Last Call — Wednesday, March 6, 1991, 5:46 PM

South Pilsen / Ashland Avenue / Cermak Road / Blue Island Avenue / Halsted Street / Kaspar & Sons haven

Chicago, Illinois

The alley behind Kaspar & Sons held two smells that never fully separated. Freezer exhaust, which was just cold pushed outward into colder air. And under it the other one, sweet and chemical, soaked into the brick from forty years of a trade the building had been built to serve. Darius had stopped noticing it in February. He noticed it tonight because he was hungry, and hunger sharpened the inventory.

Frost came off the Cutlass windshield in dry sheets, curling and breaking like paint. No water in it. Twenty-six degrees by dawn and the whole city had gone brittle.

Seven. Thirteen minus seven was six. Six units of something that used to be a person, and no way to move a unit into the column where it belonged except to go out and find it.

He went south on Ashland.

The checkpoint at 18th announced itself two blocks early — light on the underside of the viaduct, the specific blue-and-white pulse that made every parked car look abandoned. Two squads angled across the northbound lane. A tactical van idling with its side door open, a man sitting in the doorway with his boots on the bumper. Somebody had shot somebody over the weekend and then somebody had shot back, and the department’s answer was to put a hundred more uniforms on the street and let the neighborhood hold still under them.

Darius turned onto Loomis before the light caught him. Helicopter south of 26th, working the Stevenson viaduct with a searchlight, patient about it, going over the same hundred yards twice.

The first one was on Cermak east of Racine. A man in a puffy jacket, mid-twenties, walking fast with his head down and a plastic takeout bag swinging at his knee. Darius knew the restaurant on the bag. It had closed in September. So the bag was reused, which meant the man was carrying something that wasn’t food and wanted it to look like food, at three in the morning, in a corridor full of police.

Darius slowed to twenty. Read the walk, the shoulders, the set of the jaw under the hood.

Angry. Clean anger, the kind that came off a person in a straight line and went back to whatever had caused it. Nothing hollow underneath it. Nobody had a hook in this man. He owed somebody money, probably, the way everybody did, and he would pay it or not pay it and either way it was the size of a problem a man could carry.

The mouth in Darius made its determination without consulting him. It was the most reliable thing about him and he had long since stopped resenting it.

The man turned south on Racine and went behind chain-link and was gone.

Blue Island south of 21st. A ComEd truck under a streetlight that had gone dead, which was presumably why the truck was there. Orange cones in a line. One man in the bucket doing something to the head of the pole, another on the ground holding a flashlight up at him with his arm locked out straight. The ground man was big. Insulated coveralls, work boots, union patch on the shoulder. A thermos on the bumper with the cup off. He stamped his feet in place between beats of holding the light.

Darius read him from forty feet out.

Overtime. Double time, probably, at this hour, in this cold, and there was a pension at the end of it and a contract that said what he was owed and when. Cold and wanting to go home. Nothing rotting. Every problem this man had could be solved by money and he had money.

Darius drove past at twenty-five with his eyes forward.

Two misses. Two hours.

The restriction isn’t a leash. It’s a filter. You built your mouth to taste debt, and you did it on purpose, back when being selective felt like being superior. Everything else is cardboard.

The helicopter came over Blue Island low enough to put a vibration in the Cutlass’s roof panel. The searchlight swept across the hood, white and total, and moved on. Darius adjusted the mirror. The Beast came up through his chest and pressed against the underside of his ribs, a slow shouldering, a thing turning over in a stall.

They’re out looking for someone who did something wrong. You haven’t done anything yet. That’s the problem.

Halsted south of Cermak. A warehouse loading dock with one caged bulb over it, and under the bulb a man in a folding chair with a paperback.

Darius parked a half block back and watched him for four minutes.

Mid-thirties. Security company patch on a jacket rated for maybe forty-five degrees. He had his collar up and his hands inside the sleeves and he was turning pages with his knuckles. High-and-tight growing out on the sides. The way he sat in the folding chair — back off the backrest, both feet flat — was a way men sat when somebody had spent months teaching them to sit that way and then stopped checking. The book was Clancy. Submarines, or missiles, or a good American in a bad room somewhere doing the necessary thing.

Served in the eighties. Panama maybe. Or four years of garrison somewhere in Germany waiting on a war that ended without him and then a discharge and a handshake and a country that had already spent his part of the parade.

Five-fifty an hour to sit outside a building full of nothing anybody wanted.

Darius went through him line by line. VA sitting on a claim, probably. Underpaid, definitely. A card or two past due.

