CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“Let’s do something in the Southern District today,” Hayes said one morning as he sat in Samantha’s office, draped across one of her chairs.
“What?” she said.
“Southern District. Let’s do something there. Some interview.”
“We have our interviews laid out for us,” she said. “Preplanned.”
“Oh, I know. But let’s find some excuse to go out there and babble. I’m sure there’s got to be one.”
“Why?”
Hayes did not answer. His face was hidden below the lapel of his coat and he might have been sleeping again.
They went to the Southern on the tenuous lead that one interview subject, Ramirez, who had been out previously due to the recent death of his father, was now available. But Ramirez knew nothing and was confused as to why they had even chosen to speak with him. His father had died before the trolley murders and he had been away in California for the funeral when they took place. Hayes nodded and agreed and after two hours of it they went to lunch. An hour later Samantha and Ramirez returned to continue their discussion, but Hayes instead chose to walk the three blocks down and across to the Tramline production facility.
Who am I today, he wondered to himself as he crossed the railroad lots and the small service roads. He reached into his pocket and took out six identification cards, each with different names, different titles, different access codes for whatever machine. He found the one for Andrew Staunton and tucked it into his front vest pocket and walked up to the loading dock. Men in greasy jumpers were milling about, backing up trucks and shifting cargo. They looked up and frowned at this little suit who was walking toward them with some official-looking papers in hand. They called to the foreman and he tore his eyes away from his clipboard and advanced on Hayes. Hayes held up his identification like a shield and shouted, “Staunton, Personnel section. Here to see Mr. Martin Andersson.”
“Andersson?” repeated the foreman, straining to make his voice heard over the clatter. “No Andersson on the dock.”
“Believe Mr. Andersson works on the spot line.”
“Spot line? Oh, all right then. You’re nowhere close.” He peered closer at Mr. Staunton’s identification and came away impressed. “That’s way inside and down. Mess up your clothes, you know.”
“That’s fine.”
“I’ll try and grab Collier, that’s the lower deck foreman. He’ll be able to get Andersson. Come on.” He walked over to the cement wall and slapped a button. A horn sounded somewhere and the iron mouth of the loading dock began to draw back. The facility, like all McNaughton sites, was shaped like a bunker. At the ground level it was a huge cement loading dock, with an enormous upper warehouse facility and manufacturing decks below and foundry lines sunk down in the far back. Hayes rarely visited the factories, but he’d handled plans and schematics plenty of times. He’d bought a few of them off the odd cunning bastard and sold others with significant structural integrity problems designed in. But he never remembered the size and scale and scope of the things.
Inside it was a vast cavern with a roof and walls so far back light could not touch them. Strings of chains and hooks looped down over tracks that wound off through the stations, each one designated by a different-colored light standing on poles at the intersections. Piping sprouted from the cement floor to meet above the loads and trusses, and some dripped scalding water and others dripped a substance that resembled water but was freezing and smoky. Hayes could just see the foundry’s crucible in the far back, enormous and round, the molten metal within its black lip glowing a gleeful unnatural orange that turned the workers at its base into wicked, fiery sprites with black glass eyes.
The dock foreman found the lower deck foreman, presumably Mr. Collier. Mr. Collier listened to the dock foreman’s shouts and grimaced in dismay and waved Hayes’s identification forward. Hayes handed it up again and it was scrutinized once more and Collier was impressed like the others.
“Oh, all right,” he said. “This way. You know, this guy meant it when he said you really shouldn’t have dressed so well.”
“I don’t mind a spot of grease.”
The foreman laughed and walked to a set of lockers set up against a scuffed cement wall. He reached in and pulled out a mottled brown jumper streaked with ash and reeking of sulfur and tossed it to Hayes. “Not grease,” he said. “I just don’t want to see your clothes catch fire on you.”
Hayes awkwardly suited up and they both put on immense black goggles, and then they went to one grated stairway and began the descent into the bowels of the factory. Soon orange light filled the charred walls from some unseen source below. The passageway grew immensely hot and moist. Every pipe and hose and rivet glistened. Hayes felt as if they were not in some creation of men but instead in some living machine, wandering its fevered breast as it struggled to push air and metal through its passageways. As they descended a dozen workers staggered up the steps, their faces sooty and their heads half-hidden by the liquid-black lenses of the smelter’s goggles. They watched Hayes and the foreman walk by with blank faces but Hayes was not sure they could make another kind.
They walked until they came to the elevator and then climbed aboard and went two flights down until they hit a rotunda. Immense gears squalled and churned around them and the entire rotunda swiveled until they were in a different sector of the facility entirely. They walked on.
Hayes watched as the machinery moved above them, shining with grease and screaming with fatigue in places. How many men had died to make this place, he wondered. This temple of industry, this hidden hall of production. When ancient peoples had knelt before the carven faces of their gods and imagined fabled crypts and castles their thoughts could not have touched what men had made here, hacked into the bones of the earth itself. Hayes watched as one Tramline carriage rolled past on a beltway, its structure fine and smooth like a dragonfly’s skeleton, its half-built engine as delicate as the smallest clock. A goggled worker trundled along, the glassware receptors for the radios packed into a straw crate on his wagon, spindled glass like fine ice. He passed by them as though none of this mattered. Not Hayes or the foremen or the fragile wonders in his care.
They walked to the spot-welding line and Hayes could tell Andersson by his height. He held a long, sparkling welder in one hand, a sputtering magic wand. He knelt and set his solvent with the mindfulness of a man playing the cello, carefully placing his long, delicate instrument along the strings of the Tramline carriage, then drawing back slowly. The foreman waited until he was done and then waved down Andersson and his team. Andersson stood and frowned at the foreman until his eyes fell upon the little blond-haired, fair-skinned man who was clearly wearing goggles for the first time in his life. Then he laughed and opened his arms and cried, “Mr. Staunton! What are you doing here! What are you doing in such dangerous place as this!”
Hayes grinned and said something in Swedish. He wasn’t sure where he had picked it up or what it meant but it made Andersson laugh all the harder.
They retired to a sailor’s bar, full of tattooed men with thick black coats and raw faces. Andersson and Hayes spoke quietly over fish soup and black ale, and Andersson listened as Hayes gave him the news, describing how the very top was now paranoid of how they appeared to be murdering their own workers.
“Appeared,” growled Andersson. “Appeared. Idiocy. Nonsense. They did not appear. They did. It was them. They killed those men. How, I do not know, but it was them.”
“Why would they kill their own people?”
“Please, Andrew. Do not be telling me that you are such an idiot. I know you. You are a very clever man. You know that those men, the dead, they were the more violent sort. The more passionate sort.”
“Sort of what? Of union man?”
“Of Tazzer. Yes. The accidents, yes?”
“Ah, yes,” said Hayes, suddenly appearing to recall. “The accidents.”
“Yes. Some say this is the right thing to do. To fight. To kill, if necessary. I do not know. Killing is always bad. It will only lead to trouble. But some say this is what we need to do. To send message,” Andersson confided softly. “To bring attention.”
“Some say this will rally the lower classes. That the deaths of their own will unite them.”
“Who says this?”
