Victor was in a scowling sort of mood.
He scowled at the wallpaper as he made his way down the spiral staircase; he gave a great glower in the vague direction of the meeting table, granted a grisly grimace the bureau's way, and chucked an unseemly glare at the telephone for good measure. He finished off with a sweeping look of general contempt around the room, and then turned the full weight of his stink-eye on a hapless Edward Noah.
"Well?"
Edward shook his head, expression rueful and bitter all at once. "Looks just like the first one did. First one had a landing for the stairwell, this one doesn't, but other than that…they're more than just similar." The trapdoor above the two of them clicked open as he talked, and Agents Donald Brown and Bill Sullivan descended the staircase with sure, quick steps. Edward tossed an acknowledging nod their way, but continued speaking without pause.
"I just don't want to believe it, sir," he said, mouth puckering. "We interrogated Superin…Mister Veld and the rest, we ordered surveillance on them, we went through their correspondence…and somehow we failed to pick up on a whole other secret meeting room?"
"And the identity of another one of Szilard's sponsors," chimed Donald, as he joined them.
"And, hrm, Veld's allies," Bill added, shrugging apologetically when Edward gave him a pained look.
"Motherfuckers," Victor swore, half-heartedly kicking at the nearest chair. "And we thought we'd clamped down on Veld's police force buddies, too. Shit! Veld's been laughing at us the whole time! What the fuck do the boys in blue think they're doing, remaining loyal to a guy who's been goddamned stripped of his badge and then lying about it to the fucking Feds?"
Edward scrubbed a hand over his face, his worn expression suiting a man far older than his still relatively youthful age. Given his sunken cheeks and eyes, a reflection of the weight he had lost during his long hospital stay, he almost looked the part. "I—" He hesitated. "It's—" His mouth clamped shut.
Grim sympathy for his subordinate's plight gave Victor's anger a further edge, and he stomped his way over to the human-shaped outline against the wall on his far right. The outline's legs and feet were stretched out against the floor, but the upper torso marked the otherwise unblemished wallpaper. "So this is where Langsley and the police found our man Leskovar?"
"Yessir." It was Donald who answered, coming to hover at his side. "They reported that when they first entered the room, Leskovar was slumped against the wall with his wrists and ankles bound together by rope. Maiza Avaro was keeping watch over him from here." He walked past a chair, brushing his hand on the back rung to indicate it as 'here', and then toed two more humanoid outlines on the floor a little ways on with the tip of his left shoe. "And lying here were two men in Leskovar's employ, in poor – and dare I say, bloody – condition."
One of the outlines was that of a human in profile, curled in on itself with arms and legs coiled tightly near the torso. The other outline was of a human who must have been lying on his back when he was found, one arm cutting off at the torso – probably the hand had been lying on his stomach. "They've both been taken to the hospital under police supervision… Avaro admitted to personally afflicting their injuries, but said it was in self-defense."
That only served to remind Victor of how one of the lead hijackers of the Flying Pussyfoot had claimed all his kills were done in, well, self-defense. He'd laughed in Bill's face when he heard Bill's report at the time, but when it was someone like Maiza who was making such a claim…
Maiza Avaro. One of Victor's oldest friends, literally, and one of the only people who would outlast the Earth right alongside him…and yet a member of the camorra, a pervasive criminal organization that continued to rot the underbelly of New York.
"Just – just start from the beginning," Victor said, with an unenthusiastic wave of his hand. "Start to finish, tell me everything Maiza told us." Of course, he planned on talking to Maiza himself later on, but there was no better time to hear out Maiza's original statements in the room where it all happened. With a 'typical' person of interest, it was also a good way to sniff out discrepancies in testimony.
As a camorrista, Maiza's word against Leskovar's – whatever Leskovar's word was – was laughable. As Victor's wayward friend – he wouldn't get special preference. Couldn't. And besides, Victor was still mad at him for that whole 'I will be willingly complicit in the criminal acts of a mafia organization' thing. Goddamnit, Maiza.
"Well, sir," Donald said, "Maybe I should start with Ronny Schiatto first."
