The weather hasn’t gotten any better, the rain still feels like daggers, and the wind’s picked up. I pull up my collar, pull down my brim, and start walking. I’ve got full security access from Beckha now, so I’ll stay inside the walls as long as I can, and avoid crossing the park. I’m feeling contemplative and that’s not a good frame of mind in an attack, which given the many dark recesses in nature, isn’t a long shot in the park. The rain eases up after a few minutes, letting me raise my head and take in my surroundings. The plazas between these compounds are stunning, mostly because they’re empty, and empty’s hard to come by these days. At some point before the noble class decided to leave the ground behind, but after they’d decided anything less than twenty stories of living space just didn’t cut it, these plazas were their steel and glass Versailles. The rich have always known how to party, and as I understand it back in the day, these expanses of concrete gardens were often filled with music and skin. Orchestras played while silly people giggled. Must’ve seemed pretty surreal to whoever heard it while getting mugged on the other side of the wall. My clicking heels echo between empty fountains that stopped pumping long ago, it’s sort of sad. The carbon arc lamps, like cold suns, shine on the contours of wet stone statuary. Even the lights are sad here, though they illuminate my way now, their real job is to enable security cameras to guarantee this area remains empty and unused. Tiny diamonds of light pulse in collected pools, like a dream of animate stars. I turn my eyes skyward. Wishful thinking. I haven’t seen stars since Mesopotamia, and they’re the only memory of that place that isn’t filtered red. Not my favorite memory. God, this is turning into a melodramatic little walk, must be the ghosts of other people’s dreams trapped in this hard garden. But I get like this. Think too much, usually before a mission, it’s a luxury I allow myself knowing most of my thinking will descend to the more lizard areas of my brain soon. When training and instinct are your salvation, thoughts of pretty stars in water are the kind of things that become last thoughts. I shake off my reverie with thoughts of once pretty Zoe in her pretty costume, and wonder what her last thought was. I pick up the pace; I’ve gone about four blocks through this forgotten playground, and turn a corner with about two blocks to the tunnel. I’m fifty yards from the gate when I notice a familiar silhouette against the wall, and walk to him. It’s David. Michelangelo’s David to be precise, he’s standing silent sentry over this poltergeist party. Looking sad, and little worse for wear. I close the gap between us, stop and reach up to run my fingers across the toes of his left foot. I feel the cold wet marble, mixed with slick grime, slide beneath my fingers like gritty silk. I step back, stare up at him. Forgotten beauty in a forgotten garden. “Snap out of it Bannister” I whisper aloud, and wipe my hand on the granite wall. It’s a magnificent reproduction I think walking away, then remind myself who I’m dealing with, I wouldn’t put it past one of the old robber barons. Pluck this thing from Florence, impress your pals, then leave it forgotten like a dog toy in the rain. I take another glance back, and hope it’s not true; it’d be nice if he was still where he belonged.
The tunnel gate’s an old turnstile of interlocking horizontal bars, the kind that spin, the bronze gone green with neglect and muck. The security panel hasn’t been accessed in recent memory, I use the edge of my hand to squeegee the screen, and pull off a stubborn leaf stuck to the keypad. I punch in the access code Beckha’s security guys provided, push my thumb on the dirty sensor and speak my name, there’s a clunk and I see the turnstile shift a little. It’s a tight fit, pushing through I have to stay very erect to avoid painting slimy prison stripes on my back. Leaves gathered just inside the gate, crunch underfoot. I turn and check that the bars have locked, don’t need any unexpected companions coming from behind. The dirt, musty autumn smell of the leaves, and the curve of the piles, gives this tunnel entrance an organic look, more cave than architecture. Long tubes of solar-fired fluorescents blink to life ahead of me, illuminating the labyrinth, and seem to radiate coldness, bouncing harsh, blue-white off the mosaic tiled walls. The tubes hum, a dull metronome to the sharper rhythmic clicking and echoes of my heels. Like the plaza, the tunnels are part of the past, when the upper class still walked the streets. The first roots of a city within a city. Urban planners walled off select sections of annexed sidewalks and roads, communicating the great living spaces with the great civic and social spaces. Taking the original, more egalitarian grid, and remapping it to serve fewer, more specific needs. It’s all but unused now; why walk when you can fly? It’s a tribute to the indifferent self-absorption of the elevated community that it hasn’t been demolished or filled in, but at the moment I appreciate the greed. Having access to something tends to change your perspective on its relative value. This makes me think of my “Bishop” – lack of access defines our relationship pretty well. I’m close to my destination, I see another nest of leaves and trash up ahead, and the air’s getting progressively fresher. Crunching through the piled leaves, I come to the barred exit, not ones to take chances the designers provided secure entry and exit protocols. Making the tunnels resemble a kind of large, live animal trap, even if you snuck in you probably wouldn’t get out.
I repeat the scans I used to enter, push out into the colder night; the rotating bars are cleaner on this side, my coat stays clean. I’ve come to Max’s church this way once before, leaving the party where I first met Beckha. Newly retired I was experimenting with some of the new doors open to me. It didn’t take. Don’t remember much about that night, but I remember stepping out into this plaza at night for the first time. The view you leave behind when you enter the walking tunnel is nothing spectacular. But leaving the tunnel? This is what you call spectacular. The compound was once just a regular city block, a rectangle with some extraordinary features – one being Max’s parsonage in the middle – the other being the colossal museum complex here at the tunnel’s exit. Both date back to the early 1900’s, both built with great ambitions, the church looking to the past and the museum looking toward a better future than this. Max’s church is ostensibly still a house of God; however the museum shifted from public space to private, home to Kurt Larocque, Corporate Director of Communication and Culture. A fancy title for a propagandist. In my opinion he’s little more than a misogynistic collector of human weakness. I don’t like him. And I don’t like standing in his front yard, which runs the width of the block, defined on either side by the tunnel and the wall that communicates to Max’s sanctuary. One of Larocque’s ancestors had intended this block to be an urban estate of sorts, with the cathedral as his personal family chapel, but then the Holy See regained its strength. And it wanted its stuff back. Eventually, Larocque and his family was excommunicated, the church reverted to Vatican control, along with the rest of the block in particularly petty show of economic force. The family built the wall then, tall enough to blot out the sight of their greatest embarrassment, shielding their sin. And sin was Kurt Larocque’s business, both his own, and those of others. I close the gap between me and the gate as fast as I can.