Sean Michaels - Us Conductors

The stack of stolen files got taller. I opened a third cabinet, a fourth. I heard footsteps from the corridor, and I froze — the footsteps moved across the doorway and away. I felt the ventilated air against my rib cage. I left my sweated thumbprints on a creamy carton folder. In this drawer there were thin leather satchels filled with documents. PERS 01, PERS 02, PERS 03. But no PERS 07, the object of my quest, the final file on my list. PERS 04 through PERS 06 were also missing. Had these dossiers been removed? Were they concealed in another cabinet? Again, I scanned the labels of the unopened cabinets. I heard footsteps from the corridor. I froze. The footsteps moved across the doorway and away. I opened a fifth cabinet, tricking the lock with my silver pins. PERS 07 did not hide there either. I opened a sixth cabinet, heard footsteps in the corridor, froze. I looked back over my shoulder and waited. Nothing, nothing. Nothing, and then, as if there were a ghost in the room, the steel drawer of one of the other cabinets slid closed. The sound had a terrifying finality, thundering and also neatly small, like the tick mark on a bureaucrat’s checklist, like the cocked hammer on a revolver. A fissure that slides across an airship’s engine.

I looked down. PERS 07 lay in the drawer before me. A notebook in white.

I was taking the notebook from its place when the door of room 818 blasted open. It was like the landfall of a cyclone. I jerked around, bumping the drawer with my hand, scraping my knuckle, hearing the mechanism’s violent clasp. My gaze was lifting to the doorway, across polished leather shoes but not to the face of the solemn orderly, the adversary I had imagined. Instead, square in the light, like the first figure of an illuminated manuscript, stood Danny Finch. His jacket was unbuttoned. He had blond hair and pale blue eyes and there were no binoculars at his neck. His chest was rising with inhaled breath and my chest rose with inhaled breath, and I did not smile at this man, I did not greet him; I looked at him as if he had already wronged me.

His right hand moved. My eyes darted to my grey gun, quiet on its table, and immediately Danny Finch had glimpsed it too, and he was in motion, lunging, arm outstretched, and I was moving with him toward the same centre of this windowless room. Only I was no longer moving for the gun. I was moving for Danny Finch. There was a table between us and I stepped around it — front-step, my weight on my back leg. I pulled forward with a kick, jing gerk , smashing his right knee. He buckled. My fist met his face, knuckles perpendicular to the floor, and I let my hand drop. I pivoted at the hips. I slammed my elbow into his shoulder, a lever at its fulcrum, and he fell sideways. He fell at once. His head clipped the corner of a cabinet and smacked the floor with a sound like a man clapping hands. One clap and there we were, two motionless figures. Danny Finch’s limbs were folded near two legs of the table. I was standing in follow-through: bent at the front knee, arms in jong sao , tensed and untensed. On the surface of the table, the perfect stack of files. A harmless metal gun. There was a tiny crack in Danny Finch’s forehead and a line of blood was now drawing across the tile. I could see part of his brain. I stepped across his body and closed the door. The cabinets were mostly sealed, organized, absolutely inert. Danny Finch was the only mess. I looked at where the edge of a steel shelf had grazed my knuckle. My hands were still. These movements had been efficient and exact, the culmination of study. For a short moment I felt like a kind of master. Then I suppressed the swell of vomit. I realized that I was still drunk. My stomach was swirling and my chest was heaving. I was hot at my temples and collar and wrists. I was a desperate coward. I picked up my jacket from the back of a chair. I picked up my briefcase from the floor, where no blood had touched it. I opened the clasps and put the gun, twelve dossiers, my jacket, inside. Danny Finch was dead at my feet. I had murdered him with my hands. I tried to recall what he had said to me, years ago, when we met. I tried to remember if there had been malice there, the capacity to kill.

I went out of the room, in shirtsleeves, with my briefcase, shutting Danny Finch’s body among the archives. The corridor’s flooring was like a long line of tundra. I turned one corner and another and in the aftershock of adrenaline I discovered that I was blazingly angry, filled with a fury for Danny Finch and a fury for the Karls and a fury for Pash and a fury for the man who called himself Lev. A roaring wrath, roiling at my heart. I passed the harmless janitor, leaning on a doorjamb, cajoling a secretary; I slipped back by stairs to the third; I thought: I was alone when I met him in that little room, nobody forced me .

I remembered the sound of the door blowing open. I remembered the way you had looked at me, Clara, the night before, outside the Savoy, in the barren moment when we parted.

Standing in the elevator, beside the operator with the birthmark on his chin, I said, “Main floor.”

He said, “Going down.”

I KNOW THE QUESTIONS you are asking. You are asking: Did I have to kill this man? You are asking: What did it feel like? You are asking: Did it destroy you? You are also asking the other questions: Did I make sure Danny Finch was dead? Were my fingerprints not everywhere? What of the security man in the lobby, with his accounting of entrances and exits?

Eventually I learned the answers to some of these questions. Others, I still do not know. When I got into the Karls’ grey sedan and we swung away from the Dolores Building, around the block, I did not tell them that I had killed Danny Finch. I opened the briefcase on the seat beside me and they saw the files, saw the gun, and I sat back in silence until we arrived at my home. After they let me out I went down the street to the corner, where a man in a long apron pulled chop suey from a bucket. I scooped the noodles from the plate into my mouth, gnashing, ravenous. When I returned to the house I looked in the mirror. My face was flecked with sauce and scallion, and my eyes were the same as ever.

For weeks, I waited for the police to come to take me away. I kept the front door locked. The brownstone on West 54th Street seemed suddenly rickety, vulnerable, easily invaded. They would smash in the door and thunder up the stairs, and I would be rising from my wires and condensers as they descended upon me, nightsticks knowing. Instead, students rang the doorbell; friends snuck in the back. I told them I was afraid of burglars. They rolled their eyes. I received a phone call from a journalist at the Times , asking for a quote regarding the composer Edgard Varèse, an acquaintance. “He’s very pleasant,” I murmured. “Very, very pleasant.” I put down the receiver and wondered whether this had been a test, a sting, the call from a team of G-men to determine if I was at home. I went to the window. The street was filled with girls in skirts and dogs on leashes and pigeons like flying oil spots.

Months passed. Inconceivably, whole months passed. Whenever it happened that Danny Finch’s body was discovered, his broken skull, there was no story in the paper. No policemen came for me, no detectives took my fingerprints. If there were agents who suspected me, spies and spymasters, these spooks were biding their time, waging a larger war. They must have known, in the shadowlands, that Lev Termen was not the Soviets’ only soldier.

I did not feel as if I was a person. If you tore off my hands, ripped off my head, you would find asbestos, chalk dust, tufts of rags. All my blood had been drained away. It lay in an undisturbed pool outside the Savoy. I laughed with my friends and bent over my tools, felt the seasons’ skim over New York City, and I was a scientist, an engineer, a man attending meetings, I was the outer part of myself and not the inner. They repealed Prohibition and I sipped a solitary glass of cherry brandy.