Jack O'Connell - Word Made Flesh

The one with the burn-deformed face shoves Gilrein through the door as it’s opened by a preadolescent girl dressed in worn shorts and an extra-large T-shirt that reads ST. IGNATIUS INQUISITORS. The girl has a smudge of charcoal on her cheek and deep circles under her eyes. The meatboys ignore her and move inside.

Gilrein blinks to help his eyes adjust to the light change. The room is enormous, a factory loft of oil-stained concrete floors and high brick walls all sporting lengthy cracks. The general lighting is dim and yellow, a line of low-watt bulbs glowing from tin fixtures high on the walls, but this is augmented by a series of white-blue high-intensity lamps glaring from each side of a wide center aisle.

Kroger’s animals pull Gilrein down the aisle toward an open freight elevator shaft at the far end of the loft. He looks from side to side as he walks and is horrified to witness something resembling a dingy human zoo, a shabby industrial terrarium filled with children, row after row of boxes, cells, pens, tiny symmetrical stockades separated one from the next by brittle fencing and an occasional sheet of nicked-up plywood. Each pen is chained closed and inside Gilrein can glimpse youngsters seated behind tables and easels working with pencils and pens and paintbrushes under harsh desk lamps.

As he passes, many of the children rush to their doors and peer out at him but no one says a word. There are no voices. There is no din of heavy labor, just the sound of the visitors’ feet tapping off the concrete.

They stop in front of the lift and Blumfeld, the creature with the elaborate overbite, presses for the platform. There’s an awful metal whine and then a three-quarter cage starts to descend through the ceiling. Gilrein weighs the possibility of a run against both the likelihood of success and the amount of joy his two captors earned from his previous beating. He decides to be conservative, turns his head to the side and locks eyes with a young boy, maybe twelve years old, Asian and suffering from a forehead full of eczema. The kid is kneeling, turned around on top of a bar stool, facing away from his drawing board and hunched forward to peer through the fencing.

“Jiang,” a soft and thickly accented voice says, “geet bahk tu vek.”

Gilrein turns and looks across the aisle to the drawing pen opposite Jiang’s. And is stunned to see Mrs. Bloch, the woman from the Houdini Lounge, Oster’s blind tattoo artist. Her face is pointed in his direction and he can see the sick-making pancake tumors in place of her eyes.

Then a bell sounds and the open cage touches down on the factory floor. The meatboys each take one of Gilrein’s arms and yank him onto the metal apron. One of them grabs a free — hanging electrical cord, presses a button on the end, and the entire elevator jerks in place and starts to rise. It’s a slow ascent and while the goons stare at their feet, Gilrein studies a framed print mounted on the wire mesh of the left side of the cage. It’s a blow-up of the cover from this month’s issue of the Bardo title Alice Through the Attic Glass. Apparently a thriller comic, the painting depicts a dark-eyed girl, partially obscured by shadow, reacting in what appears to be shock or horror to something she’s witnessing from behind the drapes of her window.

The platform reaches its zenith, creaks to a stop in front of a set of glossy walnut doors. There’s a long wait until they slide open, then Blumfeld and Raban hustle Gilrein inside the penthouse, pull him through an enormous and ornate foyer, down a dimly lit corridor covered in flock wallpaper, and into a large den rimmed with walls of wood shelving that hold uniform rows of thousands of leather-bound books. At the far end of the room is a podium desk, a little like a scaled-down judge’s bench. Behind the desk, bent over an open volume, sits August Kroger.

He doesn’t look much like the pictures Gilrein has seen, but then it’s been three years since he was privy to OCU files and most of those prints were surveillance shots taken from a distance. The old man looks leaner than Gilrein would have guessed. He’s got a huge forehead and his hair is razor cut, close to the scalp. His ears are oversized and pink, but his cheeks are gray and droopy and lined. The eyes are close-set and squinty, covered by rimless oval glasses that are attached to a thin silver chain which drapes around his neck. But all the facial features are just gravy to the clipped rectangle of mustache that may, despite its brevity, be sporting a coat of wax.

Kroger is dressed in a pricey-looking black suit with a minimal gray pinstripe. The shirt is white, rigidly starched, the kind with those odd, rounded-off collar points. He’s wearing a maroon silk tie splashed with a pattern of what look like tiny white polka dots, but are, in fact, the letters of an obsolete Slavic dialect.

The meatboys deposit Gilrein in front of the desk, then move to the far end of the room and sit simultaneously at opposite ends of a dark paisley couch. There’s a straight-backed wooden chair facing the desk, but Gilrein stays on his feet. A few seconds go by. The sound of a clock ticking can be heard from somewhere in the den.

Kroger holds a flat hand up above his head as if calming a crowd, peers down closer to the book, and breathes deeply through a clogged nose. Finally, he lifts his head, stares across the desk at Gilrein, and slaps the book closed.

“I detest multiple points of view,” Kroger says.

Gilrein nods and says, “Did you bring me here for some book chat?”

“In a manner of speaking,” in a phlegmy voice layered with an accent, something Germanic perhaps. “You, Mister Taxi Driver, are in danger.”

“And you,” Gilrein responds, “are a little sewer rat that should’ve been stepped on a long time ago.”

He hears one of the meatboys rise, probably Raban, and then just as quickly sit back down as Kroger waves away the assistance.

“You know me, Mr. Gilrein?”

“I know all about you, asshole.”

“Such as?”

“Such as you were a low-rent errand boy from Old Bohemia who never had the balls to put together his own crew back in Maisel.”

“Such vicious rumors.”

“When you finally annoyed the local tyrants back home, you were lucky enough to be able to buy deportation. You ended up in Q-town a decade ago and weaseled your way into enough franchises to buy this firetrap.”

“You don’t like my home?”—mock offended. “I thought I’d assimilated so well.”

“Must really burn your ass that you’ll never be neighborhood mayor for the Wing. I just don’t know why Hermann Kinsky didn’t whack you already.”

“Hermann and I,” in a voice that suggests he finds Gilrein’s insults amusing, “have an understanding.”

“Well, Kinsky’s like that. He’ll tolerate anybody as long as they’re a useful tool. But after that he reaches for the piano wire.”

Kroger nods and pushes out his bottom lip. “Hermann is an impetuous man.” A pause, a look down at the table. “Anything else you’d like to add?”

Without hesitation, Gilrein says, “You’re a book freak.”

Kroger leans back in his chair.

“A book freak,” he repeats. “That is wonderful. I love it. Just marvelous. Most people call up that tired old pejorative— bibliomaniac. I find it so cliché, don’t you think?”

Gilrein steps forward, braces his hands against the edge of the desk and leans on his forearms. He waits until the air between them is thick and then, in a low voice that someone else might take for respect, he says, “The one thing every gangboy in this town knows is that you don’t dick around with a cop unless you’re doing business together.”

“But then,” Kroger says, “you are not with the police anymore, isn’t that right?”