The Veil War

Three weeks earlier

I walked up to a nondescript building in downtown Pittsburgh. I was still buzzing from three weeks in the Aegean Sea, burning through a platinum-hued credit card and Australian coeds. I checked the signboard on the wall in the lobby, but between shady-sounding accountants and shady-sounding law firms there was nothing that seemed remotely like anything that Tactical Beardman and the Chad would ever be caught dead in.

I walked up to the reception desk. I pulled the tattered business card from my pocket. “Excuse me, ma’am. I was told to meet someone here,” I said, and handed her the card.

The woman had been through the wars. Her makeup looked like it had applied by an apprentice mason’s trowel. Her scalp glistened through her thinning purple hair. She reached and took the card and squinted through her bifocals.

“One minute, please,” she said in sing-song tone.

She picked up the phone and dialed three digits. “A man to see you,” she said.

She listened for a moment. She looked up at me with cataract-hazed eyes. Her voice reached out through bourbon-scarred vocal chords, “Fourth floor. Room 415.”

“Uh, thank you.”

She returned to her Seventeen magazine and I ceased to exist to her.

I crossed the cracked marble floor to the bank of elevators at the back of the lobby. Four floors up, I stepped onto tattered carpet. The wallpaper screamed high fashion. In 1947. To the right, two doors showed 411 and 413. On the left, a single door had a bronze 415. I consulted my internal compass. The two doors to the right would face to the front of the building. They’d be small offices, only a couple dozen feet between where I stood in the fourth floor lobby back to the street.

I turned, braced myself, and walked to the right. A small plaque on the door read, “Greater Pennsylvania Association for Medieval Literary Scholarship.”

You’ve got to be fucking kidding me, I thought.

I knocked on the door. Before I finished rapping on the door, it opened silently inward. A bent and spindly old man pulled the door away from my hand.

“We’ve been expecting you.” His voice sounded like death itself. He let go of the door knob and gestured to the interior. “Do come in, Sergeant.”

Right. I stepped across the threshold. Behind the thick wooden door was an expanse of rich, red carpet dotted with Persian rugs. Mahogany bookcases lined the walls, their glass doors obscuring the leather-bound books within. A sepia-toned globe rested in a polished silver and teak stand. The window treatments were stunning.

I heard the door click closed behind me. The butler or whatever-the-fuck shuffled around in front of me. “Please have a seat, sergeant.” He indicated a comfy-looking leather arm chair, and waved me into it. I couldn’t resist his Jedi mind powers. I sat, and laid my bag of fun next to the chair.

He sketched a spare and no doubt well-calibrated bow. “Someone will be with you presently,” he said. He looked at me for a moment. I feared he was going to drop some sort of Morgan Freeman magic negro wisdom on me, but he just nodded and crossed to the single door at the back of the room and left.

The room was a Hollywood set-dresser’s dream of a London gentlemen’s club. The globe, the bookshelves. The paneling that looked a foot thick if was an inch and waxed for what to a shine that must of have been centuries in the making. Just everything in the room screamed wealth and privilege held for time out of mind. Which made it totally fucking incongruous seeing as it was in Pittsburgh.

I waited. Then I waited some more. I pictured in my mind Anna and Marcy from Melbourne, and their remarkably wide-ranging skill sets. I remembered Leutnant Bohm and his razor sharp fangs, with my own Private Idaho’s blood running down his neck.

I waited some more. Five minutes or an hour later, the door opened. The doorman walked in and sketched another measured bow in my direction. “Sergeant? If you would please follow me?”

I stood and collected my bag. We trudged through several rooms of gold-foil portrait frames, deeply carved woodwork and Persian rugs that probably took wizened peasants a hundred years each to make. We fetched up in an office occupied by a weaselly little fuck with pince-nez glasses and a severely receding hairline. I don’t know suits, but I’m guessing his tailor wasn’t working out of a mall in Altoona or a sweatshop in Indonesia.

The doorman faded out the door. The platonic form of accountants stared me down like I was a recalcitrant column of figures.

“Please, Sergeant, have a seat,” he said finally. Feeling saucy, I plopped down on the overstuffed leather chair. Air hissed faintly from the seams as it took my weight.

Accountant man straightened a stack of papers on his desk. There was no computer. There was no phone.

“I am Mr. Smithers.”

A laugh snuck through my defenses. “Are you fucking serious?”

