Colson Whitehead - The Intuitionist

“You can leave anytime you want,” Arbergast grants, rubbing his lips with his sleeve. “But if you want to help your friend, you might think about helping me out with some things that are bothering me.” He waves his sandwich nowhither. “Want to have a seat?”

A few yards away, down the hall: forgiving porcelain. Chuck pulls a chair from the wall and sets it opposite Arbergast. The things he does for friendship.

Arbergast looks over his notes. “Last Friday,” he begins, “there’s an accident at the Fanny Briggs building. Eighteen-deep elevator stack. State of the art. City’s pumped millions into the building, it’s the Mayor’s big baby. This Lila Mae Watson of yours inspects it, gives it a clean bill of health. Are you with me?”

“You haven’t told me anything new yet.”

“It’s lip like that gives you guys your reputation. So why give the assignment to Watson? She’s got a clean record. Impeccable, in fact. But it’s a pretty plum, Fanny Briggs. Something Chancre would probably give to one of his toadies for good service. Why her, is what I’m asking.”

“Like you said, she does good work,” Chuck says, crossing his legs. “She deserved it.”

“Deserves got nothing to do with it,” Arbergast grunts. “One of the stack crashes, coincidentally just as the Mayor is about to take a test drive. That makes it a high-profile mess-up. If you wanted someone to take a fall, you couldn’a planned it better.”

“Perhaps,” Chuck concedes. This IAB guy is starting to seem more interesting than he did a few minutes ago. He notices shallow depressions around the man’s temples where forceps pulled him from his mother’s legs.

“Take the elevator itself,” Arbergast continues. “Top of the line, like I said. Forensics hasn’t turned in a report on what they scraped off the bottom of the well, but I can tell you a thing or two. The cable snapped. That’s new Arbo alloy cable. You could lug a freighter with that stuff, but it comes in two somehow. The cab itself had those new Arbo antilocks on them. I was there when Arbo performed the final trials on those babies, and they’re sweet. Officially rated for two-five meters per second, but they can take twice that. They didn’t fire. That’s just for starters. This elevator went into total freefall, which hasn’t happened in five years, and that was in the Ukraine and who knows what kind of backward standards they got there. They probably got their cabs hooked up to mules out there, for all I know. It hasn’t happened in this country since before you were born.”

“So you’re obviously thinking sabotage, then.”

“You said it.” Arbergast pops the last nub of his sandwich into his mouth. “Somebody was monkeying around in there. And this Watson is the last person we know for sure who came into contact with them.”

“There’s a problem with your thinking, Inspector,” Chuck says. He presses down absently on his crotch: let’s wrap this up. “Why would Lila Mae — Inspector Watson — give the stack a clean bill if she was going to sabotage it?”

“I don’t know. Throw us off. Give herself an alibi.”

“That just doesn’t hold water, I’m afraid.” Hold water. “You’re going to have to find someone else to pin this on.”

“What you have to understand, son, is that I’m going to pin this on whoever fits.” Arbergast crosses his arms across his newly replenished belly. “That’s my prerogative as a member of Internal Affairs. I got no one else. Tell me this, tread jockey: where is she?”

“I don’t know,” Chuck answers.

“She should have checked in after her shift. Motor Pool says she returned her vehicle after her shift on Friday but didn’t punch out.”

“That’s not so rare. I myself don’t always punch out. Sometimes you’re just tired.”

Arbergast nods quickly. “Assuming she didn’t hear about the accident on the radio, of course. But why not come in the next day? Surely she would have heard about it by the next afternoon. It was in all the papers.”

“She’s not required to. Her next shift is tomorrow, and that, according to regulations, is when she has to come in.”

“She’s not even curious?” Smiling now. “Just a little? It’s her career.”

“You have to understand something about Lila Mae. She’s different than you and me.”

“She’s colored.”

“That’s not what I’m referring to, Inspector. With how she sees things. It’s not easy for her to work here. Just look at the paper, how Chancre named her to the press. If it was one of his boys, he never would have told those jackals who’d inspected Fanny Briggs.”

“He seized an opportunity for his campaign,” Arbergast dismisses. He lets out a burp so lively it is almost visual. “That’s politics. You know that. I’m going to tell you something. I don’t care for Chancre much. He’s ruthless. He’s a bully. And I don’t care much for the Intuitionists and their hocus-pocus. I care about what happened at Fanny Briggs last Friday at approximately 3:35 P.M. I don’t care if the Mayor was showing around the King of Siam. I just want to know what happened to that elevator. Somebody fixed it good. And what I know now is that Lila Mae was the last one up there. She must know something. More than what she put in her report. Personally, I don’t like Watson as the perp here, but she’s all I got and I’m going to go with what I got. So why don’t you do your friend a favor and have her talk to me as soon as she punches in tomorrow. Or she’s going to be in more trouble than she already is.” Arbergast stands up, last month’s issue of Lift magazine in his mitt. “Now I got to check out the head. You’ve kept me here long enough.”

Arbergast takes his time in the bathroom, but after Chuck has finally appeased his bladder (for now), he puts a call through to Lila Mae’s building. He has never seen Lila Mae’s building, but he can picture the phone ringing on and on in the empty hallway.

* * *

She hears keen laughter in the hall outside her room, gut chortle she has heard many times before in the office. She hears the steel door scrape open behind her. Chancre says to the men outside the door, “A Chinaman and nun, oh that’s rich, my boys, that’s rich,” and he’s inside the room. (Cell, she prefers.)

Enter Chancre in his Sunday suit, a white number favored by Southern gentlemen. He sits in the seat opposite Lila Mae, swabs his greasy neck with a blue polka-dot handkerchief. “Not many windows in here, huh?” he says, looking with distaste at the dingy room. There is no maître d’, cigarette girls with incandescent smiles and fishnet stockings.

She says nothing.

“Heard you had yourself a little visit to that colored lady of Fulton’s today,” Chancre says. He inspects the damp lines of grit he’s just rubbed into his hankie. “Your old stomping grounds, right? I still go back to old Bridgehook whenever I can. Chairman of my thirty-fifth reunion. Can you beat that?”

There is not much to hear from the other side of the table.

“That’s right, you don’t talk much. I’ve heard that you don’t like to talk much. It’s all right. Must be hard for you in the Department. They can be a rough bunch of guys sometimes — I should know, because I made them that way.” His wet lips part: faintly yellow teeth. “But you’ve distinguished yourself. Don’t think I haven’t noticed your good work. Bobby’s always given you high evaluations. Are you happy there, working for the Department, Miss Watson?”

“I like my job,” Lila Mae responds. Her voice is thin. He is fat and pink. On the United Elevator Co. advertisements, they airbrush away the pocks in his cheeks, the red slivers in his nose. In person he is too flesh, a handful of raw meat. Dogs have been known to follow him, optimistic.