“Oh.” I should feel relief. This is what I wanted. This is exactly what I wanted only moments ago. “Oh yeah?”
“Yes, yes.” He sets the book down again, gazes at the jacket, taps it with two fingers. “Bring it to Ms. Petras’s office and let them do their thing.”
Laura Petras is Our Acknowledged Expert on the Enforcement of the Laws and thus the ultimate supervisor of both the Speculators and the regular police, one of twenty committee members who oversee the administration of the Basic Law. I’ve only met her once, seen her maybe five times in my life, a bland-smiling blonde woman in a tan suit and sensible shoes who, along with her fellow committee members—Our Acknowledged Expert on Trade and Commerce, Our Acknowledged Expert on Transportation, and all the rest of them—administers the fine points of State governance. The various committees and their staffs are not headquartered down here, among the majestic showpiece buildings of the State, but at the Melrose Avenue facility, a sprawling administrative campus of one- and two-story sandstone bungalows, with venetian blinds in the windows and conference tables in every room.
Among its many other responsibilities, the committees have ultimate jurisdiction over facts and artifacts that can be proved neither true nor untrue, and which therefore must be consigned to oblivion. Put out of mind. Not to be thought of again. What Arlo is proposing is to take my artifact and spirit it away, drive up to Melrose and hand it to Petras or Petras’s people, to be referred in due time to the assembled committees, to be declared a part of the unknowable past, either known nor unknown, neither true nor false, forever.
After that, it probably gets thrown in a box or set on fire. Who knows?
I pick up the book from the bench between us, feeling suddenly protective of it. The prospect of it being declared unknown and unknowable seems—I don’t know. Wrong. Unfair, somehow. Must Crane’s prized secret possession be consigned to oblivion, just because he was?
“No, you know what?” I say. “I think I’ll hang on to it for now. Just in case it becomes relevant to the investigation.”
“Very well,” says Arlo, sounding less than entirely convinced. But I nod—good. I’ve convinced myself. It’s my investigation, my strange artifact, my responsibility. There is something else too, isn’t there? I hold the book tightly, gripping its corners with my fingers. It wants me to read it—it wants to be read.
I drop the book back in my bag and zip it up.
“And how is your novel coming, by the way?”
“Oh, it’s coming,” Arlo answers with a long happy sigh. “It’s coming along. You’ll be the first to see it when I’m done.”
“I can’t wait.”
An old joke between Arlo and me, one of thousands, part of the private language of old friends. He’s been working on his novel, supposedly, for eleven years; it is an achievement, he likes to say, to which he has long aspired, to produce a novel of his own: a true story organized into chapters or incidents, featuring a historical character… implying an inspirational message about the nature of the Golden State. Every time I ask whether I can get a look at the damn thing, he says it’s not quite finished, he’s still tinkering at the edges, smoothing the transitions, fine-tuning the ending, but I’ll be the first to see it when he’s done.
Which is only right, after all. It’s about my brother.
-
Main text:“This makes no sense,” spat Ratesic. “This makes no sense at all.”
“You wanna tell me what you’re talking about?” hissed Mr. Alvaro at his tough-talking colleague, hiding his admiration and envy behind a sneer. Mr. Ratesic was universally admired. That was a true fact, solid as steel, permanent and unbending. Among his fellow Speculators, among those who had worked with him, among dirty liars who’d had the bad luck to cross his path, he was considered a force of nature. Broad-shouldered and barrel-chested, with a strong jawline and intense, brooding eyes, Ratesic lifted a match to his cigarette and stared out the wide glass windows of the thirtieth floor of the Service.
“What do you mean, it makes no sense?” Mr. Alvaro was incensed. “This good-for-nothing punk was hustling fake IDs, and I caught his dumb ass. End of story.”
Mr. Alvaro was filling out the paperwork on an arrest he had made, a twenty-three-year-old street kid named Bert Pepper, sunglasses and a skateboard and ragged jeans, a shoulder bag filled with forged identifications. A serious crime, an out and out perversion of the truth and Alvaro was working his way through the charging documents.
But he should have waited. He should have known. When Charlie Ratesic sensed a discrepancy, when he caught wind of an anomaly, it was because there was an anomaly on the wind. He was brash and he was headstrong, but Mr. Charles Ratesic did not make mistakes.
“I want to talk a run at this kid.”
“He’s my arrest,” Alvaro protested.
“A kid like that needs a source for that kind of paper. I wanna ask him about the source.”
“Why don’t you worry about your own arrests, Ratesic?”
The rest of the gang watched as the two men butted heads. Carson raised her eyebrows to Burlington, who sighed. There was no question who was in the right, though: Ratesic was always right.
He’d come from a family of Speculators. His father, Nelson, had served with distinction, and Charles’s brother, Laszlo, had followed both of them into the Service. Laszlo Ratesic was there too, watching quietly, eyebrows raised, while his older brother persuaded Alvaro to let him have five minutes alone with Bert Pepper. There was no one like Mr. Ratesic.
He was always right and he was right
