeing careers in it. Collins, Morris. The captain. Everyone sees a bright future for the boys who bust this new gang war.”

“And you?”

Garvey was quiet for a long while. Then he said, “No. They don’t like what I’m saying. They’re trying to treat this like this is normal, like it’s just another murder. It’s not. They still can’t explain how it happened. They’re not even trying. But there are politics in play. And I’m already dirty to them,” he said. “Because of Hayes. Because of fucking Hayes.” He shook his head. “What the fuck happened. What happened to this damn town.”

Then he turned and looked at her. “I didn’t want to be there anymore. At the Department.”

“I know.”

“I didn’t want to think about things no one wants me to think about. I just wanted to leave it. I just… I just wanted to see you.”

“I’m here,” she said.

He put his coffee down and kissed her, weakly at first but then more strongly. Then she took his head in her hands and looked at it, all the wrinkles and the bags under his eyes and all the bruises, a face hard and worn by the things it’d looked into. Then she kissed him, on his chin and eyes and brow, and then finally his lips. Then they stood, lips still touching, and she led him to the bed. As she did, one of his hands ran down the front of her body to pull up her skirt and go hunting between her legs.

She was not certain if it came from genuine affection or if it was some kind of desperation, a kindred sense of being lost, like two ships passing each other on a foggy sea and calling to one another, blindly recognizing each other’s plight. But she felt that it was, at its heart, both an escape, and real. As if each time he held her she was following him down another one of the underground tunnels to be greeted by wonders that took her away from all of this, to some waiting treasure that had been there all along if only you had the eyes to see it, and she hoped that perhaps it did the same for him.

As night came they watched the spotlights drift across the ceiling of her bedroom. She sat with his head cradled in her lap, and she cracked the curtains so they could see out and watch the sky strobe soft white.

“It’s not how I remember it,” he said.

“Remember what?”

“The city. It’s changed so much, from when I was little.”

“How old were you when you moved here?”

He looked up at her. “I didn’t. I was born here.”

She blinked, then said, “Do you know, I think you may be the only native Evesdener I’ve ever met.”

He laughed. “I’m not surprised,” he said. “This is a mutt city, made of other cities and other countries. But it used to be a city. A real city.”

“When?”

“I don’t know. When I was a kid, I guess.” He struggled to describe it to her. How the city had once been something new, genuinely new, new with promise, not new with perversion, as this late Evesden was. It had been the foundation of something, not a tumorous buildup of growth. It was difficult for him to say exactly when he had realized that it had failed, though.

She found he kept returning to one particular day, the day his father closed his carpentry shop. Like all the buildings in Evesden the shop had been relatively new, he told her, but in comparison to everything else his father’s shop seemed a great old thing, solidly built of huge shafts of wood, with dark, polished eaves and an eternal scent of polish and smoking timber. It had seemed larger than a church back then, dark and cavernous with strange tools standing among the shadows. And somehow his father had seemed bigger then, too. Garvey still remembered him as a huge man, taller than any other he had ever seen, with a broad back and knobby, darkened hands, hands that were a plum-red like they had been soaked in wine. His father and the shop seemed like emissaries of an older age then, silent and wordless except for the sounds of work and progress. Even when the home-building companies began to take hold and started choking out the little shops his father had soldiered on, indifferent to the rise and fall of those strange, abstract companies. Yet they did not fall, only rise. They rose until they ruined the shop, eating up customers until the gnarled old church went silent, tool by tool, voice by voice. And on the day his father had locked up and doomed the shop, both he and the shop seemed to have lost something. It was not a great, mysterious building made of dark timber. In fact it seemed little more than a shack then, and a shoddily built one at that. And his father no longer seemed so large and mysterious. He seemed like a working man who had not been smart enough to realize when the world was eroding beneath him. And then his father had gone home and uncapped a bottle of whisky and sipped it down inch by inch, watery red eyes fixed on nothing, and he’d shaken his head and said, “It’s gone now. It’s all gone.”

And that was when Garvey had known. Had realized he had known all along. That sometime in the blossoming progress of this city there had come a wound that had sent it all awry, and it could only throw on messy layer after messy layer, like a mad pearl growing within the lips of the sound, until it ate itself alive.

He often got that feeling. That once something had happened that had sent the whole world reeling. Some great violation or change, long ago. Maybe even before Evesden. He wasn’t sure. But he had felt all his life that he was struggling in the wake of it.

As he described it to her she suddenly remembered the letter Hayes had read to her in Skiller’s apartment, and the little lost boy and his dead father, and she wondered what Garvey saw in his case with the man in the canal. Perhaps he saw that same familiar wound that had sent his life in the direction it’d come, only now there was a chance, however slight, to correct it.