A Glitch in Reality - Chapter 0032

Chapter 32

Captain Jones paced the City Hall corridors faster than a man should walk in a building where there was no emergency, and he knew it, and he couldn’t force himself to slow down. There was a particular shame in bringing good news to a place that had forgotten its essence. The night had given him something he didn’t yet fully understand, and this incomprehension weighed on his chest like a swallowed stone, neither nourishment nor poison, just weight, and he had decided, at some point along the way, that he preferred to deposit this weight on the mayor’s desk rather than spend another hour trying to solve it alone. His heels clicked against the ancient marble and ricocheted off the high ceiling, and the few employees who still bothered to enter nodded to him, as one nods to a man in uniform nowadays, quickly, without looking at him, as one nods to time. The building smelled of abandonment, dust, cold coffee, and papers that led nowhere, and he passed by offices with the lights off that hadn’t been dark a year ago, and he didn’t look inside them because a man could only carry one thing at a time, and he was carrying the briefcase.

The mayor’s outer office was the only room in the building that still pretended to be busy. A young woman sat behind a clean desk, with a screen carefully positioned at the angle of someone who had learned to look busy, beautiful in an ordinary way, as if she hadn’t yet faced any great hardship. She raised her chin when his shadow crossed the threshold. “Captain Jones?” His name sounded like a question, indicating that she was new, or that the turnover in that office had become so high that no one stayed long enough to recognize a face.

He let the weariness escape his lips and managed something close to a smile, because smiling cost him nothing and the girl hadn’t done anything to deserve the day he was having. “I have something for the mayor. It’s important.” He rested one hand on the edge of her desk, without leaning, just letting it rest there, the gesture of a man who intended to be admitted. “I won’t be long.”

She glanced at the screen, and he watched her make the small calculations that everyone in that building was making now, weighing an entire day against something that couldn’t wait, and he saw her decide. “One moment.” She took the phone off the hook and held it to her ear, and her voice changed as she spoke, lowering half a tone to the practiced calm they must have taught her that first morning. “Sir, Captain Jones is here. He said it’s urgent.” A pause, during which Jones could vaguely hear the outline of a voice he had known for thirty years. The young woman’s eyes turned to him. “He’ll see you. Come in.”

Jones knocked once with his knuckle and entered without waiting for a reply, closing the door behind him with a gentle tug on the latch, and the room closed in around him as it always did.

It was a large office, and it had been an excellent office, and the essence of that excellence still lay beneath the neglect. A wide window occupied almost the entire back wall and offered the full view of San Diego to the man who sat before it: the flat, luminous harbor at the end of the morning, the downtown skyscrapers rising imposingly against the water, and the city, seen from up there, seemed like a city that had its affairs in order, which Jones supposed was the cruelty of all high windows. The desk was large, old, and sunken. There was a computer on it, from another decade, a heavy gray machine with a fan that he could hear from the doorway, and the rest of the surface was covered with folders, stacked, scattered, and piled one on top of the other, so that the wood only appeared in the few centimeters that the mayor kept free in front of him with the constant effort of pushing the mess back with his forearms.

And the man behind it all was now an old man. Jones registered the scene as he always did, with a particular little jolt, because in his mind the mayor was still thirty, thin, and shouting over the engine noise, and the person at the reception desk had left all that behind. His hair was completely white and his beard had grown along with it, untrimmed, his collar open below, and the face above the beard bore the peculiar ruin of a man who hadn’t slept a peaceful night in weeks and who no longer expected to sleep. They had served in the same unit, both of them, far away and long ago, the kind of period of months that binds men beyond the reach of anything that comes after, and for years it had seemed just a good story to tell, that the two had ended up in the same town and ended up holding the two ends of the same broken thing. It didn’t seem like a good story this morning. It seemed like the last supporting wall of a house from which everything else had collapsed.

“Jim,” said Jones, using the first name because thirty years gave him that right and because he wanted the man to listen to him before anything else. “How are you?”

The mayor picked up a cigar that had been burning slowly until it went out on the glass tray beside him, took a drag, and the ember reignited, illuminating the lower part of his face. “Jones.” The smoke escaped slowly as he spoke. “How am I feeling? Look at me. I’m being beaten to death in this chair by something I can’t control.” He gestured with the cigar toward the built-in desk, the window, the whole deplorable landscape. “But sit down. You didn’t come here to ask about my health; you have more manners than lying to me like this. Sit down. Tell me what it is.”

Jones turned around and sat in the chair across the table, a good chair, deep and soft, the kind made in better times to keep visitors comfortable while the man behind the table decided on their affairs. He placed the briefcase on his lap and still hadn’t opened it. “I need to report something from last night,” he said.

“Of course.” The mayor let his head fall back in his chair and closed his eyes for a moment, not in rest, but in the preparation a man makes before a blow. “One more. They’re piling up faster than I can read, Jones. I get to the bottom of a pile and the top is already higher than when I started. The board will want my head on the table by the end of the month, and you know what? Some mornings, I’d hand it over just to stop reading.” He stepped closer, dropped the open folder in his hand, closed it over the rest of the documents, took another drag on his cigar, and waved his smoldering hand in a small, tired circle toward Jones that meant: go ahead, get it over with.

