my reason for taking that job, to create this work. I didn’t need employment, I chose it.” Van Vossen rubbed his hands together in front of his face, and Puskis noticed that the nails of his pinkies protruded about a quarter of an inch past the tip of the finger.
“Chose it?”
“Yes. My father was Wim Van Vossen. Perhaps you’ve heard of him. He was in shipping. Very wealthy. I was bred to be in the business. But my fascination was crime, and the work of a transcriber offered the best window on this world. Except, perhaps, for your position.”
“Perhaps.”
“My God, Arthur Puskis,” Van Vossen said with a sudden burst of energy, as if just now recognizing the esteem in which his visitor should be held. “I’m sorry, Mr. Puskis, I have been waiting for this visit for such a period of time. I am quite overwhelmed and, as you can see, rambling like a fool.”
“No. No, Mr. Van Vossen, you are hardly rambling. But the reason I came, well, I came to ask you about the DeGraffenreid file.”
Van Vossen turned serious. “So, you found the DeGraffenreid file?”
“Well, actually, I found two. One original file and, I believe, one that you, uh, you copied.”
“Yes. Yes, of course.” In a motion so effortless that it went almost unnoticed, Van Vossen dipped a pinkie nail into the tin that sat on his lap, brought his finger to his nose, and inhaled. “I did copy that file and send it back to the Vaults.”
“Why?”
Van Vossen sniffed. “I needed to get a message out to somebody, but I had to be sure that it could not be traced back to me.”
“I don’t understand. There was no message.”
“You’re here aren’t you? Listen. It was too dangerous to put an actual message in the file. Suppose the file was requested and sent out with the message still inside. Or, God forbid, another transcriber got his hands on it. I couldn’t risk it being traced back to me. I knew that two files would hold great significance for you, but would be dismissed by others as the inevitable consequence of the sheer volume of files in the Vaults. This way you could find me and I would not have to worry about anyone else doing the same.” Van Vossen smiled at the memory of his plan.
“But you did this years ago.”
“Four years. Give or take, of course.”
“Again. Why? What message were you trying to get out?”
“It was a frightening time. Listen. In late 1927 we started to get these cases of gang hits. These maniacs were going through the judicial process and being convicted, but they were never sent to prison, as far as we could tell. We got the first couple and we thought that perhaps it was some sort of oversight, so we made a note and shipped the files to you. But corrections never came. We got a few more and we called the others back from you. They all had this same notation that we hadn’t seen before.”
“PN,” Puskis said.
“That’s right,” Van Vossen said without surprise. “Do you know what it means? Neither did we. So I queried our liaison with the Department of Prisons—a gentleman named Kraal. I met with Kraal over lunch and I asked him what the hell was going on with this notation PN. What does this mean? He gets very serious and he says, didn’t they tell us about the Navajo Project? I had never heard of this.”
Van Vossen looked at Puskis to see if this registered, and seeing that it did not, continued, “So I ask him what the hell this Navajo Project is that we haven’t been told about. He lowers his voice—we were at a pub—and says that it is a new method of punishment that they are experimenting with. He says it is very controversial and it is very hush-hush in the department. He says they send these convicts out of the City and their cases aren’t handled by Prisons but by the office of the mayor. Then he began to get nervous and says that that is all he knows about it. It was obvious there was more, but he changed the subject and ignored my other questions. About a week or so later, he comes up to me on the street as I am walking home. He says that he was mistaken about the Navajo Project and that it was a plan that had been considered but never adopted. I asked him how