Sean Michaels - Us Conductors

“Wanna go back?”

“Please.”

“Yessir.” The operator pushed a button and pulled a lever and the elevator bucked in the shaft. We began to rise. I was recalling the map of the Dolores Building, the floor plan folded into the pocket of my jacket, imagining its borders expand and rotate.

“It was important,” I said.

“Yessir.”

The air in the elevator felt cool and perfect. The operator was in a good mood. He thought we were travelling companions, co-participants in a misadventure. We were not. When we arrived again at the third floor I nodded to him, told him not to wait. “Good luck, sir,” he said, and I stepped into the corridor, which was empty, and made as if to walk the twenty steps to Bert Grimes’s office: right, left, straight ahead.

Instead, when the elevator’s doors closed, I pivoted on my toe. I leaned into the heavy door that led to the stairwell. I unfastened the button of my jacket and I climbed the stairs, briskly, without touching the handrail.

I climbed to the eighth floor.

The walls were painted silver and the floor was made of silver linoleum and the doors were painted in the colours one expects of bank vaults: fiery red, hunter green, lightning silver. I proceeded down a hallway. Each door was marked with a number: 872, 874, 876. Most were closed but through two, wedged open, I saw harmless men eating lunch.

I came to an intersection. I did not need the map folded in eighths in my pocket. I remembered it. I turned left. I held a briefcase concealing a gun. I came to another intersection. I turned right. There were steel doors, glass doors, wooden doors—845, 843, 841. Now the faces behind the doors were of men less harmless-looking. Their eyes flicked up when they saw me pass. They sat with filing cabinets filled with secrets. I was the wind moving through trees. I turned left and pushed through a door with a decal of the American flag. This corridor was empty. My steps echoed. I walked more softly—826, 824. As I approached 818 I found I was holding my breath. I breathed. With my index finger I brushed a skim of sweat from my upper lip.

I turned a corner and the janitor, the janitor I had seen downstairs, the janitor with eyes like hammered pieces of carbonized steel, was sweeping dust from a clean-swept floor. His head was downturned but when I arrived around the corner his whole body tilted, swivelled, and he was facing me, slightly stooped, with a set jaw.

“Hello,” he said.

His shoes were too fine for a janitor.

“Hello,” I said.

I was standing in front of the door marked 818. It was grey. The key that Lev had given me was in my hand, cold, like a blade. The janitor had still not looked away. I had still not looked away. I smiled primly. I turned the key in the lock and went into room 818 and I shut the door behind me, standing with my back to it. I listened. There was a thin line of light under the door. I waited. I was silent. I could not hear anything. I could not hear breathing or footsteps or the sweeping of dust. It was pitch black in room 818 and if the janitor was an agent, an agent of something, then at this instant he was listening too. His ear was at the same level as mine, on the other side of this door. He was calculating what I was doing, where I stood, whether I was armed. He was the United States of America and I was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. He was reaching into his coveralls and withdrawing a loaded gun.

I crouched in the darkness. The floor tile was coloured by the thin band of hallway light. I placed my briefcase on the floor and I opened its clasps and they were deafeningly loud and I imagined the janitor kicking through the door and knocking me prone. I imagined bullets. I took the revolver in my hand and I put my hand in my jacket pocket and I stood, and I turned the doorknob. Then I pushed open the door in one swift extraordinary movement and my finger was tensed on the trigger of my gun, concealed in my pocket, and my eyes were trained on the place in the air where I would see a steely stare.

He was not there. The corridor was deserted.

I went back into 818. I turned on the lights. It was a small storage room filled with filing cabinets. There was no way to lock the door from the inside. I picked up the briefcase and I put it on a table in the centre of the room. I placed the gun beside it. I took off my jacket and set my hands flat on the surface of the table, where I stared at them. I stood like that until I had stopped trembling.

Then I raised my head and took the hooked pins from my pocket and read the labels on the locked cabinets whose entrails I had been sent to steal.

SOME THINGS ARE EASY to break: you throw them against a wall, you murmur a few words. Some things are less fragile. They cannot be carelessly ruined. Locks are like this: to break their purpose you must know them fully, as you would know certain faces. You must understand the flick and tick of tumblers, the swivel of nooks in metal. I did not know how to pick a lock. I tapped the first small silver circle. I peered at it. I wondered how long it would be until someone came into this room and found me tampering with boxes that did not belong to me. I had no time for failures. The lock was just a complicated thing that would come undone, like so many complicated things had come undone. I tapped the lock again. I imagined other locks I had seen, the greased fit, and I evaluated the size and style of the mechanism before me. In my hand were my two pins, my lock picks — one like a flattened piece of steel, hooked; one like a strong wire, bent. I considered the way these tools could be used. I took the first and I jammed it into the lock. It remained there, wedged. I fitted the second above it. This movement had no sound. I pushed inside slowly, softly, feeling for a skirting touch. Tiny grooves, sensitive places. The tools were loose in my hands. I found the faintest ridges at the top of this channel. I stroked these ridges with needle-tip. I felt hidden and very strong.

Pins trembled. My hands moved. I sensed precise small changes; pressure, movement. I pressed sideways on the first, larger pick, and the whole lock seemed to quiver. Once more, and a click, and the cabinet’s whole deep drawer shuddered out into my chest.

A long row of folders, a thousand sheets of paper.

I worked quickly, searching for the twelve files among reams of typed pages, acetate, mimeograph. There were patents, memos, lists of addresses and employees. There were plans for bridges, the schematics of turbines. Each folder seemed to be marked with a different seal, as if these were the archives of nobles. I wondered who had typed or scrawled in each dossier’s code. 1223-BO-1A10E. Was this the riddle of a spy, a bureaucrat, or an engineer? And what was I, now, rifling through a foreign ministry’s documents? Had I relinquished something, or gained it?

Four of the files on my list were within the first cabinet. They were slender manila folders, unexceptional. They now lay in a stack beside my loaded gun.

I walked to a second cabinet. Again I inserted my tools into a tiny lock. I listened with my fingers, such a sensitive burglar. I could not help but look back over my shoulder. Every second second I seemed to be looking back over my shoulder. Staring at the closed door, the almost imperceptible line of hallway light. Waiting for shadows or footsteps or the silhouette of an enemy, framed at the doorjamb. The second cabinet opened. Again, a drawer filled with papers. 2988-TY-0H76C, 5297-TY-1T43P, 8196-TY-3U42I, all these untold tales, and finally 3102-TY-1O49B, one of my needles in the haystack. 3102-TY-1O49B was an envelope, not a folder. There was no one to see me; I looked inside. A sheaf of postage stamps. Just postage stamps. I stared at these orange stamps, 3102-TY-1O49B, wondering their secret, wondering whether they tainted or elevated the letters on which they were affixed.