And then he hit the bottom of it and the bottom held.

The man was managing. Paying it down, month over month, a little behind and not drowning, the kind of arithmetic that got done at a kitchen table with the radio on and came out even by eleven dollars. There was nothing in him that had already been sold. Nothing that owned him.

He was just cold.

Darius sat with both hands on the wheel and his foot off the brake and did not move for a while.

Three. Three wrong.

Go home. Wake up thinner. Or stop pretending you have a choice about what you eat.

He put the car in gear.

Out past the rail yards the sky east of the lake had not gone grey yet, but it had lost the particular depth it held at two in the morning, the way a room changes before anyone turns on a light. The checkpoint at 18th was still running. Frost was reforming on the windshield by the time he pulled into the alley, spreading in from the corners in the same dry sheets.

The ground floor of Kaspar & Sons was colder inside than out of the wind.

The management company had cut the furnace at midnight. Thirty-day notice taped to the front door in a plastic sleeve since the first of the month — the sleeve was a nice touch, Darius thought, somebody at a desk in Oak Brook making sure the rain wouldn’t ruin the eviction. The building answered by dropping into the low forties and staying there. Industrial cleaner over old wood over the sweetness in the brick. Breath fogged. All three of them were dead and all three of them were still breathing out of habit, and now you could see it.

Tomás’s light was on in the back office. Sable was upstairs, pacing — Darius tracked her by the two boards near the front window that gave under her every fourth pass.

He went up.

She was at the window with her jacket off, the holster dark across the back of her blouse, looking down at Halsted through the gap in the shade. She’d been back for an hour and hadn’t sat down.

“You drove,” she said. “Both ways. You didn’t have to.”

Tomás came to the office threshold downstairs and stopped there, and then he was at the top of the stairs instead, backlit from the office light, a folded chantry report in one hand. He didn’t come into the room.

“It’s three in the morning,” he said. “Sable’s car was gone for nine hours and came back with you driving it. Nicolai will ask me where I was tonight, and Thursday I have to give him an answer. I’d prefer the answer be something we decided together rather than something I reconstruct.”

He’s not asking what happened. He’s asking what you’re going to make him say. He’s letting you hear that he knows the difference.

Darius took the middle of the room. He had spent the drive assembling this and it came out in the shape he’d built.

“Allicia’s out of Gary. Sable pulled her tonight. She’s somewhere safe, off Modius’s board. That’s what you tell Nicolai if he asks — an asset was relocated. You don’t have the location because you don’t need it.”

“Relocated by whom, to where.”

“That’s the part you don’t carry.” Darius kept his hands at his sides. “Not because we don’t trust you. Because what you carry, the Pyramid carries. You said it yourself. Thursday you give Nicolai an answer. So we give you an answer you can give him that doesn’t cost anyone their head.”

Sable turned from the window. She was past the point where she bothered with the long way around a sentence.

“She spoke,” Sable said. “First time in fifty-two years. She said I know. That’s what I drove four hours for.”

Tomás unfolded the report. Looked at it without reading it, the way a man checks a watch he has already checked, and folded it again along the same crease.

“You’re compartmenting me inside my own coterie,” he said. “I’ll note that the pact we signed in January assumed three people who could tell each other everything. We are no longer those three people.”

The board under Sable gave as she shifted her weight.

“I’ll give Nicolai ‘asset relocated, source protected.’ For now. But understand that I know the shape of what you’re not saying, even if I don’t know the contents.”

He took the deal and told you the deal has a clock on it. That’s the most honest thing anyone’s said tonight.

Darius said nothing, which was the only remaining move that didn’t cost anything, and Tomás accepted it as the answer it was and went back down the stairs. The office light cut out. The building went dark except for the sodium glow that got past the shade and laid a long orange bar across the floorboards.

The thing Darius did not say, had not said, would not say: what the Book was, what Mortius had put into English, what Carna intended to do with a method that could cut a fifty-two-year bond in half. It was not a secret about Allicia. It was a secret about how she could be freed, and the moment it reached Vienna it stopped being a method and became two death warrants with names already filled in.

So he kept it. The way he kept everything. In a column, by itself, where it could not be audited against anything else.

Sable went back to the window.

Three of them in a cold funeral home with maybe an hour of dark left. Only one of them had fed. The Neally clock had started yesterday and had twenty-nine days on it, and the furnace was off, and somewhere on Halsted a man in a folding chair was reading about submarines under a caged bulb, paying down eleven dollars a month, alive.