The Intuitionist (27 page)

She trips through the magazine’s masthead, which is corporealized now as a series of black nameplates on the reporters’ desks. She recognizes some of the names from articles. They are the chroniclers of her mission: the bards compose their tales here, on these typewriters, versifying the inspector’s glum adventures into darkened shaft. She searches for Ben Urich’s name on the
desks—she remembers Mr. Reed identifying Urich as the author of the squashed article. She has never liked his articles, which seem unduly obsessed with the dingier aspects of her enterprise, fixate on the backroom deals and betrayals she has done her best to stay out of during her Department tenure. (And here she is on tiptoe now, a center stage in that intrigue.) If his desk does not contain Fulton’s notes, she will move on to the editors’ offices. Travel up the masthead to those tiny specks at the top. The ones who know.

There. His desk is clean and organized, a standout from his fellow scribes’ tabletop anarchy. Lila Mae digs into her purse (another neglected artifact from her closet dusted off tonight) and finds the miniature camera. Cups it in her hand as if it were a beautiful black frog she discovered in a creek. Lila Mae bought the camera this morning with sixty dollars she discovered in the breast pocket of her Friday suit. She’d forgotten about the miscalculated bribe—so much since then—but was glad she got to put it to good use. And her hand is on the first drawer when Ben Urich says, “You must be Lila Mae Watson.” Which, needless to say, disturbs her plan.

* * *

Big Billy Porter laughs and raises a mug to his comrade’s escapade. “You think that’s gross, Ned my good man, let me tell you about the first time I ever saw the bastards. My first month out—this is Before the Code, I’ll have you know, and the Department didn’t even have the motor pool yet. We had to take the bus or the subway—they send us out in the morning with a pocket full of change and three index cards with our cases on them. Had to find our own way around, mates, and it was a damned mess. One thing after the other. So it’s my first month out, right, and I have to inspect the old Jenkins Textile Factory downtown. I know it has to
be one of those early Otis machines, you hear me, from how old the building is, but I don’t know how old. Jenkins, Jenkins Junior, I don’t know who the guy is, but he greets me on the loading dock. Like he’s been waiting for me a long time, like I don’t have anything better to do than check out that ancient rig he’s got up there, right? You know the type, boys. So he says to me, ‘We’re having a little problem with the freight elevator,’ timid like a schoolteacher. Like I don’t know that. Anyway, he drags me inside and we go up to the machine room and I’m telling you boys, you have never seen anything like this. For one thing there were no windows and you knew no one had been inside there for years. Mouse droppings all on the floor, spiderwebs hanging from the ceiling. And the dust! I thought I was going to choke to death. Anyway, I see the cables coming out of this big wood contraption, looks like a big crate. But no motor. So I ask the little guy what the hell that is and he’s talking through his handkerchief ’cause of the dust and he tells me his dad didn’t like the sound the motor made, so he had them cover it up so it wouldn’t make as much noise. And I’m thinking to myself, it was just a few years ago that United made all that money for coming up with the same innovation and here the damned owner of a rag factory has done it long before. You get patents for something like that and here it is locked up in this dump downtown. I don’t tell him that, but that’s what I’m thinking. So I tell him I’m sorry about his dad’s delicate sensibilities and all that but I’m gonna have to take a look inside it. Junior hands me an iron pipe that’s laying in the dust and I start having at the box. I’m straining and I’m trying to find a purchase point and then suddenly it gives—and they all come streaming out it, thousands of the little black bastards. And I know what you’re thinking—oh, yeah, Billy, what are you whining about, we’ve all hit a roach bomb before. But you have never seen anything like this, fellows. Thousands and thousands of them, they’re running up the bar to my hands, they’re running across the
floor like water out a fountain. I jump back and I look down and they’re all up my pants and I can feel them underneath my clothes, on my skin. The other guy is screaming—he backed up against a crate and slipped, and they were all over him. Screaming like the devil. Well, I was screaming too, if you want to know the truth. They must have been breeding in there for decades, eating that old Otis wiring and having just a high old cockroach time. We didn’t know they liked to eat elevators back then—there were stories, of course, but the Department study was still years away. I almost shit my pants. I ran out that room, shut the door behind me and got the hell out of there. Hours later I still had roaches crawling out of my pockets. I don’t know what happened to Junior. Maybe the little black bastards ate him.”