A pale and faded simulacrum of a smile took shape on his lips for a moment. And… it’s gone, I thought.

“I am Mr. Smithers,” he repeated. “Despite all indications to the contrary, you impressed certain of our… well-respected field operatives. You happened upon information that we have strived to keep… out of common knowledge.”

The pauses in his speech were already starting to piss me off.

“As you may have surmised… we are an organization dedicated to protecting the world from… threats of a uncouth and unusual nature.”

“Yeah, fascist dinosaurs and tanks the size of battleships. I grok it.”

He pursed his lips. “Yes. Even here, we prefer to be more discreet.” He obviously preferred not to include me on that ‘we.’

“I have been informed that there is a personnel need. Our mutual acquaintences further indicated that you might be suitable to fill this need.”

“Right, man. Thanks to our ‘mutual acquaintences’ I got shit-canned from the Army. So, yeah, I’m sort of available right now. In the market. If you’re selling dinosaur safaris, I’m buying.”

He pursed his lips again. He shifted his eyes and regarded the world map on the wall to my right. It had pins in it, randomly spread over the lands pictured there in four faded pastels.

“Very well, Sergeant. There is some… paperwork… you will need to fill out and sign.”

“You offer dental with this gig?”

He pursed his lips like there was a black hole hiding at the back of his throat.

“Yes. We have a dental plan.”

“Where do I sign?”

I smelled something sharp and rancid. The kind of smell you’d expect to find in the folds of a fat, meth-addicted garlic aficionado who hadn’t bathed in a decade.

“You got a quarter?”

You’ve gotta be shitting me. Not again, I thought.

Peeking into my box was the haggard, skeletal face of Quarterman. “Fuck off, Quarterman,” I hissed.

“N… N…” he explained. “Quarter?”

Jesus Lapdancing Christ. “Fuck. Off. I don’t have a quarter.” I luxuriated in a moment of delicious schadenfreude. In my pocket I had three dimes and a nickel, but screw him if he can’t learn to generalize.

“Cockfag mother… fucker…” I heard him mutter as he shambled off to hound someone else. Headphonesman had said that he’d gotten too fucking creepy for the normal people, and lately couldn’t manage to panhandle efficiently even in the shitty parts of town.

Headphonesman wandered over by the bridge’s support pillars, listening to his battered and ancient yet miraculously functional walkman, singing along to whatever the fuck he listened to and waving his hands in the air with energy and purpose. Every minute or so he’d stop, take a step backwards, raise both hands up, and shout, “Yeah!” before continuing his unending pop culture celebration.

***

A thin, distant creak of rusted metal pierced through the rumble and hum of traffic on the overpass.

I slid my eyes from the spectacle of five drunks trying to start a fire in a 55-gallon plastic drum over to the metal door of my target. Sure enough, the door creaked open as I observed from my cardboard sniper’s hide.

A slight figure emerged from the darkened hallway, his shape obscured by a long trench coat. The grey coat was the cleanest thing in a ten block radius, but at least the color didn’t make him stand out too much.

The man looked up and down the street, but he didn’t even glance my way. Living in a cardboard box is the next best thing to a cloak of invisibility.

He set out northbound, scuttling furtively. He glanced over his shoulder a half dozen times before he reached the corner of the building. Christ in a monster truck, I thought. The Marine Corps fucking band on the Fourth of July has better tradecraft than this bozo.

I rolled drunkenly out of my box and staggered to the street. I’d like to take an Oscar nod for the performance, but the pins and needles of my slowly waking legs and feet deserve all the credit for the inebriated authenticity of my lurch streetward.

I tapped the earbead communicator. “Fritz is going for groceries.”

“‘Bout fucking time,” came Tactical Beardman’s quiet response. Seeing as he’d been listening to me bellyache for the last three days, he was probably at least half as glad as me that something was finally happening.

As I angled across the street, a Pontiac K-car rolled by. I flipped off the driver and leered at the woman in the passenger seat. I take my craft seriously. Nice tits, though.

The corner of the building approached. How to play this? If you know of a man twitchier than Fritz the Nazi spy, I’d like to see your proof. Anything, ordinary or not, was like as not to spook the spook.

I stumbled around the corner unzipping my fly. Fritz near jumped out of his notional jackboots at the sight of me. So I unzipped and pissed two liters of rotgut along fifteen feet of brick. His face twisted in a moue of disgust and he dismissed me. He resumed his skulking progress.