“I’m not sure if it’s another one,” Jones said.

The mayor stopped, his cigar half-smoked. A white eyebrow rose. It was a small movement, but it was the most vivid expression his face had shown since Jones had walked through the door, and Jones understood at that instant how hungry the man was, how long it had been since someone had entered that office without handing him a fresh cigar.

“Last night we had a result,” Jones said, letting the word hang in the air. “Twenty-nine arrests. In a single night. All over the map, scattered, with no operation behind it, no prior warning, nothing we could have done. Twenty-nine, Jim, with the manpower we had left, with men working double shifts and cars breaking down faster than the garage can fix them. I’ve been in this a long time and I’ve never recorded that many in a single night, not even in the good old days, not even with three times the manpower.” He leaned forward, placed the folder on the few free inches of the table, and turned it so the mayor could open it toward him. “And I didn’t do that. That’s the part I need you to see.”

The mayor placed the cigar on the tray and opened the folder slowly with both hands, as if opening something he had already decided to distrust. Inside was a thin stack of report pages, and below them photographs, and below those, in a paper envelope, a disc. He went straight to the photos, because everyone else went straight to the photos.

They were grainy night photos, taken with the city’s worn-out cameras and two or three cell phones that had survived long enough to be handed over, and the same figure was in the middle of them all. A young man. Or rather, it wasn’t quite that when Jones strained to look honestly: a tall boy, of imposing build, in a dark suit so well-tailored that it seemed out of place in all the photos, the kind of clothes a man wears to be seen in front of a room and not in an alley at three in the morning. Blond, his hair catching the little light that was there. And sunglasses, a detail that caught Jones’s attention and also caught the mayor’s attention. Jones noticed, the slight frown of a man realizing that someone had chosen to wear dark lenses in the middle of the night and keep them on throughout everything that followed.

In one of the photos, the boy was inside the destroyed facade of an electronics store, the door ripped off its hinges behind him and men at his feet, and the report attached to the photo said eight. Eight of them, each with a sheet as long as their arm, three with gang links that the department had on file for years, and all eight on the ground, breathing and waiting, when the patrol cars finally arrived, to be taken to a cell. The frames continued. A different street, a different dark gray storefront, the same figure leaving it unhurriedly. A bus station. A loading and unloading area. The boy going through the worst hours of the worst week the city had ever had, stopping, store after store, at the very men the department had spent the entire season unable to arrest.

“With this,” Jones said, touching the edge of the photographs without disturbing them, “the footage, the photos, and the records, we can keep these men where they are. For a long time. There’s no way to get out of what’s in this folder.”

The mayor stared at the photo for a moment in silence, and then something emerged on his weathered face that Jones hadn’t seen in a year—a small, dark curve at the corner of his mouth that, in a younger man, would have been a smile. “Well,” he said. “How interesting.” He turned the photograph with a finger, aligning it to face him. “You know, I almost expected this. Not exactly this. But something like it. When a city goes the way this one is, it brings things to the surface that wouldn’t reveal themselves in better times. Hard times have always brought this sort of thing out of the shadows, on both sides of the crisis.” He looked up. “So tell me what you really know. Not what’s in the folder. You.”

“What’s in the folder is most of what I have,” Jones admitted, and he didn’t like admitting it, because a man in his chair should know more than the newspaper. “One person, as far as we understand, acting alone. He went out for one night, as far as we know, going in and out of half the city, and infiltrating whatever group was operating in each place he broke into. Gangs. Criminal groups. The burglars who break in and rob. He got involved with all of them.” He paused, because there was something in the reports he hadn’t decided how to say, and he found himself saying it. “He took them all down, Jim. Some were injured, some seriously. But none died. Twenty-nine men, and he had the space and speed to kill any one of them he wanted, you’ll see on the disc, and he didn’t use them. They’re all alive in a cell or a hospital bed now, stitched up and awaiting trial. A man who wanted them dead would have left them dead. This one left them for us.”

The mayor heard that, and Jones watched him listen, watched him ponder the restraint in the same way a man who had once carried a rifle would ponder it, because both of them knew better than most the price of not finishing something once it was started, and what it meant for a person to be able to choose, hastily, in the dark, repeatedly, the most difficult path.

“Put the record on,” said the mayor.

Jones removed the cover and slid the disc out, and the mayor inserted it into the gray tower under the table, and the old fan increased its speed, and the screen, now turned so that both could see it, filled with the flat, gray view of the electronics store seen from above. For a few seconds, it was just a robbery, eight men carrying a store through a broken door, unhurried, and then the figure appeared at the top of the frame, and the night dissolved. It wasn’t like watching a fight. Jones had watched many fights on many screens, and this one didn’t move like any of them. It moved like a man clearing a table, unhurried, thorough, each thing he touched sinking and remaining in place, and the speed was the part that bothered him, the way a body crossed the room between one frame and the next, how a grown man lost his balance, passed through a shelf and didn’t get up. The mayor watched the scene with his elbows resting on the table and his hands clasped in front of his mouth, and said nothing until the screen was still, until the last man surrendered and the figure remained alone in the wreckage, and then simply left the scene as one abandons a completed task.