* * *

She tugs the metal beads dangling from the light shade. He sits on the edge of the desk, ass a paperweight. The right sleeve of his powder-blue seersucker is rolled up in an unruly bunch to the elbow, where his arm transforms into an odd white appendage that ends in tiny pink fingertips. A stained cast. His face is slack and exhausted, dusted with tiny gray scrub-hairs. She says, “You know who I am.”

“I figured you would come sooner or later,” he tells her. “Once I got the other parts of his journal. You haven’t been to the office so you must be up to something. Your file says you’re one sharp cookie—I figured you’d be coming around. Do the same thing I would do in your position.”

Even with his injury, Ben Urich attempts a pose of metropolitan bachelorhood. His left index finger hooks into the cuff of his pants, easy baby, just passing the time. “You look confused,” he says. “I have been too, over the last few days, to be perfectly honest. Ever since I finished the article on the black box.”

“Which never came out.” She replaces the camera in her purse and zips it shut.

“My editor was convinced that we shouldn’t run it.” He raises the white club that is his right hand. “And I was soon persuaded that his decision was right. Or, attempts were made to persuade me.”

“Johnny Shush,” she offers.

“How much of his journals have you seen?”

“None yet. I was just about to take my first look.”

“Yeah, like I said, I figured you’d be around soon. You or someone else. They’re in the bottom drawer. Beneath last year’s pinups.”

The drawer slides and shudders. Bangs loud in the deserted newsroom. Lila Mae lifts two calendar pages featuring two famous picture-show starlets in erotic repose, finds the goods beneath them, split in shadow. “You can take them out,” Ben Urich tells her at her hesitation. She recognizes the cramped handwriting, the internecine, slashing script. She has studied it under the gaze of the Institute librarian, in locked rooms—she even, in the early, giddy days of her conversion, practiced Fulton’s handwriting for hours. Knows the ink. For one entire semester Lila Mae wrote her class notes in that hand, believing it would bring her closer to him. As if the mechanics of delivering the idea to the physical world were half the process. She mastered his hand, its reticent parabolas and botched vowels. Here it is now, on the familiar notebook paper Fulton preferred. She tracked down the manufacturer once; they have a plant across the river where they still turn out the Fontaine line. The teeth along the inside edge complete the tableau: they have been torn out of his notebooks.

Says to herself, “It’s his.” She could be in the Institute stacks, she could be in her old room above the gymnasium, in her converted janitor’s closet. It is that real. She decodes that scratch, tumbles down its slopes and sudden cliffs, halfway down the page
past a series of glyphs she doesn’t recognize:
Anymore tests at this point would be redundant. It works, and all that is left is to deliver to the cities
. It works.

“Is it what you wanted?” Ben Urich drawls.

“It is it exactly.” She doesn’t lift her eyes from the pages. “Who sent them out?”

“If I knew that, we wouldn’t be talking. If you knew, you wouldn’t be here,” rubbing his good hand over the dirty cast, “so I guess I’ll have to scratch you off the list.”

She barely hears him. The cream-colored paper is in her hand. She could memorize it and transcribe it later. Place her recreations next to Natchez’s photographs and see where they lead. She’ll present her copy at the dinner table and slide it to him. Her present. Still looking down … 
it required principles—a way of thinking—I thought I had abandoned
. She repeats the phrase to herself, making it indelible. As cover she asks, “How did you know I was coming?”

“It was written, you might say. Like my fingers. I assume from the reports that you’ve been staying at Intuitionist House. That you’re working with Reed and Lever to make sure Chancre and his masters don’t get it first.…” He trails off. “Which means that the Intuitionists don’t have it yet.”

“I left the House.”
I have walked away from it, only to return and find that it has not changed. It works
.

“Didn’t like the food?”

“Didn’t like the conversation.”

“Then you’ve found a different partner. I thought for a minute that you might be Arbo’s way of telling me they’re still watching me.”

What he said: Chancre’s masters. Finally, after too long pondering the minutiae, she looks up from Fulton’s notes. “Arbo? What do they have to do with this?”

His eyebrows jumping. “I thought you were smart. A hundred-percent accuracy rate.” The highest in the Department, Lila Mae
adds to herself, not that anyone would ever mention that. “Until Fanny Briggs anyway. Who do you think really needs the black box?”

