Sean Michaels - Us Conductors

“What is this?” I said.

“They are secrets,” he said.

I felt as if my spirit was stumbling through the channels of my body. I was opening and closing my hands. I couldn’t distinguish whether I was even truly angry anymore. I wanted to work myself up to make another speech, vehement, full of affirmations; yet my mind just stuttered, racing and seizing, past images of absent Pash, distant Russia, and you. It ran and ran, like unspooling film.

The man put his palm on my shoulder.

I was a ruined mine, caving in.

In a vanishing voice I asked, “Why should I help you?”

He spoke very gently. “We are Russian,” he said. “You and I — we are comrades.” He left a long silence.

“Yes,” I murmured.

“We carry one another, Lev. We stand side by side.”

I forced a bitter laugh. “Oh yes?”

“Yes,” said the man. He turned his head and I saw the way his eyes were magnified, huge, on the interior of his glasses. “Lev, you are gifted,” he said. “You are an exemplar of our people. Brilliant, with a bold heart, tenacious and brave. Yours is work that no one else can do. You must not doubt for one moment what a treasure you are, for your comrades.”

I swallowed. I said nothing.

“You have a meeting at the Dolores Building. We need you to go there and steal some documents.”

In my peripheral vision, the Karls seemed to grow fainter.

I told him I had never done anything like this before.

He said it was all right. He gazed at me. He smiled. He muttered something I could not make out. I think he said, “You are a king.” I just nodded. I looked at his pages of paper, the columns of letters and numbers. I felt a pang of homesickness for the Cyrillic Φ, the Җ. For the Neva, the Volga, their lifting bridges. I thought of you, Clara. The vodka was still swinging through my heart. I thought of you for a long moment and then I tore my thoughts from that wasteland. I took the pages from him. I folded them. I put them in my jacket pocket. “What else,” I said.

He talked of details. My appointment, my alibi, the place where the documents were stored — room 818.

“The meeting with Mr Grimes is at eleven o’clock,” the man in glasses said. He looked at his watch. “It is almost ten thirty. It will be lunchtime when you finish. The hallways will be empty.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Understand that these files are a matter of Russian security.” He did not look away from my face. “You are the only operative we have who has a reason to be at the Dolores.” He took out a tiny envelope. He slipped out a key and two silver pins. “Take these.”

The key was light, sheer, recently cut.

“For 818?” I said.

“Yes.”

“And these?” The pins, one flatter than the other.

“For the cabinets.”

I shook my head. “I do not know how.”

“It will not present you with a problem, Professor Termen.”

With two fingers, the man signalled to Mud Tony that we were leaving. The cook nodded his head. He was drying cutlery. He raised a knife to the light.

There was a moment and then I followed.

On the street, the Karls disappeared around the corner. The man named Lev took off his glasses. He scanned up and down the block. I wondered what he was looking for, and dreaded it. A squat Chevrolet pulled up around the bend, Karl and Karl in its front seats.

“So,” Lev said. He did not finish the sentence.

I opened the car’s rear door. There was a small moment when I thought this man might embrace me.

When I was inside the car, he leaned across the opening. He said, “Go safely, comrade.”

“Thank you, comrade,” I said, in a dry voice.

He pushed the door shut.

WE PASSED THROUGH MANHATTAN in silence. I felt like a trespasser. Amid traffic, it was as if we were penetrating successive circles of guards. We turned corners, plunged forward, braked. It was cloudy. The sun was a murky searchlight. After a long time, we stopped. Out the window — a great revolving door. The air was cool; I could feel it prickling at my arms. But I was still hot inside, sweat at my upper lip. I was still drunk.

“Take this,” said one of the men in front of me. He pushed back a briefcase. There was something inside. The clasps opened in my hands and I saw that it was a pistol. It lay alone at the bottom of the case.

Before I could respond, the first Karl craned round in his seat to look at me. He spoke without mirth. “Don’t get caught,” he said.

The other turned and looked, too. “It’s loaded.”

I swallowed. I closed the briefcase. I went out into the street.

In the lobby of the Dolores Building, a man in a uniform sat behind a desk. “Hello,” I said, slipping my card across the surface, “Leon Theremin for Bert Grimes. At eleven o’clock.” We both looked up at the wall’s great clock, saw the gold minute hand tick to eleven. The man smiled and flipped through his appointment book. Even upside down, I could read my name. It looked the same as all the others.

“You can go right on up, Dr Theremin,” said the man. He held out a cardboard pass. It was bright green and I pinned it to my chest. The security man did not need a pass; he wore a silver star, like a Wild West sheriff. “Number 372. Third floor.”

“Thanks very much,” I said, and I strode across the marble to the elevator. In a leather case by my side there hid a gun.

The elevator slid up the centre of the building. I put the briefcase down; put my hands in my pockets. When we reached the third floor, I smiled at the elevator operator, gave him a tip, took my things, and went out onto the navy blue carpet. Right, left, straight ahead; and through the glass doors of suite 372. The secretary said, “Dr Theremin?” and I said, “Indeed,” and she said, “Mr Grimes is ready to see you now.”

And I said, “Splendid.”

Bert Grimes’s office was not very big. He stood up to greet me, a round man in a tweed suit, extending his hand the way the man at the deli extends a sandwich. “The wonder-worker himself!” he said. “Thanks for coming.”

I called him by his first name. I sat in a comfortable chair across from Bert and for an hour we talked about the factory applications of teletouch technology. He chuckled and clucked. I crossed my legs at the knee. I said, “Exactly, Bert.” He showed me papers and we talked about numbers and by the front right foot of my chair there was a briefcase containing a gun.

It was 12:07 p.m. when Bert closed the binder on his desk and offered me another salami sub of a handshake.

“Well there we are.”

“Always a pleasure.”

“Joanie and I should have you over for dinner. Bring a lady friend.”

“Yes,” I said, picking up my briefcase.

“You still seeing that blonde? What was her name? Judith?”

I shook Bert’s hand again. He walked me to the elevator. We waited for it to open. There was a janitor at the end of the hallway, sweeping. He kept scrutinizing me. I noticed that despite his dusty coveralls he wore polished leather shoes. He swept the floor like a man who did not often sweep the floor. He had eyes like nails.

The elevator opened.

“Good day,” Bert Grimes said to me.

I said, “Have a swell one.”

The elevator closed. I smiled at the operator, the same one from earlier, a Negro with a birthmark on his chin.

“Hello.”

“Hello.”

“Thank you.”

“Yessir.”

We descended. The elevator did not stop at the second floor. As we approached the ground level I slapped my forehead. “Tarnation,” I said.

“Sir?”

“I forgot something. Back at 372.”