Word Made Flesh

21

Halfway to the Toth Care Facility, the sound of Imogene Wedgewood insinuating the ballad “Whimperative” is interrupted by a staticky bleat from the dispatch radio. Gilrein grabs the microphone and asks, “Mojo, is that you?”

But instead of an answer comes a muffled voice that may or may not belong to Bettman the dispatcher.

“Pickup at Gompers Station. Will you respond?”

Gilrein adjusts the squelch, thumbs the mike, and asks, “Mojo?”

There’s a wait of several seconds and then, through even more static, the voice says, “Fare’s name is Brown. Will you respond?”

The cab rolls to the side of the road. Gilrein sits and stares at the radio, thumbs the mike again, and asks, “Who is this, please?”

But there’s no reply. So, before he can think too much, he makes a U-turn into a stream of traffic and reverses direction.

He bangs up the curbing and rolls over ash and gravel around the back of the train station. Gompers has been closed down for dozens of years and the elements and nonstop vandalism have taken their toll on what was at one time possibly the most beautiful building in the city. These days Gompers is a burned-out shell of marble and granite that serves as communal crib to a transient junkie population as well as a notorious stock exchange for a brand of transactions that will never be reported to the SEC.

The chamber of the.38 is fully loaded and Gilrein sticks it in his jacket pocket, locks up the taxi, and heads for a new entrance that someone has spent a lot of time hacking into the stonework of the south wall. If what’s waiting inside is an ambush, the attackers have made an innocent but possibly crucial mistake. For a few years, Gilrein attended a decrepit Catholic grammar school a block from here, an ancient chunk of red brick crammed between a meat-packing distributor and a tiny used-auto lot. To get to and from his bus each day, Gilrein took a shortcut through Gompers, eventually using the extra time this bought to explore the already abandoned rail house. He probed the mysteries of this arc with the bottomless curiosity and expectation of a hyperdreamy twelve-year-old, always semiterrified of what lay in the shadows of every new tunnelway but unable to walk away with his curiosity unsated.

It was a stupid hobby and a part of him knew it at the time. Some of the Gompers tracks were already being used for the freight lines and there was a known history of more than one rail wanderer losing life and/or limb to four hundred thousand pounds of diesel-driven iron thrown down a track bed at ninety miles an hour. But that might have been part of the allure.

In any event, Gilrein never feared being crushed by the trains as much as he worried about stumbling upon a lair of one of the Gompers tribes, of whom the last-stop drunks who slept with rail-spiked truncheons in their arms were the most serene. Gompers’s endless pockets of always shrouded chambers and vaults, utility rooms and lower-level crevices, underground cellars and balcony dining coves offered a wide selection of housing choices for the city’s disassociated. In his years as a cop, Gilrein didn’t venture into Gompers territory very often. The station was the stomping ground for a very specific breed of security. You had to submit to a fairly grueling psych profile just to apply for metro transit. And nobody could tell whether you needed to flunk or pass the aptitude exams in order to draw assignment. Once in transit blues, you didn’t much associate with the general street humps. Transit policing was a world unto itself. The rail-yard gestapo drew its mission and its clout from a different well than the city’s generic force. They were a small and tight-knit outfit. They ran by their own regs, operated with an autonomy that Chief Bendix could only envy from afar. The watchword among the train bulls was keep your mouth shut. The fact was that the majority of transit cops would love nothing better than to spend a single night scaring the bejesus out of the most street-jaded reporter The Spy could provide. But the unquestioned word from above — an amorphous cloud of authority that comprised some conglomerate of the transit commissioner’s office, the chamber of commerce, and an uneasy alignment of rival freight companies — was that Gompers rumors stayed rumors. No matter what. No one was more tight-lipped than the cinder bulls about the horrors they uncovered on a nightly basis. They carried enough hardware into the tunnels to make the SWAT humps jealous and they never went anywhere inside the station without full backup, three cops to a team, and each one knowing that if a pile of rubble suddenly turned animate, made a run at you instead of away from you, you emptied the chamber of your Magnum without pausing to yell a warning. And you didn’t bother to question the nature of the rubble until coffee was served at shift’s end.

