“What?” said Garvey.
“This is Mr. Four Hundred and Eighty-six. Murder of this year.”
“Oh. That’s right, I guess. How’d you know that?”
“A rumor,” said Hayes.
“That the only good rumor you know about this?”
“Oh, perhaps, Garv. Perhaps.” He knelt and looked at the dead man’s fingers. They were yellowed with nicotine and the nails were ragged. Several small pink cuts dotted the webbing of his hands and orange calluses floated in his palms below each finger. Hayes touched them, felt their firmness. Factory worker. Maybe a loader of some kind. Or perhaps he had been, once.
“I think he’s one of mine, yes,” said Hayes softly.
“Is he a unioner?” Garvey asked.
“Oh, I’ve no idea there.” He gently placed the hand back on the cement and patted its back, as though reassuring the dead man everything would be all right. Several of the uniforms pulled faces as they watched the gesture, but Hayes was so used to the presence of the dead that he barely gave it thought. “But I’d certainly guess so.”
“Are we good to take this, Detective?” asked one of the uniforms.
“Yeah,” Garvey said, and sighed again. “Yeah, go ahead and pack him up.”
They watched as the uniforms unloaded the corpse slickerbag and tucked him in and tied it up. Then they placed him on a canvas stretcher and began carrying him up the hill as a thin rain started. Garvey and Hayes followed.
“What I would give,” said Garvey, “for something simple. A wife that shot a husband in front of the butcher. Two thugs getting into a tussle at a bar and one getting three inches of knife for his passion. Something nice, you know?”
“That’s a rather morbid thought. But then, you have made a rather morbid career choice, Garv.”
They began to crest the canal, the tops of distant buildings just peeking over the edge. “We’re going to pass five hundred this year,” said Garvey.
“Yes,” said Hayes.
“Easily.”
“Yes.”
They left the canal and came back up to civilization, to the winding cement streets and electric lamps and the distant putter of cars. The scent of burning coal laced the morning wind and cries and shouts echoed from the tenements. Rag-wrapped beggars lay in doorways like sodden mummies, by all appearances dead except for the breath pluming from their hoods. And far beyond the rambling skyline the downtown towers of Evesden overtook the horizon, their windows and lights shining bright, jealously guarding their modernity. Every once in a while a spotlight stabbed up, calling out to some airship hidden in the clouds. The future was only a mile or two away but would come no closer to places such as these.
“You should have looked at him,” said Garvey as they entered the warren of tiny lanes.
“I did look at him,” Hayes said.
“Yeah. But you didn’t want to.”
“It’s not part of my job. Or yours.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“You get too wrapped up in these things. It’ll ruin your morning.”
“He’s a victim. A real victim, I think. I’ve got a feeling about him. Someone has to look, for things like that.”
“Maybe. Do you think it’ll file?”
“I think it might.”
“Oh,” said Hayes. He thought for a moment and said, “I don’t.”
“Hm. No,” agreed Garvey after a while. “No, it probably won’t.” He sighed. “I hate Novembers. At least in December you know it’s fucking done, or near enough.”
As they left the canal behind, the neighborhood grew cleaner and the streets grew wider. Even though the dawn was lost behind the overcast the city was coming to life. Halfway up the side of a tenement a fat woman warbled something in Italian and draped patched sheets along a clothesline, her enormous white breasts almost spilling out of her nightshirt as she moved. A slaughterhouse ice cart rattled around to the back of a butcher’s, and though its back was stained rose-pink from old blood there was no threat of any viscera spilling, not on a frosty day such as this. At Milligan’s the barkeep opened the door and began kicking at three souses who’d slept hunched and penitent on the sidewalk, and the men moaned and scrambled away, cursing. Down at the corner four Chinamen sat on a wooden cage of geese, stoic and regal in their robes and caps as though they were foreign emissaries, and they watched Garvey as he walked by, sensing police. Garvey studiously ignored them, but Hayes gave them a sharp salute, and one of them favored him with a raised eyebrow. Across the street what had to be the world’s oldest newsie peeled back his ancient lips to reveal a toothless mouth and bawled out the latest trumped-up outrage, something about how President Ballinger was once again sending the nation to hell in a handbasket. Three old men strode over, puffing in indignation, and paid for three papers and read them and shook their heads.
All in all, it was a morning like any other. It was hard to believe that somewhere in all this were rivers where the dead dreamily swam through the waters, or slept under upraised houses, or perhaps waited for the morning in an alley next to the previous day’s trash. And yet Hayes knew it happened with regularity. They were simply another kind of citizen in these neighborhoods, a kind that waited to be dealt with by whoever had the time.
They found Garvey’s car, a spindly affair that looked as if it should fall apart after four miles, and they both grunted as they climbed in. Garvey primed the car’s cradle and listened to it whine as it fed into the engine. Then he eased up on the drive handle. The engine buzzed and sang its clockwork song, and he released the brake and they started off, down through the wandering alleys and out onto the trolley path and into the auto lane. Hayes leaned his head against the glass and massaged his temples and pinched his nose. He moaned a little as a trolley roared past and sank down into the underground. Then he took out a pair of spectacles with blue-tinted lenses, which he delicately referred to as his “morning glasses,” and fixed them on his nose and stared out at the street.
“Late night?” asked Garvey.
“You know the answer to that,” he said.
“Hah. Yeah. Why did you help today, anyways?”
“Pardon?”
“Why did you agree to come at all? If you’d been up so late, I mean.”
Hayes didn’t answer at first. They moved onto Michigan Avenue and started across town. The Nail rose in the distance, dwarfing the other buildings. It was at least twenty blocks north, but even from here every line of its architecture could be seen by the naked eye. Its ash-gray shaft stabbed into the sky, windows lining its castellations. At the top its jade steeple glittered with promise. They called it the Nail because to many it looked like one, with a fat head and a long sharp tooth, waiting to be hammered into something. Hayes had always disagreed. To him it looked like a finger, gray and thick, and at the top was its green fingernail, scratching at the sky. It was still a nail, but to him it was alive. Maybe growing.
Unlike many, Hayes was familiar with the inner workings of the building. He usually went there at least ten times a month. At its top silver letters spelled out the word MCNAUGHTON. His eyes traced over the letters and he sourly reflected that the same people who owned that marvelous piece of architecture also owned him, in a way.
“Well?” said Garvey.
“Mmm? What?” asked Hayes.
“Why’d you help?”
“Oh. I suppose just to have something to do,” he said, and rolled to his side and tried to sleep.
CHAPTER TWO
Garvey wheeled the car toward the Brennan Bridge as the wind shook the last drops of rain from its back.