"What?" Victor pinched the bridge of his nose. "Wait – no, that's right, Langsley did say something about the Martillos…"
See, the thing was, he hadn't been briefed at the time shit went down. The first he'd heard of anything was when Langsley had called him from some street telephone booth, forty minutes ago. "Sir, we've got a situation," Langsley had said. "The Martillos contacted us about a kidnapping. Victim was Maiza Avaro." That had made Victor catch his breath, but what came next – what came next! – "The cell of Szilard Quates that was busted back in 1930 wasn't as busted as we thought. You'll want to be here for this in person."
So Victor had grabbed his coat and gun and headed off to the address Langsley had rattled off to him with his mind whirling, meeting up with Edward, Bill, and Donald outside the building in question. Langsley and the police had already packed up shop, which had pissed Victor off until Bill had said, "Erm, sir, the accused kidnapper that Langsley's escorting? That would be Miroslav Leskovar."
Miroslav Leskovar. One of New York's wealthier business industrialists, and a poster child for the so-called American Dream rather than hailing from one of Manhattan's dynastic families. After immigrating from Slovenia at the young age of sixty-two, he'd somehow managed to make himself a millionaire and land himself a manor on Millionaires' Row within the span of two decades, not that his neighbors knew it. By all accounts Leskovar was the most private of fellows, yet seemed to dabble in a multitude of industries – shipping, steel, and fur, among others.
That someone with that much money and apparent insider influence could have potentially been in cahoots with Szilard made Victor's stomach churn. Admittedly not as badly at it had when he'd learned a Congressman was among Szilard's followers, but…
"Start from – start from Leskovar," Victor amended, his gaze inevitably drawn toward Leskovar's outline on the wall. "Firo's servant – Ennis, Szilard's creation – she never named Leskovar as one of Szilard's people."
Bill cleared his throat. "Hmm… She was alone when she met Langsley outside the building, sir. Apparently she had, ah, no idea that Leskovar was one of Szilard's crowd. Langsley said she appeared quite shaken."
Victor wasn't sure how to feel about that, but Edward luckily picked up where Bill left off and saved him from having to think about his feelings on any meaningful level for now. "Other than Leskovar's presence in the room itself and Avaro's statements, we don't have anything. Langsley's sticking with Leskovar while he's in custody, so Patterson's already out hunting for a potential paper trail while Fletcher and Moynihan are looking into Leskovar's work relations for potential interviews…"
"Sure, right, whatever, we'll talk about the bureaucratic bullshit later or on the way or something." Victor moved back toward Maiza's chair and stood before it, grimacing at the two odd bands of tied rope strewn on the floor near the chair's legs. "How the fuck did Maiza end up here is what I wanna know."
"Automobile, sir," Donald quipped, and he had the decency to look a little abashed at Victor's unamused expression. "Really, sir, he did…" And with that, Donald told him everything he'd heard from Langsley; starting from how Maiza had apparently been repeatedly murdered (so that was why they'd gotten reports of tommy gun fire…) prior to the kidnapping, to his interrogation–
"Interrogation?" Victor asked, temporarily halting in his quest to pace a hole through the floor. "What do you mean? Whose word is that, Langsley's or Maiza's?"
"Avaro's, sir," replied Bill, who'd taken over the explanation. "According to Langsley, he seemed reluctant to elaborate."
An almost magnetic pull drew Victor's unwilling gaze toward a bone saw lying on the meeting table, the bone saw, the bone saw he'd tried his damndest to ignore when he'd first entered the room. There weren't any good reasons for it to be there in the first place, no easy-way-out explanations for why one would have a bone saw in a secret meeting room.
Once upon a time he'd gone and caught his leg in an iron mantrap while fleeing Fenian agitators, bones smashing from the force of the spiked jaws. One look at the saw brought back that crippling, overwhelming pain for upwards of an instant, followed by Maiza's face, and Victor thought he just might be sick.
Then he tucked that thought away and forced himself to swallow, because of course he wouldn't be sick, that was for rookies and people who hadn't already died multiple countless painful deaths like he had. There was no way Maiza had lived for two hundred years without going through the same. He was a big boy, and Victor was not going to worry about him over something so trivial.
So he resumed pacing, and Bill resumed speaking, and he heard all about how Maiza had fought off the guards and then restrained Miroslav Leskovar with rope and Christ if this wasn't all a great big fucking mess. He opened his mouth to politely point out just how huge of a Great Big Fucking Mess this was to his subordinates, but a single pair of footsteps banging across the ceiling put a temporary hold on that thought.
