CHAPTER 30

RISING FROM ASHES

SIMONE WAS IN NO mood to chat.

“This way,” she said, pushing me farther into the bowels of the Underground.

“What?”

“Not now,” she growled.

She stormed ahead at an exhausting clip. I followed behind, straining to keep up. In some minutes we came to a narrow rope ladder.

She pointed upward. “Climb,” she commanded.

No fee-collecting drone met me as I rushed to the top. I pushed aside a light circular covering. Simone followed behind, pulling up the rope and replacing the metal disk. We entered a dimly lit room, walls bare, furnished with but an old wooden desk and two chairs, one on either side, a lone lamp casting a shadowy light across the room, a door on the other side, some light coming from beyond it. Simone pointed to a chair.

“Sit,” she said.

I complied, recovering slowly from the events of the last hour.

Simone sat behind the desk. I opened my mouth to speak, but she put her finger to her lips. “What’s going on, you want to know?” she said.

“I’d say,” I said, looking about the murky and sparse quarters I’d ascended into.

“It’s complicated,” she said in a tone I could not decipher but did not like. Her eyes were open wide. “You’ve stepped knee deep into some extreme shite, Nick. Nowhere near as deep as the pile I’m in,” she added in a scarcely audible undertone. “Things are seldom what they seem to be, and rarely what they ought to be, and never the way you want them to be.”

“Meaning?” I said.

“Where would you like me to begin?”

“How about starting with the Velvet Underground?”

“Why there?”

“The VU is a seldom I’d like to understand before we proceed into the harsher elements I’m afraid are about to come.”

“Like the holographic Rebbe?”

“For starters.”

“Well the VU,” she said, “is about half of what it appears to be.”

“Oh?”

“For the most part the folks down there are what they claim, just living their lives underground as best they can.”

A Maggie-ism sprang to mind. “For the most part means 51 percent or better. What about the ones not among the most part?” I asked.

“Undoubtedly you observed photos of the Kobliner Rebbe hanging all over the VU?”

“I’ve noticed,” I said.

“A Schmeltzerite community’s grown there.”

This made about as much sense as anything. “What are they doing down there?”

“They’re able to work without interference.”

“What are they working on?”

“A project that would be very much of concern to the authorities were they to find out about it.”

“Can you be clearer?”

“No.”

“That’s it?”

“It’s not for now, okay?” she said, shifting in the chair.

“So that line of crap that guy Brick fed me about defending the VU from the Upstairs is really about hiding this work?”

Simone nodded. “Mostly, anyway. The Upstairs doesn’t care so much about what goes on down here, partly because we are effective at confusing their thinking.”

“Where do you fit in?”

Simone squirmed in her seat. “I’m part of the not-the-most part,” she said.

“You’re one of those crazies?”

“Kind of,” she said.

“What then, exactly?”

She sighed. “You know, it’s a wretched world out there, but you’re lucky. You make your way through. Your teaching pays you and gives you something meaningful. You ride your bike, write your papers. And you’ve got Maggie . . . and maybe me.”

“So, what are these guys up to? That avatar down there kept talking about the Next Big Thing.”

“We hear it a lot, the Next Big Thing, like it’s around the corner and it’s something huge. More than that I don’t know. It keeps a lot of people busy doing things we can’t connect to each other.”

“What do you do for Schmeltzer?”

Simone folded her arms, closed her eyes, bit her lower lip, and produced a single tear. “I protect the operations,” she said.

“That’s your job down here?”

“There are forces out to destroy what we’ve accomplished. Even with our defense shield, interested parties occasionally manage to sneak in.”

“This have anything to do with those two guys who attacked Tanzer?”

“Probably. Shelley’s such a strange character, it could have been about something else. But we’ll never know, eh? You got the one and I took care of the other.”

True enough. “How did you know I was in that room with the Rebbe?”

“I suspect you already know the answer to that question.”

I nodded, thinking of the screen-filled room at Menkies’s place. “The Schmeltzerite Up communicates with the Schmeltzerite Down, right?”

“I was supposed to take care of you. If you didn’t cooperate.”

“It makes no sense. Why do they want me part of their little enterprise, anyway?”

“As best I can figure, it’s a fixation of the Rebbe’s. Whatever Schmeltzer wants, Schmeltzer gets.”

“So, what happened? I’m out of danger? No knife in the heart? Why?”

“Couldn’t do it, Nick.”

“Why not?”

“You really need to ask?” she said.

“How did you get involved with these people in the first place?”

Simone rose from the desk and paced around, the desk lamp weakly spotlighting her.

“I didn’t mean to,” she said.

“Yet here you are, working for Schmeltzer. What happened?”

“The way stupid things happen.”

“Stupid things happen in countless ways.”

“I got myself involved. Just got deeper and deeper.”

“Down the rabbit hole. I know. I’m more than midway down myself,” I said. “What was it? What did you do?”

“It’s more what I didn’t do—or couldn’t.”

“Didn’t and couldn’t are the same thing often enough,” I said.

“I was already a cop in the VU. The work felt like I was doing something good, but the money was impossible. Every cop down there must enhance, as we say. In my case it concerned my mom, who has nothing. A room, a table, a bed, sometimes heat, never enough food,” she said, leaning on the desk. “Like almost everyone else Upstairs, her life has given new meaning to the word poverty.”

One afternoon, Simone had been sitting in on one of those sidewalk Schmeltzerite lectures, embracing the messianic drivel with her heart and soul.

She told the guy leading the class her story, and they lent her some money. As these matters had a devilish way of piling up beyond hope, she found herself resolving her inability to repay by working for Yitzi Menkies, servicing his needs in the Velvet Underground. Not much had been asked of her at first, perhaps dealing with a troublesome student at one of the lectures. But the work became more extreme and questionable.

“And so here I am, an enforcer for a fool and his holographic master. But when the order came to take care of you . . .” She trailed off.

“Your reluctance is appreciated.” I leaned over and placed my hand on her forearm. But her anguish was unmistakable.

“I’ve done some terrible things in these months, Nick. Terrible.”

“How bad?”

“Bad.” The desk lamp shone on her face as she began sobbing. “I did the old man, Nick,” she said.

“Abe?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re the killer?”

“Yeah.”

The image of Abe dead on the floor, a hole in his forehead, surged into my skull.

“They ordered you to?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

She wiped away the tears with the back of her hands. “I’m the obedient soldier. I do what I’m told, no questions. In return my mother gets food and heat.”

“You killed an old man because you owed money?”

“Have you ever been so down you’re at the bottom of the abyss and it looks like you’re never going to see daylight again?”

The question required no response.

“That’s where I’ve been for a very long time. The abyss.” She looked down at her hands. “Then you and I met,” she said to the floor. “And it looked like maybe something might happen.”

“You murdered Abe Shimmer because someone told you to? And then you had the gall to show up at his funeral? And then come home and fuck me?”

She said nothing.

“So, what do we do now?” I asked.

“You could pull out that second Zap and shoot me dead. You’d be doing me a favor.” Her body slumped. She looked like a corpse.

That final memory stuck in my head as I rose from the chair and walked out into the indigent Upstairs, leaving Simone to her guilt and misery.