Scanning the area, I saw a gaggle of bikers across the street and halfway down the block. No one else in sight. I meandered between the curb and the brick wall, both to maintain character and slow my progress without being obvious about it.

Fritz dashed across the street. He either had business with the bikers, or he had a death wish. These bikers looked like the pure quill, unreconstructed Rolling Stone security types; leather jackets, bald heads, and the friendliest handlebar mustaches you’ll ever see. One of them looked over to me and goosed his throttle. Fuck me, they are doing that on purpose.

Fritz skittered fearfully toward the bikers, holding his coat closed with his left hand. He reached into his coat with his right hand, and every last biker stood up from their bikes and reached behind their backs. Fritz stopped short, realizing the error of his mistake. He held up his left hand in supplication and slowly pulled an envelope from inside the coat.

The bikers stood their threat level down from “looming apocalypse’ to ‘imminent violence’. Fritz shuffled his feet forward, envelope outstretched. A burnt offering for the lords of war, but his body clearly didn’t want to follow where his head was leading.

I stopped and pretended to gaze dumbly skyward. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched the meet go down. The biggest of the motorcycle enthusiasts snatched the envelope from Fritz. He riffled through its contents, nodded satisfaction. He said something I couldn’t hear. He pulled a gun and shot Fritz in the head.

Jesus Panhandling Christ! The shot echoed up and down the narrow canyon of the side street. Nine mil, if my ears didn’t deceive me. Fritz and his too-clean coat crumpled to the sidewalk. I affected panic and ran back up the street. Junkies not being the most in-demand of prosecution witnesses, I probably wasn’t an immediate target. Still not good strategery to hang around, I figured.

I staggered around the corner and straightened. I tapped the earbud again.

“Fritz is taking a long nap.”

“What made him so tired?”

“Bikers probably wore him out.”

“See what they’re up to, right? If they’re having a party, maybe I’ll join you.”

“Maybe?” I thought. That’s double-plus reassuring.

I took off down the street. The double talk was annoying, but like the Beardman says, NSA listens to everybody. I pondered shouting “Allahu Akbar, bomb, president, Israel” into the mike, but decided I had enough issues without courting extraordinary rendition and a stay in a Serbian resort town.

My Vietnam-era fatigue coat and ragged, stained pants were no different than moments ago. But my suddenly alert and focused movements freaked out my erstwhile overpass compatriots. I ran across the weed-choked gravel to a small ditch behind my refrigerator box. I yanked a shopping cart and a half dozen boxes off my bike, put on my sunglasses.

“Where’s the party headed?” I asked of the air.

“Hang on a sec,” Beardman said.

I jumped on my bike. One press of the starter and it roared to life. I winced preemptively and goosed the throttle.

“Got em on a traffic cam. Southbound on Dallas.”

I lifted up the lid of my box. The Martin Luther King, Jr. East Busway overpass blocked most of the sun and my hangover thanked the bridge for its kindness. My hangover was less pleased with the un-muffled choppers roaring past on N Dallas Ave.

I had a nice box, originally home for a Frigidaire Model DGUS2645LF Stainless Side-by-Side Refrigerator. A nice fridge by all accounts, and the equivalent of double-wide luxury housing in these parts. Thick cardboard, structurally sound, room to stretch out in. Through the thin gap that formed as I pushed up on the lid, I watched the windows of the building across the empty and trash-ridden area under the bridge. Puffs of breeze stirred the detritus into listless, half-hearted life only to abandon them a few inches away.

The brick building was run-down, like all the buildings for miles around. The windows were hazed with decades of grime, or boarded up with graying plywood. Behind one of those windows was a Gestapo agent. Here in the box with me was the smell of piss and vomit, with a subtle note of cheap tequila. I couldn’t figure which was more ridiculous; that I was hunting Nazi secret agents in Pittsburgh or that I’d spent the last week homeless under a bridge. Right now, I leaned toward homeless by a nose.

The back door of the rattletrap building was welded shut and blocked by a rusting green dumpster. The only functional door was on the lower right, facing me. The light in the room on the second floor came on and off at irregular intervals, but so far no one, Nazi or otherwise, had entered or left the building.

I winced as another phalanx of bikers goosed their throttles just as they passed. The loud, bubbling roar of unmuffled engines lanced pain through my frontal lobes. Fuckers are doing that on purpose, I know it.