She stares at him, the pages in her small hand bending to the floor.

“I can see you’re genuinely taken aback,” Ben Urich says. He reaches into his pocket and withdraws a shiny dime. “Arbo and United—they’re the real players here. I see I’ve upset you. Why don’t you have a seat?” She sits down slowly in Ben Urich’s seat, where he muckrakes, where he exposes. Through the windows in the north wall, she sees the dark windows of the offices across the street. No one there.

“This is a real surprise,” Ben Urich says. “You’re the key, after all.” He flips the dime in the air, as is his habit, but he’s not used to his left hand yet. He misses the silver on its descent and it rolls away into the darkness.

“What are you trying to tell me, Urich. What the hell are you trying to tell me?”

She’s talking to his back. He’s on his knees trying to retrieve his dime. “Who else needs the black box more than United and Arbo,” he asks a ball of dust, “the biggest elevator manufacturing concerns in the country? The world. Arbo broke my hand to make me back off the story, for Pete’s sake.”

“Arbo. Arbo’s dwindling markets.”

“They’re in bad shape, that’s for sure. Overseas sales down forty-five percent, domestic thirty. Ever since their Jupiter line never took off and United came back swinging. Got it!” he says, returning to his desk. “Christ, you want some water or something?”

“Ever since United got Chancre to endorse their line,” Lila Mae considers. Her voice is faint, as distant as the quiet rotors in the machine room above her.

“Of course,” Ben Urich confirms. “Every major elevator market in the world looks to this city’s Department for guidance. This is
the most famous city in the world. The Big Skyscraper. I don’t have to tell you that the whole world, every contractor and two-bit real estate tycoon, comes here first. This city.”

Remembers Reed, that first day in Intuitionist House, telling her that Lever was out of town talking to the good people at Arbo, that’s why the candidate could not meet her. “Arbo,” she says, “is bankrolling their campaign.” Whoever owns the elevator owns the new cities.

“I should hope so. It’s not like the Intuitionists are rolling in dough. Those dues don’t add up to much after you deduct all those wine and cheese symposia. Shoot, you only have that House because crazy old Dipth-Watney was feeling generous to the underdog. Arbo owned the Department when Holt was Guild Chair, and it was United’s money that won the Chair for Chancre. You know that story about Holt and the chorus girl?—she was one of United’s Safety Girls. Did you think this was all about philosophy? Who’s the better man—Intuitionism or Empiricism? No one really gives a crap about that. Arbo and United are the guys who make the things. That’s what really matters. The whole world wants to get vertical, and they’re the guys that get them there. If you pay the fare.”

He’s missed the dime again. This time it bounces and jets off to the left of the desk. He crouches again, asks, “Who do you think was behind your accident last week? United. Chancre might have done the dirty work, but only at United’s direction. Those are Arbo elevators in the building. Then there was that incident at the Follies, when Chancre fell on his ass. Had to be Arbo dealing out payback for Fanny Briggs.”

“It wasn’t them.”

“Then who was it? The ghost of Elisha Graves Otis?”

He doesn’t know everything. “You said Arbo broke your fingers,” Lila Mae says. “Why would they try to stop your article from coming out? If they’re backing the Intuitionists—and Fulton’s box is most assuredly an Intuitionist creation—then why
wouldn’t they want the truth to come out? It doesn’t make sense. The Guild hears about it, they vote for Lever, and Arbo has their man.”

“They’ve won the hearts and minds?”

“They’ve won the hearts and minds, yes.”

Still looking on the floor. “You want to give me a hand here?”

She ignores him.

“Let me ask this, Miss Watson: who has the blueprint?”

“I don’t know.”

“If they don’t have it, they don’t control it. Suppose it’s not Intuitionism-based. Suppose, for the sake of argument, it’s Empirical. Or it’s Intuitionist but Chancre finds it first with his Shush and United muscle and keeps it under wraps. Destroys it. Where does that leave Arbo?

“I’ll tell you where,” he says, “with their peckers swinging in the wind. Pardon my French. My article announces to the community that the Intuitionist black box is coming and that it’ll be found soon. Build up the hopes of the inspector electorate, that bunch of bitter bastards, and then it doesn’t show up. They’ll show their displeasure on Tuesday, in the polling booths. Here it is,” he says, standing again. To the dime, as he returns to the light: “Trying to hide from me, little buddy?”