Jonathan Lethem - Gun, with Occasional Music

It was time to stop fucking around.

THE OLD APE DIDN’T SOUND TOO ENTHUSIASTIC ON THE telephone. But when I arrived at the Office, he was waiting in front of the building, and he fell into step with me as I went up the stairs to the lobby.

“Thanks for showing, Walter,” I said.

“Don’t mention it,” he grunted.

We went in. The Office always seems caught off guard at people walking in on their own steam. They don’t have a reception area so much as they have a sort of ramp for tossing people out of the building from, and a long, clear lane for picking up speed before they get to the ramp. As for going in, they expect to have to drag you struggling through the back entrance, or unconscious on the floor of an Office van. You walk in the door, and every head turns. It was no different now.

We strolled up to what passed for a reception desk, though the guy sitting at it surely hadn’t received anything more elaborate than a delivery pizza for the boys upstairs.

“I want to talk to Inquisitor Kornfeld,” I said.

The guy surprised me by tapping the name into his console.

“Not available,” he said.

“Okay,” I said. “Inquisitor Morgenlander.”

We came up against the same dead end.

I got a funny feeling. Those had been the two factions when I checked out, and Kornfeld seemed a shoo-in to run things in the Office his way for a while to come. It wasn’t that they weren’t in the building that bothered me—it was that the guy needed to consult his computer for the names.

“Inquisitor Teleprompter,” I said.

His hands came off the keyboard. “I’ll see if she’s here,” he said, and for the first time looked me and the ape over carefully. I smiled for him, and after a minute he picked up die intercom and hit a couple of buttons.

“Ms. Teleprompter,” he said. “There’s a guy here at the door says he wants to talk to you.” He listened, then turned back to me. “What’s your name?”

I told him, and he said it to hen.

“Stay right here,” he said, a little wide-eyed. I guess he was surprised.

Surface and I were just stepping back from the desk to cool our heels when a cloud of Office hoods came stiff-shouldered and scowling, and bunched around us like an elastic waistband.

“Mr. Metcalf?‘“said one of them.

“Metcalf and Surface,” I said. “We’re traveling together.” The ape didn’t look exactly grateful, but he didn’t contradict me. The inquisitors took us each by the arms and steered us to the elevator. I didn’t think we could all get on, and was about to suggest that Surface and I catch the next one, but they insisted, and we managed it. The fat ones sucked in their gut, and up we went.

When the elevator stopped, on the third floor, they walked us to one of the executive offices. I was impressed, but I knew better than to think it was a good sign Catherine had moved upstairs. The game upstairs was no cleaner than the game on the streets, last I knew. Our escorts punched in a code at the door and pushed us inside, and a couple of them followed while the rest camped in the hall.

It was one of the nice offices, with a big picture window facing the bay, and a lot of pretty photographs and memorabilia pinned to the walls. Catherine was behind a desk as big as they come, looking six years older and not a day worse. The same hair was pulled back to expose the same throat, and I got lost there for a minute before I noticed her eyes were hard.

“Clean them up,” she said.

The boys worked us over. They located the gun on me and a little notebook on Surface, and they handed them to Catherine along with both our cards. She tossed the stuff in a drawer and told the muscle to wait outside.

“Sit down,” she said. We did.

“You were supposed to get out of town, Metcalf,” she said. “You know the way it works.”

I went up against her eyes, but it was a dead end. She didn’t budge. She didn’t even blink, or if she did, she timed the blinks to go with mine. The effect was impressive.

“I’m two days old, Catherine,” I said. “Give me a break.”

“Don’t call me Catherine,” she said. “By letting you and your monkey into my office, I already gave you one break too many.” Her voice was like a dentist’s drill.

Our eyes met again. I was looking at the woman I’d climbed into bed with two nights ago, but I had to remind myself she hadn’t spent six years in bed waiting for me to return from the bathroom. The deeper I buried those memories, the better.

“Okay,” I said. “I get it. You’re on the inside now. Congratulations, and I’m sorry. Where’s Kornfeld?”

She didn’t flinch at the question. There was still that much between us. “Long gone,” she said. “He pushed it too far, and now he’s spending time in the freezer.” She made it sound like she’d done the job herself, and maybe she had. “If you’ve got business with Kornfeld, don’t wait underwater.”

“I’ve got a punch in the stomach that belongs to him,” I said. “It’ll keep. Who stepped into his shoes—or am I looking at her?”

“That might be accurate,” she said.

I looked over at Surface. He shot me his sourest look.

“Then you’re the one I want to talk to,” I said. “Nothing to do with before.”

“You have five minutes of my time.”

“I’m sure you’ll lose track of the time,” I said. “It gets good at the end.”

“I’ve got a short attention span,” she said.

“It’s pretty simple. There’s some murders nobody ever bothered to solve right, and a guy in the freezer who doesn’t belong there.”

“If you say the name Stanhunt, you have three minutes.”

“How about six minutes for two Stanhunts?”

“Get on with it.”

“I’ll talk fast and in a high-pitched voice, and you can record it and slow it down later. I solved the Stanhunt case. Both of them.”

Surface groaned like he was on her side.

“It’s a beauty,” I said. “A carefully balanced mechanism that faltered and collapsed in on itself. And it begins and ends with Danny Phoneblum.”

“You were obsessed with Phoneblum,” said Catherine. “I looked into it. It was hopeless. You can’t shoehorn him into the case.”

“I was obsessed with the truth,” I said. “Phoneblum is the case. Phoneblum and Celeste. The first time I met her, I could see she was trying to shake a past that wouldn’t shake. It took a while, but I figured it out. She was Phoneblum’s moll, for I don’t know how long, but for a while. He loved her, and she might have loved him back. She gave him a son. Testafer was the doctor who handled the delivery.”

“You’re straining my credulity already,” said Catherine.

“Give me a minute. The boy’s name was Barry. Phoneblum was looking for an heir, and he wanted Celeste to stick around and bring the kid up. But he was abusive, a wifeslapper, and Celeste ran away to stay with the doctor. I confirmed as much with Testafer yesterday afternoon.”

She made a face.

“She took the baby with her, and she didn’t leave Phoneblum a forwarding address. Dr. Testafer was grooming a new boy named Maynard Stanhunt for his practice, and when Stanhunt and Celeste met, the sparks flew. Testafer advised Celeste against it in private, but he didn’t bother to let his golden boy know he was romancing the estranged girlfriend of an angry gangster;”

“This is pretty tired stuff, Metcalf.”

“Get ready,” I said. “This is where the Office comes in. When Phoneblum locates his wayward madonna and child, he’s pretty steamed. He wants her back but she says no, and he gets ready to put boyfriend Maynard out of the picture. Only the fat man suddenly gets an idea. He runs a business where he defrosts karma-defunct bodies, courtesy of your old pal Kornfeld, to populate a little slavebox bordello. And he needs doctors to tend to the frostbite. So he takes the kid back and blackmails Stanhunt and Testafer into running his medical facility.”