Now Ms. Paige finds me, out on the street. She is holding up her radio. An archivist trails her, and a capturer trails the archivist, her capture bobbling on her shoulder. Ms. Paige holds up the radio. “I’ve got Alvaro.”
Paige watches me curiously while I talk to our boss.
“Quite a day you’re having, Laszlo.”
“Yeah.” I take the last long drag of my cigarette and stub it out. “I know. Listen. I need you to set something up for me.”
“What is it?”
“You’re not going to like it.”
“I don’t like anything. Might as well ask.”
16.
There are aspects of the physical city that can be seen but not fully understood: visible etherealities, manifestations of a time buried under present time. Like there’s this one building on West Adams, near a hoagie place I like, a soaring construction of heavy gray stone with elaborate stained-glass windows and long, low steps that lead up to wide, tall doors. It’s a State site, accessible only to authorized personnel, in which files damaged by fire or flood or other emergency are carefully reconstructed by experts and archivists. If the building with the stained-glass windows used to be something else, it is nothing else now. It holds its past but holds it in secrecy, unknown and unknowable.
It’s like the sign up in the Hills, up at the crest of Mount Lee. You can just about make it out from where are now, idling at the Gower Street Gate, waiting for the man in the guard house to come over and check us in. Nine tall white letters on the side of a hill, spelling a word that if it meant something to somebody once, means nothing to anyone now. Nothing that can be known.
“Good morning.”
“Good morning, sir. My name is Laszlo Ratesic, age fifty-four, and I’m a nineteen-year veteran of the Speculative Service. The square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sums of the squares of the other two sides.”
“Good morning. Pi represents the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter.”
“My name is Aysa Paige, age twenty-four and a two-day veteran of the Speculative Service.”
“Did she say two days?”
“She did.”
The gate man peers past me at Aysa in the shotgun seat and grunts. “Huh.”
I’m impatient. I’m ready to go. “We need to see Laura Petras, Our Acknowledged Expert on the Enforcement of the Laws.”
“You have an appointment?”
“No,” I say, and add hurriedly, “but I believe my supervising officer called over. Mr. Luis Alvaro?”
The gate-arm man looks skeptical. Like, what? I’m going to lie?
“Give me a moment, sir,” he says, and retreats into his little house and picks up his radio.
While we wait, while the guard checks our identifications, while he checks his call log, while Aysa looks through the windshield at her first view of the vast complex that contains our collected Expertise, I happen to turn my head at just the right moment to see the Dirty Dog food truck as it cruises through the green light at Gower and Waring, the intriguing black hot dog–shaped truck with the pink piping, and I allow myself the fleeting fantasy of leaving Aysa to her own devices for this next phase of our investigation. How pleasant it would be to leap from the driver’s seat, chase the truck down the street, and then, once I have caught it, sit on a bench and eat a works with cheese, watching seagulls circle the sky.
From his little booth, the guard hands us back our identifications and the gate arm goes up.
“Okay.” The guard is squinting at us. “You folks know where you’re going?”
“Not really,” I say, and he hands us a folded-up paper map, which Aysa takes and unfolds.
“When you’re done, you gotta come out by this same gate,” he says finally, and I nod.
“Okay.”
“Did you hear me?” he says, like I didn’t answer. “Same gate.”
The complex is enormous, and I haven’t been here in a long time. Aysa holds the map and calls out directions. We drive past long low buildings with flat tar roofs, painted on their sides with various of the State’s mottos. Pedestrian walkways snake between the buildings, each marked with its department: Expertise in Transportation and Infrastructure, Expertise in Commerce and Trade, in Monetary Policy, in Agriculture. Each of the little bungalows houses the offices of a different Expert.
Dotted across the lawns that separate the buildings are cafés, kiosks, and small fountains, each a miniature version of the one in the Plaza downtown. The whole campus is organized around the water tower, seven stories high, painted brightly with the Bear and Stars, and which can be seen from anywhere on the campus—and which, on a clear day, you can see for blocks all around. It’s almost always a clear day.
It’s all old. From before. This place, its walkways and bungalows, its sprawling open spaces and its water tower—it all is and it is all built on something that was. And if your mind wants to wonder what it was, what was here before this was here, you remember to understand that it is not known and not knowable, and you let the thought drift across your mind and then away and soon enough you turn one last corner and find the building you were looking for.
We pull up outside Building 6892, the Enforcement of the Laws. It’s a modest two-story bungalow, the same as all the others, the same flat sandstone and painted doors, wooden staircases at either end of the building connecting upstairs and down.
Before we get out of the car I put a warning hand on Paige’s arm. “Okay, Ms. Paige. I’m going to do the talking here, okay?”
“Yes, sir.”
“We are going to get the information we need, and we are going to get out of there. These people do not fuck around.”
“Absolutely, sir.”
She smiles. I smile. I don’t believe her for a second. I mean, I do—she’s not lying.
