Marcus Sakey - Brilliance

“So your patterns. You can tell what people are about to do? Physically?”

“Yes,” he said. “And please don’t test it by tossing that fork at me.”

“Sorry.” She smiled and lifted her hand off the silverware. “No wonder John told us not to engage you.”

The offhand comment hit like a slap. “John—Smith? He knows who I am? By name?”

“Of course.” She was amused. “You thought it only worked one way? He knows all about you. I think he kind of respects you. He vetoed a hit plan on you last year, not too long before the thing at the Exchange. One of our guys wanted to plant a bomb in your car—what was it, a Charger?—to prove that even the DAR’s best wasn’t safe.”

“So what—I don’t understand. Why didn’t he?”

“John said no.”

“I mean, why didn’t John? Kill me?”

“Oh. He said that it would only piss the DAR off. That the cost was greater than the benefit.”

“He was right.”

“He also said that they couldn’t be sure your kids wouldn’t be in the car.”

Cooper opened his mouth. Closed it. Thought about how many times he’d climbed in the Charger, and how he never once checked for explosives. How many times Kate and Todd had ridden with him. Thought about the car in pieces, flames licking through the windows, and two tiny burned shapes in the back.

Shannon said, “So you must be quite a dancer.”

“What? No. No rhythm. I’d be a hell of a partner if someone led, I guess.”

“I’ll bear that in mind,” she said, “case we ever end up on the floor.” She folded her napkin atop her half-finished slice of pizza. “So what’s next?”

“We need papers that will get us into New Canaan. Driver’s license, passports, credit cards. I know a guy on the West Side, does great work.”

She gazed at him appraisingly. “Why didn’t you go to him instead of Zane?”

Damn it. Careful, man. “There’s a difference between papers that can get me in the gate, and the power to erase my past, let me start again.”

“This guy a friend of yours?”

“No.”

Some of the neighborhoods and suburbs west of downtown Chicago were lovely, thriving places, tree-shaded and filled with families.

This wasn’t one of those parts.

Cooper, a military brat before he became military himself, had never really put down roots—at least not geographical ones—and so looked at every place fifteen-degrees askew as a perpetual outsider. He had a theory going about cities, that the dominant industry of the town filtered into every level of the place, from the architecture to the discourse. Thus in LA, a city built on entertainment and fantasy, there were houses in the clouds and dinner conversation about cosmetic labioplasty. In Manhattan, the business of finance reduced everything, at some level, to money; the skyline was a stock chart and the streets pulsed with currency.

Chicago had been born as a working town, a meatpacking town, and no matter how many chic restaurants opened, no matter the lakefront harbors and the green spaces, its most honest parts would always be covered in rust. They would crowd the banks of the sludge-brown river and huddle in the windowless warehouses of industrial districts.

The building he was looking for was three stories of grim cinderblock. A loading dock ran the length of the face; above it, someone had painted the words VALENTINO AND SONS, LAUNDRY AND DRY CLEANING in five-foot letters. Years of Chicago winters had faded and peeled the paint. Cooper parked the car under a streetlight, though there wasn’t much point; no one lived nearby. He popped the trunk and pulled out the duffel bag.

“Dirty laundry?” Shannon asked.

“About six months worth.”

The machinery was audible as they approached the loading dock. A faint sweet humidity radiated from the place. Inside, the room was huge and hot and noisy. Beneath humming fluorescent lights, massive washing machines spun and clanked, men and women moving between them to load the drums or collect clean clothes. The air was soupy and chemical. Although the perchlorethylene used in dry cleaning was supposed to be locked in a contained system, the machines here were old, the fittings bad, and traces of the toxic cleanser were venting into the air. All of the workers had a smallness to them, the mark of people who had spent decades maneuvering narrow aisles and bending beneath heavy loads. Cooper started down the row, pausing to make room for a withered woman pushing a basket piled with suits. It had been chilly outside, but now he could feel sweat gathering in his armpits and the small of his back.

No one paid any attention as he led Shannon to a narrow staircase at the back. The second floor was hotter than the first, and noisier; here were the massive washing machines and enormous presses used for laundry on an industrial scale, napkins and sheets and towels from a hundred hotels and restaurants. There was a brief snatched glimpse of heavy machinery moving with insectile precision, a trace of music, something Mexican and discordantly upbeat, and then they were heading upward.

Steamiest of all, the top floor was a harshly bright hive of narrow desks jammed together. Scores of people were packed in around them, each squinting into a sewing machine or cutting lengths from fabric bolts. The sound was a hundred woodpeckers at once. Most of the men had stripped off their shirts and worked bare-chested or in wifebeaters, their skin glistening. A fan the size of an airplane turbine spun sluggishly, stirring air that reeked of chemicals and cigarettes and body odor.

Cooper started down the aisle, heading for the office in the back. Shannon followed. “Weird,” she said.

“It’s a sweatshop.”

“I know. It’s just, it’s like the United Nations. I’ve seen sweatshops full of West Africans, Guatemalans, Koreans, but I’ve never seen them all at the same place.”

“Yeah,” Cooper said. “Schneider’s an innovator.”

“An equal opportunity oppressor?”

“Not really. It’s still pretty much one subculture being exploited.”

“What do you mean?”

“They’re all abnorms. All of them.”

“But…” Shannon stopped. “How? Why?”

“Schneider makes terrific IDs,” Cooper said, shifting the heavy duffel bag from one shoulder to the other. “He specializes in abnorms who want to live as normals. High risk, but big money. Those who can’t pay work it off.”

“Making cheap clothes.”

“Making cheap copies of expensive clothes.” Cooper nodded to a woman three desks down. Hair the color of cigarette smoke was pinned in a rough knot at the back of her head. She wore odd glasses, like two jeweler’s loupes mounted in granny frames. As they watched, she slid a shirt from a basket on her left side, laid it across her table, kept one hand moving to dip into a cardboard box for an embroidered logo half an inch across, which she placed precisely and then affixed with swift, measured stitches before sliding the shirt into a basket on her right side and reaching back to take another from the basket on her left. The whole process took maybe twenty seconds.

“Is that the Lucy Veronica logo?”

“Beats me.” He started moving again, and she followed.

“So how long does it take to pay for a new identity?”

“A couple of years. They need regular jobs to make a living. They’re nurses and plumbers and chefs.” He paused at the end of a row, looked both ways, moved on. “It’s only after they finish that they come here, work six or eight hours off their debt.”

“You’re saying they’re slaves.”

“More like indentured servants, but you’ve got the idea.” He glanced down the aisle and saw Schneider talking to a dark-skinned guy twice his weight. “This way.” No one paid them any attention. Part of the ethos of the place; no one here wanted to be acknowledged. After all, that’s what they’re working toward. Brilliants going blind over menial labor, stitching knockoff clothing so they can earn the right to masquerade as normal.