Moments later, the trapdoor opened partway. "Sir," called a rookie, face unusually pale through the crack, "All the telephones are ringing. They're all – they – I –"
"Keep your head," Victor barked, indignation over the unprofessionalism winning out over bafflement. "Rookie or not, you're an agent of the law and you're damn well going to act like it. Fucking breathe."
The trapdoor clicked shut. When it opened again, the rookie looked decidedly more composed than he had before, despite his pallor. Quietly pleased, Victor assumed a stern expression and said, "Right. You want to try that again?"
"Yes, sir. Every single telephone booth in the area has gone off, sir. There's ringing coming out of the shops and windows, it's a helluva din."
You're joking, Victor almost said. Try that again, he nearly spat. Instead, he peered up at the rookie and replied, "There. Was that so hard?" and he was already moving away from the saw and outlines to the stairwell, adding, "You've got a lot to learn, rookie," as he clambered up and past him and out through the front doors and holy fuck that was a helluva din.
From the shops across the street and from the windows above them, from the buildings on the next block over, from every telephone booth in sight bellowed a continuous clamor of noise, like the Daily Days newsfloor amplified five times over. Here and there people leant out of their apartments' windows to stare at their neighbors in mutual helplessness, and a few shop patrons staggered out and onto the pavement with their hands over their ears.
"Sir?" Edward and the others had caught up to him, it seemed. All three senior agents appeared remarkably stalwart in the face of the commotion, with Bill's atypically alert expression the sole visible affectation of the cacophony. That rookie had better be taking notes. "What's the plan?"
No moaning and wringing of the hands, straight to action – just how Victor liked it. That settled it; the plan was to give the rookies a firm lecture on outstanding agent conduct as soon as all this bullshit was out of the way. A good old-fashioned verbal rigmarole. He couldn't wait.
With his allotted minute of indulgent fantasizing up, Victor refocused on the business at hand. "One of you may as well investigate the surrounding streets and figure out how big of a problem we got here. If you do find an unaffected telephone, wring the operators dry of information. Me, I'm gonna do what one normally does when a telephone rings."
Edward nodded and was off down the sidewalk just like that, no questions asked. Victor in turn made for the nearest booth before Donald could make whatever smart-aleck remark trembled at his lips and slid inside, leaving the door open so that he could better see his people. Glaring at the telephone did nothing to censure it, so he put the receiver to his ear and everything became very, very still.
From the silence, there emerged the sound of blood thrumming in his ears, the thump of his heartbeat, the swallow that did nothing to ease the ache in his throat. Edward shuffled into view from behind the right frame of the booth, having doubled back, and Victor waved at him once to indicate that he'd seen him.
It was only when he brought his hand down to scrub at his face did he realize his eyebrows were drawn, his mouth tight with nerves. Shit. He forced himself to relax, only for his shoulders to tense up again when a deeply confused "…Hello?" sounded out from the receiver.
The voice was that of an older male. Victor played 'good cop, bad cop' out in his head, and settled for a not-quite-neutral sounding, "Who is this?"
"I… Are you Mr. Talbot, by any chance?"
Victor stiffened at the sound of his name. "I asked you a question," he repeated, shifting so that he faced away from the booth's entrance. "Who are you? Who gave you that name?"
Some sort of racket was going on in the background on the other end – distant banging and unintelligible shouts. "I was told," the man said, carefully, "That if I picked up the telephone, I'd be put into contact with a Mr. Talbot who could help me. I'm calling from the Fifth Precinct. Superintendent Burke speaking."
Police. Victor straightened, cleared his throat. "Victor Talbot, with the Division of Investigation. Speaking." Or was it Bureau? The department was changing names so frequently that he couldn't keep up.
"…Sir!" Relief swelled in Burke's voice, and in the babble of words that followed. "Oh, thank God. It's a mess over here, we're completely overwhelmed. Got reports of gunfire earlier today and rounded up ten men with guns behind that Alveare restaurant, looked like they were gonna shoot up the place. We barely had the cell room for them."
Ohhh wait hold the fuck up. He'd said 'Alveare', Victor knew he'd heard right –
"That's not all, sir," Burke exclaimed, with an almost desperate sort of insistence. "A while after that, we got reports of screaming from a building across the street from the same restaurant. Found a stockpile of firearms and twelve men who were completely raving mad, going on and on about how they were burning to death. Somehow my boys dragged them here, but we can't – we can't deal with them. There's no space. I know it's not your problem, but..."
