The tower was a noisy place when one was alone. Wind gave it plenty of excuse to moan and crack, and the hollow, barrel shape of the structure’s central silo, in concert with the floor-to-roof helical stairs, amplified these effects. Only the upper floor had panoramic windows, which meant lighting in the common areas was minimal and dingy. Debatably the light bulb in the candy bar vending machine was the brightest in the building.
Supposedly someone was killed falling down one of the elevator shafts when the building was under Otis supervision, and the motion-activated towel dispenser in the main office bathroom, like a ghost detector, was known to cough out paper towels randomly.
After a while, Liam became occupied with other things at his desk, yet returned periodically to the puzzling scene in 1136. Assuredly the guard’s countenance showed an unnatural degree of composure, as David noted, yet the peaceful physiognomy was not beyond the ability of a skilled mortician. Truly the bare feet, which were crossed, resembled porcelain pitchers, and their toenails appeared pedicured. Such slender extremities better comported to a female than a male, and better compared to a pampered mannequin than a grizzled transient. In which case, this dummy was an outlier, and different from the other habitually wakeful prostitutes on the premises (all of whom had glaring tattooed eyes). The Korean comrades surely colluded in a jape by throwing a uniform over a new ‘uncanny valley’ prototype and placing it on a couch.
The descriptive detail in the feet, with sculptural tendons and dorsal veins, did not conjure to mind mass-produced department store mannequins, at any rate. The same could not be said of the model’s visage, which was smooth, occluded, and white as whalebone. It bore the eroded features of a corpse long exposed to cyclical permafrost, and this intimated at another possibility:
Condensation had built up on the inside panes of the window nearest to the unseen corner, and as none of the other windows in the building showed this moisture, Liam wondered, in supposing this a genuine body, if it was frozen and in a process of thawing. Was the corpse lowering the ambient temperature in the room? Or was the observer only witnessing the effects of heavy breathing? Since neither a mannequin nor refrigerated cadaver hypotheses could be ruled out, what would inspire the Koreans to perpetrate an involved masquerade?
Boredom, Liam feared, lay equally with his coworkers, who had permitted a prank to be staged in full view of a curtain-less window. It was well known among the observers (if not the higher ups) that those scheduled on the night shift sometimes took naps, even extended naps. One employee, Howard Meade, kept cardboard in the office so to make a ready bed of the metal desk. It was brazen behavior, yet conceivably more than one observer took advantage of the arrangement. Liam was principled among his cohorts, and had not (would not) avail himself of the mat. Still, sleeping on the desk was something an opposing guard with binoculars would notice and potentially exploit.
Howard was the next observer to relieve.
The informal friendship between teacher and student was tested by their differing temperaments, although the slim forty-something possessed the simmering intensity of a low-wattage pocket laser, the kind used to fire bosons at excitable cats.
Liam diagramed the scene in 1136 to his friend, including the latest permutation of his theory about a one-off dummy, but the fresh eyes affirmed David’s view.
“It’s a corpse, all right,” Howard announced confidently. “I see signs of discoloration in the feet.”
“Discoloration?”
The discoverer handed the glasses back to the doubter. “A green tint.”
A note of asperity sounded. “I see no color.”
Howard conceded, “I suppose it might be a prismatic effect of the mirror.”
“It’s too macabre,” groused the coworker, tossing the binoculars aside. “The window was fogging earlier. What is there to account for it?”
“Hydrogen sulfide, ammonia, methane—gases natural to the decomposition process.”
“But the place would be rife with smell. How could the Koreans stand it?”
“You assume they venture from their office, which, in the main, they do not do after dark. They play cards behind closed doors until daybreak.”
“Are they hiding? What are they afraid of?”
Howard turned over a dark possibility. “Where better to plonk down a murder victim than a militarized no-man’s-land—and in a location where two international concerns converge. Who, in that predicament, claims jurisdiction over the dumpster in the parking lot? Or what someone, passing by, chances to throw in it? Seems an ideal location to get away with a crime.”
“But the body isn’t stashed in a closet,” Liam challenged. “It’s smack dab in the middle of the room.”
Howard concluded, “And, of course, the uniform is the pièce de résistance.”
“So you agree? This is being staged for our benefit?”
The friend leveraged the topic. “Have you heard anything about the new hire?”
“New hire…?“ erupted the desired question. “Are we in need of another observer?”
The Lakota scout expounded, “The interview was conducted during my shift. It was all hush-hush, and, at one point, lights were turned off in the office.”
“Why would a job interview be held at night? In a dark room?”
“Interviewer and interviewee broke up outside my door,” Howard continued. “One took the working elevator down; the other, the helical stairs.”
Liam knew by his friend’s expression that he regarded this distinction as important, so stated his reading of it. “Obviously our boss took the elevator, and the new hire, being unfamiliar with the tower’s layout, or out of a profuse feeling of deference, took the stairs.”
Howard painted a scene. “I keep the lights on the stairs off until morning. You can either turn them on from the top step, or from the bottom. In either case the switch makes a loud clacking sound, and the fluorescents buzz like hornets until they warm up. The squeaky elevator lies on the same wall as the switchplate, so it’s impossible to sneak up on me.”
“And the stair lights were off when the prospective hire took to the steps?”
A look of appropriate graveness was offered, and Liam was nonplussed to picture it. “The tower is nine stories tall—if it is ten; and that circling staircase is dizzying even with the lights on. Only a slithering reptile would attempt it in the dark.”
“I poked around in the main office when I deemed it safe,” admitted the sleuth, “and found paperwork.”
The coworker did not approve of this snooping, but would not stop listening.
“Nothing particularly jumped out about the man’s application until I saw ‘blind’ listed as a disability.”
“Blind…? Surely you jest? He must’ve been applying for another position.”
“‘Observer’ was marked down.”
Liam shrugged off the compounding mysteries. “Wait until I get to the door downstairs before you leave me in the dark,” came his parting request.
The prairie grass was perhaps not so green as it was in times past. A period of prolonged drought might explain Liam’s visual color deficit, if one wanted to assign reasonableness to it. As an artist, he was remiss to have missed the onset of putridity in the Korean guard’s feet. And yet the observer’s lack of perception within a range of green tints seemed inconsequential if his employers were hiring a blind man to do the same job. What was the point of powerful (and not inexpensive) binoculars if all his employers required was a warm body seated in a chair? Would the Koreans be content to believe a sighted man sat across from their post?
Apparently the Feds wanted to project the idea that they were paying attention to the communists’ carryings-on by having someone move about the observation platform in a purposeful manner, even if this person bumped into the wastepaper basket occasionally.
Should this be his employers’ perverse thinking, then the Koreans had anticipated them by fluffing up the throw pillows with a bluff of their own: If eyes were no longer needed in this strange dance of adversaries, the same must be true of a pulse.
Copyright © 2008-2022 Michael Teague. All rights reserved.