The city’s pols had wanted to tear the train station down for decades, but had been thwarted by federal courts on behalf of a well-endowed historical society. Even this blue-blood enclave, however, couldn’t lay out the kind of funds needed to restore the station into anything resembling its former grandeur. Officially, the mayor’s office allowed that, from time to time, an occasional outpatient from Toth Care might mistakenly wander into Gompers and set up housekeeping for a few hours until discovered and tenderly returned to the Thorazine comfort of their halfway house. No one believed this fairy tale for a second and it may have done more harm than good for the mayor’s always dicey reputation for shrouding the truth like a week-old corpse. As if in reaction to this PR fable, the hearsay regarding what actually dwelled in the bowels of Gompers grew to Homeric proportions. Everyone had their favorite monster story — the packs of salivating baby killers who had squatter’s rights in the shafts of track 29, the cannibal immigrants of unknown origin who slept in the shadows of the former dining pavilion feasting on rat and wild dog between visits from unsuspecting tourists, the local satanists who celebrated their black masses with orgies and virginal sacrifices in the old porters’ locker rooms of the north wing.

As a child, Gilrein never experienced personal contact with any of these supposed denizens of the station, but he did witness a smattering of physical evidence — pentagrams painted on the tile floors of changing rooms and once a pile of unspecified bones next to an old campfire. Mainly he skirted mean drunks and bewildered junkies and a lot of insane and homeless people speaking in languages foreign to everyone but themselves. However, that was over twenty years ago, and if Gompers’s devolution even parallels that of the city in general, then it’s more than possible, it’s pathetically likely, that the majority of train-house rumors are not only true, but just the tip of a heinously cold iceberg.

Gilrein gets down on his knees and crawls inside the station. He can’t bring himself to believe that Wylie will be waiting for him within, but he’s confident that he knows the layout of Gompers at least as well as any nonresident. And it’s likely he knows it better than anyone who might have come to whack him. His first thought is to get up into one of the old smokers’ balconies that rim the western face of the building, hanging high, marbled clouds where, a hundred years ago, rich Yankee manufacturers could bathe their lungs in the sweet carcinogens of Europe’s best cigars and look down over the rushing ant heap of travelers below and never question for a second whether they were genuinely entitled to the fat bounty of God’s grace.

Once secured in a balcony, Gilrein can protect his back and get an overview of the three most likely entrances. The holes in the ceiling will expose him to a cover of moonlight, but that’s just as much of a drawback to the opposition and there’s nothing to be done about it anyway. His guess is they’ll bring at least two shooters, possibly three, and they may decide to separate, find opposing points of vantage and catch the mark in a crossfire. Meatboys like Raban and Blumfeld always want to reduce the odds to a minimum. They’d kill you in your mother’s womb if it were possible. At the same time, they yearn to find some margin for the satisfaction of their own sadistic fetishes. They’d love to see the mark twist and shout with new innovations of senseless cruelty, but not if it risks botching the job and drawing the wrath of their handler. Creatures like Oster and his Magicians, on the other hand, are less easy to chart. Their motivations are multiple and sometimes conflicting. They will tell you that at the top of their needs is a profit-driven incentive and an inner motivation to do a job well. Sort of a capitalist/marine ethic. And yet, freelancers like Oster and his boys can’t be profiled this easily. There is the issue of their steadfast bachelorhood and their insistent, at times ridiculous machismo posing. There is the confused if passionate amalgam of various nihilistic philosophies, half-digested but completely enactable. And there is a simple and primal bloodlust, the controlled frenzy of an overly trained bloodhound, drives without need of analysis, an uncomplicated desire to put an end to another life and thus manifest a self-evident and absolute power over it. Oster and his creatures enjoy owning death. It’s a drug on the level of money and orgasm and belief. It’s the epicenter of free will and self-determination. Owning death is God’s own impulse, and once it’s rolled through the veins of someone like Oster, there’s no bringing him back to human. You’ve got to kill the monster. Burn the body. Salt the ground where it fell.

