rights have been in prison, wasn’t, Puskis now wanted to see if anyone else shared this apparent good fortune. There were several.
He wrote their names down, eight in all—all convicted of murder, and none with records of incarceration. The names seemed familiar, but that was not surprising since everyone’s file would have passed through his hands at least once. It was unusual for Puskis to come across names that did not trigger some sort of recognition, however vague.
He carried the books back to the Stable and replaced them, then took out their counterparts for the following year, 1928. Back at his desk he made the same comparison as before and found twelve names. The last one he found was that of Otto Samuelson, who, convicted on July 18, had apparently never been incarcerated. He wrote down these twelve names, then returned to the Stable again, exchanging the 1928 volumes for the 1929 volumes.
The 1929 volumes, he discovered back at his desk, contained no cases of unincarcerated murderers. Still, to be sure that July 18, 1928, was the last of these incidences, he retrieved the 1930 volumes, but they too were in order. The next step would be to trace back to the first instance that he could find, but Puskis decided first to determine what it was, in reality, he was investigating. It was more than a clerical error, certainly, but that did not help him define the issue. In any case, he now had a list of twenty names, one of which—DeGraffenreid—he had already cross-referenced. Puskis took his cart and began to collect the other nineteen files.
The organizing principles for the files stored in the Vaults had been decided more than a half century previous and were the source of tremendous debate. Two methods of organizing information were common at the time. The first was chronological—simply storing the information according to the order in which it was received. The second was by name—generally alphabetized by last name and then first name. Either of these was, in principle, perfectly efficient for the retrieval of any particular file. The controversy sprang from the desire on the part of certain key decision makers—primarily Thorpe and Krause—to make the organization of the files information in and of itself. To put it another way, the way the files were stored would provide information for the people using them.
This involved a classifying system. The most basic category, it was generally agreed, would be the offense. Murders, for instance, would be grouped together, as would rapes, assaults, kidnappings, and so forth. These groups were themselves categorized by the nature of the crime (violent crime, property crime, etc.). Then came issues of conviction and acquittal. It hardly made sense, for example, to group innocent men accused of murder with actual murderers. So categories were further divided.
What other information might be useful? Taking murder again as an example, how was that murder committed? Using a handgun, or knife, or baseball bat? What was the motivation behind the crime? Jealousy, or money, or revenge? In what part of the City did the crime take place? What time of day? Was it a solitary crime or one in a series of offenses? And, as later became crucial, was it a crime related to the activities of a broader criminal organization, and if so, which one?
By categorizing the files in this manner, it was reasoned, individuals with similar criminal habits would be filed with each other. This would allow for easy analysis of similar crimes and an even greater ability to create lists of possible suspects based purely on modus operandi: Describe the crime, find the proper file category, and you produced not only a list, but the actual files themselves. The system was almost magical in its precision and utility, so long as someone thoroughly understood all of its mechanisms, exceptions, and nuances. Given the number of crimes and individual criminals in the City over the past seventy years or so, the system had grown so complicated that even a man with an advanced aptitude, such as Puskis, took literally years to understand it fully. The product of constant revision and addition according to the individual whims of the successive Archivists, it required at once a mathematical and an intuitive sense, along with an empathic understanding of the specific psychology of the previous Archivists. One had to think as his predecessors had to determine what their decisions would have been.
All this time and care and bother, and it had been