The onslaught of information hit Victor like a bullet to the teeth, and all he could think was how the fuck had his department not gotten wind of whatever the hell this was. Two major operations busted within the immediate vicinity of the Alveare was news that he absolutely should not be hearing about first from a dinky little precinct way over its head.
"Oh – that's right," Burke said, and the sinking feeling in Victor's gut would have dragged a lesser man to his knees. "The fella who told me to try the telephone – he said that you'd probably want to know that we found Miroslav Leskovar's business card in one of the perp's pockets."
Foreboding became doom, and Victor bit back disappointment and rage and wished that he wasn't so fucking unsurprised. He wished that his heart had stopped from shock, that his jaw had dropped, but his feet remained grounded and his hands remained steady. He talked where he should've been remembering how to breathe. "From the sound of it, it is my problem, Superintendent," he said, far too easily. "We'll take them off your hands and take over the investigation, starting now. Expect me in fifteen minutes or thereabout."
Burke's explosive sigh nearly did Victor's eardrum in. "You're saving our hide," he said, full of nothing but sheer gratitude – and then, in a rush, he added, "Don't hang up."
The curious tonal shift from gratitude to something queerly plaintive was more than odd, and Victor didn't know what to make of it. Good. He'd had enough of being unsurprised for the time being, and he closed his eyes and welcomed the electric anticipation buzzing at his fingertips.
"That fella I mentioned," Burke began, and Victor pictured him scratching his scalp in faint puzzlement, "He wanted me to deliver a message for you before the call ended. Real particular about the way he wanted me to say it, too. I don't get it myself, but maybe it'll mean something to you. Uh…" He cleared his throat. 'You have a visitor waiting for you. She's come back–'"
""–She's come back,"" said the rookie, at the exact same time, and Victor's eyes flew open–
""–Says she wants to see you in person,"" the Rookie/Burke continued, matching rhythm for syllable for cadence, doublespeech coming from behind Victor's back and directly in his ear in eerie harmony, ""Miss Ennis, that is.""
Victor choked.
""Mr. Talbot?"" A feminine voice had replaced the rookie's, words perfectly mirroring Burke's gravelly delivery despite the abrupt transition. Victor turned reluctantly, inch-by-inch, heart beating quick in his chest at the first sign of a feminine figure framed in the doorway. She bowed when he faced her, form as crisp as her black business suit, red hair fire-bright under the morning sun.
When she straightened, she met his gaze dead on.
""Mr. Talbot,"" Ennis/Burke repeated, her resolve clashing with Burke's bewilderment, ""I've come to apologize.""
Her mouth snapped shut, eyes blazing with a quiet determination as she awaited his reaction. The sudden silence after surround-sound was disorienting enough on its own, but even more so was Burke's voice crackling to life by his ear without Ennis' voice shadowing it.
"That's it," Burke said, quietly. "That's all there was."
The call ended.
It was several seconds before Victor numbly returned the receiver to its cradle. He had not yet broken eye contact with Ennis. She's waiting for you to say something, his brain supplied, but when he opened his mouth, the words would not come.
For once in his life, the words would not come.
::::
Several blocks away, one of New York's countless secretaries leant against the exterior wall of the Fifth Precinct and exhaled smoke rings, staring up at the clouds drifting overhead with singular attention. His serenity was such that the rare few who bothered to look his way twice assumed he had been standing there for some time, absorbed in his own little world. Had they known of the ongoing chaos playing out in the building behind him, they might have marveled at the juxtaposition.
"Mm… Even after all that, I never once crossed his mind. At times like this, I can't help but wonder if the blame lies more on his own character failings rather than the strength of my initial impression… Well, no matter."
As he mumbled to himself, he brought the cigarette to his lips once more. This time, the smoke he exhaled took the shape of rectangular glasses – an extraordinary display by human standards, but most of the humans who passed him by had no reason to look at an ordinary secretary twice, and the feat went unnoticed.
"His own failings, was it? No… Victor may be Victor, but this time it's not his fault he's in over his head. A puzzle cannot be completed if one does not have all the pieces, after all."
