Geoff Nicholson - The City Under the Skin

He dreaded these visits. Ray was loud, vulgar, wealthy, all too keen to make sure Zak knew it. His conversation was full of expensive restaurants he’d been to, new cars he’d bought, and short, madly exotic weekends he’d been on that cost more than Zak earned in a year. And although Zak didn’t doubt that Ray was telling the truth when he said that Utopiates was one of his least important enterprises, did he have to say it quite so often?

Ray’s business card announced that he was a property developer, and maybe there was always something murky about that business. You didn’t hear of real estate empires built by lovable nice guys who got where they were by being compassionate and unassuming. Maybe you had to play rough; still, Zak thought Ray reveled in it a little too much. There was often gloating talk of evictions and repossessions, and when a local journalist described Ray as a “slumlord,” he reacted as though it was the greatest compliment he’d ever been paid.

Ray also liked to insinuate that somewhere farther offstage he had an even darker life. Details were always kept sketchy, but he liked to drop hints about money laundering, political bribery, connections to some very dangerous elements. Zak had no idea whether any of this was actually true.

Now, scarcely inside the door, Ray began a monologue about a sushi restaurant he’d been to the previous night, and he was some way into a detailed description of fatty toro, sea urchin, and monkfish liver (“so fucking pricey, so fucking worth it”) before he noticed Zak’s black eye.

“What happened to you?” Ray asked.

It was a question vague enough to allow Zak to answer in any way he saw fit.

“I walked into a door,” he said, not expecting to be believed.

“A door with knuckles,” said Ray. “That’ll happen. Anything I need to know about?”

Zak still didn’t know if it was really any of Ray’s business, but since the whole drama had unfolded in and around the store, it didn’t seem unreasonable to mention it.

“Maybe,” said Zak. “Do you know a guy who drives an old blue Cadillac? Wears a beat-up leather jacket. Isn’t afraid to hit women.”

“That’s not a lot to go on,” said Ray.

“In that case, do you know a woman with a map tattooed across her back?”

Ray laughed, arched his eyebrows high and wide.

“Sounds like something we could sell. But no, afraid not.”

“Then you know even less than I do, Ray. And it’s probably best to keep it that way.”

Ray looked at Zak with amused interest. “You know, I always hoped you might have a secret life. Well done. But seriously, Zak? Want me to get you a Taser, a sawed-off shotgun?”

“No,” said Zak.

“If you want me to deal with this, I can. I don’t like people hassling my employees. I know people, right?”

“I think that might make things worse.”

Ray shrugged: it was a point of view, though not one he necessarily shared.

“You’re going to rely on your intelligence and charm, are you?” he said.

“It’s served me well enough so far,” said Zak, though this wasn’t exactly true.

“Okay, we’ll leave it there. Now let me show you the latest treasure you’re going to sell for me.”

He handed Zak a cylindrical map case, sometimes called a kit case: a leather-wrapped tube finished with straps and brass buckles, four inches in diameter, perhaps two feet long.

“Tell me what you think of this,” said Ray.

Zak unbuckled the case, extracted a scrolled map from the felt-lined interior, and opened it out across the width of his desk. The map was complex, hand-drawn in multiple colored inks and pencils, of a city he didn’t recognize: no labels or street names, no unmistakably defining features. It didn’t look especially well done, obviously not the work of a professional mapmaker. In fact, there was something very naïve, perhaps primitive about it; still, it was appealingly detailed and obsessive, and dotted all over: not at random, though without any obvious pattern, were squares, circles, stars, triangles, diamonds, in various colors and sizes.

“So what do you think?” asked Ray.

“I don’t know what to think,” said Zak.

“You ever hear of Jack Torry?”

“No.”

“I’m not surprised. He wasn’t one of your A-list psychos. He never even killed anybody, though he came close. Basically he was ‘just’ a rapist, but prolific, a volume dealer, at least a hundred. And he was clever. There was no pattern to give him away, no standard operating procedure. And apart from being a rapist, he was clean, he wasn’t in any of the files.

“Maybe the cops would have caught him eventually, but in the end they didn’t need to. He turned himself in. Confessed to everything. Maybe he had a conscience, couldn’t live with himself. That’s the charitable explanation. But maybe he wanted everybody to know what a big shot he was.

“Of course he didn’t know the names of most of his victims, but he knew where and he knew when, so he drew the cops a map — that’s what you’re looking at, Zak.”

“What do all the symbols mean?” Zak asked.

“That’s the big mystery. He didn’t provide a key. Age, race, hair color, how many times? Your guess is as good as anybody else’s. Maybe you can sit there and stare at it and you’ll be the man to crack the code.”

“I don’t think so,” said Zak.

“Whatever. Still, quite an item, isn’t it?”

“Kind of disgusting,” said Zak.

“Or titillating, depending on your point of view.”

“How did you get this?” Zak asked.

“You wouldn’t want to know.”

“No. And I don’t really want to be in the business of selling it, either.”

“But you will, Zak, because that’s your job. Not much of a job, I know, but it’s all you’ve got.”

Zak wondered if he might “lose” the map somehow, destroy it and claim it was taken by some brilliantly clever and compulsive map thief: there were plenty of those around, preying on libraries and archives as well as stores. But no, he was too conscientious for that as well, and Ray McKinley knew it.

“You think you can find a customer for it?” Ray asked.

“Maybe,” said Zak wearily. “There’s always Wrobleski.”

“No, I don’t think it’s his kind of thing.”

Zak thought it was precisely Wrobleski’s kind of thing, but he didn’t argue.

“I’m not very happy with our Mr. Wrobleski right now,” Ray said, by way of unexpected explanation. “I want you to try one or two others first. Call ’em up. Give ’em some patter. See if you can get a couple of ’em interested, play ’em off against each other, drive up the price.”

“Yes, Ray, I know how this works.”

“Of course you do, Zak. And by the way, don’t be surprised if you hear a bit of a ruckus down here in the next night or two. I’m having one of my soirees.”

Zak knew all too well what he was talking about. A couple of weeks after Ray took possession of Utopiates, Zak was woken in the middle of the night by a racket going on in the store below. There were voices and laughter and the sound of breaking glass. Zak immediately thought burglary, but what kind of burglars made that much noise?

He got out of bed, got dressed. The apartment didn’t connect directly with the store — access to Zak’s living quarters was through a separate rear entrance — so he had to go outside, walk around to the front of the building, and peer in through the store window. He wasn’t sure if he was relieved or not to find Ray partying in there: he’d only met him once or twice at that point. Ray was with a handful of other guys and a couple of women, and it seemed they were playing strip poker. Zak didn’t think grown-ups ever really did that. Ray saw Zak’s face staring in at him, got up from his chair, and lurched toward the window, beckoning for him to come in. Ray was shirtless and Zak saw he had a couple of nipple rings: hardly a shocker, but something he’d have preferred not to know about his new boss. Zak suspected that Ray was glad enough when he declined to join them. Zak was in no position to complain about these nocturnal gatherings, but given the number of properties Ray McKinley owned, it was hard to believe that this dingy little map shop was the best venue he could find for them.