“That,” the mayor said quietly, “is remarkable.”

“What do you intend to do with it?” Jones turned in his chair to face him. It was the only question worth asking, and he asked it bluntly.

The mayor didn’t answer immediately. He leaned back in his chair, his eyes fixed on the inert screen, and when he spoke, his voice was slow and somber, coming from a place deeper than the surface of the day. “We’ve gone too far, Jones, you and I both know it, I just don’t have the opportunity to say it aloud in most rooms. All the reports that arrive at this desk lately say the same thing in the end, even when no one who writes them has the courage to put the word on paper. The city is filling up with them. The powerful ones. They’ve been arriving little by little all year and now they’ve stopped. And each one that’s been presented to me until this morning was just another animal in the flood, another thing tearing a piece from the carcass.” He ran his hand through his white beard, a gesture that aged him another decade. “And this one is different. Look at him.” He nodded toward the screen. “He dressed appropriately. He went out and put on a clean suit to do this. This isn’t an animal being fed. This is someone who wants to be photographed. He wants to be more than just another cheap thug with a gift, and a man who wants that, in a time like this, is the most useful thing that’s crossed my desk in a year.”

He shifted his gaze from the screen to the window, to the artificial, orderly city, stretched flat and gleaming below, and his voice hardened as he moved forward.

“Because we’re not going to be able to keep this place afloat with what we have. You know the numbers better than I do, you live it. We’re losing ground every night and there’s no help on the way. Washington isn’t sending another penny. I’ve stopped pretending they will. And before you tell me it’s because the whole country is falling apart and we’re just another city in the pile, let me tell you what I’ve started thinking, because I’ve had plenty of time at this table to think about it.” He turned. The weariness was still on his face, but there was something underneath now, harder and colder, the look of a man who had stopped lamenting a problem and started hating it. “Everything’s too clean, Jones. A city doesn’t deteriorate this quickly because of bad luck. The money that should be reaching us isn’t. Orders that should be routine get lost somewhere in the hierarchy, and nobody can tell me where. Someone influenced someone. Someone’s been tampering with the tap, and it’s been turned towards us on purpose for months, and I can’t see whose it is down here. Until I can, we’re on our own. Completely. There’s no cavalry, just this building, its men, and whoever else I find willing to side with us.”

Jones felt the magnitude of it sinking in, as it always did, more slowly than he would have liked. He knew the funding was compromised. He hadn’t allowed himself to fully step back and observe the form of the blockade, the mayor’s deliberate intention, and now that he looked, he could no longer ignore it, and the fact that he hadn’t noticed it before suddenly seemed something he should be ashamed of. A flood that could be fought. A flood with one hand behind it was another matter.

“Find him,” the mayor said, and there was no weariness in his voice, only the command. “Find the boy. Quietly, carefully, before he hears we’re looking for him and decides he’d rather not be found. And investigate him. Everything. If he has a criminal record, if he’s wanted somewhere, if there’s blood on him that we haven’t seen yet, I need to know before I get within a kilometer of him.” He stared at Jones. “But if he’s clean. If this boy is, somehow, clean underneath all this…” He let the thought complete itself in the air between them. “Then maybe each of us has something the other needs, and I’d be a fool not to find out.”

Jones stood up. He left the briefcase where it lay, open on the table, because it now belonged to the mayor, along with all its weight. “Consider it done, Jim.” And he spoke with the same sincerity with which he had spoken for much of his life, simply and without embellishment, and he turned and left with the same quick step with which he had entered, the difference being that now there was direction in his movement.

The door closed softly behind him.

The mayor stood motionless for a long time. He let the office fall silent around him—the old fan, the muffled noise of the building, and the completely cold cigar on the tray—and reached out and restarted the recording, watching the figure emerge at the top of the frame and dominate the room. This time, he didn’t focus on the speed or the subtlety of the movement, but on the suit, the impeccable lines, the choice, the desire to be seen. He had told Jones the truth: that had been the most useful thing that had crossed his desk in a year. He hadn’t told him the other thing, the one for which he still hadn’t found words, that had occurred to him the moment the boy appeared on the screen and that hadn’t left him since.

Someone who wanted to be photographed. Someone, in a city he was almost certain was being deliberately emptied by a hand he couldn’t name, who had chosen to enter the brightest available frame and pose for the photo. The mayor knew what drove men to do this. He knew, in this country, who manufactured men who did this, who held the rights to the silhouette, the impeccable suit, and the camera angle, who had spent a generation teaching the entire nation to look exactly at that and applaud. He looked at the blond head in the dull, gray light and thought the word he refused to think, Vought, and felt a chill run down his spine, because if it bore their mark, then what he had just sent his oldest friend to fetch was no gift.

He sat there with that, and the filming went on until the end and stopped, and outside, through the window, the bright and unreal city maintained its perfect order, and the mayor reached out and started it all over again.