The secretary puffed his cigarette in silence for a while, idle thoughts of his coworkers and still-unfinished paperwork flitting through his mind. When images of Victor and Ennis once again surfaced, he resumed voicing his thoughts from where he'd left off, as if there'd never been a break in the first place. There was no particular reason for him to voice his thoughts out loud – save for the fact that he enjoyed the sound of his own voice – but he spoke with such confidence that one could have very well believed there was an invisible audience hanging on to his every word.
"Yes… All the questions Victor has – and those he has not – any outsider would be wondering the same. Even the insiders who have been involved from the beginning do not yet fully comprehend the events that have taken place. 'What happened in the time leading up to Agent Langsley's call?' 'Why were the men across the street noticed and arrested only after their alleyway compatriots had already been taken away?' 'What was Maiza thinking?' 'Why is he in police custody?'
"To know the answers at this stage, one would either have to be omniscient or a master of time itself…or be acquainted with those who are. If Rosetta were only available, perhaps she might have been able to shed some light on the situation. Hm? No, I wouldn't say I'm omniscient. What would a humble secretary such as I know in comparison to a federal agent? And even if I were omniscient, Victor would still be as oblivious as ever. What obligation have I to divulge information to someone who has yet to truly recognize my being?"
Though the secretary's face remained deliberately inscrutable, those who knew him intimately would have picked up on the faint petulant tone to his words. With the one person who knew him best currently in police custody, the emotion went unnoticed and unremarked. Suddenly weary of talking, and vaguely dissatisfied, the secretary did not deign to speak again. Instead, he simply folded himself back into the fabric of the universe and faded out of existence, neatly and without fuss.
If Victor had only thought of him in a different sense – no, not as the shapeless demon, but as Maiza's friend – then perhaps he would have come to realize there was one more being who could have provided the answers he so desperately sought. But he hadn't, and in the planck-year-eon it took for the entity to shed the final residue of his treasured human form, it realized that this bothered it more than its lack of impression did.
The universe wrinkled, smoothened itself, and began to wait.
NOTE: I cannot believe I didn't realize until now that Chs 3 and 5 were missing their section divisions, and I'm so sorry I didn't notice sooner. I post my Baccano! fics to AO3 as well, and tend to use a Menlo Regular symbol as my section divider on the site. As a result, I sometimes forget that FFN eats those symbols and that I have to manually reinsert divisions into the FFN docs before publishing. (This will sound terrible, but I'm much more on the ball when it comes to updating my fics for whatever reason on AO3 because it's just so much easier to edit chapters/fics there).
Well, I've update the chapters with the divisions they were intended to have in the first place. Ch5 especially should look more organized now. I also hope you're not reading this in the default FFN font Verdana on desktop, because it hardly depicts bold emphasis at all.
I also apologize for the wait. I want to say that the next chapter will come sooner, but considering that the next two and a half months are going to be academic hell, we'll have to just wait and see. (And yes - there is still more to come).
...On my second flight home back in December, I opened up my laptop to start writing Chapter 7. I'd spent the whole taxi ride to the airport and the first flight thinking about potential ways Chapter 7 might start, so you can imagine my surprise when I loaded the document and found a little over three hundred words of it already written - the same three hundred words that open up the chapter as you see it now. It wasn't just surprise that I'd completely forgotten writing it, either; I was genuinely startled at how the chapter begins. Victor was in a scowling sort of mood... and the succeeding paragraph completely threw me for a loop, since all the potential beginnings I'd mulled over in the taxi and first flight were entirely different. In the end I stuck with the beginning as is, because to be quite honest, it's a much better opening than anything I'd come up with in that damn taxi.
The "Fenian Agitators" from Victor's past belong to the Fenian Brotherhood, an Irish-American organization that wanted Ireland independent and out of English hands. As you can imagine, the movement also operated on Ireland and British turf. Uprising attempts were made, several Fenian raids into Canada were organized, and many Fenians and unaffiliated Irish-Americans alike harbored strong anti-English sentiments.
If you don't recall, Superintendent Veld was Edward's superior and a member of Szilard's coterie in 1930. He tried to convince Edward to join him and become an "ascended being," but Edward was having none of it and smashed the bottle of elixir in front of his very eyes. There's nothing in canon that suggests Veld still has allies within the police force, but I do think it'd be interesting if that were the case. Today's 5th Precinct houses Chinatown and Little Italy, and since Edward was clearly working to some extent in Little Italy territory in 1935, I suppose that Burke could very well be Veld's replacement. (Or a replacement of a replacement).