There’s a rapping sound that echoes, metal against denser metal. An even, rhythmic noise, neither too fast nor too slow, a measured beat of metronomic intervals. Gilrein concentrates, decides that it’s coming from track 7 and sights in on the mouth of the tunnel. It could be a decoy to turn him in a vulnerable position, but it feels like the real thing. The echo draws nearer. He lifts his gun, works on his breathing.

And a figure emerges from the tunnel, small, possibly a child. It’s walking in the rail bed itself, hunched over and using a cane of some kind, tapping the cane against the rail. It’s wrapped in a black shawl that both covers the shoulder and weaves into a turbanlike veil over the head. Gilrein gets a bead on the head, tenses to fire, and yells, “Don’t take another step.”

The figure obeys, comes to a standstill, as if expecting exactly this command.

“Move your hands where I can see them,” Gilrein yells, and the figure again complies, stretching the arms out at its sides, parallel with the ground.

Keeping the gun sighted, Gilrein surveys the rest of the chamber and sees nothing. He makes his way down to the main station floor, weapon extended the whole way, until he comes to stand before the veiled child. He lowers the gun, takes hold of one end of the shawl and unwraps it until he’s staring into the face of Mrs. Bloch. The blind woman. Oster’s tattoo artist from the Houdini Lounge. And Kroger’s indentured nanny to all the child artists.

She positions her face as if staring back at him, as if offering up a peeved and challenging expression. But there are the two thick and discolored folds of skin where her eyes should be and the sight of these flaps, these pancake tumors, launches a tremor through Gilrein’s body, a quake centered in his stomach, but extending down to his groin.

He tries to think of something to say, but before he can speak, Mrs. Bloch opens her mouth and, in that deep, clipped, guttural, Eastern European accent, she asks, “Ahr du der reeda?”

He’s so taken aback, both by the question and the sound of her voice, somehow both ghostly and deeply authoritarian, that he says nothing.

She asks in a louder voice.

“Ahr du der reeda?” the noise of her harsh, croaking words booming through the cavern of the train station as if amplified in far-off corners by some hidden web of microphones and speakers.

Unsure of what to say, but feeling prodded to say something, as if his silence could be an irreversible mistake, Gilrein mutters, “Yes.”

Mrs. Bloch turns her head into a shaft of moonlight that cuts across her left ear. And taking this as a sign to repeat himself and speak up, Gilrein says, “Yes, I’m the reader.”

Mrs. Bloch doesn’t seem to recognize his voice, or if she does she allows no indication of recognition. She steps in close, reaches up, and starts to run her fingers over his face. Then she abruptly stops and nods, reaching into the folds of her ragged trench coat and pulling out a crumpled brown paper bag.

“Dis,” she says, “ist fur du.”

She places the bag on the ground at his feet, then turns and starts to walk back to the track 7 tunnel, finding the rail with her cane, which, Gilrein sees now, is just a length of lead pipe, and starting a new run of methodically paced clanging.

He waits until she completely dissolves into the shadows, pockets his gun, squats down, and lifts up the bag. He begins to open it and instantly stops himself. This, he knows, is the package. This is the item that Leo Tani died over. This is the book that has caused his beatings, caused his lips to be sewn together. Caused Wylie to betray him. Gilrein has spent the last twenty-four hours trying to convince everyone he’s come in contact with that he has no knowledge of this volume. And now, the only thing he can think of is the fastest way out of the station.

He tucks the bag under his arm and runs for the crevice that exits into the rear yard. He tries to ignore what he thinks is the sound of hushed speech from every shadowed notch that he passes. When he reaches the Checker, he pops the trunk and reaches inside, shoves his father’s wooden tool chest to the side, finds a pile of oil rags, and selects the largest. He wraps the paper bag inside the rag, then hides it in the hollow beneath the spare tire.

He climbs behind the wheel of the cab, loads the key into the ignition, cranks over the engine, and looks out the windshield to notice, near the roof of Gompers, positioned against one of the half-toppled Ionic columns that rims a section of balcony, what looks to be a child, staring back down at him, hunched over itself, looking feral and skittish even from this distance. Gilrein leans over to the passenger seat to get a better view, but the child vanishes back into the interior of the train station. One more ephemeral tenant of the city’s expansive black holes.