Robert Bennett - The Company Man

But nothing was for sure. And sometimes when he burned them Hayes wondered if he did something to himself as well. If handling their sins tainted him in places deep inside himself.

The next evening Hayes rose and waited under the Brennan Street Bridge. It was the second largest bridge in the state, after the Kulahee, which spanned the Juan de Fuca. Rickety apartments on stilts rested up against its massive curve like barn swallows, their little windows glowing like tiny eyes. As the cold grew the grates on the street belched roiling clouds of steam, like enormous furnaces below the city were working to the point of destruction.

Hayes feared he’d never show, yet then he did. A trim, proper figure slowly walking through the grip of the steam, briefcase in his hand, not in a hurry by any means. Hayes stepped out from his hiding place along the bridge and Teddy’s eyes slid over to him, wide and curiously blank. Then he stopped before him and held out the briefcase.

Hayes took it. It was large and very heavy. “This all of it?” he asked.

Teddy nodded, still silent.

“You sure? You’d better be sure, dear Ted. I’d hate to intervene again.”

He nodded again.

“Good,” said Hayes. “Then I’ll be gone.”

He turned to leave when he felt a hand on his shoulder. He looked back at Teddy and stared into those terrified eyes.

“You know I couldn’t help it,” said Teddy.

“Get your hand off me.”

“You know I couldn’t.”

“Get your fucking hand off me.”

He did so, then stood there shaking.

“I’m not your fucking priest,” said Hayes softly. “I’m not your doctor. I don’t care about your obsession or whether you live or die. I’m just gone.”

“Will He forgive me?” asked Teddy suddenly.

“Who?”

“God. Do you think He will forgive me?”

Hayes looked at him. His breath caught in his throat and he felt the awful fear rise up in Teddy, the sick magnetism that drew him to Dockland twice a year or more, and the desire to run, to hide from the fear, to hide anywhere, maybe even in death. But as the rush of thought poured into Hayes he realized Teddy feared death even more than being exposed, for then he could no longer hide, not from God Himself, and he would be seen for what he was in his deepest heart.

“No,” said Hayes. “No, I don’t.” Then he walked quickly away and left him there.

Samantha was just wandering the borders of sleep when the door of the safe house slammed open and a dark figure toppled in. She snapped awake and cried out, then reached below the bed for the little knife she’d hidden there. Then the figure coughed and said, “Christ, Sam, calm yourself. It’s only me.”

“Mr. Hayes?” she said. She reached for the light. It snapped on to reveal Hayes struggling with the door, sopping wet, with arms full of boxes and briefcases. He managed to get a toe behind the door to shove it shut, then dumped the files down on the floor and sat beside them, breathing hard.

“God, that was a long ways,” he said.

She stood to help him. “What are you doing? What are those?”

He grinned, still breathing hard, and laid a hand on the stack with a flourish. “These? These are our keys, Sam. These are our tickets in. In to what, I’m not sure. That’s why I brought them to you.”

Samantha looked down at the files. Her eyes traced over the red tabs and the olive-green sheaths with black lettering stamped down the side. “Those are McNaughton files.”

“Yes indeed.”

“How did you get those?”

“It doesn’t matter how. I got them, that’s enough. They’re the financial records for Local Securities for the last sixteen months,” he said with a groan as he stood. “Local Securities being those who keep watch at home and pay single characters rather than companies. Shady people on the payroll. Informants.”

“Informants?”

“Yes. Are you surprised?”

“Well, no, honestly. I can’t believe we kept records for that sort of thing, though.”

“Oh, I can. Very easily. It’s a business, after all. The right hand may not want to know what the left hand is doing, but they do want to know how much they’re paying for it.”

“You want to blackmail McNaughton with that?”

“Not with that, no. I want you to look through these,” he said, fingering the files and briefcases, “and these,” and he touched the boxes.

“And what are those?”

“Those are prison records. From Savron Hill, and Garvey. You’re going to use that marvelous mind of yours to look there first.”

“Look for what?”

“Disappearances. And similarities.”

She rolled up her sleeves and began laying out the files on the floor, as there was no room on the desk in Hayes’s safe house. After glancing through the McNaughton files she saw that many of them were heavily coded, seeming to rely on the use of some sort of cipher, which Hayes concluded they didn’t have. Sighing, she set the files in order of simplicity, with the prison files close to her and the densest McNaughton files at the other end. Then she began reading, starting with prisoner records from three years back and looking for any gaps in the information, prisoners who had gone missing without any warning or notation at all. It was extremely difficult work, as the prisoner records were often either incompetent or incomprehensible. It was hard to discern if a gap was a mistake or an intended omission. Hayes was of no help at all; this sort of work bored him to tears. At first he hovered over her shoulder, asking questions and getting cigarette ash all over the papers. Then he gave up and passed the time bouncing around the room, wandering the corners and sometimes going out to the canal to watch the waterfall swell and shrink.

After three hours of work she felt she had found someone. A Mr. Gerald Crimley, once a prisoner of South Sector C, imprisoned there for land fraud. Apparently he got caught getting people to invest in properties that didn’t technically exist. Wound up stuck with a five-year sentence, and disappeared with less than a year of it served. Samantha checked and rechecked the death rolls, which were both long and appalling, but among all the names Crimley never appeared. He never reappeared, either, not anywhere else.

“Hm,” said Hayes once she told him this. He finally sat down on the bed, his eyes half-shut as though he were sleepy. “Well. We’ll need to find out where he went.”

“Am I looking for Crimley in the McNaughton files now?”

Hayes opened his eyes and smiled slightly. “Yes. If you would be so kind.”

Samantha then began the laborious job of digging through the cryptic budgetary records. They were conveniently arranged by date, but often referred to events or figures whose names were no more than letters and numbers, such as RD232 or WJR34-1-1. She guessed these were the names of other files, and if they had the cipher then she would have been able to make sense of them. Numerous code words were used as well, such as Seaworthy or Easterner or Pilgrim. After looking at all the entries and logs, she guessed that Seaworthy was almost certainly some sort of senatorial contact, while Pilgrim had to be a shipping contractor for a minor-league rival firm. Easterner was all over the records, yet she could see no pattern there. But exactly what they all did for McNaughton was never mentioned; just their costs and financial matters. Bank accounts and payment amounts and dates. It was just one long receipt.

One file name began appearing very often around the time Gerald Crimley disappeared: SP-0417. She noticed it because three weeks after Crimley disappeared from Savron a five-thousand-dollar payment was made to a bank account in San Francisco, referencing that file name as the owner of the account. Frowning, she made the tenuous leap that, provided Hayes’s vague hunch was not wrong and the two files were indeed connected, SP-0417 was Crimley.